Online research provides easy access
April 28, 2005
TIPPINST -- In my personal experience, more students read and cite articles online than ones offline. Doc Searls points to an "effort to lead the movement of body of knowlege (now offline) to the Web, where autodidacts can have access to it". There are important issues related to the larger role of both scholarship and scholarly works in the world. One of the stumbling blocks is deciding what makes an article the right unit for scholarly communication. Searls poses the relevant question: "Why not blog it? Why not make it into a wiki?" Doing that would help scholarly information more efficiently find its markets. Then he blogs during the lecture session, and gets outed for his behaviour.
During an academic lecture at Harvard, Searls reflected on several points worth discussing in our Mass Communcations and Culture class.
- Role of Publishers. What roles do the publishers play? They have a certification function. A branding function. A dissemination function. Preservation and archiving, though they haven't been good at that.
- The Certification Function. Create overlay journals. Don't send it to an editor; just post it online and send peer reviewers to it. They grade it and can choose to be publishers as well.
- Version control. If your article is a living document, what version of it is canonical?
- The Money. Authors aren't in this for the royalties. Nor are peer reviewers. So the justification for copyright falls away. Although scholars don't care as much about compensation (as say entertainment dudes), they care about attribution. They want to control derivative works.
- Writing for a huge blog audience. Jonathan Zittrain has discussed the incentives of writing papers for an audience larger than a professor who throws the paper away later — of writing,
essentially, for more than a grade. From the Searls' lecture notes:
Instead, write a paper half the length of the one you were going to write anyway... and spend half your time editing somebody else's paper... (the student doesn't know who the editor is)... and the end product will be a wikipedia of sorts.
Doc Searls -- "For learning out loud"
Richard Poynder -- "Ten Years After"
Pamela Burdman -- "A quiet revolution puts costly journals on web"
Science and Technology Committee -- "MPs Condemn Government Response to Scientific Publications Report"
Lawrence Lessig -- "Never Again"