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The Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication
- 1. Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/scholarlycommunication Sophia Krzys Acord, Ph.D. With: Diane Harley, Ph.D., Principal Investigator; Sarah Earl-Novell, Ph.D.; Shannon Lawrence, M.A.; C. Judson King, Professor, Provost Emeritus, and Principal Investigator Center for Studies in Higher Education University of California, Berkeley Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation SSP/AAUP Web Seminar: May 4, 2010 Copyright 2010, Center for Studies in Higher Education
- 2. Background and Methods The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley • 5 years, 45 mostly elite research universities, 160 formal interviews (25% with graduate students/postdocs/pre-tenure faculty), 12 case studies: Anthropology, Archaeology, Astrophysics, Biology, Biostatistics, Chemical Engineering, Economics, English-language Literature, History, Law and Economics, Music, Political Science • Research Goal: assess the criteria by which faculty decide when and in what venues to communicate the results of scholarly research—at all stages: – Tenure and promotion, making a name – Criteria used for disseminating research at various stages (publication practices, new publication outlets, new genres) – Sharing (what, w/ whom, when, why or why not?) – Collaboration (w/ whom, when, why or why not?) – Resources created and consumed – Public engagement → Variation. No one value system or set of needs. Disciplinary conventions matter! Neither senior nor young scholars a monolith.
- 3. The Current Publishing Landscape The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley • Scholars use a range of mechanisms for disseminating scholarship at various stages. • Within any given discipline, there may be a variety of publishing strategies available to authors. • Distinguish between in-progress and archival publication. • Scholars can name top 3-5 outlets in a field instantly. In physics, astrophysics, and mathematics, discipline-specific repositories, such as the arXiv, are essential outlets that exist alongside formal commercial- and society-owned journals. Massive data bases, very expensive shared telescopes, etc. Economists and quantitative political scientists use working paper repositories, such as SSRN, and personal websites for disseminating research but continue to rely heavily upon society and commercial journals for final, archival publication.
- 4. In computer science, peer-reviewed conference proceedings are the most prestigious archival outlet, but distribution of scholarship using more open methods, such as posting on personal websites, is common. The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley Software as product. History and archaeology, and other fields of the humanities, such as languages and media studies, rely heavily on the book for long arguments; journals are still very important as a means for disseminating short arguments, book reviews, and other communications. Music includes “art” historical studies of western music, computer composition, ethnomusicology, and music theory. There are multiple outlets used, including books and critical editions, highly competitive and selective society journals, encyclopedias, and MP3s, CD’s, and traditional/networked performance. In molecular and cell biology, and perhaps other sciences such as chemistry, that are fast-moving, well-funded, highly competitive, and have commercial potential, the journal article reigns and the more prestigious the journal, the better. Some PloS journals rising in prestige (not PloS One). Society Journals (and scholar editors) the most trusted. Publication lags are exceptionally short, and preprint servers are
- 5. Finding 1: The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley Conservatism in Archival Publication • The power of self-selection and socialization • Conventional archival publication behavior pre-tenure • Some have negative perceptions of OA/electronic outlets • High public sharing threshold among some, and little take- up of Web 2.0 tools/social media Is this conservatism a transitional stage? Exceptions: 1.Physics, math, astrophysics, etc., and the arXiv 2.Scholars in newer or less-established departments? → “Young scholars” are not necessarily different than what went before with regards to publication practices.
- 6. Finding 2: The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley Myth of the “Digital Native” • Do youth digital skills translate into professional activities? • Senior scholars can be quite innovative in experimenting with new media/alternative forms of scholarly output. Where is digital innovation taking place? • Many disciplines are becoming more computational/visual. • Digital “tipping point” in some fields, particularly those that are image or data-intensive: 1. Biology – visualization tools, complex figures 2. Archaeology – GIS, 3D modeling 3. Neuro Social Science – visualization, fMRI → Some young scholars play important technical roles in collaborative digital research projects. Work in these areas may demand new publication models.
- 7. Finding 3: The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley Analog vs. Digital Literature? There is an increased reliance on electronic literature, but also a continued desire for print. What are young scholars missing in the electronic literature environment? • Their literature-seeking practices may precede adequate shifts in the IT infrastructure. • Inability to independently assess unvetted work • Some develop “narrow” search practices → Young scholars have “mixed” information-seeking practices. More work is needed to develop effective filters in the electronic environment.
- 8. Disclaimer: Predicting the Future? The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley Scholarly publishers should step back and look at what individual fields are doing. • Different disciplines, different cultures • Collaborations/grand challenge questions • New developments in resources/methods • New funding/university resolutions • Role of scholarly societies • Look at scholarly practices beyond the most competitive institutions to investigate the spectrum of scholarly innovation.
- 9. Summary of Recommendations for The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley the SSP Community 1. Competitive high-quality and affordable journals and monograph publishing platforms (with strong editorial boards, peer review, and sustainable business models) 2. New models of publication that can accommodate arguments of varied length, rich media, and embedded links to data; plus assistance to manage/obtain permissions of copyrighted material 3. Support for managing and preserving new research methods and products including components of natural language processing, visualization, complex distributed databases, and GIS, among many others
- 10. Recommendation 1: The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley Peer Review and Publishing Challenges Need: Competitive high-quality and affordable journals and monograph publishing platforms Particular demand: • Sciences: serials crisis, professional editors, shortest publishable unit, overworked senior referees. • Social sciences: more journals (and expanded editorial boards) needed in low-paradigm, diversifying fields. • Interdisciplinary work: sometimes no obvious publication outlet. • Humanities: monograph crisis, not enough journal outlets, some overworked scholar-editors, high costs to obtain permissions to reproduce copyrighted images, few options to incorporate multimedia content.
- 11. The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley New publication outlets should offer: • Faster turnaround time to publication • Scholar-editors with strong administrative support • Affordable and accessible publication options • Extensive options to disseminate supplementary data • Print-on-demand options for analog/electronic reading environment How does peer review figure into new outlets? An efficient/transparent peer-review system is needed, which could include: • Better ways to evaluate an author’s contribution to multiple- authorship publications, at the institutional level. • Better ways to evaluate interdisciplinary work institutionally. • Sharing peer reviews of rejected work with other outlets, etc.
- 12. Recommendation 2: The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley New Media, New Venues Need: New models of publication that can accommodate arguments of varied length, rich media, and embedded links to data Examples of demand: • Molecular biology: Carlos Bustamante, overstretching DNA movie • Ethnomusicology: Music in the Afghan North (1967-1972) website • New Music Technology: Open Sound Control software • History: Spatial History Project GIS-based visualizations • Archaeology: Rome Reborn 3D reconstruction
- 13. The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley Media-rich publication models should offer: • A stringent peer-review process with experienced reviewers, perhaps in concert with a scholarly society. • The opportunities to integrate heterogeneous data sources and multimedia work, including work that relies on spatial (GIS) approaches, is highly visual and/or computational, and is tied to large databases. • Institutional (broadly defined) assistance to manage permissions of copyrighted material. • Clear navigational maps/tools. • The possibility to be viewed on mobile reading devices. An important question: • It can be extremely expensive to prepare and preserve new media; who will pay?
- 14. Recommendation 3: The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley Infrastructure Need: Support for managing and preserving new research methods and products. Examples of demand: • Music catalogs • Lab protocols • Cell lines • Archaeological databases • Specialist sharing groups in art history (e.g., British studies, Indian studies, etc.) • Databases for non-proprietary data in the social sciences and astronomy
- 15. The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley New infrastructure should offer: • The ability to link between grey material and published work • Mechanisms to credit scholars for their contributions • Compliance with funder mandates on data sharing • More global ways of annotating data • Sophisticated search tools and services • The ability for authors to retain copyright on contributions Other considerations: • Human subjects protections, restrictions on the use of proprietary data, and individual personality may prevent deposit.
- 16. Closing Thoughts and Questions The Future of Scholarly Communication | UC Berkeley 1. Who will pay for new publishing models? Publishers cannot ask scholars to assume the costs of production? 2. Reputation and prestige remain important considerations among senior and young scholars alike. Filtering good work from bad is important in the digital environment. 3. Field and sub-field specific solutions are needed. More detail on these can be found in our report: Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines 4. Thorny problems of Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing. See our recently posted Working Papers on the issue. All publications available at: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/scholarlycommunication
Notas do Editor
- Team effort Funded by the ever-supportive Mellon foundation In depth, qualitative study targeted at answering burning questions at future of scholarship by looking at the central motivations and values of faculty.
- Talk a little about how I frame our work. Importance of methods to judge veracity of what’s being done. Rigorous, dispassionate social scientists with training in sociology, anthropology Not just marketing research. “ Young scholars” = pre-tenure Investigate all of the kinds of things that faculty are creating (primary and secondary sources) Sharing – given hype about crowdsourcing/Web 2.0/social media Also asked: What new, transformational, developments in your field are on the horizon? What do you need that you don’t have? What are young scholars doing?
- Digital may have changed our practices, but young scholars may still have conservative values. This is based on: Self-selection into the field : (how many come from academic families, do particular disciplines provide a life style that suits/fuels their personality? Students go into history because they want to write a book, etc.) Socialization in graduate school (concerns with “jumping through the same hoops as their predecessors” and reward systems). We found no evidence to suggest that “tech-savvy” young graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, or assistant professors are bypassing traditional publishing practices. Young scholars do not appear to be submitting new forms of archival publication into their dossiers. In fact, as arguably the most vulnerable populations in the scholarly community, they hew to the norms of their chosen discipline. To do otherwise may be a “career risk”. In contrast, they are “hyperprofessionalized” because of increased competition for tenure-track positions at competitive institutions (due to the overproduction of Ph.D.s in many fields). Graduate students are very clear on where they need to publish to get tenure (they’re often explicitly told these things by faculty), and can rattle off the top journal names easily ( Cell paper is worth 10 points) . The advice given to pre-tenure scholars was quite consistent across all fields: focus on publishing in the right venues and avoid spending too much time on public engagement, committee work, writing op-ed pieces, developing websites, blogging, and other non-traditional forms of electronic dissemination (including courseware). The overproduction of Ph.D. problem has led to a glut of publications. It’s now “too easy to publish”, so traditional peer review remains important. Many worry that lack of peer review is associated with newer, untested forms of publication, such as electronic or OA journals. Number of pages publishable not restricted by cost for e-journals, thus editors of e-journals are not pressed to be as selective. No takeup of Web 2.0 tools (already known). Young scholars also have a fear of poaching or putting “half baked ideas” out into the ether in a way that could damage their early reputations. This is particularly the case in fields with commercial potential, low thresholds for sharing, and fast-moving currents, like biology and chemistry. Sharing work in these areas without receiving due credit may impact the ability to get future funding. Some mentors may “ban” their students from using tools like nature Network. They may use these venues for staying up to date, but not for sharing work. Young scholars generally don’t waste time releasing working papers because they have to first establish a reputation in PR venues. Exception: the arXiv and astrophysics. Young scholars on arXiv prefer the comments they get through that. Due to long journal turnaround time in the field, plus the idea that results are largely “accurate”, plus the lack of commercial funding and relatively small size of subfields, like astrophysics Exception: There is some indication that faculty in newer and less-established departments in the humanities and social sciences may be more amenable to risk-taking in publication practices since their particular institutions support such efforts to carve out the identity of niche departments. For instance, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, or Maurizio Forte’s work in 3D archaeological modeling at UC Merced. Molecular and cell biology, for instance, may be unlikely to move to an arXiv model because grant funding in the field is highly competitive, there is tremendous commercial potential, there is a fast turnaround time to publication (with multiple outlets available), and scholars already face an overload of information (which likely would be exacerbated under a working paper/preprint system). Indeed, this is probably the case for all fields that are fast-moving, well-funded, highly competitive, and have commercial potential; chemistry would be such a field as well.
- 1. Digital skills in their personal lives may not spill over to their professional activities. Need easy-to-use authoring tools + rigorous training in new methods. Moreover, some f that dig tech doesn’t constitute part of legitimate training. For instance, in archaeology, you may want to ‘feel the dirt’ rather than being stuck behind a GPS: http://middlesavagery.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/assessing-the-future-landscape-of-archaeological-communication/ New media outlets don’t necessary generate innovative scholarship. “ just illustrated projects” I think young scholars are probably more at home with computers in general than I am, because it was part of their learning at a much earlier stage. But I would say the test for me is not do you have computer wizards doing classics—the answer is yes—but instead, are there works in classics that have come up, which are excellent particularly because of their technological connections? I don’t know of one. 2. It may be after tenure that scholars have more room to innovate. I t is difficult to find experienced reviewers to review new forms of publication, so more risk-taking after tenure. But, with all of this said, some do have sophisticated skills and employ them in various stages of scholarly communication. Disciplines are becoming more computational, there is a digital “tipping point” in some fields, like archaeology. In astro, young scholars are computer savvy, writing programs, etc. Plus, in some cases, can provide technical support (biology in labs, archaeology with GIS, history and econ with data mining/mapping). The irony is that such young scholars may go into technical support positions, rather than tenure-track jobs.
- Benefits of electronic literature Ease of access Ability to search within and across texts Surface old literature Ability to have enough information (e.g., software code, back-end data, text archives, etc.) Concerns with the digitization of scholarly communication. Researcher practices may precede adequate shifts in the IT infrastructure. As students rely more and more heavily on online resources for literature, there is a problem preserving the continuity of good work in a field (as students may miss work that has not yet been digitized, or is not available as widely). Senior scholars are concerned about research literacy and how selective digitization can impact young scholars who may not dig deeper than a google search, etc. No time to get to the library! “Not everything made it into PubMed” Like Dave – so many brands in cyterspace – churn As more and more work is available online in various forms, there is a concern that young scholars may not be able to independently assess the quality of work that is not unvetted. Thus, senior scholars direct their students towards outlets with associated prestige. Drowning in preprints! Young scholars do more searching now and less browsing (except for TOC alerts). But, generally, young scholars tend to go to established portals (with keyword or TOC alerts), and then supplement this with Google searches. They are becoming very narrow. It’s difficult to keep up to date!
- Sciences/some social sciences – compete with commercial publishers/professional editors The American Society for Cell Biology publishes Molecular Biology of the Cell Stanford University Libraries' HighWire Press® assists in the publication of Mol. Biol. Cell Find out the niche markets to see if new publication outlets need to be created for interdisciplinary work, etc. (Anno’s point re: iSchool). Humanities – not enough journals – esp. for work in progress to test arguments that take years to come out in book form. Maybe even “long-form articles” instead of books, especially for new Ph.D.s? That way they can get on to writing the next book already! Society of 17 th century music
- New outlets should offer: Faster turnaround time for young scholars. New scholar-run journals with prestigious editorial teams that can compete with commercial publishers in some fields and provide a respected publication outlet for young scholars. High quality editorial teams can influence young scholars to publish there. Affordable and accessible publication options for young scholars in fields/institutions with OA mandates. How does peer review figure into this? More checks on reliability/verifiability during peer review – sharing peer reviews, checks on biased editors, etc. Better ways to evaluate multiple authorship, interdisciplinary work.
- Wesleyan – Mark Slobin Stanford – Jon Christenson CNMAT, Berkeley, music transfer protocol
- + Some kind of publication series/stamp
- Young scholars need: Support for managing and preserving new research methods and products including components of natural language processing, visualization, complex distributed databases, and GIS, among many others. As fields become more computational, young scholars will bear the brunt for organizing and managing complex databases. Therefore, they’re going to be looking for help with stewardship/publication. In Astro, which is federally funded, guidelines for data sharing are not mandatory…but are seen to be for the common good. - Ditto on Econ. So, need a place to share data. **If a community needs data sharing, create the place. Also, preservation issues **Need place for grey material! Jump into the computational space!!! Compete with Elsevier’s data mining thing!!!
- Data messiness Proprietary business data Medical research with human subjects