Sping 2004
IRLS589 Final Paper
(Carrie) Chen Fang

I give permission for my final project to be made available through the LIS Learning Showcase web server.

Scholarly Communication in the New Age

Introduction

As a result of the rapid development of information technology such as the advances of telecommunications, and the growth of computer network and the World Wide Web, traditional scholarly communication world is experiencing unexpected changes, of which electronic scholarly communication attracts the most attention. In the process of technologies advance, we are witnessing qualitative and quantitative in the ways that researchers communicate with each other for informal conversations, for local or distant collaborations, for publishing and disseminating their work, and for constructing social network between their work and themselves. Apparently more and more researchers and readers will take the advantage of technologies and conduct their scholarly activities via the Web (Borgman 2000). Meanwhile the electronic capabilities not only provide wide access to scholarship, but also encourage interdisciplinary and collaborative research. Disintermediation also rises as a movement that has influenced the publishing and open access of scholarly work. All these issues come together and make the evaluation of the products and the processes of scholarly communication quite different from its original ways, which have been bought in by scholars, publishers and libraries for centuries. While changes make things complicated and difficult at the first glance, insightful actions towards changes would improve the whole process eventually.

Literature Review

In technological terms, scholarly communication is being transformed through the use of computers, e-mail, word processing software, electronic publishing, digital libraries, the Internet, the World-Wide Web, mobile phones, wireless networks, and other information technologies. Due to concerns about cost of reproduction and distribution, the excellent connectivity in the scholarly community, and increasingly expensive journal pricing, it is widely expected that a great deal of scholarly communication will move from the print to the electronic format (Varian, 1997). However, the world of scholarship has been established and developing on the base of traditional communication ways. The new advent of digital technology did bring a “crisis” to the world by toppling down the fundamental processes in scholarly communication through which research is produced, disseminated and made available to the intended public (English& Collins, 2002). It also raises the opposing views of intellectual property, copyright, access to information, and etc.

From the evaluation of scholarly products point of view, traditionally the quality control process is done through peer review: the researcher writes a paper and submits it to a scholarly journal; the paper is not immediately published; it is sent by the editor to two or three referees to judge it; the editor, based on referee's feedback, decide whether the paper is to be accepted and published. Those referees are always the domain experts who are knowledgeable about the topic that is discussed in the paper and presumably would provide reasonable reviews to the paper. This peer review mechanism usually ensures the quality of the published paper adequately. Nevertheless, due to increasing cost of scholarly journals, many libraries discontinued their subscriptions after years of cooperation with the publishers. When this door is closed, the Internet technology opens a window for possible solutions to the problem in scholarly publishing and peer review, with both challenges and opportunities (Borgman, 2000; Kling & Callahan, 2003).

On the other hand, as boundary-crossing research has become more pervasive in recent decades, interdisciplinary inquiry "has become part of the process of knowledge production" (Klein, 1996). Klein (1990) suggested that interdisciplinarians need to know "what information to ask for and how to acquire a working knowledge of the language, concepts, information, and analytical skills" related to a problem. The new information technology with the Web greatly facilitates the process by providing access to information based on research needs.

The idea of disintermediation was first promoted by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), aiming at improving the compatibility among eprint services (Tammaro, 2001). Since scholars publish their findings in order to leave impact on research, not to let journals sell their work while they turn back to purchase those resources produced by their peers. Access is always the barrier to research impact. By disintermediation through new information technology, authors can bypass the organizational and economical barriers to get a wider distribution and sharing of personal publications. (Krichel & Warner, 2001). On the other hand, open archives would also build peer-review and abstracting and indexing functions upon discipline or institution-based e-print services. This should enhance research productivity and impact as well as provide powerful new ways of monitoring and measuring it. Problem with disintermediation is mainly focusing on the intellectual property, which could make the free access to scholarly publication through the Internet much more complicated.

Revolution Undergoing

The statement of putting scholarly work online has long been a controversial issue in the field. Electronic scholarly communication is faster, cheaper and more convenient, but people also noticed the difficulties in dealing with scholarly communication process and product evaluation. Fortunately many researchers have stepped into the subject and tried to find ways to solve the problem. A revolution is happening in the world of scholarship. The following are some examples of solutions.

Citation Analysis & Peer Review

The well defined citation analysis is applied to the Internet search engine to conduct the evaluation process. The fundamental measure is the citation-based journal ranking – the number of times an individual author is cited, or the occurrences frequency of citations targeting to the author. The ranking value for citations can be calculated by dividing total citations either by the number of years over which citation activity is or to be observed. An example of this kind of citation ranking is the journal impact factor, which refers to the average number of citations received per article published in the journal ( Garfield , 1972). These citation measures are often used to determine the importance or influence of a group of documents.

The citedness feature actually reflects the peer review activity, which forms a social network in the scholarly communication world. So, when the Internet and e-print repositories are introduced to the scholarly world, people started examine it from the network perspective. One example is applying Kleinberg's (1999) “hubs and authorities” algorithm to evaluate the resources.

According to Kleinberg, there are two types of useful pages: an authority page is the one that contains a lot of authoritative or definitive information about the topic; while a hub page is the one with a large number of links to authorities. In another word, a good “hub” page points to many good “authorities” (out-links counted) and a good “authority” page is pointed by many good “hubs” (in-links counted). He also assigns weights to both “hub” and “authority” on the following reciprocal basis: if a given page (which is a hub) “cites” many pages with high authority-weights, its hub-weight should be high; if a given page (which is an authority) is “cited” by many pages with high hub-weights, its authority-weight should be high.

In a study of “rethinking the entire cycle of scholarly information from creation to collaboration, review, dissemination, and archiving”, conducted by a UC Berkeley researcher Robert Wilensky and his colleagues (2001), a notion that scholars self-publish their research papers on local resources, and then engage in a continuous, collaborative peer-review system was proposed. In terms of the determination of “authorities”, Wilensky explained that "you'd like to look at those articles that are given good reviews by good reviewers-those who have given useful and reliable reviews in the past as indicated by agreement with other reviews, and maybe looking backwards with the citation index. We've used a hubs and authorities type of algorithm to establish credentials.” In another word, this is a derivation of the “hubs and authorities” concept, meaning that reviewers with previous reliable reviews (analogy to authorities with many links from other hubs) would give good reviews to others (analogy to hubs link to authorities). Theoretically it is feasible. Although no literature has shown any test on its real practicability, it provides some idea to examine the problem from a non-traditional perspective.

Reader's Judgment

Since peer review is usually taking long time (e.g. more than one year), and sometimes the reviewers' subjective judgment did not reflect the true value of the paper, this mechanism has got some criticism. When electronic methods are used in the process, it would possibly shorten the time for peer review. But the subjectivity is still a drawback of this method. What's more, as electronic communication pervades the peer review process, its nature of being faster and cheaper turns out to be exaggerated. When most of the time in peer review is taken place in referees, their costs of the equipment used in the process (computers, network connections, and so on) are hard to be estimated. (Mizzaro, 2001).

So, besides peer review, is there any ways to evaluate the scholarly publication? Mizzaro (2001) proposed a “reader's judgment” method which can be treated as both an alternative or supplement to peer review. The purpose of this method is to keep “the quality of scientific papers at a high level” and provide “a way of measuring in an automatic and objective way the quality of researchers”. In this mechanism, Mizzaro uses a default value, usually zero, to initially measure the quality (accuracy, comprehensibility, novelty, and so on) of a paper. This value will be dynamically updated based on reader's judgments in different categories. Meanwhile, there are also another two sets of values of steadiness for author and reader. The three sets of values will be calculated using mathematical algorithms to get distribution graphs. Based on the result, people can get the evaluations on all three parties – paper, author and reader. This mechanism is a very interesting attempt trying to evaluate scholarly publication in an objective way. As the author stated, it still contains some restriction, but would be a powerful method.

Eprint Repositories

The Internet has leaded a revolution in the field. It fosters the process of academic libraries to change roles, joining with faculty members, societies, foundations and even publishers to reshape and promote new ways for scholarly communication to take place out of commercial publisher's control (Albanese 2001). When librarians are seeking to make digital libraries and e-print repositories available, they face the problem from the producers of scholarly publications. The sticking point is the obstacle from the fundamental structure of scholarly communication which basically lies in the inertia of the traditional publishing paradigm. As explained by Rick Johnson, enterprise director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC) in 2001, "Until recently, the cost of commercial journals was invisible to most scholars because libraries handled the subscription aspect of the process," faculty and researchers have no idea about the process unless they get to know about the process and the increasing pricing from venders of their favorite journals. This communication process is time-consuming and difficult. But the most important reason is that scholars tend to publish their work in commercial journals (even in electronic format) rather than going to libraries or e-print repositories (Kling & Callahan, 2003). It is simply inertia of tradition.

Fortunately, there are some changes taking place as time goes one. According to SPARC's statistics, in 2001, more than 27,000 scientists joined the Public Library of Science (PLoS) initiative, agreeing they would no longer support, edit, referee for, subscribe, or submit work to scholarly journals that did not make all of their content available for free within six months after publication. The process is complicated, but predictable: the future of scholarly publishing would publicize the permanent archival record of scientific research which is now under the control of publishers. Institutional repository would be a possible solution to make it happen (Johnson, 2002).

The value of publishing research papers for scholars is not direct monetary compensation, but peer recognition to their research work and academic achievements. The online repositories provide open access to their work, which widen the dissemination of their work to the academic public. And with appropriate indexing and search mechanisms in those repositories, open access online articles have higher citation rates than traditionally published but fee-based articles. This type of visibility and awareness bodes well for both the individual author and for the author's host institution.

Conclusion

Technology and scholarly trend toward interdisciplinary, collaboration and disintermediation are really challenges to the existing scholarly communication world. The transition period is always the hardest time, but people will have to adapt to changes and to meet the demands behind changes. Quoting a famous Chinese saying for scholarly communication in the new age:

“The future is promising, while the road to it is challenging.”

References

Albanese, A.R. (2001). Revolution or evolution. Library Journal. Cahners Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Anonymous. (2001).Re-inventing Scholarly Communication. Envision . 17(1) Retrieved April 15, 2004 from http://www.npaci.edu/envision/v17.1/re_inventing.html

Borgman, C.L. (2000). Digital libraries and the continuum of scholarly communication. Journal of Documentation, 56(4) , 412-430.

Borgman, C.L. & Furner, J. (2002). Scholarly communication and bibliometrics. Annual Review of Information Science and Technololgy, 36 .

English, R. & Collins, J. (2002). Reforming the system of scholarly communication: it's time to get involved. Education, Communication & Information, 2(2).

Garfield . E. (1972). Citation analysis as a tool in journal evaluation, Science, 178(4060), 471-479.

Cronin, B. & Atkins, H. B. (Ed.) (2000). The Web of Knowledge: A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield. ASIS Monographs.

Harter, S. P. (1993). The Peer Review Process. Library Quarterly 63 , i-ii.

Jacobs, N. (2001). Information technology and interests in scholarly communication: A discourse analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(13) , 1122-1133.

Johnson, R.K. (2002). Institional repositories: partnering with faculty to enhance scholarly communication. D-Lib Magazine, 8(11). Retrieved April 27, 2004 from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november02/johnson/11johnson.html .

Klein, J. T. (1990). terdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Detroit : Wayne State University .

Klein, J.T. (1996). Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities. Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia .

Kleinberg, J. M. (1999) Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. Journal of the ACM , 48:604-632. Retrieved on April 20, 2004 from http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/ .

Kling, R. & Callahan, E. (2003). Electronic journals, the internet, and scholarly communication. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) 37 ,127-177.

Krichel, T. & Warner, S. (2001). Disintermediation of Academic Publishing through the Internet: An Intermediate Report from the Front Line. Retrieved April 25, 2004 from http://openlib.org/home/krichel/papers/sants.html .

Mizzaro, S. (2003). Quality control in scholarly publishing: a new proposal. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(11) : 989-1005.

Tammaro, A.M. (2001, March). Scholarly communication and acedemic presses: an introduction. International Conference on Scholarly Communication and Academic Press , Firenze . Retrieved April 25, 2004 from http://e-prints.unifi.it/archive/00000137/00/International_Conference_on_Scholarly_Comm.pdf .

Varian, H.R. (1997, April). The future of electronic journals. Scholarly Communication and Technololgy Conference, Emory University , USA . Retrieved April 25, 2004 from http://arl.cni.org/scomm/scat/varian.html .

P.S. Anita, I chose the first assignment as the final paper, but faced a big problem. The statement you gave encompasses many topics: technology, interdisciplinary, collaboration, disintermediation, evaluation of products, and processes of scholarly communication. In my background reading, I found way too many articles in each topic and it was really a difficult time for me to put together everything in one paper. Sometimes I felt that I even didn't know how to use the papers I found for the literature review. So, I boldly put more emphasis on the impact of technology rather than the interdisciplinary, collaboration and disintermediation to the SC. I did cover a little about the later, but they might be too shallow. Just want to let you know. Thank you!