Could We "Wikify" Scholarly Canons? 63
An anonymous reader writes "'We can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it' wrote Vannevar Bush in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. Nearly 70 years later, academics are still wrapping research in inaccessible journal articles. Might they be doing it wrong?"
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Well, Betteridge's Law of Headlines and all that. But don't confuse "wiki" with "wikipedia". Having reviewed scholarly journal entries published in a form where they are accessible to all, and all references are hotlinks, could only improve things. Some sort of discussion/comments associated with each article for Q&A, and forward links to all citing works would be great as well, especially works that refute the article in part or in whole.
There's a lot that can be done to improve accessibility withou
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Well, Betteridge's Law of Headlines and all that. But don't confuse "wiki" with "wikipedia". Having reviewed scholarly journal entries published in a form where they are accessible to all, and all references are hotlinks, could only improve things. Some sort of discussion/comments associated with each article for Q&A, and forward links to all citing works would be great as well, especially works that refute the article in part or in whole.
But this is pretty much exactly what we have at the moment. Most journals will let you read papers online in this way, and provide a list of citing articles and hyperlinks to citations. Most journals accept comments, BMJ even has these as online comments. Look at PubReader for other innovations in this area. I don't think anybody has a serious complaint that academic research is organised badly, its just the cost issue that winds people up.
Academic research at the coal face is necessarily sprawling. T
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hyperlinking it would certainly make sense.
so hypertexting the canon papers. THAT would make a lot of sense. but doing that requires also access.
which makes me ask the question is hypertexting what they mean with wikifying? have we really gone that far off the deep end?
and well a lot of papers are simply required by customs to have such and such number of references. that's why you can get shit published if you just refer to enough other shit.
PLOS (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a big fan of the work for instance. [plosone.org]
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(Damn - when will Slashdot get an edit button.) Oh well, you get the idea.
We could have wiki-slashdot and all edit eachother's comments instead of pointing out grammar flaws!
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I agree PLOS is incredibly valuable, and a great improvement over the expensive walled garden approach, but by "only skimmed TFA" you missed the key point:
PLOS ONE: original research (your quote: "reports on primary research"); written once static document, so even if they accepted reviews it would slowly continually become more and more out of date.
Scholarpedia: Encyclopedic style reviews; wiki, so continuously tracked, corrected, refined, and extended. It should, of course, also point you to all those exc
Wait a Generation (Score:5, Insightful)
Last week I spoke at an academic conference where another scholar argued for the use of open-access, open-data journals in our field. With a representative of one of the major university presses sitting right next to him, he made the bold (and correct) argument that the presses were attempting to control content going forward, even if it means strangling libraries and stifling scholarly production. He treated open-access publication as a question of scholarly freedom.
He was completely misunderstood.
As an historian among historians, I expected some resistance to any suggestion that scholarly practices should change. In at least one sense of the word, we're a conservative bunch. But the objections which were raised made me consider a career change. I may as well be a paleontologist if I'm going to walk among living dinosaurs. Nothing's free, one opined, as someone has to pay for the servers. Never mind that our presenter wasn't speaking of cost. We're in a golden age of plagiarism, said another, and this would make things worse. Never mind that we're actually in a golden age of catching plagiarists. A third worried that the ability to search for a keyword in a document would mean people wouldn't read the larger context in which the keyword appears. I can't help but imagining this individual using a razor blade on the indices of her student's textbooks.
Between embargoes, copyright restrictions, and the extraordinary expense libraries have to accept to keep subscription, scholarship is suffering when it ought to be flourishing. Of all people, we in the humanities ought to recognize this fact (last I heard, academic libraries tend to spend around 70-80% of their budgets on science and medicine journals, the rest going to facilities, staff, and last of all humanities). But there I watched a generation of scholars fail utterly to see the copyrighted text on the wall. A shift to open-access is the future of scholarship, but it will take a generation before it can happen. Rather, I should say it will take two generations. The first, mine, will publish in open peer-reviewed journals but not exclusively. We know we need to publish in the older titles if we want jobs and tenure. But once we're in place, we'll be able to accept open journals for their potential, recognizing the value of the next generation's publications in quality open journals.
Re:Wait a Generation (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting that in math, the transition to open access journals is being led by some of the most prominent mathematicians, such as Tim Gowers and Terence Tao.
Re:Wait a Generation (Score:4, Insightful)
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The last thing ignorant science people want to do is to read scholar journals. If it is out of their field, most of the scholars don't want to read them either because they would be hard to understand. That's like saying how we should strive to put more and more things out there in sanskrit because the masses of people who don't know sanskrit are really losing out.
Re:Wait a Generation (Score:4, Insightful)
With every university running a computer network and a web site, paying for servers is the least costly component of research.
With modern indexing tools (to day nothing of Google or Bing), making these accessible while not actually centralizing their storage is trivial.
Still, the transition to open journals you postulate can't forget that the whole process depends on some method of distinguishing actual scientific research from junk science posted by whack jobs. That is why journals sprang up in the first place. It has always been a process of gate-keeping.
Science might take a look at the model of Kernel Developers, and other avid PGP users and hold key signing sessions at their public meetings. Then start using those keys to sign their works. If for no other reason than to make it easier for all to know, by listing the signers of any author's keys, whether the guy is a kook or not.
You may know your peers, your students, or your teachers, but does anyone 4 time zones away, or will anyone in 20 years?
Re:Wait a Generation (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the interesting points the speaker made concerned exactly this. If more of scholarship turned toward open access, libraries could shift money from paying for subscriptions to supporting journals or journal mirrors. They'd likely save considerable cash doing so. More importantly, they'd retain their function as a repository of knowledge, a function increasingly challenged by the presses.
Indeed. But in principle, there's no reason peer review cannot also occur in an online open access journal. In fact, such things already exist. (Work by NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World [nyu.edu] highlights the potential of this.)
The big hurdle is one of prestige. Publishers hold the prestige for now. Being published is a means of getting the bragging rights necessary to get a job, tenure, and promotion. But the only thing that really gives the publishers such prestige is the voluntary efforts of generations of scholars doing peer-review. The sooner scholars realize that they themselves are the real basis for scholarly prestige, the better.
Scholar of open access estimates up to 96% savings (Score:3)
If more of scholarship turned toward open access, libraries could shift money from paying for subscriptions to supporting journals or journal mirrors. They'd likely save considerable cash doing so.
Heather Morrison, a colleague of mine, researched this. She estimated savings as high as 96%. The details are in her dissertation, Freedom for scholarship in the internet age [cmns.sfu.ca] - which is, of course, open access. The cost estimates are on page 86 (the 98th page of the PDF).
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In a lot of disciplines, the most prestegious journals are actually owned by scholarly societies, and are published under contract with publishers. 'Science' is the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 'Addiction' (the highest impact journal in my own field) is the journal of the British Society for the Study of Addiction., but is published under contract by Wiley. In other words, publishers *don't* actually "hold the prestige".
A lot of the contracts between scolarly societ
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HTML was created to be one giant open access journal of information. Thus heralding the dawn of The Information Age. Of course the "academics" will be the last ones to abandon their bogus and wrong practice of artificial scarcity of information. Instead of monetizing information which is infinitely reproducible and thus ECON:101 says has zero price regardless of cost to create, they could instead pull heads from asses and market that which is actually scarce: Their ability to do the work to create said i
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Yeah, academics certainly want nobody to know their work ... sure. That must also be the reason why so many scientists put up their published articles (and often even preprints which are not yet accepted in a journal) on places like arXiv. [arxiv.org]
Making information available is just one function of journals, and not even the most important. The most important service journals provide is pe
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ECON:101 is wrong about the cost going to zero. The linear, intersecting supply and demand curves still taught in ECON:101 are an obvious absurdity since they predict a negative price at sufficient demand. It doesn't just end there, though. The modified curves that only approach zero are also wrong. It's been known for a while now that the price of a commodity is determined by the cost of production, and therefor does not approach zero at infinite supply.
But regardless, you're right about there being a shif
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*absurdity since they predict a negative price at sufficient supply.
Re:Wait a Generation (Score:4, Informative)
I'm co-editing a (mostly) closed-access journal that's fairly highly rated in my little field. In many places, scholars are scored according to where they publish, so an article with us is worth (for performance review) four articles elsewhere. That's obscene, and the huge part of the problem is a systemic belief in the "quantification of academic outcomes"; you can't easily answer the question "Is this person good?", so you answer the question "How many articles in INT1-ranked journals did she publish?". The predictable results are: bloating of INT1-ranked journals, increase in number of INT1-ranked journals, and reorientation of scholarship aimed at what those journals are interested in. You can see the same argument, mutatis mutandis with impact factors: if you select from intelligent agents based on a measurement that has some correlation with performance, those agents will perform to the measurement, weakening the future correlation.
While professors may not care about which way the wind is blowing, academic publishers do. So our publisher recognizes that the winds are blowing open access (indeed, many European funding bodies require OA publication when possible), and offers an open-access option. They see the writing on the wall, and the copies of their works on the Russian websites, and the people at conferences with removable hard drives. As academics, scholarly work is the very air we breathe, it is a necessity, and as a group we find an inequality in access to such work more unjust than people making questionably-authorized copies of copyrighted works for their own research. Open Access, like Open Source, is a great idea, and one that can lead to great riches. The challenge lies in transferring the costs of the work: it is in the interests of academic institutions to support OA publications with material and labor, but there aren't many institutions that are willing to hire people to work exclusively on the heavy lifting behind such publications.
Finally, TFA is a scholarly-sounding advertisement for Scholarpedia. As an historian, I don't see how a wiki can function for scholarly work. Put another way, the wiki model is built on assumptions concerning human knowledge that makes it inappropriate for the humanities; TFA furthers these assumptions. The major assumption is that, since we base our knowledge on the field on the work of predecessors, we build upon that knowledge incrementally. One of the major traits of the Social Sciences and Humanities, however, is that we constantly reflect upon the nature of our discipline and, in building upon knowledge, restructure the foundations of the discipline. That means that our criteria for meaningfulness and even truth are constantly changing. So, even when I set out to do something that lends itself to an encyclopedia-style article (which happens occasionally, but not most of the time), I review as much historical data as I can and work through the reconstructions of my predecessors. Inevitably, I can't build on them so much as rewrite them, and I can't rewrite them in a series of edits, but I have to make a single narrative that is my own. Most of the time, however, I'm not writing encyclopedia entries. Encyclopedia entries are not for producing historical arguments, but for guiding readers to those arguments. There isn't a single vision of the discipline, and there isn't even a privileged voice that would express a consensus of the various approaches and interpretations.
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It will not take "a generation" to make the shift. It will take a systematic change in the hiring and funding priorities of universities, labs, and grant agencies. A faculty candidate who has chosen to publish only in open access journals (with no articles in Science or Nature or other "prestigious" journals) needs to be able to win the job over another candidate with publications in "prestigious" journals. Likewise, a researcher must be able to win a grant over other researchers under the same circumsta
Wikimedia != Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
So in conclusion? Oh God no? Nah.
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I don't think there is any confusion. The article linked to in the submission specifically mentions wikipedia by name. Didn't you read it?
They did, but someone had changed it.
Re:Wikimedia != Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
Don't confuse the Wiki as a tool with Wikipedia.
A lot of the discussion here doesn't seem to have much to do with TFA. (Surprise, surprise...)
People seem to be missing the importance of "scholarly canons" in the summary. TFA is NOT about open-access publishing (except indirectly). This is NOT about Wikipedia (except perhaps as a model of how to do certain aspects of a scholarly encyclopedia better than Wikipedia).
TFA holds up Scholarpedia [scholarpedia.org] as its main exemplar of a better kind of scholar online encyclopedia of canonic knowledge in a particular field.
That's not the only one out there, and Scholarpedia does have its issues. Personally, I think if our goal is to produce a standard scholarly encyclopedia for a particular discipline (or for many disciplines), we could also take the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [stanford.edu] as a great example of a model project of collaboration by scholars to produce a summary of research and ideas in a discipline...
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Sorry to self-reply, but to clarify
TFA is NOT about open-access publishing (except indirectly).
What I meant here is that TFA is about creating open-access resources in the form of a kind of collaborative scholarly encyclopedia summarizing the main consensus of ideas in a discipline. It's NOT about open-access publishing in the sense of publishing your random research out of context, as in a journal or something.
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But TFA formulates the problem conflating encyclopedic work with scholarly research and open access:
From a Student Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
While I am all for having science knowledge be free, somebody has to edit and layout and do a quick check of the articles to make sure they are making sense, and somebody does have to host the articles and provide the delivery system. I had a friend who worked for a publisher and it was her job to edit journal articles and she was astounded and the poor writing that was submitted and confided that some articles didn't get published because they were so poorly written. What does need to happen though is Publishers need to realize that in this modern age they need a different distribution framework. If you take the approach of netflix and make every journal article available for a small price to individual subscribers everybody would sign up. In one state Instead of having say 10 individual libraries paying 5000 each, you have 60,000 students paying $30 each. There is still a way to make money from this they just need to realize that they need to modernize their distribution methods.
Bottom line, the idea of having only certain articles get published in special prestigious journals because of their significance is still a good idea. However maybe in this future age of article accessibility having articles are voted to be part of a collection based on how often they are cited would be a better indication of how "prestigious" an article is and how well it reflects on the author.
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The vast majority of university students have access to the vast majority of (worthwhile) journals through subscriptions at their libraries. Those subscriptions cost far less than $30 per student and only require the publishers to send a few invoices, rather than trying to manage tens of thousands of small payments. You're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. If the particular journal isn't available, most universities are also part of a network that allows them to access journal articles that they
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So, 30 dollars per student in a mid sized institution like, for example, the University of Minnesota, comes to a couple million dollars per year.
Average that across the 50 states, and you have a cool Hunderd Million. Throw in non-state institutions, a few Canadian institutions and you have to wonder where 250 million per year is going.
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While I am all for having science knowledge be free, somebody has to edit and layout and do a quick check of the articles to make sure they are making sense, and somebody does have to host the articles and provide the delivery system.
What the hell are we paying colleges for then, eh? Hosting data is fucking cheap. I got 10 Terrabytes with unlimited bandwidth for $100 a year, and that's not the cheapest. Your concerns are ridiculous. Think. If people are doing work: We can pay them for that work. It matters not if that work is done behind a paywall or on a university's paper publishing wiki, except one way the work benefits the most people and the other the information is made artificially scarce so that publishers can extract mone
"Accessibility" has multiple dimensions. (Score:3)
One aspect of "accessibility" is certainly the freedom of access, to get a copy of the paper. This aspect is being discussed most and for good reason.
A second dimension, less discussed, is readability. Scholarly articles are written to be information-dense and unambiguous, communication from a specialist to another of the same. Writing more broadly readable articles is difficult and really not in the skill set of most science specialists. The more expository translation of a scholarly article will be longer than the original and will take a great amount of work to develop. Who is going to do this and how will they be compensated?
I think we need an even greater breakthrough than the Internet for this one.
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You're right that if the articles are specialized then they remain inaccessible to the masses wether they're open or locked up. But if they're open, someone may translate them into laymen's terms. If they're locked up, very few people have the chance to translate them, and even then they may be stopped by the journal's TOS.
Who pays for the translation? Do you or I get paid for posting on slashdot, or other Q&A forums? Lots of people want to make knowledge more accessible, even if they do it for free. Wo
motivation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:motivation (Score:5, Interesting)
Open-access journals and scientific wikis are failing...
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? In the sciences, at least, open access journals are thriving. Take a look at any of the PLoS journals, for instance. These venues are well-respected and scientists are eager to publish in them.
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Netcraft confirmed it.
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Exactly. My guess is that this publishing method is not the cause but the consequence of the current disfunction. Researcher are evaluated on prestige, exactly like businessmen are evaluated on money. That alone means that as a recognized researcher, you have absolutely no interest at seeing concurrent work get published, or perhaps only if they heavily cite your work. With such system, young researcher in small labs will never get any good publication (read in famous journals), whatever the quality of thei
Wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
At least one good reason why I don't put my research on Wikipedia is that it's explicitly against Wikipedia policy ('no original research').
That aside, there are journals such as PlosONE and the new Nature journal Scientific Reports which openly encourage comments by anyone. Whether genuine scientific debate gets lost in the noise is another matter.
please don't throw Wikipedia into this (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA: "When academics have been asked why they do not contribute to Wikipedia, or why they do not make their data more easily available, or why they continue to avoid new “open access” publication venues, one of the most common explanations is “not enough time” [7,8]."
The article gets a lot of things right, but that sentence is not one of them. The reasons that academics do not contribute to Wikipedia have been well documented and discussed here and elsewhere. In brief -- you get no credit for your work, and your contributions can be totally wiped out at the whims of editors. The reason experts don't contribute to Wikipedia is not a lack of time; rather, it's because doing so is perceived (quite reasonably) as a waste of time.
In contrast, most scientists I know are quite receptive to publishing in open access journals. Some are still suspicious of them, but I've never heard "I don't have enough time" given as a reason for not publishing open access. Honestly, that objection wouldn't even make sense.
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I contributed a few times and both times an editor jerked me around so I've not bothered since and I was an expert in the topic I was contributing to.
Economics (Score:1)
"Look, with just a little bit of learning this new wiki, you can give away the results of your years of hard mental effort and expensive education for free!"
"Er, thanks, but no."
As an overall observer, it seems clear that the very notion of "crowdsourcing" (i.e. free labor) is reaching its nadir on the internet. It's becoming clear that, eventually, all the contributed effort usually serves only to enrich a very small number of owners of the web sites, and the "community's" engagement with the site ends up
It seems odd to me (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems odd to me that (taxpayers) that fund public universities are not allowed access to this publicly funded knowledge; that patents don't go to the people who paid for it. That's how it works in the private sector-patents go to the one who pays for it. Yet university scholars (or the university) and not the public are the ones who pay (yet more) for patents used against them. Likewise published articles. Where I live (Canada) taxpayers fund most of the universities, yet researchers will publish pharmaceutical research, obtained at public expense, then its read by someone working for a pharmaceutical company, they patent it, and taxpayers pay (once again) for pills that their research dollars developed. If we are paying for it, at least let it be published in the open, where (if Big Pharma(tm)) tries to patent it, we can claim prior art and give rightful attribution.
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You can still access the knowledge at libraries.
Writing is difficult and time consuming (Score:3)
(disclaimer: this being slashdot I did not RTFA.)
Speaking as a scholar, the main problem that I see is that is that communicating to the public is not my job. Writing for some wiki is not my job. My job is composed of 3 components:
1/ teaching: in class and mentoring students.
2/ research: conduct, manage and fund.
3/ service: for my university in comitees and for the community by taking part in conference/journals by submitting/reviewing paper and hleping with organization.
Moreover, writing is difficult. Especially that form of quite high level all-encompasing writting. Writing a good survey paper takes months. It is a significant endeavour.
As you can see, wikifying scholarly cannons is not really a part of my job and takes a lot of time. It is not unrelated, but it is a more abstract thing. As such, it is not directly useful to my advancement. (In other words, my tenure commitee is not going to care.) I just can not afford to spend that time if it is not part of a clearly identified project.
Publish on Wiki? Never (Score:3)
Now why would that be?
Well, the whole point of a Wiki is that every man jack with an internet connection can edit it.
And that's totally unacceptable on three counts.
Firstly because, as regards my own articles I won't accept random idiots modifying what I wrote because I'm reporting *my own* work, which nobody in the world except me has any business editing.
Secondly for any article I would want to cite I can't accept something that the author (or anyone) else might modify behind my back after it was published. Simply because I'll be citing from, referring to, or commenting on that article in my own work. I can't have it change and then have my own article out of sync.
Thirdly, a pile of articles serves as a scholar's professional CV. If you need to know if someone is any good as a scholar (e.g. because he's applying for a faculty position) you read his articles. Then you know most of what matters without ever going to the trouble of speaking with him. You simply cannot have it that someone can make himself look good by retroactively correcting his articles, changing his findings, or wiping out his mistakes.
I'm afraid that these are the reasons why publishing scholarly articles on a Wiki is out.