digital scholarship
DESCRIPTION
A presentation I did for George Siemens and Stephen Downes CCK11 course. I am still working on this and will modify over the coming monthsTRANSCRIPT
Digital Scholarship
Martin Weller
Book on Digital Scholarship
Blogging as microcosm of digital scholarship
Blogging is…
Social
Blogging is…
Democratic
Blog posts can be..
Tech
Politics
Footie
Professional
Informal
To no-one To 1000s
Some questions
• Do they represent 'proper scholarship' (whatever that is)• Are they central or peripheral to practice?• Are they applicable to all domains?• Are they more useful for some scholarly functions than
otters eg teaching?• How do we recognize quality?• Do they complement or replace existing channels?• Should we reward them through official routes such as
tenure?• Should bloggers use institutional systems or separate
out their blogging and formal identities?
Digital scholarship is a shorthand for…
Digital gives common format
Network gives frictionless distribution
Social network gives new means of connecting
Openness is a way of working that facilitates connections
The Boyer view of scholarship
• Discovery
• Integration
• Application
• Teaching
<http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/digschol1 >
Give me your views
Tenure and reward
3 legged stool
How do we recognise dig schol?
enthusiasm for the development and adoption of technology should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements in highly competitive and complex professional environments. Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core.”
Harley et al 2010
Cheverie et al (2009): “While this community talks about ‘publication’, the language used implies that digital scholarship is of significantly lesser value, and word of mouth to younger colleagues discourages digital scholarship in the hiring, tenure and promotion process
Senior people don’t get it
Outsourced evaluation
Waters (2000): “ to a considerable degree people in departments stopped assessing for themselves the value of a candidate as a scholar and started waiting for the presses to decide”.
Recognising digital scholarship
• Recreating the existing model
• Finding digital equivalents
• Generating guidelines that include digital scholarship
• Using metrics
• Peer-assessment
• Micro-credit
• Developing alternative methods
Heppell (2001) “we continually make the error of subjugating technology to our present practice rather than allowing it to free us from the tyranny of past mistakes.”
How might we recognise digital scholarship?
Publishing
Research
Authoring
Submission/Review
Rejection/Modification
Publication
Distribution
Parties
Funder
Author
Publisher
Libraries
Reader
£
£
£
Business
• $23 billion STM publishing
• Reed-elsevier $1.5B profit 2009
• UK 2007, writing = £1.6B, peer-review = £200M editing = £70M
• Library costs for journals increased 302% from 1986-2005
The squeeze
• Funders mandate
• Libraries withdrawing from Big Deal
• Open Access
Open Access
• Green/Gold routes
• Rights
• Citation
• Openness allows new connections
• Commercial publishers = $3400 per article. Non-profit organisations, = $730 (Clarke 2007)
New models
• Zero cost journals
• Added value
• Levels of peer review (PLoS)
Why don’t you publish open access?
Network weather
Imagine…
• Teaching
• Conference
• Authoring
How might network weather impact your discipline?
Conferences
• Amplified
• Online
• Backchannel
The new conference archive
To make a conference viable you need people to attend and pay fees
To attend people need to get funds from their university or project
To justify this they need to give a presentation
A presentation needs to be peer-reviewed so they can include it on their CV
People only attend conferences that offer this
Alternative formats
• Barcamp
• Pre-presentation
• Voting
• Produce something
Would you attend a non-traditional conference?
What does it all mean?
A failure of ownership
Technology engagement is key
Potential to radically change practice
Digital scholarship gives alternatives where there were none previously
“it was a revolution. And we all know what
happens in a revolution. You see what goes, you see what stays, you see
what comes.
Martin Amis
“We should determine what
goes, what stays, and what comes.
These are exciting times!