Open Science & Open Research -New Paradigms in Scholarly Communication

Cornelius PuschmannUniversity of Dsseldorfcornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de

25 June 2008

Issues

Where are we?

The Web has given a huge and growing global community access to a wealth of knowledge

The bulk of this knowledge is not created by academics, whose main job is knowledge creation, but by amateurs who donate their spare time

Much of what academics create is locked away in specialized journals and publications

Paradox: those who could contribute most lag behind furthest

What are the reasons and where is change taking place?

Non-reasons

Proprietary, valuable information? (patents etc)
in most cases no

Lost publishing revenue? (selling books)
generally no, very few publications make the author money

Plagiarism?
possible, but the risk exists with any form of publishing

Is it really publishing?

our interpretation of the Web is shaped by metaphors associated with paper, printing and publishing

e.g. web sites / pages / forms, email,

but Web 2.0 is increasingly detaching itself from these sources

Why academia is resistant to opening up

parts of academia are still highly invested in paper

information overload

Is change a good thing?

Why would I want people to find me?

It's open access if I have access, right?

Reaction to perceived information overload

many researchers use paper-age methods to work with digital information

browsing instead of searching

putting things on the Web instead of research happening on the Web

finality vs. versioning

controlling quality and making available are conflated

Is change a good thing?

researchers tend to be traditionalists

peer-review, quality control etc central paradigms

lack of control, order and selection on the Web seen with skepticism by some

goal is generally to preserve tried and trusted procedures and port them to the Web (but does that work?)

Why would I want people to find me?

small, highly specialized and tightly knit research communities

inward-looking

assumption that nobody outside the field cares

lack of interdisciplinary focus

It's open access if I have access, right?

most academics have easy access to scholarly journals through their libraries

the libraries cover the subscription costs

many perceive this as open access

academics aren't directly affected by the costs associated with commercial publishing since they don't have to pay for it

younger researchers often can't risk challenging traditions - publish or perish

Change

Digital Humanities

new approach to Humanities (literary studies, musicology) using computational approaches and presentation techniques

new tools and methods have the potential to shine a new light on old data

http://www.projectbamboo.org/

WALS

www.wals.info

interactive atlas of the world's languages and their typological features (syntax, lexicon, phonology)

originally on paper and CD-ROM

now interactive, uses Google Maps

feature set and maps can be used for other projects (remixing)

OpenWetWare

www.openwetware.org

collaborative wiki for research labs in biology/biological engineering

started by grad students in 2004

originally used by two labs, now international project

ThoughtMesh

www.thoughtmesh.net

system for collaboratively tagging and linking scientific texts

content of parts can be assessed without reading everything

opens the door for vertical papers, i.e. finding, reading and citing small chunks of information instead of horizontally digesting the entire article

SciVee

www.scivee.tv

basically YouTube for scholarly content

pubcast accompanies/supplements a written paper

one clip for a paper on motor neurons in the spinal cord of mice has garnered 225.000 views since December 2007

especially attractive for content that can be described visually

Encyclopedia of Life

www.eol.org

Wikipedia for the world's species

developed (mostly) by experts using scientific taxonomy

attempt to concentrate all knowledge on living organisms on Earth in one resource

will include video, audio, photos and illustrations

Current approach to research and publishing

datatools for viewing, analyzing
and annotating the data+

research community (disciplinary, topical,
geographical....)records

uses

=

research article 1.0

public

not
public

human-readable only

static

primarily textual

Web-enabled approach to research and publishing

datatools for viewing, analyzing, annotating,
tagging, structuring and remixing the data+

research community (disciplinary, topical,
geographical....)records

uses

=

research article 2.0

public

semantically annotated

dynamic and interactive

different modes of presentation
(audio, video)

Integrating and interlinking academic content

Using blogs in teaching

Web-enabling content from scholarly journals

E-journal editor's blog

Thanks for listening!