Academic Evolution

Scholarly Communications will Transform via Cybermetrics

Continuing my series on how scholarly communications must transform, I will argue here that scholarship is about to see "webometrics" or "cybermetrics" supplant traditional bibliometrics for gauging the impact of scholarship. But this is just the beginning. Cybermetrics applied to scholarship will revitalize traditional academic publishing and pave the way for new uses and genres of intellectual work. As scholars and their institutions begin to use cybermetrics they can enrich scholarly productivity and maximize the influence of their intellectual output.

The Impact Factor Factor
Impact is a big deal to scholars and their sponsors. Really big. The Impact Factor of the journal in which one publishes adds or subtracts value from one's publications. This algorithm is derived from a calculation based chiefly on the number of citations a publication generates. It has become a prominent determining factor in securing grants, academic posts, tenure, and advancement. And why not? Don't we want scholars to be making an impact?  With today's info glut, isn't it even more important to preserve and promote systems that help us to know what information should be given more authority?

I will first look into the history of Impact Factor and will claim that this early effort to grapple with information overload has improperly become institutionalized and is neither trustworthy nor adequate for today's information culture. Then I will open the discussion of what can or should be measured through cybermetrics with online scholarly communication. Academia has some very good places to go with its treasure trove of existing and ongoing scholarship; it can't get there by clinging to authority systems based on pre-Internet bibliometrics.

Scholarly Communications must be Integrated Into the Cyberinfrastructure

I last spoke about the need for scholarly communications to be syndicated in this series of posts on how scholarly communications must transform. In this post, I discuss the need for scholarship to be integrated into the cyberinfrastructure. 

"Cyberinfrastructure" is a mouthful, but a vital concept today. Scholars, librarians, and all stakeholders in academic knowledge production need to understand the concept of cyberinfrastructure and come to see the generation of scholarship as something participating within and building this emerging structure for learned communication.

Scholarly Mobile Computing: ArXiv hits the iPhone

With the first three iPhone applications now available to serve up scholarly papers from the arXiv.org repository of scientific papers, mobile computing has now officially entered the domain of scholarly communication and is poised to demonstrate the inevitability and superiority of Open Access publishing. What's more, the appearance of bonafide scholarship on smartphones will accelerate the metamorphosis of modern scholarship because the social, geographic, and interactive aspects of mobile computing are going to reshape research, field work, peer review, and the integration of scholarship into formal and informal teaching and learning.

Conventional Scholarship as "Legacy System" and Open Access as "Middleware"

A "legacy system" in the world of computing provides a useful analogy for understanding the precarious state of contemporary academic publishing. This comparison might also keep us from stepping backward in the very act of stepping forward in promoting Open Access publishing and Institutional Repositories. I will argue that, vital as it is, the Open Access movement should really be seen in its current manifestation as academic "middleware" servicing the "legacy system" of old-school scholarship.

Podcast #004: Open Access and the Institutional Repository

In this interview with BYU Scholarly Communications Librarian Jeff Belliston, we discuss how Open Access can bring broader impact and exposure for scholarship--especially if scholars will preserve copyright so they can deposit their work in an institutional repository like BYU's ScholarsArchive or the more developed DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I play devil's advocate with my librarain friend, suggesting that however noble the goal of spreading one's scholarship to the world, the practical reality is that scholars are really only motivated to reach that small but influential audience, their peers. Listen to the episode here (or subscribe to the podcast here).

I've blogged quite a bit about Open Access, and Jeff Belliston and I have given many presentations about Open Access to the leadership and faculty of Brigham Young University (under the auspices of University Librarian Randy Olson and with the encouragement of BYU's Academic Vice President's office). It has been exciting to see this new and vital way of thinking about scholarship starting to take root on our campus. You can view one of our presentations on SlideShare. Those wishing to keep tabs on Open Access should subscribe to Peter Suber's Open Access News blog.

The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (7): The Online Archive

On my other blog I have added a seventh installment to my series on changes coming to academic publishing (in the humanities but also generally). This one is focused on the online archive or institutional repository as the third of four kinds of electronic publishing that are emerging. Hope you will read it, as well as the entire series of which it is a part.

Academic Evolution: The Book

This blog is intended to become Academic Evolution, the book. My model is Chris Anderson, whose Long Tail blog helped bring about his seminal book of the same name. Similarly, I am beta testing my ideas, developing them in keeping with the principle of transparency and with the goal of inviting public review and collaboration. I'm smart enough to know others are often much smarter, and I firmly believe that publishing one's thinking process improves it. So, here's the working table of contents for the book. Obviously I will be making each of these proposed chapters the subject of my various blog posts. Let's figure this out together! I welcome your suggestions:

Burning Redwoods: The Lost Assets of Academia

The intellectual output of a university over time is massive--like a forest of redwood trees. Ironically, much of that output is treated as byproduct and consequently has a much more limited life and impact than it might have. I'm talking about classroom discussions, teaching materials and media, and those countless student papers, presentations, and projects around which so much of education revolves. These are seen as having ephemeral value within the educational process, but they are not treated as intellectual or institutional assets like vetted scholarship is. No effort is made to capture, preserve, or make available some of the best intellectual efforts and tools produced by faculty and students alike. These are the lost assets of academia. I will explain by extending the redwood analogy.