Scholarly Inquiry Optimization (SIO) - Overview

Open Access is essential to the evolution of scholarly communication, but it's incomplete on its own. It's true that Open Access aims at maximizing the exchange and growth of knowledge, but in practical terms it manifests itself as a defensive effort intent on removing restrictions--as though all that is needed to usher in a new golden age is to untrammel academic publishing from the print worlds' scarcity economics. If the zenith of Open Access is a future in which electronic versions of print articles and books are not inaccessible, then the whole movement is merely in the business of preserving a legacy knowledge system. What if every document since the dawn of writing were digitized and freely available online today? Would we have our utopia? Not yet. That's why we need more than Open Access; we need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization.

We need more than the passive ideal of easy access to published knowledge; we need the active ideal of improved methodologies for advancing knowledge. In the Enlightenment Francis Bacon had the boldness to call for a Novum Organum, a "new instrument" of knowledge (in contrast to Aristotle's old Organum); similarly, we must devise new instruments of knowledge to match our cyber environment. Ours is a knowledge revolution on par with the introduction of empirical research itself or even the codification of the scientific method. But are we conceptualizing and establishing the new methodologies to the same degree that we are fighting for the free circulation of traditional materials?  We are not. That's why we need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization.

How will networked knowledge, ubiquitous broadband, multimedia, social networking, and mobile computing both complement and challenge the conventional academic activities of teaching, learning, publishing,and credentialing?  These are the questions of our age! But I don't see Open Access advocates trying to answer them. The Open Access movement seems fixated on fixing the Gutenberg glut; not maximizing the Edison epistemology. That's why we need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization.

Not to take the eye off the prize here (and please believe my sincerity as an advocate for Open Access), but is access the greatest hurdle to the advancement of knowledge today?  I'd say equally important as opening access is throttling it, filtering the great data deluge for quality and relevance. Digital literacy for the masses is more vital than massive digitization. A greater need exists for vetting than for getting information. And for these tasks we need the institutional, technical, and social instruments for flexible, scalable, and reliable systems for qualifying knowledge--not just for validity, but for applicability. We need tools to match research resources with researchers. That's why we need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization.

In the spirit of Bacon, I propose Scholarly Inquiry Optimization (SIO) as a new instrument to take us beyond where Open Access can lead us by itself. Obviously I am echoing Search Engine Optimization. In doing so, I risk losing readers who either see SEO as a crass, commercial thing or as something on the same order as backing up one's hard drive. I'd like you to consider SEO, not as the center piece of Internet business that it is, nor as some abstruse efficiency sought by code warriors, but as a concept with attendant practices that meaningfully organizes online inquiry. I believe the day will come that university provosts will be buying copies of Google Analytics for Dummies and playing catch up on SEO. And it won't be because their technology transfer office has found out how to sell widgets online and AdSense will pay off the new stadium. No, it's because universities will awaken to the intellectual assets being generated that they now ignore (see my earlier post devoted to the lost intellectual assets of academia).

SEO is not something you hear about much on a college campus, but it is the fulcrum upon which modern Internet marketing turns. It's all about crafting web pages to increase rankings in Google searches, thereby maximizing web traffic and profits. Clearly SEO belongs to the commercial world that academia distances itself from. And yet, as I have studied SEO I have been impressed with it from an intellectual point of view. A general web search leads one to "landing pages" crafted purposefully to be of general interest to the general searcher. These largely non-commercial, informational pages offer links to more specific issues, and ultimately to affiliated services and products. Visitors self-select toward or away from the more specific information, with the result that the "conversion" of casual clickers into customers takes place at a point where a web surfer has followed a funnel of interest and engagement genuinely qualifying him or her for the intended sale. This is not the only aspect of SEO (which also tweaks keywords, HTML code, and design elements) but the goal is the same: get the most relevant eyes and clickstreams moving through a chain of invitations that visitors will deem relevant.

Now, where is the equivalent of SEO within the world of academic publishing--Open Access or not? Nowhere. We have no equivalent of "landing pages," no concept of an infrastructure comparable to Internet advertising to guide researchers the way the general web searcher is guided today through more granular levels of engagement. This is a huge problem. The commercially driven web has developed sophisticated relevance algorithms and a structure of intelligently cascading pages, while the professors who teach alogrithms to students have no comparable instrument to drive research or learning.

Here's an experiment to see what I mean. Try a search for "stem cells" on Google; then, try the same search on Google Scholar. Then compare. This will instantly reveal to you the intellectual hobbles that are impeding scholarly inquiry today. What do you get from the general Google search? The first hit I got was "Stem Cell Basics," a useful primer from the National Institutes of Health. Apparently, there's more than one type of stem cell. Sheesh, I have a PhD and didn't know that! The NIH page links to a FAQ page and to more granular (scholarly) details in another NIH report. In contrast, the search on Google Scholar takes me to a page of results in which there is nary a title that does not contain specialized vocabulary making my eyes to glaze over by the bottom of the first screen (though the aesthete in me loves the ring of "recombinant human granulocyte" without needing to know its meaning...).

My experiment's not fair, you say? After all, we expect specialized knowledge when we turn to academic databases, don't we? Okay, but think in terms of the goal of access. Here's a thought experiment. Let's go to the early 20th Century before the Internet. Let's resurrect Andrew Carnegie and pretend he's managed to bankroll enough sets of Encyclopedia Britannica so that each and every human being on the whole earth gets one. Wow! Everybody on earth with access to the most complete compendium of knowledge then available. But wait--lots of those folks don't speak English. Oh, and hold on. Even those English speakers may not be educated enough to look things up in an encyclopedia, or even to follow a standard encyclopedia's intellectual level. Do people really have access if they can't use the knowledge made available to them? Obviously there are differing kinds and degrees of access.

You might object that I am moving from an issue that has to do with the generation and distribution of knowledge to a separate issue of the consumption or experience of knowledge; Open Access is focused on academic publishing, not on literacy or education. That would be a fair objection if the new digital environment kept publishing and learning distinctly separate the way print has done. Books are completely asynchronous. No one expects to interact with a published academic paper. But that isn't how our world is working now. The Open Access movement should be more tightly linked to the Open Educational Resources movement precisely because the formal activity of scholarly research is blending with the informal activity of learning on multiple levels and across multiple audiences. The only reason scholarship is kept divided from teaching and learning is in deference to the print paradigm that once required it.

We need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization as a concept and a set of practices in order to maximize the relevance of learned communication and bridge the gap between specialized, formal knowledge and the democratizing phenomenon of learning that's taking place outside of school settings and systems. SIO could be a way to structure knowledge, knowledge tools, and research practices to maximize the utility of these expanding resources and really make all that access worth having. In my next few posts I will be introducing SIO under the following headings:

1. Personally Configured Discovery
   
2. Contextual and Passive Search
3. Social Research
4. Mobile Research
5. Real Time Scholarship

I invite your feedback in considering ways to conceptualize and formalize the instruments for optimal scholarly inquiry.