Blog-style annotation and in-depth criticism: New niche for academic journals, in wake of Harvard open-access move?
Harvard wants to Web-publish the research of faculty members, and other schools will inevitably follow.
Will this kill off academic journals? Not all of them.
The smarter ones could adapt with better-than-ever peer review procedures and maybe even use a blog approach. They could link to the best research and also comment on the worst, while offering far, far more depth than a blog would.
Perhaps in the future, professors and grad students be judged partly by the reception they get from trustworthy sources online. I can even see link-related algorithms to help quantify this. The more links you get, and the better the numerical ratings, the more valuable your paper could be in your quest for tenure. I’d hate to see everything reduced to numbers. But this could be yet another tool. Who knows? Maybe a Google research team is already at work on these matters.
One other suggestion would be for the academic journals to try more multimedia, online conferences, wikis and other alternatives to the static text to which they’re partial now. It’s time for academic journals to learn to love the Web.
Related: Media Commons Project from the Institute for the Future of the Book.
Technorati Tags: Harvard University,academic publishing,academic journals
February 17th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
David Rothman said:
The idea of “link counting” has been present for many years in academia. One of the pioneers was Eugene Garfield’s Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Wikipedia has relevant articles discussing Citation index, Science Citation Index SCI, Social Sciences Citation Index SSCI, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index AHCI.
Note however that the links compiled and analyzed by ISI predate world-wide-web links. The links are based on citations inside journal publications. Algorithms are executed using the database of linkages to attempt to assess “citation impact” and “journal impact”. There was a research project that once harvested papers from the web and built a citation indexing engine called CiteSeer. According to Wikipedia “CiteSeer has not been comprehensively updated since roughly 2000”.
February 17th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
I do so hope you are right. Science journals are in desperate need of a shake-up, and Open Access is more than shake-up, it’s a tsunami. But some are doing better at scratching out a niche than others. Interestingly,that crusty old dame the British Medical Journal is doing better than most. Having said that, though, I left an on-line comment on a debate recently, and got no reaction. When the same comment was published in the print version, I was deluged with e-mails from people I had never heard of. So I guess plain old paper still has its place.
For more on open access in science: http://www.wisdomofwhores.com
February 17th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Let me follow up on Garson’s comment: ISI itself is problematic in terms of the selection of journals (which depends on citations from journals already in the ISI citation indices, a sort of academic country club nomination process). But that’s an area that’s being addressed to some extent by competition, both some proprietary stats and also by the Herzog Publish-or-Perish software (and its use of different bibliometrics).
I need to write an entry in my own blog, but the deeper issue is not the reputational economy of academics (you can look to the physics-community arXiv system and the National Bureau of Economic Research for alternatives that rely heavily on working papers) but the economic support of journals. The Public Library of Science model depends on submission/publication fees levied on authors, which makes sense in a heavily grant-supported area. It makes no sense in the humanities and great parts of the social sciences. Even if you wanted to trust the development of post-publication reputational dynamics, a system such as arXiv needs money for back-end operations. That’s the great problem.
February 17th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
As a social sciences student, virtually everything I read nowadays comes as a poorly scanned pdf files of journals and books (though the journals database services that the library subscribes to seem to be getting better). It’d be nice to see something that would print out looking better than my kitchen sink (which is messy and full of unwashed dishes). Or, better yet, it’d be nice to have a e-reading friendly format so I wouldn’t have to print everything out in the first place. Last semester alone, I printed out 1300+ pages of text (more than double my allotted print quota, and yes, I do print double-sided. Unfortunately IU doesn’t give us any bit of a break for doing so, so most people don’t). Oh, and not to mention the hassles of trying to get into the labs during the day! They’re always full with far too many people just dinking around on facebook and myspace to kill time between classes.
But anyhow, more ejournals would be nice. My Palm and I would love it. And if I ever get smart enough to write something someone else would have reason to read, I’ll make sure it’s easily accessible online in a plethora of user-friendly formats for readers of all types.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
More thoughts here.
February 26th, 2008 at 7:48 am
[...] Blog-style annotation and in-depth criticism: New niche for academic journals, in wake of Harvard open-access move? David Rothman, TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home, February 17, 2008. Excerpt: Will this kill off academic journals? Not all of them. [...]