Digital scholarship

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!

Digital scholarship

by Martin Weller on Jan 28, 2011

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