scholarly communication

At the PSP Pre-Conference (see my notes), Dr. Harley of the Higher Education in the Digital Age program reported being surprised by their finding that young scholars were unwilling or unlikely to experiment with new scholarly communication (tools/practices/channels). There was a question from the audience that showed the person's disbelief of this finding. No matter how many times this myth is debunked, it remains firmly entrenched. Here are some variations on it: when generation {x,y, millennial, etc} gets in {university, grad school, the workplace}, {collaboration, communication, search…
These are a continuation of my notes. This portion has been transcribed from my scribble - I was sitting on stage for the second half of the day so live blogging didn't really seem appropriate :( If there is something wrong, not malicious, just bad handwriting.   Diane Harley, Senior Researcher and Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project She's an anthropologist who has long studied the issues around new technology for scholarship and teaching. She's not an advocate for any particular type of approach for integrating new technology. She looks at value systems and faculty…
I attended this one day pre-conference session on February 3, 2010. I got here after the first group of speakers, unfortunately, due in part to #snOMG and part to parking confusion.   Barbara Kline Pope on Free at the National Academies Press Mission is to disseminate books from National Academies while being completely self sustaining.  Their content is created by volunteers who are subject matter experts asked to examine a particular issue of interest. Everything from global climate change to the care and treatment of lab animals. Very much the long tail, biggest seller had  13k sales, but…
Dorothea Salo reports that the scientists she spoke with at Science Online 2010 did not get why she was there or even why librarians would be interested in science communication. For some reason, I didn't get that so much, if at all, this year at this venue. Not that I haven't gotten that in the past. What happens now is a bit more interesting. Someone who doesn't know me either personally or through my blog will start down that direction, and someone else will say something along the lines: Oh, that's Christina, she's ok. This happens at work quite a bit, too. Huh. This isn't exactly what I…
In most of the discussions of using usage as a metric of scholarly impact, the example of the clinician is given.  The example goes that medical articles might be heavily used and indeed have a huge impact on practice (saving lives), but be uncited. There are other fields that have practitioners who pull from the literature, but do not contribute to it. So it was with interest that I read this new article by the MacRoberts: MacRoberts, M., & MacRoberts, B. (2009). Problems of citation analysis: A study of uncited and seldom-cited influences Journal of the American Society for…
One thing that kind of bugs me is that people answer the question "what impact has your funding had" with things like "I hired 3 postdocs and 2 support staff." Dr Lane talked about this at the workshop, but to some extent, I don't think her solution actually got at the bigger problem: societal impact. How has your research - done with our money - made the world a better place (maybe it hasn't, but that's ok, too). In the last post I mentioned a way I think we could start to learn more about how much scientific articles were taken up in the general media. This is at least opportunity for…
One of the open problems in article level metrics is how to automate, quantify, and describe the exposure an article has had in popular science pieces in newspapers and general science magazines. Peter Binfield (PLoS) and Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka. (European Research Council) both brought this up at the NSF Workshop I attended yesterday. I agree that this is needed. The old models of communication in science that either describe scholarly communication among scientists or popular communication with non-scientists are not enough. Lewenstein [1] and Paul [2] (among others) each describe…
stream of consciousness notes from this meeting I attended in DC, Wednesday December 16, 2009 Final panel Oren Beit-Arie (Ex Libris Group), Todd Carpenter (NISO),Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC),Tony Hey (Microsoft Research),Clifford Lynch (CNI),Don Waters (Andrew W. Mellon foundation) introduction from Cliff Lynch - gets requests for tenure reviews - he takes these very seriously. Got one that had a whole bibliometric survey of the work - with all of the citing papers, etc., about 40 pages. Things that were intended to provide insight are now used for evaluation. Could we get access streams/patterns…
Continuing stream of consciousness notes from this workshop held in DC, Wednesday December 16, 2009 Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka. (European Research Council) - intertwined research funding structures at national and European level. At the national level two main funding modes - institutional (block research funding of higher ed institutions), and competitive. Orgs structured at European level - like CERN or EMBL. Joint research funding ESF or bi or multilateral. Research Frameworks. ERC ERC Scientific Council - 22 eminent scientists. Executive Agency (where he works). 2 programs: starting grants…
this continues my stream of consciousness notes from the workshop held in DC, December 16, 2009. Peter Binfield (PLOS) - article level metrics. Not talking about OA, not talking about journal level.  Journal is just packaging, and shouldn't necessarily judge articles by the packaging. PLoS ONE has half a percent to all the publications that appear in PubMed. Evaluating an article after publication instead of before so article level metrics are of interest. JIF measures the journal and not the article (or the person). Some things that could be used: citations, web usage, expert ratings, social…
Continuing my stream of consciousness notes from this meeting in DC, Wednesday, December 16, 2009. Jevin D West (U Washington, Eigenfactor) - biology and bibliometrics. biology has a lot of problems that are studied looking at networks. From ecosystems to genomes. They want to take these huge networks and be able to tell stories. The citation network is a model for information flow that they can then use in biology. WoS 8k journals, 15 years, 60M citations. Goals of eigenfactor: develop tools to comprehend large networks in all areas of science - employ these tools to understand scholarly…
I attended this one-day workshop in DC on Wednesday, December 16, 2009. These are stream of consciousness notes. Herbert Van de Sompel (LANL) - intro - Lots of metrics: some accepted in some areas and not others, some widely available on platforms in the information industry and others not. How are these metrics selected? Why are some more attractive than others? Two other points: informal science communication on the web - it's being adopted rapidly - scholars immediately reap the benefits. Lots of metrics: views, downloads, "favorites", followers. So our current metrics are impoverished (…
I've weighed in a few times on how to build online communities or support scientists online, but it's really worth paying attention to when you get an actual scientist who is also very involved in and interested in social software tell you what he thinks. Cameron Neylon did just that in a recent blog post (comments on ff). I'll quote liberally from his blog and feedback some ideas. (he uses SS4S to stand for social software for science) All of the numbered paragraphs are direct quotes from his post. 1.  SS4S will promote engagement with online scientific objects and through this encourage and…
SUMMARY: With this notice, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Office of the President, requests input from the community regarding enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by Federal science and technology agencies. This RFI will be active from December 10, 2009 to January 7, 2010. Respondents are invited to respond online via the Public Access Policy Forum at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open, or may submit responses via electronic mail. Responses will be re-posted on the online forum. Instructions and a timetable for…
In "common parlance" we throw around chemistry, biology, physics, and all, sort of throwing off the diversity within these disciplines. Gosh, in my comps I answered (or attempted to answer) a question about how useful it was to talk about "scientists" and non-scientists. Going the other way, I'll frequently discuss "research areas" or "invisible colleges" (Price [a] and of course Crane[b]*) or even some of the other groupings of scientists: lab/university/organization social circle [c] paradigm (Kuhn) [d] epistemic culture (Knorr Cetina)[e] thought collective (Fleck)[f] core set (Collins…
In a recent post on openness and sharing in chemistry, I briefly touched on proximity to industry. This is actually somewhat nuanced and a few research studies have looked into it. As I mentioned Birnholtz, in his dissertation [1] and subsequent JASIST article [2] describes proximity to industry as both/either being funded by a commercial or industrial organization and/or "the extent to which there is an interest by researchers or others in commercializing or otherwise profiting financially from research discoveries" (dissertation, p27). There's the myth that the research university gets all…
With well known and respected open science projects coming out of chemistry as well as cool tools like pubchem and emolecules... it seems a bit unfair of me to ask if chemists are grinches. But there has been and there continues to be a lot of study of data/information/knowledge sharing in chemistry - or, really, the lack thereof.  In general, pre-prints are not passed around or self-archived, there is very little data sharing (there are counter examples in crystallography), and details are withheld from conference presentations or the conference slides are not made available (Milo used to…
It seems like there was nothing new from the established publishers for a while - nothing with their core business.  Some experimented with ways to communicate and most updated content management systems, but it seemed like most weren't touching their standard models.  PLOS' experiments met with raised eyebrows and skepticism, but now, looks like others are taking notice and finally starting to experiment in their core business. I already commented on Nature starting up a quick turnaround journal - ok, new product offerings aren't that exciting except for this is new for Nature. What seems…
It's always strange to go to a conference outside of your own primary research area. This conference had a lot of historians and philosophers as well as social scientists in every other category including media studies and information science.  I was in a couple sessions in which the presenter read from a marked up paper, clutched in their hands in a bundle.  I understand that's the norm in some fields, but there's no way I'm going to waste my time listening to someone read aloud when I could read the article for myself in half the time. There were some real highlights of the day.  A couple…
(I'm posting things from my old blog while I'm on a much-needed vacation) This originally appeared December 21, 2007 Implications of newer models of popularization of science for science library collection development* When we look at science communication - communication about science or by scientists - we normally divide that into communication among scientists (scholarly communication) and communication to non-scientists (variously: popular communication of science, popularization, or the French - vulgarization). Within scholarly communication we have formal scholarly communication (…