Reinventing Academic Publishing – Part III
This is a preprint of the third, and I’m happy to say final, entry in my “Reinventing Academic Publishing” trilogy. There is a lot more to be said on this topic, and I suspect I’ll be one of the people saying it, but for now it’s time for me to stop writing about it and begin making it happen. This will also be the last IEEE Intelligent Systems Editorial published here in Mindswap blog, from here on in they will be coming from the RPI site where I’ve resided for the past 6 months (about time I got around to changing this) - so http://tw.rpi.edu/weblog/ will be the new place for these.
-Jim Hendler.
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Reinventing Academic Publishing – Part III
Intelligent Readers,
In my past two editorials, I have addressed some of the challenges and opportunities presented to scientific publishing by new Web technologies. In the second part, I discussed why putting papers online using traditional journal approaches was not a panacea to academic communication, but in fact, something of a barrier to the creation of scientific communities that could solve the hard, interdisciplinary problems, facing the world today. I suggested some opportunities via overlay journals and similar mechanisms, but kept the focus on the traditional, peer-reviewed journal paper accepted to a reputable publication, whether it be online or print, open-access or paid. In this, the last part of this editorial trilogy, I want to look at something that is becoming more and more important to academic communication – the online scientific interaction outside the traditional journal space.
My strong belief is that a critical change is needed in our thinking to move from looking scientific disciplines to scientific “contexts.” When looking at what has been the most successful on the Web, especially in what have come to be known as Web 2.0 technologies, we see that many of the most exciting sites work because of how they take advantage of some sort of community or context focus. My colleague Jennifer Golbeck and I have recently written a paper where we go into this in more detail, but essentially a lot of these technologies work because the social context helps to define terms. For example, if you look at the flickr photo-sharing site and search on “James” you will find, at the time I write this, over 750,000 hits. Yet why in the world would this be of use? How often do you say, “I wonder if I can find a picture of someone named James”?
The key, of course, is that rarely would someone look for this in such a general search. Rather, flickr allows a user to look at pictures entered by a particular person or group. So if I know I’m looking at your flickr photos, and I know you have a brother named James, then suddenly it becomes a very meaningful tag. In other contexts, I might know it is someone’s advisor, significant other, reigning monarch, favorite secret agent or whatever. In each of these cases, I will be identifying a different person; the tag works because of the context.
In science, I would argue that a similar effect is what causes a lot of the jargon issues to arise. When we use a particular term from a particular field, we are usually in a context, be it a talk at a conference or a paper in a journal, which defines how that term is used. In fact, one problem that scientists often face is that when we try to explain what we do to the general public, they don’t have these contexts and the words we use revert to their more generic meanings – leading to misunderstandings and confusion. Similar misunderstandings and confusions happen when scientists communicate across boundaries, and that is where much of the problem arises in interdisciplinary scientific discourse.
One approach that is being explored is the development of social websites aimed at particular communities of scientists – essentially embedding the context into the site. A good example of this is the myExperiment.org site that is currently being developed in the UK as a social networking site specifically designed for experimental scientists. The site allows users to share experimental workflows and to develop communities around specific activities. Thus, a network of scientists can form around, for example, the role of some particular proteins in causing disease. These scientists can share methodologies, specialized techniques, and discussion of how to get better results among themselves in a relatively informal and blog-like way, while still being able to share the important work products that help them be more effective. While these scientists can still compete with respect to the data they’re using and the results they publish, they can cooperate in helping to develop and refine experimental methodologies, which is a crucial sharing of knowledge that would not typically be publishable in traditional journals.
A more generalized version of this idea, and one I’m coming to rely on in my own work, is that of the Twine system developed by radarnetworks.com. (I am an advisor to this company, but have no current financial interest.) Twine is essentially a social networking site where the focus is not on the activities of the members per se, but on the sharing of information products within user-created contexts. Thus, the group interested in a particular topic can create a “twine” where they can share pointers to articles, blog entries, web sites, or pretty much anything else with a URI. The context is defined by group membership and what is shared. Notes and discussion can be attached to the entries, and the site maintains the entries so that members joining later can see what has been already saved.
In Part II of this editorial I talked about overlay journals, and how they could be used for sharing information across an emerging discipline. A problem, of course, is that if it is a relatively small group who want to communicate, the expense of setting up such a site, in terms of time and resources, is prohibitive. Using something like twine, we create sort of an ad hoc overlay journal on the specific topic of our interest. Twine was not created with scientific communication in mind, but something like this clearly has a high potential to have a huge effect on scientific discourse. The twine forms the context, and the members choose what to share as they create their own shared vocabulary.  Unlike email, newsgroups, and even wikis that have been tried for these purposes, the open and dynamic nature of building the discourse in the social networking context has great potential.
I am excited by the emerging technologies for scientific interaction, and think these new technologies that expand on blog- and wiki- like ideas in creating context mechanisms will become an increasingly important part of the scientific discourse. However, whether it be specifically through technologies like this, or via new Web technologies just starting to be explored, there is one thing I am certain of: change in online scientific communication is inevitable. I was reading a blog entry by my friend, and co-author, Dean Allemang the other day. He was pointing out that when he talks to people who currently are in management and suggests that their enterprise could use something like a blog, wiki or other self-organizing information space, that they reply “… you just don’t understand. Our engineers/researchers/analysts will never do that. It just won’t happen!” I know this phenomenon well, I’ve heard it myself when I make similar suggestions to my academic colleagues about the use of technologies like myExperiment or Twine.
Dean goes on to say, however, that there is a “new generation of people entering the workforce who have a different relationship with Wikipedia than their elders. These are the people who used Wikipedia to cheat on their homework in high school.” He points out the first Wikipedia generation is now graduating from college and entering the workforce, and that they don’t know of a life without wikis, blogs, social networks, etc. They share information as a natural part of their lives, why in the world wouldn’t they do the same in their work contexts?
He makes a good point, and it is also true in academia. These same Wikipedia college students are now becoming our graduate students and the scientists of tomorrow. Just as a previous generation of students created the scientific Web sites which have become crucial to our daily work, so too is this new generation using emerging technologies to create mechanisms for sharing their interests. I hope those of us who hold more senior positions will find ways to encourage and endorse this work and reward their efforts. But even if we don’t, the change will come. It’s inevitable, and frankly, I think that’s a great thing.
(Jim Hendler)
p.s. Strangely, I set down the path of creating this set of editorials to explore the role that magazines like this one could have in the changing scientific discourse. Somehow, the Web Scientist in me took over from the EIC, and that never quite got written. I’d welcome your comments on that topic, it’s an important area, and one that my eventual successor will need your help in working out.
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