The Scholarly Kitchen

Image by that_james via Flickr

At the University of Oxford, I was yelled at for walking on the grass.  Only dons are allowed to trespass on the green carpets that form the center of most cloistered colleges.  After being thrown off the turf, I asked the docent why the quad was a privileged place.  “Dunno” he replied.  “Tradition, I guess.”

Tradition is a dangerous word.  Like patriotism, it conveys a positive frame of reference that is hard to reject.  Tradition becomes both the goal and the means to perpetuate itself.  It is a serpent that consumes its own tail.

The latest report, Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication, a joint endeavor by ARL and the non-profit research group Ithaka attempted to avoid falling into the circular argument about traditional scholarly resources.  As Karla Hahn, Director of ARL’s Office of Scholarly Communication, begins the report:

[The] frame for interpreting changing practices of scholarly communication carries the risk of falling into a certain circularity of thought – we may acknowledge that scholarly works will change and yet behave as if anything that doesn’t look like a traditional work of scholarship is not a scholarly work; thus the immutability of traditional publishing models becomes axiomatic. Different becomes less by definition. (p.5)

Yet the researchers fall into the same trap of circular thinking they were attempting to avoid.

The report represents a collective effort of 301 librarians doing interviews with scholars in 46 institutions.  I must acknowledge that this represents a major and significant effort to gather information from faculty.  The purpose of the study was not to survey the landscape but rather to “highlight interesting and relevant examples of digital scholarly resources.”

Trained librarians interviewed faculty to uncover the kinds of online resources used in research.  To qualify, a resource needed to be “online,” “original,” and “scholarly.”  Online was defined as “born digital” and “scholarly” as containing material “by and for a scholarly audience.”

The serpent has seen its tail and opens its jaws.

A scholarly resource could not be a search engine like Google Scholar, since it does not contain its own original material but points to other sources, although they did count preprint servers like arXiv and SSRN.  To me, the distinction between hosting and directing seems artificial; it does not matter for anyone other than a librarian where a digital resource physically resides.  In addition, the team counted blogs, wikis, and user-contributed encyclopedias, which is curious, since it ignores Wikipedia, which last time I checked is a user-contributed encyclopedia that contains a lot of material contributed “by and for a scholarly audience.”  Youtube was also nixed, even though I’ve watched several lectures by eminent scholars from this site.

All in all, the Ithaka team rejected more than a third of the resources (115 resources) submitted by trained librarians because it did not fit their definition of “original and scholarly.”  By doing so, they could not escape the same circular argument that they fought so hard to avoid.

The serpent has devoured its own tail.

By imposing these definitions, the researchers artificially defined scholarship in traditional terms and therefore limited what could be considered innovative.  It should not be surprising that the report is called Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication, and not Innovative Models of Scholarly Communication.

Scholarship has always been a bottom-up process defined by a community of peers. Instead of pre-defining what scholarship is for the scholars, it would have been a better learning experience to have the faculty define what scholarship is for them.

By defining scholarship, we continue to perpetuate the notion of the Oxford quad and define who is free to step on the grass.

It is, after all, a tradition.

Image via Wikipedia

A recent article in Wired showcased a trend in open source hardware, a surprising twist on the open source approach to collaborative work. The featured hardware is a microcontroller called the Arduino, a circuit board that can serve as a substrate for many small computing projects and products.

Developed by Italian and Spanish gearheads, the Arduino’s plans have been openly available, published through an Attribution-Share Alike Creative Commons license. The Arduino has been used in many settings, and can be manufactured to many specifications, but always turns out to be a cheap build.

Why would the inventors do this? Easy. The plans they’ve put out are basic, and now they’ve moved on. So, by creating interest in the Arduino and notoriety for themselves, they get hired to customize it, or to consult on how to use or implement it, or asked to do other things. Their renown grows significantly. It makes money for them indirectly, but reliably. It’s leveraging the network effect into PR.

How does this apply to scholarly publishing? In two possible ways, maybe more.

First Option: If we make publishers and articles analogous to hardware and software, we see some connections. It’s as if journals are the hardware and articles the software. Journals can be rolled out in a pretty templated way and are basically the same at most functional levels. But the applications derived from these (the articles) are what the users are really interested in. Each issue is akin to a software upgrade for some proportion of users.

In this model, the software of journals has much more churn than the software of computers (at least currently). We’ve had a major upgrade of publishing hardware, from paper to online. Are we writing software in the same old way? Are we using the hardware available to us to deliver our software effectively? Is our software even compatible?

Second Option: What the Arduino team has done is produce a basic output of their research efforts, something others can then apply to their own efforts. They give the basic output freely, to benefit the larger ecosystem and also because it draws attention to them, fits other ends, and increases their reputation and prestige among people they think are important. Sounds a lot like scholarly authors, doesn’t it? Their rewards are indirect, but very real, as the open source effort of scholarship yields tenure, further grants, and speaking engagements, among other things.

In either case, the outputs of scholarship are likely destined for more devices built on Arduinos and its cousins — small, niche devices with inexpensive separate parts but expensive syntheses, valuable when customized, and important to small groups of specialists.

Again, sound familiar?