scholarly communication
cpikas | October 24, 2009(I'm posting some classics from my old blog while I'm on a much needed vacation)
This originally appeared February 26, 2006
The reference interview in a scientific research setting: question pairs establish intellectual identity
(This is thinking out loud stuff not approved scientific paper stuff ;) )
In library school, we're told that we don't need to know the subject, we just need to know how to find it. Yet in real life reference situations, we see customers making quick decisions on whom to ask and what to ask based on some assumptions of common ground. Librarians try to establish common…
cpikas | October 13, 2009This was in an earlier EOS (pdf, not available online for institutional subscribers so I found this by flipping through the print!) - number 32 of this year from 11 August. They're trying what Nature tried and dropped and what EGU has been fairly successful with in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics - although neither gathered/s many comments.
They're trying it for just a year and only for a few journals:
G-cubed
Global Biogeochemical Cycles (?)
JGR-Earth Surface
JGR-Planets
Radio Science
It's completely voluntary.Registration is required to comment. The formal reviews will be posted (may be…
cpikas | September 19, 2009It just hit me this morning that new communications journals are sort of less expected right now. In this post I'll briefly discuss the traditional place of letters or communications publications in scholarly communications (in science) and then weave in some thoughts about pressures on the system to change and where we're going.*
First, this piece out of the standard Garvey and Griffith model of scholarly communication (also very similar to part of the UNISIST model)(drawn on Gliffy, which rocks):
Technical reports and pre-prints also might happen between regional conferences and journal…
cpikas | September 2, 2009Sometimes so many things come up at the same time it becomes difficult if impossible to ignore. Here's just a brief list:
An oceanographer came to me and asked to see a print copy of an AGU journal article. If you've followed me here from elsewhere, then you'll know my place of work was mandated to discard all print materials (we did actually make the case for maybe 4 journals that are both not available online and are not widely held - there was a 5th but it got discarded by accident). Turns out that the entire point of the article was to show two color graphics on the second page. Well this…
cpikas | August 23, 2009On one side, there are some who say the future of scholarly communication in science is databases - or, rather, more or less shared and curated data sets. Some of the folks in this crowd go farther to say that science is a continuous stream and people should be able to comment on and point to this stream.
There are those who see the disaggregation of the journal with the papers remaining more or less the same. So databases of discrete pieces that can then be re-aggregated (I've mentioned this before)
And there are those who basically think we'll sort of go on as we have been, but perhaps with…
cpikas | August 1, 2009John Wilbanks is brilliant - let's just get that down first. He makes some great points in his most recent posts (1,2), but I also disagree with a few of the things he has said.
In my abstract for the upcoming 4S conference, I echoed what Borgman and Bohlin both said, and one of his main points: the purpose of journals was, in Wilbanks' words, "registration, certification, dissemination, preservation." In today's world, dissemination is better done by other means besides journals, and maybe the other things are, too.
But, he says the hyperlink is more powerful than the citation because look…
cpikas | August 1, 2009I've been fascinated by these projects, but I felt that I didn't have sufficient time to really do them justice here. Michael Nielsen has discussed them in several venues so it wasn't clear what I could add. Then I thought about it some more, and I realized that I probably do have different readers than Michael and my view is definitely different than his (plus he nudged me on friendfeed) so here's a discussion for you.
After that rambling preface - you might ask, what's Polymath? It's the name of this project to do massively collaborative mathematics first suggested by Tim Gowers on his blog…
cpikas | July 8, 2009NB: this blog post is not about cold fusion!
.... and is that a good or bad or both thing?
Upon reading something I'd written on scholarly communication in science and blogs, a reviewer suggested I read stuff by Lewenstein. My first reaction was, "huh?" He's an STS researcher who did a few articles on the cold fusion episode - but not really about the science but how communication happened, how events unfolded, and who knew what when. But it had been a while, so I thought it was worth doubling back.
This seems to be the primary article:
Lewenstein, B. V. (1995). From fax to facts:…
jwilbanks | October 23, 2008I'm at a workshop on eChemistry today, and we were asked to prepare position statements. I'm not going to blog the conference - it's a private thing - but figured I would post my position statement here.
We were asked to answer some questions. I chose to answer this one: "do you assess the potential of new web-based communication models in Chemistry, i.e. their benefits or liabilities, their transformational power, and their chance of success?"
Full text is after the jump.
A good place to start is the transformation of scholarly communication from "using the internet" to "existing in…
sb admin | October 8, 2008On the Googles, Common Knowledge gets more than 25,000,000 hits. It's a market research company, a scholarship foundation, a non profit fundraising firm, and in its inverse as Uncommon Knowledge part of a conservative group site, and an interview series at the Hoover Institution.
We can take the Wikipedia entry:Common knowledge is what "everybody knows", usually with reference to the community in which the term is used.
or we can take an anti-plagiarism guide to heart:
The two criteria that are most commonly used in deciding whether or not something is common knowledge relate to quantity…