CITP Symposium: The Future of Scholarly Communication

Conclusion; Thanks to our Panelists

November 7th, 2007 by Ed Felten
This marks the end of the online symposium on the Future of Scholarly Communication. Thanks to our panelists: Ira Fuchs, Paul DiMaggio, Peter Suber, Stan Katz, David Robinson, Andrew Appel, and Laura Brown.  Read more »

Reactions

October 27th, 2007 by Laura Brown
There are so many interesting strands developing in this online symposium that it is hard to know where to begin to respond. Let me start with reactions to the conversation about the connection between universities and their presses. Several people have commented here about how it is wrong to have presses get closer to the intellectual [...]  Read more »

Response to David

October 25th, 2007 by Paul DiMaggio
In David’s otherwise excellent last post, he kindly refers to my previous post, to which he responds, as “trenchant and persuasive” I fear it was neither if he understood it to say that “Rather than struggle to modernize the operations of their eponymous presses….universities could voluntarily cede the turf they are losing to other [...]  Read more »

A response to Paul: Reasons for university presses to stay in the game

October 25th, 2007 by David Robinson
I found Paul’s last post both trenchant and persuasive. It got me thinking about how and why organizations take on new roles, or get rid of old ones. Paul’s post might make one wonder whether it has ever made sense for universities to have presses; in any event, the case for them seems to be [...]  Read more »

Refereeing in Computer Science

October 24th, 2007 by Andrew Appel
My previous post explained how computer scientists distribute their articles (whether refereed or unrefereed, “published” or “unpublished”). Now I will explain the strange way they referee them, because it’s probably quite unfamiliar to those in other fields of science and the humanities. I describe it not because “every discipline should do it this [...]  Read more »

Thinking in terms of organizations in a world of networks

October 23rd, 2007 by Paul DiMaggio
Something has been nagging at me as I’ve read the postings in this symposium, and the last sentence or two of Ira’s post helped me realize what it is: Whereas the Ithaka report places responsibility for addressing the challenges it identifies in universities — not just people in universities, but universities as formal organizations — [...]  Read more »

October 23rd, 2007 by Ira Fuchs
As others here (and the Ithaka report) have said, technology is certainly part of the solution to the problem of transforming scholarly communications; however, (IMHO) I think it would be a mistake to think that today’s technology by itself will give us, as Ed suggested, “90% of what we want”. As [...]  Read more »

Social Factors in the Adoption of New Academic Communication Technologies

October 22nd, 2007 by Paul DiMaggio
I found David’s report fascinating and helpful. In fact, I immediately sent a colleague (at another university) a link to the Orlando project and was sufficiently inspired by David’s comment about moving figures and tables to think about including one (via a link in the paper) to a paper I’ll be working on later [...]  Read more »

What kinds of material will scholars create in the future?

October 21st, 2007 by David Robinson
I’m writing in from the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, taking place this weekend near the campus of Northwestern University. Most of the papers are from interdisciplinary teams in which humanists and technologists are working together to study traditional humanistic areas. This morning’s schedule had three presentations, and comparisons among the three [...]  Read more »

Self-help getting to the New System

October 19th, 2007 by Andrew Appel
The “New System” of scholarly publication need not rely on organized journals or repositories. It can consist simply of professors (and students, and anyone else) putting papers on their home pages, and readers finding these professors and papers by Google. In fact this is the way that most computer scientists communicate with each [...]  Read more »

Another response to Ed: Advantages of the New System

October 17th, 2007 by Peter Suber
The New System supports two good things that facilitate research:  immediate access and open access. Peer review is valuable but time-consuming.  Because it’s valuable, we should support it, conduct it, and take advantage of it.  But because it’s time-consuming, we should only let it delay certification, not access.  I agree with Stan that the New System won’t [...]  Read more »

Response to Ed: Does the New System Work for the Humanities?

October 16th, 2007 by Stan Katz
I think that the New System described by Ed is increasingly the mode of communication in the science-oriented sector of academic creativity. It makes perfect sense, and is the logical successor to the use of the pre-print format in the analog era. But it is, for better or worse, not so obvious in the humanities [...]  Read more »

A Question for My Fellow Panelists

October 16th, 2007 by Ed Felten
To motivate my question, let me tell an exaggerated story about how the Internet moves us from an Old System to a New System. In the Old System, a scholar writes a paper, the paper is peer-reviewed and published in a journal, and only then is the paper read by the community. In [...]  Read more »

The Ithaka report, on open access

October 14th, 2007 by Peter Suber
There’s a lot to like about the Ithaka report.  I especially appreciate its call on university presses to devote themselves more to online publication, to share publishing infrastructure to reduce costs, and to “provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors” (p. 30). But I’m disappointed that it has so little to say about open access, and [...]  Read more »

Symposium on the Future of Scholarly Communication

October 12th, 2007 by Ed Felten
Welcome! For the next two weeks or so, we’ll be conducting an online symposium on the future of academic publishing. We’ve convened a strong group of panelists for a discussion in blog (or serial essay) format. Our panelists include Paul DiMaggio (Professor of Sociology, Princeton), Ed Felten (Professor of Computer Science [...]  Read more »