@misc{Rosenthal2007,
  abstract = {I attended the Workshop on Repositories sponsored by the NSF (US) and the JISC (UK). I apologize in advance for the length of this post, which is a follow-up. As I wrote it new aspects kept emerging and more memories of the discussion came back.

In his perceptive position paper for the workshop, Don Waters cites a fascinating paper by Harley et al. entitled "The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices". I'd like to focus on two aspects of the Harley et al paper:

    * They describe a split between "in-process" communication which is rapid, flexible, innovative and informal, and "archival" communication. The former is more important in establishing standing in a field, where the latter is more important in establishing standing in an institution.
    * They suggest that "the quality of peer review may be declining" with "a growing tendency to rely on secondary measures", "difficult[y] for reviewers in standard fields to judge submissions from compound disciplines", "difficulty in finding reviewers who are qualified, neutral and objective in a fairly closed acacdemic community", "increasing reliance ... placed on the prestige of publication rather than ... actual content", and that "the proliferation of journals has resulted in the possibility of getting almost anything published somewhere" thus diluting "peer-reviewed" as a brand.

In retrospect, I believe Malcolm Read made the most important observation of the workshop when he warned about the coming generational change in the scholarly community, to a generation which has never known a world without Web-based research and collaboration tools. These warnings are particularly important because of the inevitable time lags in developing and deploying any results from the policy changes that the workshop's report might advocate.

Late in the workshop I channeled my step-daughter, who is now a Ph.D. student. Although I was trying to use her attitudes to illuminate the coming changes, in fact she is already too old to be greatly impacted by any results from the workshop. She was in high school as the Web was exploding. The target generation is now in high school, and their equivalent experience includes blogs and MySpace.

I'd like to try to connect these aspects to Malcolm's warnings and to the points I was trying to communicate by channeling my step-daughter. In my presentation I used as an example of "Web 2.0 scholarship" a post by Stuart Staniford, a computer scientist, to The Oil Drum blog, a forum for discussion of "peak oil" among a diverse group of industry professionals and interested outsiders, like Stuart. See comments and a follow-on post for involvement of industry insiders.

I now realize that I missed my own basic point, which is:

Blogs are bringing the tools of scholarly communication to the mass market, and with the leverage the mass market gives the technology, may well overwhelm the traditional forms.},
  added-at = {2007-10-24T19:36:38.000+0200},
  author = {Rosenthal, David S.H.},
  biburl = {http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/275c9a650d12001ee21ae0d08752c6b89/sciencebloglibrarian},
  interhash = {d7a5fb5fc0dbdbac7ab5f8898118f507},
  intrahash = {75c9a650d12001ee21ae0d08752c6b89},
  keywords = {imported},
  month = {April},
  note = {DSHR's Blog},
  timestamp = {2007-10-24T19:36:38.000+0200},
  title = {Mass-market scholarly communication},
  url = {http://blog.dshr.org/2007/04/mass-market-scholarly-communication.html},
  year = 2007
}