World Association of Young Scientists

Such is the title of a two-part publication by Brian Whitworth and Rob Friedman. It provides for a fascinating assessment of the state-of-the-art of Information Science over the last ten years, much of it generalizable to other fields. In the following, I will list some quotes from the papers — I will try to comment on them later as time permits: Part I

Part I of this paper chronicles the inevitable limits of what can only be called a feudal academic knowledge exchange system, with trends like exclusivity, slowness, narrowness, conservatism, self-involvement and inaccessibility. We predict an upcoming social upheaval in academic publishing as it shifts from a feudal to democratic form, from knowledge managed by the few to knowledge managed by the many.

Pursuing rigor alone produces rigor mortis in the theory leg of scientific progress.

Can a system where rejection is the norm claim its primary goal is producing knowledge value?

Wrongly accepting a paper with a fault gives reputation consequences, while wrongly rejecting a useful paper leaves no evidence, as it doesn’t see the light of day.

Would Einstein today be both unable to get a job and unable to publish?

Conclusions:

The demands of cross–disciplinary research suggest that academia should:

1. Replace the myth that rigor is excellence with research as a risk–opportunity mix;

2. Reduce business influence on the grounds that academic truth is good business; and,

3. Reinvent academic publishing as a democratic open knowledge exchange system.

Socio–technologies like wikis show what is possible when communities activate, but wikis are not the academic answer as they don’t attribute or allocate accountability, nor offer anonymous review. The easy options in academic publishing have already been tried, so Part II of this paper suggests a socio–technical hybrid.

A democratic KES would reaffirm academia’s original goal of publishing knowledge freely for mutual critique and benefit. The search for knowledge should be open not closed, dynamic not static, inclusive not exclusive, current not outdated, affirming not denying, innovative not conservative and most of all, living not dead. To achieve this goal academics must hold to the goal of knowledge growth. If we do our duty as others do theirs, progress will occur naturally. Lest academia forget, its very reason to exist is to grow knowledge, not to guard it, nor to profit from it.

Part II

Part II now suggests the next evolutionary step is democratic online knowledge exchange, run by the academic many rather than the few. [...] The design proposed here is neither wiki, nor e-journal, nor electronic repository, nor reputation system, but a hybrid of these and other socio-technical functions.

Such a hybrid is on track to be released to the public in about one month as Google Wave.

Just as students request a grade transcript report from the University computer record,
so KES contributors could request reports not just of their publications, but of their
citations, number of comments, downloads and views they generated, as well as their
review, data source, comment and service contributions to the community. Aggregating
micro-contributions over many papers could recognize the work of those who amend as
well as those who create.

The decision to publish is always with the author(s), e.g. an
author with bad reviews may decide to publish anyway, even with a “Not
Recommended” (-1) rating.

Complementary to anonymous expert ratings are general reader ratings. While experts
may bias to rigor, readers may bias to relevance. This rebalances the rigor-relevance
skew identified in Part I.

Given the amazing success of Wikipedia, why not exchange research knowledge on a
wiki base? While wikis democratically engage community participation, disseminate
freely and quickly to all and allow innovation, they neither warranty quality nor attribute
well.

This is certainly true in general and for most wikis, but all of these points have been addressed by some wikis. For example, all three issues are solved at http://scholarpedia.org/ , while http://www.wikigenes.org/ provides for proper attribution and http://en.citizendium.org/ gets the accountability straight and adds a light non-anonymous review process on top.

Slashdot’s automated rating system lets readers become moderators if they act well (Benkler, 2002): they must be registered (not anonymous), regular users (used the site for a time) with positive “karma” (based on how others rate their comments). Registered readers have five “influence points” to spend on others comments as they wish over a three day period (or they expire). Highly rated commentators get more points and hence a louder “voice”. This democratically spreads influence among many rather than restricting it to a few, avoiding gatekeeper bottlenecks. [...] A similar KES function could offer readers a natural path to associate reviewer, reviewer, senior reviewer or associate editor, using reader base functions like rating and commenting to recruit and assess reviewers.

Online commenting is like “Letters to the Editor” except easier to do.

A detailed example of how easily a letter to the editor can be published is here.

A future paper could be 90% written by the original authors and 10% by 200 others. For
an individual these micro-contributions could aggregate over many papers.

Conclusion
Systems with some of the features proposed already exist in specialist fields, e.g. The Pool displays new-media projects on a graph, and rise or fall by reader ratings based on rater reputation (http://pool.newmedia.umaine.edu/). The democratic publishing concept for documents in general is illustrated by efforts like Scribd (http://www.scribd.com), where people freely web-publish in a variety of document formats. Every word is indexed for searching, and it has over 50 million readers a month. Academic publishing projects like the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca/integration) and Hannay’s Connotea (http://www.connotea.org/) still seek acceptance but systems based on academic communities like the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) are growing. Academia’s needs aren’t addressed by mainstream knowledge exchange, so Universities must use their information technology assets to improve their knowledge productivity.

To the question “Who will pay?” for the open exchange of research knowledge the
sensible answer is “Those who gain.” Current business models offer these options:
1. Reader pays. Readers pay to subscribe to journals that publish research.
2. Author pays. Common in medicine, where author grants can pay publishing costs.
These models assume the main publishing stakeholders are readers and authors, with
publishers the “arms dealers” in the middle (Esposito, 2004). Yet both models are today
struggling to remain viable. The socio-technical model suggests a new stakeholder
beyond the individuals involved: the academic community.

The blueprint for change this paper presents can only be activated by the academic
community. Technologies enable communities but only communities can make
technology come alive. Modern socio-technology has the tools, but the social will to
make it happen is still needed. If academics reject this option, it is not unthinkable that
the greater community will bring an end the university as we know it (Taylor, 2009).
Like the aristocrats of the past, they will not disappear but will fade into irrelevance.
Academia is powerful but not invulnerable to the power of the Web 2.0 world O’Reilly
and others envision: “…if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard
drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers,
indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is
rarely the path to scholarly authority” (Jensen, 2009).

An online KES that accepts all, reviews all, and publishes all would reinvent the
original spirit of academic publishing. It would also help promotion and tenure
committees select better by giving more details on publishing, reviewing, citations,
contributions, comments, downloads, views and online service roles. The current state of
information overload arises from too many isolated facts and not enough integration.