Horizon2007:Shortlist 3a
From Horizon Project
Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication
The time-honored activities of academic research and scholarly activity have benefited from the explosion of access to research materials and the ability to collaborate at a distance. At the same time, the processes of research, review, publication, and tenure are challenged by the same trends. The proliferation of audience-generated content combined with open-access content models is changing the way we think about scholarship and publication.
The new scholarship is still developing, and it is not yet clear what it will look like. Emerging forms of the book, including prepublication research and drafts shared online, the incorporation of data visualization tools into online publications, all forms of customized publishing, and the e-book, are ironically causing us to regard the traditional book as an impermanent medium. Obviously, books themselves are a very permanent form of communication; but the content of printed matter is perceived as increasingly impermanent, and is more and more often accompanied by a website, wiki, or other online resource that can communicate new insights as they arise and create and sustain a living community around the concepts entombed in the published material.
Further along this road we may see open-source textbooks, electronic books (imagine all those heavy freshman readers contained in a single tablet the size of a slim notebook!), online textbooks, and other forms of publication that take advantage of the flexible and updateable nature of electronic media. The real potential of this trend, though, is to expand access to scholarship and new ideas.
Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression
- link original texts with others that explain or expand on allusions in the text
- collaborate on scholarly publications with a much wider audience, including young people, the public, and experts from related disciplines
- combine online conversations with more traditional types of scholarly research
Examples
- The Institute for the Future of the Book is keeping an eye on these trends: http://www.futureofthebook.org
- Edit a collection of free content textbooks at Wikibooks: http://www.wikibooks.org/
- N I N E S is a consortium of scholars promoting and exploring new forms of scholarship: http://www.nines.org/
- Using Wiki in Education is a book and wiki edited by Stewart Mader: http://www.wikiineducation.com/
- Public Library of Science is committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource: http://www.plos.org
For Further Reading
Book 2.0 (Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006). Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations. http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i47/47a02001.htm
The Future of Books (Jason Epstein, Technology Review, January 2005). This article reviews the writer’s experiences in the world of traditional publishing and looks ahead to the future of publishing. http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/14064/
Scholarly Reputations: Who's Got Buzz? (Paul Kobulnicky, EDUCAUSE Review, November/December 2006) "I also wondered aloud about which "big win" choice scholars would make as time moves forward. Those of us who believe both in the rigor of peer review and in open access know that these are not mutually exclusive choices but rather are mutually beneficial elements in advancing scholarship."
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0666.asp
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Discussion
Add your thoughts, suggestions, examples to add here, and indicate who wrote it-- e.g. [Alan]
I someday would like to see the news headline "CONTENT OWNERS INHIBIT EDUCATION". I can't tell you how many times I've found a technical publication on-line, only to find I need to pay to read it. The author got paid nothing to write it, the conference collected ~$500 from all who got to see the author present it (including the author), and now readers must pay $30 to read it. As a technical author of papers (as all of us are) I would love to sign a copyright release that makes the paper free after 6 months. That way the publishers can make some money, but advancement of science and education does not need to suffer. What I'm pointing out here is emerging forms of publications will be not emerge unless a new pricing/profit scheme is developed. [Tom Z]
Today I heard a most encouraging story: a faculty member at a prominent american university wanted to retain rights to all of the images in the book so that the images could be included in this faculty member's open courseware instance. The publisher -- also an A-list publisher -- balked. The faculty member didn't back down. The compromised and now half of the images from the book are now slated to go into an open courseware space, with generous creative commons licensing to allow others to re-use. This seems to me to be one of the important stories here: by promoting open access scholarship, we end up with a universe of re-usable media (text, image, graphics, eventually time-based media) that can then be used in teaching. It's another way to arrive at the learning object nirvana that our present repository strategies aren't delivering on. [Mike Roy ]
