Knowledge structure for information professionals

1. Knowledge structure for information professionals Lecture 4: Scholarly communication

2. Review of last week • Bibliometric laws Lotak’s Law of scientific productivity Zipf’s Law of word frequency Bradford’s Law of subject dispersion • Information overload “A wealth of information create a poverty of attention”

3. Today’s agendas • Serial pricing crisis/economy of scholar publishing • The new opportunities afforded by electronic journals • Domain/field differences in scholarly communication and information seeking

4. What’s unique about scholarly publishing • Quality control through peer-review • Public registry of intellectual property • An integral part of the academic reward system • Quality hierarchy

5. Serial price crisisSource: Association of Research Libraries

6. Average titles purchased source: American Research library

7. Average expenditures on serials and monographs

9. The market structure of journal publishing • Inelasticity market caused by the monopoly of “core journals” by commercial publishers • Growth of serial titles Increase in scholarly output (pressured by the academic rewarding system) Fragmentation of knowledge (growth of specialties)

10. Demand side • Demand for periodical tends to be less elastic than monographs The demand for “core journals” The desire of have a complete collection of a title

11. Inelastic Market • “Librarians have a weakness for journals and numbered series of all kinds, Once they got volume 1, number 1 of a series, they are hooked until the end. The love neat and orderly serials records and complete runs of periodicals on their shelves. ”

12. Cost side • Specialization in knowledge and demands for specialized journals lead to the proliferation of journals. • The proliferation of journals results in small circulation per title, which results in upward pressure on unit prices (to spread the first-copy cost)

13. Growth of Serial titles Source: Association of Research Libraries

14. Pricing information • The relatively high fist-copy cost and relatively low marginal or incremental costs of culture products. • Differential pricing by versioning (e.g. hardcover and paperback) to extract the most economic value

15. Added value • Hypertext links to cited articles in the collection • More powerful search engines with additional features • Current awareness notification via email based on bibliographic categories or keywords • Opportunity to view online articles prior to release of the site license versions • Higher resolution images than are available (Varian, 1996)

16. Coping strategies • Response from library community: SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Promote alterative publishing venues Pure electronic journals Open Archive Initiatives (OAI) Library consortia

17. Open Archive Initiatives (OAI) • An initiative to develop and promote interoperability standards that aims to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content (peer-reviewed articles or pre-prints)

18. Typology of e-journals • P-E journals: primarily paper based, available through electronic channels. • E-P journals: primarily distributed electronically, but may have limited distribution in paper form. • Pure e-journals *peer-reviewed vs. self-publishing

19. The electronic publishing reform movement • Paul Ginsparg (developer of Los Alamos physics e-print server) • Stevan Harnad (Editor of Psycoloquy) • Andrew Odlyzko (bell lab, u. of Minnesota)

20. Inescapable imperative? “Regardless of how different research areas move into the future, I strongly suspect that on the one- to two decade time scale, serious research biologists will also have moved to some form of global unified archive system, without the current partitioning and access restrictions familiar from the paper medium, for the simple reason that it is the best way to communicate knowledge, and hence to create new knowledge” (Ginsparg, 1999)

21. Reclaim the publishing function • “The new technologies, however, are making possible easy publication journals by scholars along. It is just as easy for editors to place manuscripts of referred papers in a publicly accessible directory or preprint server as it is for them to do the same with their own preprints. (Odlyzko, 1996)”

22. “scholarly skywriting” • For most investigators the formal submission of a manuscript for peer review is not the first stage at which it has been subjected to peer scrutiny. That is what all those prior discussions and symposia and preprints had been intended to elicit. And all this prepublication interaction is clearly continuous with the lapidary stage at which the manuscript -- usually further revised in response to peer review -- is accepted and archived in print. Nor does it really end there, for of course the literature may respond to a contribution directly or indirectly for years to come, and there are even ways of soliciting postpublication feedback in the form of "open peer commentary“ (Harnad, 1991).

23. Interactive publication • Criticisms on peer-view process • Electronic journal of open peer commentary e.g. Behavioral and Brains Sciences (BBS) preprint archive subscriber's version Psycoloquy (refereed Journal with Peer Commentary since 1990)

24. Social shaping of technology • Not just a mater of time: field differences in adopting electronic publishing (Kling and McKim, 2000). • Publicity, accessibility, trustworthiness

25. Cultural shaping of scholar communication (Jenny Fry) • A domain-analytic approach • Discipline vs. “filed” as unit of analysis • Two dimensions of culture in scholarly communities: “mutual dependence” and “task uncertainty” (Whitley, 2000) • “Soft” and “hard” sciences

26. Degree of mutual dependence between scientists • “Functional dependence between members of a field refers to the need to co-ordinate task outcomes and demonstrate adherence to common competence standards. Contributions which do not rely on similar techniques, methods, and materials as specialist colleagues are unlikely to be published in fields which exhibit a high degree of functional dependence.” (Whitley, 2002,p.88)

27. Degree of task uncertainty • “The production and recognition of new knowledge depends, then, on the existence and structure of current knowledge and expectations. The more systematic, general, and precise is existing knowledge, the clearer will any results be in terms of their novelty and significance for this common stock of understanding.” (Whitley, 2000, p.119)

28. Becher’s matrix of disciplinary cultures source (Fry & Talja, 2004)