The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

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—and the way these activities are conducted.

Overview

Both the process and shape of scholarship are changing. Nontraditional forms are emerging that call for new ways of evaluating and disseminating work. Increasingly, scholars are beginning to employ methods unavailable to their counterparts of several years ago, including prepublication releases of their work, distribution through nontraditional channels, dynamic visualization of data and results, and new ways to conduct peer reviews using online collaboration. These new approaches present a new challenge: to protect the integrity of scholarly activity while taking advantage of the opportunity for increased creativity and collaboration.

New forms of scholarship, including fresh models of publication and nontraditional scholarly products, are evolving along with the changing process. Some of these forms are very common—blogs and video clips, for instance—but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them. Some scholars worry that blogging may cut into time that would otherwise be used for scholarly research or writing, for example, or that material in a podcast is not as well researched as material prepared for print publication. Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research—a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work. Blogging scholars report that the forum for airing ideas and receiving comments from their colleagues helps them to hone their thinking and explore avenues they might otherwise have overlooked.

As just one of many emerging examples, for its Series on Digital Media and Learning, a set of six edited volumes on the impact of digital media (in press), the MacArthur Foundation sponsored a group of online conversations for the authors of the volumes. These included a symposium in a virtual world, an online conference conducted via the web, and a series of substantive online dialogs with invited experts. The authors framed the discussions to address gaps in the literature of their field or unanswered questions related to the overall work, and posed the same questions to all three groups. The three venues served to uncover a variety of perspectives; attendees of the virtual symposium were adept in digital media, for example, while the online conference attracted a more traditional, scholarly audience. These activities were undertaken not as a form of peer review but in the course of authoring the volumes—as part of the scholarly process.

While significant challenges remain before the emerging forms of scholarship we are seeing are accepted, nonetheless, there are many examples of work that is expanding the boundaries of what we have traditionally thought of as scholarship. In the coming years, as more scholars and researchers make original and worthwhile contributions to their fields using these new forms, methods for evaluating and recognizing those contributions will be developed, and we expect to see them become an accepted form of academic work.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, and Creative Expression

The real potential of this trend for education is to expand the audience for scholarship and research— not only among those at scholarly institutions, but among the public as well. Academics can collaborate with a much wider community and easily reach out to experts from related disciplines. We are already seeing this occur in the “blogosphere”—the community of people who keep and comment on blogs—where scholars post about their current thinking and receive recommendations, pertinent questions, and thoughtful responses from others in their field and beyond.

Increasingly, we are seeing other technologies being applied to the purposes of collaboration as well. Writers use shared editing tools like Google Docs and wikis and create online books that accept reader comments at the paragraph level, opening up the process of writing itself to collaboration. These efforts are the early stages of an academic transformation that will, over the next five years, parallel the course we are now seeing with user-generated content of other kinds.

Emerging forms of publication also have the power to make the information being conveyed more easily understood. Visualization tools like Gapminder bring statistical data to life. Combined with a traditional paper—or embedded in a less traditional one— interactive charts and graphs give us a new way to see information.

The new scholarship also acknowledges certain complications of traditional methods of publication that arise from the rapid rate of change and discovery of new information in many fields. 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. While books offer a persistence that far exceeds that of other media and other forms of communication, the content of printed matter is perceived as increasingly ephemeral. A response to that trend is that more and more books are 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.

A sampling of applications for the new scholarship and emerging forms of publication across disciplines includes the following:

• Include—and learn from—new voices. Both books and their authors may benefit from the comments of interested students, colleagues, and members of the public, who in turn will benefit from hearing scholars narrate their process. When his 1999 book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace needed an update, author Lawrence Lessig set up a wiki and invited the public to help him write the second edition, Codev2, now available in both print and electronic formats.
• Control costs and reach wider audiences. Electronic texts are cheaper and easier to distribute than printed and bound copies. Many people still prefer to purchase and own hardcopies, even if they get a free electronic copy; if sales are important, the benefits of marketing to a larger audience may result in enough sales to make up for those that are lost from people who do not purchase a copy ofter reading it online. Cory Doctorow, science fiction author and coeditor of Boing Boing, found that to be true for his books (see Giving It Away, below).
• Illustrate and educate using a variety of media. Graphs, photographs, video and audio clips can all be included in an online paper or book. Online textbooks for computer science, history and politics, and other disciplines are available that incorporate illustrations both static and animated, video and audio commentary by experts in the field, and graphs that respond to user input. Combined with new methods of data visualization, mapping, graphing, and charting, online books are becoming powerful interactive tools for learning.

Examples of the New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication

The following links provide examples of the new scholarship and emerging forms of publication.

• Networked Books GAM3R 7H30RY by McKenzie Wark; The Django Book
  by Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss. These two books are online in prepublication format, where readers can add comments that will inform the authors’ work. Both are scheduled for publication in 2007.
• N I N E S
  N I N E S is a consortium of scholars promoting and exploring new forms of scholarship.
• Poetess Archive
  Developed at Miami University, the Poetess Archive provides an extensive bibliography and some full texts. Over the next year, the database will be linked to a visualization tool. The accompanying Poetess Archive Journal is an evolving online scholarly peer-reviewed publication that will take advantage of innovative technologies to push the boundaries of research and publication.
• Public Library of Science
  The Public Library of Science is committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource via a new process of peer-reviewed publishing.
• Texas Politics
  An online textbook developed at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas Politics includes audio and video, commentary, a series of live speakers, and other media as well as traditional text.
• UO Channel
  The University of Oregon has a library of video productions online, collected in the UO Channel. Featured programs include lectures, interviews, performances, symposia, documentary productions, and more.
• Using Wiki in Education
  Both a wiki and a published book, Using Wiki in Education explores the ways online publishing can extend the life and usefulness of a scholarly work.

For Further Reading

The following articles and resources are recommended for those who wish to learn more about the new scholarship and emerging forms of publication.

• Book 2.0 (Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006) This article reviews some ways educators are exploring new modes of electronic publishing.
• The Book as Place (Paula Berinstein, Searcher, November/ December 2006) This article describes the networked book as a destination and a center for community as well as reading material: “The book is now a place as well as a thing and you can find its location mapped in cyberspace.”
• 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.
• Giving it Away (Cory Doctorow, Forbes, December 1, 2006) In this article, a technology writer explains the value of publishing electronic, free versions of books.
• The Institute for the Future of the Book (Retrieved December 20, 2006) This organization promotes the next generation of the book with conversation, research, and even software.
• del.icio.us: New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication (Horizon Project Advisory Board and Friends, 2006) Follow this link to find resources tagged for this topic and this edition of the Horizon Report, including the ones listed here. To add to this list, simply tag resources with “hz07” and “scholarship” when you save them to del.icio.us.