I was given the chance to attend a conference on the changing landscape of scholarly communication (meaning: digital and electronic!) last week. Below is a link to the Symposium site where, at some point, vids of the presentations should be posted, as well as my notes from the presentations. I think this information will be especially useful to graduate students/junior faculty since there are already key concerns among faculty I know that traditional models of scholarship tend to dominate promotion and tenure committees despite some administration's expressed desire to have cutting-edge technologies utilized!

Link to site. With some clicking, you can access abstracts as well as information on the speakers.



Themes

Speakers who administer major grants programs, serve as the primary editors of university presses, and have been engaged with questions of the changing nature of digital scholarship for at least fifteen years noted that universities must begin to change the academic culture to meet the new demands of the digital age, given the following claims:

The traditional apparatus of scholarship (scholarly journal and university press monograph) can no longer compete or even adequately serve to disseminate scholarship in the new digital age.

The sciences, including medical sciences, and engineering and computer sciences are further along in technological dissemination of scholarship, but humanities and social sciences must start to engage in such dissemination.

The traditional business models (for organizations, presses, and journals) and two-century old legal monopoly of copyright have failed. New business models and IP/copyright laws and practices must be developed.

Universities must begin to take a more aggressive role in making the research and knowledge (not only in traditional content scholarship but in pedagogy and engagement) produced by faculty available to the general public.
 
Recommendations

If major federal funding agencies are going to require Open Access publishing of funded scholarship, then we must pursue developing a range of such options since we are mandated to compete for more grants.

I was able to speak to some of the A&M experts in the Texas Digital Libraries project; since I see little chance that this university can adequately fund Open Access repositories in the near future, I believe we need to work with the A&M system while also pursuing a discussion on this campus of how to best achieve Open Access publishing for our university.

One gap I noted in the presentations involves a problem I have learned about from teachers I work with in my program: when considering the audience for our scholarship on this campus, I consider teachers, and their students, in the schools, to be an important component of the 'general public' who would benefit from open access to university scholarship. Yet I know that school administrators routinely set school firewalls to limit any sort of usage of offsite databases and materials.

Summaries

Opening Keynote: Donald J. Waters, Mellon
"Archives, Online Edition-Making, and the Future of Scholarly Communication in the Humanities."

This speaker focused on the extent to which the traditional library/archive can no longer be the repository for scholarship in the humanities. The need to "transform and re-edit" humanities work in digital forms was discussed with representative examples from the Mellon grant programs, focusing on changes in disciplinary fields (inter and multi-disciplinarity were key themes throughout), contribution and credit, and new publication options (online and open access publications, on campuses and online).

Main Presentations

"Scholarly Authority in the Age of Abundance; Retaining Algorithmic Relevance in the new Landscape"

Michael Jon Jenson: The analysis of how Google 'sorts' for relevance in terms of popularity (as measured by their algorithm) was the focus of Jenson's talk. While the audience for some academic work published/available online (the NIH and NSF grants are more and more demanding open access of grants-funded scholarship via online programs) may remain other academics, the question of how academics might intervene in publishing online to address a more general audience, conveying academic expertise as a part of academic service, through blogs and other means, was also covered.

"The Harvard Open Access Policy"

Stuart M. Ashieber discussed the policy and procedures in a new open access program developed by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard Law School. Scholars who publish articles (and the program is focusing only on articles) post their work on a databases (still in production) that is located at Harvard. Academics can opt out with a request (which is always met). They are much further along in their policy than in their technology. Presentation was fairly nuts and bolts in terms of what they are doing at Harvard, except no discussion of funding!

“Intellectual Property Rights and the Open Access Movement”
Georgia Harper

This talk, by a lawyer, connected directly with my main areas of interest in media and fan studies. Open Access (OA), as defined at this conference, meant that articles published in the traditional scholarly journals would, after a period of time, be put into a database (apparently primarily on each university campus) for anyone to access who wishes to do so; the Harvard people (above) have a contract addendum to use when one is publishing an article. (Note: some journals run their own OA program.) This speaker addressed the issue of the outdated artifact of the copyright monopoly, the slowness of Congress to change it, and the need for new business models (new business models were also a major theme of this conference--nobody denies the need to have academic organizations and the scholarly journals, but the attempt to control dissemination of scholarship is no longer viable.)

“The Future of University Presses and Other Institutional Publishers”
Michael A. Keller

The editor of Highwire.stanford.edu (a university press that is apparently doing an excellent job of surviving in today's digital environment) discussed what university presses needed to do in order to survive in today's market. A must-see for anybody involved in running a university press or a unit that might collaborate with such a press.

“Impacts on the Academy”
David E. Shulenburger

This speaker argued the need for universities to shift from their formerly passive role in regard to disseminating research (requiring faculty to publish or perish, and punishing those who don't), to a move active role that moves the dissemination of research from the limited spaces of the scholarly journal and university press monograph into a digitalized, Open Access, public space (without harming the journals or presses--they have a role, but it's no longer the only role). His suggestions include developing systems at the department level, the Center level, the College level to make scholarship available via repositories and Open Access programs, including recreating historical scholarship published in the past. Universities must work to modify copyright requests, support publishing in OA journals, and supporting libraries in hard financial decisions. The NIH requires public access already (any article published with NIH grant must go into an OA repository within a year), and that should be spread to all scholarship. It will benefit faculty and departments and universities: increased exposure to work, transparency, better access to other published scholarship.

"University Missions, Academic Values and Information Technology”
Cliff Lynch

This speaker broadened the terms of argument to include more than just published articles--to focus on scholarly communication which he argues (and I'd agree) includes teaching and working materials. He does not want to see people 'mimic' the old technologies (i.e. making pdf files available online), but (back to the Keynote speech), wants to see new technologies of connecting (aggregating, linking, connections between work) (in effect, Web 3!). He also sees the use of the internet for publishing narrow (topic focus) encyclopedia databases that can easily be updated. He argues that funding agencies such as the NIH, NSF, NEH, and Mellon are all starting to think about access to data and the information storage aspects of that data relating to the work they support through grants. He also argued to expand the type of scholarly material being disseminated beyond articles to include video, recordings of music, cultural events, etc. everything that happens on a campus.

Roundtables:

The two Friday morning events were more focused on A&M specifically, dealing with the question of how the new technologies of publishing and dissemination will affect promotion and tenure standards, and how the university should create and fund an OA commitment. Apparently many of the universities already doing so (such as Harvard) are private universities; A&M could be the first land grant institution to play a major role in this area.

Combined notes from the two roundtables (general principles):

Imperatives:

Address complexity of culture shift between faculty trained/hired/promoted under traditional approaches/methods of publication and faculty now encouraged to work with new technologies but who may suffer in regard to tenure and promotion.

Must educate campus on resources and services relating to digital communication: it is not cheap.

Upper administration must commit to a continuing dialogue, but faculty must be involved from ground up in establishing questions, priorities, etc.

Fund raising must begin to include digital access as a category for donors.