{"id":11767,"date":"2012-10-26T08:21:42","date_gmt":"2012-10-26T13:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.library.duke.edu\/scholcomm\/?p=11767"},"modified":"2012-10-26T08:21:42","modified_gmt":"2012-10-26T13:21:42","slug":"is-the-web-just-a-faster-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.library.duke.edu\/scholcomm\/2012\/10\/26\/is-the-web-just-a-faster-horse\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Web just a faster horse?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Monday the Duke Libraries celebrated Open Access week with a talk by Jason Priem that was ostensibly about alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact \u2013 so-called AltMetrics.\u00a0 Jason is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina School of Library and Information Science, a co-author of the well-regarded AltMetrics Manifesto<\/a>, and one of the founders of the Web tool called ImpactStory<\/a>.\u00a0 In addition to his public talk, Jason gave a workshop for a small group of people interested in how ImpactStory works; you can read about the launch of that tool in this article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So Jason is as qualified as anyone to talk about AltMetrics, and he did so very well.\u00a0 But his talk was much broader than that subject implies; he really gave a superb summary of the current state of scholarly communications and a compelling vision of where we could go.\u00a0 For me the most memorable quote was when he said, toward the end of his talk, that the Web had been created to be a tool for scholarly communications, yet while it had dramatically changed many industries, from bookselling to pornography, it had not yet revolutionized scholarly publishing as it should.\u00a0 The problem is that publishers, and, to some extent, authors, are treating the Web as simply \u201ca faster horse\u201d and not truly exploiting the possibilities it offers to change the way scholarship is done.<\/p>\n

Jason began with some history, pointing out the the earliest forms of scholarly communications were simply direct conversations, carried out through letters. \u00a0The first scholarly journals, in fact, were simply compilations of these sorts of letters, and you can still see that venerable tradition reflected in some modern journal titles, like “Physical Review Letters.” \u00a0But the modern journal, with its submission process, peer review, and extremely delayed publication schedules, was a revolution and a dramatic re-visioning of how scholars communicated with one another. \u00a0Certainly there were significant gains in that new technology for communication, but things were lost as well. \u00a0The sense of conversation was lost, as was immediacy. \u00a0Now, according to Jason, we have the ability to recapture some of those values from the older model.<\/p>\n

Another dramatic change in scholarly communications was the movement called “bibliometrics,” which led to the creation, in the early 1960s, of the citation index and the journal impact factor. \u00a0Like the journal itself, the impact factor is so ingrained in our current thinking that it is hard to remember that it too was once a new technology. \u00a0And it is a system with significant problems. \u00a0As Jason said, the impact factor can track only one kind of person, doing one kind of research by making one kind of use. \u00a0The impact factor cannot track non-scholarly uses of scholarly works, or even scholarly uses that are not reflected in another journal article. \u00a0Also, true social impact , the kind of policy-changing impact that many scholars would see as an important goal, is seldom reflected in an impact factor. \u00a0The problem we face, Jason argued, is that we have confused the kind of use we can track with use itself. \u00a0In the process we often miss the real heart of scholarship, the conversation.<\/p>\n

In the digital age, however, we can begin to track that conversation, because much of it is taking place online. AltMetrics, by which we teach computers how to look for a variety of article-level citations and discussions, offers the chance to analyze the scholarly environment much more thoroughly, and give individual scholars a much clearer and more comprehensive story of their real impact.<\/p>\n

One connection that was hard for me in Jason’s talk, but ultimately persuasive, was his discussion of why Twitter is important. \u00a0I admit to being a reluctant and unenthusiastic Twitter user. \u00a0This blog post will be distributed via Twitter, and most of my readers seem to find what I write that way. \u00a0But still I was startled when Jason compared Twitter to that earliest form of scholarly communications, the conversation. \u00a0What was new to me was to think of Twitter as an opportunity to have a preselected jury suggest what is important to read. \u00a0If I follow people whose work is interesting and important to me, and they are all reading a particular article, isn’t it extremely likely that that article will be interesting and important to me as well? \u00a0And isn’t that peer review? \u00a0We sometimes hear that peer review is professional evaluation while Twitter is merely a popularity contest. \u00a0But Jason challenged that distinction, pointing out that if we follow the right users, the people whose work we know and respect, Twitter is a scholarly tool in which popularity becomes indistinguishable from professional evaluation. \u00a0Since many scholars already use Twitter, as well as blogs an e-mail lists, in this way, it is fair to say that new forms of peer-review have already arrived. \u00a0The AltMetrics movement aims to track those other forms of scholarly impact.<\/p>\n

Jason ended his talk with a proposal to “decouple” the scholarly journal, to recognize that journals have traditionally performed several different functions — often identified as registration, certification, dissemination and archiving. \u00a0Some of those functions are now trivial; why pay anyone for dissemination in an age when an article can be distributed to millions with the click of a mouse? \u00a0Other functions, especially certification (peer-review) are changing dramatically. \u00a0Jason suggested that peer-review should be a service which could be offered independently of how an article was to be disseminated. \u00a0Scholarly societies especially are in a good possession to provide peer-review as a service for which scholars and their institutions could pay when it was felt to be necessary. \u00a0but in an age when so much peer-review is already happening outside the structure of journal publication, it is clear that not all scholarship will require that formal service. \u00a0So in place of the rigid structure that we have now, Jason suggests, illustrates, and enables a more flexible, layered system of scholarly networks and services.<\/p>\n

As should be obvious by now, I found Jason’s talk for Open Access Week provocative and thought -provoking. \u00a0I hope I have represented what he said fairly. I have tried to indicate where I am paraphrasing Jason directly, and he should not be blamed for the conclusions I draw from his comments. \u00a0But for those who would like to hear from Jason directly, and I highly recommend it, he and several other leaders in the area of AltMetrics will take part in a webinar sponsored by NISO on November 14, which you can read about and register for here<\/a>.\u00a0 You can also finds slides and a video from a presentation similar to the one he gave at Duke here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Monday the Duke Libraries celebrated Open Access week with a talk by Jason Priem that was ostensibly about alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact \u2013 so-called AltMetrics.\u00a0 Jason is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina School of Library and Information Science, a co-author of the well-regarded AltMetrics Manifesto, and one of … Continue reading Is the Web just a faster horse?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,36,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-access-and-institutional-repositories","category-scholarly-publishing","category-technologies"],"yoast_head":"\nIs the Web just a faster horse? - Scholarly Communications @ Duke<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.library.duke.edu\/scholcomm\/2012\/10\/26\/is-the-web-just-a-faster-horse\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is the Web just a faster horse? 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