Scholarly publishing 2.0

What is scholarly publishing?

What scholar publish - a distintive sort of conversation by researchers, practices in a particular community, peer review and quality

How do we look at quality in an online world

Peer review is very important - there are different forms through journal process but also via commentary

Publish - twitter, IM, blogs, podcasts, conference presentations, slideshares, journal articles, books - funnel effect from light interactions through to more heavy discourse

What has changed is that there are more channels and an information explorsion in terms of speed of distribution

Clay Shirky - no information overload, only filter failure

Tools to help: e-Journals, citeseer and Zotero, google scholar, OU library federated search, TicTOCs (RSS)

We underestimate the way we find new resources and information by talking to each other

What really counts?

It's metrics, the REF (research framework etc)

Citation counts, impact factors, h-index (N papers with N citations)

The problem is 'gaming the system', worse outside academia - technorati (i.e. post techno-bating blogs!)

Peer review broadly considered is the way we spot what is interesting and what is of value

JISc report

Marginal cost of publishing is zero

Moore's law cost halve every 18 months

BUT E-journal price inflation > 10% every year

Publishing costs along now in the UK for schalarly material £575 m/y

Per article costs 55% is cost of writing it (and alot is reading papers you are citing), 15% on peer review, <1% on library acquisition, 30% publisher cost

Three models for publishing

1. Traditonal subsciption

2. Open access (50% author-pays)

3. Self archiving - for example e-print at Southampton or ORO at OU (our librarians will check the rights situation for the material you upload)

At of evidence that freely available materials get more citations

Peer review 2.0

Vision for a new mechanism for the journal JIME

(which was when started in mid-90s a radical open publishing mechanism with quality)

1. Author blogs submission draft

2. Editors first filter

3. Referees blog reviews

4. Author blogs revised draft

5. Editor review

6. Formal publication

There is a quantiative change in terms of publishing (more, faster, easier)

But arguably no fundamental change: open access imp but small beer (libraries traditionally opne, seamless sign on)

Peer review remains key - but what might the new forms be?