Openness in Scholarly Communication

Openness in Scholarly Communication:
Conceptual Framework and Challenges to Innovation

Clifford Tatum & Nicholas W. Jankowski

Note to readers: This manuscript is being prepared as chapter for an edited volume reflecting scholarship emerging from the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences. This version is being made available here as a collection of html pages (TOC in the right sidebar) and as a downloadable pdf, allowing for peer review among colleagues.

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There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial. Vannevar Bush (1945)

Across the domains of scholarship, expectations are high for development of “new forms of scientific discovery and scholarly research” previously considered impossible (Arms and Larsen 2007, 3). In contrast to such expectations, recent empirical research on scholarly communication suggests low rates of adoption of the technologies that underpin the vision of an e-infrastructure. Instead, there is continued preference for publishing research in traditional, high-ranked journals and book-length monographs (Harley et al. 2010). At the same time, publishers are providing digital versions of articles and books, and open access journals are increasing in number. Nevertheless, the format and structure of formal scholarly communication remains largely unchanged.

In less formal communication settings, researchers are inclined to adopt a variety of the freely available Internet products and services. Without overt concerns for the academic reward system in the informal setting, scholars are experimenting with new practices. These innovations occur differently across disciplinary contexts, degrees of collaboration, and stages in career (Procter et al. 2010a). Analysis of technologically-facilitated scholarly communication is complicated by differences in situated practice. Common among these new informal venues and practices is an environment of openness, less compatible with the role of formal scholarly communication, particularly regarding the academic reward system.

In light of these challenges, we propose an analytical framework of openness to better understand scholarly communication in the digital era. The chapter begins with a brief panorama of developments underway. This is followed by elaboration of the conceptual framework of openness afforded by digital media and the proliferation of user-generated content associated with Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005, Vossen, and Hagemann 2007). Further, we situate these changing practices within the rubric of e-research. The chapter introduces this perspective, followed by a review of scholarly communication more generally. We then focus on the dynamics of openness in formal and informal communication. This serves as a means to examine emerging practices and the ways in which such practices help understand challenges and opportunities in scholarly communication. With this conceptual backdrop, we offer illustrations of both formal and informal communicative forms, focusing on emerging practices in the informal realm and recent digital publishing initiatives by academic publishers. These illustrations serve as a basis for examination of the tension and flux in scholarly communication associated with dimensions of openness, and for proposing avenues for further empirical exploration.

Openness in Scholarly Communication

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