Tim Hickey, class of 1977

Overview

• Knowledge creation/dissemination
  scholars, editors, publishers, printed serials
• 1995-2007: Publishing without paper
• 2000-2007: Journals without publishers
• 2000-2007: Articles without editors
• 2003-2007: Encyclopedias without scholars
• 2005-2010: Effects on Classroom Teaching
• 2010-2020: Projections
• 6/7/2007: Questions and Comments

Academic Knowledge
dissemination through text (books, journals, ...)

Three types of Academic Knowledge Resources

• raw data (experiment results, historical records, observations)
  
• primary scholarship (research articles, biographies, dissertations)
  
• secondary scholarship (survey articles, encylopedia entries, textbooks)
  

Academic Knowledge Generation
the stakeholders

• The Scholar - uses knowledge to create new knowledge using Library resources
• The Journal Editor - uses Scholars to review articles, suggest revisions, accept/reject submissions
• The Journal Publisher - prints and distributes a fixed number of pages of knowledge from Scholars to Libraries for profit, but does not pay Scholars or Editors for their contribution
• The Librarian - provides local access to knowledge for Scholars (with support from the BUNWC)
• The Student - learns from Scholar using Library resources
• The Parents pay for everything in taxes and tuition

1995-2005: Print moves online

• FY2005: 25,000 Serial Subscriptions at Brandeis
• 23,000 accessible at Brandeis in digital format!
• 50% of library materials budget for digital resources
• international phenomenon

Electronic Journals and Books

Libraries provide physical and electronic access to authoratative journals and books.

• ACM Digital Library
• IEEE Digital Library
• CS Book access
• LOUIS - highly intergrated, indexed search for Brandeis Libraries

Computational Indexing of Electronic Knowledge Resources

• Emergent phenomena
• Google Scholar - contextual citation browsing and new quality estimation
• DBLP social network browsing
• Benefits of automatic indexing of digital journals/books
  • faster - Increases speed of literature search
  • wider - Encourages literature search of more topics
  • deeper - Provide new ways to search for knowledge
• Requires library access to most journal articles

Hyperinflation in Academic Publishing

• Lower Costs of Digital Dissemination => Lower Price of Journals?
  • No! Electronic price is similar to price of print journals
  • both prices increasing rapidly tied to multiyear bundle contracts
  • Online subscriptions are leases, Cancel subscription and lose all access
• Effects
  • Crisis in library budget management (cancelling subscriptions!)
  • Editorial Boards breaking away

Open Access Electronic Journals
no publisher or access fee required!

• Electronic Journals
  • Directory of Open Access Journals (free access)
  • Highwire (academic amazon!)
  • Electronic Journal of Functional and Logic Programming - University hosted (data loss?)
  • Public Library of Science - author pays (incentive to publish everything?)
• Tools
  • D-Space - open source digital archiving system (MIT/HP)
  • Creative Commons Licencing (innovative use of copyright reatins some author rights)
  • Online or invisible? Steve Lawrence, NEC, Google in Nature, Volume 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001.

Dangers/Benefits of Open Access Journals

• open access poses threats to high quality knowledge dissemination
  • proliferation of new low quality journals
  • poorly archived electronic data vulnerable to loss
  • profit motive might distort editor's neutrality
• open access enables
  (from Steve Lawrence's article Online or invisible?)
  • highly replicated online archives,
  • sharing and direct connections between scientists or research groups,
  • hassle-free links from email, discussion groups, and other services,
  • indexing by web search engines, and
  • the creation of third-party search services

Open Access Books?

• Royalty-free vs Royalty-based publishing
• The Dual Access Model
• Monographs: Free culture by Lawrence Lessig
• Textbooks: SICP by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman

Open Access Electronic Archives
no editor, publisher, or fee required!

• preprint archives: arXiv.org
• open source software: sourceforge
• personal websites: my webpage

Search and Quality Estimation

• Contextual Citation Lists and Quality Estimation
• citeseer (KU mirror)

Printing on Demand (POD)

• Editorless textbooks download free, for a fee, or buy print
• Lulu.com - POD service

Dangers/Benefits of Open Access Archives

• Dangers -
  • Same problems as with Open Access Journals but additional lack of editors
  • much harder to estimate quality of the information
  • much more information available (most of lower quality, e.g. preprints))
• open access archives enable
  • same benefits as open access journals, but also
  • minimal lag time between discover and "publication" as a preprint
  • web-spider based automatic archiving is possible!
  • controversial ideas could reach audiences and become mainstream

Wikiwiki sites
no Scholars, Editors, Publishers, Fees required!

• wikipedia.org
• run by Wikimedia foundation, supported by private donations
• English wikipedia has 1,823,080 articles
• 250 other language editions; top 14 have > 100,000 articles
• Alexa data as of 6/6/2007
  • 9th most popular internet site,
  • 8% of all users visit each day,
  • 0.5% of all unique page views are on wikipedia

Take a look!

• Anyone can edit
• Complete History maintained
• Discussion pages for each content page (with discussion history)
• Extensive automatic indexing
• Permanent Links to Particular Version
• About 1000 "administrators" with history of good work and expanded capabilities
• wikipedia.org

Quality Checking for wikipedia

Wikipedia Policies promoting higher quality information

• Verifiability (sources for all claims)
• Neutral Point of View represent all "significant" views
• No Original Research Secondary scholarship only.

Problems with Wikipedia

• Nobel Prize winners and 6th grade students have equal status as authors/editors! North Pacific Right Whale
• Edit Wars sometimes occur
  
• Vandalism happens (but is often corrected quickly) abortion entry
  
• images from Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations (2004) by Fernanda B. Vigas, Martin Wattenberg, Kushal Dave, MIT Media Lab and IBM Research Cambridge

Dangers of Wikipedia

• Easy access to incorrect information
• It's poisoning the minds of our children
• Libelous or manipulative information easy to introduce
• Kills market for authoritative encyclopedias

Benefits of Wikipedia

• Requires us to teach Quality Evaluation skills
• Quality is actually quite high for high interest topics
• Internet encyclopaedias go head to head
  Nature Published online: 14 December 2005; Updated online: 22 December 2005 ; Updated online: 28 March 2006 | doi:10.1038/438900a
  • 42 science entries in Wikipedia and Britannica
  • Scholars analyzed full text without attribution for errors
  • Errors found in both at about the same rate!

Variations on Wikipedia
Citizendia

• Citizendium
• real name policy: requires registration to edit, real name, short bio
• permanent ban for non-professional behavior policy
• anyone can edit the current draft version of the article
• family friendly
• requires experts as editors to approve pages that are visible to general public
• Current Alexa Traffic Rank about 36,000
• Designed to addrss the "lack of authoritity" problem

Effects of Open Access Internet on Teaching

• multitasking/ back channel activity
• student work contributing to greater good
• better researched papers
• easy to check for plagiarism
• more interactive classes (grewpedit)
• teachers sharing resources (Tufts, MIT)

Role of Libraries in the Internet Age

• New Roles
  • Publishing locally generated knowledge
  • Archiving self-published knowledge resources (print and digital)
• Expanded responsibilities of librarians
  • Access: providing access to authoritative knowledge resources in much larger information world
  • Expanded domain: responsible for providing present and future scholarly access to all of human knowledge
  • Organizing: responsible for organizing all newly generated knowledge (research guides)
  • Archiving: responsible for electronic data and (smaller) print collections

Pessimistic Projections

• Loss of respect for the truth (wikipedia is probably right most of the time)
• Rapid, large scale dissemination of disinformation, propoganda, ...
• Widespread availability of true, but dangerous, knowledge
• Increased dependence on web => increased danger from cyberterrorism
• Increasing government control of internet content (google censoring for China ...)
• Big brother knowing what pages you view, at what times, and for how long

Optimistic Projections

• Demise of Academic Publishers (buggy whips!)
• Free, open access, Electronic books for schools in 5 years
• Free, open access to all human knowledge in 10 years
• Rapid increase in 3rd world literacy and academic ability (with OLPC project)
• OLPC for American schools, narrowing of socioeconomic education divide in US

Citizenium-style Journals?

• Local self-publication by Scholars by their Libraries
• Article available but with no authority beyond author's reputation in field
• Article submitted to Open Access Journal XYZ, peer-reviewed,
• Accepted (and improved) article archived by multiple libraries as part of Journal XYZ collection
• Citeseer/Google Schoolar/... keeps track of post-publication contextual citation record and impact
• Errors found/corrected are sent to archives which keep most recent version and all earlier versions
• Fatal errors generate post-publication peer review and possible removal from journal (though history remains)
• Libraries play key role of archivists and knowledge base is more dynamic

Non Academic Knowledge
in the Internet Age

• Similar trends for other types of knowledge
  
  • open access,
  • rich search based on auto indexing of
    • primary sources,
    • secondary sources,
    • reviews, links, history, ...
  • democratization of information production
• Journalism - google news, RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, vblogs, fact checking websites, often with links to raw data/primary sources
• Cultural Production: Music, Photography, Novels - open access (CC licensing), social networking (Flickr and other photosites), google images
• Social Knowledge (blogs, facebook, myspace) - auto indexing (friends of friends, fan groups), info production by non-experts, community wikis, intranet wikis
• Market data: ebay, amazon - direct access to market data, auto indexing from analysis of large data sets

Summary

TRENDS TO WATCH

• Open Access (and Creative Destruction of some Publishing)
• Enhanced search (via cross-indexing/analysis of primary/secondary sources and usage statistics)
• Democratization of Information Production (wikis, pre-print publications, user reviews/comments)
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  THANKS
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  Questions, Comments, Discussion????