Tom Worthington recently pointed at a new DEST report: RESEARCH COMMUNICATION COSTS IN AUSTRALIA: EMERGING OPPORTUNITIES AND BENEFITS.
It outlines some really interesting thinking about the importance of Open Access and the changing nature of scholarly publishing.
The whole report is worth reading, but the part that grabbed my attention is:
In the longer term, the evolution of the scholarly communication system may involve the dissolution of existing and emergence of new combinations of objects, activities and responsibilities – such as, for example, the decline of commercial publisher control over peer reviewed journal titles and the rise of open access subject archives and institutional repositories populated by free-standing digital objects of all kinds, with quality control based around career review, online user commentary and more formalised but diffuse review processes, and impacts measured as hits, downloads, citations and links, which better reflect the use and impact of the work than do citations alone.
I think that changes in the traditional citation-based rating system for research is one of the most fascinating changes that is gradually happening. For instance, PageRank - the basic algorithm which most web search engines use to ranking web pages - is based on the citation model, but takes into account the number of citations each siting page has. The PageRank algorithm was recently used to recalculate the importance of various research papers, with quite successful results. In particular, the influence of “The Theory of Complex Spectra” (which was one of the founding work of quantum mechanics, but only ranked at 1853 under the citations-only raking scheme jumped to number 10).
What this DEST report is talking about is even more radical - directly incorporating input from the community of practice into the quality control process. Sounds almost like an architecture of participation!
One Comment
Thanks Nick,
I hope you don’t mind. I’ve cited you over at http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=9438#27549
Perhaps the blog owners would like to make the “Website” box a little bigger so the ‘groups.edna. links fit.
Could someone also put a link on this page http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/cache/bypass/pid/1
to the front age of these blogs (perhaps next to “Groups” at the top)
I have to believe that, like yourself, we are moving to an architecture of participation. But for that to happen, it would be nice to know where our communities’ keep their resources, scattered, as they are, between domains.
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