Given for STM Innovations seminar, 1 December 2006

1. The Social Journal
Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?
Dorothea Salo
George Mason University
STM Innovations Seminar
1 December 2006
Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/dr_pete/80464938/
Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/dr_pete/80464938/

2. What was a journal?
• Communication tool
• Overcome geographic dispersion
• Build a discourse community out of a topic of interest
• Expand the reach of scientific thought beyond the
gentleman-scholar
• Build the market for science books
• Not...
• A career tool for scholars
• Quality control
• A profit center
• An in-group/out-group divider

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4. What changed?
• Professionalization of research
• Standards!
• Authority!
• Production quality! (And its associated costs.)
• Tenure!
• “The scholarly record”
• Emergence of disciplinary boundaries
• $$$... $$$$$$$... $$$$$$$$$$$$$$!!
Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/zemoko/172174697/

5. Journal as identity marker

6. But all of that
conversational energy
had to go somewhere...

7. CiteULike
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RSS feeds
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The role of gatekeeper is not in jeopardy;
it's gone. Cyberspace has blown it away.
The power to edit the words and ideas that
go out is gone; cyberspace has erased it.
How we learn what's happening is
continuing to change, so rapidly that even
LJ's new site has not quite figured out
how to get ahead of the breaking news.

9. So now what?

10. Don’t do this!
“It is reasonable to ask whether lay members of the
public—taxpayers whose hard-earned dollars helped • Do not cut off
to support this research—will gain from their conversations!
reading of this article any better understanding of
the research results. Some certainly will, but I
• Resist the temptation
to play gatekeeper!
suspect that most will not. For those who do want
access, however, many options are available—a • Do not insult your
reprint request to the author, electronic access readers, both actual
through a library, or purchase (for a nominal fee) and potential!
directly from the APA website.”
• Do not assume that
your current
—Stephen Breckler
American Psychological Association audience is your
“Open Access and Public Understanding”
APA Online, April 2006
entire audience!

11. Your advantage over us
Library Society

12. Sine qua non
• If your articles don’t have short, reliable URLs...
• If you’re not producing TOC newsfeeds...
• If your article metadata doesn’t work with...
• RefWorks / EndNote
• Metasearch
• OpenURL
• COinS / unAPI
• Connotea
• CiteULike
• Zotero
• But what’s the use? Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/yotophoto/126295852/

13. Tracking, citing, using
• “I read something a couple weeks ago...”
• “Didn’t somebody write an article about...?”
• “Hey, did you see...”
• “Argh, where’s that citation?!”
• They’ll talk about you and cite you if you
make it easy!
• They’ll hate you or ignore you if you don’t.

14. Filtering
• Too much stuff! What’s new, what’s hot?
What’s just a retread?
• What are the experts reading?
• What are my colleagues reading?
• What do I think my colleagues ought to read?
• What do I want to read later?
• This is good; what else is like it?

15. Collaborative filtering
• Tagging, “folksonomy”
• Lets people use their own mental models and vocabulary,
not some librarian’s
• Lets people know what people they respect are reading
• Reviewing
• “Open peer review”
• Really collaborative revision
• Recommending, making connections
• Discussing: the webchat
Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/sonofgroucho/252398894/

16. Egoboo
• Visibility!
• Vanity surfing
• Personal contact
• Professional networking
• More than just impact factors!
• More than just citation tracking!
• So...
• Offer your authors download stats
• Offer ways to connect authors and readers
• Use your authors’ talents!
Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/leonardlow/253735058/

19. The Future

20. Thank you!
dsalo@gmu.edu
AIM: gmumars
Slides: http://mars.gmu.edu/