CSHE/Mellon Peer Review Study Now Available

The Center for the Study for Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, has just published the report of its project on peer review and its role in academic tenure and review and in scholarly publishing. The project included both extensive background papers and also a workshop (which I was fortunate to be able to attend). Full details in the release from CSHE reproduced below. I think this is a valuable look at a much under-explored area and should be of interest to many CNI News readers.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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We are delighted to announce the publication of:
Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, and Future
A Project Report and Associated Recommendations, Proceedings from a Meeting, and Background Papers

Authors: Diane Harley and Sophia Krzys Acord

The publication can be viewed online and downloaded at:

Since 2005, and with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has been conducting research to explore how academic values – including those related to peer review, publishing, sharing, and collaboration -influence scholarly communication practices and engagement with new technological affordances, open access publishing, and the public good.

This report includes (1) an overview of the state of peer review in the Academy at large, (2) a set of recommendations for moving forward, (3) a proposed research agenda to examine in depth the effects of academic status-seeking on the entire academic enterprise, (4) proceedings from the workshop on the four topics noted above, and (5) four substantial and broadly conceived background papers on the workshop topics, with associated literature reviews.

The document explores, in particular, the tightly intertwined phenomena of peer review in publication and academic promotion, the values and associated costs to the Academy of the current system, experimental forms of peer review in various disciplinary areas, the effects of scholarly practices on the publishing system, and the possibilities and real costs of creating alternative loci for peer review and publishing that link scholarly societies, libraries, institutional repositories, and university presses. We also explore the motivations and ingredients of successful open access resolutions that are directed at peer-reviewed article-length material. In doing so, this report suggests that creating a wider array of institutionally acceptable and cost-effective alternatives to peer reviewing and publishing scholarly work could maintain the quality of academic peer review, support greater research productivity, reduce the explosive growth of low-quality publications, increase the purchasing power of cash-strapped libraries, better support the free flow and preservation of ideas, and relieve the burden on overtaxed faculty of conducting too much peer review.

This latest report on the state and future of peer review is a natural extension of our findings in Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines (2010), which stressed the need for a more nuanced academic reward system that is less dependent on citation metrics, the slavish adherence to marquee journals and university presses, and the growing tendency of institutions to outsource assessment of scholarship to such proxies as default promotion criteria.

Links to the complete results of our ongoing work can be found at The Future of Scholarly Communication Project website.

Video of Dan Cohen’s Keynote at December 2010 CNI Meeting Available

The video of Professor Dan Cohen’s wonderful closing session “The Ivory Tower and the Open Web” is now available on both Youtube (at http://www.youtube.com/cnivideo ) and Vimeo (at http://vimeo.com/channels/cni ).

You can also find a copy of his presentation at http://www.cni.org/tfms/2010b.fall/cni_ivory_cohen.pdf

This is an extremely wide-ranging presentation that I think will be of interest to almost everybody in the CNI community; I know that a number of people who saw the talk live told me that it was so rich, and thought provoking in so many different ways, that they were eager to have a chance to watch it again. Many others were eager to share it with colleauges and students.

A must-see.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

VIVO Networking Conference, August 12-13, New York City

Over the past few years, we’ve had several presentations at CNI covering a system called VIVO, which originated at Cornell and was designed to help researchers find other researchers with similar or related interests. More recently, with funding from the National Institutes of Health, it has established a national footprint. You can find video of their presentation at the Spring 2010 CNI meeting at
http://www.youtube.com/cnivideo#p/u/3/gRnGAuMMPnk
or
http://vimeo.com/11345580

Next month, the VIVO consortium is holding its first meeting. I have included the call for participation below.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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National VIVO Conference:

Enabling National Networking of Scientists

August 12-13, 2010

New York Hall of Science

The first annual National VIVO Conference, Enabling National Networking of Scientists, will bring together scientists, developers, publishers, funding agencies, research officers, students and those supporting the development of team science. This two day conference will begin with workshops and tutorials for those new to VIVO, those implementing VIVO at their institutions, and those wishing to develop applications using VIVO. Invited speakers will present regarding the Semantic Web, Linked Open Data and the role of VIVO in support of team science. Panelists will discuss adoption and implementation findings. Feedback sessions will engage participants in requirements gathering and brainstorming regarding future network services. Presenters will discuss mapping, social networking, crowd sourcing, support for societies and other national network applications. Learn more at http://vivoweb.org/conference.

VIVO is an open source, open ontology, research discovery platform for hosting information about scientists, their interests, activities, and accomplishments. VIVO supports open development and integration of science through simple, standard semantic web technologies. Learn more at http://vivoweb.org. VIVO is funded by the National Institutes of Health, U24 RR029822.

Lynch Talk on Scholarship and Scholarly Communication

A recent talk on developments in scholarship and scholarly communication presented by Clifford Lynch at the TERENA Networking Conference 2010 is available:

http://globalplaza.org/spaces/terena/events/tnc-2010?show_video=375

The Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA) offers a forum to collaborate, innovate and share knowledge in order to foster the development of Internet technology, infrastructure and services to be used by the research and education community. TNC 2010 was held on May 31- June 3 in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Paper on Scholarly Communication Changes in Chemistry

In late November 2009, Carl Lagoze released a major report on scholarly communication practices in chemistry and how developments in open access, open data, and the re-thinking of the structure of scientific articles are altering the landscape. The report is informed by an small workshop held in October of 2008 that I was lucky to be able to attend, but goes considerably beyond the discussions at that workshop.

I neglected to post this announcement out to the CNI community earlier, but since I’ve seen some evidence that it hasn’t been as widely circulated as I think it should be, I’m posting it out belatedly here.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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I’d like to call your attention to a white paper released on November 23 titled The Value of New Scientific Education Models for Chemistry. This document is available at http://hdl.handle.net/1813/14150.  An article “Communicating Chemistry”, summarizing this white paper, is published in the December issue of Nature Chemistry at http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v1/n9/full/nchem.448.html.  This white paper examines the value of new models of scientific communication for chemistry scholarship enabled by web based technologies and the necessary future steps to achieve the benefit of those new models. It is intended as a starting point for discussion on the possible future of scientific communication in chemistry. I have attached a press release announcing the availability of these two documents to this e-mail.

I believe that these documents will be of interest to you and communities that you have contact with. I would greatly appreciate your help in distributing this information  to appropriate e-mail lists and other communication media. Also, your comments on the content would be most appreciated.

Many thanks,

Carl Lagoze
Information Science, Cornell University
Ithaca New York

Feb. 2010 CNI Conversations Available

The archived audio recording of the Feb. 10 session is now available at http://conversations.cni.org/ (to subscribe to the audio feed add http://conversations.cni.org/feed to iTunes, or any podcatcher).  CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch opened this session with some discussion of subject repositories, and he talked about a report from UC Berkeley on faculty and scholarly communication; CNI Associate Director Joan Lippincott reported on the recent EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) meeting.  Also during this call, Cliff discussed the plenary sessions planned for the spring 2010 CNI Membership Meeting in April, and he reviewed the landscape of gaming in higher education teaching and learning.

Final Report on CSHE/Mellon Study on Faculty Practices in Scholarly Communication

The Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting a major multi-year study of how faculty needs and research practices shape their choices about scholarly communication. The final report on this work, Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines is now available at http://escholarship.org/uc/cshe_fsc. This is a very important look at where faculty thinking and practice stands in regard to the changing scholarly communication environment, including a  sensitive examination of differences across disciplines. Updates on this work have been presented at some CNI membership meetings; we hope to be able to host a report on this most current work in the near future.

Workshop on Scholarly Evaluation Metrics

CNI director Clifford Lynch will moderate the closing panel of this workshop, to take place the day after the fall CNI meeting.

Registration is now open for “Scholarly Evaluation Metrics:  Opportunities and Challenges,” a one-day NSF-funded workshop that will take place in the Renaissance Washington DC Hotel on Wednesday, December 16th 2009.  Participation in this workshop is limited to 50 people.  Registration is free at http://informatics.indiana.edu/scholmet09/registration.html.

The topic of the workshop is the future of scholarly assessment approaches, including organizational, infrastructural, and community issues.  The overall goal is to identify requirements for novel assessment approaches, several of which have been proposed in recent years, to become acceptable to community stakeholders including scholars, academic and research institutions, and funding agencies. The impressive group of speakers and panelists for the workshop includes representatives from each of these constituencies.

Further details are available at http://informatics.indiana.edu/scholmet09/announcement.html

Workshop organizers: Johan Bollen (jbollen@indiana.edu), Herbert Van de Sompel (hvdsomp@gmail.com) and Ying Ding (dingying@indiana.edu)

New Publication Dedicated to Jim Gray

A collection of essays, The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery, is available for download at
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/contents.aspx

The publication is dedicated to the memory of Jim Gray and explores his intellectual legacy in Earth and Environment, Health and Well Being, Scientific Infrastructure, and Scholarly Communication. Many of the chapters are by authors well-known within the CNI community, particularly in the Scholarly Communications section, which includes contributions by Timo Hanny, Paul Ginsparg, Herbert Van de Somple and Carl Lagoze; Cliff Lynch also contributed a chapter for this section.

Members of the CNI community are urged to look beyond the Scholarly Communications section; there are a number of important chapters on broader developments in e-science that will likely be of interest. There’s also a short interview wtih Tony Hey about the book at

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/fourthparadigm-101609.aspx

(Disclosure: CNI Director Clifford Lynch serves on the Microsoft Research External Advisory Board.)

The publication is dedicated to the memory of Jim Gray and explores his intellectual legacy in Earth and Environment, Health and Well Being, Scientific Infrastructure, and Scholarly Communication. Many of the chapters are by authors well-known within the CNI community, particularly in the Scholarly Communications section, which includes contributions by Timo Hanny, Paul Ginsparg, Herbert Van de Somple and Carl Lagoze; Cliff Lynch also contributed a chapter for this section.

The CNI community is urged to look beyond the Scholarly Communications section; there are a number of important chapters on broader developments in e-science that will likely be of interest. There’s also a short interview wtih Tony Hey about the book at
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/fourthparadigm-101609.aspx

(Disclosure: CNI Director Clifford Lynch serves on the Microsoft Research External Advisory Board.)

Text Mining Workshop in the UK

The Text Mining for Scholarly Communications and Repositories Joint Workshop will  take place 28-29 October at the University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

The aim of the event is to examine the issues, challenges and priorities associated with integrating text mining technologies in applications to support scholarly communication and repository initiatives.

The audience is expected to consist of researchers, information management professionals, librarians, text miners, repository providers, publishers, policy makers and JISC service representatives.

More information at
http://www.nactem.ac.uk/tm-ukoln.php