This is my ninth post in a series on how scholarly communications must transform. In my prior post, on why scholarly communications must be scalable, I stated that scholarship, like all information systems today, should be dynamically scalable, ready to answer both high and low demand. The Long Tail provides a context for understanding why playing to this dynamic is so critical. 

Scaling the Long Tail of Knowledge

The concept of the Long Tail is based on the Economy of Abundance that is so manifest on the Internet. Like anything else digital, online knowledge can and should follow Long Tail dynamics, or a power curve distribution. If scholarly communication isn't made to scale (downwards as well as upwards), then academia effectively opts out of the attention dynamics of the Internet that increasingly brings low-demand items out of obscurity and into renewed relevance. 

As Chris Anderson has articulated, the power curve distribution for cultural products has traditionally favored the very small percentage of "hits" that make big money for corporations. However, the Internet is rapidly bringing attention and value to the other part of that power curve -- the Long Tail of less popular items trailing far off to the right on the graph. Nowadays, there is almost unlimited life to those many minor products that don't get the big hype and big bucks. Amazon can afford to keep for sale the most obscure books, and profitably so, since each year more and more consumers are making their way down the Long Tail, finding niche and specialty products that would never have had sales volumes high enough to justify staying in print before the digital age.

The Long Tail phenomenon is great news for scholars, or could be, anyway. It could overcome constraining limits of current scholarly publishing, which does not throttle up very well in response to demand. In my last post I explained that in the knowledge economy of academia, demand for consumption does not drive things so much as the drive for production -- to the point that a high demand for scholarly work is not desirable because this would undercut perceived quality. There is a certain sense to this, though I argued that scholarship only stands to win by enlarging its audience. 

But what about throttling down to accommodate low demand? How does the established publishing system do there? Being ready for low demand is just as important as for high -- and arguably more so, since there will still be very limited numbers within any field that capture a majority of available interest. This is why I said earlier that academia could be very ideally suited to the Long Tail, since scholarship is all about specialties and sub-specialties, the few addressing the few. 

Well, it turns out that scholarly publishing can only do so much in the way of speciality publishing, and the trend is very much away from niche items to more general works (at least at academic presses, pressed by tough economic times). Because academic publishing truly is a business, editors have had to get more and more realistic about the bottom line. Even at specialty journals which never expect large circulation numbers, not every worthy manuscript finds an outlet. The closure of academic presses and reduced numbers of venues for scholarship has meant that many studies go unpublished that could have been if the economics of publishing were better.

A case in point is the work of Paul F. Gehl, a respected scholar stationed at the Newberry Library in Chicago. I relied on Professor Gehl's study of the Renaissance when writing my dissertation, and was aghast when he reported to me that his recent book manuscript, about school books in Renaissance Italy, was among those manuscripts that a publisher applauded yet turned down because the anticipated sales volume made publishing Gehl's work too much of an economic risk. Happily, he has put his book online, effectively skirting the inadequate academic publishing system. It is easy to see that when one is dependent upon dead-tree economics, there are definitely lower limits to what can be published.

(I hasten to insert here that this problem of not meeting legitimate low demand for quality scholarship highlights a fundamental weakness in traditional scholarly publishing. Purportedly, the limited number of things that can be published correlates with those works chosen for their quality to be published. Academia has sworn by these Darwinian knowledge dynamics for a long time. But as Gehl's case underscores, the fittest aren't always able to survive. Academic organizations increasingly acknowledge the problem of there being more demand for the production of scholarship and more scholarship submitted than can be realistically vetted in traditional ways. In other words, the gap between what could profitably circulate in publication and what actually does circulate widens by the day. This creates a credibility gap in the extant system, since scholars are justly frustrated at good work not getting "out there" or published in a timely way. More on this on my next post.)

Of course, digital formats won't solve every problem, but as online journals discover they are not bound by many of the limits of print, they will better service the Long Tail of knowledge by giving unlimited life to works of limited interest. That is one of the great features of the Long Tail. In academic terms, publishing and archiving become increasingly the same enterprise. Ideally, all that is published becomes widely and permanently available, ready to be found by readers well outside the minor set of fellow specialists who are contemporary with the author. What's more, the Long Tail is a kind of faith in the inherent interest of knowledge. It turns out that if there is broad and easy access to scholarship, most works end up attracting more interested readers than first supposed. This fact is born out by the success of institutional repositories now adding legacy scholarship to their archives. To their surprise, these old but newly exposed studies are being consulted and downloaded far more often than ever anticipated. If you publish it right (through standards compliance), the readers will come. They are already there.

There truly is a market for all the hyper-specialization of academia, and Long Tail dynamics promise available attention not only for minor subjects, but for older works, works in other languages, and works in more diverse formats. The abundance economy favors variety, and this suggests that another key aspect of scholarly scalability is scaling outward into more diverse ways of representing information. So long as content is marked up for semantic recognition and social interactivity, then serious knowledge can be of radically different lengths, rhetorical approaches, and media -- well beyond what has been possible within traditional academic publishing. The Long Tail extends not only down the permutations of content, but outward along the permutations of form. Intellectuals ought to be thrilled at the prospect of infinitely expanding the possibilities for both the content and the forms of knowledge with an intellectual economy of abundance. 

As an added bonus, we will see that Long Tail Knowledge brings the worlds of scholarship and education closer together. As learned communication takes its place alongside teaching media, electronic textbooks, online laboratories, simulations, etc., a productive relationship can be developed between trained specialists and those less mature in inquiry. That might be seen as a problem to professors accustomed to hiding from students so they can conduct their research in peace, but this is but one of several important ways in which learned communication must learn that it should not hide from its many publics, including the republic of students.

Right now, however, the old school reigns, even when many journals are online. Scholarly publications may be online, but the knowledge they believe profits so much from being published will not be seriously public, not subject to all the benefits of Long Tail dynamics, if its agents choose to retain those many restrictions and controls that isolate and slow the flow of knowledge (see my prior posts on open access and on the lack of liquidity in academic knowledge).

In my next post I will return to my discussion of scalability -- not on the distribution or consumption end of academic publishing, but on the production end. There I will argue that Scholarly Communications must not wait for Peer Review. I hope you return for it. Of course, I've put peer review in the crosshairs previously, but after presenting at the recent International Symposium on Peer Reviewing, I had a huge epiphany about this central component to scholarship that I'm very eager to share.

This is my eighth post in a series on how scholarly communications must transform. In this post, I explain that scholarship in the digital age must be scalable. As in my earlier post urging the integration of scholarship into the cyberinfrastructure, I am again pressing for scholars to recognize that the way their work is digitally mediated makes all the difference to its significance.

Scalability has become an absolutely necessary attribute for technological information systems today. I'm claiming that this trait is of equal importance for the information system that is scholarship. Here is the bottom line: As digital modes of communicating knowledge edge out the print-based publishing, any learned communication that is not made to scale will shrink in its audiences and relevance, whereas scholarship that embraces scalability will be far more dynamic, flexible, and responsive -- a manifestly superior mode of knowledge.

So, what is scalability? In computer systems, scalability refers to whether a system can throttle data according to the dynamics of online demand. For example, Twitter, the microblogging system, stumbled early on because its infrastructure was not scaling. New users flooded Twitter faster than servers could be set up to handle them, and for a time Twitter was in danger of dying precisely because it was catching on. If it had not corrected for scaling, it would not be rising in use and importance. Businesses like Amazon and online services like those offered by Google have had to learn to scale to accommodate rapid growth. Must scholarship learn to scale, too?

Resistance to Scaling Up

Curiously, even though scholarly publishing is very much a business, and business most often thrives on increasing and meeting demand, accommodating demand is not what scholarly publishing is about. In fact, academic quality is in part measured by scholarly publishing NOT scaling up to any significant degree of demand. 

For example, linguist Deborah Tannen faced the curious problem of losing face with her peers in the field of discourse analysis when her academic study (You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation) became a popular hit in the trade market. As soon as a scholar's work moves from those $100 copies of cloth bound library monographs to $10 trade paperbacks, it isn't seen as actually being serious scholarship anymore. Selling 200 to 2,000 copies of a scholarly monograph (mostly to libraries) is a scholarly success; selling 20,000 to 200,000 copies of a book removes it from the category of scholarship altogether. A popular title is something vulgar, tied more to commerce or the fleeting plaudits of celebrity than to intellectual rigor.

Sure, there are a few scholars like Oliver Sacks who manage to keep their mortar board and gain a broad following, but by and large, as academics see it, serious intellectual work is no longer serious if it scales up to significantly larger audiences.  Of course, every academic press would love to see sales of their scholarly books double. But if those sales went up by a power of 10 (much less 100), it would be as devastating to the press as losing its university underwriting. The authority of traditional scholarship is tied to its not scaling. Ironically, traditional scholarly publishing is a knowledge system that succeeds only if it fails -- with the masses, that is.

Traditional scholarly publishing is just as resistant to scaling for production as it is for distribution. There is an ever increasing demand for scholars to publish, but academic journals must not scale up to meet that demand even if they had the manpower to do so. This is because not meeting demand for publication has become one of the main badges of scholarly quality.

Here's how it works. If a journal turns away 99% of submissions, then the 1% that do get published must be all the more superior in quality. All of those rejected submissions -- whose quantity or quality are never open for any public verification -- somehow elevate the journal's scholarly reputation by implying editorial rigor. In order for a journal's or a press's reputation to remain intact, it must be able to advertise an ongoing unmet demand for publication. Otherwise, what does end up getting published will lack the varnish coming from selectivity. Among academics evaluating one another's publications, rejection rates for journals and presses are quoted with as much authority as journal Impact Factors. Like Impact Factor, and quite contrary to scientific principles, rejection rates are not verifiable. Similar to the black-box algorithm of Impact Factor, rejection rates only work in the dark.

The bottom line here is that traditional scholarly publishing is inherently opposed to scaling because the authority of scholarly products correlates to their scarcity -- both how scarcely they are distributed to their special audiences, and how scarcely scholarly works are approved for publication. Traditional scholarship is scarcity knowledge -- its authority is based on lots of knowledge NOT being published, lots of copies NOT being made, lots of audiences NOT being addressed, or money NOT being made. If any of those scarcity factors is displaced, the scholar's or the journal's reputation is threatened.

Universities whine at the high cost of subsidizing the publication of academic books, but if university presses were profitable, their editorial motives would be suspect. Scholars whine at the lack of publishing outlets for scholarship, but they turn around and use the very difficulty of getting published as hard currency in proving their own or others' scholarly reputations. It makes one wonder at all the hand wringing that comes with the closing of another academic press; after all, press closures only increase the scarcity -- and thus the value -- of the surviving publications within this elite enterprise. No wonder the system is cracking; it not only can't scale, but it won't. To reach a broader public or to scale up the number of publications would undermine the exclusivity that only scarcity provides.  The scarcity-as-quality model is a terrible one for spreading or improving ideas (and terribly unnecessary today), but traditionalists can conceive of no other way. The ship may be listing hard to port, but most everyone stays on board since it has become the only acceptable passage to the safe harbor of authoritative academic knowledge.

Being married to the scarcity model of knowledge has resulted in many academics responding unfavorably to Open Access publishing and trembling at the very prospect of unchaperoned information. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article uses fear mongering to question Open Access: "By making the products of research freely available to anyone," worries Peter Schmidt, "it increases the risk that knowledge will fall into the hands of unintended audiences that could misuse it." Opposition to Open Access sometimes takes this ethical approach, as though somehow if scholars have the self control not to turn loose shoddy ideas on the public, then the public will somehow follow suit.

But the information vacuum academics leave in the public sphere does not remain unfilled. When the public is teased by turning up search results to scholarly sources they cannot directly and fully access, they simply turn to those unvetted sources that are a click away. Scholars are learning the hard way that knowledge that is available for use becomes superior to the knowledge that is kept from use, regardless of any validating procedures that more restricted knowledge may have undergone. Fenced behind an access wall, such scholarship has a DO NOT USE ME sign on it, regardless of having passed rigorous peer review. This is a very strong reason why scholarship must be able to scale. Without intellectual liquidity, intellectual quality is a moot issue. If scholarship does not retool itself to scale up to the attention and active use of the masses, it is essentially making itself invisible and irrelevant. Closed knowledge systems are doomed in an online world whose most valued assets play to openness. Closed doesn't scale.

Knowledge Improves with Circulation!

Scarcity and exclusiveness have bought a lot of prestige for scholars, but perhaps at the expense of that very knowledge that learned publishing was established to preserve and promote.

There is nothing more necessary for promoting the improvement of Philosophical Matters, than the communicating — [of] such things as are discovered or put in practice by others; it is therefore thought fit to employ the Press.  -- Henry Oldenburg, 1665

So said the secretary of London's Royal Society within the first English academic journal, Philosophical Transactions. A new medium had presented itself to that fledgling group of scientists. Print publication would leap past the limits of handwritten reports, speeding discovery, and broadening the number of interested parties who could extend, refute, and refine others' work. Remnants of those original purposes remain in today's system, but if Oldenburg were alive today he would wonder at our reluctance to embrace another medium promising a similar leap forward. The exponentially faster speeds of digital communication have put into high relief the fact that print publishing methods of knowledge production -- even when used to produce electronic publications -- impede that rapid flow and interchange of thought always accepted as a primary condition for the better evolution of ideas.

So ossified and sluggish is the reigning communications methods for scholars that they have ironically violated the primary article of faith for learned communication: the improvement and utility of knowledge correlates directly with how broadly, quickly, and interactively it circulates. People have been arguing for the free marketplace of ideas since the Enlightenment or earlier (Milton's Areopagitica comes to mind). That marketplace is being reinvigorated through the Internet, and it's poised for adding exponentially more value to ideas because of the new digital tools for intelligently finding, sifting, and gathering information. These tools include metadata, recommendation systems, social bookmarking, ranking algorithms, data harvesters, data mining, data visualization, simulations, virtualizations, telepresence, and hosts of others to come that have no real counterpart in the print world.

Knowledge online is smarter today, and getting smarter by the day. And that's great news! Scholarship is able to scale today as never before because it can benefit from the robust searching, distributing, and sharing methods available to all digital content. Because of the vitally social nature of online communication, the digital realm can suddenly propagate mass attention to something through word of mouth. Of course this mass attention can go to a video clip of a cat swinging from a ceiling fan, but academic work CAN go viral. Anthropologist Michael Wesch can attest to this, with nearly 10 million views of his Web 2.0 video. Did this sudden, massive attention hurt Kansas State or Wesch's own reputation? No, it put digital anthropology on the map in a major way and led to Wesch being recognized nationally for his teaching. His video was not scholarly publishing of any traditional variety, but he succeeded in moving the conversation forward in ways that a hundred peer reviewed articles about digitial anthropology never could. It also had a halo effect for Wesch's more traditional publishing, his students, and his university.

But scholarship need not go viral for it to scale up meaningfully. Part of this simply means being prepared for bigger, more diverse audiences. Once scholars realize that their work is actually being read, commented upon, and actively integrated into current discussions, they may find it both profitable and enjoyable to ready their thinking for more than fellow specialists. Scaling up means scaling out to those audiences. This should change the way scholarship is conceived of, conducted, packaged, and valued.

The likelihood of a broadened audience for one's intellectual work will naturally align scholarship more with civic involvement (see my post on scholars as public intellectuals), with real-world applications, and of course, with teaching. Many academic purists are above tainting their research with pedagogical or civic concerns, but universities fighting for the relevance of their intellectual products and purporting to promote teaching or life-long learning shouldn't be turning a blind eye to ways that scholarship can be mediated to the masses. Scaling up scholarship means anticipating both the work and benefits attending a more diverse readership.

Obviously I'm talking about scalability in broader terms than simply a broadened distribution for scholarly work. Scalable scholarship will be that sort of communication readied to do and be more things in more places with more people than the dignified but static output of traditional publishing. Embracing scalability means rethinking rhetorical approaches, rethinking when and how one's research circulates online, rethinking how we measure progress and contributions. It means being willing to scale outward to new forms of communication and collaboration. It means not keeping one's scholarship scaled back to the tight borders of print-based communication or print-based ways of authoring or evaluating intellectual work.

Thus far I've only spoken abut scalability in terms of it scaling upward or outward, broadening its audiences, its scope, and its appeal. But it is important to note that scalability also refers to a system's ability to down-throttle, to accommodate low loads. Serving low demand is just as vital to having a robust information system as gearing up for higher demand. This may seem paradoxical, but it's all part of integrating scholarship -- of the past, present, and future -- into the Long Tail dynamics of online attention. This I will explain in my next post, Scholarly Communications must serve the Long Tail of Knowledge.

Of course traditional scholarship must be made available on hand-held devices, but more importantly, the full range of scholarly practices -- research, laboratory work, field work, presentations of findings, and publishing itself -- will all transform themselves in order to conform with the social and intellectual practices of ubiquitous, networked, interactive communication that mobile devices are enabling. The future of scholarship is literally in our hands, and the phone is ringing.

Mobile computing is the future for computing, period. There will always be reasons for desktop computers, just as there remain reasons for mainframe computers. But the PC revolution of the 20th century will be imitated by the smartphone revolution of the 21st. According to the Horizon Report 2009, "A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project predicts that by the year 2020, most people across the world will be using a mobile device as their primary means for connecting to the Internet." Will it really take that long?

Mobile computing is also the future of education. Students are acculturated to and equipped with mobile phone technology beginning in grade school, and the rise of digitally mediated pedagogy will naturally lead to using cell phones to pipe in Open Educational Resources, recorded lectures, podcasts, and of course electronic versions of textbooks. The mobile phone/computer will not only serve up teaching media, but will enable constructive interactivity and superior teaching and learning environments by connecting students (locally or at a distance) and by supplying productive feedback loops for instructors (A good example of this can be found at Abilene Christian University, whose mobile learning initiative includes "Nano tools" that enable in-class feedback for teachers to assess comprehension and adjust instruction on the fly). Of course there is the digital divide, there will be format wars and many adjustments and issues, but mobile computing and education will be as inevitable as teens texting under the table. (See these EDUCAUSE resources on mobile education)

What is often overlooked in the discussions about eBooks or even the pedagogical possibilities for smartphones is the rise of the mobile computer as a data gathering device. Smart phones already come with a variety of sensors that only need programs to be written to take advantage of their GPS functions or accelerometers.  Some iPhones are being outfitted with auxiliary sensors or together function in the aggregate as broadly distributed data input points for sensor grids. Citizen science is following the same road paved by citizen journalism. 

Mobile phones are also going to serve as a primary portal for student research activities. This may begin with SMS-enabled library catalogs or basic information services, but already students are beginning to use smart phone and browser-level programs to assist them in gathering information intelligently. These include browser add-ons like Zotero or Evernote. Both are tools one can use to collect and tag texts and media needed for research. All that data is synced between desktop, laptop, and smartphone through the cloud. High quality cameras in phones now make it possible through services like Evernote to take snaps of pages from library books that then become searchable. With one's smartphone, one is always prepared to gather, digest, and share research. So there's going to be a lot of gathering, digesting, and sharing of knowledge media just as there is already with music or casual media.

I emphasize these educational uses of mobile technology because more formal scholarly research will follow suit (and indeed, most likely will be blended with the less formal researching done by students). Scholars that do not use their phones to enhance (and ultimately drive) their scholarly pursuits will be left behind by their own students. Imagine anthropology students in the field NOT using smartphones to gather, process, and report field notes. Why wouldn't one record audio or video of natural or social phenomena when it is as natural to do so as it is to dial a phone number?

Scholars unwilling to use mobile computing are going to be disconnected from their peers. When everyone else is getting instantaneous updates about critical issues in the field through RSS feeds or microblogging updates, but you are waiting a month or more for your copy of The New England Journal of Medicine to come out -- well, you aren't going to seem very professional. You know that one professor who was a holdout from email for so long and still needs the secretary to show him how to mail attachments? In the near future, a professor without a smartphone just won't be all that smart.

This has to do partly with the intensely social nature of this hardware and the cultural practices that come with it. Text messaging is still ridiculed by old schoolers, but the intellectual filtering and real-time benefits of microblogging are improving so quickly now that it will be intellectually irresponsible not to use the live web as a primary protocol for any serious scholarship. Services like Twitter and the various tools built on top of that can work on a desktop, but they thrive in the field, on the go, wherever thinking and research can take place, which is a lot more places than an office or a library.

One of the consequences of mobile scholarship will be an evolution in scholarly genres. The best mobile applications are native to the device, not imitations of their desktop counterparts. This at first appears to be a limit, since screens are smaller and the various riches of a graphical user interface from Web 1.0 seem impoverished by this reduction. But with the strict limits of bandwidth and screen space has come a welcome simplicity. I find in my own computing that I am increasingly turning to use my iPhone to look things up because the interfaces for a smartphone are simpler than desktop applications.

Studies will be conducted proving what smartphone users already know instinctively: mobile computing is more efficient not only for what this hardware adds (such as a camera, or integration of data storage and digital tools) but for what it subtracts. It is not surprising to me, as I follow the development of operating systems, to see talk of the mobile OS becoming primary and the desktop OS secondary. There will be more people (by orders of magnitude) using mobile devices, driving innovation, and there will be reasons to prefer smartphones intellectually and socially.

Genres of scholarship will change in terms of their length and their appearance as mobile computers become a primary outlet for intellectual work. Scholarship will include more multimedia because literacy is becoming multimodal. But perhaps even more significantly, scholarship on a cell phone will be more social and more interactive -- and therefore more aligned or coincidental with teaching. We may begin thinking less in terms of scholarly publications as vetted objects, and more in terms of scholarly activities being conducted by trusted authorities. This raises profound questions about peer reviewing practices, as well it should. We are going to find that sophisticated intellectual work is going to be conducted outside of the ivory tower, and those within those elite walls must find ways to articulate their skills and knowledge through these new intellectual mechanisms (hardware, software, social practices) -- or risk getting excluded from the more consequential conversations.

Scholarship has in many ways retained its authority relative to its erudite isolation; but reputation and authority are rapidly evolving online within popular culture and across a vast array of online social interaction. The silo style of authoritative imprimatur is inconsistent with the intellectual and social mores of the Internet that favor open standards and more public reputation methods. In other words, mobile scholarship will have to play by new vetting rules, new rules of reputation management. Being published in a certain place is not going to matter as much as demonstrating the ability to coordinate informal and formal knowledge activities towards measurable outcomes that are of value to more than fellow specialists.

Mobile computing will drive demand in scholarship, prompting ideas and enabling on-the-fly collaboration and coordination, and forcing it to become more timely, more rhetorically nimble, more accessible on multiple levels. It is going to improve learned communication to have it piped into the hands of the masses.

So, by claiming that scholarly communication must be mobile, I am also claiming that this will drive and/or accompany profound epistemological and rhetorical shifts for learned communication. Scholars can hop on board the moving train of mobile computing, or they can stay in their silos and listen to the whine of the doppler effect as the masses with smart phones use those devices in ways more sophisticated than any system based on closed publication and isolated expertise. Scholarship needs to become mobile to survive.

Next up in this series, I will discuss the need for scholarship to be scalable.

The Impact Factor Factor
Impact is a big deal to scholars and their sponsors. Really big. The Impact Factor of the journal in which one publishes adds or subtracts value from one's publications. This algorithm is derived from a calculation based chiefly on the number of citations a publication generates. It has become a prominent determining factor in securing grants, academic posts, tenure, and advancement. And why not? Don't we want scholars to be making an impact?  With today's info glut, isn't it even more important to preserve and promote systems that help us to know what information should be given more authority?

I will first look into the history of Impact Factor and will claim that this early effort to grapple with information overload has improperly become institutionalized and is neither trustworthy nor adequate for today's information culture. Then I will open the discussion of what can or should be measured through cybermetrics with online scholarly communication. Academia has some very good places to go with its treasure trove of existing and ongoing scholarship; it can't get there by clinging to authority systems based on pre-Internet bibliometrics.

Origin of Impact Factor

Where does Impact Factor comes from?  The photo here links to the 1955 article in Science in which Eugene Garfield first proposed the creation of a citation index for science. He was trying to solve a problem we face on a bigger scale today. With so much information circulating and the great need to sift the wheat from the chaff (even 40 years before the Internet), Garfield proposed that citations be used as a quality filter. The reasoning here is sound. After all, when people reference others' research, it shows they consider that research important. So, if lots of people cite the same things, the idea goes, then those things obviously have more influence. Quantifying citations has become the post-publication counterpart to pre-publication peer review. Peer review evaluates work before it is in print; cumulative citations show how researchers are filtering for quality by way of what they read and cite.

Could it be that today's web page hits or inbound links are the analogs to traditional scholarly citation indexes? Yes and no. But before getting into the details of webometrics or cybermetrics, it's important to appreciate the impact of the impact factor upon academia and the problems this has created. What started as a good faith effort to systematize scholarly selectivity has turned into a system that abuses that good faith. It has led some scientists to claim that "Garfield's impact factor is now being used by others in ways that threaten to destroy scientific inquiry as we know it" (Roger A. Brumback). Less apocalyptic but equally earnest protests are widespread. The British Medical Journal has even commissioned a series of articles analyzing problems with Impact Factor, and in a stinging editorial from the Journal of Cell Biology, the inadequacies of Impact Factor are laid bare.

What could go wrong? Well, first of all, Impact Factor simply is not the objective instrument academic evaluators treat it as. Eugene Garfield commercialized his Science Citation Index, creating the Institute for Scientific Information -- thus, the "ISI Impact Factor" for which it is so famous.  ISI carefully guards the secret formula(s) that yield their Impact Factor. Unlike the scholarship rated by Impact Factor, this proprietary instrument itself is not subject to review or analysis. That discrepancy did not go unnoticed by editors of the Journal of Cell Biology. They rightly claimed that "opaque data" is contrary to editorial policies and scientific transparency. "Just as scientists would not accept the findings in a scientific paper without seeing the primary data," they concluded, "so should they not rely on Thomson Scientific's impact factor, which is based on hidden data." Consider the intellectually shaky ground of basing a whole system of authenticating knowledge upon a reputation algorithm that is not open to review. Science doesn't work this way, but somehow the system that warrants scientific authority gets to do so.

This secrecy is a recipe for abuse, and bias becomes even more likely when one takes into account that ISI and its valuable Impact Factor were purchased by Thomson Corporation, a publisher of scientific journals (which are rated by ISI). Thomson has aggressively marketed the ISI metric along with its scientific publications that garner $600 million annually. This glaring conflict of interest is ignored by academic institutions because the value of using the ISI Impact Factor in the academic evaluation system is greater than the potential threat of internal bias within Thomson.

And there lies the true problem. The abuse of Impact Factor has come through institutional over-reliance upon it. From the beginning Impact Factor was never meant to be a primary or sole criterion for judging academic quality. But as many others have pointed out, Impact Factor has gone beyond its original purpose and has become an all-too convenient proxy for quality within the academic evaluation system. No one needs to read a scholar's work to gauge its importance: the fact that his or her work has appeared in a journal with a certain Impact Factor warrants its quality. As one college dean complains:

The problem is that Impact Factors were never designed to be used for evaluating the quality of scientists or their research projects. So, why are they being used for this? It is a cop-out by reviewers, referees and, perhaps more importantly, administrators who are distributing funds — it is a brutish, simplistic quantitative tool that allows them to avoid hard decisions in the judgement of quality. (Graeme Martin, "Impact Factor=Rip-Off Factor")

Sadly, there are very strong forces at play to keep the Impact Factor as the prime mover in the evaluation of scholarly publications. For Thomson, obviously, the sale of high impact journals is extremely lucrative, so the reputation of the index they publish through ISI directly affects their bottom line. For academics, Impact Factor provides an attractive simplicity that is hard to let go of. Impact Factor works for promotion and tenure committees or for granting bodies the same way SAT and GPA scores work for college admissions: a number gives evaluators a rapid and efficient way to make hard decisions.

The critics have not had trouble punching holes in ISI's bibliometrics. Out of tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journals, why are only a few thousand indexed? How can a new journal ever compete with an older one for citations? Why are only very recent publications factored in? What scholarly items make the count in deciding impact -- proceedings? notes? or just complete articles? What if in one field proceedings have more weight and articles have more weight in another? How does one compensate for self-citation? Doesn't this system encourage rhetorical footnoting? Isn't it true that faulty scholarship is often highly discussed, giving it a faux authority because it gets cited so much?

Impact Factor's authoritative and proprietary nature is not consistent with the ascendant open paradigm of the online knowledge commons. It is unsurprising to find an Open Access outlet like Public Library of Science ONE rejecting ISI's Impact Factor altogether. Earlier this year, this journal announced it would be exposing all sorts of data about the articles it publishes in an effort to encourage innovative and article-level metrics. We are entering a new era of data availability, and it would be as foolish not to look to new metrics based on that data as it would be to try to keep the leaks patched in ISI's Impact Factor. It is time for cybermetrics.

Cybermetrics

While cybermetrics is in its infancy, the principles informing it are readily understood, and we can look at current efforts to apply cybermetrics in order to get our bearings on the future. 

Early webometrics paralleled bibliometrics. The various links back to a given page can be quantified into a measure of impact or authority. But such a "Web Impact Factor" (WIF) has really just been a Web1.0 effort. Today, cybermetrics is growing up as people are understanding and evolving uses of networked information and developing general and commercial Internet metrics for online information. This is the first thing to understand about cybermetrics: it promises not simply an electronic updating of Impact Factor, but a suite of analytical tools that can be variously applied and customized. And whereas Impact Factor has been completely journal-centered, the focus of Cybermetrics is both broader and more granaular, as I will explain.

In what follows, I'm drawing heavily from work being done by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. This group also publishes the journal Cybermetrics, "devoted to the study of the quantitative analysis of scholarly and scientific communications in the Internet." I see many problems of scope and methodology in what they are attempting, but the difference from ISI is they have made their methodology explicit and have created their journal as an organ for publicly discussing and improving those methods. In other words, CSIC is in keeping with principles of transparency and collaboration that we are recognizing as superior values in the information economy of the 21st century.

Beyond Journals: Measuring Institutional Impact

Since 2004, the Ranking Web of World Universities has been published semi-annually in an effort to showcase the overall intellectual output of universities and to encourage best practices for electronic publishing and for exposing archives intelligently online. While the salient outcome of their project is a numerical ranking that may seem as simplistic for universities as ISI is for journals, the premises upon which CSIC has developed its alogrithm are an intriguing challenge to traditional measurements of scholarship.

The novel assumption here is that universities can and should be measured in terms of their intellectual output and overall presence online. Universities have long been ranked (as with US News & World Report's annual college rankings), but the Ranking Web ignores cultural reputation or alumni surveys in favor of a data-driven index that reveals not campus life or teacher-student ratios, but an institution's intellectual web presence. 

Why shouldn't universities have a measurable online presence -- one that is not simply the product of company PR or cultural reputation, something independently measured and based upon overall intellectual output? Consider how this might change the way universities are viewed generally (or how they might view their contributors internally) once it becomes evident that certain kinds of activities can boost one's intellectual imprint on the world. Think of how funding agencies, state legislatures, and philanthropic organizations might be looking for more bang for their research buck, calibrating grants and support to an institution's net contribution to the information commons of the world. Such measurements could materially affect institutional practices and increase productive competition. It could also throw traditional academic measurement systems into a tailspin.

The criteria and weighting of factors within CSIC's university rankings bear careful discussion. Are the many informal web pages and all that non-scholarly content universities put on the web to be thrown in with peer-reviewed publications in evaluating a school's intellectual contributions? Rather than opening that can of worms right now, I'd like to look just at the most traditional measurement of intellectual output, peer-reviewed publications. Let's consider what it might mean to create some sort of aggregate measure for institutions of its overall output of conventional scholarship.

Tracking an Institution's Overall Scholarly Output

It will be surprising to non-scholars to learn that universities do not track the scholarly output of their faculty members. There may be some internal fact finding and summary reports prepared for accrediting agencies, but until recently, there has been little effort to systematically gather and centralize the scholarship produced by an entire institution. This is due to the fact that faculty are evaluated individually for tenure and promotion within their specialties. And while a university may feature selected scholarship within its public relations, there has been no motive to try to gather faculty work en masse. It has been the function of journals and libraries to gather and preserve scholarship.

But the Internet is changing that. Now, universities and research centers are creating institutional or disciplinary repositories to warehouse scholarship for permanent access. This is driven by the Open Access movement. Now, leading schools like Harvard and Stanford have put in place policies requiring faculty to retain copyright of their publications and to grant the school a non-exclusive license to permanently host copies of all their scholarship in a local archive. 

Here is where cybermetrics is going to prove very interesting. Right now such archiving is being led by librarians who see the virtues of organizing knowledge with metadata and preserving permanent open access to it. Faculty (and most administrators) have not yet recognized that this is far more consequential than simply preserving a record. Archiving means a kind of permanent publishing, and increasingy sophisticated data harvesting tools and data mining activities are already creating a longer and richer life for publications that in the past have only been valued at the point of publication. The after market for academic content is going to be huge, and the true demand of that content is just beginning to make itself felt. Metrics will signal the demand and change these repositories into active assets of the university. Record labels and non-academic publishers have found that Long Tail economics, recommendation systems, and social media have combined to give renewed attention to products once lingering in obscurity. How long will academia resist the cultural and technological forces pushing for the robust discovery and use of its legacy content? About as long as it takes for administrators to read usage metrics and see the value of awakening academia's dormant intellectual assets.

While composing this post I received an email alerting me that a scholarly presentation I once gave on Beowulf was downloaded from where it is hosted online. Suddenly, I am wondering about giving that presentation a revision. After all, now that I can get reports on the use of my work, it changes how I see it and configures my future projects. What happened to me incidentally today is what is happening on a more organized basis at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln through their institutional repository, Digital Commons. There, metrics on the use of archived scholarship have begun to change how faculty view their work. Rather than simply seeing to the publication of their work in a respectable journal, faculty are now seeing the value of their publications being housed where they will be continuously used and where they will get reports each month about the frequency with which their various publications have been downloaded (or commented upon). It is the pattern of things to come.

I foresee the day that both institutions and individual scholars will take as keen an interest in the ongoing life of publications as they now do in placing those publications in respectable journals, precisely because metrics will drive interest that way. If an assistant professor can show that an article published in a relatively minor venue is generating lots of traffic on the university's institutional archive or has created productive attention to the university, will this not be relevant to how that professor is evaluated? Or, if publications in highly respected journals prove to attract nary a hit or generate hosts of negative comments, will this not change the way reputation and rewards work in academia? We have barely scratched the surface of the coming impact of institutionally based scholarship metrics.

These metrics will change the role of academic journals, too, taking from them much of the authority they have traditionally held as arbiters of quality. Peer-review that happens pre-publication will be in competition with the emerging values that attend the use of scholarship once it is published and exposed to the web. Cybermetrics will be driving that change.

We will see the day when universities will try to maximize the value of their intellectual endowment by actively monitoring and marketing their scholarship (old and new). I broached this topic earlier by introducing the concept of Scholarly Inquiry Optimization to parallal Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO and web analytics are now firmly entrenched in enterprise, and the value this monitoring adds will at some point become centrally relevant to scholarship. The sort of data now available to those monitoring web assets for business is astounding -- from granular reports of the location of web visitors to the type of platform used to access the data, to a whole host of attention data as clickstreams are tracked and crunched. This makes for a robust way to fine tune marketing and to better match the needs of customers with services and products. Such data begs to be used; the utility is self-evident. And why wouldn't universities begin to capitalize (perhaps even literally) on being able to monitor and direct the attention of its web visitors? Won't this also affect how resource decisions are made on campuses? Once demand can be measured and tailored to customers, we'll have new criteria for organizing and prioritizing scholarly activity.

Measuring Scholarly Media, Metering Scholarly Data

The Internet is spawning the use of multimedia in every aspect of culture, including scholarly inquiry, and we will soon see media-rich born-digital scholarship complementing and competing with traditional articles and books. And as Open Access begins to predominate within scholarly publishing, the effect will do far more than increase the exposure and use of traditional scholarly publications; we will see value accruing through opening scholarly media -- old and new -- to remixing and reuse.

There will be new things to measure when a social scientific study includes the publication of protocols and data that can be separated from the original scholarly study for separate significant use. CSIC measures "rich content" web pages, which for now might simply be limited to the presence of images, audio, or video. But it is not hard to imagine putting in place ways to measure the creative reuse of open scholarly media. A service such as TubeMogul already offers the ability for mainstream media to detect and measure pirated video (by tracking a video's "DNA") in order to provide content producers a sense of the overall impact of their content (which sometimes goes much further through informal and illegitimate channels than through the channels chosen by the content producer). When academic institutions abandon the foolishness of propertization of intellectual output and realize the enormous value of creative commons licensing, cybermetrics will be there to track how broadly and variously researchers' work is used. And as scholars turn to audio and video formats for disseminating their ideas, services like TubeMogul can provide granular analysis of user attention. It will be possible to pinpoint the exact second within a lecture when user interest wanes. This sort of data will provide feedback loops to improve academic media and keep existing content in play longer. Cybermetrics will reveal better ways to use, re-use, and improve intellectual content -- including the application of scholarly content to pedagogical uses (and teaching media to scholarly purposes).

We will see open data becoming increasingly important as an asset in the knowledge commons. As researchers optimize their results by drawing upon publicly available data sets, cybermetrics will be there to meter usage of that data. Suddenly, that study that is a decade old will have its data refreshed as another researcher employs it in a different study. This will reflect positively on the original researchers and funders. Such extended life for data hinges upon metrics that document and encourage the extended life of scholarly products.

Cybermetrics and Structured Knowledge

Cybermetrics will encourage scholars to observe the protocols of the semantic web. The more machine-readable information is, the more readily it can be shared, re-used, and measured. XML and standarized schema will enrich the life and usage of intellectual content. Scholars can therefore be measured not just on their actual research or their arguments, but on how efficiently they have structured their work to be further used and built upon. We will be measuring how well knowledge is structured to articulate with the knowledge commons, how open it will be to data harvesters and data mining. We will measure the degree to which scholars are building the cyberinfrastructure by making their work not just an end in itself, but a building block for future work.

Cybermetrics and Informal Knowledge

Scholarship today is understood largely in terms of the formal genres of publication (the scholarly monograph, the academic article), and certainly traditional bibliometrics are conducted only upon these sorts of finished products. But within the new paradigm there will increasingly be more value placed upon informal and in-process knowledge: research logs, field notes, lab notebooks, and a whole range of teaching resources and media. Part of this new value will come precisely because the usage of such content can and will be measured.

What is going to happen when a teacher's online syllabus or that professor's blog or that open science notebook can be as readily monitored as the usage of a peer-reviewed article? We will see things that have normally been undervalued or seen as ephemeral having increased permanence, publicity, and use. And as faculty contribute Open Educational Resources as readily as they do Open Access publications to their institutional repositories, there wil be creative overlap (as well as vexing competition) between those intellectual assets aimed at teaching and those aimed at scholarship. Again, the measurement of usage will be central to the reshaping and evolution of various kinds of intellectual output.

Cybermetrics and Real-Time Scholarship

Data drives knowledge, and the measurement of data now possible on the web will continue to reshape the forms of knowledge and the formats of scholarship -- especially because of the ease and efficiency of measurement tools. Those tools are driving faster feedback and more granular analysis of user behavior, leading to cycles of analysis and genesis that approach real-time. A tool like Reinvigorate extends Google Analytics to make real-time feedback loops viable. Much more remains to be thought through on the topic of real-time scholarship, but I raise it here as an emerging phenomenon that, like so many other things online today, is driven not just by emerging communication tools like microblogging, but by web metrics. The networked environment is continuously evolving improved ways of tracking behavior, providing feedback, and creating value. Even though these phenomena are mostly in the enterprise space, they will certainly not remain there.

Scholarly communication -- as academia in general -- will be changing because of how knowledge and data can be measured. Cybermetrics is not some curiosity, nor is it anything close to being a modest update of bibliometrics or the ISI Impact Factor. Print-based metrics will be rapidly transcended by a richer, deeper set of measurements that will help broaden the concepts, genres, and uses of all our intellectual work.

What would you include in an undergraduate course on digital civilization -- a course beginning in the Renaissance and arriving at our current digitally-mediated state of communication, knowledge, and culture? Are there analogs to our digital world in the past? What authors or texts from history illuminate our present? What themes would you address? What fields of knowledge or cultural movements across the centuries have bearing on the digital now? If education itself is transforming, what's the recipe for teaching and learning both in and about the digital age? How would you structure such a course?

As the title of my blog proclaims, academia is evolving, including what counts as a general or liberal education. We still have our lists of Great Works, but literacy itself seems to have shifted. How does one read a book now that we understand books as limited vehicles for knowledge or as sets of data to be searched and sampled? How does one respond to art, literature or life, when writing and publishing are now casually intertwined and socially mediated? What is the role of a course, a school, a curriculum when Internet access provides most people unlimited knowledge without any classroom, campus, or syllabus? How are ideas to be synthesized or thoughts composed when it is becoming as natural to use images or other media alongside or in place of texts?

These questions puzzled me and my BYU colleague, Daniel Zappala, and at first we cooked up a new course on digital literacy. Plenty to cover there! But as we explored the option of a civilization course, it offered some appealing breadth and depth. Suddenly, everywhere we looked across western history we found that the issues confronting us in the digital age have been encountered before. That doesn't mean that the current age isn't truly new nor that we don't have substantial changes from the past. But what it means is that there are shoulders to stand on.

This led to our course proposal, "Western Civilization and the Digital World." Hopefully we will be approved to teach this course in our school's Honors program in Fall 2010 or the following semester in 2011. But it occurred to me that we should post our syllabus right away. It has some weak spots, to be sure, and I'm confident that great suggestions can be made to rectify those lapses if we are willing to share our intellectual work in progress. Such a launch-and-iterate pattern is one of the primary principles of the digital age. We do not wait to participate; we look forward to critique and collaboration, since now we are starting to understand that knowledge is optimized when made social.

Besides, if teaching and learning (like so many things now) can be time-shifted or place-shifted, why wait to begin that class a year from now? I'll post the syllabus in its present form on my blog here, but I'm hoping to reformat the syllabus and course material, placing this on Rice University's Open Educational Resource platform, Connexions. I have already identified a module on Connexions about Galileo's telescope (by Albert Van Helden) that we might work into our course (which will end up as a "collection" of these "modules" -- or learning objects). In turn, our course's modules will serve as building blocks for others' educational purposes.

As Daniel and I reviewed history, it was simple to align core components of digital culture with their antecedents. The most obvious was the rise of printing as an agent of cultural change. As many have noted, we are undergoing cultural upheavals today comparable to those of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The authority of knowledge and its institutions was influenced by the democratization of media -- and it's happening again now. Just as Christians found they could go directly to the Bible without priestly mediation, so students of today are finding they can go directly to educational resources -- bypassing institutions of learning, their costs, and their limits (See, for example, Lisa Chamberlain's bold experiment in this regard, "Open PhD").

The issue of controlling or vetting knowledge for religious, political, or commercial reasons is a continuous theme in western civilization -- from the Vatican's index of prohibited books, to the licensing and copyright acts of 17th and 18th century England, up through those conglomerate scholarly publishers of our day who restrict access to scholarly knowledge for billions in profit. The propertization of the commons through enclosure laws compares to the propertization of knowledge through copyright. But intellectual property turns out to undermine its original purpose (to promote innovation), and so we are returning to the "commons" notion for an improved knowledge economy (see Creative Commons).

There are plenty of other historical analogs to our digital culture. The Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment (Diderot, etc.) compare to Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia. Studying the rise of periodicals and the popular press invites easy comparison to blogging. The rise of scholarly and scientific journals from the 17th to the 20th centuries leads directly to today's crisis in scholarly communication and the Open Access movement. The standardization that came with the Industrial Revolution relates to the web standards that are so critical to Information Age. The Oxford English dictionary proves to be a pre-electronic age example of crowdsourcing. Agitation for social change in the 19th or 20th century (Marx, for example) compares to online activism and digital manifestos. The popularization of mass media in the 20th century compares to and prepares for the online memes of today. And along the way, religion, politics, science, and education get redefined as information and media mix and remix culture.

So here's our first stab at the course syllabus. Daniel and I would love your feedback!

"Western Civilization and the Digital World."

Dr. Gideon Burton (English) / Dr. Daniel Zapalla (Computer Science)

Overview

Western civilization has been greatly influenced by how we produce and share knowledge.  Since the development of the printing press in the 15th century, the printed word has dominated religion, philosophy, science, economics, politics, and education.  We are now in the midst of the digital revolution, with online media such as blogs, wikis, social networking, and the web shaping our civilization.  In this course we will view western civilization through the lens of the digital revolution, learning both what the past has to say about how we produce and share knowledge, and what our experiences with modern technology lead us to discover about the past.  Our readings will pair great works of western civilization with current texts and tools, exploring common themes that include the structure of knowledge, principles of openness and participation, authenticity, identity, privacy, and copyright. Students will become fluent with the concepts and tools needed to be lifelong learners and active participants in a world where technological innovations change rapidly.

Learning Outcomes

• Students will understand how knowledge production and communication has evolved since the Renaissance due to technological and cultural forces.
• Students will be able to relate philosophies and trends in education, economics, religion, science, and politics to the current digital age.
• Students will learn the principles underlying the digital age (openness, participation, authenticity, identity, privacy, intellectual property) and be able to relate these to their historical analogs.
• Students will acquire digital literacy – familiarity with the tools and principles of the digital age, as applied to philosophical and literary concepts and texts from the history of civilization.
• Students will relate pre-digital and digital-age principles and tools to life-long learning and to the mission of our university.

Readings

• Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine
• Martin Luther, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church
• Thomas More, Utopia
• Galileo, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems
• Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
• Shakespeare, The Tempest
• Milton, Areopagitica
• Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, The New Scientific Method
• Descartes, Discourse on Method
• Denis Diderot, Encyclopedie
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On Education
• Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman
• Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
• de Toqueville, Democracy in America
• Charles Babbage, Decline of Science in England
• Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Utilitarianism
• Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, Walden
• Joseph Smith, Doctrine & Covenants, Book of Mormon
• Charles Darwin, Origin of Species
• Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence
• Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
• Thomas Khun, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Marshal McLuhan, "Gutenberg Galaxy"
• John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
• Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
• Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End
• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
• Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
• Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet
• Chris Anderson, The Long Tail
• Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• Yochai Benkler, Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm
• Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
• Kevin Kelly, Better than Free
• Paul Levinson, New New Media

Method of Instruction:

Discussions, presentations, tutorials, student-led instruction, self-directed learning

Methods of Evaluation:

Class and online participation, essays, digital media, lab exercises
Evaluated as both a learner and a teacher, engagement beyond the classroom

Skills (to be both used and studied)

• Google Wave
• blogging platform
• Google documents
• Twitter
• facebook
• multimedia composition
• design software
• collaborative online tools
• wikipedia
• gaming
• simulations and immersive environments

I enjoyed putting together the Prezi presentation (about which I've blogged previously) because it truly helped me to think through the issues and to visualize these concepts for myself and for my audience. The public Prezi presentation (without narration) is available at Prezi.com, here, in case you'd like to use it yourself (or play with the great zooming and non-linear presenting features of Prezi).

I've spent a number of hours exploring Second Life, flying my avatar across digital landscapes that materialize as my bandwidth catches up. I've strolled through the arcades, been a bit puzzled by the Halloween party feeling of all the tricked out avatars and people typing to each other. I even used some of my free Linden dollars (the currency there) to buy a necklace for my avatar. I don't wear necklaces in real life, so this was stepping out a bit for me. I have been reluctant to engage in this demi-monde. Once, I landed on an idyllic little spot and strolled through a lovely house beside a stream. A woman avatar typed/shouted at me to get out. This was her land. What was I doing there? I didn't know. A bit embarrassed, and frustrated at not being able to figure how to create objects and buildings (that obviously so many have become so adept at), I left Second Life. I haven't been back for a long time.

But in keeping close watch on the educational technology space, it's become apparent that Second Life is indeed coming of age for educators and for education. See, for example, the community of educators discussing its use for professional development and for student learning on Classroom 2.0. This is all very fascinating, but I'm not gambling on a lot of uptake for Second Life in higher education any time soon -- even though I'm convinced that the prospect of 3D learning, data visualization, and Second Life's unique community-creating characteristics could enhance and potentially replace some college classes or scholarly conferences.

It's just that a virtual world requires a higher learning curve than other electronic tools. It's more than a tool (like using a wiki or even producing a video). It's an experience, an immersive digital environment. And frankly, it's just hard to take the plunge, even for people who like to think of themselves as digital enthusiasts. And there is a seedy side to Second Life that can scare one away, too.

I do think that this virtual world is still largely in its "let's play with this thing and think about what we might do with it" stage. However, enough people are making serious use of Second Life for educational purposes that I think it should at least be on the radar for teachers and learners of all ages. It appears to me that it's the K-12 educators who are really doing serious play with Second Life. But those of us in higher education should not be ignoring it. I can imagine forward-thinking online universities gaining some ground in this space, since students at Capella or Walden universities are already principally online.

The slideshare presentation below shows several viable categories for the academic use of Second Life. It is followed by a 5 minute video in which Bill Freese talks about his positive experience in the AECT sponsored space on Second Life (The Association for Educational Communications and Technology). You should take a look. Suddenly, I'm starting to think that virtual academia could be more than a sandbox experiment; it could be a major draw and a major boon for higher education. I'm going to be looking into it further. I hope you will, too.

I'm going to send @ScholarlyComm a direct message in a second, suggesting he/she use a hashtag like #openaccessweek to be sure other audiences who would be interested in this conference can join in as I am, via electronic means. As this Twitter reporter sends snippets along, I take a second to search online about the speaker and the learned society he's affiliated with. At my mobile computer (now in a parking lot in my car) I may in fact be getting more out of this than if I were in the room in New York. I combine my listening with casual research that links this speaker's or this Tweeter's interests with mine.

I also am checking Twitterfall on my iPhone, set up to bring me real time tweets filtered on the hashtag #openaccessweek or #openaccess since I (like so many worldwide) am focusing on this topic this week and checking in on various events simultaneously occurring in celebration of Open Access. This is fun. In a couple hours a presentation on Open Access in the arts and humanities will be taking place at the University of Utah, and if no one tweets it live I'll get the near-live version online (Columbia is making their conferences, like past ones, freely available on iTunesU).

What an awesome time to be a scholar! Not only will I get up-to-the-minute thinking from like-minded people across the globe, but I can interact in real time (or nearly so) with those involved. I watch the Twitter names of posts that are meaningful to me, then, using Tweetie or another Twitter client application, I look up the person behind the moniker, check out his/her web page, and quickly find real colleagues. If they have invested in creating a web presence, I get a quick sense of their work and its relevance to me, and then I decide sometimes to comment on their blog, follow them on Twitter, or contact them directly -- all while seated in my car awaiting my son.

This is real time scholarly inquiry, and it has a value that complements and transcends traditional scholarly publication. The tools are only getting better and better for discovery, networking, data mining, networking, collaborating, representing findings and disseminating learned communication. I pity my colleagues trapped in the print paradigm. By the time a journal article appears (or even an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education), what they report on will be secondary to the real conversation. The real scholars are the real-time scholars. We use legacy knowledge systems and respect them for what they do, but we don't wait for them to fossilize the conversation; we're too busy growing live knowledge with the more intellectually agile tools of mobile phones, microblogging, and live update streams.   

"Cyberinfrastructure" is a mouthful, but a vital concept today. Scholars, librarians, and all stakeholders in academic knowledge production need to understand the concept of cyberinfrastructure and come to see the generation of scholarship as something participating within and building this emerging structure for learned communication.

The cyberinfrastructure relates in part to the physical, technical, globally networked system of permanently maintained digital archives and repositories, but saying that makes it sound as though it is mostly the concern of IT specialists or librarians. Those people play crucial roles, but so do scholars in general and those who oversee them or evaluate their contributions. The cyberinfrastructure is built as much upon social parameters, intellectual property provisions, and academic evaluation systems as computer systems. It requires us to reconceptualize what is consequential about scholarly work beyond traditional genres or methods of academic publishing.

Those unfamiliar with this concept should begin with the 2008 Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure (known informally as "the Atkins report"), where the term was coined. The cyberinfrastructure, explains the report,

will become as fundamental and important as an enabler for the [scientific] enterprise as laboratories and instrumentation, as fundamental as classroom instruction, and as fundamental as the system of conferences and journals for dissemination of research outcomes. Through cyberinfrastructure we strongly influence the conduct of science and engineering research (and ultimately engineering development) in the coming decades. (Appendix A)

The report begins with the sciences, but anticipates comparable changes across all disciplines, and this has been explored by the American Council of Learned Societies in their companion report, Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Provosts, Academic Vice Presidents, and every dean, chair or promotion and tenure committee member should know these reports and how they describe the new conditions for scholarly communication.

Why? Because we are no longer in the world of paper research or trafficking in the one-off article or monograph. We are publishing media, software, datasets, simulations, and interactive, socially-optimized research and learning structures. We are not distributing knowledge commodities in the print paradigm mode; we are constructing knowledge environments to accommodate ongoing and dynamic researching, teaching, and learning, and we have not finished the job by simply setting something loose on the world as a "publication." We are all becoming cyber-engineers, social constructionists, and curators of data both informal and formal.

I recommend the recent book by scholarly communications front runner, Christine L. Borgman, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (one might also view this video lecture of the same title). 

These resources begin to tackle the important issues beyond merely technical concerns. Obviously the move toward Open Access publishing is central, as is the role of institutional repositories and disciplinary repositories in hosting and curating learned communication. But I would emphasize that the cyberinfrastructure concept is critical for scholars themselves. I don't think most scholars think in terms of its concepts, and they should.

Why should scholars choke down a portemanteau word like "cyberinfrastructure"? Because the difference between our research processes and our publishing processes are blurring. Because scholars are becoming necessarily multidisciplinary and depending more upon data and databased resources (in all disciplines). Because scholarship is becoming more collaborative as people share large computing resources or cooperate in the construction and maintenance of large-scale online archives. Because what is starting to matter most with scholarly work does not align neatly with those quantifiables of the print paradigm, publications in scholarly journals. 

The cyberinfrastructure includes not only large computing installations, but large data sets that need intelligent articulation and interpretation through combinations of machine and human intelligence. It includes social knowledge that is being piped through social media tools and integrated into research tools and methodologies. It includes the accumulation and aggregation of informal modes of reporting results or discussing knowledge projects. It is much much more than a discrete set of high-impact journals and the fact of publication within them.

In fact, as I've said elsewhere, traditional publications stand in danger of becoming less and less relevant to the emerging scholarly commons because of their static and isolated nature and their lack of articulating features like links, rich metadata, and informal metadata folksonomies.

Let me give an example of how something not valued highly in traditional scholarly publishing can be highly valued within the concept of the cyberinfrastructure. Within the print paradigm, interpretive scholarship has been more highly prized than the development of tools that make such interpretations possible. A scientific paper is aimed at conclusions; a paper in the humanities might do a close reading or theoretical interpretation of a work of literature. But preparing a scholarly edition of a work of literature has been considered second-tier work. Not in the cyberinfrastructure. In fact, those who are structuring data intelligently so that others in the future can make use of it in a variety of ways are doing as much or more to contribute to the growth of knowledge as interpretive scholarship in discursive form.

This is evident in something like the very successful Perseus Project. What began as a way to get classical texts digitized and online has turned into a project more focused on structuring data and data tools for other scholars to use:

The Perseus digital library project has developed a generalizable toolset to manage XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents of varying DTDs (Document Type Definitions); to extract structural and descriptive metadata from these documents and deliver document fragments on demand; and to support other tools that analyze linguistic and conceptual features and manage document layout. (source)

Not only is the content openly available, but Perseus has also evolved a set of portable services as part of its "Perseus Hopper" open data effort: linguistic support for corpus research of texts in classical languages; a contextualized reading module for customizing secondary texts to accompany primary texts and for soliciting user input; and a searching module enabling sophisticated searches of the morphologically complex ancient languages.

What this means is that other projects can piggyback on years of work parsing and structuring and marking up this data. One example of such secondary scholarly work is the Diogenes project, a separate tool for searching and browsing ancient texts that imports Perseus Project data (along with other sources). Another example is the Archimedes project -- a more focused database looking just at the history of mechanics. Yet it draws upon the Perseus Project data to the extent it is useful for that purpose. A very different use of the Perseus Project data is HandHeldClassics, which drew upon Perseus Project open data to bring classical texts to handheld devices. This last application appears to be somewhat dated (intended for early Palm Pilot-type handhelds). But the data, built on XML and openly available, is ready for someone to make it flow into the smart phones of today, or their successors a year or a decade from now.

How does one place a value on the Perseus Project? One values it in terms of its contribution to the cyberinfrastructure. Its makers did not simply publish valuable content; they published structures and schema that were then later combined with the efforts of other scholars. Their content has become, in effect, a platform for others' uses. We have always had the notion of "standing on the shoulders of giants" in the history of scholarship. Conventions for citation mark the debts that we owe to our predecessors. But obviously the Perseus Project makes a more direct and material way for the building of future scholarship upon earlier work. It is more of an exponential contribution than merely an additive one. 

There are less monumental ways of adding to the cyberinfrastructure than a large, years-long project like the Perseus Project. But it illustrates in an obvious way a different mode of scholarship that is arguably as significant, or more significant, than the standard article.

What do you think? Do you know other examples of scholarship helping to build the cyberinfrastructure? What do you think we need to do to retool the way we work to promote this more sophisticated kind of knowledge building?

In my next post on this theme, I will talk about scholarship in terms of something usually thought of only in connection with optimizing web content for commercial purposes. When an entity like Google is proclaiming its intention to organize the world's knowledge (and has developed sophisticated mechanisms for directing our attention to and retrieval of that knowledge), then maybe we should think about scholarship having web metrics and analytics, too.