1. RE-DESIGNING
(HACKING?) SCHOLARLY
COMMUNICATION
Openness and its Discontent
KMD 1001F — KNOWLEDGE MEDIA DESIGN: FUNDEMENTAL
CONCEPTS

2. Key Messages
• Open Access as a philosophical principle and a set
of practical tools
• “Journal” no longer serves the needs of networked
scholarship
• From “Wealth of Nations” to “Wealth of Networks”
• Need to rethink measurements of “impact” and
values, especially for research for the public goods
• Innovations are happening in the “peripheries” but
there are gatekeepers and social barriers
• Aligning funding and reward policies with new
scholarly practices and inclusive metrics

3. BOAI

5. “Now as then, the hacker is
characterised by an active
approach to technology, undaunted
by hierarchies and established
knowledge, and finally a
commitment to sharing information
freely.”
http://cspp.oekonux.org/special-issues/expanding-the-frontiers-of-

6. Cohen, Dan, and Tom Scheinfeldt, eds. Hacking the Academy: A Book
Crowdsourced in One Week. Center for History and New Media,
George Mason University. 21-28 May 2010.
http://hackingtheacademy.org/

7. http://wiki.diffandrep.org/performing-scholarly-communication

10. Problems
• Current Scholarly Communication system is broken
• Emerging tools are not being used effectively to serve
scholarship
• Re-designing Scholarly Communications

11. The Dysfunctional Economy of Scholarly
Communications
• Commodification of public
knowledge
Bundling
• Oligopoly
• Artificial scarcity
• Homogeneity of forms and
functions
• Reputation management

12. Hacking the bundle
Explore ways by which new practices can be
coded (codified) so that the key functions of
scholarly communication – authoring,
certification, quality control, archiving, and
rewarding - can be decoupled and better served
by emerging tools for collaborative authoring,
sharing, and reputation management.

13. This is not just a technology issue, but a
socio-political problem.

14. Institutional
Design
Sustainability as a set
of institutional
structures and
processes that build
and protect the
knowledge commons
(after Sumner 2005,
Mook and Sumner 2010)

15. Broadening the definition of “success”, “impact”,
“value” and “capital”
Business value monetary return, financial capital,
efficiency, competiveness
Scholarly value Reputation and citation; trust; symbolic
capital
Institutional value Public mission, community outreach,
intellectual capital
Social value Equity, participation, diversity, social
capital
Political value Evidence based policy, transparency,
accountability, civic capital

16. http://ip-
science.thomsonreuters.com/citation

18. http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4328

20. The JIF is appallingly open to manipulation; mature alt-
metrics systems could be more robust, leveraging the
diversity of of alt-metrics and statistical power of big data to
algorithmically detect and correct for fraudulent activity.
This approach already works for online advertisers, social
news sites, Wikipedia, and search engines.
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

21. http://impactstory.org/

22. Scholarly Primitives
Discovering Annotating Comparing
Referring Sampling Illustrating
“…basic functions
Representing common to scholarly
activity across
disciplines, over time,
John Unsworth. "Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities
Researchers Have in Common and How Might Our Tools Reflect and independent of
This?" "Humanities Computing, Formal Methods, Experimental
Practice" Symposium, Kings College, London, May 13, 2000. theoretical orientation.”
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

23. Opportunities for Digital
Scholarship
Public outreach
and engagement
New forms of
Service
“impact”
Student training Data sharing
New scholarly
Curation
practices
Personalization Experimentations
Interdisciplinary
Professional
and Collaborative
development
research

24. Scholarly Primitives and Reputation?
Discovering Annotating Comparing Referring
Sampling Illustrating Representing
John Unsworth. "Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities
Researchers Have in Common and How Might Our Tools Reflect
This?" "Humanities Computing, Formal Methods, Experimental
Practice" Symposium, Kings College, London, May 13, 2000.
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

26. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/

27. http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/

28. Conclusions
• Open Access is just the substrate, but
an essential one
• Metrics drive behaviour, but we have
been using the wrong metrics
• Need to rethink what we value as a
public institution
• Reward open scholarship

29. http://www.openoasis.org
http://www.bioline.org.br
http://www.openaccessmap.or
g
Thank You!
chan@utsc.utoronto.ca