Traditional scholarly prestige and new forms of buzz
Paul Kobulnicky, Scholarly Reputations: Who’s Got Buzz? Educause Review, November/December 2006. Excerpt:
While giving a presentation at a recent international meeting on institutional repositories, I responded to a member of the audience who questioned the motivation for faculty to participate in such repositories. The individual repeated the oft-mentioned position that scholars, by placing publications in such repositories, unduly risk their contractual relationships with publishers. I responded by acknowledging the concern and by describing options that minimize risk, but since I had the stage, I also wondered aloud about which “big win” choice scholars would make as time moves forward. Those of us who believe both in the rigor of peer review and in open access know that these are not mutually exclusive choices but rather are mutually beneficial elements in advancing scholarship. However, for the sake of the argument, I asked if scholars would choose (1) to have their work published in the premier journal in their field or (2) to have that work regularly come up on the first screen in an appropriate Google search. Although I made the statement to stimulate discussion in front of an audience, I believe that my straw-man choice raises issues that need to be discussed further….
[T]he choice between a prestigious scholarly publication and a high Google ranking was not really an either/or choice. No one should dismiss or diminish the value of using high editorial standards to point both the scholarly and the general communities to work of high quality. However, the placement of scholarship in an open-access institutional repository need not preclude publication in a prestigious title. Authors and their publishers can move to provide open access to their works in pre- and/or post-publication versions. From the perspective of return on social investment, open access to published works can create positive returns for both authors and scholarly publishers. My straw-man choice was contrived, of course: neither scholarship without perceived relevance nor scholarship evaluated only on Web buzz is desirable.
Within the classic and respected framework of scholarly review and selection, scholars need to think about the impact of contemporary, open information access and about the mechanisms that can be used to generate relevance in their work. They need to think about choosing appropriate metadata and about how others, not necessarily just their disciplinary peers, might seek and use their information. They need to think about the links that ought to exist between their work and the broader society that inevitably supports it. Finally, they need to give some thought to the very unscholarly but pragmatic aspects of their work: marketing and promotion, which contribute to the creation of scholarly reputations with “buzz” on the Web.
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