The Future Of

Authors want readers. Why else would they publish?

For authors of research publications, the above statement is true but the question is too simple. Researchers publish for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to establish and share their scholarship, with the aim that it will be read and cited by others. To that end, publications must be accessible.

Open access is a movement to provide broader access to scholarship by removing price and permission barriers through publishing and archiving:

• Open access publishing ensures that articles (and sometimes books) are freely accessible to anyone worldwide, regardless of institutional affiliation or society membership, and grants reuse rights up front while authors retain copyright;
• Open access archiving enables free access to articles published in traditional journals, often through the final author’s version of the accepted article, and sometimes under embargoes to respect publishers’ distribution rights.

Regardless of whether you wish to explore publishing or archiving (or both!), the Z. Smith Reynolds Library supports your pursuit of open access.

Open Access Fund
Reynolda Campus faculty who wish to publish in open access journals that charge article processing fees may apply to the Open Access Fund for assistance in covering publication costs. Two-thirds of the costs will be covered by the Z. Smith Reynolds Library and the Office of Research & Sponsored Programs, with the final third sought from author’s departments or other University funding opportunities. Read more and apply for funding at the Open Access Fund website.

WakeSpace Faculty Scholarship
Wake Forest’s institutional repository, WakeSpace, is a digital archive that houses collections of scholarship unique to the University and its scholars. Faculty collections provide open access to articles, book chapters, videos and other publications. Explore the growing number of WakeSpace Faculty Scholarship collections.

Open Access Consulting
Molly Keener, Scholarly Communication Librarian, is available to consult with faculty individually or in groups on open access, copyright management and author rights retention, and compliance with funders’ public access requirements. Contact Molly at keenerm@wfu.edu or x5829 for support.

Institutions worldwide are celebrating Open Access Week 2010 by raising awareness of open access. All you have to do to join the movement is be informed!

Updated July 8, 2010 – see below.

Blogging. For many, the term evokes thoughts of cringe-worthy diary-esque posts by angry teenagers, or bland breakfast tweets by bored acquaintances. But in many fields, including the sciences, law and librarianship, blogging has become vital to the advancement of scholarship. Blogs provide outlets for scholarly exchanges and expression of ideas that might otherwise be lost among the cacophony of hallway conversations and hastily-jotted margin notes. Blogs expand the conversation beyond a handful of colleagues gathered in the same physical space to an online intersection of scholars, students and interested individuals who are able to share insights in a more real-time manner than traditional exchanges via letters and rebuttal articles in journals. Blogging advances an idea or argument, and that is the ultimate goal of scholarship.

Blogging has changed dramatically, both since its genesis in the late 1990s and again within the last five years. In 2005, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a pseudonymous article titled, Bloggers Need Not Apply, which was soon followed by Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs by Robert S. Boynton on Slate. Although Boynton was critical of the claim that blogging automatically had an adverse effect on career success, Mark Sample best summed up the objection to blogging within the academy when he stated that “…the real problem with academics who blog is that they leave evidence that they’re not at that precise moment engaged in research or teaching. A blog is an index to one’s daily ‘unproductive’ activity” (Sample Reality blog).

In the five years since “career killing blogs” first “attacked,” blogs and specifically scholarly blogging have matured. Publishers, such as Nature Publishing Group, and higher education media outlets, including the Chronicle, have blogs, speaking to the importance of blogging within research fields and higher education generally. The the rise of vetted blogging communities and the evolution of publications via blogs/blogging platforms point to the rising value of blogs as an outlet for scholarship. Noted examples of these communities and publications include:

• ScienceBlogs – 80+ bloggers covering various aspects of science; sharing and assessing research, discussing science news and events; launched in January 2006
• ResearchBlogging.org – over 1,000 blogs/10,000 posts; aggregates blog posts on peer reviewed articles, posts similar to review articles; started in mid-2007
  
• In the Library with the Lead Pipe – peer-reviewed (one external, one internal) blog authored by six librarians, with submissions by guest authors; has an ISSN; peer reviewers named but reviews not public; average 2 articles per month, 2,000-5,000 words; publication began in October 2008
  
• Hacking the Academy – book project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; collected in one week in May 2010 through crowdsourcing, using hashtags (e.g., #hackacad); over 300 contributions from nearly 200 authors; full content available online, print edition forthcoming from Digital Culture Books
  

Despite such projects, written scholarly output in many fields is still expected to appear in a journal or monograph, vetted by pre-publication blind peer review. To engage in written discourse that does not have the peer review stamp of approval prior to distribution seems folly to many. Even fields with a healthy culture of sharing articles pre-peer review via repositories such as arXiv or SSRN eventually feed that scholarship into traditional publication structures.

Admittedly, the lack of editorial oversight and traditional peer review are strikes against blogging as scholarship. But to automatically dismiss blogs from the realm of scholarship, even while desiring universal electronic access to information (ahem, that’s scholarship folks!), is to fail to “stop trying to pound the square peg of digital scholarship into the round hole of analog scholarship” (Mills Kelly, Making Digital Scholarship Count (2), edwired). As Kathleen Fitzpatrick, author of Planned Obsolescence, notes, the criteria used during a scholar’s tenure and promotion review usually tries to assess impact on the field through the tally of peer-reviewed publications. But, she argues, “why should the two-to-three readers selected by a journal/press, plus that entity’s editor/editorial board, be the arbiter of the authority of scholarly work–particularly in the digital, when we have so many more complex means of assessing the effect of/response to scholarly work via network analysis?”

If scholars are to be truly evaluated on their impact to the field, a blog that fosters healthy debate and discussion, and ideally advances ideas or problems within the field, is a strong indicator of immediate impact. Blogging busts through access barriers that are currently limiting scholarly advancement by tying scholarship that “counts” to a centuries-old system that often fails to connect and engage scholars expediently. Through commenting and response posts, blogging has even evolved its own peer review system, albeit post-publication. Do you believe it is time for blogging to be validated by the academy as a means of scholarly discourse?

UPDATE: This week, an event has taken place that might have undermined my argument that blogging is scholarship, but I believe it actually underscores it. ScienceBlogs (SB) has come under scrutiny for a move that angered many of its bloggers and brought its credibility into question. Because this event did not pass by unnoticed, but sparked intense debate across the SB blogosphere and beyond, it confirms that blogging is actively monitored and reviewed by an engaged peer community that takes threats to credibility and autonomy very seriously. Read more from the Columbia Journalism Review, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker at MIT, The Guardian’s Science Blog, and Carl Zimmer at The Loom.

As a librarian, my job is to preserve library materials: books, paper items such as posters or hand printed broadsides, and any other paper materials the library has acquired. It’s rewarding. I take a very old and brittle book, carefully mend the broken joints and torn pages, and restore it to usability. This is good in every sense of the word. I’ve had the privilege of handling and restoring books like: The Thanksgiving Visitor (a 1967 edition of 300 signed by the author, Truman Capote); an 1854 printing of The Poetical Works of John Keats and Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman. First of all, something that was damaged has been repaired. Next, we’ve restored the contents of this book for access by library users. And, in a global sense, the intellectual content of this item remains available and accessible for the immediate future. In this form of traditional preservation, we attempt to keep things unchanged.

How should we then approach materials that never existed in print? These would be materials that were “born digital.” Do these materials have the same importance as print materials? Should we attempt to keep these “digital objects” unchanged? The fact is the preservation of digital materials is the opposite of preserving paper materials: Digital objects must be changed to be preserved. Digital media lacks permanence, depends on computer readability, and exists in a variety of formats. This is the future of preservation.

Today, digital materials are being created faster than we can imagine them. In order to preserve these materials, we need better storage media, digital data renewal strategies, and format migration plans. We also need to think about the preservation of our digital objects from the moment of their creation (or before).

There are a number of initiatives that attempt to address the issues of digital preservation:

• National Digital Information Infrastructure & Preservation Program (NDIIPP): The Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation program was established by Congress in 2000 to collect, preserve, and make available digital content.
• National Recording Preservation Act: A bill to maintain and preserve sound recordings and collections of sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. A very innovative program called IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.) has been developed by physicists at the Library of Congress. IRENE uses a camera connected to a computer to visually scan the grooves on vinyl records and wax cylinders. This “hands-off” technique can restore the sound of damaged and fragile sound recordings.
• The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP): A partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of Congress, and state projects to provide enhanced access to United States newspapers published between 1836 and 1922.
• Digitizing American Imprints: A program to digitize thousands of public-domain works, with a major focus on at-risk “brittle books” and U.S. history volumes in The Library of Congress.

These national programs help to move us towards best practices in digital preservation and to think about how we, as individuals and institutions, will preserve our digital materials now and in the future.

In fact, this past week, the Library of Congress has announced it will keep a digital archive of every public tweet that has been broadcast on Twitter since its inception in March 2006. Everyone has seen the rapid adoption of social media. Are these entries and other social media-enabled communication just disposable comments or are they the “primary source materials” of the future?

Today, librarians, archivists, and others are scrambling to restore and preserve sound and print materials from the past. In the future, will these same people be scrambling to recover tweets and posts from today? What significance will social media hold in the future? How do you preserve such fast and fleeting media? What will become of our digital life?

As a library user, you may be familiar with Library of Congress Subject Headings. While the Library of Congress call number tells us where to shelve or locate a book, the subject heading helps describe the content and, in the library catalog, can link a researcher to other titles that share that same subject heading. Library of Congress Subject Headings have been developed over several decades to be standardized and widely applicable and, as such, they are quite extensive and frequently complex. In fact, the library’s cataloging and reference departments have a five volume set, totaling almost 8,000 pages, listing all the possible subject headings. Though subject headings are certainly very useful in research, with an organizational system as complex as the LCSH, flexibility and the ability to reflect contemporary terminology and usage can be a challenge.

In response to this type of complexity, many social and organizational websites are using the folksonomy approach to help users classify and link their own information, which is generally known as “tagging.” In the same way that the LCSH describes content, users can create individualized categories and tags to describe their content in ways that make sense to them and allow them to retrieve that information quickly. Unlike the LCSH, however, there is no standardization, which can make open and public sites more difficult to use, as there is no “quality control.”

Here are a few examples of folksonomies in use:

• Steve.Museum: In this collaborative project, users are able to tag art images with any type of descriptive terms that makes sense to them. The site organizers are interested in understanding how users describe information and use the tags.
• Flickr: Flickr is a well known photo hosting site that allows users to share their photos online. Users can create albums and tag their photos with descriptions that work for their organizational style.
• Flickr: The Commons: In an interesting partnership, Flickr and the Library of Congress have teamed up to allow the public to help identify and annotate images from the Library of Congress’ extensive photo collection.
• Gmail: Unlike other email clients that use folders, Gmail uses tags (or labels) to organize your messages, allowing you to have messages in multiple categories.
• Zotero: A bibliographic storage tool, Zotero makes it easy to download and organize the books, articles and other information that you use for research.

One research aid I would like to discuss in more detail is delicious.com, which is an online bookmarking website. It allows the user to go beyond the traditional features of browser-based bookmarking to create meaningful categories and connections amongst the varieties of information found online.

When you create a bookmark with delicious, you tag it and It is this tagging feature that really makes delicious useful and allows you to customize your bookmark organization. Delicious allows you to create or enter as many or as few tags as you need to describe or categorize a particular bookmark.

One recent example from my own delicious account: I tagged an article, “How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age,” with seven different tags. These tags were based both on the content of the article and how I planned on using it. The content of the article was described by the following tags: teaching, higher_ed, education and research. The tags “librarianship,” “infolit” and “to_read” described the ways I intended to use the article. Thus, depending on my future needs, I have several different ways of getting back to that article. If more information or annotation is desired, there is also a notes field where you can highlight a particular aspect or feature of what you are tagging. If you are like me, and bookmark a lot of things, clarifying why you originally bookmarked that item can be very useful when you return to it at a later time!

Other uses for delicious include:

• RSS: Your delicious page, or even a particular tag, have RSS feeds attached to them. You can use this to pull everything you tag with a particular term into another application, such as a blog or course page. For example, anything I tag with “lib250” (a course I teach) would show up on my course blog for students to see without them having to go to my delicious page.
• Collaboration: Tags can also forward your information to another delicious account. If you are collaborating on a project, you can tag something with “for:accountname” and it will appear in the other person’s list of bookmarks.
• Beyond using your own tags, you also have access to everything else that is tagged by someone with a delicious account. You can go to the delicious homepage and see what is currently being tagged, what the most popular terms are, or what other people have tagged with “funny,” “tutorial” or “design.”

Bookmarking is a basic online task that has been made more useful by new social media features. These features encourage collaboration and, by being “in the cloud,” allow you to access your information anywhere you have an internet connection. How do you see services such as delicious, or the idea of tags in general, changing how you use and share information?

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous (HD30.2 W4516 2007) is an excellent place to start!

In order to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” Congress enacted the first version of the Copyright Act in 1790¹. This act granted exclusive rights to authors to publish and sell copies of maps, books, and charts for a period of 14 years, before passing into the public domain, after which anyone would have the ability to use their material in it’s original form, change it, grow it and advance the culture. The original Copyright Act of 1790 has undergone considerable changes and addendums; the most recent address issues with emerging formats of information dissemination, continuing to define intellectual property, and extending the life of original copyright ownership to it’s current length of “life of the author plus 70 years”. However, the last full revision of The Copyright Act occurred in 1976, long before MP3 files, electronic media, or streaming video. The questions must be asked, then, what is the future of The Copyright Act in the Digital Age? Is the Copyright Act of 1976 still relevant in an era of digital preservation, user-generated content, distance-learning education, and the recent Google Book settlement? Is copying the right metric for judging infringement? Will the Digital Consumer’s Bill of Rights help codify the law with regard to digital uses of content?

The answers to the questions are still unclear. Recent legislation related to copyright has had the effect of increasing rights to copyright holders and limiting rights of those who would use the work. But copyright law still provides for “fair use” which allows for use of material held under copyright as long as certain standards related to the purpose of using the work, the amount of the work users are utilizing, the nature of the work needed, and the effect on the marketplace are met. Even with these 4 standards, there is much left up to interpretation, leaving those who would use others works to advance culture and education to wonder “am I infringing?”

Even in the realm of education, which copyright law recognizes as a legitimate use of copyrighted materials (provided the other three provisions are also met), there are limits to an educator’s ability to use the work of others to forward knowledge. In order to have material “copied” in course reserves, or in course management software, faculty or librarians need to ensure that copyright guidelines are not ignored. Copyright holders believe copyright payments should be made to the rightsholders when putting materials in coursepacks that are used indefinitely. Currently, in the case against Georgia State University, three publishers are suing the University for putting material up on electronic reserves without paying for copyright. Georgia State University asserts that the use of this material is completely within the bounds of “fair use.” Who will win in this important question? The jury is literally still out. Stay tuned.

¹ “The Constitution of the United States,” Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.

Discoverability of research is vital to scholarship and the expansion of knowledge. Expectations for access to scholarly publications are changing. Are your publications optimized for maximum reach and impact?

As published research output increasingly becomes digitally delivered, expectations for easy access are the new norm. While faculty and students affiliated with large universities and colleges are typically able to access the full text of needed research outputs through electronic journals and ebooks with minimal clicks, researchers at smaller institutions or independent research firms are more likely to encounter barriers. Although there are options to gain access, many researchers have neither the time nor money to pursue access for an article or book that only might be beneficial to their scholarship.

As a scholarship producer, you have the power to lower or remove access barriers to your published research. Many publishers automatically allow authors to post the peer-reviewed-but-not-copyedited version of their papers on individual and institutional websites. Some publishers allow authors to archive those versions in subject or institutional repositories, such as arXiv or PubMed Central. Other publishers allow you to keep your copyrights and retain control over the final published version of your article by publishing under an open access model. For consultations on maximizing research accessibility, you can contact the Scholarly Communication Librarian.

Resources exist to help you determine what rights you have as an author when publishing in a particular journal, as well as to help you ask for rights you don’t already have or to find more rights-friendly publication venues.

• SHERPA/RoMEO: database of author permissions normally granted in publication agreements; searchable by journal or publisher name; provides information on funder archiving requirements and author archiving allowances
• DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals: search for free, full-text journals to find scholarship or explore publication venues
• SPARC Author Rights: information on how to negotiate for author rights when publishing using the SPARC Author Addendum
• Open Access Guide: resource guide on all things open access, including initiatives happening at Wake Forest University

Easy access to the full text of published research is not only desired, but by many is already expected. Researchers have unequivocally stated that if they cannot get access on the first couple of clicks, they move on. You do not want your research to be bypassed due to access barriers. Might you alter your publication strategies to ensure broader access?

Archival resources are more important than ever for research and instruction. Even as we discuss the future of information and libraries, historical research remains a necessary foundation for successful scholarly work.

Have you ever been in a class where your professor requires at least one “primary source” reference? Have you wondered about where to find the personal papers, manuscripts, maps, historical photographs, ephemera, or books of a person, company, community, or historic period? You may discover that history is rooted in what is documented in the historic record. Technology has made historical research easier, by allowing us to search inventories of collections (also known as finding aids), view digital images of records, objects, and artifacts, and create and archive born-digital records. Nothing says you did your research like an image or quote from the original source!

For faculty, teaching and encouraging historical research methods help students understand the origins of theory and practice in nearly every field. Because of the variety of archival materials available for research through the web, students can quickly engage with human experience and culture. Subject-based repositories and global catalogs make it easy to discover archival resources such as finding aids and digitized items. If you are interested in a demonstration of research using rare books or manuscripts, or how to research these online, contact Special Collections and Archives.

There are many places to search for archival resources. Some are local, but millions of records and digital objects can be explored online.

• ArchiveGrid: Search collection inventories (finding aids) using ArchiveGrid, then connect directly to the inventories and contact information for thousands of special collections and archives institutions around the world.
• OAIster (via WorldCat): Use “advanced search” on WorldCat or go directly to OAIster to search over 23 million open-source digital resources contributed by over a thousand global institutions.
• Internet Archive: More than their famous “Wayback Machine” that archive websites, the Internet Archive is an open-source archive of music, video, texts, and images that has partnered with institutions from the Library of Congress to the National Science Foundation.
• Search for a subject- or historic period- themed online archive, such as the Walt Whitman Archive, the Civil Rights Digital Library, or the Online Archive of California.

Increasingly, the unique collections of libraries, archives, and museums can be discovered and interacted with online. As we find ways to make these archival resources available through description and digitization, questions about preservation and access to born-digital resources (our future archival resources) are not far behind. How do you see yourself using archives and special collections for your work?

Video is popular. In fact, in December, more online video was consumed by Americans than any other month in history.

As a professor, you might want to use video from the web for your course. Videos can help engage your students by appealing to multiple learning styles. You can reinforce your message by bringing in video of other experts discussing the same content your class is discussing. Assigning video between class sessions can free up in-class time for more active learning exercises or class discussion. There are many potential benefits of incorporating video into your class. If you have questions or you are interested in a workshop for your department, you can contact the Instructional Design Librarian.

As a student, you might want to use videos as resources for your assignments. As the content quality of video on the web increases, some serve as good primary source material or can provide other good supporting research for your work. Some class presentations require visual components, and you might even find that some of your professors will accept a short video clip.

Luckily, there are several good resources out there to support your work, whether you’re teaching or learning.

• Academic Earth: Contains video of lecture from Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, MIT, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, Yale. You can browse on subjects, universities, instructors, or playlists as well as doing more advanced searching.
• Hulu (PBS and other programming): Hulu streamlines your ability to watch television online. Some shows stream directly from the site. Other times (as is the case with some PBS programming) Hulu redirects you to the website that contains the video.
• OpenCourseWare by MIT and others: OpenCourseWare follows similar principles to Open Access publishing, if you are familiar with that concept. In this case, content creators allow their intellectual property to be available online for others to use. Many times, this includes videos of lectures and other course content.
• TED Talks: An acronym for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, TED brings together leaders on a number of topics to give short talks (no longer than 18 minutes) on their subject of expertise. These highly engaging talks range in topics from the arts to the sciences.

In many of the above cases, you can actually embed the video you’re using in your Blackboard, Sakai, or other course website. If you have questions about this, we’re happy to help!

Video is clearly gaining popularity and is easier to work with than ever before. As online video becomes more mainstream, we can anticipate increased popularity in the classroom as well. Do you think this technology has the potential to enhance your classes?