Digital Humanities and the State of Scholarly Communication

Jeri E. Wieringa
 Digital Publishing Production Lead with Mason Publishing Group,
George Mason University Libraries

image source: https://library.uwinnipeg.ca/scholarly-communication/index.html
Framing inspired by Isabel Galina Russell, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

What is Publishing?

The action of making something publicly known...

- Oxford English Dictionary

Shifting Economies

Print-based publishing operates within an economics of scarcity, with its systems determined largely by the fact that a limited number of pages, journals, and books can be produced ... Electronic publishing faces no such material scarcity...

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence,

Ch. 1, pp. 37-38 (print)

Tensions in the Publishing World

• Open Access and Control of Content
• Alternative Business Models

Open Access & Distribution

• Assessing copyright of your publications
  • Sherpa Romeo

• Distributing what you can
  • Institutional Repositories
  • Subject Repositories
  • Personal Sites

Alternative Licenses: Creative Commons

• CC-BY : Attribution
• CC-BY-NC : Attribution, Non-Commercial
• CC-BY-ND : Attribution, No Derivatives
• CC-BY-SA : Attribution, Share-Alike

https://creativecommons.org/

New Models:
Open Monographs

Suite of studies, funded by Mellon, on the costs of monograph publishing and alternative models.

http://sr.ithaka.org/?p=276785

Direct Author Subventions at University of Michigan and Indiana University

http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/113671

image source: https://library.uwinnipeg.ca/scholarly-communication/index.html
Framing inspired by Isabel Galina Russell, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Shifting Economies

However, in a self-multiplying scholarly commons ... what remains scarce are time and attention.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence,

Ch. 1, pp. 37-38 (print)

Post-Publication Models: PressForward

• Addressing the problem of an abundance of distributed scholarship produced on individual websites.

• Bringing the "journal" to the scholarship, rather than the scholarship to the journal.

Gathering and Selecting Content

Discovery through Aggregation

Rise of open networks for indexing and discoverability of distributed content:

• Digital Public Library of America
• SHARE Network

image source: https://library.uwinnipeg.ca/scholarly-communication/index.html
Framing inspired by Isabel Galina Russell, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Peer Review

Who should provide evaluation / gatekeeping and when?

• Open Peer Review
• Post-Publication Review
• Review through Data Analytics

Shift to "Altmetrics"

How can we assess the importance (influence) of a piece of scholarship?

• Reputation of the Journal?
• Use by popular and scholarly audiences?

Things to Consider:

• Who is making the decisions regarding how "impact" is measured?
• What types of data points are counted? What isn't counted?
• To what end?

Look Behind the Curtain:

https://www.altmetric.com/products/free-tools/bookmarklet/

image source: https://library.uwinnipeg.ca/scholarly-communication/index.html
Framing inspired by Isabel Galina Russell, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Thank you!