Academic Evolution

Scholarly Communications must Transform

I got this series of articles from the blog "Academic Evolution"; Gideon Burton, the author of the blog itself, has written a series of articles discussing how and why scholarly communication needs to undergo a radical transformation in order to remain useful and "alive" as we enter the digital age. The series focuses on ways that scholarly communication must change in order to "keep up with the Joneses," so to say. Burton picks openness, standard compliance and syndication as three major areas in need of development.

Burton started out with outlining the traditional method of scholarly communication and discussing how academia is eager to join the digital environment as its potential for elevating the level of scholarship is so possible and evident; however the openness of the digital culture and the exclusiveness of traditional scholarly communication are at odds with one another. Burton maintains that the online/digital environment is fast becoming the new and accepted method of dispensing information in the future and that if academia wants to maintain its current exalted position in the information world, then some major changes in scholarly communication will have to take place.

The first area that Burton tackles is the idea of openess; he lists areas where openness is needed

• Open Access
• Open Review
• Open Dialogue
• Open Process
• Open Formats
• Open Data

These are all areas where traditional scholarly communication are known for their exclusivity and, according to Burton, greater transparency and flexibility needs to become an accepted characteristic within the academic publishing world if they are going to join the digital environment.

The second area that Burton focuses on standards compliabilty. He maintains that, due to the rise of the semantic web and increased demands of interoperability, information will have to become "format agnostic," in other words, be independent of format but be formattable for the semantic web.

The third area of change that scholarly communication needs to undergo is syndication. The presence of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) ensures that information can be easily disseminated quickly and effortlessly to a large group of people. Burton suggests that scholarly communication needs to be syndicated in order to gain its audience and create dialogue which in turn, inspires new areas of thought, discoveries, new insight.

The way that Burton's series of articles on transforming scholarly communication directly applies to our in-class materials is that it, like most of the other articles, explores the difference between print sources and digital sources and examines the long term ramifications of the changing format of information.