Scholarly Communications: Using big words to do things right

On Academic Evolution, Gideon Burton's recent blog entry is about the changing nature of scholarly publishing and why scholarly communications should be integrated into the cyberinfrastructure. His post mentions the necessary paradigm shift that must happen in order to do this. Throwing out "paradigm shift" and "cyberinfrastructure" all over the place, Burton uses big words and ideas to illustrate the basic point: scholarly publishing must change.

In his brief literature review, Burton mentions some of the documents we've read for class, such as the NSF report and Christine Borgman's book, Scholarship in the Digital Age, as important resources and foundations to the ideas of cyberinfrastructure. He thinks all scholars should think about these issues because scholarship is becoming more interdisciplinary and collaborative. The amount of data and how it's being used are also reasons everyone should care about cyberinfrastructure.

Building on a past blog entry, Scholarly Communications must be Syndicated, Burton states that traditional print journals are becoming increasingly outdated due to their "static and isolated nature" when compared to linking, rich media, etc. of digital communications. He suggests syndicating scholarly communications, making it as easy as getting updates from a favorite blog. In the Big Word shout-out, Burton states, in the earlier post, that "the print paradigm cannot win against the ease of use and the timeliness of RSS-supplied content" and "what is starting to matter most with scholarly work does not align neatly with those quantifiables of the print paradigm, publications in scholarly journals" (in the most recent entry). Information sharing will come through different modes, from social media to research tools.

A main point Burton makes is that new attitudes within digital scholarly communications will value the building of an cyberinfrastructure, not just what the infrastructure holds and its interpretive possibilities. Burton discusses how Perseus and related projects help the evolution of cyberinfrastructure to organize accessible information, just as scholars use previous works upon which to build their research. This echoes Borgman's discussion of "infrastructure for information" and not "infrastructure of information" (p42).

I especially like that Burton mentions these issues are beyond technical concerns, that curating, organizing, and hosting are larger issues, which I include in 'cyberinfrastructure'. I also hadn't considered cyberinfrastructure as scholarly communication previously, but do buy Burton's argument that projects that do it right are creating important research and 'publications' (in the very new paradigm-shifting sense). While the technical aspects of these topics overwhelm me at times, I can understand the need for good cyberinfrastructure (since we've all seen bad examples), and I like that Burton pushes the scholarly community - the authors themselves - to understand this as well.