Trust in the Digital Age

The article I read for this week is called “ A Question of Trust” and it centers on one of the issues which have come to the fore in push into digital collections for science publishing: how to handle the publishing of scholarly papers.

At first blush the process seems simple enough. Create a collection that is accessible and allow people to publish to it. This is a VERY simplified version of what happens at several collections such as Cornell universities preprint publishing site arXiv. This the content of this site is moderated by groups who ensure that certain standards are met by the work but none of the articles are peer reviewed at the time of submission or perhaps at any time after.

The Peer Review Process is one of the journal publishing business key claims to adding value to the system. They use this process as a means to justify status quo of a small number of publishing houses charging exorbitant rates to universities so that these universities can have access to the very research that is being done in their schools.

This leads to one of the central questions that we as digital curators must face how does one establish “trust” in the digital world. The blog posits a novel solution that stems from another area of dubious trust the ever maligned Wikipedia. By borrowing from the Wikipedians a system for color coding accuracy based on the prior record of the editor.

The key that the author has honed in on is that this system will allow those who take the time and review article to establish a certain amount of “Trust Metric” which can be capitalized on in the field. And by this I do not mean sold I mean the editor can use this metric as a descriptor to the quality of work they can produce.

This sort of ground up accreditation provides impetus for the system to change. The systemic issues that stand as road blocks in the path of an open digital model of scholarly communication largely exist because there is no clear financial reward or gain for doing things differently. This method is one piece of the puzzle which after modification could clear the path and help create a new model for scholarly debate.