Digital Scholarly Communication Projects List

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I did an independent research project last spring about new forms of scholarly communication. In the spirit of academic sharing, here's my googledocs spreadsheet with about 75 or so different projects I found and related notes. Halfway through the semester I decided that there was too much to talk about with any depth, so I narrowed my project to be about emerging forms of peer review. I discussed things like rating systems, online comments, different kinds of blinded review, and legitimization and trust. I think the conclusion of the paper was a little weak because it turns out (gasp!) that the promotion and tenure system isn't really capable of handling new forms of peer review. I came to realize that the projects in the spreadsheet containing some element of peer review, whether formal (formal as in, I guess, journal sanctioned) or informal, are really just isolated experiments without any measurable influence in the larger scheme of things. It would have been more useful if I had been able to talk to some of the people that contribute to these projects to see if they found them valuable or not. Here are a few selected projects you guys might be interested in.

• gpeerreview: Google's unfinished answer to peer review, involving getting endorsements from "endorsement organizations," graphing those endorsements, and then providing some kind of credibility ranking
• Faculty of 1000: online research tool that highlights the most interesting papers in biology, based on the recommendations of over 1000 "leading scientists"
• MONK: an open source "digital environment" that humanities scholars can use to analyze patterns in texts
• www.myexperiment.org: scientists contribute their scientific workflows (I assume this is like sharing their lab notebooks) so that others can use them, also see UsefulChem
• SciLink: Facebook for scientists, but instead of using email contacts to mine your connections like Facebook does, it uses bibliographies from articles