...The beneficial potential for open networks and scholarship has been widely noted for years.
However, for all this potential to be realized, the Web has to be seen as a content management system – a knowledge web – and not simply a vast forest of web pages and hyperlinks....
A knowledge web needs to be capable of much more than linking and searching. It asks for more power in the individual link, and requires different balances between fragility and durability, allowing, for example, content “genealogy” – who had an idea first, and where? It also asks for new writing methodologies. How do we replicate the writing methodology we observe in Wikipedia in order to connect a huge diversity of scientific information and, by doing that, generate knowledge? E-writing is very different than traditional scholarly writing, and scholars need to utilize these new writing methodologies as well as emerging infrastructures such as the semantic web or features such as annotations....
We also need to contextualize the incentives of scholars in the knowledge web....Thus, new impact factors also need to be developed if we want to see the full potential of the knowledge web realized*. Some help on this discussion is coming from the Open Access movement, which recommends, for example, requiring links to scholars’ online publications as a new field in the road for tenure....
One of the main elements of transfer of scholarly knowledge – peer reviewed papers - represents the biggest failure to make the leap to the web. While journals have migrated to the Web, they are just digitized version of paper. They are not “becoming digital”. The PDF versions of “papers’ are amorphous objects that promote cross-platform human readability but restrict machine readability such as text mining, semantic indexing, hyper-linking and direct integration with databases.
As noted by John Wilbanks: “… the human-readable paper is the least valuable format of knowledge from a cyberinfrastructure perspective.” To be integrated in the generative knowledge web “ we have to understand a important conceptual transformation that knowledge itself needs to be treated as something similar to software, something upon which computing happens and depends - and the implications of that transformation.” ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/11/2009 01:26:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
