After tracing the history of Western academic publishing, the authors argue for new ways of disseminating academic research, including mediums that are dynamic and collaborative. This type of dissemination would place more focus on the process and open endedness of academic findings and publishing.
Tracing the historical beginnings of academic publishing, the authors are able to clearly argue for a change in academic publishing and research dissemination. We’ve moved beyond a print era of publishing and instead of trying to force old styles of print media onto the virtual platforms, the authors argue we should use these platforms to rethink the publishing process, making it more dynamic and collaborative.
“Publishing preprints, postprints, or even the peer-review process allows the tracking of the development of a final version of a scholarly article” “Its impact is measured by counting the amount of citations to it, references which result at article level … it remains unclear as to whether the article is referenced as a citation within the introduction, a reference to similar ‘Material and Methods,’ or whether the cited article is being disputed in the discussion” The production process is not visible to the reader … currently, final versions of scholarly publications
In terms of experimental and installation ethnography, this text encourages a dynamic approach to research dissemination. Thinking in these terms, then, how could our installation be constantly changing? How much of the process are we willing to reveal publicly? With their conversation on social networking systems, these authors seem to prioritize conversation with different groups of people. This could help us think of different iterations of the same project. Who’s our audience? Do we have multiple audiences? How could they be in conversation with each other?
Lambert Heller: He is an open research infrastructures specialist and a librarian (LIS master’s degree from Humboldt University, Berlin). He started TIB’s Open Science Lab in 2013. His work centers on research infrastructures and cultural heritage institutions, and how they change and grow in a networked, globalized world.
Heller, Lambert, Ronald The & Sönke Bartling 2014. “Dynamic Publication Formats and Collaborative Authoring.” Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing. Springer International Publishing. http://book.openingscience.org.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/vision/dynamic_publication_formats.html.
Springer International Publishing published the book Opening Science in January 2014. The content of the book is Open Access with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license. The website in which the text is embedded is intended for collection of comments and revisions of the book chapters as the text evolves. The text is formatted in Markdown, is converted into HTML by the Pandoc document converter and the Jekyll static site generator, and all files are stored in git version control and hosted on Github.
In contrast to traditional printed journals that are closely bound to the medium of paper, static and lacking the ability to be revised over time, the authors seek to depict the potentials of Dynamic Publication Formats and to analyze the necessary prerequisites needed to implement them. The authors argue that dynamic publication formats will enable bodies of text, graphics, and rich media to be changed quickly and easily while still being available to a wide audience.
The authors begin by depicting the traditional path along which scholarly publications tread, critiquing such issues as the need to publish new editions and articles when new evidence is found, the lack of context for citations, and the retraction of articles/books due to scientific misconduct. The authors present the issues involved with current publications systems and how they impede on the pursuit of dynamic knowledge creation processes.
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