{"id":645,"date":"2019-10-23T11:24:41","date_gmt":"2019-10-23T09:24:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dariahopen.hypotheses.org\/?p=645"},"modified":"2025-11-04T18:04:56","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T16:04:56","slug":"laying-the-pavement-where-people-actually-walk-thoughts-on-our-chances-of-bringing-scholarship-back-to-the-heart-of-scholarly-communication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dariahopen.hypotheses.org\/645","title":{"rendered":"Laying the Pavement Where People Actually Walk: Thoughts on Our Chances of Bringing Scholarship Back to the Heart of Scholarly Communication"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Recently, the ScholarLed<\/a> team invited me to contribute to their blog post collection<\/a> celebrating Open Access Week 2019. It was my pleasure to share some of my thoughts on the conflict between the richness of contemporary scholarship and the prestige economy that defines our current academic evaluation culture. You can also read the post here on DARIAHOpen or on ScholarLed’s blog<\/a> together with the other pieces of the collection. In our last Open Access week post on Friday, we take the chance to bring you closer to the initiative. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walking the cities of the world, we can see two types of urban landscape. The first one is structured by pavements complemented by community-beaten, unpaved tracks that residents are actually using to reach their goals. In the second type, there is no such disharmony. Instead, we can see that the walkways were designed by observing which tracks people use, and only then paving those, or else by keeping an eye on whether the paved routes still provide the best service for everyday traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Image source: Google Maps from Vahidi et al. 2015.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In\n this post, I wish to point out that in present-day scholarly \ncommunication, we suffer from a similar sort of dysfunctionality to that\n present in the first type of landscape. What follows are casual \nwonderings about how to prevent scholars having to duplicate their walks\n on both paved and unpaved paths; what are our chances of better \naligning the paved and unpaved routes, or, in other words, what are our \noptions to reduce the gap between established, \u2018paved\u2019 practices of \nscholarly communication and actual, evolving research practices? My \nthoughts are situated in the contexts of arts and humanities research, \nbut similar phenomena are surely present in other disciplines as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why scholars go off-track<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The\n major tension that probably drives more and more scholars to go \noff-track and experiment with novel means of disseminating their \nresearch lies between the inherent, extreme diversity in present-day \nknowledge creation practices, versus the relative rigidity of the \nregular publishing mechanisms that have been shaped by the printing \npress. Clearly, while legacy forms, classic book and journal publication\n and their digital simulations are and will remain perfectly suitable \nfor certain forms of scholarship,an increasing number \nof scholars are struggling to communicate their research results in ways\n that truly align with their digital research workflows. In an arts and \nhumanities context, this is especially true for scholars working with \nDigital Humanities methods and tools, or with formats such as the \ndigital scholarly edition. These are important for the scholarly \ncommunity, but they cannot fit in the boxes provided by conventional \nunits of scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real beauty of  efforts to bring \ninnovation to scholarly communication is that they stem naturally from \nthe realities of research and from its continuous advancement. For \ninstance, even if such contributions remain out of the scope of a \nconventional publication record, scholars will still continue to explore\n the most innovative ways of creating digital editions or archival \nresearch guides. This is simply because making cultural resources \navailable in digital and structured formats is a prerequisite for \npresent-day arts and humanities research and is also an important \nscholarly activity in itself. Similarly, mediating scholarship through \nrich multimedia: videos, virtual exhibitions, interactive or even \nimmersive technologies such as VR; using newly emerging narrative tools \nsuch as forking history, research notebooks or elegant data \nvisualizations built on the top of scholarly databases; or sharing \nwell-documented codes on gitHub or GitLab, make it far easier for \nscholars to uncover complete epistemological processes and allow others \nto interact with their scholarship in-depth, to reuse parts of it or \neven to build new things on top of it. All these innovations offer great\n advantages to scholars seeking to communicate their research more \nvividly and comprehensively and thereby improve the quality of their \nwork.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Source: Twitter<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

If research realities stray from the prescribed formats, why, then, are scholars still driven back to the paved pathways?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In\n the light of all the possibilities inherent in these newly emerging, \nfit-for-research dissemination practices, it seems much less \nself-explanatory why scholars must still turn back at a certain point, \nto double the length of their walk by travelling along the paper-centric\n publishing routes that cannot always fully accommodate the wealth of \ntheir scholarly work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer, as we all know, lies in the ways\n in which research is transformed into capital (symbolic or literal) in \npresent-day academia. As Martin Paul Eve puts it in his recent preprint,\n Violins in the Subway: Scarcity Correlations, Evaluative Cultures, and Disciplinary Authority in the Digital Humanities<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cDigital\n humanists find, time and time again, that they are expected to perform \ntwice the labour of traditional scholars; once for the work itself and \nonce again for its evaluation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Journal and book \npublications still well-serve as long established, standardized units of\n scholarly outputs that easily recognised by research assessment panels,\n especially if published in prestigious publication venues with long \ntraditions. Within such an assessment process, which is severely \nconstrained by proxies that reward only certain publication types and \nbrands, the novel digital scholarly objects that organically grow out of\n present-day research practices will remain simply by-products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This\n forces us to face a quite unsettling gap between the realities of \nresearch in the digital era and the realities of of the research \nevaluation system. That is, while maintaining a classical and \nprestigious publication record seems to be an essential prerequisite for\n scholars to continue their work, the innovative dissemination practices\n mentioned above are essential for the well-being and advancement of \nscholarship itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This situation results in many bizarre and \nanomalous scholarly communication episodes, which we can observe day by \nday: such as authors\u2019 witty meta-reflections on the often \nmulti-year-long publication processes and the simultaneous advancements \nin their field between submission and publication, or the struggle of \ntenure-track candidates to fit all their scholarly production into a \nthick paper dossier.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Source: Twitter<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Such\n examples clearly indicate the split between publication practices and \nthe practices of actual communication that allow immediate online \navailability of research results, swift responses to current events and \ninteractivity with the reader. Such real-time exchanges often get \ncrowded out to GitHub repositories, blogs, academic Twitter, and other \ninformal communication spaces, which yet remain invisible for the \npurposes of research assessment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luckily, and importantly, this \nsituation doesn\u2019t fully prevent all the exciting practices associated \nwith open access and research innovation. Experimental book publications\n and enhanced monographs provide us with a range of examples to \nillustrate how long forms of scholarship can be expanded to accommodate multimedia<\/a>, interactive maps<\/a>,\n 3D visualizations, data — basically, anything arts and humanities \nscholars work with. For instance, by linking back to primary resources, \nwe can transparently show where the source is, where our enrichments or \narguments start, what are the potential ambiguities in the materials — \nall of these open a much broader window on our fields of inquiry. Some \nof the bolder experiments<\/a>\n are really pushing the boundaries of what we can conceive as the \nscholarly monograph and transform it into living scholarship that \ndynamically develops even after publication. The production of such \nworks is a long way from being available on a mass scale, not only \nbecause of  financial or infrastructural constraints, but also because \nof the relative lack of an evaluative culture around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\n are our chances of better aligning the paved and unpaved routes, and \nturning the current landscape into a place that works for all kinds of \nscholarship?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

1. Breaking the vicious circle of \nresearch evaluation and empowering emerging evaluative cultures around \ninnovative forms of scholarship<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paving those routes that \nthe different disciplinary communities actually walk, while also opening\n them to the public, is admittedly a complex task. One key step towards \nreducing the gap between recognized formats of scholarly communication, \nand innovative research practices, would be to empower emerging \nevaluation cultures around such practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Digital Scholarly Editing: Theory, Practice, Methods<\/em> conference (October 2016, Anvers, Belgium), Anne Baillot opened her talk<\/a> with the following lines:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cImagine\n if you were to stop being first and foremost a scholar for a little \nwhile in order to take a job in which you could do something that would \nbe useful not just to your personal career, but to the whole scholarly \ncommunity. What would be the focus, what would seem most useful to you?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Asking\n (from time to time) the exact same question of disciplinary communities\n would certainly end by efficiently paving the way towards pilot \nframeworks for the appropriate crediting of new contribution types that \nare relevant to their activities. Still, as we see, the need for a \ncultural shift in research evaluation is currently stuck in a vicious \ncycle. As long as scholarly communication practices are trapped by \nresearch evaluation criteria that are dominated by the prestige economy,\n such community-driven innovations and efforts will remain strongly \ndisincentivised. As a result, they will not grow sufficiently to inform \nresearch organisations, funders and policy-makers about alternative \nproxies that could replace the current harmful system. One way to break \nthis vicious cycle would be to achieve synchrony by incentivizing \nscholarly communities to invest into such new certification systems and,\n on the other hand, incentivizing their institutions and funders to \nlisten to them and trust them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Collectively investing in \u2018safe places\u2019 for scholarship<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

However,\n scholars are not only exposed to systemic impediments inherent in the \ncurrent evaluation proxies; they are also dependent on the \ninfrastructure that determines where their work is published, stored, \ndisseminated and preserved. Their connection to and involvement in the \ndevelopment of collectively maintained public services, networks and \nplatforms that embrace new modes of production is therefore crucial: it \nempowers them to seek a path that suits their own research questions and\n practices, rather than following the routes set by the legacy formats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developments in research infrastructure can create such \u2018safe places\u2019 for scholarship. This broad term covers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n