EN

Openness as social praxis

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Matthew Longshore Smith, Ruhiya Seward

Since the early 2000s, there has been an explosion in the usage of the term open, arguably stemming from the advent of networked technologies — including the Internet and mobile technologies.

‘Openness’ seems to be everywhere, and takes many forms: from open knowledge, open education, open data and open science, to open Internet, open medical records systems and open innovation. These applications of openness are having a profound, and sometimes transformative, effect on social, political and economic life.

This explosion of the use of the term has led to multiple interpretations, ambiguities, and even misunderstandings, not to mention countless debates and disagreements over precise definitions.

The paper “Fifty shades of open” by Pomerantz and Peek (2016) highlighted the increasing ambiguity and even confusion surrounding this term. This article builds on Pomerantz and Peek’s attempt to disambiguate the term by offering an alternative understanding to openness — that of social praxis.

More specifically, our framing can be broken down into three social processes: open production, open distribution, and open consumption. Each process shares two traits that make them open: you don’t have to pay (free price), and anyone can participate (non-discrimination) in these processes.

We argue that conceptualizing openness as social praxis offers several benefits. First, it provides a way out of a variety of problems that result from ambiguities and misunderstandings that emerge from the current multitude of uses of openness.

Second, it provides a contextually sensitive understanding of openness that allows space for the many different ways openness is experienced — often very different from the way that more formal definitions conceptualize it.

Third, it points us towards an approach to developing practice-specific theory that we believe helps us build generalizable knowledge on what works (or not), for whom, and in what contexts.

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7073

FR

Introduction à l’écrilecture scientifique et aux modalités techniques de son augmentation

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : Evelyne Broudoux, Gérald Kembellec

L’objectif de cette introduction est de placer l’écrilecture numérique dans le contexte des humanités numériques afin de mieux saisir l’ancrage de ce procédé comme partie prenante de cette mise en mouvement disciplinaire.

L’écrilecture, y compris scientifique, est une pratique ancienne dont les procédés évoluent en même temps que les outils et qui structure la réflexion de générations de penseurs.

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01494369

FR

Enjeux des « revues hypermédiatisées » pour l’édition scientifique

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : Lise Verlaet, Hans Dillaerts

Au sein de cet article nous nous intéresserons aux nouvelles formes de revues scientifiques numériques. Les mutations induites par le numérique ont en effet un impact fondamental sur le secteur de la communication scientifique (Dillaerts, 2012).

Comme nous le démontrerons dans une première partie à travers l’exposé de l’état de l’art, ces dernières se limitent bien souvent dans un premier temps à une simple transposition de la version papier. Toutefois de nouveaux modèles de diffusion sont apparus, notamment le Libre Accès (accès gratuit avec la possibilité de réutiliser et redistribuer l’article) ou encore la science ouverte laquelle prône une démarche scientifique ouverte, des modèles de peer review innovants (open peer review et les méga-revues).

Fort de ces observations et constats, nous développerons ensuite le concept de « revue hypermédiatisée » que nous présenterons au regard du développement de la revue COSSI (Communication, Organisation, Société du Savoir et Information). Inspiré de l’idée de « site médiateur » (Davallon & Jeanneret, 2004), une revue hypermédiatisée propose une redocumentarisation (Pédauque, 2006 ; Salaün, 2007) de son corpus pour en dégager un sens inédit.

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01476924

 

EN

“Facebook for Academics”: The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic on Academia.edu

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Brooke Erin Duffy, Jefferson Pooley

Given widespread labor market precarity, contemporary workers—especially those in the media and creative industries—are increasingly called upon to brand themselves. Academics, we contend, are experiencing a parallel pressure to engage in self-promotional practices, particularly as universities become progressively more market-driven.

Academia.edu, a paper-sharing social network that has been informally dubbed “Facebook for academics,” has grown rapidly by adopting many of the conventions of popular social media sites.

This article argues that the astonishing uptake of Academia.edu both reflects and amplifies the self-branding imperatives that many academics experience. Drawing on Academia.edu’s corporate history, design decisions, and marketing communications, we analyze two overlapping facets of Academia.edu: (1) the site’s business model and (2) its social affordances.

We contend that the company, like mainstream social networks, harnesses the content and immaterial labor of users under the guise of “sharing.” In addition, the site’s fixation on analytics reinforces a culture of incessant self-monitoring—one already encouraged by university policies to measure quantifiable impact.

We conclude by identifying the stakes for academic life, when entrepreneurial and self-promotional demands brush up against the university’s knowledge-making ideals.

URL : “Facebook for Academics”: The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic on Academia.edu

DOI : https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:11561

EN

Bibliodebout: a collaborative library in a social movement

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Raphaëlle Bats, Marilou Pain

An unexpected political mobilisation leads to the occupation of a large number of public squares in French cities from the end of March to July 2016. In those Nuits Debout, a collective starts up BiblioDebout, a participative library working on a gift basis.

Trough participative observations and text analysis of the collective’s mailing lists, this paper studies how BiblioDebout expresses a specific relationship between knowledge and power, and, therefore, emancipation.

BiblioDebout is utopian, egalitarian, emotional and experimental, and so on could be an inspiration for public libraries willing to renew with their political vocation.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01496139

EN

Organization and Delivery of Scholarly Communications Services by Academic and Research Libraries in the United Kingdom: Observations from Across the Pond

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author: Christine Fruin

INTRODUCTION

The U.K. library community has implemented collaborative strategies in key scholarly communication areas such as open access mandate compliance, and U.S. librarians could benefit from learning in greater detail about the practices and experiences of U.K. libraries with respect to how they have organized scholarly communication services.

METHODS

In order to better understand the scholarly communication activities in U.K. academic and research libraries, and how U.S. libraries could apply that experience in the context of their own priorities, an environmental scan via a survey of U.K. research libraries and in-person interviews were conducted.

RESULTS

U.K. libraries concentrate their scholarly communication services on supporting compliance with open access mandates and in the development of new services that reflect libraries’ shifting role from information consumer to information producer.

DISCUSSION 

Due to the difference in the requirements of open access mandates in the U.K. as compared to the U.S., scholarly communication services in the U.K. are more focused on supporting compliance efforts. U.S. libraries engage more actively in providing copyright education and consultation than U.K. libraries. Both U.K. and U.S. libraries have developed new services in the areas of research data management and library publishing.

CONCLUSION

There are three primary takeaways from the experience of U.K. scholarly communication practitioners for U.S. librarians: increase collaboration with offices of research, reconsider current organization and delegation of scholarly communication services, and increase involvement in legislative and policy-making activity in the U.S. with respect to access to research.

URL : Organization and Delivery of Scholarly Communications Services by Academic and Research Libraries in the United Kingdom: Observations from Across the Pond

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2157

 

EN

Amending Published Articles: Time To Rethink Retractions And Corrections?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Virginia Barbour, Theo Bloom, Jennifer Lin, Elizabeth
Moylan

Academic publishing is evolving and our current system of correcting research post-publication is failing, both ideologically and practically. It does not encourage researchers to engage in consistent post-publication changes.

Worse yet, post-publication « updates » are misconstrued as punishments or admissions of guilt. We propose a different model that publishers of research can apply to the content they publish, ensuring that any post-publication amendments are seamless, transparent and propagated to all the countless places online where descriptions of research appear.

At the center, the neutral term « amendment » describes all forms of post-publication change to an article. We lay out a straightforward and consistent process that applies to each of the three types of amendments: insubstantial, substantial, and complete.

This proposed system supports the dynamic nature of the research process itself as researchers continue to refine or extend the work, removing the emotive climate particularly associated with retractions and corrections to published work.

It allows researchers to cite and share the correct versions of articles with certainty, and for decision makers to have access to the most up to date information.

URL : Amending Published Articles: Time To Rethink Retractions And Corrections?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/118356