Transcript Cyberinfrastructure - Cornell University

The New Kaleidoscope of
Scholarly Communication
Cornell University
June 7, 2007
Ithaca, New York
Steven Wheatley
Vice President
American Council of Learned Societies
Our Cultural Commonwealth, 2006
Four score and seven years ago
(4 x 20 = 80 + 7 = 87)
Our
Fathers
Parents
Founders brought forth upon
this continent
• new nation
• liberty
• created equal
Problems of Scholarly Publishing,
1959
Problems of Scholarly Publishing,
1959
Conclusions:
• Scholarly publishing is not and cannot
realistically be expected to be selfsupporting
• The uncomplicated scholarly manuscript of
good quality will find a publisher
Problems of Scholarly Publishing,
1959
But certain kinds of manuscripts will have
difficulties:
•
•
•
•
Highly specialized
Too long as an article/ too short as a book
Using specialized materials
The scholarly tool work
Problems of Scholarly Publishing,
1959
Solutions:
• Technology: micropublication, XeroX
• Funding: “the provision of
appropriately administered funds.
[from] the generosity of one or more
of the philanthropic foundations. . .”
On Research Libraries, 1967
On Research Libraries, 1967
“American research libraries . . .are all
faced with refractory problems that
impede their satisfactory
performance.” p. xiv
On Research Libraries, 1967
Problems:
• Inadequate bibliographic apparatus
• Inadequate funding
• Automation (“both a problem and a
promise”)
On Research Libraries, 1967
Recommendations:
• National Commission on Libraries, which
would coordinate acquisition and
bibliographic policies
• Increased Federal and private funding
Scholarly Communication, 1979
Scholarly Communication, 1979
• Motivated by “widespread concern in
the academic community that a crisis
in finance threatened the
performance of research libraries and
the viability of scholarly publishing” –
p. 1
Scholarly Communication, 1979
Conclusion
• “The extraordinary growth of the scholarly
enterprise in the last two decades requires
important qualitative changes in the way
certain scholarly materials are published,
disseminated, stored and made available.”
– P. 11
Scholarly Communication, 1979
Recommendations
• National bibliographic system, periodical
center, library agency
• Broader role for foundations
• NEH Office of Scholarly Communication
• ACLS, ARL, and AAUP Standing
Committee on Technology
www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure
Commission Members
Paul Courant
Provost, Economics
University of Michigan
Peter B. Kaufman
VP, Innodata-Isogen
President, Intelligent Television
Sarah Fraser
Art History
Northwestern University
Jerome McGann
English
University of Virginia
Mike Goodchild
Geography
UC Santa Barbara
Roy Rosenzweig
History
George Mason University
Margaret Hedstrom
School of Information
University of Michigan
John Unsworth (Chair)
Library and Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Charles Henry
VP & CIO
Rice University
Bruce Zuckerman
Religion
University of Southern California
Why a report?
Potential of Cyberinfrastructure
“New information technologies
empower research on traditional
objects of study.”
ACLS Report, p. ii
Necessity of Cyberinfrastructure
“Most expression of human creativity in
the United States will be ‘born digital.’
The intensification of computing as a
cultural force makes the development of
a robust cyberinfrastructure an
imperative for scholarship in the
humanities and social sciences”
ACLS Report, p.ii
What is Cyberinfrastructure?
“an effective and efficient platform
for the empowerment of specific
communities of researchers to
innovate and eventually
revolutionize what they do, how
they do it, and who participates.”
-- NSF Report
What is Cyberinfrastructure?







Discipline-specific software
Expertise
Best Practices
Tools
Collections
Policies
Collaborative environments
ACLS Report, p. 6
Necessary Characteristics
•Accessible as a public good
•Sustainable
•Interoperable
•Facilitate collaboration
•Support experimentation
Recommendations
1. Invest in cyberinfrastructure as a
strategic priority.
2. Develop public and institutional
policies that foster openness and
access.
3. Promote cooperation between the
public and private sectors.
Recommendations (cont’d)
4. Cultivate leadership.
5. Encourage digital scholarship.
6. Establish national centers to support
scholarship that contributes to and
exploits cyberinfrastructure.
Recommendations (cont’d)
7. Develop and maintain open standards and
robust tools.
8. Create extensive and reusable digital
collections.
Invest in Cyberinfrastructure
Invest in Cyberinfrastructure
Create Extensive Digital
Collections
Encourage Digital Scholarship
Encourage Digital Scholarship
Encourage Digital Scholarship
Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure
and Promotion
Recommendation:
• “The profession as a whole should develop a
more capacious conception of scholarship by
rethinking the dominance of the monograph. ..”
Encourage Digital Scholarship
Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and
Promotion
Recommendation:
• “Departments and institutions should recognize the
legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether
by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures
for evaluating these forms of scholarship.”
Encourage Digital Scholarship
Hillary Ballon and Mariet Westermann,
Art History and its Publications in the
Electronic Age
• “While art history continues to be a field of
lively intellectual investigation and
scholarship, its system of scholarly
publication does not serve the discipline or
general readership as well as it could.”
Encourage Digital Scholarship
Hillary Ballon and Mariet Westermann,
Art History and its Publications in the Electronic
Age
Recommendations
• “Support libraries in their efforts to use the
internet to make copyrighted and orphan
works available at the lowest possible cost to
the widest communities of readers.”
Encourage Digital Scholarship
Hillary Ballon and Mariet Westermann,
Art History and its Publications in the Electronic Age
• “Develop online publication genres and formats that take
advantage of museum exhibition as sites of research
and appear during and after the exhibitions.
• Enhance the mission of university presses in terms of
knowledge dissemination and scholarly communication
rather than book publishing alone, and connect some of
their programs more closely with their namesake
universities and libraries .”
Foster Openness and Access
http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure
Scholarly Communication, 1979