Racial Inequality and the Rhetoric of Responsibility

Last Spring, Brown University economist Glenn Loury presented at Harvard sociology’s Workshop on Race and Black Youth Culture. He titled his talk “Culture, Causation and Confusion: Why Bill Cosby is Wasting His Time,” engaging with the pervasive “rhetoric of responsibility” frequently applied to blacks in the United States. As Loury argued, our public discourse is saturated with demands on the so-called black community to police its own ranks. This rhetoric of “black communal responsibility” suggests that the solutions to racial inequality are cultural, and the ill-defined “black community” should therefore bear the burden of “fixing” its collective deficiencies.

The rhetoric of black communal responsibility is a common response to discussions of racial inequality, and black folks seem to be hearing it from both sides. From within, you have Bill Cosby, John McWhorter and even President Obama stressing the role of black parents in the cultivation and education of black children. From the outside, you have a slew of white conservatives, wide-eyed and incredulous, wondering why the black community just can’t lift itself out of disadvantage.

The problem, as Loury astutely pointed out, is that categories such as “black community,” “black culture,” and “black leaders” are political constructs void of intellectual definitions. So-called “culture talk” imputes a sense of groupness where no such political collectivity exists. African-Americans, as a race, have no institutional structures to police themselves and bring about the kind of solutions culture critics (like Cosby) demand. They don’t hold conferences or summits—at least, none that all blacks are required to attend by virtue of their racial identity. There aren’t any meeting minutes we can rifle through to make sure they are working to “fix” their collective culture. This notion of an aggregate “black community” was invented ex post facto with a distinctly political motive: impute agency on a racial category where none exists, and wipe our hands clean of any societal responsibility for inequality.

That’s not to say that racial groups don’t share certain histories, privileges, or disadvantages by virtue of their socially constructed racial identity. Moreover, many racial and ethnic groups often share certain traditions, rituals, and affinities. As a Jew, I frequently refer to myself as a “member of the tribe,” implying both a shared allegiance and shared history with my fellow Tribesmen. Such is the general case for other races and ethnicities in the U.S., African-Americans included.

But that doesn’t mean they can be expected to act like a civic collectivity or a civic organization and, by extension, engage in civic action. Who elected Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson to be the spokesmen for the so-called black community? I don’t seem to recall a campaign or election for these self-appointed leaders. Yet the “black culture” rhetoric, purported so frequently in public discourse, assumes their civic appointment. The ability of blacks to act as a distinct group is taken for granted—an assumption of their collective agency. But a racial category is not a group with civic powers. Nor is it a collective body with a unified political or cultural agenda. As University of Chicago sociologist Mario Small has argued on countless occasions, there are multiple black communities and multiple black cultures.

The rhetoric of black communal responsibility imputes collective agency where none exists, assuming group-level cultural deficiencies while ignoring the society-level creation and maintenance of racial inequality. The logic is problematic and condescending at best, dangerous and incendiary at worst. It at once obscures the tremendous diversity among African-Americans and distracts our attention away from the actual causes of inequality. Whatever “the black community” is, we can’t exactly depend on “it” to solve, or do, anything without the institutional means to solve, or do, anything. Assuming communal responsibility is dead-end rhetoric, promoting a self-fulfilling prophecy of disadvantage. It serves a political purpose, but does little to advance our intellectual understanding of inequality.

Individual communities can certainly make important contributions toward greater social equality. But you just can’t expect an artificially constructed group, based on an arbitrarily constructed racial category, to solve inequality at the national level by itself. You can’t expect action where no institutional ability to act exists.

Monday's Musings: New Name, New Look But Same Old Neighborhood, Same Old Politics

I am not one much for looking down on new initiatives that aim to help others. In fact, it is usually quite the opposite, especially when it comes to education initiatives (one of my areas of academic interest). On Sunday, Kathleen McGrory wrote about the changes to Edison Senior High School in Miami in her article “Miami Edison Senior High Gets New Name, New Look.” A little background as to why these changes are so important and worthy of attention. Edison Senior High (aka Haiti High) is a school in one of Miami’s most economically disadvantaged areas, Liberty City, is predominately Haitian (the area is generally called Little Haiti), has made headlines for its deplorable performance on state exams (the FCAT—a grade of F in 7 of its 8 last performances) and tensions between students and staff recently culminated (or rather degraded into) in a riot.

McGrory reports that the new initiatives are aimed at adding that spark, providing that incentive, to get students to take education seriously. To use her words, “the challenge [is to] take one of the state’s lowest-performing schools and transform it into a place the county’s best students are clamoring to attend.” She is right to call such an ambitious goal a challenge. It is herculean task for even the most ambitious of us all. I applaud Miami-Dade County Public School officials for embarking upon such an arduous journey; they are surely to be commended.

One of the key changes to the school that may prove to be its more attractive and efficacious features, to students and teachers alike, is the internal restructuring of the curriculum, broadly defined. More specifically, Edison will now be structured like a university with four colleges within it where students get to choose the college that best fits the academic and extracurricular activities. I believe that this is important because it at once empowers students through their ability to choose and also matching teachers with students actually interested in the material being taught. The former should not be taken lightly; having control over one’s life, in this case, one aspect of one’s life, is empowering. The latter deserves equal credit as having engaged teachers with equally engaged teachers is something special.

However, as the old adage goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Again, I am not arguing against the program; I am simply being and arguing for others to be cautious of accepting such new initiatives blindly for in our zeal for progressive and promising projects, we can become shortsighted. The reason I go along this cautionary road specifically in the case of Edison and its changes is best explained using a car metaphor (bare with me). The oil is the lifeblood of the car; without it, you are not going far. The dirtier the oil, the worse the car runs until it finally breaks down. So far so good. Well, to me, the kids are the oil. The school, the car—literally and figuratively the engine of social (im)mobility. If the students only interacted with the school things would run smoothly (or at least smoother than they do now). The problem is that the oil—these students—must first run through the muck, the dirt, the filth that is the remains of Liberty City, a part of Miami that is poor, hostage to criminal activity, and still recovering from race riots of generations past. It goes without saying that this areas is also as political disenfranchised as it is economically. I am not making an argument against the individuals who attend Edison or live in this area. What I am saying in connecting the students, school, and community has been posited by many immigration and race scholars like Harvard Sociologist Mary Waters and Princeton Sociologist Alejandro Portes: the immediate location of these immigrant and native communities matter with respect to the students’ well-being and how they come to formulate their identities and their connection (or lack thereof) to schooling and mainstream routes to upward mobility.

Portes with his colleague Min Zhou argue that segmented assimilation occurs when immigrants are blocked from upward mobility by different barriers, whether they be political, language, social, cultural, or any combination of the above. In response to such barriers, subsequent generations of immigrants (the second generation) begin to identify with different subcultures—in the case of the Haitian population in Miami, poor, inner-city blacks who have experienced the effects of both interpersonal and structural racism. This is where I find such an initiative as an amazing step forward but one with the possibility to do more harm than good because it places all its resources in the school to the neglect of the community. The problem is that is that if this program does not succeed with amazing results, then cultural arguments will be everyone’s rationale for why things didn’t work: these people, the individuals and their cultural patterns at writ large, are somehow defective. The comment box for the article already presents itself as evidence for such a prediction. However, such attacks against the group would never take factors like the deleterious effects of residential segregation, the cumulative disadvantages of living in concentrated poverty, the racial politics of Miami with respect to its Cuban, Haitian, Black, and White citizenry, and the like into consideration.

The new name—Edison EduPlex—new look—paint job, planting trees, the works—and new “structure”—transforming the internal running of the school to mimic a university with four colleges within it—addresses structural problems of the school. However, by effectively placing the school in the spotlight and key component of the reform efforts to the detriment of a more critical assessment of the antithetical role the community can play when attempting to create initiatives of this kind, we may find ourselves with the same problem once the attraction of the newness wears off. Is this a recipe for change or one of another cycling of resources with mixed and inconclusive results?

Sporadic Anger is Not Political Insurgency

The most recent spats over healthcare (or “Obamacare,” depending on your political persuasion) have centered on the “American-ness” of the angered, predominantly middle-aged white folks throwing fits at town hall meetings across the country. Republican commentators are lauding their civic engagement, while Democratic leaders are deriding their uncivil outbursts. The public debate has recently reached the absurd, with each side jockeying for sole control of the ever-effective “Nazi” insult. Apparently, somebody is Hitler incarnate—we just don’t know if it’s President Obama or Rush Limbaugh.

The ensuing public discussion underscores the point I made last Friday: that the GOP’s “anti-community organizing” rhetoric is antithetical to actual political mobilization. I’ve watched the Youtube videos, and it’s almost pathetic to see potential political activists relegated to mere rabble-rousers. With just a skeleton of an organizational structure, these folks could really make a substantial difference in American political culture, shifting us away from the dead-end debate over their patriotism and instead focusing the national discussion on their concerns and misgivings.

Of course, if that were the focus of the debate, their worries might be assuaged with the logic of Obama’s healthcare plan. Or maybe not. Either way, the current state of affairs is producing roadblocks from all angles: from the outside, the visible anger at these town halls is framing the national discussion on emotions rather than substance, while lack of organization is impeding the “protestors” efforts from the inside.

Sean Hannity has called their actions “as American as apple pie." Michelle Malkin has lauded their “counter insurgency.” Other conservative commentators graciously refer to them as “demonstrators.” Real Americans realizing their democratic duty and standing up for what they believe in. A group of modern-day Paul Reveres, they claim.

As persuasive as these pundits are, I can’t say I’m convinced. Without organization, these outbursts are ephemeral. Organization aids sustainability, and there really isn’t a centralized effort to harness their collective anger. Our failure to discuss political organization is in large part due to our faulty understanding of past political action and protest. Many Americans still hold the historically inaccurate, romanticized vision of Rosa Parks as a courageous individual that was just too tired to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus—a single, individualized event that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. But Parks worked as a secretary at the NAACP’s Montgomery chapter for years before her famous act of civil disobedience. In fact, that single, courageous act actually took months of planning—and Parks wasn’t even the NAACP’s first choice to be their poster child for the bus boycotts. The original woman chosen by the NAACP—fifteen year-old Claudette Colvin—became pregnant a few months after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, and the organization feared her pregnancy might delegitimize their cause as a result.

Effective political action occurs after lengthy planning sessions, prolonged mobilizing efforts, and strong leadership. Unfortunately for the Republicans, it doesn’t come through dispersed, decentralized angry outbursts.

Of course, political organizing may be the necessary action to enact change, whereas sporadic yelling and screaming at the town halls may be effective at thwarting change. And at the end of the day that’s what these folks want, after all. But let’s not confuse this for something it’s not. Civic engagement, sure. Political protests? Demonstrations? The seeds of a new social movement? Not by a long shot.

A Different Kind of Concentration Effect: Mental Health in the Juvenile Justice System

A friend from Amherst passed along a Solomon Moore's NYT article, "Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System," and asked SSL to comment on it. The article speaks to the current state of mental health issues within the criminal justice systems. More specifically, the trend of courts to funnel juvenile delinquents who have documented mental health issues into the juvenile criminal justice system instead of hospitals or mental health facilities. In responding to the request, I will speak on the content of the article and the article itself.

First, this is some depressing material: “About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates—who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000 in 1999—have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.” These numbers are surprising to me because, admittedly, I tend not to factor in mental illnesses like bipolar disorder when thinking about criminal activity. I think part of the reason why the two are decoupled in my mind is because I always considered (emphasis on the past tense here) certain mental disorders as “problems” of the rich (and white). I am revealing my own biases but when one thinks about how mental disorders, as opposed to physical or medical disorders like diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, and the like, are represented in popular media, the news, and even in schools, “illnesses” become stratified by race and class in the mind. To give one example, think back to when the character Kim from Moesha, says something like “Mama always said that the only thing black folks need is Jesus and Oprah.” I do not speak for all; I am simply relating the abstract image of diseases with their social groupings. Reading this article made me realize even more that such stereotypes, as stereotypes always are, obscure reality.

The fact that so many of the youth in the criminal justice system are suffering from mental illnesses is frightening. For if these documented number are this high, what are the projections for those actually suffering but have not received any form of documented help as of yet. However, what saddens me more than the staggering statistics is the slippery slope recent fiscal cutbacks have created for this population. In the article, Moore highlights the fact that since the incorporation of powerful “antipsychotic medications coincided with a national movement to close public mental hospitals” across the nation. What is worse now, given our “we so broke” phase of the recession, more and more youth who are being funneled into the criminal justice system instead of mental health facilities because mental health facilities (both at the community and state levels) are harder hit by budget cutbacks. Even parents have opted to send their children to get help in juvenile facilities because community based facilities are disappearing. In other words, instead of being in an environment with trained mental health professionals, juvenile offenders are instead in a farm environment: prison guards as trained herders, wardens as farm owners, and padded cells as one’s pen.

This “farm” metaphor leads to a different from of concentration effect. In the study of urban poverty, to channel Harvard Sociologist William Julius Wilson, concentration effect is the term used to capture the consequences of the historical social transformation of the inner city which resulted in the disproportionate concentration of the most disadvantaged segments of the urban black population, creating a social milieu significantly different from the environment that existed in all black communities several decades before. This current social milieu is one of rampant crime, high violence, and other social dislocation that plague inner city environments. The prison is yet another one of these institutionalized environments where the concentration of disadvantage leads to increased aberrant behavior.

For those who already suffer from mental disorders being treated like chattel and placed with others who are experiencing the “jail house effect” only places fuel on the fire. To put it simply, it compounds the problem further. It is not surprising that one hears accounts like “he’s been in 130 fights since he’s been with us” (though I think 130 may be an exaggerated number). Such new policy lines by judges, according to Moore, to argue that juvenile are better than mental health facilities ignores such a reality.

With respect to that article itself, I find it troubling that race and class are at once conflated and implicit. I find this problematic because nowhere in the article are we given demographic characteristics to access exactly who the juvenile delinquents are. Though it may not be point of the article, because we are left in the dark (literally and figuratively) with facts about the “who,” we also do not know if even in this disadvantaged population if everyone is placed on the same track into the jails and not mental health facilities. In other words, is there tracking even amongst those who are tracked?

However, the question becomes how do we know that the population is disadvantaged? The answer, which troubles me as well, is because of the offhand comments included in the article. Take for instance, including what the grandmother said about her troubled grandson and then the psychiatrist who Moore uses to close the article. We are left with the picture of abandoned children and helpless (or hopeless) parents.

“I’ve begged D.Y.S. to get him into a mental facility where they’re trained to deal with people like him,” said his grandmother, who asked not to be identified because of the stigma of having a grandson who is mentally ill. “I don’t think a lockup situation is where he should be, although I don’t think he should be on the street either.” (Grandmother)

“Often Daddy is nowhere to be found, Mommy might be in jail,” said Daniel Connor, a psychiatrist for the Connecticut juvenile corrections system. “The home phone is cut off. The parent speaks another language, so it’s often hard to figure out exactly what’s going on with each kid.” (Psychiatrist).

With its faults, I think Moore forces us to look at how the changing policies within the courts are dovetailing with the fiscal reality of communities, states, and the nation as a whole at the expense of those who are in need of help the most. For in this case, the help these young individuals need are beyond changes they can engender themselves.

The Reverse of Discrimination is "Not Discrimination"

I recently went on a road trip with my uncle, traveling from Boston to New York for my brother’s high school graduation. As we drove through western Massachusetts, our conversation eventually drifted to employment and the economy. In what would prove to be a fascinating discussion, my uncle began to recount his first job interview after college. He graduated from Northeastern University in the ‘70s—right around the time President Nixon institutionalized affirmative action and quotas served as the nation’s predominant employment policy. He had worked in Northeastern’s admissions office for a few years, so when a full-time position opened up at the University of Michigan’s admissions office, he made the 14 hour drive halfway across the country to interview for the job.

A funny thing happened during his interview, however. According to my uncle, his interviewer immediately apologized as he entered the room. ‘Look, I hate to say this,’ the interviewer said. ‘But there’s no way we’re going to be able to hire you. If you were a woman or black, I’d hire you on the spot. You are totally qualified, but we’ve got to fill our quotas.’ Naturally, my uncle was none too pleased, commenting plainly (but forcefully) that acts of “reverse discrimination” are unfair. I did my best to defend affirmative action policies, discussing their historical necessity, noting their negligible affect on white male employment, and even waxing philosophical about the entitlement associated with staking claim and ownership over falsely constructed “spots” in colleges or the workforce. It was all to no avail, though. Cliché as the phrase is, my uncle was “passed up” for the job, and there wasn’t much I could say.

We’d be naïve to trivialize my uncle’s experience or write it off as just another “reverse discrimination” fairytale. It happened. It’s a reality. The problem was not that this was an exaggeration; instead, it was that my uncle forgot about his lifetime of advantage as he harped on that one, single experience.

See, claiming reverse discrimination is a lot like recounting your golf score. It’s always the one or two bad rounds that leave the deepest, most painful impressions. You always remember the bogey on the 9th hole, but never the birdie on the 10th. Somehow, the abundance of good holes are taken for granted, while the one or two missteps are amplified and taken as indicative of the entire round. Sure, my uncle remembers getting passed up for the job with the University of Michigan—an event that (probably) happened the way he said it did. But, in the process of recounting this single experience, he forgot about a lifetime of job interviews in which he directly benefited from his whiteness or his gender. In all the jobs my uncle interviewed for, how many times were applicants immediately rejected for having “black” sounding names? How many women were turned away because employers didn’t think they could handle the stress of the job? How many times did my uncle’s employment prospects benefit from acts of statistical discrimination that weeded out potentially qualified minority applicants?

Still, many others that hide behind the “reverse discrimination” mantra often have few, if any, personal experiences to justify their outrage. But the golf analogy still fits. These folks are the ones that throw a fit over their buddy’s 10-stroke handicap. That’s not fair, they complain. But in their moral grandstanding, they forget all of their privileges that negate—and even surpass—their buddy’s handicap. These privileges may include the country club membership that afforded them hours of practice on the course, the childhood golf lessons their parents paid for, or the hand-me-down Callaways their father didn’t need anymore after he got his new set of clubs. Their buddy with the 10-stroke handicap was just allowed to join the country club recently, had parents that couldn’t afford to invest in clubs or other activities, and never inherited any valuable assets. In short, the two golfers didn’t begin the round on equal footing.

With some folks, claims of reverse discrimination are proxies for implicit assumptions of black or brown intellectual inferiority. The operative word here, however, is some. Other folks have had very real experiences with so-called “reverse discrimination”—it’s just that these isolated instances fill a disproportionate share of their memory. The real problem with the “reverse discrimination” debate (besides the logically incoherent label “reverse discrimination”—what is the reverse of discrimination anyway? Not discrimination?) is our inability to honestly discuss the issue. The question shouldn’t be whether or not this incident—or others like it—actually occurred. Instead, we need to ask ourselves, how often does this happen, and to what effect? Such acts rarely occur anymore, and the effect is almost always minor or marginal. And, of course, the folks that decry “reverse discrimination” have almost always benefited from other instances of privilege. They just tend to forget about them.

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Citation Distortions > Unfounded Authority

How Citation Distortions Create Unfounded Authority: Analysis Of A Citation Network / Steven A Greenberg / Associate Professor Of Neurology

Children’s Hospital / Informatics Program and Department of Neurology / Brigham and Women’s Hospita / Harvard Medical School / 75 Francis Street / Boston MA / 02115 / USA / sagreenberg@partners.org

BMJ 2009;339:b2680 / Published 21 July 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b2680

Objective

To understand belief in a specific scientific claim by studying the pattern of citations among papers stating it.

Design

A complete citation network was constructed from all PubMed indexed English literature papers addressing the belief that β amyloid, a protein accumulated in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, is produced by and injures skeletal muscle of patients with inclusion body myositis. Social network theory and graph theory were used to analyse this network.

Main outcome measures

Citation bias, amplification, and invention, and their effects on determining authority.

Results

The network contained 242 papers and 675 citations addressing the belief, with 220 553 citation paths supporting it. Unfounded authority was established by citation bias against papers that refuted or weakened the belief; amplification, the marked expansion of the belief system by papers presenting no data addressing it; and forms of invention such as the conversion of hypothesis into fact through citation alone. Extension of this network into text within grants funded by the National Institutes of Health and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed the same phenomena present and sometimes used to justify requests for funding.

Conclusion

Citation is both an impartial scholarly method and a powerful form of social communication. Through distortions in its social use that include bias, amplification, and invention, citation can be used to generate information cascades resulting in unfounded authority of claims. Construction and analysis of a claim specific citation network may clarify the nature of a published belief system and expose distorted methods of social citation.

Source And Full Text Available At

HTML [http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/jul20_3/b2680]

PDF [http://www.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/339/jul20_3/b2680]

News Coverage

Diversion, Invention, and Socialized Medicine

[http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/07/30/diversion-invention-and-socialized-medicine/]

From Publishing to Knowledge Networks: Reinventing Online Knowledge Infrastructures

Alexander Hars / Berlin: Springer/ 2003 / ISBN 3-540-01250-8 / $US 104

Today’s publishing infrastructure is rapidly changing. As electronic journals, digital libraries, collaboratories, logic servers, and other knowledge infrastructures emerge on the internet, the key aspects of this transformation need to be identified. Here, the author details the implications that this transformation is having on the creation, dissemination and organization of academic knowledge.

The author shows that many established publishing principles need to be given up in order to facilitate this transformation. The text provides valuable insights for knowledge managers, designers of internet-based knowledge infrastructures, and professionals in the publishing industry. Researchers will find the scenarios and implications for research processes stimulating and thought-provoking.

Source

[http://www.springer.com/business/business+information+systems/book/978-3-540-01250-4]

Content Overview

1. Leveraging information technology for science 1
1.1. Motivation 1
1.2. Analytical focus 5
1.3. Objectives 7
1.4. Approach 7
2. Characteristics of scientific knowledge infrastructures 9
2.1. Theoretical analysis 10
2.2. Empirical analysis: Emerging knowledge infrastructures 34
2.3. Visions of scientific knowledge infrastructures 55
2.4. Synthesis 57
3. Structure of scientific knowledge 83
3.1. Objectives 83
3.2. Theoretical foundations 87
3.3. Object-oriented model of scientific knowledge 102
3.4. Elements of scientific knowledge 124
4. Implications 187
4.1. Feasibility: IS Cybrarium 187
4.2. Conclusion 196

Source and Detailed Table Of Contents

[http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783540012504-t1.txt]

[http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783540012504-t1.pdf]

Google Books

[http://tinyurl.com/nye3aa]

Review

[http://tinyurl.com/l83e3c]

The Scientific Paper in the Age of Twitter

Walter Benjamin and Biz Stone

The FASEB Journal / 2009 / 23 / 7 / 2015-2018

Biz Stone: (dryly) In the middle of what?

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for 'letters to the editor.' And today... at any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.

Maureen Dowd: If you were out with a girl and she started twittering about it in the middle, would that be a deal-breaker or a turn-on?

Maureen Dowd: Why did you think the answer to e-mail was a new kind of e-mail?
Biz Stone: With Twitter, it’s as easy to unfollow as it is to follow.
—The New York Times, 2009 (1)

—Walter Benjamin, 1931 (2)

All registered users are able to add Notes, Comments, and Ratings to any article...Highlight the text to be annotated, and then click the 'Add a note to the text' link in the right-hand navigation menu of the article ...Notes can be started at any point within the text, but for ease of reading we ask that you do not begin Notes in the middle of words.
—Public Library of Science, 2009 (3)

THE SANDBOX OF IDEAS

It’s reassuring to read that our colleagues at The Public Library of Science have remained true to the integrity of the word, if not the sentence or thought. PLoS One has raised this banner for verbal integrity in a cheery commercial entitled "PLoS Journals Sandbox: A Place to Learn and Play (3) ." The new format, which permits instant interruption of on-line, formal scientific papers, is certainly in keeping with the temper of our time. Were this to have been the practice in old-fashioned print libraries, many of our journals would by now resemble kitty litter.

In the Age of Twitter we’ve become accustomed to bell-tones and roving thumbs in every venue of human life. We call it social networking when we summon up Facebook, YouTube, or MySpace—and it’s no longer limited to teenagers. Twitter and the other social networks have been used by nearly one in five of online adults ages 25 to 34 (4) . Nowadays, in the plenary sessions of national scientific meetings, one sees heads bowed in homage to the Holy Book of Face or tweeting to Twitter in fewer than 140 characters of text.

Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, explains:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? (5)

[snip]

And as for science: what are we doing? Today, on screens large and small, every online scientific paper is just a cursor stroke away. That makes it possible, as Benjamin predicted, for any reader to turn into a writer. No surprise, then, that PLoS and other new venture journals encourage us to adorn the digital text with notes and comments, blogs and tweets. [snip] Right on to the Public Library of Science! How fitting it is that PLoS, the youngest kid on the block of reputable science journals, is out to compete in the sandbox of ideas (3) .

ENDANGERED SPECIES OF PRINT

It’s no secret that scientific journals have been losing readers of their printed versions to the greater audience on the web. For many scientific journals, the number of "hits" they receive daily online is a factor or two greater than their monthly print circulation. [snip]The printed word still retains a good chunk of older devotees, but even these are as likely as their younger colleagues to prefer electronic to printed copies of their favorite journals (8) . [snip]

This sea change in the way that information is handled and supported has worried many and frightened a few (9) . We might recall that scientific journals as we know them are relatively recent arrivals on the scene and have moved along paths trod by the general culture. [snip]. Science and publishing became professionalized at the dawn of the Enlightenment. The two oldest scientific journals on record are The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London) and the Journal de Scavants (Paris), both founded in 1665. Originally filled with material of general interest for fellow citizens of "the republic of letters," they soon morphed into publications that reported the most rigorous science of the day (10) . [snip]

IT HAS NOT ESCAPED OUR NOTICE

The mold was struck for the modern scientific paper between the two world wars. [snip] .Today the acronymic IMRaD formula (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) is now required by all reputable journals, including this one. But there’s always been wiggle-room around the canonical IMRaD format; most journals are enlivened by letters to the editor, rebuttals, conference proceedings, abstracts of meetings, news reports, etc. Walter Benjamin’s description in 1931 of the marketplace of print still applies to the market in scientific ideas:

Today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character (13).

He would have loved texting and Twitter; I can imagine his pleasure at running his thumbs over the passing comments and pertinent grievances as he "follows" and "unfollows" as both author and reader

In this context, one can only imagine what the epochal Watson-Crick paper would look like these days on PLoS. Their 1953 paper was written as a "Letter to the Editor" in Nature and never underwent peer review. John Maddox, editor-in-chief at the time, later admitted that "the Crick and Watson paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident." That’s a matter of dispute, as we’ll see (14) . The Watson-Crick paper begins with:

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest...

The ending of the paper is of course perhaps the best known in scientific prose:

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

But for many of us, the real action is in the acknowledgments at the end:

We are much indebted to Dr. Jerry Donohue for constant advice and criticism, especially on interatomic distances. We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London (15).

One need only to imagine what tweets, twoops, formal corrections, and comments might decorate these passages on PLoSOne today. Pauling, Chargaff, Avery, Meselson, Cairns, Donohue, Perutz, Franklin, and Wilkins would have had their say:

This structure has novel features COMMENT: YEAH! HYDROGEN BONDING, LINUS!) which are of considerable biological interest. COMMENT: FOR WHICH I WROTE THE CHEMISTRY, ERWIN FORMAL CORRECTION: IT’S THE GENETIC MATERIAL, YOU FOOLS!, GENES! OSWALD

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing FORMAL CORRECTION: BASE PAIRING A/T=G/C, ERWIN we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. COMMENT: LIKE WHAT? CONSERVED? SEMI? MATT COMMENT: MORTAL OR IMMORTAL? CAIRNS

We are much indebted to Dr. Jerry Donohue for constant advice and criticism, especially on interatomic distances. FORMAL CORRECTION: SEZ YOU! I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE KETO TO ENOL TAUTOMERS. YOU KNEW SQUAT FROM THE CHEMISTRY! JERRY We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature FORMAL CORRECTION: I SHOWED YOU THEIR PICTURES, MAX of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin FORMAL CORRECTION: YOU PEEKED, "DARK LADY" and their co-workers at King’s College, London COMMENT: OUR TWO FOLLOWING PAPERS ARE DATA, YOURS IS A LEAP, MAURY.

ARCADES TO THE BORDER

Walter Benjamin, (1895–1940) the quintessential European intellect and literary omnivore, would have loved having a COMMENTS and FORMAL CORRECTIONS option at his finger-tips. [snip]

More to the point: much of the Arcades Project prefigures the home page of a social network on the Web. Benjamin literally explores a network: the linked indoor shopping arcades of nineteenth century Paris, the Passages (16) . I imagine a Benjamin today, reincarnated as the perennial flaneur; who follows a path in the Arcade of Panoramas. He stops occasionally at one site or another site. The flaneur ambles (surfs) along a protected space (MySpace) in which bustling crowds are reflected in shiny Windows. He adjusts his cravat in a store-front mirror (Facebook), and when the bell-tone rings in his pocket, he takes out his timepiece (Blackberry). He looks past his mirror image (YouTube), to find two generations of followers (Twitter).

Were Benjamin to log on to Twitter, he’d have thousands of tweets on hand to send to generations of followers. [snip]In the century of the common man film was art without "aura" and accessible to all:

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web...Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment (2) .

I can see Benjamin now tweeting, now twoopsing, now blogging, now surfing, now scrolling. His thumbs move quickly over the tiny keys—the sandbox of images in sight. He tweets directly to Biz Jones and the other followers of WB (his nom-de-tweet), an upbeat quote from Paul Valery (1928). Valery and WB were sure that other great gadgets would soon supplant celluloid film:


Pretty good prediction, no? Isn’t that "simple movement of the hand" what the thumbs are doing these days on a Blackberry. The quote is also about twice the 140 characters that Biz Stone permits, but heck, WB could have split it in two.

[snip]

It’s less than 140 characters. I’d bet that Benjamin would have been at home in our new world of texting and tweets, blogs and hand-helds. In the Age of Twitter, he’d be ready to play in the sandbox of ideas, and we wait for his FASEB Journal essay in "Milestones."

Source and Full Text (Open Access?)

Full Text Available

HTML [http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/23/7/2015]

PDF [http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/reprint/23/7/2015]

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign (17) .

Mobilizing Under an "Anti-Community Organizing" Banner

Reeling after a disappointing November, the Republican Party has suffered a case of organizational schizophrenia as they try to retool the Party’s message. Republicans just aren’t on the same page when it comes to the GOP’s future organizing agenda. On the one hand, you have the election of Michael Steele to the head of the RNC—a wise move politically, if you took it as a sign that the GOP was trying to court favor from our nation’s rapidly expanding minority electorate. If that were the case, Steele isn’t doing a very good job. When asked last month how he plans to attract more diversity to the Republican Party, he replied, “My plan is to say, ‘Ya’ll come.’” A member of the audience then shouted, “I’ll bring the collard greens,” to which Steele added, “I got the fried chicken and potato salad.” Stay classy, GOP.

Then you have the self-proclaimed, awkwardly labeled “birthers.” Admittedly, these folks aren’t a major part of the GOP’s formal organizational apparatus; in fact, quite a few conservatives have distanced themselves from the group as of late. Still, their sentiments represent a very real and influential part of the GOP’s electorate—one that the GOP can’t afford to alienate, politically speaking. However their battle-cry—“Obama’s a citizen of Kenya!”—is a little too specific (among other things) to remain an energizing Party message.

Then there’s the “RINOs”—Republicans in Name Only. RINOs tend to be moderate or even liberal Republicans. Meghan McCain is arguably the most visible RINO, speaking for a generation of young Republicans that tend to believe in traditionally conservative ideals like small government, but also tend to favor socially liberal positions such as gay marriage. While they represent a sizable portion of young Republicans, the RINOs seem too ideologically nuanced in our current two-party system to become the main voice of the Republican Party.

Of course, there’s also a core group of overt racists, typified by folks like Pat Buchanan. In the wake of Sonia Sotomayor’s congressional hearings, Buchanan wrote an article for HumanEvents.com in which he suggested that John McCain would be President if only he had done a little more race-baiting during the campaign. Seriously. Buchanan concluded that the key to future GOP success is simple: court white males disenchanted with affirmative action, using modern day Willie Horton-style images. Seriously. This election certainly brought out vicious racial animus from the Republican side of the aisle, but I don’t foresee the RNC using this as an actual organizational strategy anytime soon.

But no rhetoric has caught as much steam amongst Party loyalists as the Michelle Malkin-inspired “corruption of community organizers” mantra. Indeed, the dominant message of the Republican Party currently centers on a fundamental disdain for community organizing—a sentiment that runs much deeper than simple contempt for the “community-organizer in chief.” While often racially tinged, the rhetoric is certainly pervasive, and every sector of the Party seems to be latching on. But is this really the best Republicans can do?

The problem with anti-community organizing rhetoric is simple: How do you mobilize potential constituents and supporters when your main organizing strategy is to mock organizers? It makes no sense. It’s like trying to sell a product by making fun of your competitor’s marketing division. It reeks of arrogance, assuming your product is so good that it sells itself. The thing is, the GOP’s product just isn’t that good. Forget my snark for just a minute and really think about it: How effective can deriding community organizers be as an organizing philosophy? It’s a logical contradiction. You can’t organize without organizers; you can’t mobilize without mobilizers. Without a centralized organizing structure, you just aren’t going to win many elections. Good luck recruiting constituents when you mock, ridicule, and racialize the act of recruiting.

viXra.org: An Alternative Archive Of e-Prints In Science And Mathematics

ViXra.org is an e-print archive set up as an alternative to the popular arXiv.org service owned by Cornell University.

[http://vixra.org/]

It has been founded by scientists who find they are unable to submit their articles to arXiv.org because of Cornell University's policy of endorsements and moderation designed to filter out e-prints that they consider inappropriate.ViXra is an open repository for new scientific articles. It does not endorse e-prints accepted on its website, neither does it review them against criteria such as correctness or author's credentials.

Source

[http://vixra.org/]

Why viXra?

In 1991 the electronic e-print archive, now known as arXiv.org, was founded at Los Alamos National Laboritories. In the early days of the World Wide Web it was open to submissions from all scientific researchers, but gradually a policy of moderation was employed to block articles that the administrators considered unsuitable. In 2004 this was replaced by a system of endorsements to reduce the workload and place responsibility of moderation on the endorsers. The stated intention was to permit anybody from the scientific community to continue contributing. However many of us who had successfully submitted e-prints before then found that we were no longer able to. Even those with doctorates in physics and long histories of publication in scientific journals can no longer contribute to the arXiv unless they can find an endorser in a suitable research institution.

The policies of Cornell University who now control the arXiv are so strict that even when someone succeeds in finding an endorser their e-print may still be rejected or moved to the "physics" category of the arXiv where it is likely to get less attention. Those who endorse articles that Cornell find unsuitable are under threat of losing their right to endorse or even their own ability to submit e-prints. Given the harm this might cause to their careers it is no surprise that endorsers are very conservative when considering articles from people they do not know. [snip]

[snip]

It is inevitable that viXra will therefore contain e-prints that many scientists will consider clearly wrong and unscientific. However, it will also be a repository for new ideas that the scientific establishment is not currently willing to consider. Other perfectly conventional e-prints will be found here simply because the authors were not able to find a suitable endorser for the arXiv or because they prefer a more open system. It is our belief that anybody who considers themselves to have done scientific work should have the right to place it in an archive in order to communicate the idea to a wide public. They should also be allowed to stake their claim of priority in case the idea is recognised as important in the future.

[snip]

In part viXra.org is a parody of arXiv.org to highlight Cornell University's unacceptable censorship policy. It is also an experiment to see what kind of scientific work is being excluded by the arXiv. But most of all it is a serious and permanent e-print archive for scientific work. Unlike arXiv.org it is truly open to scientists from all walks of life.

Source

[http://vixra.org/why]

News Coverage

Fledgling site challenges arXiv server

[http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/39845]

Rejecta Mathematica: Caveat Emptor

Rejecta Mathematica is a real open access online journal publishing only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences.

[http://math.rejecta.org/]

About Rejecta Mathematica

Mission

Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences.

At Rejecta Mathematica we believe that many previously rejected papers (even those rejected for legitimate reasons) can nonetheless have a very real value to the academic community. This value may take many forms:

• "mapping the blind alleys of science": papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions;


• "reinventing the wheel": papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas;


• "squaring the circle": papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;


• "applications of cold fusion": papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;


• "misunderstood genius": other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.

All research papers appearing in Rejecta Mathematica include an open letter from the authors discussing the paper's original review process, disclosing any known flaws in the paper and stating the case for the paper's value to the community.

Selection and Scope

Rejecta Mathematica publishes two types of papers: research articles and correspondences. The screening process for publishing research articles in Rejecta Mathematica includes no technical peer review (hence the slogan Caveat Emptor); rather, papers are selected on the basis of their potential interest to researchers in the mathematical sciences.

It is expected that the authors will discuss any known flaws or rediscoveries with full and honest disclosure in their open letter. As an additional means of quality control, follow-up correspondences are strongly encouraged from the community at-large and will be considered for subsequent publication.

The scope of Rejecta Mathematica is very broad, encompassing all disciplines relating to the mathematical sciences, including: pure and applied mathematics, statistics, engineering, and computer science.

Open Access

Rejecta Mathematica is an open access journal; all papers appearing in Rejecta Mathematica are immediately made freely available via this website for downloading, reading and distributing as long as the original authors and source are attributed.

All works published in Rejecta Mathematica are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license that allows redistribution of the work while the authors retain copyright ownership. Read more about Rejecta Mathematica copyright policies, including the specific terms of the distribution license.

Other Information

Rejecta Mathematica is published by Rejecta Publications, Inc., a non-profit corporation based in Texas. Rejecta Publications, Inc. is not affiliated with any university or other educational institution.

Donations are graciously accepted in order to help defray the (modest) cost of web-hosting and administrative expenses. Alternately, you can support Rejecta Publications by purchasing Rejecta Mathematica merchandise.

Other Rejecta journals may follow (in disciplines outside the mathematical sciences). Please contact us if you are interested in starting your own Rejecta franchise.

Source

[http:/math.rejecta.org/about-rejecta-mathematica]

Frequently Asked Questions

[http://math.rejecta.org/frequently-asked-questions]

Reinventing Academic Publishing | 1 > 2 > 3 / James Hendler

Letter from the Editor / Intelligent Readers

PART ONE

Although quoting yourself is generally considered tacky, I've been involved in several recent activities and discussions I'd like to share with you. These largely arose from "Publishing on the Semantic Web," a column that Tim Berners-Lee and I coauthored in Nature back in 2001 (www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/bernerslee.htm). In that column, one of a series of opinion pieces about academic publishing's future, we discussed the Semantic Web's potential impact. We ended with this somewhat brash statement:

The semantic web will provide unifying underlying technologies to allow these concepts to be progressively linked into a universal web of knowledge, and will therefore help to break down the walls erected by lack of communication, and allow researchers to find and understand products from other scientific disciplines. The very notion of a journal of medicine separate from a journal of bioinformatics, separate from the writings of \ physicists, chemists, psychologists and even kindergarten teachers, will someday become as out of date as the print journal is becoming to our graduate students.

In the past year, I've found that this quote is resonating more and more and that some of the big players in academic publishing are starting to think along these lines [snip]. Not all of them are considering using Semantic Web technology; some are inspired instead by Web 2.0's community-oriented features. However, the notion of breaking down the lines between traditional disciplines and reaching out to audiences beyond the academic bench scientist is becoming an important "meme" in academic publishing.



More Than Just Technology



One leader in this area has been Nature itself, which launched the Nature Network [http://network.nature.com/], a social-networking and blogging site aimed primarily at scientists. Users can create a social network, share forums and blogs, and use tags to create semantics. [snip]



Lately, I've been hearing from other publishers and magazines that they're also considering doing more to enhance their online sites with community-oriented features. They have been motivated by Nature's lead, by users' increasing reluctance to pay for hardcopy articles when so much is free online, and by the increasing facility that young scientists, [snip]



It's becoming clear that making a successful community-oriented Web site requires more than just the technology. [snip]While ... [some] sites have taken off, others have languished owing to misunderstanding the mismatch between the technology and the community they want to reach.



Overcoming Resistance



Which brings us back to academic publishing. As publishers try to promote new models of communication among scientists, with an eye toward finding some new role in the process, they need to respect the way science works. Although this, like many other things, might be changing owing to the Web's impact, some natural points of resistance must be overcome before new, more community-oriented, interdisciplinary scientific sites succeed. While scientists have gloried in the Web's disruptive effect on publishers and libraries, with many fields strongly pushing open publication models, we're much more resistant to letting it disrupt the practice of our disciplines.



At the Science Foo Camp (tagged on many blogging sites as "scifoo") held at Google in August 2007, several sessions dealt with academic publishing's future. The topics included open-source publishing; publishing "pre-review" (or with community reviewing of some sort); and the use of blogs, wikis, and other new technologies to enhance scientific communication.



However, motivated by comments arising the first day, the second morning featured the session "Culture of Fear: Scientific Communication and Young Scientists." This session, led by postdoctoral researchers Alex Palazzo (Harvard) and Andrew Walkingshaw (Cambridge), explored issues that those starting out in scientific fields face when using these new technologies. The job market for scientific positions, especially in academia, is tight. So how do a team of scientists, sharing partial results pre-publication, assign credit? Authorship blurs when small amounts of information, which might contain key insights into making processes successful, are publically shared. How does a blogger get credit for the information that leads to an eventual publication at a competing lab?



Another theme of the session was peer review's role in scientific fields. Although some pseudoscientists have claimed that we use peer review to keep their brilliant insights out of our precious literature, most scientists truly appreciate the filter that peer review provides. The high standards publications maintain are a useful way to ensure that ideas are well argued and strongly evaluated before being published. On the other hand, some feeling has always existed in the community that, especially with respect to funding, the peer review process might be overly constraining and considerably delay new ideas from coming to the fore. [snip] These factors have motivated many in the community to discuss new mechanisms, based on emerging Web technologies, that let us communicate more ideas more quickly.



For example, one model involves publishing after a minimal peer review and then creating some sort of postpublication metrics as to the paper's value. Some online journals are already exploring this model. However, as Alex put it in his [http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2007/08/scifoo_day_3_well_that_was_yes.php],

Until the scientific establishment reaches a consensus as to whether these post-publication metrics are indeed useful for determining the credentials of a scientist in the shorter term ... .

What Can We Do?



So, we arrive at the crux of the issue facing many of us, whether we're the editor in chief of a magazine such as IEEE Intelligent Systems or the head of a major press or publishing house. How do we embrace the new technology and encourage more of the sharing that Tim and I were calling for, without causing career risk to the very people to whom the technology is most familiar—the younger scientists? If we don't think through the social issues of usage, the technologies alone won't have any significant impact and will go largely unused.



One option—and I'd like to see more effort in this area—is for innovation to come "from the top." Eventually, as these young scientists become the leaders of our fields, they will bring these new technologies with them. But with the world in its current shape, needing the help of scientists for our very existence, we can't afford to wait that long. Rather, we need to find ways to bring more senior scientists into contact with the positive side of these technologies.



In computer science, where the barrier has been lower than in some fields for senior people to learn to use new computer technologies, we've seen some of this happen. For example, Tim Finin has been instrumental in bringing bloggers to the AAAI conference, which has caused others to read, and in some cases create, blog content. [snip] When young scientists see their field's leaders embracing new technologies, it's that much easier for them to demonstrate to the rest of us, without fear of retribution, what these technologies can do.



Conclusion



It's time for us as computer scientists to take a leading role in creating innovation in this area. Some ideas are simple—for example, providing overlay journals that link existing Web publications, thus increasing the visibility (and therefore impact) of research that cuts across fields. [snip]



In my next column, I'll discuss current ideas regarding new technologies for academic communication that we as a field might be able to help bring into being, and some of the obstacles thereto. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the subject.



Full Text Available At



IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol. 22, No. 5. (2007), pp. 2-3.

[http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MIS.2007.93]

Letter From The Editor / Interlligent Readers

PART TWO

Last issue, my letter focused on some trends in academic publishing that journals, magazines, and other scientific-publishing endeavors are facing. I argued that we computer scientists should take a leading role in helping create technologies that will break down the walls between different disciplines.

An obvious response is, "haven't we already?" That is, Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web, coupled with Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page's PageRank algorithm that powers Google, has led to a world where scientists publish preprints and papers on the Web and can find each others' results without having to subscribe to the same journals. Doesn't that solve the problem? Just pick your favorite chemical, check it out on Google (or even better, Google Scholar), and there's the paper you need. What more is there to say?

New Medium, Old Ways



Unfortunately, the reality of sharing papers on the Web doesn't live up to this ideal. With rare exceptions, Web-based journals and open source publications and preprint servers have been modeled on the same field and subfield considerations that print journals and scientific communication have been using for decades. [snip]



So while we've made journals electronic, with positive results on distribution, we still haven't really done much to revolutionize the scientific-communication aspects of scientific publication. If a computer scientist searches for some term in the field—say, "case-based reasoning"—in an online journal, he or she will likely find papers of interest. [snip] Despite the prevalence of online literature and the ability to search with great ease, jargons—the different ways different fields describe similar things—still get in the way.



This is true even of sites that have tried hard to provide organizational structures to help people find each other's work. Scientific publication sites such as PubMed [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez] or arXiv [http://arxiv.org/] , for example, organize papers on the basis of disciplinary terms familiar to the scientists who use them. [snip]



This is particularly troubling because many, if not most, of the key scientific discoveries of the next generations will require interdisciplinary approaches. [snip] Unfortunately, despite the growth of these larger science projects, the publishing still tends to be in traditional journals, arranged along disciplinary lines and reviewed by experts in the traditional fields. [snip]



Overlay Journals



This need for better support for interdisciplinary work is exactly what's motivating many of the new solutions being considered online. Rather than simply replacing print journals with online journals of the same ilk, people are considering new models that can more easily cross disciplines and find papers (or projects and so on) related to their interest areas. One model that's becoming more common is the overlay journal (sometimes called a deconstructed journal, after John Smith's 1997 paper "The Deconstructed Journal"). The idea is to create an online publication by taking some crosscutting theme and providing links to papers published elsewhere. By providing links rather than republishing, the overlay journal provides a service to both the reader, by linking to many publications, and the publishers, by bringing more eyeballs to their sites. [snip]



Models of Curating



A number of different models are being explored for how best to "curate" such overlay publications. One model is to have the overlay journal function as an independent publication. The IEEE Computer Society will be taking this approach with Computing Online, a site that will serve multiple purposes. One purpose is to provide an overlay functionality across the different Computer Society magazines ... . The new publication will thus provide a means for a wider audience to see our magazine's articles, and we'll be providing articles to that site, reducing its need to solicit and produce new material. [snip]



Another model has a more open Web feel to it. For example, the University of Southampton's Leslie Carr is creating a submitter-based Web science overlay journal. Submitters can fill in a simple form (or share metadata from other publishers) to have a paper listed on the site. The submitter

• points to the original publication,
• proposes where to link it into an evolving hierarchy of terms (basically a folksonomy seeded by a set of terms from a domain ontology, thus providing Semantic Web metadata), and
• briefly comments on why to include this paper.

The submitter can be the paper's author or someone else who feels the paper will be of value to the community. Mechanisms for determining how to moderate the site ... are still being discussed. This mix of submission with overlay seems to combine the best of several worlds.

Conclusion

[snip]. Beyond the overlay journal, we start to look at more novel ideas that depart further from traditional publishing. Such ideas include blog-based scientific publication, Web 2.0-based community sites, and sites enhanced by the Semantic "Web of data." More on this in part 3.

Full Text Available At



IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 2-3, Nov./Dec. 2007



[http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/abs/html/mags/ex/2007/06/mex2007060002.htm]

Letter From The Editor / Intelligent Readers

PART THREE

[snip]



In this last part of my editorial trilogy, I discuss something that's becoming more and more important to academic communication—online scientific interaction outside the traditional journal space.



The importance of contextWe must change our focus from scientific disciplines to scientific "contexts." When looking at the most successful Web technologies, especially in what's known as Web 2.0, we see that many of the most exciting sites exploit a community or context focus. [snip]



[snip]



The Power of Social Networking



Social websites for particular communities of scientists offer a way to, essentially, embedding the context into the site. A good example of this is myExperiment.org, a social-networking site for experimental scientists. The site lets users share experimental workflows and develop communities around specific activities. A network of scientists can form, for example, around certain proteins' role in causing disease. These scientists can share methodologies and specialized techniques and discuss how to get better results in a relatively informal and blog-like way, while still being able to share the important work products that help them be more effective. While these scientists might still compete with respect to the data they're using and their published results, they can cooperate in developing and refining experimental methodologies. This crucial sharing of knowledge typically isn't publishable in traditional journals.



A more generalized version of this idea, and one I'm coming to rely on in my own work, is the Twine system, developed by radarnetworks.com. [snip]



Twine is a social-networking site that focuses not on its members' activities per se but on sharing information products in user-created contexts. [snip]



In part 2 of this editorial trilogy I talked about overlay journals and how they could be used for sharing information across an emerging discipline. A problem is that if the group wanting to communicate is relatively small, setting up such a site involves a prohibitive amount of time and resources. Using something like Twine, we can create sort of an ad hoc overlay journal on our specific topic of interest. Twine wasn't created with scientific communication in mind, but something like this is obviously applicable to scientific discourse. The twine forms the context, and the members choose what to share as they create their own shared vocabulary. Unlike email, newsgroups, and even wikis, the open and dynamic nature of building the discourse in the social-networking context could greatly improve such information sharing.



The Source of Change



I'm excited by the emerging technologies for scientific interaction; these new technologies that expand on blog- and wiki-like ideas to create context mechanisms will become increasingly important to scientific discourse. However, whether change in online scientific communication comes specifically through technologies such as these or through new Web technologies just starting to be explored, I'm certain of one thing: this change is inevitable.



The other day, I was reading a blog entry by my friend and coauthor Dean Allemang [http://dallemang.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/12/what-will-2008.html[. He says that when he suggests to people in management that their enterprise could use something such as a blog, wiki, or other self-organizing information space, they reply, "You just don't understand. Our engineers / researchers/analysts will never do that. It just won't happen!" I know this phenomenon well; I've heard it myself when I make similar suggestions to my academic colleagues about the use of technologies such as myExperiment or Twine.



Dean goes on to say, however, that there's a "new generation of people entering the workforce who have a different relationship with Wikipedia than their elders. [snip]. They share information as a natural part of their lives; why in the world wouldn't they do the same in their work contexts?



He makes a good point, one that's also true in academia. These same Wikipedia college students are becoming our graduate students and tomorrow's scientists. Just as a previous generation of students created the scientific websites that have become crucial to our daily work, this new generation is using emerging technologies to create mechanisms for sharing their interests. I hope those of us who hold more senior positions will find ways to encourage and endorse this work and reward their efforts. But even if we don't, the change will come. Frankly, I think that's a great thing.

Full Text Available At

IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 2-3, Jan./Feb. 2008,

[http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MIS.2008.12]