To what extent should informal web publications - such as blog posts, Wiki contributions, and even social bookmarks - be classed as 'proper' publications, and to what extent are they just part of an everday informal channel of academic discourse like a corridor meeting, seminar discussion, or conference chat?
Over recent months, there has been a push in UK HE towards the adoption of institutional repositories for collating the research output of an institution, and perhaps testing the waters of Open Access publication. If there is a part for infomal yet 'peer reviewed' channels - like blogs - to play in citable discourse (and even corridor conversations and email chats can be cited as personal communication), then should institutional repositories be somehow archiving those citable moments?
I used to play the research publication game in a very small way (e.g. here are my research publications) but in recent years I have become less and less productive, publication wise, which is not likely to do my academic career prospects many favours!
However, I have started blogging more and more, and hope that in some small way this is contributing something of value to my peer group. [Or perhaps not... Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs: When academics post online, do they risk their jobs?]
The way I use my blogs, as much as anything, is to record notes and snippets of stuff I’ve done that may be useful and/or of interest to others, or may be useful for me personally at a later date (can you tell I never throw anything away?). There is always the danger, of course, that this blog may be bad for my career...
Even so, from time to time it may be that academics who blog may publish a post that resonates with more than a few readers, and that in a small way becomes citable, e.g. through other blog posts or public bookmarks, for example.
Consequently, I think it's worth the blogging community asking the following question on a regular basis: Should blog posts count as academic publishing? And if so, how should they be archived as a matter of record?
Just what to archive is an issue, of course. For example, this post on Post or Perish asks whether individual blog posts should be counted as separate publications, or the blog as a whole should be counted as a single publication.
Where a particular post becomes heavily cited, then potentially an individual post as publication may be appropriate.
In such a case, it may also be useful to preserve the post in a more formal environment, and I wonder whether institutional repositories should be able to offer this sort of facility? For example, might it be appropriate to provide a ‘research memo’ area of the repository into which significant blog posts could be logged, or at least archived with a permanent URL?
Where the blog as a whole becomes the publication, (and for sake of argument I shall suppose that it is well respected by the community, as for example according to Pubsub Community Rank then we should perhaps consider whether it should count on an academic CV as a publication, or as evidence of esteem/reputation.
In general, I wonder whether there is a role for institutional librarians to act as guardians of cited, but informal publications - such as blog posts, or well referenced Wikipedia entries that don't get much revision - especially if they are made available via websites that are part of the institution's domain, even if they are counted as 'personal' web pages as far as domain controllers are concerned (such as this blog, for example).
Even if posts aren't archived, then perhaps there is a role for institutions to run closed (to the institution) social bookmarking services for the purposes simply of recording/archiving potentially citable links to digital resources produced by the instution's academic staff? Or perhaps post hoc bookmarking informal research related resources that have known to become linked to widely from outside (e.g via something like Who Rates This Page?).
The potential contribution of institutional repositories to formal reporting, such as in the UK's regular RAEs (Research Assessment Exercises) has been considered by Michael Day, from UKOLN, in his paper on Institutional repositories and research assessment.
I don't know whether blog posts are, or should be, eligible for inclusion in RAE 2008 returns. A quick inspection of the guidelines for the Computer Science and Informatics unit of assessment includes the following:
Research Outputs, s.12: All forms of research output will be treated equally. The sub-panel expects to receive outputs in the form of books, chapters in books, articles in journals, conference contributions, and other formats including creative media and multimedia, standards documents, patents, products and processes, items of software, and technical reports, including consultancy reports. Outputs in all forms will be given equal consideration and the sub-panel acknowledges the breadth of publication practice in computer science and informatics.
Research Outputs, s. 17: In assessing excellence the sub-panel will look for originality, innovation, significance, depth, rigour, influence on the discipline and wider fields and, where appropriate, relevance to users. The sub-panel will not use a rigid or formulaic method of assessing research quality. It will not use a formal ranked list of journals and it will not use impact factors or citation indices in a formulaic way.
Esteem Indicators: 36. Departments should list indicators of peer esteem and national and international recognition that relate to the staff submitted and were gained in the assessment period. The sub-panel will expect to see a range of esteem indicators, distributed across the department’s staff, appropriate to the size and staffing profile of the department. Indicators should be listed by individual and ordered by research group and may include:
You'd need to be able to demonstrate a contribution to your peer group, of course. For example, that your blog was frequently referred to by members of your community, (but measured how? [e.g. Blogpulse or PubSub rank]); how useful a social bookmarker you are (but measured how? e.g. [del.ico.us CollaborativeRank]); or how major a Wikipedia contributor you are (but again, measured how?).
One important question that arises with respect to blog posts or Wikipedia entries is the permanence of the content of the post, particularly if the author is free to edit it over time, (as I occasionally do to these posts myself). In this case, care needs to be taken in considering the relationship between the archived copy of the post and the living document on the author’s blog itself.
At the very least, it would be useful to record somewhere the history of any changes to the post, much as the history tab of a page on Mediawiki records the evolution of a wiki page.
The preferred method of citing web references (e.g ?????? Accessed on: ??? from http://?????) can thus be tracked - via the history page – to a particular version instance of a post.
This issue of citing potentially dynamic sources poses all sorts of questions, I think, not least concerning the dynamic nature of academic discourse. This is something I shall have to go away and think about…
PS on the issues of repositories, this articule on Using simple online tools to 'make' a repository is worth a read. It includes a section on making resources available by using social bookmarking.
Posted by ajh59 at November 20, 2005 10:57 PM