0.32 Scholarly information management: a proposal  (Page 4/11)

Scholarly communities on the web

Now the question is: who will resolve all these policy problems? In order to fulfill the conditions of digital scholarship, scholars will undoubtedly have to come to agreements with their libraries, publishers and other stakeholders. First of all, though, we scholars must come to an agreement amongst ourselves: we need to form Open Scholarly Communities on the Web to lead the change into digital scholarship. These are free international associations of specialists who work on a specific author or area of research. They collaborate with libraries, universities, and publishers, but they themselves fix their own priorities, preserve the stability of texts and authorship, guarantee scholarly standards, and ensure open dissemination and thereby the long term preservation of content. Scholarly communities on the Web do not yet exist and they will be difficult to create: levels of digital literacy and awareness vary greatly between scholars, public institutions are not always open to allowing online access to their holdings, and there are also few publishers who seem willing to accompany scholars into the digital era. (This is perhaps understandable, as they don’t want to change their old business model; but less understandable is that scholars are often bound hand and foot to the publishers and seem happy to stay that way.) The model for the creation of these open scholarly communities on the Web can be found in the tradition of the academic societies of the seventeenth century: the Accademia dei Lincei , the Académie Française , the Royal Society . These were the social networks when modern science was born. After the time of the Academies, a new model emerged and it seems no longer suitable for the transition into the digital era.

Scholarly information management

Up to this point, we have discussed some of the basic and necessary requirements for scholarship. We have seen that these requirements necessitate a certain number of policy decisions and that the principal actors who should make these decisions are the scholarly communities on the Web. They are the real stakeholders—those who really know what is at stake, who care about it and who are willing to act (or at least they should know, and should care and should be willing to). Now the question is, how can we conceive, from a technological point of view, the realization of our island of selected scholarly knowledge? For a moment let us imagine that Nietzsche Source will be the island in which Nietzsche specialists consult and publish reliable editions and scholarly articles, the same for Wittgenstein Source. A first version is available at (External Link) and (External Link) ; see also the other website published within the Discovery project: (External Link) . Together, the Scholarsource Federation will be the archipelago containing documents that can be quoted in a stable way, which receive the consensus of a scholarly community and which will be disseminated and preserved. What other functions could it feature? How should the content be organized? My initial thought was that all the scholarly communities should rely on the same software, like Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, etc. Like Scholarsource, they are islands in the Web, each one of them with its own features, rules, values. But scholarship is more complex and scholars are too different to adopt a “one size fits all” strategy. Each Island should therefore chose or develop its own software. So what will be suggested here is only a conceptual model of scholarly information management containing some general structures and features that are not necessary elements like the conditions of possibilities, but only possible forms of organizing scholarly content and which can be realized with different technologies. They can be divided in three categories: 1) Ontologies; 2) Capacities; 3) Interfaces.