Dr Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), addressed a forum from UCT Libraries, Research Office, IT specialists and researchers on Friday, 23 January.   

He focused on having a new way of thinking about what can be achieved with scholarly communication. 

Neylon’s seminar referenced the scholarly communication paradigm that was started in 1665 with Henry Oldenberg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, with the paper-based, peer-reviewed journal as its context. Today everything has moved online; in some respects there have been radical changes in scholarly communication, while in other respects things have stayed very much the same. Talk continues around the business model of the journal, which is an over simplification of what scholarly communication is about.

To understand what scholarly communication is about, Neylon said, “It’s time to ask: What was that Royal Society journal? What were the underlying thoughts around the journal? Who was that community? What was the Royal Society trying to achieve? This Society was a club, so to speak, and it was their purpose to promote the natural world.”

If one looks at the content of Oldenburg’s journal, Philosophical Transactions, one gathers that this group came together to test each other’s ideas and experiments, they saw how data was collected,  looked to see if consensus could be reached and shared the results prior to publication; all taking place within a community of knowing each another. Oldenburg looked at the sharing model of disseminating the journal, so that more people could observe this scholarly process of inquiry. 

In today’s journal publishing process, Neylon commented, “We don’t have the data sharing as part of the journal, nor the respect that existed prior to peer review [as was evident within the Royal Society]. The data is lost. It’s not communicated anymore.” 

Furthermore, in the review process we loose the scale of knowing the community who will critique the results; it’s now anonymous, as if there’s no human element to the review process”.  

The big question is: “How can we maximize having the right experts critique the processes of inquiry?”

The example of the success of arXiv (Physics preprint archive) was used. Conversations occur when the preprints were made available, more than when the formal publication was published. “Academics should make their work public before it’s published to contribute to the conversation of inquiry.”

One asks the question: What is the purpose a university serves in this process of inquiry? It’s the place where these conversations should take place. Being an institution that is distinct and offering something different will mean that they move away from ranking people and institutions. Its strength is in the ability to explore new spaces; take the risks. 

Where does it leave the Library? Is it just the space? The tables? The coffee shop? It’s not purely about the content. The library has a role as the holders of the light to the process of inquiry. The place where the infrastructure exists to create the lifecycle of scholarly communication, for example the institutional repositories can track the conversations of inquiry. Academic blogging is important as it’s seen as a means for engagement with community. It’s become a bit more mainstream and is becoming a serious part of the literature. 

It might be difficult to change these bureaucratic systems, but we should challenge them and work around them, concluded Neylon.