Scholarship, Liberated From Paper at Last – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
Randolph Hall the Vice President for research at the University of Southern California suggests that academic scholarship can finally be liberated from paper or traditional print formats. We have access to digital repositories where huge data sets are made available to all researchers in hopes of finding answers quicker and to take advantage of serendipity. Cornell, Harvard, MIT and many other ivy league institutions are making their research available to everyone without formal peer review, speeding the pace at which research is disseminated.
Hall argues that we should make room for digital scholarship and should consider the following starting points:
Revise promotion-and-tenure guidelines where they discriminate against the collaborative work typical of much digital scholarship.
Create an infrastructure for the wide sharing of research and data.
Move beyond the outmoded concept of “authorship” to recognize scholarly contributions in forms other than books and papers.
