INFORMATION SCIENCE SEMINAR

Geri Gay, Carl Lagoze, Shay David, Bing Pan - Cornell Information Science

Date: Tuesday, February 24, 2004  2-3p* (Talk moved due to a conflict with Bill Gates' talk on Wednesday)

Location: Cornell Information Science, 301 College Avenue, Seminar Room

Title of the talk: APPRAISE -- a new research platform for investigating hybrid networks

Abstract

In this presentation we will introduce our NSF project proposal for Appraise, a software environment and a site for social scientific research that is focused on scholarly communities and the social networks that induce and are induced by document networks. The program explores how documents, the artifacts of scholarly communication, provide the context for ideation and other scholarly activities. A hypothesis of the research is that the nature of the document, the technical artifact of scholarly activity, and the nature of the social networks in which this activity takes place have a reflexive relationship. Understanding the nature of this relationship and the manner in which it changes as technology changes is a primary goal of Appraise. We hope to solicit input and get feedback from the forum on this work-in-progress which is now at a preliminary stage.

For nearly 350 years, the scholarly journal has been the primary vehicle for communicating the results of scholarly activity, providing the basis for registering new results, establishing the quality of those results through peer-review, and awarding tenure and promotion. This system is now under serious pressure.  Its economic viability is questioned as rising subscription prices challenge flat library budgets. Scholars are increasingly resistant to surrendering copyright to journal publishers. Finally, the lag time between submission and journal publication is at odds with the increasingly fast pace of scholarly endeavors.

The ubiquity of the Web and new publishing technologies provide alternatives to this traditional publishing model, but these are not free of problems of their own. These alternatives include e-Print repositories that facilitate rapid publication and access to new results, and institutional repositories that give authors and institutions more control over intellectual property. They are enabled by new technologies for the packaging and presentation of scholarly results and for interoperability among distributed repositories.

Appraise addresses key aspects of this system in transition. The proposed research program explores the relationship between the technological basis of scholarly communication and the structure of scholarly communities that use the technology.

For more information please contact Phoebe Sengers at sengers@cs.cornell.edu