Christine Borgman and Scholarly Communication

Professor G E Gorman

Victoria University of Wellington

The many stakeholders in scholarly information infrastructure are addressing their own territories, whether technical, legal, economic, social, economic, or political, or in individual research domains, but few are taking a big-picture view of the interaction of these factors (Borgman 2007, xviii).

This is a somewhat sad indictment of scholarly behaviour at a time when integration and collaboration are not only more possible than ever before, but in fact are essential if we are to break down the narrow disciplinary barriers that have thwarted truly creative thinking, research and writing for centuries. This is not to say that collaboration and lateral thinking have not existed over the centuries, but rather than they are not normative for most scholars.

Christine Borgman once again has found the soft underbelly of our rather confused approach to the information infrastructure upon which we are totally dependent. As in her previous book, From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World (Borgman 2000), she forces us, quite convincingly so, to look long and hard at our assumptions about information infrastructure from both social and professional perspectives; in doing so, she points out some home truths that should make information professionals scholars, and particularly readers of this journal, to see themselves in her critique.

On the one hand, present-day initiatives in ‘e-everything’ make it possible for us as scholars to enter realms of creativity and lateral thinking never before possible, but now not only possible but amazingly constructive. As Borgman suggests, with sophisticated e-research tools and services, we can ask new questions and find answers, compare literary themes, find details of events, undertake better machine translation, compile better directories and indexes, etc. And all of this is based on our ability to access data online. 

On the other hand, and this is the soft underbelly alluded to above, the scholarly communication system is ‘remarkably stable’ (Borgman’s words).

The reward system continues to be based on publishing journal articles, books and conference papers. Peer review legitimizes scholarly work. Competition and cooperation are carefully balanced. The means by which scholarly publishing occurs is in an unstable state, but the basic functions remain relatively unchanged (Borgman 2007, xviii).

Certainly any author or editor can relate to this assessment; our reward system would fall apart without the peer review system, and there is widespread suspicion of any alternative that might be suggested by over-eager info-boffins. One need only look at the Research Assessment Exercise in Britain, or its equivalents in Australia and New Zealand, to see that traditional peer review is still what matters in determining peer esteem among scholars, with citation counts and related paraphernalia used as gauges of this esteem. Sure, we have Open Access and similar initiatives, and we have the Wikipedias of this world, but precious few of our colleagues put much assessable value on such new boys on the block, and one sees not much sign of this changing overnight.

And editors in particular, whether academics or professionals, can relate to the comment that “the basic functions [of scholarly publishing] remain relatively unchanged”. Works may be online in unprecedented numbers, and the editorial and review processes may be electronic and thus that much faster, but the way we reach outputs hardly differs from what it was a century ago. I, for one, do not want this to change – I want to rely on publishers and editors to serve as information gatekeepers, preserving me as much as possible from the intellectual cholesterol that clogs our collective veins of e-scholarship. “As Internet penetration and bandwidth increase”, there is no reason that that time-tested tradition cannot continue, and improve in terms of speed and rapid turnaround, and the faster publication of materials online. But this is missing one of Dr Borgman’s main points, as the rest of her early statement in Chapter 2 suggests:

As Internet penetration and bandwidth increase, so has the volume and variety of content online. Much of it is just “stuff” the unverified and unverifiable statements of individuals, discussions on listservs and Web logs (“blogs”), questionable advertisements for questionable products and services, and political and religious screeds in all languages, from all perspectives (Borgman 2007, 1).

Compare this with the volume of online content that is extremely valuable for scholarly work, and the problem becomes partly how to find this in the proliferation of “stuff”. One solution relies on the improvement of infrastructures to allow scholars to locate, access and capture superior online content. Another is to make certain that readers of the genuinely valuable scholarly e-output know how to assess “trust and authenticity”. There have been many, some rather overblown, assessments of the dangers of online dating, and some wonderful cartoons on this theme; knowing how to determine the genuine value of online scholarship may carry some of the dangers of online dating – if one is not accessing authoritative sources. This is a major role for education and information literacy in particular.

This and much more is addressed in Scholarship in the Digital Age, which focuses particularly on the scholarly infrastructure and the information infrastructure, with satellite discussions of the value chain of scholarship, how disciplines treat data and information differently – and all addressed in a most insightful and provocative manner. As this is not a book review, it need not provide a detailed analysis of the content. The main points to be made are these:

1. E-scholarship and traditional scholarship, at least in terms of dissemination, are at once remarkably similar and significantly different (similar process, different engagement with data and ideas); scholars must be aware of, and work with, both the similarities and differences. There really is no place for technophobes of laggards among active and productive scholars, nor is there room for those who would ignore the best of our sound tradition of scholarly assessment and dissemination of scholarship.

2. Both the solution and the problem lie in a new scholarly and information infrastructure. The solution is here because of the great advantages that the emerging, yet-to-be-built infrastructure promises. “Information technologies have matured sufficiently to enable rich new forms of data- and information-intensive, distributed, collaborative scholarship” (Borgman 2007, 31). The problem is that many advocates of this brave new world fail to realise that this is an evolutionary process, and not an ex nihilo occurrence – though many would deny this, because to accept evolution gives us responsibilities as custodians of the past. As Borgman (2007, 31) reminds us, “rarely is anything a complete break with the past. Old ideas and new, old cultures and new, old artefacts and new, all coexist. It is necessary to be able to recognize the relationships and artefacts around us, while at the same time being able to critique them.”

This is admittedly a personal view of the import of Dr Borgman’s newest book, but it is one that resonates with personal experience. Others may have different views, but the inescapable fact is that scholarship is living through turbulent times, and it behoves us all to take seriously what Borgman so succinctly and elegantly lays before us, to engage with the challenges of the emerging scholarly infrastructure, and to contribute to a better infrastructure. Surely this is something that contributors to, and readers of, this journal can appreciate.

References

Borgman, C.L. (2000) From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Borgman, C.L. (2007) Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.