The Duke of Wellington is attributed to have responded to a threat of blackmail with the words ‘publish and be damned’. See Oxford Dictionary of Quotations p727 or Wikiquote. Whilst the circumstances are somewhat different for researchers today, perhaps the inverse of Wellington’s remark is more appropriate, thus not publish and be damned.
Researchers know the importance of scholarly communication and will disseminate their findings via the written or spoken word. Leaving aside giving presentations at conferences, let’s focus on the written word.
Traditionally researchers would seek to get published in journals with an established reputation using a metric known as the ‘impact factor’ to identify the ‘best’ journals in a subject area. A sense of authority would be conferred on journal titles with the highest factors and would-be authors would target these select titles.
However scholarly communication is changing. The proliferation of read/write websites (so-called web 2.0) with their voting, rating and tagging capabilities means that the concept of authority is changing. Take for example Chemrank where ‘you’ decide the quality of the literature or social bookmarking sites such as CiteULike, Connotea and del.icio.us or indeed portals such as Chemical blogspace, individual blogs and wikis, not to mention Wikipedia / Citizendium.
Michael Jensen has coined the term Authority 2.0 to describe the issues surrounding reliability, quality and reputation etc in an environment in which anyone can participate. His article makes for some interesting reading, however it is the final sentences that send a particularly potent message:
”Perhaps most important, if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers, indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is rarely the path to scholarly authority”.
Whilst Jensen was not making an explicit plug for the notion of open access to research via institutional repositories, the message is clear – if you do not make your research as publicly available as possible, you will be invisible.
If you would like to find out more about how Loughborough’s Institutional Repository could make your research more visible please contact one of the team.
