Peer Production and Virtual Communities: Light and HeavyWeight Models for Collaborative Publishing P

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Peer Production and Virtual Communities Light
and Heavy-Weight Models for Collaborative
PublishingPaper presented at the Print,
Internet and Community conference, Tel Aviv,
Israel, June 2007

• Caroline Haythornthwaite

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Two Trends

• Collaborative Peer Production
• From commons-based peer production to virtual
  communities
• Free/Libre movement
• Free as in free speech rather than free beer
  -- Free/Libre rather than Free/Gratis
• Open source, open science, open access, creative
  commons

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Outline

• Collaborative, Peer Production
• Commons-based and Virtual Community-based
  Production
• Information in the Information Age
• Scholarly Publishing and Community
• as a model of peer production and publishing
• Publishing and the Internet
• Opportunities

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Collaborative Production
Peer Production commons-based peer production
Virtual Community
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Lightweight vs Heavyweight

• Weak or no ties between contributors
• Weak or no association between contributions
  (modular)
• Contributions require only small amount of effort
  (granularity)
• Minimal commitment
• Easy entry and exit
• Low overhead to start no obligation to stay
• Contributors have weak coorientation to overall
  goals
• External authority and control
• Evaluation of quantity of contributions

• Strong ties to community members
• Different kinds of contributions are needed
• Strong interconnection between contributions
• Commitment to belonging and staying
• Apprenticeships obligation to provide
  contribution obligation to others
• Strong coorientation to overall goals AND to
  community members
• Internal authority and control
• Evaluation of quality of contributions, and of
  contributors

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Scholarly Publishing

• Personal interest
• Tenure, promotion
• Personal recognition, fame
• Economic and career survival
• Publish or perish
• Public interest
• Knowledge
• Education
• Society

• Institutional interest
• University
• Library
• Students
• Virtual community interest
• Colleagues
• Discipline/Field
• Methodology

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Academic Calculus Where to publish?

• Whats the prestige value of the resulting
  publication?
• to my institution, my colleagues, my discipline,
  my scholarly community
• What is the likelihood of acceptance?
• By the publisher, journal editors, etc.
• What is the likely timeframe?
• (1) review, (2) for a decision on acceptance, (3)
  for appearance in print or on-line
• How much time do I have?
• Will anyone find it?
• Buy it, own it, shelve it, put it on a course?

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Why Peer Production?

• Why now?
• Because information has broken the bonds of print
  and is making a run for it on the Internet

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Information in the Internet Age

• Information wants to be free
• Information wants to be free because it has
  become so cheap to distribute, copy and recombine
  too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive
  because it can be immeasurably valuable to the
  recipient. (Brand, 1988)
• free of structure and arrangement, free of usage
  restrictions, and/or free for the taking (Kaser,
  2000)
• Free as in free beer (Open access)
• Unbundling
• Free of form (paper, journal, book) and industry
  (publishers, book trade, bookstores)
• Free of editorship, gatekeeping, (old) community
  values, pre-publication peer review, time
  constraints
• Free as in egalité equal opportunity

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Information in the Internet Age

• Information wants to be
• Attached to its creator, reputation system,
  discourse community
• Found - now - by friends, colleagues, readers
• Part of a conversation
• Information wants attention
• Information wants to be networked
• Information wants to evolve

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Publishing in the Age of the Internet

• Internet is both a solution and a driver of these
  wants
• Information wants to be Free
• Libre, gratis equal
• Contributor Retriever
• Fast, Attributed, Found, Networked, Evolving
• The challenge -- and fuss -- is in commons-based
  peer production
• The opportunity is in both commons-based and
  community production

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The Fast and The Slow- the lightweight
heavyweight -

• it is striking in any review of the literature
  on electronic publishing how much of the
  advocacy for electronic publishing comes from
  authors in mathematics and other
  scientific/technical areas. the view of
  knowledge or information entailed here, and the
  model of dissemination it invokes, assumes a kind
  of published text that is data-rich and that has
  a relatively homogenous form But when an
  essay's form is closely linked in design as well
  as in substance with the expression of a
  distinctive point of view then the rapid
  turnaround and fungibility of electronic media do
  nothing to help, and might in practice hinder,
  the preservation of a form of writing and
  publishing that cannot be reduced to an
  information dissemination model. (Burbules
  Bruce, 1995)

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Current Strengths and Challenges

• Gatekeeping
• Reviewing, selection
• Internet has no gatekeeping. Non-reviewed works
  arrive online and get more attention than the
  reviewed
• Publisher-author relationships
• Editorial and production process
• Control of document record
• Maintaining author-document association
• Trust relation is suffering (in academia)
• Publisher practices are getting out of synch with
  author needs. Failure to respond to changes in
  community needs
• Reputation of publisher
• Entrenched position of publishers as reputation
  control
• Need for this reputation is challenged by online
  posting and retrieval, and diminished when
  priority seems to turn to profit over community
  goals

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Peer Production Niche

• Peer Production
• Discrete items
• Multiple voices, single format
• Metadata rich
• Formalized
• Electronically analyzable
• Automatic indexing, abstracting
• Fast, Incremental
• Release early, release often

• Publishing
• Lightweight association with contributors
• End-to-end project control
• Contributor base, metadata, document structures,
  coordination, distribution
• Promotion of overall goal
• Mindful of social contract with contributors
• Niche opportunities
• End-to-end hosting, entry to publication

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The Flora of North America Project

• The Flora of North America Project will treat
  more than 20,000 species of plants native or
  naturalized in North America north of Mexico,
  about 7 of the world's total. Species
  descriptions are written and reviewed by experts
  from the systematic botanical community
  worldwide, based on original observations of
  living and herbarium specimens supplemented by a
  crucial review of the literature. Each treatment
  includes scientific and common names, taxonomic
  descriptions, identification keys, distribution
  maps, illustrations, summaries of habitat and
  geographic ranges, pertinent synonomy, chromosome
  numbers, phenology, ethnobotanical uses and
  toxicity, and other relevant biological
  information.
• http//hua.huh.harvard.edu/FNA/index.html
• Emphasis added

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Virtual Community Niches

• Virtual Community
• Integrated
• Single, communal voice
• Non-formalized
• Human document analysis
• Slow(er), publication of completed product

• Publishing
• Heavyweight association with contributors
• Co-ownership of contributions
• Shared responsibility with community
• Collaborative determination of product(s), their
  interrelationships, distributions
• Mindful of community needs, of reputation and
  reward systems, of the information ecology
• Expanded content
• E.g., Data (data curation initiatives)
• End-to-end support
• idea to expression, i.e., editorial help

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National Academies Press

• The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by
  the National Academies to publish the reports
  issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the
  National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of
  Medicine, and the National Research Council, all
  operating under a charter granted by the Congress
  of the United States. The NAP publishes more than
  200 books a year on a wide range of topics in
  science, engineering, and health. Hundreds of
  these books can be downloaded for free by the
  chapter or the entire book, while others are
  available for purchase. Our frequently asked
  questions guide answers questions about
  purchasing and accessing our electronic books.
• http//www.nap.edu/about.html

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Code 2.0, Lawrence Lessig

• So Code v2 is officially launched today December
  2006. Some may remember Code and Other Laws of
  Cyberspace, published in 1999. Code v2 is a
  revision to that book not so much a new book, as
  a translation of (in Internet time) a very old
  book. Part of the update was done on a Wiki. The
  Wiki was governed by a Creative Commons
  Attribution-ShareAlike license. So too is Code
  v2. Thus, at http//codev2.cc, you can download
  the book. Soon, you can update it further (were
  still moving it into a new wiki). You can also
  learn a bit more about the history of the book,
  and aim of the revision. And finally, there are
  links to buy the book more cheaply than you
  likely can print it yourself. Most important,
  however, as we come to the 185,000 mark of the
  CC fundraiser All royalties from Code v2 go to
  Creative Commons, in recognition of the work done
  by those who helped with the wiki version of Code
  v1.
• http//www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003633.shtml

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Re-Bundling and Derivatives

• Unbundling leads to Re-bundling
• Unbundle information from print, rebundle in
  digital forms
• Digitization projects, digital libraries, online
• Disintermediation leads to Re-intermediation
• Keywords, indexing, abstracting, and cataloguing
  are replaced with full-text search, data mining,
  tagging, folksonomies and search engine
  algorithms
• Peer review in advance replaced by peer review
  after
• Post-hoc discussion (Psycholoquy journal)
  post-hoc voting by site visitors (YouTube)
  linking to others (CitesULike)
• Reward systems lead to Derivatives
• Secondary products that take advantage of
  opportunities created by the primary products
• Building on reputation systems, need to organize
  and retrieve information, need to store digital
  content

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Derivative Niches

• Reputation
• Contributor statistics and recognition for
  quantity
• Wikipedia has entry for a highly prolific
  contributor
• Scholarly impact measures
• ISIs web of science, h-index, Harzings publish
  or perish
• Prizes and Awards
• Retrieval
• Aggregators (AddALL Google CitesULike
  Dogpile)
• Portals Amazon
• Clearinghouses ERIC, JSTOR
• Collections, Repositories Archives E-granary
  digital libraries
• Cataloguing Classification
• Standards and procedures, Metadata Library of
  Congress OCLC centralized cataloguing tagging,
  folksonomies
• Re-mediation
• Digitizations online journals online impact
  factors post-hoc peer review
• Archives Archiving electronic copy (HighWire,
  LOCKSS, Portico), archiving employee copy
  (Institutional Repositories)

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MyLifeBits Project, Gordon Bell

• MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It
  is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex
  vision including full-text search, text audio
  annotations, and hyperlinks... Gordon Bell has
  captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books,
  cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos,
  pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped
  lectures, and voice recordings and stored them
  digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning
  to capture phone calls, IM transcripts,
  television, and radio MyLifeBits software
  leverages SQL server to support hyperlinks,
  annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting,
  clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is
  designed to make annotation easy, It includes
  tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio
  and television We are beginning to explore
  features such as document similarity ranking and
  faceted classification.
• http//research.microsoft.com/barc/mediapresence/M
  yLifeBits.aspx

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Summing Up

• Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtual
  Community
• Two models of collaborative, peer production
• Lightweight to Heavyweight production systems
• Evaluation matters
• Quantitative for lightweight Qualitative for
  heavyweight
• Retrieval matters
• Retrieval Evaluation Reputation
• Reputation creates opportunity for Derivatives
• A third model relating to peer production

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Opportunities

• Recapture the value-added of publishing
• Make it so it is not publishing on the web when
  no editor, review, or publisher is present in the
  transactions
• Focus on reputation and reputation derivatives
• Add value in author relationships
• Editing, distribution, exposure, retrieval
• Find value in online publications
• Find authors online and bring into the reviewed
  arena
• Publish online and offline
• With review, reputation system, reach
• Create and host collaborative publishing
  environments
• Create collaborative agreements with authors,
  with societies, scholarly communities
• Harness peer production to expand contribution
  from the commons, from the community

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References

• Benkler, Y. (2002). Coases penguin, or, Linux
  and the nature of the firm. Yale Law Journal,
  112, 369-446.
• Benkler, Y. (2005). Common Wisdom Peer
  Production of Educational Materials. COSL Press.
  http//www.benkler.org/Common_Wisdom.pdf
• Burbules, N. C. Bruce, B. C. (1995). This is
  not a paper. Educational Researcher, 24(8),
  12-18.
• Haythornthwaite, C. Bregman, A. (under review).
  Peer, community and derivative models of
  collective production.
• Raymond, E. (1998). The cathedral and the bazaar.
  First Monday, 3(3). http//www.firstmonday.dk/issu
  es/issue3_3 /raymond/
• Willinsky, J. (2005). The unacknowledged
  convergence of open source, open access, and open
  science. ?First Monday, 10(8). http//firstmonday.
  org/issues/issue10_8/ willinsky/index.html