New forms of scholarly communication

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New forms of scholarly communication

• Hal R. Varian
• UC Berkeley
• http//www.sims.berkeley.edu/hal

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Eprints

• Eprints
• Benefits
• fast, inexpensive, inclusive
• Drawbacks
• peer review, version control, permanence
• Models (function and cost)
• centralized (LANL)
• decentralized (CS reports)
• moderated (SSRN)

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Peer review

• Publication as costly signal of quality
• redundant in some areas (physics?)
• too many journals reduce value of signal
• difficulty with monographs
• Changing costs
• when publication was expensive, filter ex ante
• when publication is cheap, filter ex post

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Ex post review

• Peer review
• dont have to be 0-1
• implict rating hits
• explicit rating 0-5
• improve quality of article
• suggestions -- need version control
• comments -- need threading system

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Forms of rating

• Anonymous
• mediated v non-mediated
• open to all v restricted
• Signed
• endorsements
• Recommender systems
• Grouplens
• gaming the system?

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Dimensions of rating

• Is this interesting?
• May be able to tell easily
• Patterns of reading articles
• Is this correct?
• Usually requires more effort
• Mathematicians and philosophers

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Form of articles?

• Abstract (1 paragraph)
• 5 page version
• article
• appendix

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Possible model

• Experts judge interest based on 5-page
• Readers judge correctness
• Prizes as incentive
• best of collections in print or CD
• Forms
• threaded, cross linked, notification system,
  recommender system

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Interlib project

• Berkeley, Stanford, UCSB
• Berkeley
• distributed, continuous, self-publishing
• tools
• collaboration using MVD
• electronic research notebook
• content analysis
• images, text

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Multivalent documents

• Document is many layers
• languages
• scanned bits OCR text
• commentary
• Challenges
• interface, manipulation, document types

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Research notebook

• Palm pilot device
• networked repository
• search, creation and annotation of documents from
  large collections
• Interface for searching and visualizing large
  collections of documents

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Other topics

• Image search and analysis
• Mathematical documents
• Automatic categorization
• Access control and rights management
• Business models
• GIS
• Testbed environmental data