0.20 The idols of scholarly publishing  (Page 2/6)

If the low cost of digital storage encourages inclusiveness in documentary evidence, however, the nature of the network exerts a countervailing pressure—or at least it should. Living in the world of the Norton Anthologies and multi-decade Papers of … editions we have been conditioned to fret about exclusion and inclusion, but the Internet has taken an entirely different view of the matter. Tim Berners-Lee, building on the network, assumed that to encompass a topic completely you would have to rely on the electronic synthesis of hyperlinked resources—decentralization over centralization. Everything is intertwined on the web, and all boundaries are permeable. The sheer ease of linking and the machine-readable nature of digital collections allows websites to be satisfied with incompleteness, since a viewer can jump elsewhere for complementary content, additional information, or services.

We should therefore take inspiration not from the editorial projects of print but from this core characteristic of the web: network-scale systems. The idea of a strongly bounded editorial series in the digital edge is folly. Instead, we should be pushing toward network-scale scholarship and curation . The Internet is very good at combining resources and services spread across the network and, if done correctly, this can enhance the natural research process while allaying the fear of digital collection providers that they have failed to be comprehensive. When the University of Michigan Library, the Cornell University Library, and the State and University Library Göttingen implemented a common search layer on top of their scans of rare historical works on mathematics to create the Distributed Digital Library of Mathematical Monographs , they were thinking at network-scale rather than within their own cave. When Price’s Whitman Archive offers its DTD for download so that other collections can encode the works of contemporaries in complementary ways, they are thinking at network-scale. When digital collections use APIs, OAI-PMH, and Creative Commons licenses, they are thinking at network-scale.

The vernacular web has become increasingly savvy about how networks work. For instance, the simplicity and availability (from its conception) of Twitter’s APIs and the liberation of its content from the Twitter.com domain has successfully encouraged the development of a tremendous ecosystem around the service. The rather shrewd assumption made by the founders of Twitter is that others will have a better sense of what to do with their content than they will. As much as it may pain us, academics could learn a thing or two from the oft-maligned Twitter.

The interrelations enabled by APIs and open data undoubtedly offend those with traditional views of authorship and edited collections. In his crowd-pleasing keynote to the gathered booksellers at the 2006 Book Expo convention in Washington, John Updike famously ridiculed Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s notion of a universal digital library (in Kelly’s New York Times Magazine article “Scan This Book!”, itself a transparent attempt to provoke) as full of “teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship,” and stirringly implored his audience to “defend your lonely forts [and] keep your edges dry.” An adaptation of John Updike’s talk, “The End of Authorship,” was published in the New York Times on June 25, 2006, in the Times Book Review , and is available (ironically) at (External Link) . The podcast (again, ironically) of his Book Expo talk (June 23, 2006) is available at (External Link) . Kevin Kelly’s “Scan This Book!”, New York Times Magazine , May 14, 2006, is available unironically at (External Link) .