0.32 Scholarly information management: a proposal  (Page 3/11)

Consensus is the second important requirement for scholarship. As with other social activities, to receive support and to be included in the common research enterprises, scholars must produce works recognized as interesting by their colleagues. But more than in other social activities, in scholarship this recognition is understood to be based on evidence and must be as fair and transparent as possible. In reality, of course, this is very difficult to realize. Peer review and other systems of fair evaluation are continuously contested. The Web holds a real possibility for change, a chance to organise consensus in a better way: easier, more transparent, more efficient. In this case the Web is an improvement over the traditional system, allowing for new possibilities: article ranking according to quotation, impact factor based on semantic tagging, number of citations or downloads of an article. And some journals, for example Nature , are already experimenting with new types of digital peer review. It is important to note that in this case as well, policy decisions, more than technology, will determine the success of these new systems.

The third condition for the possibility of scholarship is Preservation . Scholarship is essentially an historical activity and we must be certain that our electronic documents survive us. Stanford’s LOCKSS (“Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”) project supposes that the best way to preserve an electronic document is not to keep a unique copy in a very safe place, but to let people make thousands of copies and to spread them all over the world. They are right; the thirty centuries of our cultural heritage confirm the premise of LOCKSS. We have lost only what we did not copy. Why did we lose almost all the work of Heraclitus, while we preserved almost all of Aristotle’s work? Because Heraclitus had a DRMS (Digital Rights Management System) strategy: he stored the unique copy of his work in a safe place (the temple at Ephesus) and people could not copy it. As a result, his work was lost and only the quotations made by other authors still survive. Aristotle, on the contrary, was a copyleft guy: allowing his students to copy his works whenever they wanted. Copy after copy of Aristotle’s works have been passed down to us. The worst enemies of preservation are copyright, DRMS, and all of the technical means that now prevent copying. The true friends of preservation are free sharing and the copyleft movement.

I am wondering if we should add a fourthcondition of possibility: Dissemination . Dissemination seems to be a fourth requirement because it is hard to imagine modern scienceor scholarship without public diffusion of its results. Modern science is a public conversation based on evidence in which both primarysources and research results must be easily accessible to all. On the one hand, it is impossible to provide arguments or proofs based ondocuments which are not accessible; on the other, to be taken in account, research results have to be published. Yet as we agreed thatdissemination through copy is the best—and ultimately the only—way to achieve preservation, then dissemination is not a fourth condition ofpossibility, but a different name for the third one. Preservation and dissemination are indeed the same thing—two faces of the same coin—andthe third condition of possibility is twofold: Dissemination/Preservation. In this case, we have to conclude that theelectronic medium—the Web in particular—is the best medium for both dissemination and for preservation, if we agree that digital preservation is best achievedthrough copying. This means that to maximize preservation and dissemination, we should remove all legal obstacles that so oftenobstruct access to sources and the diffusion of research results. In the long run, open access is not an option for digital scholarship: itis a requirement. And this is yet another problem of policy, not of technology.