It was perhaps eight years ago, and within a week of the new semester opening. As I recall, the head of the school where I taught sent a memo to all teaching faculty asking—demanding, really—that we create a website to accompany each course we taught. These websites, the memo continued, should be in operation by midterm.

The response varied. One group of faculty members insisted they could never permit use of the internet in their classroom. A few immediately squeezed into their own schedule the oversubscribed introductory course that explained the basics of creating a website. Several others ignored the request as redundant (they already had an internet component in place), as exploitative (the increased workload came with no increase in compensation), or because they didn’t read the memo. At the end of the semester, this department had the same number of “course websites” as it had before the memo was distributed.

Readers with at least one foot in academia may recall similar episodes at their own institution. The conflicts raised by differing perceptions of “digital scholarship,” “the internet,” or “cyberspace,” and differing perceptions of its value, are by no means confined to classroom teaching, to the university, or to education, however. I’ve observed similar anxious requests and equally anxious responses at nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, professional societies, homeowners’ associations—all institutions that serve a constituency and are concerned with serving it well.

We (or our administrations) know the internet is a useful addition to our scholarly lives. But how, exactly? What must we learn to do, or to accept? What place should the internet hold in professional activities or scholarly endeavors?

In answering these questions, it is helpful to remember that the internet is, in essence, a communication tool. It can bring information to a great number and range of people more quickly and at less expense than surface mail or conference attendance. It is also helpful to remember that the essence of scholarly activities is communication. It’s not enough to generate new ideas or conclusions; telling others and learning their opinions are critical aspects of participation in the academy. The adoption of the internet by scholarly communities has changed the paths of scholarly communication, argues Christine Borgman in her new book Scholarship in the Digital Age, and in so doing has transformed those communities.1 An aspect of that transformation is a redefinition of data—what it is, how it is used, who owns it and what that ownership means—that challenges the foundations of the academy.

Scholarly communication, much like building a website, involves a series of interconnected activities and considerations, some public, others private. Borgman’s assertion is based in the particular ways that interactive (internet-dependent) digital formats have altered scholarly digital communications. They offer new presentation tools and new techniques to communicate with colleagues. Discussions and distribution of information and resources are simultaneously broader and more personalized. The revised formats accommodate and encourage greater collaboration.

These changes have brought good and less-good results, as the proliferation of information has altered attitudes toward content and presentation. Internet access eases the exchange of information within and beyond single disciplines; this democratization of information is a notable feature of digital scholarship. Some common internet or cyberspace protocols disrupt assumptions that academic or scholarly work is published exclusively by academic or scholarly publishers. The ease of distributing unprocessed data along with explanatory charts, graphs, and conclusions means that information can be studied in different ways by practitioners of different disciplines. As a result, the use of the internet as a tool for scholarly communication raises new questions about controls and gateways. The same questions arise when examining the internet-wrought changes to peer review and to concepts of ownership, particularly as each relates to the goal of open access. In scientific disciplines where acknowledged priority ensures future funding or advancement, openness and the interactive nature of the internet are as much threat as promise. Openness and interactivity have widened the gateway into the humanities, suggesting that scholars in those disciplines need to conduct more critical assessments of internet-accessible works.

Which of these you consider good results and which less-good depends on other factors, as standards for scholarly interactive communication have not yet reached a consensus point. The unresolved issues range from acknowledgment of new uses for “raw data” (and so the need to recognize data management as a valid contribution to scholarship) to the need for further discussion about priority and copyright to defining for whom and to what specific purposes any scholarly digital system exists.

To further the goal of developing a consensus, Borgman defines the present state of interactive digital scholarship. Her emphasis, as she explains, is on the science and social science disciplines; she leaves out the humanities because their cyberinfrastructures are less well established. She looks at both the architecture and design of current systems and categorizes unresolved issues as a means to further illuminate collaborative possibilities. Borgman finds that the functions of the scholarly communities (peer review), the dissemination of new findings (open access), and the need to preserve information (preservation) are key differences between digital and paperbound scholarship systems.

Traditionally, the scholarly community has relied on a print-focused partnership to communicate. A scholar generates new information. Peer reviewers ensure its quality and priority, and similar concerns. A publisher or conference organizer provides the means of dissemination, producing an object (journal, book, pre- or post-prints, book of abstracts, etc.) and informing the whole community of its availability. The paper form has a finality that supports and is supported by its significance.

While aspects of the print-focused partnership exist in digital scholarship, the ease of disseminating work through the internet has shifted its balance. Scholarly digital publishing relies on production and distribution systems that are both similar to and different from those of “traditional” publishing. One way to understand the differences is to consider the distribution of costs of the two communication paths. For electronic publication, the greatest expense resides in production of the first or master copy; the marginal costs of additional copies are minimal. (These statements also explain email spam and the shift to digitized backlists in publishing.) A paperbound book or journal has similar expenses associated with the initial print run, but the costs of warehousing, delivery, and reprinting can be considerable and do not diminish much as copies are sold. And, while social and sociological factors may limit the number of born-digital books (at least in the humanities), born-digital or internet-based journals have become a common feature of many scholarly disciplines.

The role of peer review, in particular, changes when coordinated with the concept of open access familiar in digital scholarship; Borgman calls on sociological studies in her analysis of the impact of these changes. She suggests that peer review may become an interactive post-publication event in which the opinion of many peers, apparent through citation (in the traditional sense, or as links to a book or paper), replaces the time-consuming and often problematic prepublication review system. But I wonder if, by setting aside the humanities, Borgman has misjudged the potential contribution of a different kind of model to the development of this new scholarly system. When data are not quantitative, peer review systems demand more individual analytical skill to judge the quality and presentation of information. Perhaps a greater part of developing these new standards will be to ensure that future scholars are able to assess the communications offered by their colleagues, whether raw data or detailed analysis. These are familiar skills in the humanities.

Recognizing these changes raises other questions. How much do assumptions about or perceptions of audience affect scholarly electronic publishing now? How will this change? Do you write for your colleagues today, even those who refuse to read digitized material or participate in an internet-based scholarly enterprise more interactive than a listserv? Or is your audience your peers in three or five or fifteen years, a group that will no doubt be more comfortable with interactive formats but at the moment has no influence on your prospects of tenure or promotion? The answers hover around current attitudes toward the internet as a scholarly tool and in more general discussions about the construction of a scholarly cyberinfrastructure. The length of time a publication remains important to a community, the likelihood that any article or book will become important to several disciplines, and the possibility that a presentation will be revisited in the future are discipline-specific factors. This issue may not ever have a single answer.

Access issues appear to be equally resistant to consensus. What is excessively open to one discipline (or person) might be stultifyingly restrictive to another. But open access—which is not, as Borgman points out, the same as free access—also calls into question the role of the publisher, threatening the publishing system (including business models) just as interactive communications challenge peer review systems. Open access affects scholars by redirecting control of intellectual property, though this could be considered an advantage as much as a disadvantage. Again, although what counts as valuable scholarship or as work of value to scholars varies with each discipline, open access and the expanded communication opportunities of digital scholarship have consistently altered the terms. As an example, Borgman describes the changing perceptions of research data in the experimental sciences. Predigital accumulations of raw data were incidental, assembled in the course of a project but useful only after treatment and without value outside of the project. As these data become part of the scholarly infrastructure they form a new and different kind of capital for the sciences

The combination of open access and expanded communication also suggests that an ideal of “perfect information” might be possible. To some extent this ideal already exists in the humanities and certain social science disciplines, when a comprehensive bibliography or copies of critical primary sources are appended to a publication. But it is an order of magnitude different to imagine that I might have access to every book printed before 1800 that I believe I need for my research, including books that exist only as single copies in repositories scattered around the world. And it is a difference several orders of magnitude greater still to consider that I might have access to every document in every archive that I believe I need, and that I might make this accumulation of data available to others, or be able to examine the materials similarly compiled by someone else.

The problem of access to data and its reinterpretation is also a problem of stability and permanence: physical equipment changes and media deteriorate over time. This is probably a more serious concern—with different possible resolutions—for those systems on which the cyberinfrastructure is based than it is for an individual scholar who wishes to save personal scholarly records. The need to migrate data as obsolete hardware or software become difficult or impossible to maintain is well-known in the preservation community, but again the permanence standards have not yet reached a point of consensus. One data preservation service now offers to save digital photographs on archival-quality film as the best way to ensure permanence without constant migration. Illegibility of old files is a problem that still needs resolution, if only in the interest of achieving the goal of access to all data.

It may seem that the problems of scholarly digital publishing—including those of ownership, management, reproduction, peer review, preservation, and control—are unresolved because they are irresolvable, and that these problems overwhelm any advantage. But perhaps we are so familiar with the drawbacks and limitations of paperbound systems that we simply overlook them. Perceived differences between electronic and traditional publishing models carry over into expectations about the use and the availability of scholarly communications—whether initially raw data, interpretations that have become raw data for others, or objects that have value exactly as originally intended—in the future.

Clearly, scholarship has entered the digital age. We can no longer ignore the memo telling us it has arrived, or refuse its entry into our professional lives; even if we don’t partake, it has changed the work habits of our colleagues and changed the expectations of our disciplines. The details and meanings of those changes are still fluid, however, and may remain so for some time still.

1. Christine L. Borgman, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007, pp. xxiv+336, $35).

Dr. Lowengard is a historian with a special interest in early modern technology and science. She has been an active participant in internet-based scholarly and professional endeavors—including listserv and website editorships, curriculum design and teaching, and born-digital publication—for more than fifteen years.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 49 No. 4 (October 2008)