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Pressing Questions of the Information Age: 12 May 2005
The Internet and scholarly quality control
Paul Wouters
Programme Leader, Networked Research and Digital Information, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Scientists and academic scholars are increasingly using the internet and the World Wide Web. This varies from simple email to sophisticated cyberscientific instruments and collaboratories. Is this affecting the way researchers are being assessed? Does the internet make it easier or more difficult to make scientific and scholarly research accountable to society? Are Web data, such as hyperlinks, reasonable measures for scientific success in the era of the internet? And what are the risks for the traditional criteria of scholarly quality, as embodied in peer review, if researchers massively change the way they make their results, and the underlying data, available to each other and to the public? Should we discard the old academic values as un-cool? Or should we rather defend them in the name of public science? This lecture addresses these questions by taking a closer look at how scientific quality actually is measured. We tend to think that quality is a built-in attribute of a piece of scholarly work, be it an article, new software, uploaded or visualised data, or an exhibition. I will argue that it is more productive to see quality as produced by the systems that measure quality. This perspective enables us to better understand the impact of new media on the process of knowledge creation. I will draw some historical parallels between the present situation and the early 1960s in which the Science Citation Index was created. The lecture will conclude by exploring some provoking possible futures of academic work. |
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