Significant Science

This post is about a gem of an article from 2002 notice of which came into my email inbox the other day and which is well worth reading even in 2010.

The article is E Is for Everything: The Extra-Ordinary, Evolutionary [E]Journal by Gerry McKiernan The Serials Librarian, 1541-1095, Volume 41, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 293 – 321.

McKiernan has very generously, helpfully self-archived the piece here.

There are several reasons I want to write about McKiernan’s piece.

First of all, the article is an excellent overview of what publishing an article in a scholarly journal has entailed over the years, how things stood in 2002 and how things were progressing back then.  I wish I had been assigned this article in library school and recommend it to library science instructors.

I was particularly struck by the wording, “…the journal is one large object made up of article objects, individual request objects, a server object, solution objects, page objects, and reference objects, and other objects that interact with each other, the network and the hardware environment to create the journal that is delivered to each reader…In this model, the reader is considered an object that dynamically participates in the creation of the journal.”

Pretty prescient of McKiernan and the authors he cites, End-User Customized Chemistry Journal Articles Steven M. Bachrach,* Anatoli Krassavine, and Darin C. Burleigh J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci., 1999, 39 (1), pp 81–8.

I had not heard of Steven Bachrach before and it really is fascinating how much of the work in leveraging the power of the Web for Science 2.0 is being done not by info professionals but by chemists such as Bachrach, Jean-Claude Bradley, and Antony Williams.

Librarians and information scientists are major beneficiaries of the work the chemists and other basic scientists are doing vis-à-vis transforming the very basics of how science is done and what forms scientific communication and scholarly publishing are taking.

Thank you, Gerry McKiernan, for instance, for introducing those of who live in the world of librarianship and the info sciences to the quite brilliant Dr. Bachrach who seems to have no trouble excelling in his field of chemistry while in his off hours helping to transform the very basis of the cornerstones of the edifice of scientific communication: the journal and the article. Kind of depressing, really, what people like Bachrach, Williams and Bradley accomplish in so many fields while the rest of us struggle along trying to do even one or two fairly useful things in our own, less impressive grooves!

The second reason I wanted to highlight McKiernan’s article is that it is an excellent example of the value of self-archiving as a way of sharing one’s scholarly production with greater audiences than may be subscribers of a particular journal. Thanks to McKiernan’s proactive actions of a) self-archiving his article so that it is easily accessible as a PDF to all comers and b) alerting various audiences to his article with a link on where to find it more of us can learn about important topics.

For instance, I noticed a message from McKiernan himself in one of the electronic discussion lists of The American Society for Information Science & Technology ASIS&T: a good lesson on the merits of unabashed marketing of one’s work. I wish more librarians would do the same—don’t be shy, group! More of us should request from scholarly publishers (and this goes for everyone—scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, the sciences, etc.) the right to self-archive or deposit our work in institutional repositories.

And this brings me another reason I want to highlight McKiernan’s act of self-archiving. It is actually to the benefit of the journal and thus to the publisher of it.

For instance, I am not a serials librarian but I am now interested in the journal in which McKiernan’s article first appeared and have been perusing the web site of the journal, The Serials Librarian and almost certainly would not now be considering subscribing had I not been able to download and read McKiernan’s article and to think, “Hmm, I am not a serials librarian. But this is a pretty thought-provoking article. I wonder what else is in that journal…”

And I came across some quite interesting stuff in the abstracts, like this one about the article, “What Color is Your Paratext?” and was edified there to read this quite interesting passage:

Geoffrey Bilder from CrossRef discussed the problem of how to identify trustworthy scholarly information on the Internet. This problem is exacerbated by readers’ growing distrust of intermediaries such as publishers and librarians, by the fact that the Internet lacks the traditions that have developed in scholarly communication to ensure trust, and by the sheer amount of information now readily available. Paratext is understood as anything outside of a text that sets expectations about that text. In the past, paratext, for example a publisher logo, provided important clues as to the trustworthiness of information. In the context of the Internet, Bilder suggested creating a meta-brand to serve as paratext. CrossRef is developing a meta-brand called CrossMark that would certify for the reader that the online content to which it is attached has been vetted by processes of scholarly review and is therefore trustworthy.

That snippet made me think, “How sloppy of me to have gotten all the way through library school just a year ago and not really to have grasped what CrossRef is.”

Therefore, I checked out what it is exactly.

This is a rather long-winded (but you are all used to that with me, no?) way of saying that allowing for self-archiving is good for readers, authors who want to be read and the journals that allow for it. It also shows that journals can be quite effectively promoted by the generosity of the editors who allow people like McKiernan to self-archive. Good for Taylor & Francis, Routledge and Informa (so many imprints these days!) for allowing me to get a look via McKiernan’s article for free of what kinds of things appear in The Serials Librarian and thereby better gauge the value of a paid subscription to it. Clever of them! And, by the way, kudos to Iowa State University Library for sharing the esteemed McKiernan with the wider world of library and information science.