The increasing ubiquity of network communication and the changes in the World Wide Web due to the social networking tools of Web 2.0 are revolutionizing the way that scholars collaborate and share information. However, the receptivity to and use of these new tools differs radically among the various scientific disciplines. This project will initiate planning for an international symposium to advance a very unique and promising set of research discussions on these issues begun in a workshop titled "New Models for Scholarly Communication in Chemistry", held in Washington DC in October 2008 (http://hdl.handle.net/1813/14150). The international symposium envisioned will address complex issues associated with academic scholarly communication practices and emergent technologies and the ways in which web-based intellectual content is created, managed and used to advance research productivity. A goal will be to determine the interdependence of these processes and points of beneficial intervention. To begin the planning process for the symposium, this award will support the formation of a small international steering committee to develop the agenda for the larger symposium and identify necessary participants and potential sources of financial support. Community input will be actively solicited in all stages of the planning process.
Over the last decade, science policy has increasingly focused on the benefits of knowledge sharing, openness, and collaboration, a policy theme that has motivated a number of large recent investments by the NSF and other funding agencies in cyberinfrastructure development and deployment. The success of these investments however depends on attention to discipline or even field-specific practices and cultures that may influence or even block adoption of cyberinfrastructure. An understanding of the roots of these differences benefits science, the funding agencies, and the public as a whole by facilitating white investments in scientific and scholarly cyberinfrastructure The funded project is one component of a suite of research projects led by the PI and senior personnel that employ a variety of methodologies - both qualitative and quantitative - to study the nature of collaboration and knowledge sharing in a number of scientific domains. We have particularly focused on chemistry since historically it has both embraced new communication technologies and resisted their opportunities to open access to scientific results. In addition to our theoretical and empirical research, we have brought together a small group of scholars from chemistry, information science, and computer science and members of the chemistry publication community to further our understanding of the roots of this resistance. The result of this was an extensive white paper and article in Nature Chemistry that were widely circulated amongst broader community. The intent of the current project was to explore the possibility of a larger follow-on workshop at an international scale, which would be funded through external funding mechanisms.. Through numerous interviews with chemistry scholars in both Europe and the United States and attendance at major chemistry meetings, we have determined that the political opposition to discussions of open access amongst major players in chemistry publication, especially the American Chemical Society, would make such a high visibility workshop an unwise investment of energy and funds at this time. Instead, the prudent course, which we have followed in the balance of this project, is to further our theoretical and empirical knowledge of the roots of resistance to open access in the chemistry community and an understanding of how to both politically and technologically move forward. We have made especially notable progress in our understanding of the dynamics of temporal development of participation and collaboration patterns through statistical analysis and visualization of coauthorship and co-citation graphs. We can thereby understand how new scholars join the existing publication networks and how the influence of these new scholars and their increasing predilection towards open access might be leveraged to change the existing paradigm.we therefore still continue planning for a larger workshop, and are confident that a several year hiatus during which further research will be undertaken will be a significant contributor to the success of that workshop. Both the methodology employed in our research and the results have notable intellectual merit. The combination of network analysis and qualitative, ethnographic research is unique and innovative, leveraging the advantages of each: ethnographic research for its ability to tease out nuanced features of social interaction, and network analysis for its ability to examine phenomena at large scale. Our results are a significant addition to the growing body of research on the sociotechnical aspects of cyberinfrastructure and the ways in which technological change interacts with, is affected by, and effects sociocultural phenomena.
