Platforms of Plenty: Scholarly Communication and Digital Metrics

About

Professor Blaise Cronin will examine the evolution of academic writing, from established genres (e.g., single author monograph, refereed journal article) to recent innovations, such as enriched texts, micro scripts and nano publications. Cronin asks what it means to be an author in an age of team science and massive collaborations, of citizen science and crowdsourcing, of distributed accountability and vanity publishing. He will consider the changing dynamics of the scholarly publication process, which has shifted from being a sluggishly linear to an intensively interactive, time-pressured process. He will go on to assess the implications of open access and open peer review in terms of system transparency and community trust. Lastly, Cronin will describe the emergence of multi-dimensional, real-time indicators of scholarly influence that take us beyond conventional approaches to bibliometric evaluation.