Fully Digital: Policy and Process Implications for the AAS
Over the past two decades, every scholarly publisher has migrated at least the mechanical aspects of their journal publishing so that they utilize digital means. The academy was comfortable with that for a while, but publishers are under increasing pressu
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1 Introduction Scholarly communication has evolved in interesting ways for millennia. From Archimedes writing letters on scrolls to his correspondents, to Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeting to his followers, scholars have discussed not only the issues of their disciplines and the insights of their research, they have (at least recently) discussed how other scholars communicate as well (Odlyzko 2002; Heuer et al. 2008; Renear and Palmer 2009). However, in this paper I won’t talk about blogs, wikis, txts, tweets, youtubes, crowd-sourced GPS-enabled climate-sensitive thoroughly-modern mobile droidbots – and all that jazz. I intend to confine my remarks to formal communications: information that is published in the things we recognize today as the peer-reviewed journals. It is worth stating plainly that at the AAS, we are primarily concerned with communications that benefit professional astronomers. For the purpose of this paper, that means I won’t worry about how we might address audiences other than researchers. A. Accomazzi (ed.), Future Professional Communication in Astronomy II, Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings 1, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8369-5 9, c Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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I’m also going to assume that the notion of formal communication as we know it is basically a good thing, because it comprises other good things: peer review is a good thing, consistency is a good thing, permanence (durability, longevity) is a good thing. I acknowledge that there are voices crying out against some of these things – “peer review must die”, e.g. – and certainly there is nothing wrong with questioning fundamental tenets. But let me make an observation. Archimedes wrote to his colleagues in a form that is structurally very much like communications between scholars today. We can read modern translations of Archimedes, and they seem familiar to us; the same is true for works of Euclid or Eratosthenes or Galileo. The information has certainly been durable (although in the case of Archimedes, not without some close calls; Netz and Noel 2007). What is remarkable, however, is how consistent the form is, whether written in parchment scrolls, bound codices, printed books, or LATEX files. In spite of hyperventilated claims that “digital changes everything”, formal communication has survived format changes intact for thousands of years. My point is not to belittle Web 2.0 style communications; my point is not that formal communications are better somehow; my point is that formal communication is not going away. As a specific instance of formal communication, scholarly journals have a number of merits for the organization of these communications. They provide an initial selection of articles through different editors with different aims and scopes; they offer a range of editorial temperaments; they provide peer review; and they are a platform for the methodical organization, normalization, and preservation of information. In addition, as a publisher of scholarly journals, the AAS offers scholars a sens
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