Scholarly Communication

The Discourse of Scholarly Communication (Lexington Books, 2023) examines the place and purpose of modern scholarship and its dialectical relationship with the ethos of Enlightenment. Patrick Gamsby argues that while Enlightenment/enlightenment is often used in the mottos of numerous academic institutions, its historical, social, and philosophical elements are largely obscured. Using a theoretical lens, Gamsby revisits the ideals of the Enlightenment alongside the often-contradictory issues of disciplinary boundaries, access to research, academic labor in the production of scholarship (author, peer reviewer, editor, and translator), the interrelationship of form and content (lectures, textbooks, books, and essays), and the stewardship of scholarship in academic libraries and archives. It is ultimately argued that for the betterment of the scholarly communication ecosystem and the betterment of society, anti-Enlightenment rules of scholarship such as ‘publish or perish’ should be dispensed with in favor of the formulation of a New Enlightenment.

Patrick Gamsby is the Scholarly Communication Librarian and Cross-Appointed to the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He previously worked in scholarly communications at Brandeis University and Duke University. Patrick holds a MLIS degree from the University of Western Ontario, a MES degree from York University, and a Ph.D. from Laurentian University. He is the author of two books - Henri Lefebvre, Boredom, and Everyday Life and The Discourse of Scholarly Communication - and he lives in St. John's, Newfoundland with his wife and two daughters.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program and Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Listen to this interview of Christopher Reddy, environmental chemist and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. We talk about his book Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider's Guide (Routledge Earthscan 2023).

Christopher Reddy : "Communication definitely teaches us scientists things that we hadn't knows or appreciated, even in our own research. I mean, when you have to rethink about how and why you're doing something and what the outcomes mean, that is a series of mental gymnastics. And when we do gymnastics, we become fitter. We increase our longevity and have a richer and fuller quality of life. And that goes for science too: When you are challenged in the communication, you are putting yourself on a treadmill and you become fitter."

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Listen to this interview of Prem Devanbu, Distinguished Research Professor in Computer Science, University of California, Davis. We talk about using cross-disciplinary pollination to interrogate ideas and also oneself.

Prem Devanbu : "Science is a social process. You put some idea out, and other people try to figure out if it makes sense or if you've made some mistake with it, or whether you've asked the right question and gotten the right answer. And then you go from there."

Here's the paper by Prem and coauthors which won the 2022 award Most Influential Paper at the International Conference on Software Engineering.

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Listen to this interview of Katherine Firth, academic at, Australia. We talk about the necessary trouble that people have when they write new knowledge. We also talk about the unnecessary trouble that people have when they imagine that this first sort doesn't exist. Firth is the co-author of How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble: A Practical Guide (Open UP, 2018).

Katherine Firth : "Most people write to the computer screen. They write perhaps to their supervisor. But they don't actually have a concept of an audience beyond that, or their concept is just so huge and diffuse — Everybody in the whole wide world! Well, I really don't think that everybody in the whole wide world is particularly interested in this very technical paper on, you know, electromagnetic radiation. But there are, of course, people who care about this. You just need to identify who those people are, and then write to them. Expect those people to listen to you. Maybe go, when you're at conferences — go and talk to those people and see how when you explain things in one way, they really get it, but when you explain it in another way, they really don't. Then use in your writing the way that works."

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Listen to this interview of Christian Kästner, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about reading papers, and how to do that while balancing speed and accuracy, and we talk about writing papers, and how to do that for a reader going fast and moving with purpose.

Christian Kästner: "I don't want my reader to be doing a lot of work synthesizing details across a paper of mine. I want to make it obvious what the key idea is. And honestly, I think we all have to, because otherwise, for example, the reviewers will not get the point, and if published, then the paper might just cause confusion or disagreement about the value of the work. So, I prioritize stating very explicitly the point."

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Listen to Episode No.6 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and today as well, Bradley Alger, Professor Emeritus, Department of Physiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is How the hypothesis means.

What does out knowledge mean after it’s been hypothesized and tested? And what can we claim to know by having tested it? Also, just how far into the scientific enterprise does hypothetical testing reach — in other words, why are scientists writing so much when the hypotheses they test seem to be testing so little? What's all the communication about? These questions — and many, many more — make the meat of this lively discuss about meaning and the hypothesis.

Listeners might be interested in my interview with Bradley Alger about his book Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis: From Reproducibility Crisis to Big Data (Oxford UP, 2019). And if you want to buy the book, go here. 

You can learn all about the hypothesis at The Scientific Hypothesis.

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Listen to this interview of Natalie Aviles, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia. We talk about how organizations shape people, and how people shape science.

Natalie Aviles : "I think, in general, the more self-conscious that scientists can be about what motivates them, about what makes them happy, about what drives them — the more, then, they can try to imagine a future that satisfies not only their intellectual curiosity but helps them navigate, too, the very sort of prosaic conditions that they find themselves in on a day-to-day basis."

Works referred to in the interview:

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Listen to this interview of Wouter Lueks, faculty at the CISPA Helmhotz Center for Information Security. We talk about getting into the reviewer's mindset, and also about research collaboration outside the walls of the university.

Wouter Lueks : "For first ideas, you don't need writing. You can stand in front of the whiteboard, make a couple of drawings, chat with people — and it's very engaging. But then at some point you somehow need to deal with all the nitty-gritty details — and all the nitty-gritty details typically means that your initial idea was wrong. And the only way that I have found that is reliable to figure out all the ways that you've got things wrong is actually to sit down and write out the details, you know, work on the proof or at least on an argument of how to convince somebody else that this thing you have just written down is actually secure or in the case of my research, private — in other words, just why your solution is a good solution. And it's here, I think, that the writing as a technical tool really shines."

Here's the example of the scientific-societal collaborating which Wouter talks about at length in the interview.

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Listen to Episode No.5 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and also Gang Wang, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is what decision means.

Decision is no simple matter, whether the decider in question is human or machine. In a sense, both are black boxes to us, and yet the urgency today to open the lid on A.I. is heightened because of how human-like the machine seems to be able to do decision. This is why, across disciplines, we need to convene and discuss and decide together on how to understand and use A.I. The alternative is grisly: Everyone using a tool that no one fully understands — no one using the tool in full understanding or for that matter, in any understanding at all.

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Academic Librarianship: Anchoring the Profession in Contribution, Scholarship, and Service (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) by Marcy Simons is needed now as a response to how much has changed in academic librarianship as a profession (from the smallest academic libraries to large research libraries).

Much has been written recently about the status of the profession of librarianship, i.e. whether or not it should still be considered a “profession,” are the same credentials still required/enough, should things change dramatically in SLIS programs in response to the new normal, and what is the impact of hiring PhD’s in disciplines outside of librarianship.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program and Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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