[Insight-users] SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION: Sharing Data, Constructing Science -- Hahn 320 (5880): 1162 -- Science

[Luis Ibanez]

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5880/1162

Science 30 May 2008:
Vol. 320. no. 5880, pp. 1162 - 1163
DOI: 10.1126/science.1155430

Books
SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION:
Sharing Data, Constructing Science
Karla L. Hahn*

Scholarship in the Digital Age
Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet

by Christine L. Borgman

MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 2007. 360 pp.
ISBN 9780262026192.

<quote>
We have now traveled a short distance down the path into what is widely
recognized as a paradigm shift in how new knowledge is created and
exchanged. Twenty-first century research requires the ubiquity of
digital information. We expect the networked environment to house the
scientific literature and foster collaboration between researchers on
disparate continents. Now primary data are moving into the electronic
realm as well, with shared digital data stores from GenBank to the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey feeding entire research specialties.

While science prospers under the new order, there is much contention
over the practices that will determine the ethos of the digital age.
What will be the new norms for "sharing" and "access"? The movement of
documents and data into a digital realm has placed great strains on the
structures supporting the exchange of research knowledge--social
structures as well as technologies. Major battles are being fought over
such issues as the appropriate intellectual property regime for a
digital age. Publishing systems that formerly maximized the exchange of
scientific research are becoming, instead, barriers to research
distribution. Both issues underlie the recently implemented National
Institutes of Health Public Access Policy that requires that articles
resulting from NIH funding be deposited in PubMed Central and become
available to readers within a year of publication. Such questions extend
beyond research reports and publications to touch research data as well.
</quote>




<quote>
Christine Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information,
Infrastructure, and the Internet looks across the emerging landscape,
identifying key choices and exploring the perspectives of different
disciplines. Borgman (a professor in information studies at the
University of California, Los Angeles) has been both a keen observer and
an active participant in recent shifts to new digital modes of
information exchange, keeping an eye as well on the shifting cultures of
the scholarly tribes that engage in the research enterprise. She has
received several major grants from the National Science Foundation for
digital library infrastructure and data management projects and also
been active in information policy development. Her previous book, From
Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure (1), also looked at
digital library development, information infrastructure, and information
policy issues, but comparing the two books merely reveals how much has
changed since the first was published in 2000--both in the external
environment, including policy issues, and in understanding the social
environment of networked science.


A striking feature of Scholarship in the Digital Age is its synthetic
approach, integrating policy documents and published scholarship.
Borgman lays out the trajectory of change in information exchange with
the advent of the digital age, but her main concern is developing "a
model of cyberinfrastructure in which scientific databases and digital
libraries form an 'information and content layer' above the middleware
layer that provides the services and underlying core network
technologies." A dichotomy of research data and authored works
structures her analysis of this content layer.
</quote>





<quote>
In contrast to the body of knowledge on the culture and practices of
scholarly communication, no such foundational research exists for
researchers' use of data. Consequently, Borgman's analysis of the
challenges posed by the burgeoning possibilities for building
collections of digital research data is her most original and insightful
contribution. She demonstrates that, although behaviors regarding
publications and data are tightly interconnected, they tend not to be
analogous. Even the incentives and disincentives for sharing documents
are notably different from those for sharing data.

Yet data and documents cannot be treated separately. The problems of
connecting the two predate the digital era, but in the dichotomous
content layer, the need to create and manage connections between data
and documents assumes new prominence despite the inherent challenges. In
theory, data can be embedded or co-published with documents, but this is
minimally useful. Documents and data rarely exist in a one-to-one
relationship. Rather, some documents draw on multiple data sources, and
many data sources support multiple documents. These relations negate
simplistic solutions such as storing data with individual documents on
disparate publisher repositories; they require investment in broadly
interactive, network-based solutions.
</quote>



<quote>

"Open science" has always been essential to the success of the research
enterprise, with U.S. policy notable, as Borgman observes, for its
enactment of this principle. But openness in the digital age has a more
expansive meaning, and the changes needed to honor traditions of open
science will be difficult--making some researcher resistance to new
norms of openness predictable. Borgman's analysis successfully
highlights key barriers to the development of new norms for access and
sharing. However, some of the pessimism she expresses for policy
strategies has already proven premature, as new policies from the
National Institutes of Health and Harvard University's Faculty of Arts
and Sciences create mandates for public access to research that truly
change expectations and incentives.

</quote>



Reference

    1. C. L. Borgman, From Gutenberg to the Global Information 
Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World (MIT Press, 
Cambridge, MA, 2000).

10.1126/science.1155430
The reviewer is at the Association of Research Libraries, 21 Dupont 
Circle, Washington, DC 20036, USA. E-mail: karla at arl.org