I’ve recently discovered the joys of dLIST. This is particularly slow on the uptake of me, since Kristin has been telling me about it for over a year, & Scott is on the Advisory Board. Well, I’m slow but I get there eventually.
Anyway I’ve started depositing preprints on dLIST. (See my author page.) Actually Scott beat me to it for the three papers we’ve co-authored. I mean, we know that online and open access articles get cited more. Of course I put preprints of my articles up on my own site. But I figure, maybe the more instances of an article exists online, the more it will get cited. Has anyone studied that? Someone do that. Anyway, given my obsession with open access on this blog, I figured I should start putting my money where my mouth is.
And lo and behold, someone has already noticed! Luke posted commentary on my conceptual framework for chat reference piece a few days ago, & it’s some really good thinking. This is, I suppose, precisely the point of having open access publications, institutional repositories, preprint servers, and the like; to enable everyone to read pubs. Interestingly though, most of these venues do not have comment functionality; that’s offloaded to other venues, such as blogs. In a way that makes sense, particularly for already-published materials, since the point is access, & not discussion. It would be different for open peer review, where having comment functionality would be necessary.
Anyway, I love the idea of opening up the universe of ideas in this way. The New Republic of Letters, redux. Why should readership be confined to such a limited universe of readers anyway? Who do you consider a peer? Is Luke a peer? In the sense of being an academic colleague, no. In the sense of being someone in my field whose ideas I respect, yes. Fred & I got some very good feedback on our blogosphere reference paper, back when it was a mere technical report, that we were able to use when we were revising it for publication. Is Luke’s commentary useful to me in my thinking about this topic further? Absolutely. Would these virtual conversations have been possible, prior to the blogosphere? Maybe, but certainly not as easily or visibly.