Every now and then I come across some quite silly article titles on IngentaConnect that cause me to stop and re-consider my inbuilt expectation that science is only carried out in the pursuit of high-minded noble ideals.

Some of my favourite examples over the years include Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting, Blind Ducks in Borneo, and Weeble Wobbles: Resilience Within the Psychoanalytic Situation (this one even had follow-up articles, What Is A Weeble Anyway, And What Is A Wobble, Too? and "Wobbly Weebles" and Resilience: Some Additional Thoughts). And of course we've suddenly uncovered a wealth of them since we came to host the Annals of Improbable Research ("A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown" is certainly one I'll be taking home for further study).

The one that has caught my attention today, though, doesn't have the most immediately entertaining of titles (Biblical Entheogens: a speculative hypothesis). But perhaps I would have found it more noteworthy if I had at some point learnt the definition of

entheogen (en.THEE.oh.jun) : any substance, such as a plant or drug, taken to bring on a spiritual experience

Psychoactive substances? in the Bible? Well, yes, according to this recently-published hypothesis, which claims that Moses' vision of God and the burning bush was brought on by hallucinatory drugs. And what a stir it has caused. (It even made the British Daily Mail, but I'm afraid I'm too liberal to give them any link love).

It's particularly interesting to compare this to the Weeble examples I cited above. In that case, a controversial article was followed by letters to the editor, follow-up articles and the publication of "some additional thoughts" - the traditional progress of an academic debate.

In the Moses case, the discussion is already raging in the blogosphere just days after the article's publication (aided, I acknowledge, by an inflammatory TV appearance by the author in which he upgraded his 'hypothesis' to a 'probability'). Sure, a lot of the blog postings are Beavis-and-Butthead-style sniggery, but beyond them there's also a fair amount of reasoned, informed analysis (the Merkavah Vision and and BHA Science Group postings, for example).

It is in the reactions provoked by these controversial publications that we see the ongoing development of alternative scholarly communication channels - but they are also evidence of the "authority" problem with user-generated content. In having to sort the wheat (informed analysis) from the chaff (ranging from uninformed sniggery to non-scientific zealotry), I found myself frustrated by not knowing whose rhetoric to trust, and remembering m'colleague Leigh Dodds' paper at our PT Trends forum in December (Authoritative? What's that? And who says?).

Roll on wider adoption of the BPR3 initiative (which proposes that bloggers use icons to indicate when their posting is a serious discussion of a peer-reviewed work), or indeed of the embryonic kitemark for authoritative content that Leigh posited during his paper and which CrossRef are exploring further. As the boundaries between peer-reviewed publications and other fora for debate become less defined, I for one will appreciate a mechanism that defines whose analysis I can take seriously and who I should take with a pinch of salt.

Labels: "peer review", blogging, bpr3, publishing technology, scholarly journal, user-generated content

I've just returned from an exhausting, but always exhilarating, few days at the UKSG conference (which the team and I blogged in great detail at the UKSG's LiveSerials blog, if you want to read up on some excellent presentations). Perennial hot topic "what's the value of the journal?" reared its complex head in many sessions, and as usual, one of the arguments for not throwing the journal out with the OA bathwater was the wrapper of authenticity which the journal applies to scholarly content (i.e., sure, many of its other processes can be carried out by other mechanisms, but will academics be willing/keen to engage - either as authors or readers - with non-journal ways of publishing, given their lack of prestige or authority?)

I then returned home to an email alerting me to this article in the Washington Post. The "send this article to a friend" note by which I was alerted to the article included this trail:

Joshua Bell is one of the world's greatest violinists. His instrument of choice is a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius. If he played it for spare change, incognito, outside a bustling Metro stop in Washington, would anyone notice?

This caught my eye because it seemed to relate to the value-of-the-journal debate, and reminded me of previous thoughts I've had about analogies we can draw between the online models of music and publishing - imagine:

Gordon Arbuthnott is one of the world's greatest researchers. His publication of choice is multimillion-dollar journal [insert prestigious, highly-subscribed title here]. If he published his research free, without the stamp of a respected journal, in a bustling repository such as iTunes, would anyone notice?

Now, you can argue this is an entirely specious analogy, and I'm sure many archivangelists would do so (should they ever read this blog!) But nonetheless I think we need to pay attention to what happened to Joshua Bell: no-one stopped to listen, although some threw money (totalling $32) into his case as they passed. This is a man who normally makes $1000 an hour for his performance, so we can already see the extent to which the value of what he does was undermined by the method in which he choose to make it publicly "available".

In addition, "When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted." - a motivation perhaps familiar to academics seeking respected journals to publish their work, because of the validation and acceptance it provides for them and their research. As the article goes on to say, "Context matters."

Finally, an expert in the field (Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra) was asked prior to Bell's experiment what he thought would happen. The article notes that he expected a crowd - of maybe 75-100 people - to gather, and for Bell to make "about $150". Yes, yes, yes, it's all conjecture and it's not even our field - but, as I say, it reminds me of the OA debate, where its proponents use projected figures to "prove" that self-archiving won't cannibalise journal subscriptions, or that author-pays is a sustainable business model. What if they, like Slatkin, turn out to be way off the mark?

As Sally Morris noted in her USKG plenary session, we'll have a hell of a job resurrecting the journal model should we kill it off as a result of misguidedly, misinformedly, and incautiously embracing unproven (albeit well-intended) alternatives. Hence I remain on the side of caution. And continue to save my pennies for Joshua Bell tickets, since I don't expect him to be performing for free on my street-corner any time soon.

Labels: iTunes, open access, publishing, scholarly journal, uksg