tenure, academia and "online scholarship" - Bill Hooker

"Internet sites, in contrast, have no such mechanisms for quality control" - that's not strictly true now, is it. - Neil Saunders

I should add that I haven't read this myself yet -- I just thought the underlying issues would be of interest around these parts. - Bill Hooker

Neil - Reputation is the proxy for quality on the net. - Mr. Gunn

Interesting, but demonstrates some biases. "Only an accreditation process of that sort will resolve the principal obstacle to evaluating research published online. And only our most prestigious learned organizations can be trusted to review and endorse works of scholarship to the satisfaction of all involved. A certification process would give working scholars a modicum of faith in digital resources, and would enable tenure committees and administrators to make informed decisions" - Deepak Singh

This story is from Arts faculty, not sure if it applies all that much to science ... surely for assesments of output like this in science it would boil down to wheather the publication was peer-reviewed or not .. the medium, electronic, paper shouldn't matter so much. - Andrew Perry

Oh this is awful. It fails to deal with sites that exploit the strengths of the web - they change fast and they are multiply authored. This is entirely the wrong approach in my view. Any website/document of any value will have changed by the time the committee has its next meeting, let alone the process of arguing over which committee is the right one. And the same goes for peer review. People need to cope with the fact that the game has changed [sigh - its been a long week, clearly needed to let of steam] - Cameron Neylon

I would slighlty disagree with Mr Gunn. A trusted recomendation is the proxy for quality. Trust within social networks is the key. That's not quite the same thing as a generic reputation - there are more facets to it than that. I trust Deepak to recommend interesting papers - but I don't much like his taste in music :) - Cameron Neylon

Since we can't anticipate the opportunities afforded by new technologies we cannot impose rigid criteria ahead of time. Certainly any form of Open Notebook Science would not pass because you can't possibly get a committee to review every page version every hour of the day. What I think is more realistic is a just-in-time evaluation, where a candidate coming up for tenure would ask "respected members of the academic community" to write letters and explain how the scholar has had an impact in their field - Jean-Claude Bradley

Jean-Claude, I'm looking at that and thinking - how is that different from our tenure review/promotions are done at the moment? :) - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, you defined it better than I did, but I totally agree with you about reputation and about the quality of that article. As online networking penetrates deeper into traditional academia and the proportion of early adopters gets diluted, more and more of that kind of thought is going to be expressed online. The established offline authorities naturally assume their authority extends to the web. Both we and they can learn lots from one another, about how authority works and about how teh tubes work. - Mr. Gunn

That's right Cameron the system is already in place to handle this and it is going to be tested by people like Gus... - Jean-Claude Bradley