I was having a discussion with our library director today about how social networking and self publication are changing the world of journals. We acknowledged that the weight and influence that peer reviews had is diminishing. More people are publishing abstracts or even articles on their own websites, even if they don’t get accepted by a peer-reviewed journal.

As search engines like Google come up with ever more complex but effective formulas for displaying and prioritizing search results, authors’ material will more frequently be found. Given the ease with which people can publish their own materials, scholars even in esoteric areas of study can skip the review process and just publish their research themselves, with the result that Google (and Google Ads, if they like) will add their material to the great ethos of information that is becoming ever more ubiquitous.

This is not to say that there is no value in peer reviews, because there most certainly is. They are what establish credibility and authority in the world of scholarship. It’s just that emerging technologies are leading us away from authority because of the abundance of information. We can already see this in our high-school and college students today and how they only think to search where the largest amount of information is, without regard for where the most authoritative information is. It’s a information-seeking culture of “good enough.”

Michael Jensen recently wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority” (Section: The Chronicle Review, 15 June 2007, Volume 53, Issue 41, Page B6) that examines this issue well and discusses the ramifications of these changes. He says that Web 2.0 is changing how we exchange and evaluate information:

In Web 1.0, roughly 1992 to 2002, authoritative, quality information was still cherished: Content was king. Presumed scarce, it was intrinsically valuable. In general, the business models for online publishing were variants on the standard “print wholesaler” model, duplicating the realities of a physical world as we garbed new business and publishing models in 20th-century clothes.

Web 2.0, roughly 2002 through today, takes more for granted: It presumes the majority of users will have broadband, with unlimited, always-on access, and few barriers to participation. Indeed, it encourages participation, what O’Reilly calls “harnessing collective intelligence.” Its fundamental presumption is one of endless information abundance.

That abundance changes greatly both the habits and business imperatives of the online environment. The lessonsderived from successful Web 2.0 enterprises like Google, Flickr, YouTube, etc.include a general user impatience with any impediments, a fracturing of markets into micromarkets, and many other changes in entertainment and information- and education-gathering habits across multiple demographics. Information itself is so cheap as to be free. Abundance leads to immediate context and fact checking, which changes the “authority market” substantially. The ability to participate in most online experiencesvia comments, votes, or ratings is now presumed, and when it’s not available, it’s missed.

Thus we see Google leading us into microadvertising; we see the rise of volunteerism in the “information commons” providing free resources to everyone; we see Wikipedia and its brethren rise up and slap the face of Britannica. We also see increasing overlaps of information resources — machine-to-machine communications (like RSS feeds), mash-ups that intermingle information from different sites to create new meanings (like Google Maps and Craigslist apartment listings), and much more.

Web 2.0 is all about responding to abundance, which is a shift of profound significance.

He continues by discussing how we’re living and working in a Web 2.0 environment while maintaining our Web 1.0 habits and mindsets.

It’s my thought that as technologies continue to improve indexing, linking, and meta-analysis, more emphasis will be placed on references made by other authors, where the world of reciprocal citations mirror that of blogs and other websites exchanging links. Technology will help establish the credibility of an author and the importance of an article by tracking these kinds of references. Peer reviews will still exist, but they won’t carry the weight that they used to before the advent of the Internet.

Jensen ends his article by projecting how Web 3.0 will change things more:

In the Web 3.0 world, we will also start seeing heavily computed reputation-and-authority metrics, based on many of the kinds of elements now used, as well as on elements that can be computed only in an information-rich, user-engaged environment. Given the inevitable advances in technology, remarkable things are likely to happen. In a world of unlimited computer processing, Authority 3.0 will probably include (the list is long, which itself is a sign of how sophisticated our new authority makers will have to be):

  • Prestige of the publisher (if any).
  • Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
  • Prestige of commenters and other participants.
  • Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
  • Raw links to the document.
  • Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
  • Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
  • Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
  • Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what’s its authority status?
  • Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
  • Quality of author’s institutional affiliation(s).
  • Significance of author’s other work.
  • Amount of author’s participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
  • Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
  • Length of time a document has existed.
  • Inclusion of a document in lists of “best of,” in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
  • Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

None of those measures could be computed reasonably by human beings. They differ from current models mostly by their feasible computability in a digital environment where all elements can be weighted and measured, and where digital interconnections provide computable context.

The importance of articles and other material will be based more on these new metrics and less on the significance that scholarly publishers place on the articles through their peer reviews. That means if you’re producing something and want it to be read, you’ll need to use a variety of methods and formats and will definitely need people to link to your material. Use the system as best you can to your advantage if you want to get published and read.

Looking at this another way, it’s nothing new. Walt Whitman self-published his Leaves of Grass and only sold eight copies–to friends and family. He couldn’t get a publisher to accept it or even anyone to review it. So he wrote some reviews of his book himself under various pseudonyms and got them printed in different newspapers and magazines. Only THEN did he start seriously selling the book and gain the reputation he deserved.