This is in fact what is happening online, at least, outside the circles of formal education. People are finding coaching where they need it, community where they want it, and lectures and demonstrations for those days when they have the time.
Stephen Downes (2020)
The evolving landscape of healthcare and education would benefit from a critical reassessment of our current approach to research and scholarly communication in physiotherapy. Traditional academic publishing faces challenges such as limited accessibility, slow dissemination, and disconnection from practice.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how community-focused approaches to scholarship could address these issues by promoting open knowledge sharing, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, and bridging the gap between research and practical application. This shift towards a more collaborative, dynamic model of scholarly communication has the potential to enhance the relevance and impact of academic research, ultimately leading to improved educational outcomes and patient care.
Podcast
Selwyn, N. (n.d.). A journal editor’s view on getting published. Meet the Education Researcher podcast.
Getting published in academic journals can be a major source of stress for education researchers. We talk to Sam Sellar (lead editor of Discourse) about how best to navigate the article writing and submission process, dealing with peer reviews, and seeing journals as a space for ongoing conversations and community-building.
The academic publishing landscape is undergoing significant changes, with traditional peer review processes and journal formats facing challenges in the digital age. As publishers experiment with new models like online single article publication, there’s a concern about the potential loss of coherent academic discussions and community engagement (although I’d suggest that there’s very little of this in the current model).
Scholars are advocating for a balance between innovation and preserving the valuable aspects of traditional journals, such as fostering ongoing conversations and providing broader context for research. The conversation centres on how to adapt peer review and publishing practices to maintain their rigour and significance while embracing more inclusive and efficient approaches. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that academic publishing continues to advance knowledge and nurture vibrant intellectual communities in an evolving scholarly ecosystem.
Article
Hartley, J., et al. (2019). Do we need to move from communication technology to user community? A new economic model of the journal as a club. Learned Publishing, 32(1), 27–35.
Much of the argument around reforming, remaking, or preserving the traditions of scholarly publishing is built on economic principles, explicit or implicit. Can we afford open access (OA)? How do we pay for high-quality services? Why does it cost so much? In this article, we argue that the sterility of much of this debate is a result of failure to tackle the question of what a journal is in economic terms. We offer a way through by demonstrating that a journal is a club and discuss the implications for the scholarly publishing industry. We use examples, ranging from OA to prestige journals, to explain why congestion is a problem for club-based publications, and to discuss the importance of creative destruction for the maintenance of knowledge-generating communities in publishing.
The main takeaway from the article is that scholarly journals might be better understood as “club goods” rather than purely private or public goods. Looking at journals as clubs, where members confer benefits on each other through shared resources and exclusivity, provides a more accurate economic model of scholarly publishing. New technologies could also enable journals to function more efficiently as knowledge clubs, potentially transforming the current publishing system.
Resource
Linus Lee (2021). Towards a research community for better thinking tools. The Sephist blog.
This also spurred some interesting conversations I’ve had with other folks in the field about what an ideal research community could look like. What kinds of people and companies would push the ecosystem in the right ways? How might these researchers and companies communicate new ideas with each other in a way that results in open, lasting progress?
I’m a big fan of Linus Lee and how he thinks about knowledge work. He’s a software developer so the connection to research community may not be immediately obvious, but in this piece he’s speaking specifically about what his ideal research community looks like, and I think there’s a lot of insight here around:
- Better thinking and creativity tools.
- The emphasis on outward-looking problem discovery, open collaboration, and novel ways of communicating findings.
- New research methodologies and dissemination practices.
- Short research cycles.
- Different funding models.