Parameters

The library has always been a fundamental partner in the research process. But key changes in the information, technology, economic, and scholarly environments are challenging this relationship and raising critical questions about…

Several years ago, a university press director wryly observed that the crisis in scholarly publishing had reached its twenty-fifth anniversary. Today it has surpassed the thirty-year mark.

For most of the past century, there were ready-at-hand answers to the question of “what scientific knowledge looks like”: namely, the learned article or specialized essay as printed in a professional journal…

In the academy, Wikipedia increasingly serves as both a default source and an instance of participatory democratic practices. Erik Olin Wright, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and past president…

One vital point that advocates of open access must make clear: open access does not mean that publication is free.

Social science explores human interaction. So, now that we have data on virtually every type of human interaction, can we, once and for all, see exactly how human society works? Sort of.

Writing a book on peer review in the social sciences and humanities helped me think through how changing digital contexts are influencing evaluative practices and their impact on the making of reputations.

Today, the power of social concepts, technologies, and data to change the world should be obvious to anyone. The greatest successes of applying the explosive progress in computing and the World Wide…

The arguments around scholarly communication, and particularly scholarly communication within the social sciences, are rather more complex than the simple “evil closed publisher/good open researcher” narrative that dominates so much of the…

Can diagrams, bar charts, or network maps possibly convey the human warmth and drama of literature, religion, and history? And what happens to a researcher’s critical capacity and sensitivity when she uses…