[GOAL] COAR Annual Meeting and new Executive Board

[Jean-Claude Guédon]

Peter,
Just to touch upon this very quickly, in my talk, I used the metaphor
of a town. Towns relate to other towns basically in two ways. First,
geographical proximity; second economic complementarity. Transposing
these two variables onto the communication system, this yields the
following possibilities:
1. Intellectual proximity works in ways that relate to disciplinary or
specialty domains. In many ways, this is also what many journals do as
well: they bundle articles that relate to each other (more or less) by
virtue of being in the same domain.
2. Intellectual complementarity works in the ways that inter-
disciplinary teams generally work. Another way of putting it is to
refer to the "Mode 2 of scientific production" that was proposed (back
in 1994) by Michael Gibbons and his colleagues in a collective book
called  The New Production of Knowledge. What is presented as "new"
really means an inter-disciplinary approach focused on a complex
problem.
Both 1 and 2 open the possibility of tackling new or neglected
scientific problems, provided an adequate reward system is built around
repositories. This is probably the major challenge to overcome, given
the present (and silly) obsession with impact factors. To address this
issue, I suggested first to downplay the role of metrics, and then to
base evaluation (rewards) on at least three variables: scientific
significance (particularly theoretical significance) which should be
expressed in words, not numbers; relevance to specific problems and
their solutions (e.g. Zika is known since the '40s, but was little
studied because journals did not see a potential for many citations in
such a research problem); reach (how do these questions reverberate in
a wider public and can be of help to it).
I hope this is a little helpful.
Best,
Jean-Claude

Le mardi 22 mai 2018 à 12:47 -0400, Kathleen Shearer a écrit :
> Well I’m sure Jean Claude could do a much better job in explaining
> than I, but the idea is to build into a distributed system a way to
> support solving problems and intellectual dialogue and exchange on
> specific domains, fields of studies and problems. Journals bring
> together content that is related. We also want to do this but in a
> distributed, global repository network that is currently very
> multidisiplinary.
> 
> On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 12:19 PM Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>
> wrote:
> > Replying only to GOAL... 
> > 
> > Thank you very much for this report.
> > 
> > One question:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 5:05 PM, Kathleen Shearer <m.kathleen.shear
> > er at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Jean-Claude Guédon, Professor at the Université de Montreal and
> > > respected open access advocate, urged us to consider two
> > > important principles within our repository network: intellectual
> > > proximity and problem solving complementarity. 
> > 
> > Could you please expand on these as I don't understand what they
> > mean in detail.
> > Thanks
> > 
> > P.
> > 
> > 
> > 
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