The text suggests that there must be room for maneuver and collaboration, as well as giving credit where it is due. The installation/experimental ethnography should not be seen as complete projects, but as always changing and open to revision. This is particularly useful for thinking about the work that we do on PECE. Perhaps the text encourages us to see our work as contributing to the general scientific body of knowledge, and thus there should be more openness regarding remixing and reuse. Perhaps it asks us to think about past installations and experimental works: are they finished and done with, or do we continue to build upon them, not only individually but collectively? How might we engage in a more open form of collaboration around installations?
“Figure 1. Today’s scientific publications are static—meaning finalized versions exist that cannot be changed. Dynamic publication formats have become possible with the Internet. The publication can now evolve with the development of new knowledge. In dynamic publications many parts and texts can be ‘reused’ (as represented by the parts of the text that keep the color; new additions represent novel scientific knowledge).”
“The knowledge creation process is highly dynamic. However, most of current means of scholarly publications are static, that means, they cannot be revised over time. Novel findings or results cannot contribute to the publications once published, instead a new publication has to be released. Dynamic publication formats will change this. Dynamic publication formats are bodies of text / graphic / rich media that can be changed quickly and easily while at the same time being available to a wide audience.”
“With the Internet came new possibilities for publishing, transporting results, and defining the nature of ‘a publication’. Dynamic publications can adapt to the development of knowledge. Just as Wikipedia is developing towards completeness and truth, why not have scientific publications that develop in pace with the body of scientific knowledge?”
“An important feature of dynamic publications is the availability of a history functionality so that older versions of the publication are still available and referencing to the older versions can occur. This might not only be of interest to historians of science, but may also be very valuable in assessing the merits of earlier scientific discoveries and documenting scientific disputes.”
“A SNS for scientists combined with a text editing and publishing platform might be the ideal platform to realize a dynamic publication system.”
The authors begin by depicting the traditional path along which scholarly publications tread, critiquing such issues as the need to publish new editions and articles when new evidence is found, the lack of context for citations, and the retraction of articles/books due to scientific misconduct. The authors present the issues involved with current publications systems and how they impede on the pursuit of dynamic knowledge creation processes. They claim that the production process is not visible to the reader, that the contribution of individual authors are not visible (including honorary authorships), mistakes cannot be corrected, and scientific discourse around a publication cannot occur (or if there is discourse, those authoring the comments are not credited). There is also a high risk among authors of being accused of plagiarism for reusing certain parts of other texts, resulting in unnecessary rewording and a greater workload. This renders the question of how one might locate the new contributions to the scientific field? In addition, there are legal and technical hurdles to reusing content, despite the increased possibilities of sharing and development of dynamic publication formats with the inception of the Internet. The authors proceed to examine the positive aspects of dynamic publication formats to bring publication up to the times with the Internet’s possibilities. Dynamic publications can evolve, trace who authored which ideas/theories that led to a contribution, provide an openness via working versions of works, and allow for innovative forms of remixing and reuse. The authors depict the ways in which dynamic publishing is already being implemented, including via blogs, open peer-review processes in some journals, wikis, and stack exchange. The authors conclude by asserting that SNS for scientists may be the ideal platform to realize a dynamic publication system due to their mixture of multiple opportunities to interact and engage with other users.
In contrast to traditional printed journals that are closely bound to the medium of paper, static and lacking the ability to be revised over time, the authors seek to depict the potentials of Dynamic Publication Formats and to analyze the necessary prerequisites needed to implement them. The authors argue that dynamic publication formats will enable bodies of text, graphics, and rich media to be changed quickly and easily while still being available to a wide audience.
Springer International Publishing published the book Opening Science in January 2014. The content of the book is Open Access with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license. The website in which the text is embedded is intended for collection of comments and revisions of the book chapters as the text evolves. The text is formatted in Markdown, is converted into HTML by the Pandoc document converter and the Jekyll static site generator, and all files are stored in git version control and hosted on Github. The technical implementation of the website is coordinated by Martin Fenner.
Heller, Lambert, Ronald The & Sönke Bartling 2014. “Dynamic Publication Formats and Collaborative Authoring.” Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing. Springer International Publishing. http://book.openingscience.org.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/vision/dynamic_publication_formats.html.
Lambert Heller: He is an open research infrastructures specialist and a librarian (LIS master’s degree from Humboldt University, Berlin). He started TIB’s Open Science Lab in 2013. His work centers on research infrastructures and cultural heritage institutions, and how they change and grow in a networked, globalized world. His main focus is on responsible research data governance and building digital capability. He started TIB’s Open Science Lab in 2013.
Ronald The: He is a designer, information architect, and concept developer. He holds a Graphic Design Diploma from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and a Master of Arts in Communication, Planning, and Design from the University of Design, Schqabisch Gmund. He founded the user experience consultancy company infotectures and specializes in user interfact design, web-design/mobile design, and presentations.
Sonke Bartling: He is a researcher in medical imaging sciences at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and a board certified radiologist at the University Medical Center in Mannheim.