[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 54, Issue 1

Murray Turoff murray.turoff at gmail.com
Fri Jan 2 02:47:58 PST 2009


Tom, fancy meeting you here as we usually interact on the Sloan list.



Computing, whether it is called IS (systems), IS (science), CS, IT, ECE,
MIS, etc is not what I would called a mature academic field like Physics
(where I came from).  In one of the papers I have I listed about 20
different names for Computer Mediated Communications under which related
work was published in the 20 years since 1975 including things like CSCW,
Groupware, Group Decision Support Systems, etc.  It seems every application
of computers to a particular application for using the computer for human
communications has a different name even though the fundamental requirements
and supporting theories are common to all the applications.



The real problem is that we are part of a commercial field and each company
building a new system wants to come up with name for what they are doing to
make it sound like it is a completely new concept.  Unfortunately the young
members of the academic community are quick to jump on the band wagon and
use the terminology even if it duplicates older efforts.



In physics there was always a strong emphasis on and recognition for those
that did careful state of the art reviews of the literature and had the
knack to point out what had been accomplished and where the uncertainties
still existed.  We do not have much of a tradition in computing for that
sort of emphasis.



I think Poole's classic in the 60's on the growing proliferation of journals
and the ultimate swamping of the capacity of professional communities to
keep up with their fields is truer today as a major problem than it was then
as our National Library of Medicine study shows form the Emergency
Management community of practice.  We have too many publishers who are
pushing almost a vanity press excess since electronic publishing and
publishing on demand make cheap publishing by individual item cost
effective.  The attempt my many academic libraries to go electronic is now
forcing them to cut out electronic subscriptions because of growing costs
rather than decreasing costs which the technology would allow but the
current printing industry is not going along.  I think those disciplines
like physics and many biological and medical ones that have gone open source
for all academic publications in the wave of the future.



I also think that the sooner we can get a true universal mico-money systems
on the total Web so individuals can be their own publishers with a cent for
a poem and where the writer sets is own fees and the provider gets only a
10-15% as opposed to the author getting only 10-15% is far more inline with
real economic costs.  I have said this in papers twenty years ago.  Researchers
on the web need to take a normative view the future of the Web.  The Web and
its evolution is the process of designing social systems (Also in earlier
papers).


Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:30:57 -0600
> From: tom abeles <tabeles at hotmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 53, Issue 27
> To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
> Message-ID: <BAY108-W271099AF0FE805C943354EA7E50 at phx.gbl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>
> Hi Murray
>
> You raise a critical issue about government "memory". We were contacted
> several years after we did a report for the USEPA. A consulting firm had a
> contract to do what we did as a separate publication under a broader
> contract. We gave the caller the document number in the EPA publications
> list and never heard from them again.
>
> A parallel experience happens in The Academy when professors assign
> research papers. Now with analysis programs, many of these plagerized papers
> are spotted. But, still, it is clear that:
>
> a) that there is a lot of duplication, including papers in scholarly
> journals by academics who should know better
> b) with the proliferation of materials in all media, good searching is hard
> to do even if the searchers wanted to take the time to plumb the depth of
> what is out "there". I was once booted off a listserv on ICT's for pointing
> out both the insufficient searching for materials and the trivial nature of
> much of the published works. In the past, one would collect and verify
> before publishing. With pressure to pub/perish today, the publication of a
> data point and the further publishing of a second point or a deepeer
> analysis would count as two papers while the past lies buried waiting for
> some archivist to uncover. In fact it was specifically pointed out that a
> new journal was needed because the academics needed the space. It is
> estimated that there are over 20,000 academic type journals extant. Open
> access databases are now also expanding.
>
> This becomes critical for internet researchers given the increasing ability
> for "bots" or intelligent search engines to scour the entire literature,
> both formal and informal, mainstream and fugitive which sits outside the
> traditional search stream. This changes the roll of the researcher. It
> should also change the form and substance of an academic publication since
> it is no longer necessary to have documents which have less than 10% new
> material. All should only need a hot link to the past history. This should
> reduce a publication to a single page, reducing the literature and turning
> most publications into a "note". The problem is that The Academy doesn't
> know how to deal with pub/perish for promo and tenure without the default to
> a count of annual publications, many of which could be footnotes in the
> scheme of the universe.
>
> tom
>
> tom abeles, editor
> On the Horizon
> http://www.emeraldinsight.com/oth.htm
>
>
-- 
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Information Systems, NJIT
homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff



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