Stephen M. Griffin
Visiting Professor and Mellon Cyberscholar
University of Pittsburgh
This presentation reports on the outcomes of a workshop on new models of scholarly communication held at the University of Pittsburgh in January 2013. The discussions focused on approaches for effectively communicating the full range of processes and products of “digital scholarship,” that based on data and computation in which new types of data analytics, information objects and heuristic representation of findings are common, but frequently cannot be accurately or faithfully described using current scholarly communication models. The meeting also addressed the value of capturing, documenting and reporting information associated with each stage of the scholarly workflow in order to gain a full record of the often complex set of activities. When this can be done, the final value of a research endeavor is enhanced further if it can be naturally and easily linked and become part of larger and often global data infrastructures. Linked open data and semantic Web technologies were viewed as particularly valuable and advantageous in accomplishing these ends. Taken together, efforts of this kind could result in continually expanding global data and knowledge infrastructures capable of acquiring and delivering valuable information for scholars from many disciplinary domains, often in real-time; infrastructures that could, over time, mature into higher order infrastructures capable of supporting a full range of unencumbered, complex scholarly communication models. The result would be new sustainable resources of exceptional value to the overall scholarly enterprise.