I have been tortured by the need to find ways radically change some of the ways librarians as researchers handle research, authorship, peer-review, and publication. As information professional we should be innovating in these areas and yet at least tenure-track librarians are in the same or worse boat as other faculty members in the Titanic of scholarly communication. Sure there are bright lights, but in general and in practice we aren’t practicing what we preach. So perhaps we need to pick some low hanging fruit in the library literature.
But should one librarian in each country or state/province or each large institution or subgroup of librarians repeat the study and republish the results in another scholarly journal? Doesn’t the technology exist to do this in scale? Don’t librarians love SurveyMonkey? We need to accept that there are scales of scholarly accomplishment and that something can be worthwhile and still only exist on a blog post or open data set.
Yep, I hear you! BTW, have you seen this new open peer-review site: http://www.peerevaluation.org/ . It’s got some highly reputable researchers behind it, including our very own Lee Giles.
–Patricia