Browsing by Author "King, Adam"

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    A Bit More To IT: Scholarly Communication Forums as Socio-Technical Interaction Networks
    (Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics, 2001) Kling, Rob; McKim, Geoffrey; King, Adam
    In this article, we examine the conceptual models that help us understand the development and sustainability of scholarly and professional communication forums on the Internet, such as conferences, pre-print servers, field-wide data sets, and collaboratories. We first present and document the information processing model that is implicitly advanced in most discussions about scholarly communications -- the “Standard Model.” Then we present an alternative model, a model that considers information technologies as Socio-Technical Interaction Networks (STINs). STIN models provide a richer understanding of human behavior with online scholarly communications forums. They also help to further a more complete understanding of the conditions and activities that support the sustainability of these forums within a field than does the Standard Model. We illustrate the significance of the STIN model with examples of scholarly communication forums drawn from the fields of high energy physics, molecular biology, and information systems.
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    The Remarkable Transformation of E-Biomed into PubMed Central
    (Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics, 2001) Kling, Rob; Fortuna, Joanna; King, Adam
    In 1999, NIH Director Harold Varmus proposed a national biomedical literature server called “E-Biomed.” E-Biomed reflected the visions of scholarly electronic publishing advocates: it would be fully searchable, free to access, and contain full text versions of both pre-print and post-publication biomedical research articles. However, in less than a year, the E-Biomed proposal was radically transformed, eliminating the pre-print section, instituting delays between article publication and posting to the archive, and changing the name to “PubMed Central.” This article examines the remarkable transformation of the E-Biomed proposal to PubMed Central by analyzing posts to an online E-Biomed discussion forum created by the U.S. governments’ NIH, and other forums where E-Biomed deliberations took place. We find that the transformation of the E-Biomed proposal into PubMed Central was the result of highly visible and highly influential statements made by publishers and scientific societies against the proposal. We conclude that: 1) scientific societies and the individual scientists they represent do not always have identical interests, especially in regards to scientific e-publishing; 2) stakeholder politics and personal interests reign supreme in policy debates, even in a supposedly status-free online discussion forum; 3) multiple communication forums must be considered in examinations of public policy deliberations.