The Digitization of Scholarly Communication: Discourse and Practices, Measurements and Identity Formation

The contribution deals with what happens when science opens up and communicates’ and the emerging challenges for future scientific communication.

Research that investigates respective researchers’ engagement in Open Science varies widely in the topics addressed, methods employed, and disciplines investigated, which makes it difficult to integrate and compare its results. To investigate current outcomes of Open Science research, and to get a better understanding on well-researched topics and research gaps, we aimed at providing an openly accessible overview of empirical studies that focus on different aspects of Open Science in different scientific disciplines, academic groups and geographical regions. In this paper, we describe a data set of studies about Open Science practices retrieved following a PRISMA approach to compile a literature review.

Recent years have witnessed a revival of the old question what research quality is and how best to assess it. These debates have been propelled by the intermingling of new metrics and novel value concepts. We first relate researchers' quality conceptions to their appraisal of metric indicators (25 semi-structured interviews). Second, we contrast these views with 14 expert interviews about Altmetrics' perils and potentials. Valuing indicators that reflect scientific chains of production, researchers judge few Altmetrics as useful. Conversely, experts value Altmetrics' potentials to explore new impacts and align evaluation accordingly. Altmetrics exemplify a reterritorialization of research (evaluation) along the lines of platform capitalism.

Expertise in research (e-)valuation is a currently debated matter (CoARA, 2022; DORA, 2012; Wilsdon et al., 2015). The Altmetrics- (Priem et al., 2010) and the Leiden Manifesto (2015) exemplified diametrical visions of how expertise in assessing research should be distributed and practiced (Leckert, 2021). As inherently ambiguous measures, Altmetrics offer insights into how new forms of expertise arise, namely platformized information brokerage. We analyze how multi-dimensional ambivalences around Altmetrics are silenced by motifs of discursive convergence in order to show a) how research assessment is induced with new objectives, and b) how new forms of expertise re-distribute competences and responsibilities in research (e-) valuation.

Bibliometric measures are increasingly used in academic funding and hiring situations. Although rather vaguely described as “impact” or “performance” indicators, they often appear to be equaled with research quality. Altmetrics challenge established bibliometric evaluation concepts by promoting alternative notions of impact: Attention, visibility or societal relevance are some of the concepts that may be used to charge metrics with value and thus add to the many dimensions of quality. Research quality, however, is a hard to define concept. Researchers are likely to express different understandings of quality, influenced by their fields’ shared epistemic and cultural beliefs.

Open Science, it is often held, aims at enhancing the science and society relationship by making science more open, transparent, and accessible to the public, thereby restoring trust in scholarly knowledge production. Yet, in order to restore trust and to make science more accountable to the public, scholars are also expected to more openly communicate their ideas and findings to the public, exploring new channels for communication and interaction with wider audiences. This session aims to explore which frictions such practices of open communication face in the light digitalization.

The advance of Open Science by Digital science communication (DSC) has been a major argument in promoting Altmetrics. Such metrifications of DSC have turned out to be a profitable business: Collected from commercial online platforms, aggregated by for-profit companies, showcased by most large publishers. While the question "what do they mean" remains, Altmetrics are reflected back on scientists, scoring their work alongside citation measures. By analyzing interviews with both researchers active in DSC and experts from the Altmetrics field, this contribution contrasts scientists' situated online behavior with its re(e-)valuation in aggregated form. This allows to study the production of reactive potentials in science (e-) valuation.