In (Digital) Scholarly Communications We Trust? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"At industry conferences, seminars, and board meetings around the world, the digital revolution in scholarly communications dominates the conversation. From open access journals to new approaches to peer review, from altmetrics to plagiarism-detecting software, our community has seen a decade or more of rapid change, with no end in sight. You might think that all these changes would affect perceptions of trustworthiness and authority in scholarly communications, but a recent study by the University of Tennessee and the CIBER Research Group* found that – with a few exceptions – that is not the case. Or at least not yet. The study concludes instead that: 'The results … of this long, large and robust investigation confirms what some commentators had suspected, but had little in the way of hard evidence to support their suspicions that the idea, methods and activities associated with trustworthiness in the scholarly environment have not changed fundamentally. In fact, arguably, the main change has been a reinforcement of the established norms in the face of the rapid expansion in scholarly communications and the digital information tsunami that it unleashed. Instead of looking to the future for a lifeboat, researchers have looked to the past and gripped established practices … even more firmly.'  One of the study’s main findings is that – perhaps somewhat surprisingly – peer reviewed journals are still the most trusted and preferred vehicle for scholarly communication. If anything, the authors suggest that trust in peer review has increased, though there are clear indications that this is not the case for everyone. So, for example, while life scientists see peer review as critical, young scholars (aged 30 and under) are more likely to also trust other, less traditional forms of scholarly communication, such as social media. They are much more likely to believe that checking to see how many times an article is downloaded and taking account of colleagues’ opinions is important when deciding what they trust as readers, whereas older researchers overwhelmingly see peer review as the most important factor.  Interestingly, a perceived lack of peer review was one of the main arguments the researchers surveyed gave as not wanting to publish in an OA journals ..."