Dialogue: a new model for conferences and scholarly communication

Recently I've been thinking a lot about how librarians communicate with each other to explore ideas and professional practice.

Generally speaking I see four current models for substantial professional communication - journals, conferences, blogs and unconferences. All have strengths, but they also all have significant weaknesses.

Journals

Scholarly journals date to the seventeenth century, and their longevity is not without good reason. Typically journal articles are of sufficient length to really explore a problem, discovery or experiment in detail, and standard practices with regard to provision of evidence and citing of sources ensures that assertions can be tested and the literature can be further explored if the reader so desires.

The traditional journal format has many drawbacks, however, and these are only becoming more apparent as technology has advanced, particularly in the last couple of decades. Traditional business models for scholarly journals have become socially unacceptable as the economic justification disappeared - when publication costs approach zero, charging anything for access to read articles becomes highly questionable at best.

The Open Access movement was a logical response to this new reality, with Plos and arXive being two early and wildly succesful players. In the library world, journals like Evidence-Based Library and Information Practice and Code4Lib Journal are well known examples. Even open access journals, however have problems. Pre-publication peer review is the standard, and that takes time. Well-regarded journals usually end up with more proposed articles than they can publish, which can further blow out the time between the paper being finished and being published. Finally, the journal article format lends itself to interaction mostly via other journal articles or written responses, mostly not easily located via the original article.

Conferences

Conferences are mostly an attempt to address the final point about journals. A robust discussion in the coffee queue or at the bar after a conference session can be much more efficient than trawling through journal articles across a range of journals and editions. Conferences are also a great way to meet with other professionals, network, and hopefully be inspired by the keynote speakers.

The big problem with conferences is the conference paper. In theory, this is the point of conferences - hear a bunch of smart people presenting their new findings or ideas. Professional conferences like VALA or the ALIA Biennial issue a Call for Papers, then screen and peer-review paper proposals. VALA tends to screen on proposals, whereas ALIA Biennial wants completed draft papers straight up. Whilst this sounds like a recipe for robust papers of the quality of journal articles, it can be fairly limiting and stifling. Because they are a venue for face to face interaction, conferences should enable attendees to discover the latest research, ideas and initiatives. When papers are expected to be original (i.e. not previously published) and submitted six or more months ahead of the conference, that immediacy is squashed. It doesn't help that many conference presentations give one the impression that the paper was simply written to ensure the author's employer paid for conference attendance.

There is also a mountain of evidence that having someone stand at a lecture and talk at a group of people is a terrible way for the audience to learn anything. This is widely understood in higher education institutions - as this 2012 article about teaching Physics explains, the research goes back to 1976. Regardless, we continue with the conference paper presentation and pretend that it is a great format for learning about new ideas and discoveries. In the worst cases, conferences are simply locations for people to read what amounts to a tepid journal article out aloud, to a crowd wondering whether they'll get the scones again at afternoon tea.

Attn conference planners. Want your conferences to not suck? See my Conference Manifesto for an attendee POV. http://t.co/KaB63gane1

— Mary Ellen Bates (@mebs) February 26, 2014

It's not as if I'm the first person to have identified these problems. Just a few weeks ago no less an authority than Mary Ellen Bates announced A Conference Manifesto pointing out that "The traditi