Tom, fancy meeting you here as we usually interact on the Sloan list. Computing, whether it is called IS (systems), IS (science), CS, IT, ECE, MIS, etc is not what I would called a mature academic field like Physics (where I came from). In one of the papers I have I listed about 20 different names for Computer Mediated Communications under which related work was published in the 20 years since 1975 including things like CSCW, Groupware, Group Decision Support Systems, etc. It seems every application of computers to a particular application for using the computer for human communications has a different name even though the fundamental requirements and supporting theories are common to all the applications. The real problem is that we are part of a commercial field and each company building a new system wants to come up with name for what they are doing to make it sound like it is a completely new concept. Unfortunately the young members of the academic community are quick to jump on the band wagon and use the terminology even if it duplicates older efforts. In physics there was always a strong emphasis on and recognition for those that did careful state of the art reviews of the literature and had the knack to point out what had been accomplished and where the uncertainties still existed. We do not have much of a tradition in computing for that sort of emphasis. I think Poole's classic in the 60's on the growing proliferation of journals and the ultimate swamping of the capacity of professional communities to keep up with their fields is truer today as a major problem than it was then as our National Library of Medicine study shows form the Emergency Management community of practice. We have too many publishers who are pushing almost a vanity press excess since electronic publishing and publishing on demand make cheap publishing by individual item cost effective. The attempt my many academic libraries to go electronic is now forcing them to cut out electronic subscriptions because of growing costs rather than decreasing costs which the technology would allow but the current printing industry is not going along. I think those disciplines like physics and many biological and medical ones that have gone open source for all academic publications in the wave of the future. I also think that the sooner we can get a true universal mico-money systems on the total Web so individuals can be their own publishers with a cent for a poem and where the writer sets is own fees and the provider gets only a 10-15% as opposed to the author getting only 10-15% is far more inline with real economic costs. I have said this in papers twenty years ago. Researchers on the web need to take a normative view the future of the Web. The Web and its evolution is the process of designing social systems (Also in earlier papers). Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:30:57 -0600

From: tom abeles <tabeles@hotmail.com> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 53, Issue 27 To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Message-ID: <BAY108-W271099AF0FE805C943354EA7E50@phx.gbl> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Hi Murray

You raise a critical issue about government "memory". We were contacted several years after we did a report for the USEPA. A consulting firm had a contract to do what we did as a separate publication under a broader contract. We gave the caller the document number in the EPA publications list and never heard from them again.

A parallel experience happens in The Academy when professors assign research papers. Now with analysis programs, many of these plagerized papers are spotted. But, still, it is clear that:

a) that there is a lot of duplication, including papers in scholarly journals by academics who should know better b) with the proliferation of materials in all media, good searching is hard to do even if the searchers wanted to take the time to plumb the depth of what is out "there". I was once booted off a listserv on ICT's for pointing out both the insufficient searching for materials and the trivial nature of much of the published works. In the past, one would collect and verify before publishing. With pressure to pub/perish today, the publication of a data point and the further publishing of a second point or a deepeer analysis would count as two papers while the past lies buried waiting for some archivist to uncover. In fact it was specifically pointed out that a new journal was needed because the academics needed the space. It is estimated that there are over 20,000 academic type journals extant. Open access databases are now also expanding.

This becomes critical for internet researchers given the increasing ability for "bots" or intelligent search engines to scour the entire literature, both formal and informal, mainstream and fugitive which sits outside the traditional search stream. This changes the roll of the researcher. It should also change the form and substance of an academic publication since it is no longer necessary to have documents which have less than 10% new material. All should only need a hot link to the past history. This should reduce a publication to a single page, reducing the literature and turning most publications into a "note". The problem is that The Academy doesn't know how to deal with pub/perish for promo and tenure without the default to a count of annual publications, many of which could be footnotes in the scheme of the universe.

tom

tom abeles, editor On the Horizon http://www.emeraldinsight.com/oth.htm

-- Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff