Digital scholarship is changing the face of academic research. Will it be for the better?

Question: What is the future of the U.S. university? 

Krisztina Holly: So there are two main parts to the university. There is the research enterprise and there is the educational enterprise and I definitely see both parts of it changing a lot in the next decade or so. So, speaking about the educational enterprise it’s not enough for people the learn the skills that they’re learning today, as valuable as they may be, but it’s going to be very important for them to learn innovation skills that enable them to better communicate their ideas and communicate a value proposition, figure out how to make greater impact with their ideas by enrolling other people in their vision and to understand how to finance their idea and how to turn it into a sustainable business, nonprofit, whatever form it is. So that is going to be really important. We think it is especially important at the PhD level. We think that is something that has been ignored. In fact, Kurt Carlson who is the CEO of SRI International, they’re a non-profit research lab in Menlo Park, he was giving a talk recently and he said that they get the most amazing PhDs around the world, around the country to come and work for them and despite that, it takes them seven to ten years to become fully productive members of the team. Why is that? It is because they lack the innovation skills. They lack the skills of understanding how they fit into the innovation ecosystem, how they fit in, how they communicate their ideas and how they address real world problems. So that’s perfect validation for the fact that at USC we just announced and we’re launching for the fall an innovation diploma program for PhD students that is free of charge for PhDs. It is a three-course sequence unlike any other program that we’re aware of, and we think it is really, really valuable for our students. We’re not trying to turn PhDs into business people. We don’t think that is appropriate. We don’t think that it always works. We want to keep them as researchers at the cutting edge of their field and that’s their whole goal is to become the absolute best in a discipline and there have been some criticisms that academics don’t understand the bigger picture or they’re too specialized. The reality is if you’re going to be the absolute best you have to be very specialized, but that doesn’t preclude you from understanding how to communicate with others that can take your idea and make it into something really impactful. So it’s sort of bridging that gap by making both the academics aware and then of course we’d like to focus on the business community as well to bring them closer to academia.

Question: How might digital scholarship impact innovation at universities? 

Krisztina Holly: There are a lot of changes that are happening now that are really going to be impacting the way innovation happens in the university. One of them, for example, is open access to research results and people are publishing increasingly in open access journals and in fact I think there have been about 5,000 new open access journals that have popped up online in the last couple of years that are circumventing the typical peer reviewed printed journal publications and that will have some significant affect in the future. It’s not just a matter of open access to the papers, but also there has been a greater drive towards open access towards the data itself. It is somewhat controversial because there is definitely an interest by faculty with all the work that they put into collecting that data and this has been a challenge for a while, but it is exacerbated by this new open access. How do you get to benefit from your own data that you’ve worked so hard to collect and then and publish on? So how long is it appropriate to hold back that data before you share it with other people? Obviously the sooner you get the data out there the more people will benefit and at the same time you need to motivate faculty to be collecting that data in the first place and so that will be an interesting thing to see. 

Also digital scholarship is changing the output of research. It used to be that you can do some research, you can write it up in a thesis or a paper, publish it or put it on a bookshelf and that was your publication. That is not going to cut it anymore. You have digital multimedia output. How do you archive that? For example, we have this system that was developed at USC in collaboration with some other universities called Hypercities. It was developed by a historian in fact at USC, Phil Ethington and what it is, is you can put geo-rectified maps and geo-tagged photographs into the system. I can look at my neighborhood and then click on a button and it goes from the view from the sky, the satellite view down into "Well let’s see what the map looked like from 1986. Now let’s see this other map from 1920," and you realize "My God, there is no marina there," and it’s almost like going through time and seeing how things were. You can look at different photographs and very much in a crowdsourcing fashion it enables other historians now. It’s this platform where other people can add to this archive of information, so it brings up some interesting questions. One of the questions is how do you store that kind of output if it is not a piece of paper that you can put in a library or you can scan in? How do you archive this? How do you enable people to access that information? And if you are allowing people to contribute to it then how do you give proper credit to those individuals that are contributing to this piece of scholarship if there is now hundreds of people that are contributing to this? So this is very different. It’s a brave new world. It’s different from the way it was 20, 30 years ago and it’s going to continue to change.