Cyberinfrastructure For Knowledge Sharing

Abstract

Knowledge sharing is at the root of scholarship and science. A hypothesis is formulated, research performed, experimental materials designed or acquired, tests run, data obtained and analysed, and finally a publication. The scholar writes a document outlining the work for dissemination in a scholarly journal. If it passes the litmus test of peer review, the research enters the canon of the discipline. Over time, it may become a classic with hundreds of citations. Or, more likely, it will join the vast majority of research, with less than two citations over its lifetime, its asserted contributions to the canon increasingly difficult to find – because, in our current world, citations are the best measure of relevance-based search available. But no matter the fate of an individual publication, the system of publishing is a system of sharing knowledge. We publish as scholars and scientists to share our discoveries with the world (and, of course, to be credited with those discoveries through additional research funding, tenure, and more). And this system has served science extraordinarily well over the more than three hundred years since scholarly journals were birthed in France and England.