From the Scholarly Kitchen…

No, not a recipe—rather a post from The Scholarly Kitchen blog. This post is called Participation Value and Shelf-Life for Journal Articles
and takes a look at factors surrounding what appears to be the lack of engagement with academic publications in journals—why, in other words, people aren’t reading articles and generating vibrant discussions (online or elsewhere). This paragraph gets to a central issue:

Much participation is hampered by cultural issues within research communities, discussed here, particularly a hesitancy to speak openly and critically. But there are other factors involved that limit participation value. First, there’s a huge amount of diverse material continuously published. With few exceptions, each paper published is relevant to only a small subset of the overall academic community. If there were a thousand professional football leagues, each with hundreds of teams, it would be a lot more difficult to drive participation around an individual game than it is to unite the country around the current one national Monday night game.

Certainly something to think about as we try to figure out how scholarly publication is changing, and what some viable directions might be with regards to directing that change. Here is the full post.