Academic Community

Context:

‘Whilst academic research is subjected to stringent peer review and assessment procedures, it has been argued that this has led to inward-looking results produced more for the self-sustaining benefit of the academic community and less for the wider professional and public good.’ [7]

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New web technologies and practices set a series of challenges and opportunities for universities and research institutions – how might the interests, objectives and working methods of the academic community be managed within a virtual knowledge sharing environment?

A key objective of the wiki is to connect the two principal sources of architectural knowledge and research: the academy (academic and applied research) and practice.  Much of the profession’s knowledge is created through a cycle of continuous feedback between these two sources: practitioners supply architectural data; academic inquiry converts this raw material into a systematic, verified body of knowledge.  Within this context, one of the key purposes of universities and other institutions within the academic community is to regulate the exchange of knowledge in a formal way through established principles and procedures; for example, articles which are published in academic journals and academic research papers are scrutinised in a rigorous process of peer review, or refereeing, carried out by accredited experts.

The advantage of academic peer review is that its outputs are certified against an accepted level of quality – it can usually be assumed (but not guaranteed) that academic research is more soundly based than research by laypersons, and a formal approach helps to ensure that academic work matches the essential criteria of originality, significance and rigour, listed by Jeremy Till in an article published on the RIBA research wiki: ‘What is Architectural Research?’ [7]   However, the traditional peer review process is far from being perfect and a major reason for its drawbacks – described by the British Medical Journal in 1997 as: ‘expensive, slow, prone to bias, open to abuse, possibly anti-innovatory, and unable to detect fraud’ – is that it was designed many years ago to suit an economic and political model where knowledge was restricted to a privileged few and relatively static.  Under a traditional business model, the key issue for institutions and academic journals operating in a competitive market, where research grants and publishing space are scarce resources, is how to translate research into reputation and reputation into money.   

Open access publishing and self-archiving removes these constraints, making academic papers freely available on the web.  Usually, these papers are either pre-prints or have already been peer reviewed and cannot be publicly edited, as is the case with open content / source publication – see pattern Peer Production.  Open access can reach a far wider audience in a much faster time than traditional methods; however, built into the traditional business model is the cost of filtering information through peer review, so that open access challenges not only paper publishing but also the peer review process.  For this reason, there is interest within the academic community in developing processes for open peer review. 

Open peer reviews are conducted by anyone willing to participate, rather than by invited experts.  Accreditation is decided after the event based on the results of the review instead of before the event on the basis of formal qualifications – filtering and ranking can be performed by page-ranking algorithms, as used by Google and Amazon.  Many open access sites use discussion threads attached to papers to capture deliberation and comments, and the identity of reviewers is usually mandatory, which makes the process more transparent than traditional peer reviews. 

Therefore:

The RIBA architectural research wiki could be developed in ways which allow the academic community to take advantage of the benefits of new web technologies – what might be called Research 2.0 – whilst maintaining the rigour of the traditional academic process.
 
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The attitude of the academic community towards new web technologies and practices can be ambivalent or hostile; some academics fear that the new model might sweep away traditional methods, flattening expertise and reducing the privileges of the academic community – refer to the pattern The Cult of the Amateur.