As Kaitlyn and Isabelle write in their annotations, dynamic publishing makes us think about the kind of choices we must make when "opening up" our work together: figuring out authorship when possibilities of revisions and revisitations multiply, grappling with privacy of our data while seeking collaboration and feedback. They also note that this changes how we view an installation in a gallery space: what would an open installation mean?
As the authors present questions we must ask when we shift from conventional to dynamic publication modes, they contrast affordances of print and digital media. When shifting our work from the digital PECE platform to a gallery space, materiality has to be reckoned with again. The back-end work of installations would be digital (like this annotation) and constantly changing, and if this dynamic/collaborative back-end work is what constitutes new ways of creating and communicating content, how do we demonstrate that in a gallery space? What expectations would we have from visitors, and how do we graft that back on our digital workflow?
"It is important to notice that in many disciplines and scientific cultures, mainly humanities, textual reproduction with precious words and in a literary manner is a considerable feat which is beyond the pure transportation of information. Here, the reusing and remixing of content has to be seen in a different context... Concepts such as ‘transclusion’ , ‘pull-requests’, and ‘forking’ allow for different kinds of remixing and ‘reuse’ of earlier publications... An important feature of dynamic publications is the availability of a history functionality so that older versions of the publication are still available and referencing to the older versions can occur. This might not only be of interest to historians of science, but may also be very valuable in assessing the merits of earlier scientific discoveries and documenting scientific disputes. Many of these remixing and reuse concepts stem from collaborative software development and many of these are in turn far removed from the current perception of the life cycle of scientific publications."
"While openness can be seen as a tool for assuring quality and preventing scientific misconduct, at the same time it puts researchers under great pressure. Usually early versions of documents are full of spelling mistakes and errors and not meant to be seen by the public; furthermore, they usually lack approval from all coauthors. A possible solution allows for some parts of the publication and editing process to take place with limited visibility in a working version. After all authors have approved a version or a revision, this version can become part of the public version (Figure 5). The step from working version to public version would be based on some internal ‘gatekeeping’ criteria, such as the discussion and consent of all authors, making the process similar to that of the peer-review process. However, the peer-review is done by people other than the authors themselves and the peer-reviewing process can be organized by a quality-granting authority such as a journal."
Wikis (not Wikipedia) are presented as a compromise between collaborative scientific publishing and encyclopedic initiatives: open platforms edited by a large group of users with content control by a core group (people who have accumulated trust and expertise through sustained engagement with the digital infrastructure of the wiki and the topic), where it is possible to see revisions and comments. A wiki's core group can set up style guides and protocols for workflow, and future users work in the consensus of the core group. Ideally, the core group is not static and users can become a part, revising how the wiki is designed and operated. Also, a wiki is not meant to perform original research, but curate instances of knowledge creation so a user can get a dynamic, hyper-linked overview of a "field". Saying that, the authors offer an example of a wiki that integrates functions of a peer-reviewed scientific journal: Topic Pages by PLoS Computational Biology. With a static version of an article, Topic Pages will contain reviews and reviewer identities to be included later in Wikipedia.
The article is an overview of the shift from "conventional" modes of print publishing characterised by closed-door peer-review process, limited revisions of published work, restricted modes of collaborative authorship towards a more "dynamic" publication workflow and system afforded by digital platforms and tools that allow revisiting of what it means to write and to publish. The article raises questions we should think about when we make these shifts. What does it mean to write academically when the audience is potentially limitless and digital tools could allow comments from beyond academia? How does the text and the logics of collaborating transform when new tools afford archiving revisions and comments by peers and beyond? The article also provides themes to think with while making these shifts: how would quality be assured? what would quality mean? how does it transform the "linear" mode of scientific knowledge production and how would humanities and social science scholarship in particular be affected? how would authors revise and edit texts together and would revisions count as "original" scholarship?