{"id":856,"date":"2016-04-11T11:00:34","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T09:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/langsci-press\/?p=856"},"modified":"2016-04-21T09:32:22","modified_gmt":"2016-04-21T07:32:22","slug":"open-authoring-as-the-obvious-next-step-in-open-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/langsci-press\/2016\/04\/11\/open-authoring-as-the-obvious-next-step-in-open-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Authoring as the obvious next step in open publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it comes to writing, reviewing, and proofreading scientific publications and text books (for university students), I am convinced that a radical wisdom of the crowd<\/a> paradigm does not apply, mostly because the crowds are too small and likely also too fragmented. However, the principles of open access definitely allow larger communities to contribute suggestions, ideas, and corrections to publications, simply because the hurdles and the fuss brought about by copyright restrictions are removed. In this post, I propose that there is much more potential to unleash for the writing and editing process by borrowing concepts and adopting technologies from open source software development.<\/p>\n

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1. Motivation<\/h1>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The motivation behind the ideas presented here comes from my experience with the almost completed process of creating the second edition of my introduction to German grammar (Einf\u00fchrun<\/em><\/a>g in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen<\/em><\/a>) published by Language Science<\/a> Press<\/a>. The second edition was necessary because of many minor errata and my dissatisfaction with the chapter on phonology. After the first edition had been published, I first created a traditional list of errata (now removed) on the book’s website<\/a>. The process of tracking errata typically involved colleagues writing me an email, telling me things like which word was misspelled on which page. I would then log in to the book’s WordPress site and make an entry in an unstructured list. This is the same workflow that was used in 1900, except that back then emails were letters to authors or editors, and book websites were printed sheets added to (or even glued to the inside of the book cover of) the remaining copies of the current edition. This workflow \u2013 intended to eradicate errors \u2013 is itself prone to introducing errors, mostly because information is copied by humans in several places. Even worse, having to write a personal email to the author involves a high inhibition threshold and an unreasonably high workload given the amount of transmitted information. Also, there is no automatic way of keeping track of which errors have already been fixed and which haven’t. Most severely for the readers, however, they have to either go to a website and check whether a potential erratum has already been recognized as an erratum, or simply wait for the next edition. If it is a substantial error and not just a typo, it would be favorable to implement the fix as quickly as possible and deploy a fixed version to the reader. In summary, traditional lists of errata and the traditional editing processes are laborious, error-prone, and clumsy.<\/p>\n

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The open review of Stefan M\u00fcller’s Grammatical Theory<\/a> has demonstrated to the linguistics community that open processes in publishing actually do work. Using the hypothes.is<\/a> platform has shown that the technology to implement the new open processes is already there. In a recent post<\/a>, Stefan describes how community proofreading helped to polish his Grammatical Theory using contributions from the larger community and the hypothes.is platform. I suggest that also after<\/em> a book’s release, we should adopt community-based efficient and modern workflows from open source software development for tracking errors and creating new editions. Using platforms like GitHub<\/a>, open source software developers have efficient ways of<\/p>\n