ScholRev is a community in favor of the Open Scholarly Revolution

This is from the mission statement draft, crafted by Eugenio Battaglia et al.:

“#ScholRev is a decentralized union of scientists, educators, programmers and digital enthusiasts which share the vision to deliver a series of open tools in order to create, disseminate and evaluate scholarship according to the digital transition that scholarly publishing is facing nowadays.

ScholRev was born on March 20, 2013 in Amsterdam during a break-out session at the conference Beyond the PDF 2 created by the FORCE11 group. You can read the manifesto of the FORCE11 group here, and information about the outcomes of the conference here. In this conference many of us felt that we needed a radical approach to scholarship and its communication. This wasn’t planned, but 25 of us met at lunch and decide we wanted to DO something different.

We aim to deliver new open tools to solve the major issues in current scholarly praxis. Data-driven systemics is replacing Hypothesis-driven science, blogs and metrics algorithms are replacing journals and the peer-review system. We argue that present models of publication/ dissemination are not adequate in presenting content and context of scholarly research in ways that take full advantage of the capabilities of the Web, and new digital transformations.

“Now we are witnessing the transition to yet another scholarly communication system — one that will harness the technology of the Web to vastly improve dissemination. What the journal did for a single, formal product (the article), the Web is doing for the entire breadth of scholarly output. The article was an attempt to freeze and mount some part of the scholarly process for display. The Web opens the workshop windows to disseminate scholarship as it happens, erasing the artificial distinction between process and product.” — Jason Priem in Scholarship: Beyond the paper on Nature

While the majority of the members have a science background, there are also people interested in humanities. We believe that both communities can learn a lot from each other, and “synergy” is a word that we hear a lot in this community. For example, humanities scholars can learn from the way scientists work collaboratively, and data intensively. Conversely, scientists can also learn from the way humanities scholars do close reading of the material, developing digital editions that are alternatives to traditional publication models.”