Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

10.10.11 | By definition, scholarly research builds on what has come before. This is how fields of knowledge progress. Yet most scholars pride themselves on their original ideas and primary research.

A cultural shift is well underway. I loved this post over at the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) that encourages academics to view sharing and remixing different perspectives as crucial to breeding innovation and advancing ideas.

The post uses “Everything is a Remix”—a great series of web videos by New York-based filmmaker Kirby Ferguson—as a jumping off point to ask key questions about copyright in the digital age: Is remixing content (collecting material, combining, transforming, and distributing) just part of the creative process, or is it stealing someone else’s work?

The SSRN is an online community for researchers that encourages scholars in a variety of fields to share and distribute research well before it is published in journals or books. Its eLibrary provides open access to this research and has more than 1,000 abstracting eJournals that deliver research electronically.

Gregg Gordon, SSRN president and CEO, writes that the level of access provided by SSRN “allows researchers to remix different perspectives from different disciplines into new innovative research.”

One of the core ideas behind SSRN is that scholarly research relies on previous research to identify new problems, develop solutions to problems, or empirically test those solutions.

Without a doubt, remixing is an important part of helping all of us adapt to the digital future, where creativity and collaboration are critical skills for success. But is remixing also a part of helping prepare scholars to innovate inside the academe?

In previous posts, Spotlight has covered how the web is changing scholarly practices such as peer review that have been around forever – forcing academics to take a look at crowd sourcing, open access, and ways of using technology to highlight the types of work that don’t make it into academic journals, including conference papers, white papers, and scholarly blogs. (See, for instance, this post on PressForward.)

Last week, The Guardian covered Princeton University’s recent decision to adopt an open-access policy (pdf) making all its published research and articles made accessible for free. Other universities that have taken this step include Harvard, MIT and, most recently, Bucknell.

In related news, this year marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Creative Commons, which is leading the way in the movement for greater latitude in reuse and remix, including efforts to share data and expand the use of Creative Commons licenses in scientific and technical research.

“One thing that’s changed significantly is that you can’t interact with media without triggering copyright law,” former Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito told Spotlight last year. “Before, the average person – even if they wanted to – probably wasn’t running into it. Now, if you sit at your computer and go online, you are having some kind of interaction with it.”