The Disciplinary Shaping of Internet Resources in Supporting Professional and Scholarly Communication: Should We Seek Best Practices and Standards?

Introduction This paper addresses two major issues in information systems. The first is of wide import to the IS field: to what extent are industry-wide systems standards or "best-practices" workable? The second concerns communicative practices within the IS field itself. Due to limited space, this paper focuses on the second, examining issues of standardization and best practice in scholarly communication. It also bears on the first question. The use of the Internet to support scientific communication is one of the major shifts in the practice of science in this era. In the scientific communities, these communications include informal e-mail, communication of conference programs as they gel, sharing of preprints, access to electronic versions of journal articles, and development of shared disciplinary corpuses. These communicative practices can appear to be sweeping across the sciences. However, most of them seem to be structured so as to integrate with preexisting communicative practices of specific fields rather than indicating transformations in scientific communication. It is easy to be sanguine about this differential pattern of developments. One argument is that “sooner or later everyone will catch on” and learn to use the various e-media forms in all fields. Another argument is that the variety of e-media initiatives reflects a creative period in scientific communication, and this, in itself, is a good thing. Last, some science policy analysts suggest that we identify “best practices” or standards and encourage their widespread adoption. We see notable risks in a pure laissez-faire “let them work it out for themselves” approach. Large amounts of money, resources, and effort are being committed (by government agencies, academic departments, publishers, professional societies, and individual researchers) to the development, maintenance, and promotion of new forms of communications technologies. However, in the absence of a valid theory of how scholarly fields adopt and shape communications technologies, scientists and policy-makers are left only with context-free models, and hence resources may be committed to projects that are not selfsustainable, or that do not effectively improve the scientific communications system of the field. The risks may not only be suboptimal use of financial resources, but also wasted effort on the part of individual researchers, and even data languishing in marginal, decaying, and dead systems and formats. This paper examines how and why scientists in different fields shape the roles of e-media in their fields in distinctive ways and suggests that best practices or standards may not be appropriate.