Leveraging Multimedia to Advance Science by Disseminating a Greater Variety of Scholarly Contributions in More Accessible Formats

Abstract

For the welfare of the scientific community, we are intentionally rocking the boat with regards to the way we conduct, recognize, and disseminate scholarly contributions. As a scientific community, we are doing ourselves a great disservice by ignoring the insights, artifacts, discoveries, and conversations which naturally occur in the scientific process of advancing knowledge, but which do not fit into the very narrowly defined form of print-style articles. By failing to recognize, reward, and publish the wide variety of scholarly contributions that are not well suited to the print-style article, we hinder scientific progress, devalue important and necessary contributions to science, and demotivate these types of vital contributions. Although the effectiveness of the print medium for conveying scholarly knowledge has been demonstrated by over three centuries of scientific publishing, the print-style article captures only a single form of scholarly contribution in a highly limited media format. Unfortunately, the current tenure and promotion process recognizes only this one form of scientific contribution. As a result, science at large advances inevitably only by this single type of contribution. Given the radical advances in audiovisual technologies, storage and bandwidth capacities, public virtual infrastructure, and global acceptance of user-generated open content, the time is ripe to exploit the possibility of publishing more forms of scholarly contributions in a publicly available multimedia format (e.g., video). In this paper, we provide a practical examination of the feasibility of this proposal, a model to demonstrate the sustainability of this approach, and a discussion of potential limitations.

Keywords: Communication media, research dissemination, knowledge dissemination, scholarship, academic publishing, video media, multimedia instruction