Discoverability practices of journals

The third axis of the revue 3.0 project, “discover”, focuses on tracing and understanding the life of scientific content once it has been published in the digital ecosystem. While every article has a vocation to be read, understood and cited by other researchers, in order to participate in the “evolution of knowledge” and, better still, in the great scientific conversation, the heuristic potential of digital publications is not always up to the task. Despite the constant efforts made by institutions to promote open science and open access, the discoverability of digital scientific content remains limited, as do the ways in which it is appropriated - strategies for annotation, citation, preservation, updating, accessibility issues, and so on.

In a research-action approach with the partner journals of the Revue 3.0 project, we intend to identify the communication practices of partner journals, with and for them, as well as those of scholarly journals in their long history. We will combine interviews with documentary research, with a view to reconstructing the past and present diversity of journal discoverability practices.

Issues

According to the OQLF, the neologism “discoverability” in digital culture refers to “the potential for content, available online, to be easily discovered by Internet users in cyberspace, particularly by those who were not specifically looking for the content in question”. From this point of view, discoverability is distinct from “findability” - the fact of finding precisely what one was looking for. This distinction enables us to grasp the importance of discoverability in any research process which, although guided by hypotheses or even intuitions, must be able to benefit from a certain serendipity. But since the system of authority specific to the scholarly community is based on principles of citation index, a principle that digital research infrastructures (but not only) tend to amplify (with bibliometric logics strongly criticized by the research community), the search for digital scholarly content sometimes obeys more a principle of findability than discoverability.

While dissemination seems self-evident (reaching as many people as possible), we'll be questioning the commercial a priori that tends to structure thinking about the communication and appropriation of scholarly content. From the point of view of journals, how can we ensure that their scholarly content is found “by the right people”, and “for the right reasons”? More precisely, we'll try to answer these research questions: how do journals ensure that their readers read them? Do they know who their “audience” is, and how it arrives at the content they offer? Do they seek to encourage certain paths, certain categories of audience?

Technical challenges

To ensure not only the visibility, but also the long-term viability of digital journals, publishers have deployed considerable resources to create publishing infrastructures, such as the famous OJS and Lodel CMSs. However, these infrastructures have led to a certain platformization of scientific publication, imposing an editorial format as much as a certain way of thinking. In this context, it seems important to us to study how to reconcile the challenge of discoverability (which imposes a high degree of standardization of content and its structuring, in order to guarantee its digital visibility) and that of bibliodiversity (which favors formats that are sometimes highly experimental, and therefore difficult to promote).

Research activities

• Collective interviews (focus groups) with members of the editorial boards of partner journals
• Analysis of collective interviews and informative questionnaires sent to partner journals, and of their online traces (website and social networks) to produce “sensitive” mappings
• Search of archive documents (via the 'waybackmachine' in particular) of off-platform journals, and evaluation of their “discoverability”.
• Experimentation with researchers' digital sociability via Revue 3.0's online forum, through the software Discourse.

Deliverables

• Sensitive mapping of discoverability practices of journals: in particular, we need to be sensitive to the heterogeneity of practices, their resonance with the objectives of each journal, and the co-existence of ways of distributing and encouraging “discovery” that can be very diverse in nature and scale (from sending targeted e-mails to registering on referencing platforms, from organizing launch events to working with meta-data...). In seeking to explain these different practices of “(getting) discovered”, we'll be looking in particular at what resists digitalization, or projects of systematization and standardization. Sensitive cartography is a good way of representing this variety of practices, while offering a common basis for comparing approaches and discussing methodology, without formalizing them. If the map is a representation - an objectifying one, admittedly, but a representation nonetheless - of the world, then the “sensitive” approach allows us to assume a major epistemological turning point: that of “situated” research.
• The digital sociability of researchers at a time when the major social networks are failing: we'll be looking at the conversational potential of digital tools in a social web in crisis. The discoverability of scholarly journal content owes a great deal to non-institutional spaces such as social networks, where conversation between researchers has become a powerful force. Twitter, in particular, has proved to be an essential recommendation tool, but also a space for debate on the fringes of scientific events. Against a backdrop of increasing pollution of the major social networks, of which X, formerly Twitter, has become the symbol, many researchers have deserted these discussion forums. The alternatives (Mastodon, BlueSky) are struggling, while other networks seem to be doing well, but playing on very different registers: this is the case, for example, of LinkedIn, a professional network that is attracting more and more institutions and researchers, with a promotional rather than conversational objective. The days of the great social networks and the utopian collective that was played out on them seem to be somewhat behind us... to the benefit of older, pre-social web forms. This is particularly true of the forum, which we intend to experiment with the members of the Revue 3.0 project through an instance of the Discourse forum.