SLIS Professor Blaise Cronin gave the keynote address at the 2nd International Conference on Integrated Information in Budapest, Hungary. The conference, held from August 30-September 3, 2012, covered many aspects of information science and management, including digital libraries, electronic publishing, e-research, and semantics.

Talk Abstract:
“In this presentation I examine the evolution of academic writing, from established genres (e.g., single author monograph, refereed journal article) to recent innovations, such as enriched texts, micro scripts and nano publications. I ask what it means to be an author in an age of team science and massive collaborations, of citizen science and crowdsourcing, of distributed accountability and vanity publishing. I consider the changing dynamics of the scholarly publication process, which has shifted from being a sluggishly linear to an intensively interactive, time-pressured process. I assess the implications of open access and open peer review in terms of system transparency and community trust. Lastly, I describe the emergence of multi-dimensional, real-time indicators of scholarly influence and impact that take us beyond conventional approaches to bibliometric evaluation.”

Biographical Notes:
"Professor Blaise Cronin is the Rudy Professor of Information Science at Indiana University, where he was Dean of the School of Library and Information Science for nineteen years. From1985-1991 he held the Chair of Information Science and was Head of the Department of Information Science at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He is concurrently Honorary Visiting Professor at City University, London and also at Edinburgh Napier University.

Professor Cronin is the author/editor of more than 300 research articles, monographs, technical reports, conference papers, and other publications. Much of his research focuses on collaboration in science, scholarly communication, citation analysis, and the academic reward system. His books include The Citation Process (1984), The Scholar’s Courtesy (1995) and The Hand of Science (2005). He has also published on topics such digital pornography and information warfare. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and for 10 years was Editor of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.

Professor Cronin has extensive international experience, having taught, conducted research, or consulted in more than thirty countries. He was a founding director of Crossaig, an electronic publishing start-up in Scotland, which was acquired in 1992 by Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) in Philadelphia.

Professor Cronin was educated at Trinity College Dublin (MA) and the Queen’s University of Belfast (Ph.D, DSSc.) In 1997, he was awarded the degree Doctor of Letters (DLitt., honoris causa) by Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh for his scholarly contributions to information science. In 2006 he received the Award of Merit from the American Society for Information Science and Technology, the Society’s highest honor."

Photo Credit: Budapest - 287 by Nouhailler. Some Rights Reserved.

Posted September 20, 2012