This year, the 2nd Open Access Week event will be held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka, Croatia on Tuesday, Oct 23rd, at 6 p.m.

For more info and the text of the table in Croatian, visit OAYarn.

Round Table: Who is the Author 2.0?

Speakers: Senka Tomljanović (University Library Rijeka), Kristina Posilović, Sara Uhač, David Blažević, Boris Ružić, Bernard Koludrović

Moderator/s: Katarina Lovrečić, Matko Hrvatin

Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits.(Michel Foucault, What is an Author)

The internet technology inspires the idea of a digital age, the age of Web 2.0 – the age of a “roaring machine”. The machine certainly changed the way scholars do their work, but did less, or is doing more slowly, to change how the scholarly value system works. However, scholars are beginning to rethink impact, and are even looking into multiple and different n-dimensional impact spaces. All the information that we can collect on the web and share with readers is not the information that could once fit between the covers of a scientific journal. A scientific discovery may no longer be up to a single person, but a group of scientists can collectively claim to understand separate pieces of a scientific discovery.

But, how many scholars have really moved their work onto the web? How many of them are using social networks to communicate and share their ideas? How can they better understand the meaning of a shared fragment, to find the missing one or repair one. Should we take into account the influence of a single scholar on Twitter or Facebook, while we study his scholarly impact? If one does nothing but – collaborates, how can we fairly credit his work?

More importantly, can an author benefit from making his work available online, by making his work open access? And if so, can he adjust “the machine” to count more than just stats? What counts, then? The impact of an article as a whole, or the progress made because of a separate piece of information in this article?

The option to choose “what counts?” is one of the features of a digital age, the age which creates digital, living texts online – texts that do unfold like a game, texts that can be re-read, re-written, texts that can stay open-ended. And how does this change the role of – authorship? How can an author caught inside the web of a networked culture – defined by a copy, by remixing and sharing, continue to exist as a distinguished author among his fellow scholars? Is it finally time for the academy to welcome the emergence of the Author 2.0?