For the last few years, I have been reluctant to publish in academic journals and edited volumes, where the content that I contributed would not be available on the web. I have now some doubts about the wisdom of this position. If one assumes that citation is a proxy indicator that someone out there is reading what one writes, one could conclude that the more cited articles are the most read. I dislike publishing in platforms that do not make content available on the web because I think that fewer people can read what I publish there. So, it would be reasonable to hypothesize that my work that is freely available on the web, on platforms such as SSRN and in open journals, should be read more and should generate more citations.
CPRsouth, LIRNEasia’s primary vehicle for capacity building, places great weight on the practice of “standing on the shoulders of giants,” also known as conducting literature reviews, and referring to previous work through citations. Is this an importation of an alien Western practice? Is there an alternative? Our objectives and those of Wikipedia are not the same. Still, it may be interesting to see if there is anything to be learned from the Wikimania debate.
Reading an article by Araba Sey on a small-sample study of teleuse among non-owners in Ghana in a special issue of info, edited by two colleagues in LIRNE.NET, I was surprised to see no references whatsoever to our work. We who are at edge of the global academic system had excuses, but really, after Scholar.Google, no one has excuses. Further, I was told that Araba had been at a talk given by Helani Galpaya at USC Annenberg School in October 2007 and had been given an entire set of teleuse@BOP2 findings, which makes the omission even more saddening.