Scholars are knowledge producers.  How scholars produce that knowledge and what form it takes is changing.  What does it mean to create knowledge in the 21st century when our ideas can flow out of the walls of the university like rivers or streams?

A key component of JustPublics@365 is creating new kinds of scholarship. What might have been called “knowledge products,” in a previous era, we are now reconceptualizing as “knowledge streams.”  These knowledge streams, whether podcasts, infographics, blog posts or digital videos, or documentary films, are available to a broad audience and are designed to reach beyond the traditional boundaries of the academy to wider publics.  Knowledge streams available through open access on the web also offer the potential for new kinds of measurement, what some are calling “altmetrics.”

Legacy models of academia demand that scholarship appear in bound volumes, printed by for-profit, third party publishers for a small audience of other experts.

That is changing now.

Scholars completing their PhD’s today have likely never known a world without the web. At the same time, some senior academics are experimenting with crowd-sourcing, steaming video, and blogging in ways that supplement older forms of publishing research and create new kinds of peer-review.

Throughout 2013, JustPublics@365 has worked to foster the creation of knowledge streams, from training hybrid skilled academics to create their own podcasts, data visualizations, and videos in our Mediacamp workshops, to creating some of these on our own such as the podcast series, to our topic series on stop-and-frisk,  to hosting a series of panel discussions with experts in the emergent discussions of open access publishing and how to measure the impact of these new forms of scholarly communication on social justice.