The Garden of Forking Paths – Forms of Scholarship and the ‘Formations’ Pre-Prints System for Cultural Studies and Related Fields

This paper describes and analyses a web-based pre-prints project in the UK's Electronic Libraries Programme in order to raise issues about the forms of scholarship that are best suited to online working. Specifically, the paper describes some of the underlying processes at work in academic research and seeks to match these, where appropriate, to forms of online working. In doing so, the paper describes in detail a scholarship of integration which seems well suited to online tools such as pre-prints systems, but speculates that such forms of scholarship are too seldom explicitly identified when academics refer to research as a totality. As a consequence the potential match between working practices and emerging tools may not be obvious to academic researchers. To investigate these issues further, the paper examines the degrees of formality involved in different kinds of online communication and describes how academic working practices might be supported by adapting established ‘groupware’ tools such as Lotus Notes. The eLib ‘Formations’ project, which is using Notes to develop an integrated pre-prints and e-journal system for research in cultural studies and related fields, is described in detail, focusing on the underlying technology and the overall design.