Quality in Online Science: Concepts and Recommendations for the Future

A decade ago, Neus et al. (2001) noted the negative impact of the internet upon matters of ‘information quality’. With the internet making publishing virtually cost-free, many processes that used to evaluate the ‘quality’ of information are now becoming less relevant, leaving a question about the alternatives. Assessing quality is difficult because it cannot be directly measured, it often varies according to the point in time of the evaluation and the task at hand and it is often emotive and politicized. It can also depend upon individual, opinion, with similar measures proving divergent in practice (e.g., Martens and Martens, 2001; Bartneck and Hu, 2009). In this paper, we report work that seeks firstly to understand quality in scientific online settings better, and secondly, make recommendations for the design and implementation of self-organizing quality systems (such as scientific communities in which scholars share, evaluate, and access relevant information).