New book by David Worlock. Pre-order now at Marble Hill Publishers or Amazon.

A small Cotswold farm is the setting for a classic struggle of wills. Robert Worlock, eccentric and demanding, resolutely maintains the old ways, determined above all to make his son into a farmer fit to take over the family acres. His son, David, is equally determined not to be bullied into something he neither wants nor likes. His childhood becomes a battleground: can he find a way to make his father love him without denying his right to determine his own life?

 So what has been more exciting? The neck and neck race for the American Presidency and the future of the free world? Or the continuing argument about the future of citation indexing in the age of PRC (publish, review, curate)? I may be feeling a little jaded by the coverage that I have read, but here I stand, one day before the election, and the latter is becoming more and more attractive as a topic of conversation!

In both instances, of course, it depends where you stand. On the two occasions when I had the great pleasure and privilege of a conversation with Eugene Garfield, the great man, the master of citation indexing as a metric , pointed out that he thought that what he had done was the creation of the “least bad” methodology for comparing science research articles and journals. His acceptance that all systems would be gamed by some people. contrasted with the reluctance of many of his successors to admit that citation falsification was a real problem. in these conversations he was never less than completely scholarly and completely detached. When asked why he was selling ISI to Thomson. he pointed out that, for age and  health reasons, he could no longer run it himself, and in any case new insights and perspectives would be needed to reinvent it. I had a strong impression  of a scientist and researcher who felt that everything, in time ,  needed to be reassessed, to change and to be reinvented.

These thoughts come to me this week as the Web of Science service , essentially Garfield’s citation indexing environment, made a series of announcements that make me worry about its future. Rather than seeking to change with the increasingly turbulent world of science research article publishing, it seems to be painting itself into a corner,. Gene Garfield believed passionately that his metrics were helping scientists to compare and measure. He did his work in a world where there was a routine orthodoxy around the review and processing of an article submitted to a peer  reviewed journal. He would, I think, be the  first  to say that things have to change once that conventional picture begins to fragment.

And it has been fragmenting for many years now. From the beginning of open access through to the post publication review model launched by  eLife two years ago it has begun to change. With more and more articles appearing first of all on preprint servers and only subsequently (and not always) in versions of record in journals. We are moving into the age of mega journals and self publishing. Some would argue that we need more metrics, different metrics, or better combinations of metrics. Others believe that we need ways for accounting for the subsequent performance of articles post publication, that we need to recognise their review history, and not just a snapshot taken pre-publication.

Web of Science have moved, but it does not seem to me that these announcements reach out to the changing state of the journal publishing marketplace. By suspending journal services like CUREUS, Or telling eLife that it is under investigation, I seem to see a service in retreat from the Garfield objectives of better universal standards of measurement. The danger for Clarivate is that they will end up with owning a measurement guideline which measures a shrinking segment of the market. They may feel safe while the impact factor that  arises from these measurements is still linked to the publishing outcomes, vital to academic jobs and promotions. unfortunately, the things that we say will never change have a habit of changing, and when they do change, it can bevery quickly indeed. And Eugene Garfield, were he amongst us now, would be the foremost scientist trying to invent the better mouse trap.

It  is not of course true that Web of Science are these days the only measure in  the marketplace. The positioning of Scopus and of Dimensions is now extremely important in the future of research metrics. And then add the AI potential to this. Our increasing ability to explore the relationships between articles, the performance and reliability of reviewers, and to test the validity of citation index in itself should be seen as a key pointer to the future of science article metrics. Maybe the announcements made by Web of Science this month are an indication of something else – the beginning of the winding down of the curtain on an age of apparent (but not always quite real) certainty, and the beginnings of a new age of uncertainty before new standards are created and established.

 

I am on my way back from Boston. These days America seems a strange place, pivoting towards extremes and polarised as never before in my experience. It has become  a land in which I am afraid to discuss politics. My American friends are still my American friends: charming, cultured, intelligent. I am still in love with them, but they do not talk politics either. We have grown afraid of what we might hear ourselves saying, and what effect it may have on the people to whom we are saying it. It was not like this when I first visited this city in 1974.

So it is best to concentrate on business. Over 100 companies, members of  the Outsell community, met together in Boston this week. From my own viewpoint, as a rather ancient observer who has attended each of the previous 17 such meetings, I thought that this was a great success. It had that element of turning point, of mutual and collective recognition of change.Of course we had to get through the ritual of complaints about the  state of the USeconomy first. A short spell in Europe would convince most people that the American economy is in a pretty healthy state. I do not want to downplay the problems, but in terms of growth rate and in terms of employment, the American economy is in an enviable state and it is clear that the US based companies that I have spoken to this week  have been investing steadily in the future for the past year, a year in which margins have not touched record levels, but are still so significantly restored from the pandemic period that reinvestment is a realistic possibility. But any optimism here is held down under a heavy cloak of caution. It is easier to persuade oneself to invest in infrastructure or in cost saving retooling, or in headcount reduction through technology adoption than it is to invest in new product development for markets which are emerging but which do not quite  exist yet.

At the previous  meeting of this community , in 2023, attendees were given no doubt that the vision of the future was an AI infused vision: machine intelligence was going to drive the world of content generation from publishing and information provision through data and analytics and into a Brave New World of generative AI. This was an important moment. It was like saluting the Internet before the creation of the Web. Or saluting Gutenberg. without knowing that the scriborium had another hundred years of successful operations still to run. in other words, it was a moment of faith and belief and expectation. It was not a moment for concrete demonstrations and outcomes.

Yet recognising change and saluting it has never been more important. The 100 years that they waited from the mid 15th century for the printing revolution to actualise itself had their equivalent in the 14 years that we waited between 1979 (the launch of my first searchable database) to our first real Internet connection in 1993. Sustaining investment during the time period required, in this case,to move digital from dial up to TCP/IP was a real problem. As well as good sense and good judgement it also required, as investment so often does, faith.. And, as I have often said here, the road to AI has not been a short one. In my own terms I dated my own faith from a Media Lab seminar at MIT run by Marvin Minsky in 1985.

So what did I really expect of the 12 months between Outsell 2023 and 2024? I travelled to Boston hoping for more of the same.

More cautious optimism? More gradual exploration of the commercial issues ?What I did not expect was a room full of companies all experimenting in some way or another with the concepts, ideas and investments involved in utilising AI  in some way in their business. I sensed a real change in business attitudes. I do not now see information based businesses sitting back as at the beginnings of the digital age, and waiting for  something to happen. I do not see small businesses backing away from change, or big data-based businesses saying that they will wait upon big AI tech to sort out the world before they invest for themselves. The picture emerging  now is complicated, but it is about engagement and about embracing change. Above all, in the information and communication sector, I sense an eagerness now to look hard at the technology and ask what it may do for them. This time round, rather than become the victims of change, the industry that I have served for the past 55 years seems determined to be an instigator of change. And that is a very welcome relief!

if you strip away all of the analysis and all of the strategy, investment at the final point of decision becomes a balance of hope and fear. Many of the people I have spoken to this week entertain the real fear that unless they can bring costs down and re-engineer their processes, whether they are creating a credit rating or  a scientific research article or drafting a legal document, they are going to come up against competitive headwinds, as ungentle as hurricane Milton. As I heard of these developments from the platform and discussed them around the room, it was apparent as well that re-engineering process through AI was also about adding value , and thus increasing competitiveness. 

The meeting this week contained a session on improving data quality for AI. Five years ago corporate response to this sort of presentation was negative: it was all very well to talk like this, but these things cost money and nobody was prepared to pay more for better data. Here the atmosphere was totally different. There were  few players in the room who were not actively improving their own data, and no one was not aware of the role of machine  intelligence in automating and accomplishing this.

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Flying into Boston, my mind was full of  Big Tech licensing controversies, the regulatory framework that is emerging and whether we were all going to be swallowed up by Big AI Tech, who would buy our data for a pittance and then “hallucinate “it into the search boxes of our users. These preconceptions were entirely wrong. Much more time was spent discussing case studies and exemplars. There was more emphasis on using small learning machine environments, RAG, and applications dependent upon  company-owned data sets, plus some licensed files, and publicly available data inputs . Yes, you could create your own training sets for your own application in your own niche..  You did not need to ride on the back of the big AI developers:some were using open source or licensed AI software. The urge to experiment was borne both from a perceived need to anticipate competitive threat – “ they seem to think that anyone can come in here, buy the right data sets, engineer them to user requirements, and take our markets away from us  “– and an optimistic feeling that the existing players were in a more powerful position than they had ever realised. They had the customer relationship , they knew the needs and requirements and the ways in which those were changing, and above all, they had the data. There was a confidence in the room that well structured, well prepared data which effectively covered the niche in depth was a key strength. By the end of the conference participants were reminding each other that AI would never succeed unless it had access to data of the highest quality. It was all very well to hoover up the dark web. It was apparently okay scrape other peoples websites. It was even okay to pay puny license fees as a gesture to regulatory conformity. But, the players in the room seemed to be saying, we have the real data and we know exactly how important it is. And we also now know that AI is only as good as the quality  of the data it ingests allows it to be. AI as a consumer experience will be very popular, and will build very large starter audiences, some of whom will stay as they discover real personal value in its usage. But in business and professional and research marketplaces, things will be very different. Here, in the next 2 to 3 years, there will be real opportunities to lop as much as 30% off processing costs, while adding a similar amount to data value. The title of the Outsell conference was “From hype to reality“. Many members of this community clearly now recognise reality as opportunity.

By the end of the meeting, my mind began to fill with the next projection. How will the use of our AI products and services, as we develop them, change the way in which our end-user  clients work? it is clear that major pharma players like BioNtech are rolling out AI research assistants. Similar developments will take place in every industrial and commercial sector. Should we be their partners in these developments? Or will their developments be fuelled by licensing our data and cheating us out of the value to be added to it?  Exploring those unresolved problems remains the role of research and thought leadership, but at least, at this point, we are discussing the future with a common agreement that there is a future: in 1985, starting out in strategy advisory work, I faced the initial difficulty of persuading anybody that digital did present any sort of future at all . Even if we acknowledge that we had not yet travelled very far, those of us who left Boston last week seemed sure of the direction of travel and were optimistic about its potential.


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