Nov
19
Integrity in the age of agents: or is scholarly communications learning enough from the rest of the information world?
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We are living in an uneasy transitional period between the “online“ world to which we have become relatively accustomed, and the agenic,bot-based ,AI-driven world of the future.
Over the past 50 years I have watched as the information communication industries have either narrowed and specialised in unrelated segments or broadly generalised in pan-digital shared experience. My feeling is that neither is necessary or desirable. At the moment , scholarly communications, about which I feel a certain passion, is going through one of its isolationist phases. Perhaps this is a mirror of the hateful political and nationalistic isolationism of our times, which seems equally unproductive to me. However, just as I feel that the world of journal publishing is approaching a period of major change, so I also feel that it’s huge problems will not be addressed by introspection. Nor is it likely that all of the solutions will be internally sourced. Scholarly communications needs to look at the whole world of information handling and communication for relevant and helpful answers.
These thoughts come to mind while reading an excellent report by Phill Jones commissioned by International STM on the problem of verifying images used in science journal articles. A real problem and both author and funder are to a be congratulated on tackling it. I am now partially blind, and my reader software, although increasingly sophisticated is not always good at picking up footnotes and references so I might have missed something important. If I did, my apologies in advance.
But what I missed in this excellent document was any reference to the work done by Adobe and Microsoft, together with the New York Times and other newspapers in developing the verification system C2 PA. Now adopted by Associated Press and Reuters, and installed in Sony and Leica cameras, this system gives an image provenance record from the beginning. And then again I searched for any mention of ISCC, the International Content coding system which is now a draft ISO standard. This foundation, and it’s developer Sebastian Posth, have a huge amount to offer in the world of academic research. at the same time that this report was published, Digital Science launched its Dimensions Author Check system. Morrissier have made real strides in integrity checking; the work of Clear Skies and of Research Signals is really exciting and progressive. But because we are concentrated on the problems of researchers, their institutions and their funders, it does not mean that we cannot learn from people involved in credit rating, banking services, healthcare or education.
These thoughts may explain my own long interest in the overall communication between the segments of what we used to call, very many years ago, “publishing.“ Last week I had the pleasure of lunch with Clive Bradley, now aged 90 and formerly the chief executive of the UK Publishers Association. At his behest, I worked on the founding of CICI, The Confederation of Information Communication Industries in the UK, an organisation which still exists as a way of communicating the wider interests of the broadly defined information industry to government and others. Our conception, 20 years ago, was that trade bodies would become de facto standards setters as well as special interest groups. Thus, in the crisis of integrity which currently afflicts science research publishing, helping journal publishers to band together to set minimum standards of proof for the acceptability of articles and images would seem to me to be a very proper thing to do. Refusing to accept articles which did not demonstrate alignment with data standards which rendered the work verifiable, complete, and free from post creation tampering might seem fairly obvious to some. Yet while we sit wringing our hands about retractions, falsified special issues and papermills, we are in the midst of an industry with no kite marks, no assurance standards, no logo of trust and integrity that readers can invest any faith in at all.
Whatever I have written here about the challenges and opportunities of AI, I think that it remains true that the continuing issues of most concern in the transfer of knowledge in the network society remain exactly as in the mid-1980s. Trust and identity are paramount issues. As I think about this, I think about the writings of my friend David Birch, the hugely respected commentator on the financial services marketplace. His maxim is that “identity is the new money “. He sees banks ceasing to earn margins in trading in money, but in an agented society becoming the agency which establishes identity, credentials, protocols and standards which allow our agents and botsto work in digital networks on our behalf. For my part, I believe that journal publishes will, and in many cases are already, making a similar pivot. Acts of publishing will become increasingly individual or institutional or professional society based: commercial services around them will be concerned with data, integrity, and connectivity, including many of the services that banks of the future will offer to their customers.
Last month the world’s journal publishers will have gathered at the Frankfurt Book Fair. After 51 years of annual worship there. I no longer attend, but I am sure that the STM Conference and it’s great dinner covered all the issues of the current integrity problem. The same people were this month at the Charleston conference and will have been doing the same thing. I just wonder how much of the discussion was devoted to how public and researcher trust in journal article publishing can be restored without concerted action by all market players to create standards of trust and integrity for their industry. Publishes have shown that they can act in concert in the past. Their accomplished really important things with collaborations like CrossRef and Chorus. They are currently doing really important work on integrity.But we all have to ask if it is enough and if it is fast enough? And will it result in enforceable trade standards which all participants in the ecosystem can trust?
of course, none of this will be relevant to the journal if in fact the journal does not survive. When I wrote last about metrics, I was trying to make the point that unless the metrics embrace the experimentation, the experiments in new business models are handicapped from the beginning.i
It may well be that the sort of integrity standards that will emerge, deploying AI effectively, in current journal article publishing will have a profound influence on integrity standards in all other forms of communication in the network, and vice versa. Or, I could speculate, the journal based business model and system will never resolve the integrity issues: that will have to wait for advanced AI development in agent-based systems, where it is the individual researcher who sets the integrity standard for the research data that their bot can accept and use as legitimate. It would not be the first time in the age of digital network communications that the decision point devolved to the end user.