Dec
17
Access, Evaluation, Science – all Open?
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
“When the Spin slips, change the name!” as British Spin Meister, Alistair Campbell, almost said but didn’t until I put the words into his ever-open mouth. When I look back over the past 15 years of science publishing, I see more spin and less change than I would ever have believed possible. Yet when I try to look forward 10 years I see a wave of fundamental change more threatening than the games we have been playing in these Open spaces. For me, a good proof of the failure of the almost political campaigning around Open Access to carry the day beyond some 12-15% of users (check the latest Outsell market report, Professor Harnad) is the name switch game – with PLoS now talking “Open Evaluation” and Academia.edu being used by 5 million scientists who believe in Open Science. The fundamental change is about self-publishing and post-publication peer review: this will upset the applecart of commercial publishing, if it does not adjust in time, and the ersatz Fundamentalists of the Open Access movement of a decade ago, who wanted to preserve peer review as much as they wanted to destroy commercial ownership and restriction.
Since we are talking Science, lets try an experiment. Take any other broken, mis-used and meaningless hackneyed term and place it in this context where “Open” is now in terms of Science and Access. For example, take “Socialist”. Or “Community”. Or even “Public”. See what I mean? All meaningless, or, like those eye tests, you see the same through each lens that the optometrist puts into the frame before your eye, and end up lying about the difference between this one and that – because there is no discernible difference but you do not want to disappoint. Real change is not to be described by this means. It concerns the wish of young scientists to be noticed in the network as soon as possible on completion of their work – and before that where conferences, posters, blogs and other mentions begin to build anticipation. Real scholarly communication is now available in several different flavours, from Mendeley to Academia.edu. Since I have been solemnly assured for 30 years by senior scientists and publishers alike that scientists will not share I have to be amazed by the size of these activities. These newcomers are not less worried about attaining research grants or tenure than their predecessors, but they live in a networked scientific world where if you are not quickly present in the network you are not referenced in debate – and being part of the argument is becoming as critical to getting grants and tenure as a solid succession of unread papers published two years after the research ended used to be.
These convictions are much strengthened by this week’s announcements. The announcement from F1000Research (December 12) that their articles are now visible in PubMed and PubMed Central gives a complete clue to what this is all about. Users want to publish in five days, but they want to be visible everywhere where a researcher/peer would expect to look. And increasingly they will expect that the article will collect into post-publication peer review all those earlier references in conference proceedings, blogs and elsewhere. So while people like F1000Reaeach will handle “formal” post-publication peer review, informal debate and commentary will not be lost. And the metrics of usage and impact will not be lost either, as we look so much more widely than traditional article impact to discern what this author/team/ findings/ideas have had. “Open Evaluation” from PLoS aims just there, as it recently launched its second evaluation phase from PLoSLabs (http://www.ploslabs.org/openevaluation/). This post-publication article rating system reminds me very precisely that PLoS One was not in any sense a traditional peer review process. It was a simple methodological check for scientific adequacy (“well-performed” science), and while the volume of processing solved a multitude of financial issues, the fuller rating of these articles still rests with the user. We shall see PLoS One as the turning point to self-publishing when the history is written.
And so we move towards a world where original publication of science articles is no longer the prerogative of the journal publisher. While review systems will flourish and abstracting and indexing will remain vital, that tangled mass the second and third tier journals, the most profitable end of traditional STM, will slowly begin to disperse. Some databases will adopt journal brands, of course, and the great brands will survive as ratings systems themselves. “Selected by Cell as one of the 50 most influential research articles of the year”, or “Endorsed by Nature as a key contribution to science” will be enviable re-publishing, increasingly with datalinks, improved access to image and video and other advantages. This is where semantic enrichment and data analysis will first become important – before it becomes the norm. But these selections will be made from what is published, not what is submitted for publication. And a clue to what the future offers was indicated by a Knovel (Elsevier) announcement this week. Six publishers with either small, high quality holdings in engineering research, or activities in engineering that can use the Knovel platform, entered into collaboration agreements to make their content available via the Knovel portal. Amongst these were Taylor and Francis (CRC Press), as well as specialists like ICE (Institute of Civil Engineers) or the American Geosciences Institute. As novel is in a directly competitive position with IHS GlobalSpec, it is relevant to ask how many engineering research portals that marketspace will need. It now has two – and I seriously doubt that there will ever be more than two aimed at both research and process workflow, though their identities may change (see Thomson-Reuters/Bloomberg/Lexis in law). Increasingly then small science publishing will be re-intermediated – and we do not need a business degree to imagine what that will do to their margins, as well as their direct contact with their users. “Open”, whatever else it means, connotes “contraction” for some people.
Dec
11
Miley Cyrus v Pope Francis
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
A good headline attracts attention. And I do have some, lame, excuse, since my headliners were both in the top 10 mentions on Facebook. As a commentator on these matters I am only deficient in two small details: I am not on Facebook and, ahem, I did have to look up Ms Cyrus. But in other respects I come by the subject matter honestly. Both parties here had their 2013 fame boosted by a “new publishing” combo of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Neither was reliant on “old publishing” in the form of TV, radio or even newspapers or books, and indeed old media spent the year covering what these individuals did in new media terms. And while old media compete for the attention scraps (and I am sure Mike Schatzkin is right when he says that once TV becomes a world of self-scheduled downloads it competes more effectively with the time slots currently held by reading) our thoughts should turn naturally to the complete disintermediation of access in the network.
Which mine did when I saw Cambridge Assessment announce a conference on “The School in the Cloud” for next February (http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/insights/schools-in-the-cloud/). In some ways we have already removed “teaching”: what school, teacher or publisher would not subscribe to the idea of the “learner-centric” world today? And quite right too. Yet we have scarcely begun to cope with the real social ramifications of everyone learning at their point of learning readiness. Teachers have not been repositioned as mentors and moderators, the mobile/multi-site nature of education using technology is not yet clear, we still expect everyone to reach the same levels of achievement at the same time, and we blame the teachers when results fail expectations. Arguably, we should put the resources online, create the programming that links resources into learning journeys, watch the outcomes and abandon formal assessment. But the world that moves lightning fast in some places grinds very slow in others. This week I at last saw an advertisement for a course which cheerfully announced its BYOD status (Bring Your Own Device). And while I was delighted the same day to see the announcement that McGraw Hill Education would produce all their content to IMS Interoperability standards, allowing users the ability to use it with true digital flexibility, I still wonder why we did not do this years ago: recalling a discussion at an ELIG meeting in Sestre Levante in the early years of this century when we all agreed on the necessity – but did nothing.
And in all these discussions we keep ignoring the powerful things that happen when someone educates themselves. Yesterday the death of Colin Wilson was announced, whose books “The Outsider” and “Religion and the Rebel” lit up my teenage years and sent me to university as an existentialist. My first visit to Paris was dominated by the need to haunt the Boul’ Mich for a sight of Sartre, Camus or de Beauvoir. Wilson was an entire autodidact, son of a shoe industry worker who left school at 14. There is something wonderful about knowledge gathered the way he gained his, and small wonder he expounded it with such enthusiasm, given that he had quarried it himself. And how sad it is that, now that both of my younger children are at university themselves, I can confess to my entire dissatisfaction with the way they were educated at both public and private schools. What do you recommend in terms of reading around the subject at A level? I asked the head of Classics. Not on my course he replied. All the pupil needs to know is the mark scheme. This is about Results. Reading around the subject? he repeated. Takes far too much time and any additional knowledge gained only confuses them. Well, Mr Gradgrind is now over 150 years old. Dickens’ brilliant creation should be left where he belongs and removed from current teaching/anti-learning practice. Do we want education as workflow (which, paradoxically, is what assessment has given us) – or as Discovery?
So the disintermediation of the teacher may bring some unexpected rewards. Along with the same process in most other professions. The shattering of the legal profession in the last downturn is typical. As we turn the Cloud into everyone’s back office, so we grow in realization that most back offices are all similar And once you get into workflow, you are moving away from reference and research – and reading around the subject. Legal services which began as support activities like PLC, acquired this year by Thomson Reuters, end up as a wholly new way of out-sourcing areas like corporate law. With operations like Axiom Law (http://www.axiomlaw.co.uk/) growing rapidly – and globally from the start – this type of disintermediation may be quicker. And, incidentally, they will need the same skill sets as current publishing/legal services. It is no accident that Axiom have appointed, it is said, a leading Lexis executive to run one of their regional businesses.
Current publishers will react in two ways. One will be to develop the software which enables learners to learn by creating journeys and relearning experiences, and link relevant content, their own and other people’s, to it. And the other will be to ensure that base level primary content is available in the system at all points. In this regard the science publisher’s who worked with CERN on SCOAP3, the largest physics archive ever assembled, which goes live on 1 January 2014, are to be congratulated. And so, incidentally, is Pope Francis, who beat Miley Cyrus by seven places to head up the Facebook league table (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/pope-francis-miley-cyrus-and-a-royal-baby-what-facebook-talked-about-in-2013-8994023.html). Now that’s a rare victory for the archaic tongue – pity I never managed to teach myself Latin successfully!
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