Apr

13

UKSG 40: The Temple of Change

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

The sunny but sometimes chill air of Harrogate this week was a good metaphor for the scholarly communications marketplace. Once the worshippers at the shrine of the Big Deal, the librarians and information managers who form the majority of the 950 or so attendees now march to a different tune. From the form of the article to the nature of collaboration this was a confident organization talking about the future of the sector. And at no point was this a discussion about more of the same. Three sunny days, but for publishers present there was an occasional chill in the wind.

I started the week with a particular purpose in mind, which was all about the current state of collaboration. I was impressed by the Hypothes.is announcement with Highwire (www.highwire.org). There are now some 3000 journals using open source annotation platforms like the not-for-profit Hypothes.is to encourage discoverable (and private) annotation. Not since Copernicus, when scholars toured monasteries to read and record annotations of observations of the galaxies in copies of his texts, have we had the ability to track scholarly commentary on recent work and work in progress so completely. And no sooner had I begun talking about collaboration as annotation than I met people willing to take the ideas further, into the basis of real community-building activity.

It seems to me that as soon as the journal publisher has imported an annotation interface then he is inviting scholars and researchers into a new relationship with his publishing activity. And for anyone who seeks a defence against the perceived threat of ResearchGate or Academia.edu the answer must lie in building patterns of collaborative annotation into the articles themselves, and becoming the intermediary in the creation of the community dialogue at the level of issues in the scholarly workflow. So it seemed natural that my next conversation was with the ever-inventive Kent Anderson of Redlink, who was able to show me Remarq, in its beta version and due to be formally launched on 1 May. Here discoverable annotations lie in the base of layers of service environments which enable any publisher to create community around annotated discussion and turn it into scholarly exchange and collaboration. We have talked for many years about the publishing role moving beyond selecting, editing, issuing and archiving – increasingly, I suspect, the roles of librarians – and moving towards the active support of scholarly communication. And this, as Remaeq makes clear, includes tweets, blogs, posters, theses, books and slide sets as well as articles. Services like Hypothes.is and Remarq are real harbingers of the future of publishing when articles appear on preprint servers and in repositories or from funder Open Access outlets, where the subject classification of the research is less important than who put up the research investment.

And, of course, the other change factor here is the evolution of the article (often ignored – for some reason we seem to like talking about change but are reluctant to grip the simple truth that when one thing changes – in this case the networked connectivity of researchers – then all the forms around it change as well, and that includes the print heritage research article). Already challenged by digital inclusivity – does it have room for the lab video, the data, the analytics software, the adjustable graphs and replayable modelling? – it now becomes the public and private annotation scratchpad. Can it be read efficiently by a computer and discussed between computers? We heard reports of good progress on machine readability using Open Science Jupiter Notebooks, but can we do all we want to fork or copy papers and manipulate them while still preserving the trust and integrity in the system derived from being able to identify what the original was and being always able to revert to it. We have to be able to use machine analysis to protect ourselves from the global flood of fresh research – if the huge agenda was light anywhere then it was on how we absorb what is happening in India, China, Brazil and Russia into the scholarly corpus effectively. But how good it was to hear from John Hammersley of Overleaf, now leading the charge in connecting up the disconnected and providing the vital enabling factor to some 600,000 users via F1000 and thus in future the funder-publisher mills of Wellcome and Gates, as well as seeing Martin Roelandse of Springer Nature demonstrating that publishers can potentially join up dots too with their SciGraph applicationfor relating snippets, video, animations sources and data.

Of course, connectivity has to be based on common referencing, so at every moment we were reminded of the huge importance of CrossRef and Orcid Incontrovertible identity is everything, I was left hoping that Orcid can fully integrate with the new CrossRef Events data service, using triples in classical mode to relate references to relationships to mentions. Here again, in tracking 2.7 million events since service inception last month, they are already demonstrating the efficacy of the New Publishing – the business of joining up the dots.

So I wish UKSG a happy 40th birthday – they are obviously in rude health. And I thank Charlotte Rouchie, closing speaker, for reminding me of Robert Estienne, who I have long revered as the first master of metadata. In 1551 he divide the bible into verses – and to better compare Greek with Latin, he numbered them. Always good to recall revolutionaries of the past!

PS. In my last three blogs I have avoided, I hope, use of the word Platform. Since I no longer know what it means, I have decided to ignore it until usage clarifies it again!

Apr

5

STM : Rebirth of a Marketplace

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

” Next Week in Harrogate ” . Sounds like a new wave movie or a British attempt at Scandi Noir crime fiction ? In fact it is the annual meeting of the UK Serials Group , guardians of the lamp of scientific journals publishing , as users and producers ,in this country . This is a segment of what was once called ” the cash cow ” that supported mighty publishing brands from Bertelsmann ( former owners of Springer ) to Wiley , from Thomson ( former owners of Chapman and Hall et al) to Informa ( Taylor and Francis ) , and , pre-eminently , the great Reed Elsevier organization as well as a host of institutions and societies , Royal and otherwise . Many a tear has been shed at the graveside of this industry already , not least in this column , so it is not my purpose to repeat all that – but simply to mark a moment , last week , which we will recall as a landmark , and which should be in the front of our minds on the road North to Yorkshire’s neoclassical city of the moors .

I have boringly prophesied the arrival of the Gates Foundation as a publisher so many times during the Open Access years that I was about to do so again semi-automatically when speaking in the opening Plenary next Monday . But then , gentle reader , it Happened! It was not hard to predict : there was always going to be a point when the cost of publishing Open Access articles in terms of APCs ( author fees ) would grow to a point where it was cheaper for larger funding bodies to do it for themselves . I am a little surprized that we are there already , but since , reportedly , Gates will be using the F1000 publishing mechanism already used by Wellcome , it may have seemed opportune to move quicker and before the cost of Open Access in terms of fees breached the billion dollar point widely seen as the signal for mass change .

But I remain fascinated that it was not , as we were all assured for a decade that it would be , Open Access of itself that did the damage . I see this as part of a wider drive to self-publishing , with post-publication peer review becoming ever easier and reputational judgement gathering in post-publication performance amongst the range of altmetrics that now become hugely influential in creating opinion around the value of research . And as publication in a timely manner outweighed waiting to appear in print within a discipline or domain branded vehicle , and discoverability made online anywhere as visible as a publisher’s database , the pressure to get it out and get it noticed outweighs most other urges , and sharpens the point of people investing in pre-print servers .

And I am sure there will be an aftermarket . And some journals have a long life to go , even if they become re-publishers ( Our Editorial Pick …the best of XYZ in 2017 etc) . But I wonder if the article itself , in its present form , is not the next point of rapid change . In other industries it has proved most constructive to concentrate in digital terms on the workflow , and it is noteworthy that very many publishers , commercial and otherwise , have spent a huge amount in providing ” self-publish to this platform ” software , whereas it might have been just as loyalty-productive , even if not fitting the publisher cost-reduction model , to invite researchers to join their community and then publish anywhere – which is of course exactly what Academia and ResearchGate will do as they develop as publishers . The bottom line here is simple . There is no barrier to entry any longer provided by the technical processes of publishing or by the former necessity for peer review . And the business of organizing content for consumption by librarians and researchers becomes increasingly problematical .

So we turn back to that researcher workflow and ask again how we can support the research process – and we find howling gaps in the provision of services . I have always admired the attitude of Kudos on sticking to the knitting of researcher existence – driven always by winning research grants and gaining or maintaining tenure . And I rejoiced in their latest survey , released this week ( https://blog.growkudos.com )which shows that while most researchers respect and acknowledge the importance of copyright , over 60% admitted that they put their stuff on social networks and give it away in defiance of any publisher copyright instructions . What , give it away in the hope of it coming to the notice of a new research team or the faculty I want to join despite my publishers instructions ? Unbelievable !

In the list at the front of this note you will have seen that many great corporations in publishing are “former ” owners of STM assets . This will speed up as the market gets more difficult and the pressures of users grow . How much longer , for example , will the great subscription services like ScienceDirect and Springer Link be able to lurk on the dark web , demanding subscriber only access , and not conforming to common principles of access for licensed data-mining ? Publishers can and do raise value – a good example this week was Karger’s agreement with UNSILO to add value though machine learning and AI to specific biomedical services .Yet these service improvements are like a rising tide , and the next generation of researchers readily assume that this is the norm for content presentation .

So the Journal will go and the Article will change , but a wonderful marketplace still remains for those willing to discover how researchers work , and and how to save them time and cost and improve their productivity . Digital Science and its peers are already deeply into this , but I still see areas that are relatively unsupported . When playing a role in bringing BioRATH to Digital Science some years ago , I spent time researching regulatory compliance in science research . Now many of the industries I looked at have moved beyond compliance – to competency . Not just to are these scientists storing the chemicals correctly and properly feeding the lab animals – but to does this team have the right components , the qualifications , the experience , the leadership , to accomplish its goals . While scientific researching funding is not diminishing globally , our expectations of results and our need to test there foundations has developed enormously . Is competancy the next reputation ? Interested in any of this ? See you in Harrogate !

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