Oct
2
The Spirit of Our Age
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
This is not the age of Trump and it is not the age of Brexit. No one will remember the narrow minded bigotry associated with the US presidential candidate referred to this week by Bruce Springsteen as “a moron”, or the mass suicide attempt of the British people in their own descent into intolerance and isolationalism, if democracies act with the wisdom with which we credit them. As an optimist I believe that we will remember this period as one typified by Jemma Redmond, who died aged 38 in August but whose obituary reached the Guardian last week.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/20/jemma-redmond-obituary?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Let me make one thing clear at the start. I did not know Jemma. I came across her company, Ourobotics (www.ourobotics.com) when doing research in advances in 3D printing 18 months ago. I had heard her give a talk (https://www.labtube.tv/video/ourobotics-the-future-of-bioprinting) full of modesty about the advances she had made, full of justified hope for its future impact. I read an interview with her when she was asked what she would like to have printed for herself. Her response – a uterus – was clearly an in joke that I did not understand, though I do now. What I remember was an unaffected personality from the modest Dublin suburb of Tallaght, child of a construction worker and an office worker, who developed a compulsion to solve a problem, gathered the educational qualifications to do it, won a Google Europe funding award, built a start-up inside a Cork-based accelerator in biotechnology and had five patents pending on her accomplishments so far. And then she sadly, suddenly, died.
All of which brings us to the problem she chose to solve. She spoke about the disparity between the huge increase in the number of organs needed for transplant and the modest increase in the number of donors. She identified the issues surrounding the fact that research labs capable of growing human tissue and building the blueprints in software for replicating organs from them were not located close to the hospitals and surgeons capable of using them. So she dedicated herself to the biotechnology of 3D printing using “human ink” – keeping cells alive so that they could be transported and rebuilt into new pieces of human tissue. She believed that growing organs was a less likely solution than transplanting sections of tissue that would result in organic growth. She built a ten jet printer that could store and use human cells, and she demonstrated that her $176,00 prototype could be produced and sold for $12500, within the price range of the world’s 60,000 hospitals.
And she was not just a clever person who got lucky. Listen to her account of lugging her heavy prototype around America to get finance and support. She carefully places the printer on a table in order to demonstrate it, but the table tips as she does so and the machine falls to the floor. So she edges it aside with her foot, while continuing to engage her audience with her presentation. In other words, she walked where all of us have walked who sought, as entrepreneurs, to engage or persuade or cajole support or finance. And she did not do this in Silicon Valley, but in Cork, demonstrating that in Ireland, as in many other parts of the modern world, dreams of the digital future can come alive in a networked society. When the time came, she did not shrink from putting her ideas into a company and leading it as CEO. No doubt our fast moving world will catch up quickly with Jemma’s innovations, though the strong team she leaves at Ourobotics will surely stay very competitive.
Jemma’s ability to drive learning into business development and pitch at goals that stretch the range of human aspiration should be what we mean when we talk about the spirit of our age. I do not know how or why she died so suddenly and that is not the point of this piece. But I do know from the press coverage why the wry comment about printing a uterus got reported. Jemma it appears was born Intersex. In our world, which struggles to increase diversity, reduce gender barriers and allow each of us the full range of opportunity to match our skills and ambitions, this fact, set against her achievements, should alone mark her out of one of the special people who should stand for these troubled but ever hopeful times.
All
Aug
17
A Month in the STM Country
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Ah, the slow moving waters of academic publishing! Take your eye away from them for a day or a week, let alone a month, and everything is irretrievably changed. Last month it was the sale of Thomson Reuters IP and Science that attracted the headlines: this month we see the waves crashing on the shores of academic institutional and Funder-based publishing, as well as a really serious attempt to supplant Web of Science as the metrics standard of good research and critically influential science. And, as always, all unrelated events are really closely connected.
So let’s start with the wonderful world of citation indexes. Inspired by Vannever Bush (who wasn’t in that generation?), the 30 year old Eugene Garfield laid out his ideas on creating a science citation index and a journal impact factor in 1955. His Institute Of Science Information was bought by Thomson Reuters in 1992, and I am pleased to record that in my daily note to the then EPS clients (we were all testing the concept “internet” at the time), I wrote “It is widely thought that in a networked environment ISI will be a vital information resource”! Full marks then for prescience! As Web of Science, the ISI branded service, became the dominant technique for distinguishing good science, and funding good science, so Thomson Reuters found they had a cash cow of impressive proportions on their hands.
But this history is only significant in light of the time scale. While there have been updates and improvements, we are using a 60 year old algorithm despite knowing that its imperfections become more obvious year by year, mostly because the whole marketplace uses it and it was very inconvenient for anyone to stop. Although altmetrics of all sorts have long made citation indexes look odd, no move to rebase them or separate them from a journal-centric view took place. Yet that may be exactly what is happening now. The inclusion of RCR (Relative Citation Ratio) in the National Instiutes of Health iCite suite fits the requirement that change is effected by a major Funder/official body and can then percolate downwards. RCR (I do hope they call it iCite – RCR means the responsible research code of practice to many US researchers) now needs widespread public-facing adoption and use, so its implementation across the face of Digital Science is good news. Having once thought that Digital Science in its Nature days should acquire Web of Science and recreate it, it is now becoming clear that this is happening without such an investment , and companies like figshare, Uber Research and ReadCube will be in the front line exploiting this.
And then, at a recent meeting someone said that there would be 48 new university presses created this year for Open Access publishing for both articles and monographs. I cannot verify the number – more than Team GB’s initial expectation of Olympic Medals! – but the emerging trend is obvious. Look only at the resplendent UCL Press, decked out in Armadillo software producing some very impressive BOOCS (Books as Open Online Content). In September they launch the AHRC- British Library Academic Book of the Future BOOC, if that is not a contradiction. Free, research-orientated and designed to high standards.
Just up the road in London’s Knowledge Quarter is Wellcome, and it is interesting to see the first manifestation of the predictable (well, in this arrondissment anyway) move by funders into self-publishing. As author publication fees mount (one major Funder already spends over a billion dollars US on publishing) there has to be a cheaper way. And at the same time if you could actually improve the quality of scholarly communication by bringing together all of a grant holder’s research outputs in one place that would seem to make sense. It simplifies peer review, which fundamentally becomes a function of the funder’s project selection – saying in effect that if we thought it right to fund the work then we should publish the results. It does have some objective checks, presumably like Plos!, but the object is to very quickly publish what is available: Research articles, evidential data, case reports, protocols, and, interestingly, null and negative results. This latter is the stuff that never gets into journals, yet, as they say at Wellcome “Publishing null and negative results is good for both science and society. It means researchers don’t waste time on hypotheses that have already been proved wrong, and clinicians can make decisions with more evidence”. The platform Wellcome are using is effectively F100, and so is designed for speed of process – 100 days is Wellcomes aspiration – and for post-publication peer review, allowing full critical attention to be paid after materials are made available. And the emphasis on data very much reflects the F1000 dynamic, and the increasing demand for repeatability and reproducibility in research results.
So, what a month for demonstrating trends – towards more refined metrics in research impact, towards the emergence of universities and research funders as publishers, and towards another successful development from the Vitek Tracz stable, and a further justification of the Digital Science positioning at Macmillan. In an age of powerful users focussed on productivity and reputation management, these developments reflect that power shift, with implications for the commercial sector and the content-centric world of books and journals.
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