Feb
14
Open… and Yet Shut
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
I am a passionate fan of the World of Open. Without a network ethic of Open we will strangle the world of connectivity with restriction and force ourselves into re-regulating just those things which we have so recently decongested. Yet not all the things we want to designate as Open will be open just because we put the word in front of the previous descriptor. In most instances being Open does not necessarily do the trick on its own – someone has to add another level of value to change Open meaning “available” to Open meaning “useful”. So, the argument that Open Access journals are an appropriate response to the needs of researchers and to a wider public who should be enjoying unfettered access to the fruits of taxpayer-funded research would seem to be a given. But creating real benefits beyond such general statements of Good seems very hard, and the fact that researchers cannot see tangible benefits beyond occupying the moral high ground probably connects with the grindingly slow advance of Open Access to around a quarter of the market in a decade.
I feel much the same about Open Citations. Reading the latest Initiative for Open Citations report at i4Oc.org, I find really good things:
“The present scholarly communication system inadequately exposes the knowledge networks that already exist within our literature. Citation data are not usually freely available to access, they are often subject to inconsistent, hard-to-parse licenses, and they are usually not machine-readable.”
And I see an impressive number of members, naturally not including either Clarivate or Elsevier. Yet using the argument above I would say that either of these is most likely to add real value to Open Citations, and certainly more likely than most of the members of the club. What we have here, all the time, is a constant effort to try to emulate a world which has largely now passed by, and we do it by trying to build value propositions from wholly owned artifacts or data elements, thus turning them into proprietory systems. This urge to monopoly is clearly being superseded: what has happened is that the valuation systems by which markets and investors measure value has not caught up with the way users acknowledge value.
Outside of the worlds of research and scholarly communication it seems clear that the most impressive thing you can say about the world of data is “Use it and lose it”. The commoditization of data as content is evident everywhere. The point about data is not Big Data – a once prominent slogan that has now diminished into extinction – but actionable data. The point is not collecting all the data into one place – it can stay wherever it rests as long as we can analyse and utilise it. The point is the level of analytical insight we can achieve from the data available, and this has much to do with our analytics, which is were the real value lies. Apply those proprietory analytics back into the workflow of a particular sector – the launch music around Artifacts in Healthcare in Cambridge MA was ver notceable last week – and value is achieved for an information system. And one day, outside of copyright and patents, and before we get to the P&L account, someone will work out how we index those values and measure the worth of a great deal of the start-up activity around us.
So from this viewpoint the press release of the week came from Clarivate Analytics and did not concern Open at all directly. It concerned a very old-fashioned value indeed – Brand. If the world of scholarly communication is really about creating a reputation marketplace, the ISI, Eugene Garfield’s original vehicle for establishing citation indexing from which to promulgate the mighty Impact Factor, is the historical definition point of the market in scholarly reputation. By refounding it and relaunching it, Clarivate seem to me to be not just saying how much the market needs that sort of research right now, but to be aiming at the critical value adding role: using the myriad of data available to redefine measurement of reputation in research. In many ways Open Citations will assist that, but the future will be multi-metric, the balance of elements in the analytics will be under greater scrutiny than ever before, and ISI will need to carry the whole marketplace with them to achieve a result. That is why you need a research institute, not just a scoring system. And even then the work will need a research institute to keep it in constant revision – unlike the impact factor the next measure will have to be developed over time, and keep developing so that it cannot be influenced or “gamed”. In the sense I have been using it here, ISI becomes the analytical engine sitting on top of all of the available but rapidly commoditising research data.
We have come very quickly from a world where owning copyrights in articles and defending that ownership was important, to this position of commoditized content and data as a precursor to analysis. But we must still be prepared for further shortening of the links and cycle re-adjustments. Citations of evidential data, and citations on Findings-as-data without article publishing will become a flood rather than the trickle it is now. Add in the vast swathes of second tier data from article publishing in India, China or Brazil. Use analytics not just for reputational assessment, but also for trend analysis, repeat experiment verification and clinical trials validation. We stand in a new place, and a re-engineered ISI is just what we need beside us.
Jan
15
New Dimensions Address Old Problems
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Industry Analysis, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Workflow | Leave a Comment
In many parts of the Scholarly Communications world we have moved long past the milieu that Gene Garfield’s ushered in thirty years ago with the establishment of ISI and the impact factor . But conservative marketplaces have a long tail , much of the academic world is still firmly tied to the evaluative gold standard of the impact factor , and no one will be persuaded to do anything differently until they are also persuaded that it works . And it will take a long time to persuade people that a new governing metric is available , a platinum standard for distinguishing the highest quality of research over time , because a great deal of data has to be assembled and analysed before that can be accomplished . Yet leading voices in the sector , from funders and governments to researchers and librarians , continue to seek evaluation that includes all the available metrics , that allows places for network usage appraisal as well as the impact of blogs and tweets and posters and demonstrations , and which tries to draw a more holistic picture of the impact of a researcher or a research team .
And while we need tools like this for the benefit of funders and governments in making funding decisions , we are equally desperate to help researchers manage and discriminate amongst the tsunami of research publishing at the present time , and the and the wall of knowledge building up behind it as access to second tier research from a host of countries outside of Europe , the US and Japan supplements the very considerable research contribution of China , India , Brazil and other counties in recent years . And since we long ago lost sight of a specialist being able to read everything published in his sector in a year , we vitally need the data , and especially the metadata , which will enable us to summarise what we cannot read , apply standards where. We cannot form judgements , help us to derisk the issue of missing something significant and ensure that our literature reviews and our management of prior knowledge does not sink the research ship before we set of on the real voyage of discovery which takes place after the discovery of the known .
And we have been preparing ourselves for this for years and this is clear in commercial market movies over the last few years . When Clarivate Analytics , owners of Web of Science and thus the citation based world we have inherited , bought Publons , I have always imagined , since using the peer review data in this context will be very important . Equally , Elsevier began the whole long development track behind SciVal in order to use vital data from Scopus and elsewhere to begin this immense evaluative task . And Informa bought Colwiz and Wizdom.ai in order to get into the same boat . As of today, the boat is getting just a bit more crowded . The launch this morning of Dimensions , based on the funding data work of the existing Dimensions site at Digital Science , but now integrating data from six Digital Science companies , is a dramatic step and raises. the bar for all of its competitors . It teaches us something important about bringing data from a variety of sources in a way that gives users a new view with an enhanced utility and it shows how a publisher service like ReadCube can also be turned round to become a discovery engine in its own right . And with a marketing plan that starts from free access for researcher and moves through institutional fees at different levels of value it really accommodates itself to the prevailing culture around the costs of service provision .
This is a great start from which to build – and there is a long build yet to go . There is both geographical data and altmetrics data . Then there are the evaluative tools that will support research management in its urgent evaluation needs . Impressive as this aggregation is , there is more in front than there is behind . , But Dimensions certainly puts Digital Science in position . It is the first service development that makes Digital Science a company and not an incubator , andthis may be very important to its next steps . Like Clarivate , Digital Science is not a publisher . It there fore has Clarivate’s vital neutrality from the things that it is rating . Above all , it is a data and analytics company and was created to work in this research management space . A place where many publishers will try to struggle into as journal publishing , the cash cow of the 1990s , becomes a more and more difficult and less predictable marketplace .
Yet all of these players face one sobering difficulty. Building the foremest evaluative research engine is not like other competitive parts of this marketplace . A new standard is just that . Four competing standards help no one . Winner takes all , and after a time the prevailing system becomes supported by other people’s tools , and competition is reduced . This is not to say that there is not good business in providing researchers with good analytical tools , just that it is most likely that the successor to the impact factor will remain a single entity managed for tha market by one of these players – or by one we do not yet see coming , perhaps from the non-profit sector . In the meanwhile , “new “ dimensions should be celebrated , and not least by Holtzbrinck . If they do need to suck debt from Springer Nature post IPO then Digital Science is becoming a very valuable token for doing that and ensuring their majority position . If that does not happen , then they have a an asset with fast growing value in the group .
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