Nov

1

Members of the House of Peers

Filed Under Blog, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Not another note on Open Access, surely? Well, I am sitting here on 31 October reading an article published on 1 November (how up to date can a blogger be?) in the Educause Review Online (www.educause.edu/ero/article/peerj-open-access-experiment) and I really want to convey my respect for people like Peter Binfield, who wrote it, for their huge energy and ingenuity in trying to make Open Access work. Peter’s note, “PeerJ: An Open-Access Experiment” describes the efforts that he and his PeerJ colleagues have put into the business of creating fresh business models around Open Access, which was borne without one and has always seemed to its adherents to need to be cloaked in one. Open Access has proved a far from lusty infant in many ways, but those who continue to adhere to the cause seem to feel, in their admirable and unfailing optimism, that some small tweak will suddenly create economic salvation and thus a take off into sustainable business growth.

In the case of PeerJ, the take-off vehicle is going to be a membership model. Peter Binfield co-founded the outfit in June 2012 with Jason Hoyt, former Chief Scientist at Mendeley, but the model that they feel will work owes nothing to smart algorythms. Instead, they simply launch themselves at the Author Processing Charge (APC), the way in which Gold OA has been sustained so far, and replace it by – a subscription. Now this is admittedly a personal subscription, levied on all article contributors (that is where the volume lies – in multi-authoring) and subscribers – or members as they would wish to describe them – can then continue to publish without further charges as long as they keep up their membership fees. Of course, if they join with new teams who have not previously been members then I presume we go back to zero, until those contributors are also members with a publishing history. Each contributor who pays a membership fee of $299 can publish as often as he likes: a nominal $99 contribution allows you one shot a year.

PeerJ have assembled a peer review panel of 700 “world class academics” for peer review purposes and intend to open for submissions by the end of the year. In a really interesting variation on the norm, they have put a PrePrint server alongside the service, so submissions will be visible immediately they are considered. It is not clear how much editorial treatment is involved in these processes, or indeed what “publishing” now means in this context, or indeed when a submission appears on the pre-print server. But one thing is very clear: this is not going to be peer review as it once was, but simply technical testing of the type pioneered by PloS One. Once it is established that the article conforms to current experimental good practice, then it gets “published”.

It is around this point in ventures of this type that I want to shout “Hold on a moment – do we really know what we are doing here?” I am sure that I will be corrected, but what I can currently see is a huge dilution of the concepts of “journals” and “publishing”. PeerJ starts with no brand impact. It is not conferring status by its selectivity, like Nature or Cell, or even some brand resonance like PloS. And its 700 experts, including Nobel Laureates, are being asked if the enquiry methodology was sound, not whether the result was good science or impacted the knowledge base of the discipline. PeerJ should be commended for allowing reviews by named reviewers to be presented alongside the article, but, fundamentally, this seems to me like another ratcheting downwards of the value of the review process.

Soon we shall hit bottom. At that point there will be available a toolset which searches all relevant articles against the submitted article, and awards points for fidelity to good practice or for permissable advances on established procedures. Articles where authors feel they have been misjudged can re-submit with amended input. The device will be adopted by those funding research, and once the device has issued a certificate of compliance, the article, wherever it is stored, will be deemed to have been “published”. There will be no fees and no memberships. Everything will be available to everyone. And this will introduce the Second Great Age of Publishing Journals, as the major branded journals exercise real peer review and apply real editorial services.

But something has changed now. The Editors of the Lancet or Nature or Cell have decided, in my projection, not to entertain submissions any longer. Instead they will select the articles that seem to them and their reviewers most likely to have real impact. These they will mark up to a high level of discoverability, using entity extraction and advanced metadata to make them effectively searchable at every level and section and expression within the article. Authors will have a choice when they are selected – they can either pay for the services up front or surrender their ownership of the enhanced version of the article. Since the article will be available and technically assessed already, spending more on it will seem fruitless. So we shall return to a (much smaller but equally profitable) commercial  journals marketplace. Based once again on selectivity and real, expensive peer review.

Experienced readers will have already spotted the flaw. With wonderful technologies around like Utopia Documents and other new article development activities (Elsevier’s Article of the Future) surely the new age of the article can only exist until these technologies are generalized to every institutional and research programme repository. That is true – but it will take years, and by that time the publishers will be adding even higher value features to allow the researcher’s ELN (Electronic Lab Notebook) full visibility of the current state of knowledge on a topic. Beyond that, we shall consider articles themselves too slow, and inadequate for purpose, but that is a discussion for another day.

Oct

23

The PM and the Hub

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Pearson, privacy, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

The Story So Far (for slow readers and foreigners): One morning, three years ago, the then newly elected UK Prime Minister awoke determined to right a wrong. The previous day, in a meeting with the fabulous founders of Google, he had heard that it would have been impossible to start Google in the UK because of the UK’s intellectual property law regime. “Something should be done” turned into “writing a report”, as so often in political life, and the good Professor Hargreaves was duly appointed to do just that. After pouring down invective and contumely on the industry he was meant to be examining, the good Professor recommended a Hub, and everyone agreed. The good Richard Hooper, late of OFCOM the regulator, was then appointed to decide what the Hub was and what it might do. He decided that it had five roles:

The sensible Mr Hooper then retired from the fray and the really very good Dr Ros Lynch took on the role of implementing the Hub. She was appointed last month and now has 11 months in which to complete her work.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. The four 25 year old professional users of information who “keynoted” the Outsell Signature Event in early October are much to blame, since their apparent indifference to the existence of copyright – and their confidence that anything they needed could be found on the web, and usually for free, reminded me forcefully that the PM, Prof Hargreaves, Mr Hooper, Dr Lynch and myself live in a different world from those young(er) people, and it is not necessarily the real one. So I decided to to get back to the source of all of this and see if I could not find what had been in the PM’s mind at the time and whether he thought we were making progress. And as it happens my thinking about the future has just about reached thought and gesture based computer interfaces, so I thought I would get around the Press office at No 10, avoid the difficulties of where to put one’s bike in Downing Street, and go straight for Mr Spock and the old Venusian mind transfer. And the old one’s are the best ones: within minutes I had caught the great man between speeches on the new British criminal justice regime, which he said would be “tough and intelligent” (like the Guardian I wondered if the regime of the past three years had been ” tepid and demented”), and very happy to answer my thoughts with his own.

I started where he had started. Did the changes mean that the next Google could be sourced in Shoreditch? Well, the changes had not taken place yet, and were unlikely to do so before the next election, but he wanted to hope that we were building a regime  which would mean that any enterprize could start within this Green and Pleasant and not be disbarred by an inadequate legal framework. But, I urged, IP is about Global Networks in Global Marketplaces, surely. The next Google will grow where there is cost-effective labour, the most favourable tax regime, a large domestic market and an abundance of entrepreneurial drive. Well, he thought, it was unlikely that George would let him tweak the tax base in this sector, and we were a small country, but surely I must admit that we were smart and entrepreneurial? And the Hub, a great British notion, would create a point of exchange in the network for trading IP which would become as important as the City in financial services, leaving the nations of the world once more gasping in our wake at the ability of the Brits to organize the world’s marketplaces for them.

I admit this thought set me back a bit, but I countered by asking why, in that case, Dr Lynch had been given a year, and a staff of one, and was currently based in a small office gifted by Pearson for the purpose. He thought it vital that the Hub was not imposed, or, in these straightened times, funded by government. It should grow from the industry and be funded by the industry. My thought was that getting the whole media and information sector to think together was likely to be a difficult task – getting consistent data on rights – probably a Big Data issue in itself – to plug into the back of the Hub would prove hard for some sectors, and almost impossible for others. Might this not be an area where more government leadership was required? I thought, but banished the thought, that the strategy might be to get the media sectors spending the next two years building their rights databases and fighting each other, so they could be seen to be to blame when the Hub’s likeness to the tower of Babel at length became clear.

He thought that this was unworthy. And his counter-thought really interested me. “So where would you put the priority, clever clogs” obviously matters. My thought was that the front end was what needed government support if industry was to get the back end done in time. The interface that changed behaviours had to have values. Free or discount purchases for registration and the ability to audit? Want those graphs from this market research report in your powerpoint – subscribe to our loader toolset. Want to use this lesson with that video and this music in your classroom? Use our special comprehensive school-rates education one stop clearance system (Hooper says schools currently need to use 12 clearance agencies in the UK). I pointed out the precedents in this education zone alone: teacherspayteachers.com in the US, now competing with the UK’s TES Connect working with the US teaching unions. Was that not entrepreneurial? We needed to re-invent the way users saw rights, and we needed to make rights protection relevant to the work of every individual as a creator of IP, and offer them real value to be licit!

But, sadly there came no reply. All I faintly recall was the echo of another thought, as though someone was whispering in his ear, “now this Savile scandal has broken you can attack the BBC on all fronts without fear” and the thought transfer process came to an abrupt end. I will try to re-connect, but, in the meanwhile, these are make or break months for the Hub.

 

 

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