Apr

19

Scholarly Communications: the View from Fiesole

Filed Under Artificial intelligence, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, machine learning, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

You can see a long way from Fiesole. John Milton, in Paradise Lost, remembered the red orb of the sun sinking over the Tuscan hills and likened it to the burnished shield on Satan’s back as he is cast into Hell in Paradise Lost. Some of the delegates at the annual Fiesole Retreat, looking at Open Access and the future of scholarly communication, may have felt similarly cast down, but, if so, they kept it to themselves in a meeting, celebrating its 21st birthday, that lived up to a reputation for real debate, direct speaking, but total respect for the positions of delegates from all sides of the scholarly information workflow. This meeting, a joint venture of Casalini Libri and the Charleston library conference, was at its very best as the European Commission, critically important library interests, publishers of all disciplines, and OA providers alongside traditional subscription journals all contributed viewpoints on a developing situation in scholarly communications which desperately needs the debate engendered here. 

As an observer of the debate and anchorman for the ensuing discussion I have waited ten days before adding my own view to all this. In truth, I cannot sum up the complexity and detail, or render the passion and eloquence of many of the arguments. But the cumulative effect on me was to sharpen the conclusion that I was witnessing something coming, however slowly, to an end. The debate about OA and Plan S is not an end in itself. Subscription publishing will never reassert itself and OA disappear. Nor will the world slowly become totally OA. The changes and the debate point to bigger and more fundamental changes. I was left feeling that just as we have been through Digital Replacement – all paper based content went digital – followed by Digital Transformation – the workflows and processes went digital and became wholly network interconnected – we now approach Digital Re-invention – in which the forms and artefacts of the analogue world themselves give way to digital connectivity which not only alters relationships in the network, but introduces the computer, the machine as reader and researcher, into the workflow. 

We are now in a situation where the old generalities are becoming useless. STM and HSS are near meaningless, given the differences between Life Sciences and Physics, or Chemistry, as research communication fields. Likewise statistical social sciences and humanities. And when I asked what the identifiable critical information problems of scientists were I got two answers – Reproducibility and Methodology. In other words, researchers were anxious to repeat previous experiments using the same or different data or conditions in order to see if results were the same, and they wished to explore the methods used by successful experiments  in order to justify a choice of methodology. Response to these demands requires that all of the data is available and connected by metadata, which is evidently not the case. And of course, specialist services will come into play to meet the needs – in these cases protocols.io, and Ripeta and Gigantum (both new members at Digital Science). These are the type of tools that researchers will use. So what about the books, journals, articles? Who will read them? The answer of course is the intelligent machine, and the nomenclature will change as it becomes obvious that the machine is only interested in content-as-data, not in format at all. 

I asked, again and in vain, whether any publishers present had an idea of the current proportion of usage made by non search bot machines. But the fact is we are not measuring this. And we all nodded when someone said the next generation just want to get the preprint done and stop there – getting something into the network with a growing confidence that it will be found seems to be the thing. We are certainly getting smarter at measuring impact and dissemination, though still behind the curve in accomplishing those vital matters. And, Lordy, Lordy, we do have an industry hang up about the way academics are rewarded with tenure and grant support. Is it so frightening for us to imagine change here because we have hung the future of academic publishing around the neck of an archaic system of academic rewards? Why is it that we always think that change only occurs in our sub sector and the rest of the world stays constant? There is already movement around impact factors in academic review systems. The very fact of PlanS shows funders getting more interested in measuring impact and increasing dissemination. The only certainty about a network is that when one position alters, so do all the rest. 

So my concerns about this sector remain  more about the pace of change than the direction. Work like the eLife Reproducible Document Stack (RDS) is fascinating in this regard – will we interconnect the research lab manuals and review the work in progress at some point? Or will publishing be an automated function of the RDS in time. Whatever happens, we will always need the presence of cross industry multi-disciplinary groups like Fiesole to get the vital perspective, the view from a hill.

Mar

2

The Network Effect and Scholarly Communications

Filed Under Artificial intelligence, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, internet, machine learning, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, STM, Workflow | Leave a Comment

First, an apology. I have started to write this piece every week in the past three. Then something happens… and then something else happens… and then I wait for the inevitable something else. And during these hesitations, I have the same feeling that I had when the music industry fell over, or when the regional newspaper industry sank into a grey dusk from which there is no return, or when post 2007 advertising declines became permanent and changed the nature of B2B publishing forever, decimating trade magazines and creating a new industry around community and workflow and solutions. There are many different network effects, but they all stem from the obvious fact: when a digitally networked society, grouping or industry finally moves over to complete reliance on digital communication, they shed the residual forms and appearances of the analogue world which for safety and reassurance they had carried with them into the new digital world. This process, slow at first, becomes a tsunami of change by the end. Once it is over, the balance of network power has moved decisively from producer or intermediary to first author and end user.

In scholarly communications these two are the same. And the people who employ them and fund their research are similarly a part of the same network power shift. History may be surprised that commercial interests were as dominant as they were in scholarly communications in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, using a powerful combination of prestige brands, control of peer review and the ability to ensure  impact and dissemination. We should neither mourn nor celebrate the passing of this age. There are other useful jobs to be done in the network to create value and improve frictionless access to knowledge, and we need the energy and the commercial support of erstwhile publishers to create the added value needed in this software driven world. My task, meanwhile, is simply to try to track the cracks of change in the plaster and see where they lead. And in the last few weeks the cracks have turned into a tracery. Hence the hesitation.

Let’s start at the most recent point and work backwards. The Springer Nature announcement that they were working with ReseachGate on a fair sharing policy has elements that run right through the tracery of fissures. It tells us that commercial players have no commercial reason to do anything but compete, and that Springer Nature, Thieme, CUP and in time others want to be seen as more user supportive in this regard than, others. This is not for me a new form of permitted “syndication” – simply a gracious concession to license what users were doing anyway and remove some friction. It also says that in the games yet to be played, many people see tracking usage of the traceable communication as an important source of information, and potentially of revenues. The pressures felt by players like Springer Nature and Wiley as they at once try to differentiate themselves from the very clear stance of a market leader like Elsevier while trying to protect their service integrity at the same time are similarly shown in the Projekt DEAL developments. Market leaders get trapped and isolated in market positions they cannot give up, while the rest dissociate and differentiate themselves as best they can, while trying hard not to lose revenue margins in the process. Then sit down and read the reactions to Plan S – Springer Nature were paragons of moderation and reason. The loudest squeals came from those with most to lose – scholarly societies with journal revenue dependence.

So what can the market leader do about this change as they face increasing user criticism? The traditional answer always was “push intransigence as far as it will go, and if those who would change the terms of trade do not come to heel, change your CEO as a way of changing your own policy without losing face”. It may of course be an entire co-incidence that Elsevier’s CEO Ron Mobed retired last week without prior indication that he was about to go, and has been replaced by a very experienced RELX strategy specialist, Kumsal Bayazit. She is warmly welcomed and deserves a good chance to rethink the strategies that have backed Elsevier into a corner with Projekt DEAL and with the University of California. The people who work at Elsevier are, to my certain knowledge, as dedicated as any group I know to the objectives of their customers and the improvement of scholarly communications: they know that at the end of the day the customer has the final say. And let’s think about what the power of a market leader now really means: 20 years ago companies like Elsevier demanded that authors surrendered their copyrights on the grounds that only the publisher was powerful enough to protect them, while today no publisher is powerful enough to shutter SciHub.

And all these things are factors of  digital change. Yet the one which was most striking to me was made by eLife  (https://elifesciences.org/labs/ad58f08d/introducing-elife-s-first-computationally-reproducible-article) as they outlined their work with Substance and Stencila on the RDS (Reproducible Document Stack). Knowing that we will emerge into a world where journals are a distant memory and articles are unrecognisable, I find the idea of fully integrating video, creating graphs and graphics where users can alter the parameters, run their own variants or introduce their own data, quite fascinating. The arguments around journals and articles today will seem to our successors to be backward looking at the least. As I read the eLife article I recalled the Digital Lab Manual discussions of 20 years ago. Futuristic then, but obviously influential and now pulling through in all of this current work. All of that precursor work must have cost an investment fortune and been written off as losses – by the then market leader, Elsevier. It’s what you need market leaders for!

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