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 .

So, my fiftieth Frankfurt came and went. Three days of intense and interesting discussion with people who are building very successful businesses from the technologies and the social change in a networked society which I have been studying and monitoring since the 1980s. Much of this is hugely encouraging, some is faintly irritating (I still get questions about what happens when print re-asserts itself, or when will innovation be over!). But all of it, nine meetings a day, the receptions, and chairing the Innovation Day opening session, is, frankly – tiring! By Friday I needed a break.

And that duly came, though in the most surprizing manner. On Saturday I journied out of Frankfurt and down the Rhine valley to the comparatively (in German terms) “new town” of Karlsuhe. I wanted to revisit FIZ Karlsruhe, a part of the Leibniz Institute of Information Infrastructure, which is based some 12 km north of the site on the campus of KIT, the great technical university. That visit, on the following Monday, was all I had hoped it to be, and a testimony to the powerful work of these part (25%) state funded institutions in Germany. But more of that in its own context, having travelled through Boston the previous week, and experienced a grand party to celebrate the 50 years stuff with some 100 friends (enough of that now that we are in year 51!) I was pooped. My only interest was a delightful book on the history of sixteenth century Albania and I was quite prepared to embrace that for the weekend had not Karlsruhe itself intervened.

As I said, it is a new town. Started in 1715 as the Margrave of Baden sought to distance himself from the unruly citizens of Durlach. He built a monumental castle, and from his front door planned city streets running out from that central point in a great fan shape – its nickname is the fan shaped city. Thomas Jefferson, visiting at the other end of the same century, was impressed and its structure finds echoes in L’Enfant’s Washington. I was impressed too, and despite the disruption of installing a metro system, this remains a civilized and relaxed place. Go to Grundrechte square and you can see the civil liberties enjoyed by Germans emblazoned on street signs – this is the home of the German Federal Supreme and Constitutional Courts. The fact that this is a university town gives a pleasant diversity. By the time I reached the doors of the ZKM I was beginning to revive, but I had no idea of what I was to encounter next.

Imagine a huge munitions factory, stripped and turned vast  three story galleries that reminded me of the central space at Tate Modern – only much longer. Then fill that with a wholly mixed population of all ages and abilities united in one pursuit – finding art and enjoyment in immersion in digital media. Walk into a room where cameras pick you up and show you on a screen. I paused before the slightly alarming image before me, when all of a sudden I was joined on screen by the people who had passed through earlier, all crowding and laughing and strolling around my similarly moving image. Then turn to a scanner which wants to look at objects in your pockets, and then similarly mixes them on screen with the images from other pockets. Very simple stuff, this, but it drove the laughter and delight of the visitors as they went to other galleries, brought their own devices into play and felt the power of the most perfectly designed and produced art gallery for digital as art that I have yet seen. ZKM is Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, and is an example to us all of the artistic and educational value of digital art. Gloomy reporters who ask what can be done to prevent children from spending too much time on their devices should be sent here for retraining. The networks provide digital opportunity for multimedia and individual media expression  and social art of a high order. This has to be better acknowledged than it is in conventional media exchanges, and here is a wonderful example of how to do it.

And learn from it. As I wandered through the elements of a major show called Hydrid Layers I was struck, involved and then compelled to watch a deck called Basilisk, a video performance by an American artist called Daniel Keller. Using two ideas – the Streisand Effect, which occurred when the actor’s lawyers forced the removal from the Web of an image only previously seen by ten people, thus exciting the curiosity of millions, and the Basilisk concept, from the ancient world via Harry Potter, where the threat can only be extinguished by holding up a mirror, he explores the 2016 US election. With Google Maps shots of Streisand’s former Malibu home being undermined by coastal erosion as a backdrop, Keller uses flat and unemotional language to explain the US Alt-right memes around Pepe the frog, the frog pharaoh, and the Cult of Kek, and how this symbolism and its cartoon imagery became important in the attack on Clinton and the election of Trump. And, if we are ever to hold the Mirror up to the Basilisk, these are things about a networked society that we must learn and understand. Indeed, unless we have museums and galleries like this it is very hard to see how we can, at any age, learn and understand.

I left ZKM with the same sore feet that I had brought down from Frankfurt. Perhaps slightly worse. But I was elated and refreshed by what I had seen. If the Hydrid Layers or Art of Immersion shows come to a place near you please rush to see them. The only way to stop our kids falling for the Kek Effect is to immerse them so thoroughly in digital art and society that they have the ability to fashion their own mirrors to expose to the face of ever-present Basilisks.

 

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