May
19
When Fiesole comes to Lille
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…or the capital of civilisation reaches the capital of Flanders. For those of us who have been many times through Lille by train but never stopped to look, this was a very pleasant surprise on many fronts. And if, like me, you were checking into the 19th Fiesole Retreat, a unique conference which brings librarians, academics and publishers together to communicate in a group small enough to allow that to happen and large enough to be representative, there was double pleasure. Vieux Lille is fascinating, and the city has the second great art collection in France, laid out with huge imagination at the Beaux Arts. This edition of Fiesole, as ever meticulously managed by the Casalini team working with the Charleston Conference, was hosted by Julien Roche, director of the brilliant LILLIAD learning centre and innovation on the new university campus, which housed the retreat.
As soon as I arrive at a Fiesole Retreat I wonder why other conferences do not have this feel. During the days of the Retreat this really does feel like peers explaining to peers how all this new digital stuff is working out in academic life. The opening session was named “Linked (Open) data – Big Data” and reminded me at once of why I really enjoy these meetings – whatever the questions raised there is a chance here to develop your own agenda and pursue it in discussion at breaks and lunches with people who are unlikely to share your background and the limitations of your experience with experts from both the French and German national libraries on the roster we were bound to get differences of approach. What i found rather unexpected was the unanimity around the basic concepts of a data driven research world, and the underlying, central importance of text and data mining in sustaining that world. And as the concepts build from the experience in the room, one realises the gulf between the world into which Retreat members are emerging and the one from which they are departing. Between a world where licensing text and data mining is still non-standard, and where the corpus of knowledge can be searched in a single sweep, where barriers of ownership and control and location frustrate at every turn.
I have found this regularly happens to me at Retreat meetings. Once a theme has become apparent to my mind, I find it recurring in every subsequent session. The agenda went on to consider Reshaping Collection Development for 2025, but the issues that grabbed me came from Laurent Romary from Switzerland discussing “How to open up Digital Libraries for Digital Scholars”. Similarly when the session on “The Changing Scholarly Communication Ecosystem” came along, absorbing sessions from Jayne Marks (Sage) and Bas Straub (Konvertus) began to sharpen my view on the sustainability of current academic publishing practice. Anna Lunden from the Swedish National Library, describing the huge effort they have made to accommodate Open Access in one country alone, and then Frank Smith of JStor addressed the comparative poverty of the Open Books effort, despite Knowledge Unlatched, And then Michael Keller, librarian at Stanford, summed up in his crisp and masterful way. If Stanford spend $2.1 million on APCs this year then the argument about Open Access begins to collapse as cheap, effective publishing software turns every researcher and his librarian as the publisher of source. As Charles Watkinson reminded us, the growth of US (and UK, I would add) university presses has been remarkable. While the traditional Journals market players have tried to defend their branded journals, their requirement for copyright, and their control of the market through peer review, the smoke seems to me to be clearing, revealing a very different picture.
So when you can submit an article with reviews, ready for publication on a pre-print server or a university repository or figshare, will we be too concerned about the publisher of record as long as the metadata is in place? As long as the metadata is properly organized by libraries working together will we worry about brand or journal? Will today’s publishers become tomorrow’s organisers of reputation, ranking scholars and reviewers and contributions to the scholarly communication chain in terms of what other researchers did as a result – cited, blogged, downloaded, annotated etc? And will this turn into a rating system that helps to guide investors in governments and the private sector, or universities making appointments? And will the article cease to exist in the new workflow of scholarship, at least as something read only machines, or will it be replaced by conclusions directly annotated on the data and cited? And obviously, while every discipline and geography is different, where will the first movers be?
No one knows, of course, which is why a Retreat, particularly one focussed on what we are going to collect, store and search in the future, is so valuable. I clearly see now that Open Access is not the answer, but part of a journey, and part of the next stage will be the emergence of funders (Gates and Wellcome are there already) as publishers. But I am hooked – and will be at the 20th Fiesole in Barcelona to debate the issues with colleagues I have come to trust.
Apr
13
UKSG 40: The Temple of Change
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The sunny but sometimes chill air of Harrogate this week was a good metaphor for the scholarly communications marketplace. Once the worshippers at the shrine of the Big Deal, the librarians and information managers who form the majority of the 950 or so attendees now march to a different tune. From the form of the article to the nature of collaboration this was a confident organization talking about the future of the sector. And at no point was this a discussion about more of the same. Three sunny days, but for publishers present there was an occasional chill in the wind.
I started the week with a particular purpose in mind, which was all about the current state of collaboration. I was impressed by the Hypothes.is announcement with Highwire (www.highwire.org). There are now some 3000 journals using open source annotation platforms like the not-for-profit Hypothes.is to encourage discoverable (and private) annotation. Not since Copernicus, when scholars toured monasteries to read and record annotations of observations of the galaxies in copies of his texts, have we had the ability to track scholarly commentary on recent work and work in progress so completely. And no sooner had I begun talking about collaboration as annotation than I met people willing to take the ideas further, into the basis of real community-building activity.
It seems to me that as soon as the journal publisher has imported an annotation interface then he is inviting scholars and researchers into a new relationship with his publishing activity. And for anyone who seeks a defence against the perceived threat of ResearchGate or Academia.edu the answer must lie in building patterns of collaborative annotation into the articles themselves, and becoming the intermediary in the creation of the community dialogue at the level of issues in the scholarly workflow. So it seemed natural that my next conversation was with the ever-inventive Kent Anderson of Redlink, who was able to show me Remarq, in its beta version and due to be formally launched on 1 May. Here discoverable annotations lie in the base of layers of service environments which enable any publisher to create community around annotated discussion and turn it into scholarly exchange and collaboration. We have talked for many years about the publishing role moving beyond selecting, editing, issuing and archiving – increasingly, I suspect, the roles of librarians – and moving towards the active support of scholarly communication. And this, as Remaeq makes clear, includes tweets, blogs, posters, theses, books and slide sets as well as articles. Services like Hypothes.is and Remarq are real harbingers of the future of publishing when articles appear on preprint servers and in repositories or from funder Open Access outlets, where the subject classification of the research is less important than who put up the research investment.
And, of course, the other change factor here is the evolution of the article (often ignored – for some reason we seem to like talking about change but are reluctant to grip the simple truth that when one thing changes – in this case the networked connectivity of researchers – then all the forms around it change as well, and that includes the print heritage research article). Already challenged by digital inclusivity – does it have room for the lab video, the data, the analytics software, the adjustable graphs and replayable modelling? – it now becomes the public and private annotation scratchpad. Can it be read efficiently by a computer and discussed between computers? We heard reports of good progress on machine readability using Open Science Jupiter Notebooks, but can we do all we want to fork or copy papers and manipulate them while still preserving the trust and integrity in the system derived from being able to identify what the original was and being always able to revert to it. We have to be able to use machine analysis to protect ourselves from the global flood of fresh research – if the huge agenda was light anywhere then it was on how we absorb what is happening in India, China, Brazil and Russia into the scholarly corpus effectively. But how good it was to hear from John Hammersley of Overleaf, now leading the charge in connecting up the disconnected and providing the vital enabling factor to some 600,000 users via F1000 and thus in future the funder-publisher mills of Wellcome and Gates, as well as seeing Martin Roelandse of Springer Nature demonstrating that publishers can potentially join up dots too with their SciGraph applicationfor relating snippets, video, animations sources and data.
Of course, connectivity has to be based on common referencing, so at every moment we were reminded of the huge importance of CrossRef and Orcid Incontrovertible identity is everything, I was left hoping that Orcid can fully integrate with the new CrossRef Events data service, using triples in classical mode to relate references to relationships to mentions. Here again, in tracking 2.7 million events since service inception last month, they are already demonstrating the efficacy of the New Publishing – the business of joining up the dots.
So I wish UKSG a happy 40th birthday – they are obviously in rude health. And I thank Charlotte Rouchie, closing speaker, for reminding me of Robert Estienne, who I have long revered as the first master of metadata. In 1551 he divide the bible into verses – and to better compare Greek with Latin, he numbered them. Always good to recall revolutionaries of the past!
PS. In my last three blogs I have avoided, I hope, use of the word Platform. Since I no longer know what it means, I have decided to ignore it until usage clarifies it again!
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