May
19
How Old is Innovation before it’s New…?
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
Living in a society that seems to value “innovation” above all things it is sometimes easy to forget that innovations sometimes have to wait and fester on the sidelines for many years before we recognize how new they really are, that the most common cause of innovation-failure is being before one’s times, and that some innovations never really perform until other innovations are available to make them fully useful. As a law publisher 30 years ago, we managers were deeply concerned with the quality of our thesaurus and how we could effectively use the major law dictionaries of the day; in 1983 I can recall discussions with West Publishing, as it was then, and the depressing conclusion that Blacks, the prevalent power in the marketplace, would never make it online. Now all the dictionaries and thesauri are online and we refer to them no more, but my other memory of those days of roaming the US as if it was a larder of innovation is going on to Denver to meet a guy who was compiling standardized word lists, which he called taxonomies, and inviting information companies to embed them online. He was a former camera shop manager and he knew from experience how many words could be used at retail to describe the same thing, or facets of the same thing.
This is in my head this evening since a note from a very bright and lively innovatory service player in Vienna, the Semantic Web Company, reminds me that they are a member of Wand Within (http://www.poolparty.biz/poolparty-becomes-partner-of-wand-within-program/), and refers me back to Ross Leher, the founder of Wand and my host on that visit in the mid-80s. I have written about Wand many times since, but it has never struck me more forcibly that it is the semantic web movement that releases the power of taxonomy by placing it in the context of technologies that enable us to be really creative in service innovations around it. The wonder to me is that Ross, his son, and their smart company, have been able to survive the 30 years it has taken for the world to get to where they were. I can well remember sending directory companies to them, but the sort of places where I was recommending them as a cure were dying of market forces anyway. The sort of things that Ross was preaching were endemic to the information culture in Denver and its environs anyway: this is light engineering and aircraft building country, and its largest information services player, IHS Inc (Information Handling Services), was created from the needs of customers with big “parts” lists, a multiplicity of standards to obey and scores of component suppliers.
Wand Within’s members are a guide to the aristocracy of semantic web service suppliers. TEMIS, the important French data analytics player, has often been referenced here as I wrote a White Paper with them on Collaboration earlier this year. DataFacet is Wand’s own toolset. Pingar, the New Zealand semantic search company has also been covered here. But it is also worth taking careful note of the Semantic Web Company and its PoolParty tools. (http://blog.semantic-web.at/2013/05/07/17-video-tutorials-are-available-now-learn-how-to-use-poolparty-step-by-step/). Here is another European source of advanced service development tools which should be critically important to publishers and service providers in the coming year. And attentive readers (both of you) will have noted regular reference here to a project called Jurion being developed by Wolters Kluwer Germany which represents, for me, one of the most complete visions of a semantic web-driven project yet available to us anywhere. The Semantic Web Company were their partners in this venture
(http://www.wolterskluwer.de/ueber-uns/presse/pressemitteilungen/aktuelle-pressemit-einzeln/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=1309&tx_ttnews[backPid]=10365&cHash=af81776d45e924a85dc9ff273c2b40f6) and both of them may one day be persuaded to translate their press release into English!
So if we look for innovation, let us look for the new, and also for older services which the new play back on side. And let us recognize that innovation can be the re-integration of historic practice in a new context as well as discovery or invention. And, of course, invention never comes entirely from the ether. In just the sense used by Newton, the early fathers of thesauri are the information scientists upon whose shoulders we are now standing.
And one brief moment more, and a little more old law publishing. Thoughts of the Semantic Web Company in Vienna nourished the idea that if it was no accident that taxonomies came out of Denver, then innovation in a world of concepts would be natural in the great city of Freud and Wittgenstein. Which recalled visits in the 1980s to that city to see Tony Hilscher and Franz Stein of Manz Verlag (now 40% owned by Wolters Kluwer) and the wonderful aroma of coffee and cakes from Demel’s coffee house in the same street. And their company history reminds us of how intimately intellectual and commercial life can be linked to common ends:
“In 1912 the famous architect and critic of architecture Adolf Loos designed the main entrance to the bookstore, situated at Kohlmarkt 16 in Vienna’s First District. This entry has been preserved in its original state to the present day. Following Sigmund Freud’s principles of psychoanalysis, its most significant feature, a recessed entryway combined with indirect lighting, was to exercise a subconscious attraction on passersby, pulling them magically inside to browse.”
This is the 201st issue of this blog: thank you for your patience.
Apr
30
Is Open Access Over?
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 5 Comments
A sudden thought. Doing an interview with some consultants yesterday (we are fast approaching the season when some major STM assets will come back into the marketplace) I was asked where I had estimated Open Access would be now when I had advised the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee back in 2007 on the likely penetration of this form of article publishing. Around 25%, I answered. Well, responded the gleeful young PhD student on the end of the telephone, our researches show it to be between 5-7%. Now, I am not afraid of being wrong (like most forecasters, I have plenty of experience of it!). But it is good to know why and I suspect that I have been writing about those reasons for the last two years. Open Access, defined around the historic debate twixt Green and Gold, when Quixote Harnad tilted at publishers waving their arms like windmills, is most definitely over. Open is not, if by that we begin to define what we mean by Open Data, or indeed Open Science. But Open Access is now open access.
In part this reflects the changing role of the Article. Once the place of publisher solace as the importance of low impact journals declined, it is now the vital source of the things that make science tick – metadata, data, abstracting, cross-referencing, citation, and the rest. It is now in danger of becoming the rapid act at the beginning of the process which initiates the absorption of new findings into the body of science. Indeed some scientists (Signalling Gateway provided examples years ago) prefer simply to have their findings cited – or release their data for scrutiny by their colleagues. Dr Donald Cooper of the University of Colorado, Boulder, used F1000Research to publish a summary of data collected in a study that investigated the effect of ion channels on reward behavior in mice .In response to public referee comments he emphasized that he published his data set in F1000Research “to quickly share some of our ongoing behavioral data sets in order to encourage collaboration with others in the field”. (http://f1000.com/resources/Open-Science-Announcement.pdf)
I have already indicated how important I think post-publication peer review will be in all of this. So let me now propose a four-stage Open Science “publication process” for your consideration:
1. Research team assembles the paper, using Endnote or another process tool of choice, but working in XML. They then make this available on the research programme or university repository, alongside the evidential data derived from the work.
2. They then submit it to F1000 or one of its nascent competitors for peer review at a fee of $1000. This review, over a period defined by them, will throw up queries, even corrections and edits, as well as opinion rating the worth of the work as a contribution to science.
3. Depending upon the worth of the work, it will be submitted/selected for inclusion in Nature, Cell, Science or one of the top flight branded journals. These will form an Athenaeum of top science, and continue to confer all of the career-enhancing prestige that they do today. There will be no other journals.
4. However, the people we used to call publishers and the academics we used to call their reviewers will continue to collect articles from open sources for inclusion in their database collections. Here they will do entity extraction and other semantic analysis to make what they will claim as the classic environments which each specialist researcher needs to have online, while providing search tools to enable users to search here, or here plus all of the linked data available on the repositories where the original article was published – or search here, on the data, and on all other articles plus data that have been post-publication reviewed anywhere. They will become the Masters of Metadata, or they will become extinct. This is where, I feel, the entity or knowledge stores that I described recently at Wiley are headed. This is where old-style publishing gets embedded into the workflow of science.
So here is a model for Open Science that removes copyright in favour of CC licenses, gives scope for “publishers” to move upstream in the value chain, and to increasingly compete in the data and enhanced workflow environments where their end-users now live. The collaboration and investment announced two months ago between Nature and Frontiers (www.frontiersin.org), the very fast growing Swiss open access publisher seems to me to offer clues about the collaborative nature of this future. And Macmillan Digital Science’s deal on data with SciBite is another collaborative environment heading in this direction. And in all truth, we are all now surrounded by experimentation and the tools to create more. TEMIS, the French data analytics practice, has an established base in STM (interestingly their US competitor, AlchemyAPI, seems to work most in press and PR analysis). But if you need evidence of what is happening here, then go to www.programmableweb.com and look at the listings of science research APIs. A new one this month is BioMortar API “standardized packages of genetic patterns encoded to generate disparate biological functions”. We are at the edge of my knowledge here, but I bet this is a metadata game. Or ScholarlyIQ, a package to help publishers and librarians sort out what their COUNTER stats mean (endorsed by AIP), or ReegleTagging API, designed for the auto-tagging of clean energy research, or, indeed, OpenScience API, Nature Publishing’s own open access point to searching its own data.
And one thing I forgot. Some decades ago, I was privileged to watch one of the great STM publishers of this or any age, Dr Ivan Klimes, as he constructed Rapid Communications of Oxford. Then our theme was speed. In a world where conventional article publishing could take two years, by using a revolutionary technology called fax to work with remote reviewers, he could do it in four months. Dr Sam Gandy, an Alzheimer’s researcher, is quoted by F1000 as saying that his paper was published in 32 hours, and they point out that 35% of their articles take less than 4 days from submission to publication. As I prepare to stop writing this and press “publish” to instantly release it, I cannot fail to note that immediacy may be just as important as anything else for some researchers – and their readers.
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