Dec
11
Research article publishing: individualised, institutionalised… Nationalised?
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Last week’s announcement that the Indian government had concluded a “One Nation One Subscription “deal with 30 major journal publishers to allow 18 million users free access to previously paid for journal articles over five years starting on the 1st of January 2025 should, in my view, have sent a ripple of apprehension through the journal publishing businesses. Instead, the only people who commented immediately, were Indian academics who espoused the cause of open access and saw it as a retrograde deal.
Personally, I see it is a landmark deal. It has the potential, over time, to change very many things. It has apparently taken five years to construct this agreement, but just think of it in precedent terms. If India can do this, then why not Brazil? If it is appropriate for India then surely it is hugely appropriate for countries in Africa and South Asia who have real problems with the cost of access? This could expand the existing provision hugely and remove all the limitations which great schemes like Research4Life, Hinari , Agora and Oare have always suffered from.
But this, I imagine, was not the objective. While the 30 publishers gathered together to negotiate this, hopefully holding hands with their anti trust lawyers all the while, they might have been thinking about the problems of illicit use in India or indeed the threat of the Indian state declaring their monopoly illegal. I have very happy members from the 1970s of publishing books through the then British Council overseas aid scheme “The English Language Book Society”. These ELBS editions were meant to cut out illegal local reprinting by publishing at a third of the price of the UK edition, the difference made up by the UK government.
I recall standing in a bookshop in Kuala Lumpur one day and being shown my own company;s first year university biology textbook. displayed on the shelf alongside four Indian and Malaysian pirated editions, all illegally reproduced and all selling for less than mine!
However, the reasoning behind distinguishing this as a landmark move is slightly different. I think that in Europe and the USA we have a problem in imagining that the huge research and innovation enterprises in science and technology now funded by the Indian and Chinese governments, and increasingly by the Brazilians and others, will forever and always want to publish through multinational companies domiciled in Berlin or Amsterdam or New York. While brand and prestige still rule, and commonly used metric systems refuse to recognise change and experimentation, the current situation just holds. Loosen any of those ties and it could become very attractive for an Indian or Chinese state publishing house to assume the publishing role, creating diamond open access by legislation at a single stroke!
And as I have so often written here, I do think that the ties are loosening. The assumption, for a start, that US, UK and EU science research will always prevail in quality and size of funding terms is now shot to pieces. In an interview that I conducted a week ago with a Chinese AI researcher in Beijing, we explored both the huge progress being made in China and the collaborative nature of much of the research that will drive AI forward. We are now past the point where publications in chemistry in the leading journals are dominated by Chinese researchers: publications, not submissions. We are also past the point where Indian data scientists go to Silicon Valley automatically to seek work. At all levels. Indian data science has world leadership capacity.
I have argued in the past that self publishing will have huge importance in the future development of reporting scientific research and innovation.. I think that the CEREUS model , whenrevised to repair its current deficiencies and, as now backed by springer Nature has a huge future, but self publishing will take many forms . It logically takes forward existing pre-print server publishing into a more controlled and managed environment using peer review potentially pre-and post publication. In fields like medical science, I see huge importance in institutional publishing, as major players seek to underline and demonstrate the quality and extent of their research activities -and brand them. I also see that funders may wish, in certain circumstances, to become research publishers themselves . Governments have a poor track record in open publishing, but the geopolitical changes in the balance of power may make them feel that this is a role for them. Isolationist politicians and trade war warriors all over the world are likely to complicate things, by not seeing what is happening or by defending so called “national interests”.
Finally, when those 30 publishers were all in the same room, I wonder if the conversation strayed away from debating what the Indian government might be persuaded to hello, hello there I’m fine. How are you pay them to some momentary thoughts about what collaboration might produce elsewhere. Did they ponder, I wonder, on the possibility of a self regulation system for the acceptance of articles might reduce bogus submissions and increase the integrity of their publications.? Perhaps they spent an odd moment considering standardised peer review procedures so that all researchers could be sure that all articles had been scrutinised in approximately the same way? I know, I know. It is a lot to ask. But it is Christmas, and old men must be allowed to dream…
Nov
19
Integrity in the age of agents: or is scholarly communications learning enough from the rest of the information world?
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We are living in an uneasy transitional period between the “online“ world to which we have become relatively accustomed, and the agenic,bot-based ,AI-driven world of the future.
Over the past 50 years I have watched as the information communication industries have either narrowed and specialised in unrelated segments or broadly generalised in pan-digital shared experience. My feeling is that neither is necessary or desirable. At the moment , scholarly communications, about which I feel a certain passion, is going through one of its isolationist phases. Perhaps this is a mirror of the hateful political and nationalistic isolationism of our times, which seems equally unproductive to me. However, just as I feel that the world of journal publishing is approaching a period of major change, so I also feel that it’s huge problems will not be addressed by introspection. Nor is it likely that all of the solutions will be internally sourced. Scholarly communications needs to look at the whole world of information handling and communication for relevant and helpful answers.
These thoughts come to mind while reading an excellent report by Phill Jones commissioned by International STM on the problem of verifying images used in science journal articles. A real problem and both author and funder are to a be congratulated on tackling it. I am now partially blind, and my reader software, although increasingly sophisticated is not always good at picking up footnotes and references so I might have missed something important. If I did, my apologies in advance.
But what I missed in this excellent document was any reference to the work done by Adobe and Microsoft, together with the New York Times and other newspapers in developing the verification system C2 PA. Now adopted by Associated Press and Reuters, and installed in Sony and Leica cameras, this system gives an image provenance record from the beginning. And then again I searched for any mention of ISCC, the International Content coding system which is now a draft ISO standard. This foundation, and it’s developer Sebastian Posth, have a huge amount to offer in the world of academic research. at the same time that this report was published, Digital Science launched its Dimensions Author Check system. Morrissier have made real strides in integrity checking; the work of Clear Skies and of Research Signals is really exciting and progressive. But because we are concentrated on the problems of researchers, their institutions and their funders, it does not mean that we cannot learn from people involved in credit rating, banking services, healthcare or education.
These thoughts may explain my own long interest in the overall communication between the segments of what we used to call, very many years ago, “publishing.“ Last week I had the pleasure of lunch with Clive Bradley, now aged 90 and formerly the chief executive of the UK Publishers Association. At his behest, I worked on the founding of CICI, The Confederation of Information Communication Industries in the UK, an organisation which still exists as a way of communicating the wider interests of the broadly defined information industry to government and others. Our conception, 20 years ago, was that trade bodies would become de facto standards setters as well as special interest groups. Thus, in the crisis of integrity which currently afflicts science research publishing, helping journal publishers to band together to set minimum standards of proof for the acceptability of articles and images would seem to me to be a very proper thing to do. Refusing to accept articles which did not demonstrate alignment with data standards which rendered the work verifiable, complete, and free from post creation tampering might seem fairly obvious to some. Yet while we sit wringing our hands about retractions, falsified special issues and papermills, we are in the midst of an industry with no kite marks, no assurance standards, no logo of trust and integrity that readers can invest any faith in at all.
Whatever I have written here about the challenges and opportunities of AI, I think that it remains true that the continuing issues of most concern in the transfer of knowledge in the network society remain exactly as in the mid-1980s. Trust and identity are paramount issues. As I think about this, I think about the writings of my friend David Birch, the hugely respected commentator on the financial services marketplace. His maxim is that “identity is the new money “. He sees banks ceasing to earn margins in trading in money, but in an agented society becoming the agency which establishes identity, credentials, protocols and standards which allow our agents and botsto work in digital networks on our behalf. For my part, I believe that journal publishes will, and in many cases are already, making a similar pivot. Acts of publishing will become increasingly individual or institutional or professional society based: commercial services around them will be concerned with data, integrity, and connectivity, including many of the services that banks of the future will offer to their customers.
Last month the world’s journal publishers will have gathered at the Frankfurt Book Fair. After 51 years of annual worship there. I no longer attend, but I am sure that the STM Conference and it’s great dinner covered all the issues of the current integrity problem. The same people were this month at the Charleston conference and will have been doing the same thing. I just wonder how much of the discussion was devoted to how public and researcher trust in journal article publishing can be restored without concerted action by all market players to create standards of trust and integrity for their industry. Publishes have shown that they can act in concert in the past. Their accomplished really important things with collaborations like CrossRef and Chorus. They are currently doing really important work on integrity.But we all have to ask if it is enough and if it is fast enough? And will it result in enforceable trade standards which all participants in the ecosystem can trust?
of course, none of this will be relevant to the journal if in fact the journal does not survive. When I wrote last about metrics, I was trying to make the point that unless the metrics embrace the experimentation, the experiments in new business models are handicapped from the beginning.i
It may well be that the sort of integrity standards that will emerge, deploying AI effectively, in current journal article publishing will have a profound influence on integrity standards in all other forms of communication in the network, and vice versa. Or, I could speculate, the journal based business model and system will never resolve the integrity issues: that will have to wait for advanced AI development in agent-based systems, where it is the individual researcher who sets the integrity standard for the research data that their bot can accept and use as legitimate. It would not be the first time in the age of digital network communications that the decision point devolved to the end user.
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