Jun
20
Am I a Computer?
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Could you tell, dear reader, and would it matter, are the thoughts that come most readily to mind in answering my own question. As it happens this column is not machine-written, but, equally, it very easily could be. GPT-3, the latest release of OpenAI, became available yesterday. You may recall that the previous release was pulled because of the ease with which it could generate fake news. Now a new and more powerful version is with us, only to be licensed to applicants who can demonstrate and contract for legitimate and benign use cases. The debate goes on about the control and regulation of such powerful software, and it is very right that it should. My question is much simpler: now that it is possible to create content of the highest value, and simultaneously in a variety of languages, what will the happen to the value of content? And how will that impact the content industries, and that odd and eccentric business that we still, irrationally, call publishing?
First of all, a thought to chill you to the bone. I have been writing here for ten years. What I have written in that time could be ingested and analysed in moments. With my creaking style and linguistic peculiarities and grammatical infelicities duly noted, it would be a simple matter to have these arguments machine honed whenever they were needed, and written in a way that I myself, let alone you, would mistake for my own. And even more frightening, the content producing process could give me Immortality, defying death and decrepitude and maundering on about new developments in the information economy several times a month for centuries yet to come. Until, of course, communication ceases to involve eyes and ears and in the new age of brain-to-brain communication someone switches me off. Or makes me a God!
Apologies. Must get a grip. This is a factor of social isolation and Zoom immersion. But the serious point remains. If you remove a cost base around content creation, you remove the industry who covered those costs in order to make a margin upon them. Of course you introduce other costs, but it seems to me that costs and our industry structures are so aligned that it is a different industry. Think about the market for historical romances. We are half-way to machine compilation already. Every year genre publishing responds to demand and while each offering has marginal claims to originality, they have to stay close to reader expectations and genre conventions. A very exploitable machine driven marketplace!
But this is even more the case in scholarly communications. Here the issue is workflow, and the conventions are rigid. As long as the journal article remains bound to its structure, and the process of peer review enforces those conventions, it will be easier to create articles without much human intervention in the natural and social sciences than in the current hand-stitched manner we cannot be far from a Jupyter lab notebook collecting all the information and writing, editing, correcting, proofing and submitting the article. In English, Japanese, Mandarin and Hindi. All the analysis required for peer review is already collected readily by smart AI systems, as Cactus and UNSILO have demonstrated. The current crisis shows us that paper is not missed at all except in some areas of HSS. Pre print servers show us how easy it can be to get vital content quickly into the marketplace. And no mention has been made here so far of Open Access or Open Science.
Some publishers in these markets believe that nothing will ever seriously change – at least until they retire. Some commentators – and we now have such a range that you can shop around until you find one that agrees with you – eagerly track change to try to trip it by its heels – this preprint server is not growing fast enough, that one is financed by the wrong tycoon. These are the cobblestones of history and the carriage of change rolls smartly across them, disregarding Fogies, Old or Young. Were the complete reversal of the content economy my problem I would not seek re-assurance from such complacent comforters. Rather I would look at every phase of what I do in knowledge transfer in scholarly communications to see where value can be added or increased. And that may not be in traditional content creation, but it will be in improved workflow, in speed to market, in critical and assured distribution of OA output to peers and peer research groups, to collaborative work with research institutions to privatise their knowledge transfer and reputation enhancement needs, and above all, I would try to suck out, curate and analyse every iota of data that I could find which reflects on the impact of this output on the users, the researchers, their institutions and their funders.
Meanwhile, I wonder if this iPad can manage some AI auto writing. In isolation you need someone to tell you what you are thinking!
May
29
MicroPublishing Points the Way
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A small blogging industry has built up around the upsides of isolation during the current pandemic. I don’t want to add to it here, except to remark that the cancellation of a number of publishing events has forced me into other channels, away from my usual haunts where industry colleagues assure each other that whatever happens in terms of change, subscription services, paywalls, impact factors and restricted copyright re-use will see them into retirement. And then it’s someone else’s problem. Since I have a constitutional requirement to keep reminding them that Change is not a measurable process: as soon as you produce a chart that maps it’s steady progress and have used it to reassure investors and stakeholders that they have nothing to fear in the short term, then you suddenly find the graph line around your neck and strangling you. Think Open Access and forget complacency.
So this month and last I wasn’t at a book fair or even in a bar loosely attached to a book fair. Instead I was listening to world experts like Richard Susskind talking about digital law courts last month, and in May it has been a joy to get to the Open Publishing Fest, organised by Adam Hyde. And of course I have enjoyed those Bob Stein sessions on the slow re-interpretation of the meaning of “book” in a digital networked world. I never tire of the subject or it’s pioneers. But my real joy has been three sessions I attended on micro-publishing. In part this is they were run by librarians and academics with genuine expertise hard won in practice. Partly because of the manner of the discourse – no participant left unthanked, every effort made to acknowledge the pioneering work of others. And partly because all of these professors or researchers or curation librarians were outstanding experts in publishing, running fully fledged and successful publishing operations within the academic world. I soon found that I had much to learn from them.
MicroPublishing in this context means the publication of short, single experiment, peer reviewed OA articles, with DOIs and metadata to make them citable and discoverable. Typically this might be supplementary or ancillary material that might have been once grouped into a major research program report, delaying it and making it too dense or bulky. Or it might be work on reagents that has genuine scientific interest but, as an incidental finding, only clutters the main report. And MicroPublishing might be a first chance for a post grad or even a student doing lab support work to get their name onto a collaborative publication for the first time. And in all of this work of adding small pieces to the jigsaw and making sure they did not get lost or overlooked – curation is clearly at the heart of these efforts – I heard nothing described in terms of workflows or process that would not have been identical in a commercial environment. And that is important. There is a great deal of bogus hype around “publishing expertise”. If you are clever enough to be a Professor of Genomics, then mastering publishing does not seem to be a huge intellectual challenge. And the digitally networked world has democratised all processes like publishing. We can all be publishers now – and we all are!
But who are these MicroPublishing people? They are women and men of a similar type to those who I have written about for a decade when using Cell Signalling as an example. In this instance the field is data related to genomics, involving research institutions holding and curating data around MODs – Model Organism Databases. Many were members of the Alliance of Genomic Resources. WORMBase at Caltech were clearly influential with this group, especially in software development. The GOC-gene oncology consortium – has all these groups working together to create ontologies covering all the taxa involved: I noted FLYBase, XENBase and TAIR (Drosophila – fruit flies – frogs and mustard plants) amongst the participants, though no MODs for rats or mice. The one thing they have in common is collaboration around common needs. They have now re-invented themselves as fully fledged publishers of their own work and I left three sessions at Open Publishing Fest thinking that everyone who works in scholarly communications should be very attentive indeed to how they work and what they are doing.
And we should be attentive not just because of the competitive element. I have a 30 year record of saying that the competitor to the information provider in a digital network is the user doing it for himself, and I am not altering that view now. But we really need to pay attention because this is where and how innovation takes place. This is where and how needs are discovered. If granularity, discoverability and speed to market are the critical issues here, then those are the issues that we must attend to, instead of packing articles with greater amounts of supplemental material, holding articles in peer review until they are “complete” or using citations to game journal impact factors. Above all, we have to remember that scholarly communication is communication by and for scholars. They will, and are, re-inventing it all the time. Rather than propagandising the virtues of “traditional publishing” commercial publishers should be forming relationships that help change take place cost-effectively and at scale.
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