Sep
15
Open Science and Open Minds
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Scientific Communication as a Volume Business
Last week’s OAI 12 ,the Geneva Workshop on Innovation in Scholarly Communication, hosted as always by CERN and Geneva University , was a delight . Real scientists talking with real passion . Genuine case studies that underlined some critical issues where science can do better . A good sample of “ citizen science “ involvement to remind us that real people , not just scientists , can perform science as well as experience it and benefit from it . Once again the meeting was truly international and once again , it featured not just the performance of Open Access but the much wider implications , seen through the wider lens of Open Science . And it was immediately clear that Open Science is not just a lens but a prism , and those who look through it experience some very different emotions .
There is , for example , a chasm of intent between those who embraced Open Science as the democratisation of science , and those who worried about the purity of scientific performance . There is now a strong and practical demand to open up a wider understanding in the general public about scientific conclusions and what they mean . This has been given sharper point by the pandemic , but it is worth noting that while professorships in the public understanding of science go back 30 years in many countries , and we have had many very distinguished science journalists , politicians and the press have real ( and sometimes deliberate ) difficulty in explaining what science means – and admitting its limitations . People who rally under this banner tend also to believe that all research funded by the state should have its results published by the state , so that all citizens and taxpayers can have access to it . They are met with voices who hold that too much science is published , too little selectivity is exercised , and too much duplication of identical experimental results is permitted in an Open Access context .
This tribe in turn is confronted by a fervent lobby who believe that the publishing research results is notoriously incomplete . Where , they ask , is the data , evidential or not , that surrounds the scientific process ? Certainly not lodged with the article , too often not even linked to it , too often not even available , just because commercial publishers never found a way to monetise it . And even when it is in a repository or linked to the article , it is often not presented in a way that makes it usable , either to another scientist using different analytics , or to another computer trying to reproduce the experiment . What hope , they then say , for “ Open Science “ when so much science is closed even to the re-use of other scientists ?
Beyond these knowledgeable Geneva conference attendees are the worried ranks of working researchers who have a suspicion that not everyone is following the same basic rules . Does evidence sometimes get distorted to meet the claims of the hypothesis ? Is someone gaming the citations in order to get tenure or preferment ? Is someone distorting what was actually put on record to create panic and discord ? ( It is hard to attend these meetings without being given a case history of anti-vaxxer conspiracy ) . As in any community , rumour takes flight , and while it is impossible to talk about the extent of malpractice , Open Science now also means “ open up science “ and shine a more public light on retractions , on plagiarism , and upon the claims of experimentation that defies reproducibility .
One striking conference session featured the very vigorous crop of small presses developing OA books programmes and sharing infrastructure to do so . ( ScholarLed , COPIM). They may point to the increasingly comprehensive and available workflow software for publishing , which may serve the desired democratisation by enabling every research team to report results and data to open platforms , subject to automated primary peer review , leaving the eventual status of the work in the hands of its readers and users across time . The proponents of ‘too much ‘ will be appalled , but this has been the drift since Open Access itself began – a fee-based business fuelled by APCs can only be a volume business .And if the future really is Diamond OA , it may cease to be a business at all . This will please some and not others , and the fault lines became clear in the final session . Under the chairmanship of Tracey Brown , the Director of Sense about Science , Geoffrey Boulton of Edinburgh University and Kent Anderson of Caldera Publishing debated what had gone wrong . Would that they had debated what to do about it , because there is now a tendency in these sessions to search for a villain . For Professor Boulton the universities are to blame . They created the “ publish or perish “ world and cannot retreat from it fast enough . It is they who have “ lined the pockets “of major publishers with profits from articles read by “ about 0.5 readers “ per article . For Kent Anderson it is the techno-utopians ( a term he has kindly used on me in the past !) and the Tech companies . Academic Publishers are the virtuous providers of journals “ whose focus on rigour and quality “ is so lacking elsewhere . He points especially at the irresponsible pre-print servers . ( “ MedRxiv and ArXiv are funded by Facebook essentially “). At times , while condemning Google and Facebook for amplifying conspiracy theories it almost sounded as if , by connecting Steve Bannon, anti-vaxxers , CERN and predatory journals in the same context , we were knitting a few of our own . A sad lapse in a very interesting session .
It was a really interesting and informative five days , with many voices heard that are normally silent or ignored . Our urgent needs for finding more effective means for evaluating research and researchers , for giving scope to the ongoing evaluation of science research as it changes over time ,for ensuring and recording its reproducibility and safeguarding its accessibility, and getting the evidential data in place and reusable by both man and machine engages all of us in scholarly communications – publishers and software developers and data and analytics companies as much as researchers , funders , institutions and librarians . Our path to a new concession will be eased if we concentrate on the debate and avoid the smears . ( https://oai.events )
Sep
1
And Now , The Searchable Seminar !
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Putting the seminar on the Research Workflow map
In the age of Open Science , nothing seems more natural than the opening up of processes that have hitherto been closed within university , departmental or research team practices . In the last five years the academic conference has become increasingly better covered by networked services .Think of Underline Science , or , over a longer period , of Riverview . Then add in Morrissier , reproducing the meetings and then using the data derived from posters and conference proceedings as indicators of progress in early-stage research . The ability of players like the latter to add the content to the citable research record through DOIs and make transcripts as searchable as any other content in the scholarly communications workflow is a huge step forward in process transparency .
But if we thought this was the end of the story , Cassyni ( https//.Cassyni.com) proves us wrong . Its founders , one of the most credible teams in scholarly communications , point out that below the level of formal conferences are a huge volume of scholarly seminars . They note that the pandemic drove these into Zoom , which suddenly created some benefits of its own ( sharing thoughts with other groups , showing how departments or research groups worked as a promotional or recruitment tool ) , but they also believe that less than 10% of these sessions are now searchable or retrievable by third parties . And they think that the number of such sessions globally could be up to a million . So the founders of Publons , Kopernio and Mendeley saw a new challenge in front of them – creating a sustainable business to provide standardised tools to record , transcribe and create searchable files of such seminars , add DOIs and metadata to improve search effectiveness , and eventually to index not only past and current seminars , but provide a signpost to future events . And , since comprehensive cover is important , they also recognise that some institutions will want a private or embargoed service – Open always has to live with ‘sensitive’.
This huge quantity of academic presentation and debate , in the Cassyni toolset , will get a Zoom video for each seminar , with the organiser adding an abstract , and the slide deck(s) will be attached . The DOI and metadata will be available within CrossRef , and so publicly searchable and citable . They envisage material coming from university departments running series of meetings designed to keep everyone updated and to stimulate fresh thinking ; from inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional seminar efforts promoting knowledge exchange and co-operation ; and from society journals and other journal editors who seek to explore and develop new topics . Indeed , it is easy to see Cassyni developing as an editorial tool , since this is surely how most journals were created , or bi-furcated , in the first instance . The Cassyni team are surely exploring the primordial soup from which journal life on Earth first sprang ?
Who learns what from all of this activity – another huge searchable store of primary science research material ? Certainly seminar organisers will get a great deal out of it , since the feedback on topics and techniques will be rich , and full of tips on making such series really hum . One can imagine that the journal editors and publishers would respond to clear signs of where the next papers are coming from – this is embryonic research indication – and what new topics were flying . Universities will use their seminar series popularity as a promotional tool ( ‘ most downloaded ‘ etc . ) and individual researchers will list their searchable seminar sessions amongst their publications – and their citations . But , at the end , Cassyni stands or falls by its utility to the individual researcher , by the delight of being able to hear exactly what was being said when Slide 10 was on the screen , or what the response was to a particular issue in Q&A when it arose in any seminar series .
The Cassyni system has been widely trialled in beta ( the views of Peter Vincent at Imperial College , London are particularly interesting ( https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/09/01/rethinking-the-research-seminar-for-a-post-covid-world-with-cassyni/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ImpactOfSocialSciences+%28Impact+of+Social+Sciences%29 ) It is now fully installed at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand as a partner site . The Journal of Computational Physics ( Elsevier ) is an early user . As we salute the continuing inventive energies of Andrew Preston , Ben Kaube and Jan Reichelt , one also has to wonder about two things : once it is widely used , will Cassyni by its very presence alter the nature of the seminars and the communications that it records – and are there still any unexplored territories left in scholarly workflow and scholarly communications that need this exposure to the digitally networked world ?
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