Jul

6

The Unrepentant Techno-Utopian

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I have been accused of being a Techno Utopian. And , on reflection , I am delighted . In the first place , it makes me sound as if I know a great deal more about technology than I actually do . In my business that cannot be a bad thing . Then again , it labels me as an optimist . And I am an optimist . I do not go as far as the late Dr Pangloss in an unreasonable belief that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds – no reader of this column could accuse me of that – but I do believe that it is within the span of man’s accomplishable ambitions to improve the quality and impact of science scholarly  communication . And in particular address worrying  issues of reproducibility , data availability and metadata dissemination . Thus I believe that Open Access is here to stay and that Open Science will open up the way to further fundamental changes in the way science and its findings  are reported and digested within the scholarly community . My accuser levelled this techno-utopianism  accusation at me in response to a comment I made on LinkedIn . I am told that he has developed the charge in his own subscription newsletter . Sadly I have not been able to read this  since   he threw me off his subscription list some years ago !

What I am called is fun, and funny , of course , but far less interesting than what happens in this critical marketplace . Nothing should distract us at the moment from looking carefully at what has happened during the pandemic . In particular we should perhaps be looking at the way in which the pre-print movement has developed in the last 18 months  . From the reports that I have seen activity levels have been high , predictably in the life sciences , but also elsewhere. Getting work “out there “ seems to have been an understandable priority for many researchers in uncertain times . It did not lessen a concern to be ultimately published in high brand , strong impact factor journals . We can connect that continuing wish to what many see – though there are no numbers to guide us – as a growth is the frequency  of “pre-validated “ articles  going onto pre-print servers. “ Pre-validated “ could mean pre-checked for plagiarism , or to correct references or citations , or to improve standards of English expression – the whole variety of checking mechanisms deployed by service support companies like Cactus Global or ResearchSquare. Applied at scale , the quality of manuscript submissions will improve . Some publishers will see this as a cost reduction advantage : others will see a risk to the ultimate control of process by publishers . If you threaten that , they will say , you risk the one thing that keeps the publisher in the game – the certification of the research process by virtue of control of the version of record. 

Besides increasing activity on pre-print servers , something else has been happening during the pandemic . More and more so-called “ transformational agreements “ between publishers and institutions have been signed and a variety of terms exhibited . However , we are yet to get into a renewal cycle and it might be wise to speculate a little on what the learning experience may be for the not- unsophisticated negotiators on the university and institutional side of the table . The deals and the process may predictably move power of discrimination of where publication takes place out of the hands of individual lead researchers and place it in the deal making bundle . Institutional negotiators will be no less keen than individual researchers on creating acknowledgement of worth and enhancing reputation . But an institutional view might be a percentage view . Imagine a negotiator saying that “ we estimate that 60% of the research we produce should reach your highest impact factor journals – but if we are wrong , give us a compensatory discount greater than the savings on APCs . “  Or even “ Our researchers now expect a full value pre-publication manuscript preparation and vetting service , including exposure on a pre-print server while decisions are made . While you have first publication options , they will be time limited so that other publishers can adopt pre-prints from your servers when options to publish are exhausted. “

These future negotiations will become very complex . Some institutions , especially in medical research , will probably evolve single publisher relationship , which may make renewal negotiations very difficult at times . Others may decide that it is easier to work with two or  three larger players who have a range of journals at various levels of impact that fit their requirements . This not only further squeezes the societies , many of whom predictably will follow the IET-Wiley route , but will also impact the small specialist publisher . And when the negotiations begin to include the wider requirements of Open Science – pre-registration , for example -the pressure on publishers to shoulder a wider part off the process and its contingent  costs will intensify . The winners , whatever their scale , will be the full service players who , aided by ever-improving technology , take on the widest responsibility for taking scholarly communication from the research bench to its definable  , mapped and aware readership . These will be difficult days for those who want publishing to retreat to its traditional bounds . 

Now , Reader ! Was that too “techno” for even the most delicate of digestions ? Or too Utopian for even the most pessimistic ? Be my judge !

Jun

22

Repeat It or Take It Back

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Amongst the many things speeded up by the COVID pandemic , the advance of Open Science could be the most marked . While the grateful world rejoices in the speed with which vaccines were produced , the unprecedented sharing of knowledge , techniques and data between the major labs – in Berkeley,   Broad ( MIT and Harvard ) , Oxford and elsewhere – was a major element , alongside the setting aside of normal competitive feelings between research teams . This enabled roll-out within a year rather than the usual vaccine cycle of three to five years . Add the fact that wholly new science was being deployed – the use of CRISPR gene editing with messenger RNA  – and we are left with a remarkable conclusion : in a collaborative environment and under Open Science protocols , things can go faster and become effective sooner than we had ever imagined . 

With that in mind it is worth considering the role of publishing in all of this . Whenever I become too strident in talking to publishers in the science research communications sector about the changing role of journals , and the incoming marketplace of data and analysis, I usually get a fusillade of questions back about the opportunities in data and the claim that significant flags have already been planted in that map . And they are right , though they often ignore the issues raised by more and more targeted and specific intelligent analysis . And they also ignore the fact that outside of eLife and , to an extent , PLoS , no one of scale and weight  in the commercial publishing sector has really climbed aboard the Open Science movement with a recognition of the sort of data and communication control that Open Science will require . 

So what is that requirement ? In two words – Replicability and Retraction . While we still live in a world where the majority of evidential data is not available with the research article , and is not always obviously linked to data in institutional repositories , it is hard to imagine moving forward from the position reported by Bayer’s researchers – that only 25% of research that they want to use is capable of being reproduced in their laboratories . Other studies have shown even lower figures . What does “peer review” actually mean if it produces this sort of result ? Yet publishers have for years disdained publishing articles that “merely” reproduced existing results and validated previous claims . A publisher interested in Open Science would open up publishing channels specific to reproducibility , link successful and unsuccessful attempts to the original article and encourage others to do the same , while building collective data on replication work for analysis – including the analysis of widely cited papers which cannot be reproduced outside of the ambit of the originating team . 

Open Science advocates would go further and push for the pre-registration of research methodology , peer reviewing the submission of the research plan and publishing it . This would prevent a subtle twist in the reporting that would allow the aims to be slightly adjusted subsequently to fit the evidence actually collected . To my knowledge , and I hope I am wrong , only PLoS have a facility for this at present .Searching and analysis of preregistration data could be immensely useful to science , just as the activity itself could add greater certainty to scientific outcomes . In particular it might lead to less retractions , and it is this area that publishers can again make a huge contribution to Open Science . Retraction Watch and the US charitable foundations that support the two principals there do a brilliant job . Since 2010 they have reported on 20,000 retractions of journal articles to 2019 , but the issue is getting greater and greater , and the number of retractions between October  2019 and  September 2020 rose by another 4064. The fact that researchers are reporting and recording this data wherever they can find it is admirable , but surely publishing should be doing its own house keeping , and collecting and referencing  this data to a central registry . There have to be analytics , in an Open Science environment , which point to the effectiveness of peer review , and if peer review is as important as publishers claim , then protecting its standards should be a critical concern . Along with another Open Science mandate , the publishing of signed peer review reports alongside articles , this constant monitoring of retractions is vital if researchers are not to be misled . This is not about fraud , but about over ambitious and unjustified claims . Publishers should not try to hide the number of retractions they have made , but use the open display of the results to demonstrate how effectively they work in the vast majority of cases. 

The last element here is time . Publishers can use data and analytics far more effectively to track article lifetimes , show that previously diminished work in its first five years can come back into importance in the second , show how retractions issued late in the life of the article can effect other work which cited it or was built around it . By the time we reach 2025 the data around the article life cycle will be far more important than much of the data in all but the most important research articles . 


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