Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to give a presentation on new forms of scholarly publishing, Open Access and Open Research at a virtual meeting organized by Catalina Danis of IBM’s Social Computing Group. It was great, although preciously little time for discussion remained, due to a slightly overambitious (i.e. too voluminous) presentation on my part. Thankfully, the session next week will be used for discussion and I am very much looking forward to that. Once more, a big thanks to Catalina for inviting me and to everyone who attended.
Edit: if this looks strange, please reload the page. For reasons I cannot fathom slideshare’s embeds manage to blow up the page unless I manually adjust the source code…
Last week I had the opportunity to have dinner with a group of very interesting and (and, dare I say it of researchers who rid the world of cancer and explore the origins of life?) fun people. Bjoern Brembs was nice enough to invite me to a get-together at the top of Berlin’s Fersehturm, some 230 meters above Alexanderplatz. The view was spectacular, though most of the time I was too caught up in the discussion to pay much attention. Catriona MacCallum, Martin Fenner, Randolph Nesse and Bjoern Brembs offered their views on where academic publishing is going and what is wrong with the system we currently live (and suffer) under.
Below are some of Bora’s photos, shamelessly ripped from his blog.
Mark the Chelsea fan and Catriona enjoying a cool Berliner Pilsener
Bjoern Brembs, apparently also a soccer handball enthusiast. Yeah, they don’t *throw* balls in soccer
Bora is up in arms against the less progressive elements of the publishing industry
Martin Fenner’s wife (to whom I apologize - my memory for names is terrible) and humble me
By the way, even if you don’t know a thing about evolutionary medicine or psychology, you should definitely have a look at Randolph Nesse’s blog.
In any case, publishers have to have some motivation, some guarantee not that they will make money (very few scholarly publishers make money) but that they won’t lose it. The for-profit publishers (and there are many scholarly publishers such as Wiley that do a healthy, for-profit business) will need some form of compensation. The scholarly non-profit publishers (largely but not exclusively university presses) will need some method for offsetting any revenue lost from open access. Unless that bottom-line is figured into the equation, there is no motivation for someone to be a publisher. Without publishers, then authors have to be in the business of self-publishing. That’s fine . . . but, as I’ve written about many times in this blog, self-publishing isn’t free. And it isn’t easy. And, most definitely, it isn’t “professional.” Finally, authors should be in the business of writing (which is hard enough); we should not also have to be publishing our own writing and doing all that is required to have it published in a polished, formal way (i.e. not in the casual and spontaneous format of a blog but as refereed, responsible online scholarship).
I absolutely agree with Cathy’s observation that open access doesn’t mean zero cost. The costs of publishing are significant and that is not something that magically goes away with open access.
That being said, I can’t help but wonder whether our perception of self-publishing as non-professional will persist. Arguably, the more polished a publication is the more it is geared towards posterity. It’s very much like paper publishing: what is released is a ‘finished’ product that is no longer updated. Of course I am not implying that peer-review, citing of sources and other cornerstones of academic discourse are not important. But what makes these things - in principle - impossible to have in blogs, in conjunction with pieces which are not modeled after print texts? Citing and linking are highly transparent processes in blogs (or in any other hypertext). And surely systems of peer review could be put into place as well (probably a form of open peer review). Perhaps we’ll find some answers to these questions in November.
I just came across this article in the WSJ (via open…). From the piece:
In the future, it’s likely that a new, more flexible model will develop in which some scholarly papers, published under the banner of an online journal, will be peer-reviewed, while others will appear without any such apparatus, destined to rise or fall based on their contents and their authors’ reputations. The challenge, in the coming new world of open access, will be keeping the best of the current system while jettisoning the rest. Maybe some scholar would like to study the question — and publish his findings for all to see.
I’m pretty sure the differences between publishing in an open access journal vs. saving your paper in an institutional or disciplinary repository are already being assessed, but the the author is spot on in his evaluation - both approaches can co-exist peacefully. Journals will increasingly mean ‘reviewed’, not just ‘published’.
Wow, I think I’ve never had a post title as long as that one.
As some of you might know, I’m very much engaged in the Open Access movement and involved in several projects related to making scholarly information more accessible. In light of this, I am enthusiastic to announce that I will be organizing a panel with the working title New Forms of Scholarly Communication: Blogs, Wikis and Web 2.0 in Academia at the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference in November. The event is the successor to previous Berlin conferences organized by the Max Planck Society and its partners and will take place here in Düsseldorf.
What exactly is behind the title of the panel? Essentially, I envision a bundle of presentations centered on these interconnected aspects:
research publishing beyond e-books and e-journals - what new forms of publishing (if any) has the Net brought us?
new ways of dealing with data - how do platforms such as IBM’s Many Eyes and MIT’s SIMILE library affect how we can look at data and, consequently, how we publish?
new ways of collaborating - how do new means of communication and collaboration affect us - for example, the use of social bookmarking tools to create shared bibliographies, use of wikis to collaboratively write books etc?
new ways of evaluation and discussing - how do approaches such as open peer review affect our view of science and the way in which we evaluate research results?
I am pinging the institutions and individuals listed below, which I believe could contribute greatly to making this an interesting and diverse panel. Please do let me me know (via blog or email to puschmann@gmail.com) if you are interested in contributing, or if you have suggestions for subtopics or speakers.
Note that these are just a few names that popped into my head spontaneously - there are many more.
I also realized this morning that one immensely interesting speaker on the changing forms of information and on how we share it, disseminate it and evaluate its usefulness would be JP Rangaswami. About 1,5 years ago, I read this fascinating post by JP about what he called “livebrarians”. The post, in which he sketched out differences between the Net and physical libraries, ignited a debate about what role information “professionals” (in other words, librarians) can play in a read-write environment where retrieval happens via keyword search and semantic information is annotated automatically or by amateurs. I particularly liked this quote: “my problem is I really think that any damned fool can be a librarian.” I fully agree. JP has also recently posted about Many Eyes, a project that I very much want to integrate into the discussion.
One might think that open access publishing is a very specific issue, relevant only to academics and librarians, while what we generally call Web 2.0 is just a bundle of trendy buzzwords and an opportunity for tech companies to make money, and that the two issues have little to do with each other. But I believe that means not seeing the big picture. Ultimately, open access publishing is about making information accessible to anyone with an interest in a given area of research, because it is assumed that what can be created as a result of the information being free is worth more than what can be earned by selling it. Open access is to research what open source is to software and for that reason it should be every bit as relevant to companies.
The question smells of hyperbole, but it’s an idea that’s rather persistant for me. But let’s start at the beginning.
If you’re active in the Open Access community, you’ve probably read about nothing else in the last week: the Harvard Open Access resolution. In a nutshell, everything that’s published by members of the faculty will be made available on the Net for free, unless the author asks for an exemption. While some scholars might do this, it means that the bulk of what is published by researchers at Harvard will be Open Access from now on.
This is the first university-level open access mandate in the US, from the most prominent university in the US, and as many have noted, this is a huge step forward for open access to research. There are two aspects to the mandate: the familiar aspect directs faculty to supply Harvard copies of their papers to post; the more novel aspect stipulates that Harvard automatically get the rights to post their faculty papers for free. Harvard allows faculty members to exempt papers from these requirements, but it must be done in writing, with reason, separately for each paper that a faculty member wants to exempt.
I find this approach ingenious. As people maintaining institutional repositories have come to know, there are two main barriers to distributing one’s faculty’s work in one’s repository: getting hold of the work, and getting the right to publish the work. The first of these can be handled in various ways; whether the faculty, the departmental administrators, or the librarians get the content to the right place, it’s all purely a matter of local negotiation. But that’s not the case with rights. By the time we repository maintainers get content from authors, the authors have often signed their rights away to the journals that published the papers. The publishers have effectively called dibs on redistribution rights, and we can’t distribute unless they agree to it. A faculty member that may want to have us distribute her work too may no longer have the power to let us– she’s already signed that right away to someone else.
In a sense, the question of how Open Access can be facilitated has always been discussed by the wrong people. No level of activism could ever solve the key problem: that the majority of researchers do not truly care about how their work is distributed - and why should they? Harvard’s decision has the potential to make what seemed a complicated situation rather simple:
to get a job at a prestigious university, a scholar must sign an agreement to publish OA
when the scholar has an article ready for publication, he forwards it to the librarian who manages the institution’s repository (or to an admin who takes care of that)
anything that ends up in the repository is globally available via Google Scholar and similar services
keyword searches combined with a knowledge of the disciplinary landscape (i.e. I know that X, Y and Z have published things relevant to my research before - what about their other work?) are how researchers find relevant sources
What does this mean for traditional peer-review and the future of scientific journals?
I think that, quite plausibly, this could be the beginning of the end for both of these institutions.
Think about it. Right now, the idea of quality control via commentary and evaluation of a piece of research is married with making it available. An article is only published after having been reviewed, because that is how the print process works. But once digital availability is guaranteed regardless of quality, this no longer makes any sense: evaluation and discussion of a paper and it’s availability are two separate issues. Journal publishers will no longer have to fuss around with technical issues if publication, storage and archiving are handled through their institution’s repository. Those functions will be entirely where should have been in the first place: with the libraries. Repositories will replace journals as the ‘place’ where articles are stored - the exciting question is what will replace them as the place where they are discussed and evaluated. It’s hard not to see the immense potential for open peer review and moderated discussions. And once papers truly live on the Net (i.e. are hypertext and freely accessible) it is only logical that they will be linked and crossreferenced in the same way that blogs are.
I know that there are skeptics who believe that this will have a negative impact on the quality of published research. But that mistakes the Internet for a browsable medium, for a resource that you can ever look at in its entirety. It no longer makes any sense that only what has been deemed worthy should be principally available. What is truly significant scientifically will be recognized by peers and separated from what is of lesser relevance - as it has been the case. But no longer will availability and quality be two ends of the same equation.
As you can probably tell by the long pauses in between posts, I am still not quite back to my normal blogging routine, but thankfully things are picking up little by little. Last week I held two presentations, one at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (concerned with the eLanguage project) and another at the University of Paderborn (about using the Web for linguistic research). Oh, and I can announce with some degree of pride that I have published my first peer-reviewed article (in First Monday, together with Peter Reimer) which is also related to eLanguage.
danah boyd recently posted a brilliant piece about why she’s not ready for the academic job market. My main reason for finding it brilliant is that much of what she says is exactly what I have on my mind these days - I also hope to complete my PhD next year, have the burning desire to do more research and fear being tied down in the long, grueling and bureaucratic process that is tenure track. Says danah:
I have been watching friends go through the tenure process and it makes me sick. There’s no room for innovation, for playing outside of the rules. You have 7 years to publish X articles in the *right* journals in the *right* way. My favorite phrase associated with this is “Least Publishable Unit.” In other words, what’s the minimum contribution you can make to get a good publication out of it. I don’t write like that and I don’t want to. I also think that most of the “respected” journals are so locked down as to be inaccessible to broader audiences. I want to be an academic, not a hermit. I believe that academia is an institution built on knowledge creation AND dissemination. My goal is to write for public audiences, to make knowledge palatable and interesting and accessible. I want to contribute big ideas that will make a difference, and to leave the mini-contributions for my blog.
Things are different in many ways on this side of the pond, but not necessarily any better. On the way to professorship we have the Habilitation which is essentially Dissertation 2.0. Again you write a book (normally a longer one) and again you present and defend your findings, only this time before your entire Fakultät, which generally means that a lot of tenured professors from a number of different disciplines get to judge your work. Think someone from philosophy making a call about the work of somebody from Japanese or Asian studies and you have the right picture.
And then, as danah points out, there’s all the antediluvian ritual associated with publishing in academia.
There was a time, now strange and long gone to the wired and paperless of us, where getting something published also meant that it had won the approval of peers, or at least the approval of an institutional publisher willing to print a few copies. Those times are gone now - getting it out there no longer means that it as been approved, that people agree with it or that it’s good. And quite frankly, I don’t see the problem with that, because I’m a grown-up and in my field I can generally tell a good article from a bad one, peer-reviewed or not. I’m not saying that peer-review is not useful for separating the wheat from the chaff. But I believe that access is the most important thing and that writing for the “right” journals because that’s what your supposed to do is wrong when they exist in walled gardens that are only accessible to a select few. I will continue to self-publish because danah is spot on: academia is an institution built on knowledge creation AND dissemination.
Digital technology affects us in all areas of life by empowering the individual on an unprecedented level. That means that institutions and social conventions lose influence to a degree - we no longer depend on printing presses and the goodwill of entrenched institutions in quite the same way we used to. But while comparably there’s a lot of personal freedom in academia, there’s also a lot of pressure to fit in, because the quality of what you do is always judged by your peers. The dissertation is basically the initiation trial you have to go through, even more so in the U.S. than here, and for some it turns into a one-way street.
From the NYT article:
For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years.
Eight years. Jesus. If all goes well I’ll be done with my thesis a year from now. I doubt that my investigation into corporate blogging will change the world, but on the upside it should be concise, readable and not outdated by a decade.
It’s no longer cool - or even ok - to publish a web site in PDF to browsers and some other data via a WS-* type web service to others. Instead, once you forget about browsers being the only user agents, quite a bit of the web 2.0 developments seem very natural.
So the participative aspect of web 2.0 starts well before everyone creating content; it starts with not making restrictive assumptions about who and how people - or programs - will use your site. Let the web participate in reusing your content.
With much of the 2.0 hype coming from a non-technical direction theses days, it is easy to overlook that access is what greases the wheels of the social web. Web 1.0 basically treated every user the same and forgot who you were or what you had just done a moment ago each time you clicked on a link. Data and design were essentially inseparable and websites were conceptualized as real estate on the Net - the more you had, the better (this was the age in which Yahoo still wanted to be a portal). We now get that websites are not like real estate and that our content is not synonymous with our website. People will want to use your content in ways you haven’t anticipated and it hardly matters whether they use it “here” (on your site) or “there” (on a portable device, their own site etc). As Robert points out, Web 2.0 is about making up for technical mistakes that were made in the past and about losing the spatial metaphor that makes us see the Web as consisting of sites and pages.
It’s fascinating how blogs allow you to overhear conversations between people with similar interests, regardless of where they are and whether or not you know them. And then there’s the magic of following links, going from one blog to the next until you’ve forgotten how you even got to a certain place.
What I keep hearing is, how can we impact factorize open science. Well, the answer is, you can’t. Let’s stop trying to find some magic algorithm whereby a machine tells us what quality science is. What’s completely mad to me about this is that we already have processes to assess science quality. Every time you review a new student, every time you look at a grant proposal, heck, even on the infamous tenure committees and research assessments, a group of humans looks at a portfolio of existing or proposed work, and decides whether it is good enough.
I guess because the ways we find and retrieve information have changed drastically, we also expect quality assessment to become automated at some point. One could argue that it already has in other contexts with things like PageRank, though of course that’s popularity being ranked, not quality (the two seem to converge to some extent when it comes to web search).
Regarding terminology (”Open Science”, “Open Research” etc): like Bill, I could care less. Linguistically the Science-Humanities-Social Sciences split doesn’t map to languages other than English anyway. In German we say Wissenschaft (which is all of the above) and add a prefix (Naturwissenschaft for (Natural) Sciences, Geisteswissenschaft for Humanities and so forth). The other thing is where to situate many new disciplines in regards to these traditional categories. If, like me, you do natural language processing, social network analysis and genre studies more or less at once, does that belong to Science, SocSci or Humanities? I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. Human language is just one phenomenon that can be studied with a variety of methods and I won’t wait for disciplinary delineations to catch up. We should call it Open Science and just broaden the semantic range of the word science a bit. Words do, on occasion, change their meanings.
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