Beyond the PDF: New modes of dissemination

Experiments from PLOSTheo Bloom, Editorial Director for Biology, PLOS

Amsterdam, March 2013

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Take-home / talking points / provocation

• Trying to fix a big interconnected system - it’s not easy or fast

• One change at a time brings people along• Steps are good if they’re in the right direction• Partner with others wherever it makes sense• Experiments are good: adapt to the results

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Do some science

Write a description

Share it with the world

Read/use other people’s work

Discuss ideas

The idealised cycle of research communication

Do some science

Write a description

Do more work as requested

Read / use other people’s work

Submit it to a journal

Resubmit

Publication

Be judged bypublications

Get grants

Get promoted

Discuss ideas

Rejection. Tryanother journal

The real-life cycle is more complicated

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5885/36.1.full.pdf

Do some science

Write a description

Do more work as requested

Read / use other people’s work Submit it to

a journal

Resubmit

Publication

Be judged bypublications

Get grants

Get promoted

Discuss ideas

Rejection. Tryanother journal

The real-life cycle has some big problems

Problem 2: publication venue as a measure of publication quality and/or impact

Problem 3: because of problem 2, repeat cycles at different journals; publication is delayed

Problem 4: poor links from underlying data and methods to write-up

Problem 1: Access to what you want to read and (re) use

Problem 5:

Do some science

Write a description

Do more work as requested

Read / use other people’s work Submit it to

a journal

Resubmit

Publication

Be judged bypublications

Get grants

Get promoted

Discuss ideas

Rejection. Tryanother journal

The real-life cycle has some big problems

Problem 2: publication venue as a measure of publication quality and/or impact

Problem 3: because of problem 2, repeat cycles at different journals; publication is delayed

Problem 1: Access to what you want to read and (re) use

Problem 4: poor links from underlying data and methods to write-up

All subject areas; not assessing ‘impact’

Problem 5:

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We haven’t ‘solved’ problems 1-3

• Beyond CC-BY: explore better ways to do openness (metadata, data, reusability); and accessibility

• Beyond ALMs: make altmetrics optimally useful and encourage wider adoption

• Beyond PLOS ONE: more formal experiments with peer review this year – increase openness; structure reviewer information; portable reviews?

… We have made some progress in these areas

Do some science

Write a description

Problem 4: poor links from underlying data and methods to write-up

Do some science

Write a description

Store some of the data somewhere…

Do some science

Write a narrative description that is

inextricably linked to the data and methods

Integrated collection of methods, results, data, metadata

Store all of the data somewhere useful and link to publication

Steps towards better data handling

Partnership with Dryad (www.datadryad.org)• Unstructured data ‘packages’ associated with published articles• Freely available - CC0• A unique identifier (DOI) for each package• Statistics for access• Seamless tying together of article and data

Partnership with figshare (www.figshare.org)• figshare widget displays Supporting Information files directly in the article • search, magnify, download singly or as a package

Planning in hand for ‘data papers’ (www.ploscompbiol.org)• Describes reusable dataset to support reuse• Publishes associated metadata • Ensures valuable data is actionable for reuse• Data accessible in a recognized, stable repository

What to do with ‘homeless’ data?

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Can we revolutionize speed? Problem 5:

Seeking Lessons in Swine Flu Fight

“Another problem is communication.

Officials and experts say they have learned a lot about human swine influenza. But relatively little of that information...has been reported and published. Some experts said researchers were waiting to publish in journals, which can take months or longer.”

New York Times, August 10th, 2009

Lawrence K. Altman, M.D.

PLOS Currents: Influenza - Inspiration

Authors may revise but can be published almost immediately post-review

Rapid technical and scope review

Content is peer-reviewed, citable, publicly archived, and included in PubMed

What comes out: flexible (familiar) format

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PLOS Currents as an experiment

• Swine flu epidemic faded away - then a new one started

• We said “submissions do not have to be full-length articles” – but what did we get?

• What use-cases make most sense for Currents?• Can we try harder with non-traditional article formats?

– Single findings– Negative results– Replications– Methods and protocols

• Publish all results with as little delay as possible

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Back to issue 1: Access vs. accessibility

• Readable by machines as well as people• Intelligible

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Where do people go for information?

• open review via wiki • PLoS Comput Biol article “version of record”• A high-quality Wikipedia article that can be

edited and updated

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Take-home / talking points

• Trying to fix a big interconnected system - it’s not easy or fast

• One change at a time brings people along• Steps are good if they’re in the right direction• Partner with others wherever it makes sense• Experiments are good: adapt to the results• We need to work with real people – authors,

readers – as well as with machines

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tbloom@plos.org

Open Access