what's wrong with scholarly publishing today?
DESCRIPTION
Quick walk over the main issues of contention in the current scientific publishing system.TRANSCRIPT
Björn Brembs, Freie Universität Berlin
How much does it cost to subscribe to 24,000 journals?
Serial & Monograph Costs, 1986-2002
North American research libraries
ARL Statistics
Ray English
Chemistry $3,254Physics 1,756Astronomy 2,850Engineering 1,548Geology 1,724Biology 1,323Math & Computer Sci 1,278Zoology 1,259Botany 1,238Health Sciences 1,132
Library Journal Periodical Price Survey, April 2006
Ray English
People produce your product for youThey check it for qualityThey’re even kind enough to give you their intellectual propertyYou polish it up and distribute it And you charge those same people handsomely to make their product available back to them They think they must have your product, even though they created it, so you’re free to raise prices
What a magnificent ship! What makes it go?
Cartoon by Rowland B. Wilson
Request increased budgetsRequest increased budgetsCut subscriptionsCut subscriptionsReduce monograph purchasesReduce monograph purchasesCut subscriptions and reduce monographsCut subscriptions and reduce monographsCollective purchase of electronic journalsCollective purchase of electronic journalsRely on document delivery or ILLRely on document delivery or ILL
Ray English
Ray English
David Nicholas
lot worse worse same better much better0
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Access: now vs 5 years ago
Substantial portion isfunded by taxpayerssupported publiclycreated in non-profit sector
Journal literature is freely given away by authors
But journal publishing is largely under corporate controlA public good in private hands
Ray English
“By ‘open access’ to this literature [i.e. peer-reviewed journal articles], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.” (Budapest Open Access Initiative, www.soros.org/openaccess/ .)
ROARDOAJRoMEO
First route : authors deposit copy of pre-print or post-print in an “institutional repository” or other open web-site
Over 600 open repositories already established world-wide
Second route : authors publish in peer-reviewed journals funded by publication charges rather than by library subscriptions
Over 1400 peer-reviewed open access journals now listed in the Lund Directory of Open Access Journals www.doaj.org
Open access enables more people to read research reportsMore readers lead to greater use and exploitation of research results (including higher numbers of citations), facilitating the funding of further researchGreater use of research results leads to more public awareness of the value of scientific researchMore public awareness leads to a higher political profile for academic researchRepositories help university administrators to keep a record of university research reports
Frederick Friend
(“Online or invisible?”, Steve Lawrence in Nature 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001.)
• Bits and bytes 1010100101000001101010 (not paper)• In pervasive cyberspace (not physical space)• Databases and/or Web identified by URIs: (not buildings)• Cost of distribution fallen by orders of magnitude• Read and indexed by machines like Googlebot et al (not just humans)• Increasingly public, available to everyone via Open-Access publishing (less
private, less restrictive copyright)• Everything is great?
Alexander Griekspoorwww.mekentosj.com
Duncan Hull
www.scopus.com
www.pubmed.gov
http://ukpmc.ac.uk
isiknowledge.com
scholar.google.com
Duncan Hull
Isolation each discipline has its own data silo
Impersonal and unsociable “who the hell are you”?Where are “my” papers? (authored by me, or of interest to me)What are my friends and colleagues reading?What are the experts reading? What is popular this week / month / year ?
“Cold”: Identity of publications and authors is inadequateObsolete models of publication, not everything fits publication-sized holes
Micro-attributionMega-attributionDigital contributions (databases, software, wikis/blogs?)
Duncan Hull
How can I find anything?
1. http://pubmed.gov/18974831 2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/189748313. http://ukpmc.ac.uk/articlerender.cgi?accid=pmcA25688564. http://ukpmc.ac.uk/picrender.cgi?artid=1687256&blobtype=pdf 5. http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000204 6. http://www.dbkgroup.org/Papers/hull_defrost_ploscb08.pdf 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204
One paper, many URIs. Disambiguation algorithms rely on getting metadata for eachBig problem for libraries is these redundant duplicates
Matching can be done by Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and PubMed ID (PMID); these are frequently absent < 5% (Kevin Emamy, citeulike)
Duncan Hull
Or filter failure?
Publish or perish: number of publicationsWhere are you published?
~24,000 scholarly journals (~6,000 with IF)~2.5 million publications/year60-300 applicants per tenure-track position
Reading enough publications is impossible!
Thomson Reuters: Impact FactorScImago JournalRankEigenfactor
Publikationstätigkeit(vollständige Publikationsliste, darunter Originalarbeiten als Erstautor/in, Seniorautor/in, Impact-Punkte insgesamt und in den letzten 5 Jahren, darunter jeweils gesondert ausgewiesen als Erst- und Seniorautor/in, persönlicher Scientific Citations Index (SCI, h-Index nach Web of Science) über alle Arbeiten)
Publications:Complete list of publications, including original research papers as first author, senior author, impact points total and in the last 5 years, with marked first and last-authorships, personal Scientific Citations Index (SCI, h-Index according to web of science) for all publications.
As much as some may want metrics to go away entirely, that Genie is already out of the bottle and won‘t go back in.
Albert Einstein
Who knows what the IF is?Who uses the IF to pick a journal (rate a candidate, etc.)?Who knows how the IF is calculated and from what data?
50,000 employeesUS$600million profit/quarterThomson family owns 53%$30,000-120,000/year subscription rates
2006 and 20072008
IF=5Articles published in 06/07
were cited an average of 5 times in 08.
citations articles
Introduced in 1960’s by Eugene Garfield: ISI
Journal X IF 2008=
All citations from Thomsons Reuters journals in 2008 to papers in journal X
Number of citable articles published in journal X in 2006/7
NegotiableIrreproducibleNot mathematically sound
PLoS Medicine, IF 2-11 (8.4)Current Biology IF from 7 to 11 in 2003
Bought by Cell press in 2001
Rockefeller University Press buys their data from TRUp to 19% deviation from published recordsSecond dataset still not correct
Left-skewed distributionsWeak correlation of individual article citation rate with journal IF
www.mendeley.com
www.zotero.org
connotea.org
www.mekentosj.com
hubmed.org
Re-couple metadata that has be de-coupled from data
www.2collab.com
www.refworks.com
“iTunes for PDF files”
Where the work is publishedJournalRank
Citationsscholarly, hyperlinks, social bookmarks
Web usagePublisher platform; 3rd party locations
Expert ratingsF1000; Peer Reviewers; Ed Boards etc
Community rating & commentingDigging; Commenting; Rating etc
Peter Binfield
Media/blog coverageWhich sources are considered the most important?
Policy development?Who published it?
And where do they work? What did they publish before? How ‘impactful’ are they?
Who is talking about it?And what authority do they have?
Who is citing it ?And what authority do they have?
Peter Binfield
“Your article was published in a journal with
an Impact Factor of X”
Peter Binfield
Your article:Received X citations (de-duped from Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science)It was viewed X times, placing it in the top Y% of all articles in this journal/communityIt received X CommentsIt was bookmarked X times in Social Bookmarking sites.Experts in your community rated it as X, Y, Z.It was discussed on X ‘respected’ blogs It appeared in X, Y, Z International News media
Peter Binfield
Prestige of the publisher (if any). Prestige of commenters/usersPercentage of a document quoted in other documents. Raw links to the document. Valued linksObvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments etcLanguage in comments: positive, negative, clarified, reinterpreted. Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s). Significance of author's other work. Amount of author's participation in other valued projects.Reference network: the significance of all the texts cited.Length of time a document has existed. Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, etcTypes of tags assigned to itAuthority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.
Peter Binfield
Discuss…
No more publishers – libraries archive everythingSingle semantic, decentralized database of literature and dataPeer-review done by independent bodyLink typology for text/text, data/data and text/data links („citations“)Semantic Text/DataminingAll the metrics you (don‘t) want (but need)Tagging, bookmarking, etc.Unique contributor IDs with attribution/reputation system (teaching, reviewing, curating, blogging, etc.)Technically feasible today (almost)