Science Library Pad

Web 2.0 from a publisher perspective, using 2Collab as an example

One of the big challenges for all of us developing Web 2.0 is finding out what the users actually want.  That's part of why libraries and publishers are taking various lab, web development group, developer network and contest approaches.  Another big challenge is trying to build a community around your tools.

Just a quick review of some of the online activities:

There are lots of library labs, and a few publisher initiatives, including Elsevier Labs, Elsevier Scopus Labs (accessible only to Scopus subscribers), Ingenta Labs, and Nature's Web Publishing group (I don't think it has a home page, but you can see some of their work on Nature Launch Pad).  In the sort of library-vendor space OCLC and Talis have developer networks.  I think some of the other library catalogue vendors may have developer spaces, but they are usually closed.

Looking at a few more Elsevier things specifically:

Elsevier has SciTopics, which is also on Twitter.

Elsevier also just announced the winner of their Grand Challenge, the Reflect project (if you follow my FriendFeed, you may see some familiar names in the winning team, like Lars Juhl Jensen and Michael Kuhn).

Which brings us to Elsevier's 2Collab.  I had a chance for an advance preview of 2Collab in late 2007.  It takes a somewhat different tack to other academic bookmarking tools, focusing a lot on group collaboration.  I had a chance to see Camelia Csora present about 2Collab as a research collaboration tool (PDF) at NISO Discovery Tools forum in 2008.

There are lots of challenges with these kinds of tools.  Can we integrate them into user workflows?  Can they understand bibliographic metadata, do lookups on DOIs, read COINS from source and embed COINS into their bookmarking pages?  Can we build standard APIs for these services?

Camelia has moved on to ebooks, and I see in my FriendFeed today that the new Product Manager for 2Collab, Michael Habib, will be presenting about 2Collab as a publisher collaboration tool

http://www.slideshare.net/habibmi/engaging-a-new-generation-of-authors-reviewers-readers-through-web-20

You can read more in his posting Engaging a New Generation of Authors, Editors, and Reviewers - Presentation for Boston Editors' Conference.

One of the big challenges in this area is getting people into the new network in order to collaborate - this is the issue that most of the "scientist social networks" have - there's no one there.  Even using Google Docs to collaborate tends not to scale very well, as you end up having to invite and reinvite groups of people to each new document.  FriendFeed as a collaboration space I think has a lot of advantages, in that it brings an immediate, individual benefit (mindcasting/lifecasting unification of web activity) as well as a critical mass of people, as well as lightweight group and discussion tools.

That's not to say you couldn't use 2Collab along with FriendFeed - and it occurs to me that one immediate step all the publishers (and other service providers) could take would be to work with FriendFeed to add their academic bookmarking services added as top level "import" sites.  Right now, despite a strong scientific user community, FF only has the non-academic sites in its list: 

• delicious
• Diigo
• Furl (which is now gone, bought by Diigo)
• Ma.gnolia
• Mister Wong
• StumbleUpon
• Twine
• はてな

The key point is it can no longer be either/or. It's not my site OR your site, it's all of our sites, interconnected. It's also/and.  I have to be able to go seamlessly from LibX to Zotero to Mendeley to Connotea to EndNote to 2Collab to Papers to FriendFeed and back again.  If Zotero has a great tool, I should be able to call it using an API from LibX.  Data can't be trapped at point of creation, it has to be able to flow around the web to be useful.

ideas for book publishing innovation in Canada & an unconference

I have to admit, when I was scanning through Boing Boing and saw "Six good technological ideas for improving publishing", that word "publishing" started me off with the tyranny of low expectations.  However (and those of you who know me will know I don't go in for false praise) I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Michael Tamblyn's entertaining presentation which has six great ideas, some of which are relevant outside the specific world of book publishing.

(Sorry, initially published as a blocked link - have to unflashblock this content - hazard of browser-editor interaction.)

I have to admit, this is my first time hearing of (or at least my first time paying attention to hearing about) BookNet Canada and this particular event, BookNet Canada TechForum '09.

To be honest, I think it starts a bit slow - Michael Tamblyn starts off talking about the recession - I recommend you skip ahead to about the 3 minute mark where he gets into the meat of his talk.

He calls for a number of things, and I don't want to steal his thunder, but some highlights include:

* publishers getting smarter about how they share their data online - BookNet has an initiative called BiblioShare - "BiblioShare is a service that allows Publishers to store their most recent ONIX files at a central server that can then be picked up by any aggregator that needs them."

* publishers getting better at XML workflows - he indicates O'Reilly's Start with XML as one place to begin

* publishers opening their organisations up to innovation, and embracing ideas from creative technologists (I like this terminology of "creative technologist" a lot)

* publishers experimenting and connecting - BookNet is supporting an unconference called BookCampToronto on June 6, 2009

The one area of mobilizing data he didn't really talk about was connecting publishers to libraries (he focused on the connection to booksellers).  I think there are lots of opportunties in the library space, particularly for sharing data.

I know we often give publishers a hard time for being resistant to innovation - this is a great example of an individual and an organisation that are leading with their ideas.

I have to say I found their site a bit confusing.  There is a blog which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed.  There is an RSS feed, but it appears to be for news items.  There are supposed to be slides at There are slides from the TechForum at

http://slides.booknetcanada.ca/

but I could never get it to load.  You can also see Michael Tamblyn's slides directly on SlideShare.  There's also the blip.tv channel, which has a few other talks on it so far.  The blog slice that is about the TechForum is also useful.  The tag was bnc09 if you want to dig around further.

The Scholarly Communication Problem

I arrived late to the JISC Libraries of the Future online video stream, so this may not be a full picture of the discussion, but what I heard was mainly the Scholarly Communication Problem.  This problem is extremely well known and I have heard it talked about--forgive me--endlessly, without (m)any solutions proposed.  It goes like this:

Universities / research organisations pay researchers.
Funders grant money to researchers.
Universities / research organisations give money to libraries.

So far so good.  Then a strange dance:
researchers submit work to publishers who perform several functions:

• they assemble the various files together (text, charts, figures etc.)
• they select notable papers
• they send them out for peer review and manage the review (e.g. ensuring comments are in on time)
• they edit the copy itself for clarity and do QA
• they apply necessary metadata, get a DOI etc.
• they do layout on the copy so it looks nice

They don't actually perform the peer review, this is done by the reseachers.

Then libraries and funders pay publishers for this bundle of services, despite the fact that one chunk (peer review) is performed by the researchers.  Funders may also pay extra for OA, or sometimes journals have direct fees for publishing at all.

The impact factor of publications lends a certain authority, and is then used in determining both individual and institutional "worthiness".  This necessity of publication drives what I believe the gentleman from Harvard called a "cocaine marketplace" - once you're hooked by publishers, they can keep raising and raising the prices.

Then funders and libraries may pay AGAIN, to have the researcher submit the document to the repository followed by what is essentially a mini-publishing workflow run by librarians - again assembling the files together, again doing QA, applying necessary metadata and perhaps assigning a handle.

So: organisations effectively pay researchers to research, to peer review, and to submit to journals,
and then pay the publishers to get their own research back.  They maybe pay researchers and a bunch of other people to do this in a mini-version again, paying to get their own research back, in their own repository.  So paying for the same research two or three times.

THIS PROBLEM IS WELL KNOWN

Talking about these over and over and over again does nothing to solve this problem.  In fact I think talking about this any more without providing concrete (preferably implemented) solutions should be banned.

To fix it you:
1) identify what services researchers could self-organise (or be organised by libraries) to perform, like peer review
2) identify what, if any services from publishers are still needed, and pay only for those
3) go directly to public OA publishing of the peer-reviewed manuscript
4) find a new way to measure the "worthiness" of individual researcher and organisation output

There are lots of people who have identified this issue, I can submit my thoughts from three years ago - June 21, 2006 - my article on peer review for Nature.

There are a small number of groups taking a "just do it" approach to solving this problem.  There need to be many more.  There's also a whole set of related issues, like how to you manage versions in this environment, how do you manage discoverability when content may be all over the place, and how do you think about "notability" when a document may be an ongoing dynamic collaboration, rather than a static final publication with a fixed set of authors.  And this is not even touching the issues of "data as publication".  There's plenty of work to be done.

elimination of whitespace to herald bold age of efficiency

Publishers have been analysing their tremendous success at making full-text machine unreadable through lack of semantic markup.  Their analysis indicates further efficiencies can be made by eliminating all white space in documents altogether, including between words.  Abstracts will be dramatically more compact, and overall this will lead to tremendous savings of paper and electrons - a bold new development for a greener scientific literature.

"Althoughthiswillmakeitmuchharderforpeopletoread,"aleadingpublisherstated,"wefeltthatpeoplemightaswellhavethe sameexperienceasmachines,intheinterestsofefficiencyandequality".

UPDATE: In case you can't tell from the date, the above was an attempt at April 1 humour.

Springer AuthorMapper

Springer has a site that displays a bunch of information for a search, including a map, a list of results, a keyword cloud, institutions and publication dates.  It also allows you to search for OA articles only, in the "show all options" search.

Shown is a screenshot of the top of the page for a search on 'akerman'.

http://authormapper.com/search.aspx?q=akerman

There's more information down the left hand side of the screen below the part I cut out.
The Download PDF link takes you to SpringerLink.
You'll probably have to click several layers down (several zoom levels) before clicking on a particular "pin" will give you a popup saying something like "x articles from y institutions" followed by an institution list.
The search results list doesn't change as you zoom in on the map.

Despite the name, you can also search by topic, or by combinations of criteria (an example given is Map migraine articles published by authors from the USA).  The default starting screen shows the locations of the last 100 articles published.

This is a great example of making your existing data work harder, as Lorcan says.
I don't know exactly how they're doing it (one could guess some reasonably straightforward term extraction).  There's not much info about how it works in their AuthorMapper blog.

via Twitter

tables of contents with RSS - ticTOCs

"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

# Find 11,396 scholarly journal Table of Contents (TOCs) from 413 publishers.
# View the latest TOC for each journal.
# Link to the full text of 290,590 articles (where institutional or personal subscription allows).

http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/

I assumed this would do three things:

1. keyword search against article titles
2. email alerts
3. provide OpenURLs and COINS for your link resolver and browser tools

It actually:

1. lets you search for journal titles and get the TOC for the journal
2. lets you build an OPML list of journal TOC RSS feeds

With the OPML you can at least get the info out on the web where you can do all the other stuff with it, but it seems a bit of a missed opportunity.

Incidentally this is free for anyone to use, you don't have to be in the UK or in higher education.

via my FriendFeed

crowdsourced travel magazine - Everywhere

Everywhere magazine looks like any other travel magazine - glossy photos of beautiful locales, written guides to particular locations.

But how it works behind the scenes is quite different:

1. See the world
2. Document your trip
3. Peer Review (yes, this is the terminology they use)
4. Final selection "Our editors curate each issue from the best of the best."
5. Publication

In other words, you contribute your travel photos and stories to the online community, and if they vote you up high enough, you get published in the print magazine (and get U$100 and a free subscription).  To extend Clay Shirky... here comes everybody, everywhere.

User-created content in a magazine... well I guess that isn't a total revolution, considering it's the model that Nature and other scientific journals have been using since their inception.  Still it's quite unusual to have this bridge between the online and the offline, and the results are far from "amateur".  Are there any lessons we can learn from this effort and apply to our online science services?  (To some extent PLoS ONE is using this model of "publish any good science online and then let people rate", without the offline magazine component.)

STM publishers imprisoned in their own walled gardens?

The latest Outsell Insight (about OA issues but itself, very much for-pay), by Daniel Pollock, has some rather controversial things to say about scientific communications.  He starts by discussing the controversy over Declan Butler's article "PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing", highlighting Timo Hannay's posting about the controversy.

The gist of Pollock's piece in my reading is that publishers may have to consider becoming (at most) solely peer-review services, with the resulting articles being in repositories, the benefit being that the articles can be discovered and mined openly.  A few snippets:

Much scholarly communication takes place outside the STM publishers' domain, via conferences, proceedings, data sets and so forth, none of which fit the process of the peer reviewed research article. Scientists have long (always?) been collaborative creatures - and the digital age means that scientists, and science itself, no longer need publishers to handle the distribution and sharing of information.

...

Perhaps funders are not advocating the open repository as part of some grievance towards STM publishers, but in order to create new ecosystem in which the next generation of R&D productivity tools can evolve.

...

Automated knowledge discovery processes require unfettered access to content.... And - to anticipate the common objection - don't think that harboring "the definitive version of the article" is necessary either! Text mining tools are increasingly capable of disambiguating multiple sources...

...

we issue a warning to the proponents of the peer-reviewed journal article: beware of overstating your value to the process of science! The longer its focus on its narrow part of the scholarly communications process continues, the more the STM publishing community will seem out of touch, and the more likely that - whether it charges for access or not - it will become a prisoner in its own walled garden.

Nature Publishing Group Sets the Cat Amongst the Pigeons of Open Access, But Maybe We're All Missing the Point - by Daniel Pollock, Vice President & Lead Analyst - London, UK - July 18, 2008

 

I'm afraid the above bits don't really give the full shape of his argument.  I think he makes some compelling points, but is I think overly optimistic on the attention and technology side of things.  Journals aggregate interesting science - many scientists still very much like a group of qualified editors and peer reviewers providing a filter on the deluge.   Secondly, while knowledge discovery requires unfettered access for machines to content, I don't see why that necessarily implies unfettered access for humans.  You can perfectly well have an API that lets machines mine full-text, while still putting up a paywall for humans.  As well, I think the versions issue is very challenging, and we are a long way from reliable automatic disambiguation and identification of authoritative copies.  Finally, many conference proceedings already are peer-reviewed, and we can certainly imagine peer review extending to other areas, such as data sets.

I do think that the idea of the imprimateur of peer review existing outside the journal package is an interesting one, it's one of the concepts I covered in my article "Technical solutions: Evolving peer review for the internet"

An article or blog entry submitted to, and passed by, a stand-alone peer review service might be recorded in a public registry, or be digitally signed as part of the certification process.

As well, I do think the point that publishers have to think more about (and provide services for) the overall system of scholarly communication is well-taken, and I think we already seen both Nature Publishing Group and Elsevier (amongst others) taking many strides in this area.

Trouble with Medical Journals?

Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian newsanchor, interviews Richard Smith, former BMJ editor, author of The Trouble with Medical Journals.

30 minute Windows Media video

http://www.cbc.ca/mrl3/8752/oneonone/20071124.wmv

Book info at

http://www.rsmpress.co.uk/bksmith.htm

Semantically-enriched search results coming from Yahoo

In an upcoming talk I will be continuing a theme I started at Allen Press, calling for more semantic enrichment of scientific information online (I am of course, only one of many making such calls).

It is therefore timely to see Yahoo offering an open platform for harvesting and returning semantically-enhanced search.

There was a pre-announcement on TechCrunch, followed by the official word on the Yahoo Search Blog

In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

Yahoo Search Blog - The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem - March 13, 2008

You can sign up for more information at

http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/open.html

So what would an appropriate set of semantic information be for a scientific article, what would your ideal search display include?  # of citations?  Impact Factor?  Chemical and gene sequences?  Price?  (Sometimes information wants to be expensive...)  How much can we fit into a couple of lines that will help to select one article over another in results?

UPDATE: And Yahoo is just one player in this space, as Paul Miller indicates in his posting Looking for a dominant Semantic Web search engine.

via Twitter mostly

Elsevier Patient Research beta

Elsevier has launched a beta pilot that supports patients and their family members looking for medical information; providing access to individual full text journal articles from selected Elsevier publications. The articles are delivered via email for a minimal handling fee of $4.95.

http://patient-research.elsevier.com/patientresearch/about

Permitted Uses

You may access in a given twenty-four hour period a reasonable number of Content items, and you may download and print such Content after it has been delivered to your e-mail address. Such access and use is for your own personal use, although you may also share and discuss such Content with family members and medical professionals involved in your medical care or the care of a family member. You can make further copies for such family members and medical professionals.

Prohibited Uses

Personal use does not include the use by researchers, instructors or students for research purposes or educational use.

http://patient-research.elsevier.com/patientresearch/terms

You can see the list of journals covered at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/patientresearch

There is a Facebook App, that provides a search box and also lists "popular articles".

It's not clear to me how you search without using the Facebook App.  There are some hits on various articles visible in Google.  The terms of service says

After ordering the article and confirmation of payment, we will e-mail the document to you typically within 2 hours, but no longer than 24 hours.

Facebook App seen via Carol Serroul.

your unique author-ity

There are many ways to generate lists of one's publications, Martin Fenner lists a few in

An easy online list of all your publications

Mention is made of both the Scopus author ID, and the Thomson ResearcherID.  This makes me wonder what ever happened to the Digital Author Identifier system in the Netherlands.

A Google search turns up

Digital Author Identification (DAI) is a unique national number assigned to every author who has been appointed to a position at a Dutch university or research institute or has some other relevant connection with one of these organisations. SURF and OCLC PICA have set up a link with the PICA thesaurus of personal names that is maintained and updated by the university libraries. One very important factor in this system is the link between the Metis research information system and the repository.

surffoundation.nl - Digital Author Identifier (DAI)

Searching also turns up a paper and running system for UAI_Sys

UAI_Sys is a pilot Java web application allowing each one author to register/update his/her own metadata content and request a unique identifier that s/he is going to retain and make use of for life. Apart from obtaining his/her unique author identifier (codenamed: UAI code), the author specifies the subset of his/her personal (meta)data that s/he wishes to become globally available to all interested parties, including variations of his/her name used in publications s/he has (co-)authored. The system supports the industrial standard interface for other applications to connect to and co-function with, over the Internet.

See UAI_Sys application and paper at DLIST.

Of course, this gets me thinking about Name Authorities and whether there's some way to get a worldwide name authority unique ID.  I discover that Lorcan of course has already written about this: Names, Names, Names - VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File)

UPDATE 2008-02-25: I also found a report from a Knowledge Exchange Institutional Repositories workshop - Author identification report (PDF, September 2007).

Ingenta - Publishing Technology Trends

In December 2007, Ingenta held the first event in their new Publishing Technology Trends seminar series.
Topics:

• "Authoritative? What's that? And who says?"
  Leigh Dodds, Chief Technology Officer, Ingenta
• "Beyond articles"
  Toby Green, Head of Publishing, OECD
• "Adding value to visitors"
  Paul Goad, Managing Director, TACODA
• "Keeping pace with online challenges"
  Randy Petway, VP, Publishing Technology
• "Key issues in the development of publishing"
  David Worlock, Chief Research Fellow, Outsell

See their posting (part of their eye to eye February 2008 newsletter) for more information and links to the presentations.

getting HEP to scholarly infrastructure

As an appropriate follow-on to my previous post thinking about domain-specific sites on the net, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN DG-elect, shows us what a High-Energy Physics (HEP) e-Infrastructure for Scientific Communication may look like:

1. Build a complete HEP information platform
2. Enable text- and data-mining applications
3. Demonstrate and deploy Web2.0 applications
4. Preservation and re-use of research data

www.scoap3.org/files/APE2008-Heuer.pdf

As you might expect from the URL, there is also some discussion of the SCOAP3 initiative.

Although there are of course aspects that are unique to the HEP community, there are also lots of ideas that are generally applicable to domain portals for other areas of science.

Previously:
June 11, 2007  IATUL 2007 - June 11 - Dr. Rüdiger Voss - Open Access - SCOAP3
June 11, 2007  OA and repositories : beyond green and gold - Jens Vigen - June 11 - IATUL 2007

Scholarship in the Digital Age - reviewed for Nature

My review of Christine L. Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet has been published in the January 24, 2008 issue of Nature

Nature 451, 401 (24 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451401a - Published online 23 January 2008 - Full Text - PDF (110K)

UPDATE 2008-01-24:

The article is subscribers-only, although it appears to me that, for the moment at least, the preview extract provided is actually the entire 700-word article.

I have permission from Nature to post my original, unedited author manuscript.

Download borgman_scholarly.pdf

The one clarification I would like to make on the original is that I struggled with a simple way to convey that this is intentionally not a technology-focussed book.  This language: "there is no mention of “wikis”, particular types of websites that provide the ability to collaboratively edit and share text, of which Wikipedia is the best-known example.  This is by intent, not omission." I later reconsidered, since I didn't want to even mildly speculate about author intent.  The wording is considerably clearer in the final version.  Anyway the gist of it is that you shouldn't go to this book looking for technology discussion or recommendations, it's simply not there.  Borgman takes more of a "history of science" approach, looking at a high level at what people do in science, not the technologies they use.  She recommends research directions and policy approaches, not technologies.

ENDUPDATE

There are also (currently just a couple) bookmarks to support the article at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/digitalagereview

For more around the general topic, you can see my blog category E-Science, and my Furl bookmarks on E-Science and Scholarly Communication.

This is a reference book, a textbook, so it was rather challenging to review, it doesn't have a strong narrative that you read.  Instead it provides a comprehensive look at the sociopolitical aspects of scholarly communication in an Internet environment, with copious citations.

Borgman's approach is useful because as technology people we can often lose sight of our users.  As I said in response to a question at IATUL 2007, we need to ensure that technologies we build will work in the real workflows of researchers.  You can build wonderful repositories and lovely tools, but if no one uses them, what was the point?

In case you're wondering about some of the language in the review, I was happy to have an excuse to use "invisible college" and it is a term that shows up in the book (I wonder if I could have gotten "unseen university" past the Nature editors).  Also Borgman places her discussion quite strongly within a framework of Open Science, which she defines on pages 35-36 of the book

The notion of "open science" arises early in Western thought... Open science has been subjected to rigorous economic analysis and found to meet the needs of modern, market-based societies.  As an economic framework, open science is based on the premise that scholarly information is a "public good." ...

The emphasis in e-Research on enhancing scholarship by improving access to information is an implicit endorsement of open science.

While not exactly bedtime reading, this book definitely finds a place on my reference shelf.  Whenever you're writing a proposal or a paper in the areas of scholarly communication, e-science and "scholarly infrastructure", this will be a good book to have at hand.

Borgman used it in her course IS 204 Electronic Publishing (PDF) and via LibraryThing I see it tagged as LIS 2670 (Digital Libraries), I'm guessing for Pitt.

You can access her book site via http://snipurl.com/BorgmanDigitalAge
It includes an extensive list of references, with clickable URLs.

ResearchBlogging.org

http://researchblogging.org/ is an aggregator that picks up posts (from registered blogs) that have BPR3 tagging to indicate it is a post about peer-reviewed research

via Bora

I think this is a great step in promoting peer-reviewed research on the web.

Previously:
August 09, 2007  the peer review logo

understanding academic copyright

through puppets

via David Flanders - Twitter

Code4Lib Journal 1

The first issue of the Code4Lib Journal is up.
There is an article about the NCSU CatalogWS API - Beyond OPAC 2.0: Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform.

I think it's great to have a library journal that can focus on more technical topics.

Previously:
November 06, 2007  NCSU CatalogWS API - DLF Fall Forum 2007

ELPUB 2008 in Toronto June 25-27: Open Scholarship

The CFP for ELPUB 2008 is out.

Scholarly communications, in particular scholarly publications, are undergoing tremendous changes. Researchers, universities, funding bodies, research libraries and publishers are responding in different ways, from active experimentation, adaptation, to strong resistance. The ELPUB 2008 conference will focus on key issues on the future of scholarly communications resulting from the intersection of semantic web technologies, the development of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and the sciences , and new dissemination channels and business models. We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of these communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of scholarly communications.

deadline is January 20, 2008

NRC Research Press launches updated site

<marketing-mode>
NRC RP has a new site (which if you know anything about the constraints of Canadian government CLF and official languages is an accomplishment in itself).  An explanation of the open access compliance of the journals is prominently featured in the bottom centre of the front page.  I find the site has more modern look.

http://pubs.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/home.html
</marketing-mode>

E-Science and libraries

As I said over a year and a half ago

A lot of science today is very computation and data intense.  I think there is a big role for academic libraries as custodians of data and research output.

Science Library Pad - the role of the academic library and librarian - January 13, 2006

Fortunately, there are lots of people thinking about the role of the library in relation to cyberinfrastructure, as well as e-research and publishing.

This month's D-Lib has a number of relevant articles and opinion pieces, including

Library Support for "Networked Science"
by Bonita Wilson
doi:10.1045/september2007-editorial

Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 1: A Cyberinfrastructure Primer for Librarians
Anna Gold, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
doi:10.1045/september2007-gold-pt1

Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 2: Libraries and the Data Challenge:  Roles and Actions for Libraries
Anna Gold, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
doi:10.1045/september2007-gold-pt2

The editorial by Bonita Wilson points to "The Dawn of Networked Science" in The Chronicle for Higher Education (which is not open to read, so no link for them).

I also recommend the August 2007 CTWatch Quarterly, which was on the topic "The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure".

A reminder that there will be an E-Science track in the upcoming OECD meeting on October 3, 2007.

For more information on this topic, you can see my E-Science category.

CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs approved

The CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs was recently approved by the CIHR Governing Council.  As a publicly-funded agency, CIHR has a fundamental interest in ensuring that research results are available to the widest possible audience and at the earliest possible opportunity in order to maximize the utility and impact of the research it funds.  This policy aims to increase the diffusion of research publications supported by CIHR, while respecting the freedom of researchers to publish where they deem their research will have its greatest impact. 

...

This policy applies to all grants awarded January 1, 2008 and onward, which have received funding in whole or in part from CIHR. While not required, researchers holding grants that were awarded prior to January 1, 2008 are encouraged to adhere to the requirements of this policy.

...

For now, CIHR has decided to limit this policy to peer-reviewed journal publications and publication-related biomedical research data, which is typically deposited into public databases as a condition of publication. CIHR is committed to improving access to research outputs and will explore broadening the policy to include research materials and other research data in the future.

...

• Grant recipients are now required to make every effort to ensure that their peer-reviewed publications are freely accessible through the Publisher's website (Option #1) or an online repository as soon as possible and in any event within six months of publication (Option #2).

• Under the second option, grant recipients must archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscripts immediately upon publication in a digital archive, such as PubMed Central or the grantees institutional repository. Publications must be freely accessible within six months of publication, where allowable and in accordance with publisher policies. Grant recipients may use the SHERPA/RoMEO database to locate summaries of publisher copyright policies. The SHERPA/RoMEO database will help grant recipients determine which journals allow authors to retain copyright and/or allow authors to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies. However, CIHR recommends confirming with editorial staff whether archiving the postprint immediately, and making it freely accessible within six months, is permissible.

• Grant recipients may also wish to submit their manuscripts to a journal that provides immediate open access to published articles (if a suitable journal exists). CIHR considers the cost of publishing in open access journals to be an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds.

Access to Research Outputs - Modified: 2007-09-04 - Accessed: 2007-09-04
Policy on Access to Research Outputs - September 2007

Disclosure: CISTI is far from a disinterested observer in this development, but as always, if you want any kind of statement about anything CISTI is doing, please contact CISTI Communications, not me.

Previously:
July 21, 2007  Globe and Mail on Open Access
November 29, 2006  CARL and SPARC respond positively to CIHR draft research access policy
October 13, 2006  Institutional Repositories - David Moorman SSHRC

Also see other postings in my Open Access category.

open science and the impact factory

Jean-Claude Bradley instigated a session in Second Life - SciFoo Lives On: Open Science.

Next week will be something like "Medicine 2.0".

You can see in the transcript that one part of SciFoo that definitely lived on was a discussion around Open Science and webliometrics, both definitions and how to handle impact.  It seems to me that we get tangled in endless debates about definitions.  I have proposed that the nodalpoint Open Science wiki page be used to come to a consensus definition, but in the meantime:

open science

opening your scientific activities up to public examination, making work available without it having gone through formal peer review

peer review

The process of a group of scientific peers assessing the quality of a submitted piece of scientific work, currently most commonly associated with gatekeeping into a scientific publication, wherein it may also involve aspects of improving both the scientific thinking used in the paper and the expression thereof.  There is no relationship between peer review and closed or open access.

open access

making a publication available without subscription fee, but possibly with usage limitations

free access

unfortunate term due to existing definition of open access, adding element of unrestricted usage and reuse (e.g. text mining)

impact factor

An imperfect measure of the scientific "importance" of an entire journal.  Misused to measure the quality of individual scientific output

(Marked up using HTML definition lists, which you have probably never heard of, which incidentally is why the Semantic Web will fail.)

Yes, there are many types of peer review in different disciplines, and yes, things are often considered published and citable without having gone through peer review, such as conference papers and presentations which often go through a sort of editorial board selection instead.

I know these definitions are far from perfect, but good lord, can we get to good enough and go beyond this debate?

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.

So if I may modestly propose, let's continue to do that, and no one other than journal publishers should ever look at impact factor numbers again.  Arise, qualitative assessment, begone quantitive nonsense.

There is still a place for technology, but it's not in providing some bogus seemly-quantitative quality measure.  It's in enabling us all to present our scientific portfolios online, or to use Euan's words, our "professional lifestreams".  And there is a real problem to be solved.  It starts with students and their scholarly output stuck in closed university systems.  Students move around.  Scientists move around.  Their work history should move with them, not be lost in some scholarly dark web, or frozen as some web page at their previous institution that they no longer can access.

The European e-Portfolio is one effort to address this for students.
Electronic Theses and Dissertations is another piece.
The next step is to have those integrate into some, shall we say, flow or... flux (sekrit inside Nature joke) of the rest of their scholarly activity when they graduate.  Bookmarks created, databases curated, papers reviewed, etc. etc.

That's the technology piece.

The other piece, however, cannot be solved with technology.

Find better ways for humans to review scholarly portfolios and make decisions based on them.  That's going to address this problem of evaluation far better than anything else.

SIDEBAR

And of course you can do some side bits with technology of course once you have all this info circulating around, like ranking relevance to help people find the best, most relevant work in the flood of science that is sloshing around.  Usage factor, other metrics, these may all help in recommending things to read.

END SIDEBAR

References

Richard Monastersky, "The Number That's Devouring Science", Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 52, Issue 8, Page A12 (2005)

The PLoS Medicine Editors, "The Impact Factor Game", PLoS Med 3(6): e291 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030291 (2006)

Peter A. Lawrence, "The Mismeasurement of Science". Current Biology, 17 (15), r583. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.014 (2007)

Bruno Granier, "Impact of research assessment on scientific publication in Earth Sciences" (PDF), a presentation at ICSTI June 2007 Public Conference on Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information

Richard Akerman, "Web tools for peer reviewers...and everyone" (PDF), a presentation at ICSTI June 2007 Public Conference on Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information

Corie Lok, "Scifoo: day 1; open science" (2007)

Alex Palazzo, "Scifoo - Day 2 - Science Communication" (2007)

Alex Palazzo, "Scifoo - Day 3 (well that was yesterday, but I just didn't have the time ...)" (2007)

Previously:
June 2007  Science Library Pad: ICSTI 2007 category

impact factor considered harmful

It is not so funny that, in the real world of science, dodgy evaluation criteria such as impact factors and citations are dominating minds, distorting behaviour and determining careers.

Modern science, particularly biomedicine, is being damaged by attempts to measure the quantity and quality of research. Scientists are ranked according to these measures, a ranking that impacts on funding of grants, competition for posts and promotion. The measures seemed, at first rather harmless, but, like cuckoos in a nest, they have grown into monsters that threaten science itself.

The Mismeasurement of Science. Current Biology, August 7, 2007: 17 (15), r583.
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.014 ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.014 )

via DC's goodscience

via nsaunders Google Starred links

UPDATE 2007-08-20: Also see new posting open science and the impact factory.

the peer review logo

In the session "Reinventing scientific publication (Web 2.0, 3.0, and their impact on science)" led by James Hendler at SciFoo, one of the items was an idea from Geoffrey Bilder, for publishers to provide a "peer review logo" that could be attached to (at this point I am interpreting based on my own understanding) e.g. blog postings, some sort of idea of a digital signature to indicate peer reviewed content.  (I know the list well since I'm afraid my major contribution to the evening, despite having thought about this topic a lot, was transcribing the list).

2) ID, logoing, review status tag, trust mechanisms
- other peer review status

I wonder if we should make a wiki where we list all of the grand (and not so grand) challenges of web science communication and discovery, and then people can pick off projects.  The SciFoo prototypes list is one angle on this.  Of course, in the perpetual-beta web world, it's probably faster to just create a wiki, than to try to start a discussion about whether one should be created.  It's in that "just do it" spirit that I'm pleased to find there is already a peer review logo initiative in the works, although the angle is to indicate that you're writing about a reviewed work, not that your work itself has been reviewed.  From Planet SciFoo:

Cognitive Daily - A better way for bloggers to identify peer-reviewed research, by Dave Munger

[we] have decided to work together to develop such an icon, along with a web site where we can link to bloggers who've pledged to use it following the guidelines we develop

via Bora Zivkovic, via Peter Murray-Rust

(it's strange and also good to be blogging now about people that I've finally met)

UPDATE: I do have a vague idea in a similar space, which would be a "repeatability counter".

As I have learned more about peer review, I have understood that it has many aspects, but preventing fraud is not one of them.  Peer review can help to create a paper that is well-written and has "reasonable" science, but it can't stop a determined fraudster.  (This isn't my insight, but comes from a presentation I saw by Andrew Adrian Mulligan of Elsevier - "Perceptions and Misperceptions - Attitudes to Peer Review".)  What does address fraud, and keep science progressing, is falsifiability: someone else does the experiment and sees if they get the same results.  Now I realise there are many different classes of results, but it's interesting that many of these are not publishable, and are maybe not captured in the current system:

• We tried to repeat the experiment, but it failed because we didn't have enough information on the protocol
• We tried to repeat the experiment, but it failed and we think the paper is in error
• We successfully repeated the experiment
• (probably more scenarios I haven't considered)

So I think it would be interesting to have a sort of "results linking service" where you would click and you would get links to all the people who had tried to reproduce the results, and indications of whether or not they succeeded.  We use citation count as a sort of proxy for this, but it's imperfect, not least of which because there is no semantic tagging of the citation so you don't know if it was cited for being correct or incorrect.  I think this kind of experiment linking might add a lot of value to Open Notebook Science and to protocols reporting (whether in the literature like Nature Protocols, or in a web system like myExperiment).  Otherwise I worry that the amount of raw information from a lab notebook makes it hard to extract a lot of value from it.

UPDATE: Christina in the comments rightly chides me on my loose use of "falsifiability".  Basically I'm trying to get at two aspects of testability: 1) is there enough information in the paper to test the author's claims?  2) What are the results of such a test?