key steps for online science publications - Council of Science Editors

My presentation for the session "Culture Shock: Managing the Change in Publishing" at Council of Science Editors 2013 Annual Meeting. I presented the theory of how publishers can adapt to the online environment, and Cameron MacDonald, Executive Director, Canadian Science Publishing (NRC Research Press) presented the practice, the specific steps that they have taken as part of the development of CSP as a private company. CSP provided the funding for me to attend the event.

Culture Shock: Managing the Change in Publishing from Richard Akerman

A few key points I conveyed:

• online offers a much richer communications environment than print; take advantage of channels such as video for abstracts or demonstration of complex methods
• online is not just about moving your print journal experience to a screen using PDF; you are missing out on the opportunity to transform your processes and leverage the power of machine processing if all you do is post PDFs
• being OF the web means adopting new ways of developing online (what is often called "agile web development") - discovery, alpha and beta - but this is really just bringing the scientific method to journal service development - hypothesis, first small experiment, larger experiment
• social media demands that you be authentic, no corporate boilerplate - and the progress of science can hugely benefit from humanizing and demythologizing the work you do - expose some of the challenges of your work, the human interactions, and you may create more entry points for young people curious about science
• fundamental to the journal as part of the scientific ecosystem is an emphasis on replication and retraction - realise that in the online environment we could leverage the power of the machines to automate and connect, for connecting replication (and non-replication) of papers into a coherent body of work, as well as for ensuring that retractions propagate throughout the entire system and are tracked in a standard way
• another key support for replication is ensuring that the data and code associated with an article are provided alongside it - and that you consistently apply this policy, and measure yourself
• as indicated on the slides, the American Economic Review has an excellent data & code policy, but they did not follow it for the 2010 quick release of the Reinhart-Rogoff paper

Twitter hashtag for the event was #cse2013 but there wasn't a lot of tweeting.