Disruptions in a complex ecology: the future of scholarly communications

Michael Jubb, Research Information Network

Mike held an excellent breakout session and fit a lot into a relatively short space of time, hence the length of this post!  

What is purpose of scholarly communications?

It isn’t just about communications, it is about many other things and the system has a number of different purposes:

• Registering research findings, their timing, and persons responsible
• Reviewing and certifying the findings, making sure the work is not bogus via quality assessment and peer review etc.
• Disseminating new knowledge.
• Preserving  record of findings for the long term efficiency and effectiveness of research
• Rewarding researchers for their work

More recently, the Royal Society  wrote a report, Science as an Open Enterprise in which it reported that research should be communicated in ways to make it

• accessible
• intelligible, so people can understand it 
• assessable, making open to quality assessment by others.  Not just an assertion but the evidence on which it is based
• usable, as others should be able to use the results of the research

So, if those are the purposes, how is scholarly communication done? 

Answers from the audience included: articles, books and monographs, conferences, posters, websites, blogging and social medial. Broadly, the mechanisms for scholarly communication fall into two camps, oral and written.

Oral – lectures, seminars, conference presentations, teleconference etc

Written – theses, working papers, preprints, books, journal articles, wikis, emails etc.

There are some important distinctions between these different mechanisms.  The degree of openness or closed-ness can depend on the tool used.  Written forms can be open - a blog can be read by anyone who can find it, a book or article can be read by anyone who can buy it – but other forms of communications are more restricted.

The other distinction is the degree of quality assurance associated with the scholarly communication.  Blogs can come about by someone sending their thoughts out into the world, while other forms go through some pre-publishing quality assurance mechanism.

Who are the key players are in this ecosystem, and are their specific interests congruent?

Researchers are interested in career advancement, street cred by publishing good work, discover as readers, disseminate as authors.  As readers they want quick access to best research they can find.

Universities care about reputation building, making money  via attracting research grants and new students.

Funders- care about impact and the outcomes of the research.  They fund research in order to make an impact on the world at large or to be able to monetize date (eg pharmas), so there is a big interest in maximising dissemination and impact of high quality research, with a specific emphasis on efficiency in the scholarly system.

Publishers – are interested in generating revenue, building reputations, attracting authors and maximising dissemination of high quality research.

Learned societies – these share lots of interest with the other stakeholders, but also have their own interests as publishers and /or supporters of researchers.

As can be seen, these stakeholders don’t share exactly the same interests, so it not surprising there are some tensions in the ecology.  Each player needs the others but don’t all sing from the same hymn sheet.

The research landscape: funders and do-ers

A report prepared by Elsevier showed that approximately £27bn was invested in research in the UK in 2011.  The biggest proportion of this came from business enterprise (c 50%), with government next (c30%) and funding from other research charities and overseas funding last (25%).

But who did the research? The biggest sector was business enterprise (c64%), followed by higher education (26%) and with under 10% undertaken by government.

It is important to recognise that the research funded by government and charities that is done in higher education, is open, whereas most of the research and development undertaken in the UK – business enterprise – doesn’t get into the standard kind of scholarly communication mechanisms.  

International differences between funding sources

How research is funded differs widely by country.  In Japan an overwhelming proportion of funding comes from business enterprise, whereas in the UK a much lower proportion of research is funded by business, with a higher proportion being funded by government.  The UK is something of an outlier in terms of how research is funded across major research nations.

In terms of where research is done, Japan sees the majority of research being done in the corporate sector.  The UK shows less corporate research being done, but is far less of an outlier.

Research is an increasingly collaborative enterprise

Over the last few years, the UK and Germany show rises of up to 50% of the number of articles involving researchers from other countries.  This is very different from China, which stands at about 15% at the moment, or the US which has much lower levels of international collaboration in comparison with the UK or Germany.

The number of articles with single authors is also decreasing.  In the UK 15% of articles have single authors and in Germany, only 10%.

So different players have different interests, and now involve international players all with different interests. 

The big challenge is the extent to which research is bound to higher volumes of data compared with 20 years ago.  It might be simple to present findings and data on which it is based within an article, when using a small number of data points; you can’t do the same with 6 million data points. 

How do you present this in prose along with the vast increase in volumes of data and analytical tools used to analyse data (software, tools workflows etc)?  This will be one of the essential challenges over the next 10 years.

Some stats on the scholarly communication ecosystem

Number of scholarly publishers in the world: c 2k

Number of journals: c 28k (10k in WoK, 18k in SCOPUS)

Number of articles published per year: c 2M

An STM report prepared last year by Mark Ware showed the following:

Revenues by geographic territory

·         52% US

·         32% EMEA

·         12% APAC

·         4% other

Revenues by source

·         70+% library subscription

·         16% corporate

·         4% adverts

·         3% memberships

·         4%other

So if you join subscriptions from libraries and corporate libraries, you are looking at over 90% of revenue coming from that source, with relatively small amounts coming from other areas.  A few years ago, memberships would have been a higher proportion, which shows a significant change in the landscape.

Quality assurance and peer review

Many stakeholders are involved in quality assurance: researchers as peer reviewers, Editors and Editorial boards, publishing staff.   Broadly the types of review are:

• single blind, where the referee knows the identity of the author
• double blind, where neither side knows who the other is (the norm for humanities)
• open, when both sides know who each are

There are a number of issues with peer review, including:

• fairness and bias
• delays
• Inefficiency due to repeat submissions and reviews
• data and reproducibility making it harder for reviewers to assess the work
• overload – too many articles! Some publishers report difficulties in finding reviewers

Mike also listed some other ways of reviewing work, including:

• soundness not significance (eg PLOS1)
• cascade (pass article from one journal to another within a single publisher’s portfolio)
• portable (pass article from one journal to another, across to a different publisher)
• open and iterative (done in the open on a journal platform once an article is submitted)
• post publication peer review (comments and ratings alongside articles)

 Open Access routes (with uptake)

• fully OA with apc (5.5%, but 9% for UK)
• fully OA with no apc (4.2%)
• hybrid (0.5%, but 3-4% for UK)
• delayed free access journals (1%)
• repository pre-print (6.4%)
• repository accepted ms (5%)

 

Balancing the ecosystem

In the last part of his talk, Mike referred back to the original list of key players, stating that there are many other players in this ecosystem that are important to its maintenance, including: subscription agents and intermediaries, library systems, reference management services, OA infrastructure, Metadata standards, text and data mining etc. 

All these elements are becoming increasingly important – it is a far more complex world. 

The big challenge is how to sustain that world with continuing flow of innovation on one side, and sustaining ecology on the other side.

In closing, Mike asked if articles are not the future of scholarly communications, what is the future for the journal?

The future of scholarly communication

David De Roure, University of Oxford, Oxford e-Research Centre

This morning on the opening day of UKSG 2014 David De Roure presented his view on the future of scholarly communication, looking at the shift in scholarship, end of the article, research objects and social machines.

The full slides are on http://www.slideshare.net/davidderoure/future-of-scholarly-communications, here is a summary of what I found most interesting:

Social media:

People doing completely new things with social media. New social processes – citizen reporting. 

Guardian reading the riots project (http://www.theguardian.com/uk/series/reading-the-riots) about the Summer 2011 riots. Examples of rumours spread on Twitter before being confirmed or Denied; London eye on Fire, rioters attack London Zoo and animals on the loose

Information now interdisciplinary and "in the wild" - "in it" versus "on it", significant methodological shift

End of the article guy: 

8 points for why article has failed:

1. No longer possible to include evidence in the paper – Container failure
2. No longer possible to reconstruct a scientific experiment based on the paper alone
3. Writing for increasingly specialist audiences restricted essential multi-disciplinary re-use
4.  Research records needed to be readable by computer to support automation and curation 
5. Single authorship gave way to casts of thousands
6. Quality control models scaled poorly with increasing volume
7. Alternative reporting  necessary for compliance with regulations
8. Research funders frustrated by inefficiencies in scholarly communication - Outputs need to be  discoverable and reusable

myExperiment and Research Objects:

Isn't just about the data it is what you do with it – Methods are important, software, protocols etc. Need to look at software as well as data to get complete picture.

myExperiment (http://www.myexperiment.org/) is a tool to allow scientists to share workflows. Can associate other content with e.g. PDF and PPTs to create packs.

Research Objects (http://www.researchobject.org/) - Enabling reproducible, transparent research.

The R Dimensions - Research Objects facilitate research this is reproducible repeatable, replicable, reusable, referenceable, retrievable, reviewable, replayable, re-interpretable, reprocessable, recomposable, reconstrutable, repurposable, reliable, respectable, reputable, revealable, recoverable, restorable, reparable, refreshable (See pic.twitter.com/2c9pxZp1gv for the photo)

Social machines:

Tim Berners-Lee talks about social machines as "...processes in which people do the creative work and the machine does the administration.." 

Wikipedia classic example – etiquette and protocol has developed over time and socially constituted

Every hashtag on Twitter can be considered social machine

Final thoughts/questions:

1. Shifts in scholarship -A "turn" or ongoing transformation?
2. End of the article - Don't retrofit digital, think post-digital
3. Research Objects -Inevitable with automation. How do we cite them? how are they curated?
4. Social Machines - Humans in the loop, empowered. Can you view your projects as social machines?

Hours to go until the 2014 conference starts.  Check back for posts regularly.

We'll tweet from @uksg with #uksglive when a new post appears.

Josh Harding's 'The Student Information Relationship' - Blogged by Stephanie Robinson, BL

A presentation which sparked a lot of discussion at this year’s UKSG was ‘ The Student Information Relationship’ presented by Joshua Harding.  Josh is a second year postgraduate student at Warwick University studying medicine.  Prior to this Josh studied Physiology at the University of Newcastle.

What struck me about Josh’s presentation was how much student experience and expectations have changed in such a short amount of time.  To illustrate this Josh showed a photograph of the output of his studies at Newcastle which was a pile of 11 hefty print text books and an equally tall pile of A4 ring binders full of printed, handwritten or annotated notes.  Josh said that this pile of analogue items had all the answers he needed to successfully complete his course, but that they were just too big and heavy to carry around and they weren’t easily searchable. 

Josh’s solution to this problem was to switch to digital – he bought an iPad .  Three years on Josh considers himself to be a completely paperless student, he even goes as far as to say that everything he needs to study medicine is on his iPad and that the only supplementary source of information he needs is the internet.  Josh gets slides from lectures on his ipad, has a textbook library on his iPad and organises his notes into notebooks on his ipad.  What I did find interesting was that Josh still makes notes in an analogue way – he uses an app (Notability) to handwrite his notes directly onto his ipad as he thinks this a better way to learn than typing – an interesting mix of digital and analogue.

The benefits of having all his content digitally on one device are that Josh can easily and quickly search across all of his content and resources, he can seamlessly switch between note taking, resource apps and electronic text books all of which improves his efficiency, reducing stress and increasing satisfaction.  As Josh states tablet computing provides students with a powerful personalised education tool  and he predicts that in as little as 18 months tablets will be adopted as the norm for students.  Josh expects that as a minimum students will demand access to their most used resources digitally and that will want enhanced education resources. 

Josh who is currently on an orthopaedics and anaesthetics clinical rotation in a hospital continues to make full use of his iPad.  He uses the calendar as a diary, the Notability app to take patient history, he uses his iPad to enable him to answer questions with confidence, he is able to refresh his memory on procedures he hasn’t seen or done in a while which ultimately enables him to perform with confidence.  When Josh comes across drugs he isn’t familiar with he uses apps like the British National Formulary app (BNF) to find them providing him with instant information. 

A good example Josh used to demonstrate his use of apps was that he had been asked to scrub in on a  radical neck dissection, he hadn’t studied head and neck anatomy for a while, but was able to use resource apps on his iPad, in this case Pocket Body, to immediately recap this bringing the information to the forefront of his mind and providing anchor points for new knowledge.

Back at university Josh uses his iPad to download lecture slides before his lectures and he then exports them into notability where he is able to annotate the lectures and record the speaker.  During the lecture he is able to consult resources like electronic text books, resource apps, old notes and the internet which allows him to produce a near complete set of notes as he goes along, unlike other students without tablets who after the lecture often have to fill in gaps in their notes from analogue sources.  

Josh then goes on to talk about interactive, multimedia eBooks from Inkling which allow the purchase of individual chapters.  He described these ebooks as the future of the text book and believes we are reaching the end of the paper text book, although he does concede that the nails aren’t quite in the coffin of the print text book just yet.

So if using a tablet is so beneficial to the student why aren’t all students digital students?  Josh argues that this is for two reasons; awareness and costs.  Josh hinted that the role of the Librarian should be changing and that we should consider using student advisors who are familiar with the new ways of learning and how they link together to demonstrate the full capabilities of tablet devices to new students.  In relation to costs aside from the obvious upfront cost of the tablet the costs of eBooks and subscriptions to educational apps all of which have to be paid by the student are high.  There is also the problem of fragmentation, there are multiple eBook formats often these restrict use, multiple eBook Platforms, multiple third party DRM apps all of which add to the costs and frustrations of the end user.

In his ideal world, and Josh admits himself that this is probably a pipedream, the interactive textbook would be as standard in a single DRM free format on a universal platform which can be viewed on any device and can be loanable, like a print textbook can be from a library and that there would be institutional subscriptions to important apps.  He also suggests that interactive textbooks of the future should include analytics so that they can study the student as they study informing them of their progress adapting content to the user – in effect becoming a personal study buddy. 

I personally don’t think this should be a pipedream, but I do agree with Josh when he says that because publishers and libraries have to plan so far in advance basing decisions on evidence, they are not currently able to deal with the rapidly changing demands of the digital student.  A prime example of this was in the Q&A session at the end when Josh described a student who had a print copy of a text book but who had broken the spine and manually scanned each page to create a digital copy of it which they could use restriction free on their tablet – if the textbook had been available in a DRM free format and at a cheaper price or if individual chapters had been available to purchase, or if the textbook was loanable or even rentable in a suitable electronic format then Josh suggested that students would happily pay for them rather than taking these seemingly extreme measures. 

  

Josh’s use of his iPad is impressive, others at the conference later described Josh as a ‘super user’, so I should say that the impression I got from delegates from the University Libraries was that Josh’s use of his tablet isn’t typical…….. yet.  With more and more schools introducing tablet computers the demand for accessible digital resources from students is only going to grow.  Libraries and publishers need to take note of Josh and really think about the way users will want to access and interact with their content.   The big question Josh posed to the audience was ‘are you ready to meet this inevitable demand?’ I’m not convinced librarians or publishers are quite there yet.

So What Happened This Year at UKSG?

I posted this on the SAGE Connection blog and thought I'd share here also along with all of the other conference posts. 

Guest post by Bernie Folan, Head of Library Marketing in London.

Last week saw the annual UKSG conference take place in Bournemouth on England’s south coast. For those who may not be familiar with UKSG, more information can be found here. UKSG exists to connect the knowledge community and encourage the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication. It is the only organisation spanning the wide range of interests and activities across the scholarly information community of librarians, publishers, intermediaries and technology vendors.

This cross-industry focus enables a valuable forum for the exchange of ideas and healthy discussion around current themes. Working groups, projects and innovative initiatives have in the past sprung from these discussions. Counter and Project Transfer are two well-known examples.

There was a wealth of information to be absorbed via plenary sessions, breakout groups and lightning talks.  This short post highlights those themes that were to the fore, and of interest to us at SAGE in our efforts to disseminate teaching and research on a global scale.

Data

The value of data was a recurrent theme. Whether in talks about the importance of good data governance within publishing companies or the ORCID initiative (which is gathering pace with 107,000 researchers registered) the power of good data was evident.

Under this theme also sits Mendeley which calls itself “the best free way to manage your research”. Mendeley enables research to be organized, shared and discovered. News broke whilst at the conference that it had just been bought by Elsevier and time will tell what impact that makes. Mendeley has 2.3 million users and 90 million unique articles in user libraries in the cloud. It is growing by 69k users a month.

User behaviour and workflows

A really interesting session was lead by Joshua Harding, a graduate medical student who relies solely on his iPad for all aspects of his study – including note-taking (handwriting app), downloading lecture notes, reading eBooks (and annotating, highlighting sections), and even for taking patient histories during ward rounds. He describes himself as a “paperless student”.

Despite his success in losing the print, there are barriers. For example, he can access print copies for free but not all of the digital copies he needs. There is also variable quality. He wants to be able to buy eBooks from one universal store, view on one universal platform or borrow for free from his library. He cried out for digital textbooks to be both SMART and interactive. He feels that publishers have not yet scratched the surface on making the most of fully interactive textbooks. 

For instance, he’d like features that enable assessment whilst reading, and to be alerted to areas 
that he has not read sufficiently.

SAGE is currently exploring many options in the eBook arena to make our content as useful and accessible as we can. Joshua urged publishers to get ready; he explained that although many of his colleagues are not reliant on one device, future students will expect to work this way as they have grown up in the “on demand” generation.

Business models for acquiring content

In both sessions and meetings with customers we heard a lot about changing content acquisition models. Particularly prevalent were conversations about evidence-based eBook purchase (as opposed to eBook package purchase). This is where a librarian assesses which content is used from a large selection before committing to specific titles. Purchase is based on usage and automated. Many librarians are already using this model with aggregators and direct with other publishers. Will customers move away from collections completely? SAGE is working on developing models in response to discussions with customers.

Publisher-Librarian collaboration and dialogue

In a thought-provoking closing plenary by Scott Plutchak, the relationship between publishers and librarians was addressed. We were reminded that we share the same values and aims – we are on the same side and need to work together even if we don’t always agree. Plutchak urged us to reject caricatures that have been built up such as “publishers only care about the money; librarians are hopelessly, wilfully naïve; publishers want to lock information up; librarians don’t care about quality”. Recent discussions around budgets and Open Access are examples of where there have been clear “us and them” attitudes on display that do not help drive forward our shared goals.

He offered us some practical tips:

• Librarians: Cool it with the emotions. Attend some publisher conferences. Be educated by your knowledgeable faculty.  Buy a publisher a drink once in a while!

• Publishers: You are not great at telling your own story. Be more transparent. Be more open about your mission and your decision making. Sit in on some of the sessions at the library conferences you attend

Both publishers and librarians ultimately need to gain a deeper understanding of each other and a deeper knowledge of what each other do in order to work together effectively.

As we all expected, Open Access was the subject of the opening plenary, but I won’t address that topic here, keep your eyes on SAGE Connection for Lucy Robinson’s (Journal Publisher at SAGE) presentation slides on OA. I would say though it was a less of a hot topic than I expected. 

Much more was discussed from altmetrics to initiatives to help libraries better understand their content.  A wealth of other insights and information can be found at the following sources

• Conference Blog:  http://uksglive.blogspot.co.uk/
• Conference Presentations on Slideshare:http://www.slideshare.net/UKSG
• Sessions on YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/user/UKSGLIVE?feature=watch

On a personal note, this was my first year attending the conference as UKSG Marketing Officer and main committee member. Apart from 3 paid staff, UKSG is made up of volunteers drawn from one of the constituent groups it serves.

It was hugely satisfying to see all of the hard work and discussion coming together to form the biggest annual conference to date and, if early feedback is representative, one of the most popular. Planning for 2014 starts in June!