Encouraging more discussion about open science #rwa

I posed this question to people in an internal Elsevier forum. I wonder what kinds of responses I will get?

Concerning the recent Elsevier boycott from a number of scientists, a representative from Elsevier Science noted that they "need to do a better job of communicating" with their readers, subscribers, authors, librarians and other interested parties.

Michael Nielsen, author of Reinventing Discovery [Note, I will finish the book tonight], recently said that "we need positive actions as well, not just an agreement about what not to do! But what’s good about the boycott is that it has engaged lots of new people in serious discussion about better ways of doing and communicating science, and some of those people are taking action. That’s exactly what’s needed for open science to thrive." Open Science is coming. When Elsevier supports legislation like the RWA, that is not going to endear many researchers. My question is, what do you recommend Elsevier read to understand the cultural shift that is happening in open science?

Library thoughts derived from the book, Where good Ideas Come From

A couple of years ago, I was able to go to a presentation by Steven Berlin Johnson. (I remember the Berlin part of his middle name, because there are A LOT of Steve Johnsons out there.)  Anyway, he was at DU talking about his 2006 book, Everything Bad is good for You. That was way back on March 31, 2009 for a Bridges to the Future (video) event.  (He was also selling his 2009 book, The Invention of Air.) Just this year, he wrote Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.  This book also looked interesting, so I checked it out from Penrose.  In short, I was able to glean lots of great perspectives and insights that could be applicable to the library world.  Here are some:

Concerning open systems - "When one looks at innovation in nature and culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders." Page 22.

"Innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts--mechanical or conceptual--and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those combinations--by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges--will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration." Page 41.

"The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table." Page 42.

Concerning the supposed wisdom of the crowd vs. herd mentality - "This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they are connected to the network." Page 58.

Concerning browsing and serendipity - "But serendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you've made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked." Page 108-109.

Bill Gates from Microsoft used to take annual reading vacations.  He (and his successor Ray Ozzie) would "cultivate a stack of reading material--much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft--and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they've stockpiled." Page 112-113.

More on browsing and serendipity - "But it [browsing on the web] is much more of a mainstream pursuit than randomly exploring the library stacks, pulling down books because you like the binding, ever was.  This is the irony of the serendipity debate: the thing that is being mourned has actually gone from a fringe experience to the mainstream of the culture." Page 118.  I am not sure that I agree with this.  There is a bit of research that shows that browsing and serendipity was important in the print world of the library, too.  Here is one good article, final version is behind a paywall...

Concerning the market of ideas and intellectual property - "All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters--liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity, noise exaptation, emergent platforms--do best in open environments where ideas flow in unregulated channels.  In more controlled environments, where the natural movement of ideas is tightly restrained, they suffocate." Page 232. Yes, yes, yes.  Let's get scholarly research out from behind paywalls.

"Most academic research today is fourth-quadrant in its approach: new ideas are published with the deliberate goal of allowing other participants rerefine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond proper acknowledgement of their origin." Page 233.

Concerning walled information gardens - "Participants in the fourth-quadrant don't have those costs; they can concentrate on coming up with new ideas, not building fortresses around the old ones." Page 235.

"Whatever its politics, the fourth quadrant has been an extraordinary space of human creativity and insight.  Even without the economic rewards of artificial scarcity, fourth-quadrant environments have played an immensely important role in the nurturing and circulation of good ideas--now more than ever." Page 239.

Thomas Jefferson noted: "That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition...."  Johnson noted: "Ideas, Jefferson argues, have an almost gravitational attraction toward the fourth quadrant.  The natural state of ideas is flow and spillover and connection.  It is society that keeps them in chains." page 241.

Another good line concerning the Internet - "There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas." Page 243.

Overall, I liked the book.  I highly recommend it.

What should OA publishers work on next?

An OA publisher representative asked me. "What would you like to see ... publishers doing that they aren’t now to help promote growth of OA? Outside of supporting it more, obviously ;). Any specific steps you’d like to see us make?"

I responded with:

----------------------------------------------------------
Hi XXX,

Sorry it took me a while to respond… I’ve been thinking about how and what to write back.

1) I would like to see some more experiments in different peer-review systems. Other scientists have argued for reviews to take place after the article is published, similar to the Faculty of 1000. (But that system is extra review after the pre-publication peer reviewing is already done.) Why not make the post publication review the peer review? This way, the publications can make it out to the public faster.

Here are some good posts and reports concerning the convoluted peer review system we have now.

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/three-myths-about-scientific-peer-review/
Michael Nielsen has a great new book out. (Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science) Have you read this yet? It should be required reading at [Publisher name redacted]. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691148902

http://jasonpriem.org/2011/01/has-journal-article-commenting-failed/
Jason Priem does good work on alt.metrics for journals. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

http://futureofscipub.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/open-post-publication-peer-review-full-argument/
http://futureofscipub.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/open-post-publication-peer-review/
I am not sure who does this blog, but it seems very well thought out.

http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=379
PEER REVIEW IN ACADEMIC PROMOTION AND PUBLISHING: ITS MEANING, LOCUS, AND FUTURE.by Dr. Diane Harley and Sophia Krzys Acord. We had Diane Harley come to our campus last year, and here is her presentation. See the third video down, http://library.du.edu/penrosepen/videos-from-the-provost-conference

There are lots of other good writers and scientists who would like to see faster publication through different arrangements of peer review.

2) Could you get my faculty to understand all of the different models and systems of scholarly communication out there? Get the university’s administrators to modify the tenure and promotion system to encourage more openness? (Yeah, this is a tough one.)

Joe

Presentation on "Open Access: Like free kittens, not free beer"

Open Access: Like free kittens, not free beer

View more presentations from Joseph Kraus

This particular presentation is CC BY-SA 2.5 to match the image license.

Another great video of Heather Joseph - "Setting the Default to Open"

"Setting the Default to Open: Using Research to Advance the Public Good"
www.bigideasfest.org
License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

My thoughts on Open Access

It is now near the end of Open Access Week, and I want to get some thoughts down in electrons.

I went to a presentation by Dr. Keith Seitter from the American Meteorological Society (AMS, not to be confused with the American Mathematical Society...), Wim van der Stelt from Springer, and Heath Joseph from SPARC/ARL speak at the UCAR facility up in Boulder on Weds the 20th.

I was struck by the fact that the AMS revealed how much revenue they get from publishing their journals, and that they take in about 10% "profit" to help support some of the other activities in the society. Pretty much, the publishing is the only thing that brings in revenue, so they have to use some of that money to support those other activities. I think the amount of revenue is on the order of $8 Million, but don't quote me on that. They do have a fully OA journal, and many/most/all of their journals where they provide free backfile access. Here are their OA policies, from Sherpa Romeo.

Author's Pre-print:	author can archive pre-print (ie pre-refereeing)
Author's Post-print:	author can archive post-print (ie final draft post-refereeing)
Publisher's Version/PDF:	author can archive publisher's version/PDF
General Conditions:	[A bunch of conditions are listed...]

In short, they are in favor of Open Access, but they want to see a smooth and balanced transition to OA so the society can survive.

Wim from Springer approached the topic of OA from a commercial standpoint. Most of what he talked about was their commercial author-pays model of OA. They own and manage the BioMed Central OA journals. I applaud them for venturing into OA, but I think they are too tied to the author-pays model. There are many other financial mechanisms for supporting OA.

In the far future (maybe 10-25 years out), I see academics and scholars taking back publishing from the commercial realm. Someone will invent a system where peer-review can be done in a wiki or blog-like fashion, and in a way that displays who commented on what or who modified what. These systems exist now, but there isn't very much uptake. A lot of the scholars are slow to use these new systems because there is a great deal of inertia that makes it difficult to change course. Faculty want to publish in Nature or Science (Note: they do allow for various forms of OA, but they are not Gold OA journals.) or Whatever Journal that has the highest supposed impact. Once faculty begin to realize that they can have a greater impact by publishing in OA sources, the name of the journal will not matter as much. The names of the authors with high prestige will draw in the readers regardless of the name of the journal that the article has been published in. This will be the new academic whuffie economy. How will authors and researchers earn high whuffie scores, high prestige, high esteem from colleagues and a great reputation? They will write great articles, and share their knowledge with the most people possible through OA. They will not write articles in closed-access journals where only a few people can read them.

That, and they will probably also learn to calculate their own h-index score instead of just using the impact factors of the journals they happen to publish in.

Open Access Week Kick-off Event

Happy Open Access Week!

Open Access Week 2010 from SPARC on Vimeo.

More info about this can be found at this blog post, Momentum continues: Open Access Week 2010 begins.

Here are some notes from Cameron Neylon who is in the video.

Cyberinfrastructure Days at CSU

What the heck is Cyberinfrastructure? Go to these three websites for more information.

• http://coloradoalliance2010cidays.wordpress.com/
• http://www.cidays.org (with a redirect)
• NSF Report, "Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery"
  

Note that CSU is Colorado State University, not Cal State anything...

I used the Twitter hashtag #cidays to mark some of my notes and comments from most of the sessions. (The conference took place last Friday, August 13th.) It was interesting to see that the comment that lead to the most feedback outside of the room was that the PLoS model is /not/ the correct one. What do you think? Will author supported OA fees ever go the way of the buggy whip?

I don't see that any of the presentations have been posted yet, but I think you get the gist of what went on by now...

We like this new marketplace much better

This is my entry concerning thesis #72 from the Cluetrain Manifesto. It is: "We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it."

In this little screed, I will focus on the marketplace of information, and how the landscape has changed in the last 10 years. As a librarian, this is what I am most attuned to.

The general public has taken a much greater interest in creating and distributing information of all sorts. With the advent of the Internet and Web2.0, it is much easier and cheaper to distribute digital information to a global community.

In the past, the gatekeepers at the small number of media outlets considered themselves to be the main filters of quality information and entertainment. If the editor of a newspaper didn't like a story, it didn't get published. If a TV executive didn't like a show (or it didn't get enough advertising revenue), it didn't get aired. There was only so much space in a printed resource, and only so much time on network TV. They operated on the premise of scarcity, but that problem has gone away.

Compared to traditional print media, there is now essentially unlimited digital space for magazines, journals and newspapers. While there is only so much time in each day, there is more choice in the number of television channels.

Concerning news, Craigslist has killed off the need for many people to advertise their used junk in printed newspapers, and this has really reduced their revenue. Blogs have created an outlet for the average person to publish an information source. Google has made the search for relevant news and information much easier to find.

The print encyclopedia industry is dead, but Wikipedia does a very good job, and it is getting better by the minute. The "wisdom of the crowd" is replacing the wisdom of the few.

The academic journal market continues to be a huge problem for libraries, but there are more and more Open Access outlets for researchers to get their articles published. Many authors also post their articles in subject-based repositories, and that makes it much easier for readers to find and read their research.

The book market continues to be heavily print based, but some publishers are printing books on demand for authors that would normally never see the light of day. It will also be interesting to see how much the Kindle (or even the iPhone) impacts the printed book market in the next 5-10 years.

We are creating our own entertainment with YouTube and other video sites. Many are mashing up video games software and scripts to create machinima.

We are creating virtual photo albums using our digital images. We no longer need to rely on the corner photo lab or drug store to process our film.

While the main television networks are still around, the big four networks are getting less and less viewership. People simply find other things to be more interesting, such as reading and writing blog entries, reading books, playing videogames, creating YouTube videos, watching other cable channels or playing frisbee.

While some see problems with too much choice in the information landscape, many others demonstrate that there are positives in the long tail of information and that having more options is a good thing.

Changing a conservative scholarly culture...

The question I have today is -- how can the library change a very conservative scholarly culture when it comes to the sharing of faculty publications and research?

Some/many of the faculty here are not used to sharing their ideas, papers and presentations over the web. (They could be afraid people will steal their great ideas...) In fact, some of our faculty were simply shocked to learn that DU doctoral dissertations were available online through Proquest. Some faculty are worried that their doctoral students will have a hard time finding a book publisher to publish the dissertation. Thus, they would have difficulty getting tenure after leaving DU. (There is no strong evidence to support this conclusion.)

The library would like to see more faculty involved in sharing their research through either our Institutional Repository or through the DU Portfolio Community. I am the head of a group called the "Open Access and Scholarly Communication Taskforce". In mid-May, we will be presenting some/all of these resources (see below) to a group called the Library Liaison Advisory Group or LLAG for short. The LLAG meetings invite one faculty member from each department, so this is a small representative sample of the DU faculty. I will probably only have about 10-15 minutes to present this to the faculty.

Here are some things I would like to present concerning the broad topic of "scholarly communication". This is probably too much information in the time allotted, but I am not sure what to cut out. What do you think? What should I take out or add?

1) Start with the Create Change Website and the "old" 6 page brochure.

2) Quickly look at the updated serials and book expenditures chart from the ARL, 1986-2006.

3) How researchers benefit from expanded dissemination of their work.

4) Mention the Harvard case and the SPARC response -- "Open Doors and Open Minds" white paper. (I am sure we will get questions about Harvard. Maybe some will also know about the MIT mandate and others.)

5) Address misunderstandings about Open Access.

6) How to make the new scholarly communication system work for the faculty in various roles.
• As a researcher and author
• As a reviewer
• As an editor or editorial board member
• As a society member
• As a faculty member
• As a teacher7) Ask for advice on where to go from here. How do we change the "culture of DU"?

I was just talking to a grad student yesterday who is working with a faculty member about how to make greater open access to his faculty publications through DU portfolio, and I showed him the Sherpa Romeo website that explains which publishers allow for various flavors of green OA. I think many more faculty need to know that the majority of journal publishers allow for green OA in local repositories. Should I mention Sherpa Romeo at the meeting?

I know the culture will not change overnight, and it varies quite a bit by department, but we have to start somewhere.