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

UCLA talk by John Wilbanks - "The Fragmentation and Re-Integration of Scholarly Communication"

I've had the pleasure of seeing John Wilbanks speak once before. Here he is at UCLA talking about changes in scholarly communication.  Recorded May 11th, 2011.

Thanks Bora for the notice.

Here is the blurb from UCLA:

The UCLA Library is proud to share this presentation by John Wilbanks, VP for Science at Creative Commons, entitled "The Fragmentation and Re-Integration of Scholarly Communication."  The scientific paper has been the primary container and distribution vessel for scientific knowledge for centuries. It's a creative work subject to the same sorts of legal and technical pressures as other creative works: it's part of an industrial-creative complex built on artificial scarcity, distribution, and top-down decisions about what is going to be high impact. And it is subject to the same disruption by the internet as other industries with that attitude, like music. But unlike music, there was a set of intermediaries creating a lot of inertia that kept the network from being disruptive, including funding agencies, tenure and review systems, and general lack of incentives. But the revolution that broke apart the music industry is well under way in scholarly communication. The journal is fragmenting already into the article, but it's not going to stop there - the advent of assertion-enhanced publishing, nano-publication, data publication, and more are going to drive a rapid disintegration of traditional "container cultures" and business models for scholarly communication.  This talk examines the progress made to date by the internet in etching away at the traditional means of scientific knowledge transfer, the importance of the digital commons in a world where content is fragmented, and some future avenues for "re-integrating" fragmented scientific communication that build on open systems. The talk was recorded at the Charles E. Young Research Library on May 11th, 2011.

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...

Scholarly Communication Institute at UVa

Wish I could have gone to this conference (SCI 8: July 14-16, 2010, Experimental Approaches to New-Model Scholarly Communication) sponsored by the University of Virginia's Scholarly Communication Institute. The program and the speaker and participant list is impressive. I will be following along their tweets.

Ithaka Report : Faculty Survey 2009 Webinar

I watched and listened to a webinar yesterday on the Ithaka Faculty Survey report. The one hour presentation will eventually be archived at the bottom of this page, but it isn't there yet. But, if you want to see and listen to the discussion concerning how faculty feel about libraries, the discussion of Chapter 1 is there. This is a windows media file, .mwv.

The presentation I went to concerned Chapter 2, which is about the "Format Transition for Scholarly Works" (Faculty members’ growing comfort in relying exclusively on digital versions of scholarly materials opens new opportunities for libraries, new business models for publishers, and new challenges for preservation.)

It was interesting to see how faculty are getting very comfortable with having electronic only access to journals. And, it is a growing trend for humanists as well as scientists and social scientists.

At the end of the session, I made a comment concerning the fact that there are different levels of access. Faculty may not know that there are many levels and flavors of access. For example, do faculty really care if they access articles from a journal via the publisher or through JStor or through an aggregator like EBSCO? They just want the article, but to the library, it makes a difference.

I will try to go to the discussion about Chapter 3 on May 5th ("Scholarly Communication" issues) but I might only be able to attend half of that session.

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.