Does LIS need yet another OA journal?

I'll start off with the answer to the question in the title of the post with "Yes, why not."  Now, I'll say why.

• The journal needs to be Open Access so that authors and scholars have a way to reach all possible readers.  There can always be more OA journals with more publishing options.
• The journal should use the CC By license so that we "allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in [the] journal, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers."
• If you clicked on the link above, you can tell that I am thinking of something along the lines of a PLoS ONE format.  The editorial and peer-review process would be similar to PLoS ONE, but it would be modified to suite our discipline.
• This journal is not intended to compete with PLoS ONE since I imagine that we might publish around 4 to 40 articles in a year.  This isn't even a dent or a door ding in the side of PLoS ONE.
• I don't think we should worry about prestige of the journal as a whole.  Let the articles stand by themselves.  We will use article level metrics (maybe similar to what PLoS does) to let the authors know how often their articles have been downloaded and cited. 
• Encourage submissions of all different kinds of research.  If an author has a very small survey sample, then our journal could be the one to publish the minor results. Negative results would also be fine.  If someone wants to provide examples of how not to do something, that could really help others.  Scholarly essays and opinion pieces would be dandy. Turn that poster paper into a real article.  Turn that long blog post into an article. Write up an overview of a conference. ("Every article its reader." Let readers filter articles for relevance.  The journal editors and peer-reviewers can determine if something meets a minimal "technically sound" criteria before publication. )
• It could be funded by donations to pay for the cost of domain registration (and maybe other things) if needed.
• I see myself as more of a journal facilitator than as the journal "editor."  I don't plan on editing other people's articles all that much.
• Publish the articles when they are ready instead of making readers wait for an issue to be completed.

Questions.

• What should we call it?  [Whatever the title, I don't think we should co-opt the use of the word "ONE."  Maybe something like the Discussions in Library & Information Science or Findings in Library & Information Science or Journal of Library & Information Science Topics or something that indicates that it accepts manuscripts from a broad range of LIS topics.]
• How much editing should we do on articles that are written by non-native English writers? [Cross this bridge when we get there.]
• Let people use any kind of citation format?  [That would be ok with me, as long as people can find the cited references.  We do not need to be citation police.]
• Where should we host it?  [While it could go into a section of thelsw.org website, it might be better if we purchased a different domain and had it hosted someplace else.]
• When would we launch?  [I am thinking either fall of 2012, or January of 2013.  Depends on how quickly this all gets put together, and if anybody is interested.]
• What should the format of the articles look like?  [While most articles could be published in an HTML format within a blog setting, some articles might be better suited to PDF documents.  This could be the case where there are many images in the article, and it is easier for the layout editors to simply tie up the images with the text into a PDF file.]
• How should the articles be loaded onto the site? [I am thinking we could just load up the articles into a single blog-post like format, and leave comments on the articles for a limited amount of time, maybe a week or a month or a year. TBD.]
• Should we try to get the journal indexed in some of the LIS indexing databases, or just let Google and/or Google scholar handle the indexing?
• Should we get an ISSN registered for the journal?
• Who would like to be on the editorial board? [I'd like to try to get a bunch of people involved from academic to public to special to archives to independents or whatever.]
• Where should we backup and archive the articles? [Cross this bridge when we get there.]
• Aren't there enough LIS journals out there?  [While there are plenty of OA LIS journals, but I don't know of any that have a PLoS ONE like system.  If you know of one, let us know in the comments.  Even if there are others, why not another publishing option?]

Korbel School TechWeek Event - HealthMap.org

Today, I was able to go to a TechWeek Event which was in the CyberCafe of Ben Cherrington Hall.

The topic was "Tracking global public health threats through apps and the web."

Health mobile applications--Digital Disease Detection
by Dr. David Scales
Harvard Medical School
Children's Hospital Boston
david.scales@childrens.harvard.edu

He will cover the what, how and why of Healthmap.org -- Global Health Local Knowledge

They have a news section Sometimes breaking news is published in another language, and they translate the news into English. How? They get newspapers RSS feeds, 93 feeds and about 2000 alerts per day. They also take reports from individuals. they get information on the locations, species, and disease patterns, and this is put into 5 categories: Breaking news, warnings, old news, context, not disease related. They rate by risk by color: yellow, orange and red. They have seven languages on the website and 1 million hits per year.
Who uses this? CDC, WHO, national state local public health organizations, and many others.

Politics sometimes gets in the way of information transmission.  He tells the story of the 1972 Iran smallpox problem.At that time, the International health regulations required that the WHO act on official information only. Statements were made in 1951 and 1969.

Newsweek article on SARS. WHO "shining moment" in 2003.  WHO had been using unofficial data since 1998.  The WHO issues travel advisory to Hong Kong, Toronto and later, China. WHO was allowed to use unofficial sources in 2005/2006.

Disease reporting flowchart
Outbreak start, detection and reporting getting lots better time wise.
Promed disease social network
They want to build up use of social media into their results
Google news MMWR data, Geosentinal and CDC.

Next generation public health information coming from twitter and other social media sources.
Outbreaks near me iPod app. 100k downloads.
Will have a droid version soon
Signal to noise concern
Pretty close trend lines
Validate undiagnosed events by mobile phone Call 919 map1bug or on website or...
Chikungunya in India 7/22/11
he mentioned a Contagion movie tie-in  to help advertise healthmap.org.

Flunearyou.org Weekly survey.  Invite your friends. Win money.

Covered http://www.google.org/flutrends/  

Beyond digital disease detection.

This technology can be used for other types of tracking, such as the illegal animal trade, human rights abuses, etc
Dengue.  There are 4 types. See this PLoS article about it.  (PLoS was changed to plod on my iPod Touch.  It looks like he publishes and blogs quite a bit in PLoS journals.)

Cholera in Haiti surveillance
Twitter use Volume of tweets correlation? Yes

Bio.diaspora airline traffic and disease Problems near the Hajj - Healthmap.org/hajj
Biomosaic (PDF about the project) Demographics, migration and health and foreign born population issues

Wildlife trade clandestine industry unmonitored and underground WWF wildlife trade map

Spread of polio virus 2004/05 Nigeria Vaccine News.

Hama massacre syria tracking human rights 1982 Syria tracker human rights abuses torture deaths etc.

This is a "Novel Internet-based collaborative system." It can play an important complementary role in gathering health info.

Media reports have been declining because there are less journalists covering health issues.  30-45% less articles and major newspapers. Science and medical journalists are getting laid off.

Advice for newish librarians to be

On Saturday, I wanted to help LIS students with advice on how to interview and get a job, but the interviewing workshop got cancelled.  Bummer.  Anyway, I thought it would be good to put down some of my thoughts about how to get a job in this mixed-up crazy library world that we live in.

1) Take the advice of Jenica when building an online identity or presence. She had this presentation way back in 2009. "Yes, You Are Speaking In Public: Some Implications of Building a Personal and Professional Online Presence." (PDF).  Go out there and create a blog or two, and write about what you are interested in.  Write up some book reviews and stick them on the web. If a blog is not your thing, create a nice looking portfolio page for yourself.

2) Post some of your better class papers online.  Put them into E-LIS or something similar.  Submit some of them for journal articles.  Really, many library journals are hungry for content--even from grad students.

3) Learn about why you should license your work with a creative commons license.

4) Follow other librarians or library organizations on Twitter to see what they are discussing.

5) Take a look at the advice from others such as this and this and this and this.

6) Once you interview for jobs, think of the process as you interviewing them.  You want to see how well their culture will fit with your personality.

7) Remember that once you get a job, the learning ain't done.  You will need to continue learning stuff, so keep reading and going to conferences and meeting people with new perspectives.

Added 4/18:

8) Here are some other semi-random articles/blog posts on nailing the interview for a library job, what not to do at an interview, and networking.

Overview of the NCAR/UCAR Data Citation Workshop up in Boulder

It has now been a week since the first day of the NCAR/UCAR Data Citation Workshop.  They recently put up all of the slides, so it is good to go back and see them again.  Here are my main take aways.

Purpose of Data Citation (Page 7)
• Aid scientific reproducibility through direct, unambiguous connection to the precise data used
• Credit for data authors and stewards
• Accountability for creators and stewards
• Track impact of data set
• Help identify data use (e.g., trackbacks)
• Data authors can verify how their data are being used.
• Users can better understand the application of the data.

“Tracking Dataset Citations Using Common Citation Tracking Tools Doesn’t Work”—Heather Piwowar, DataONE (Page 13)
• Traditional fields such as author and date too imprecise
• Web of Science, Scopus, and other tools don’t handle identifiers

Surprise, many scientists do not know how to cite data. We need to better advertise this guide from the Digital Curation Center.

Something basic like this could be used.

Author(s). ReleaseDate. Title, [version]. [editor(s)]. Archive and/or Distributor. Locator. [date/time accessed]. [subset used].

In addition to DOIs, there are other identifier systems, such as ARKs, and EZIDs. EZID is used by many organizations.

Data citations in NCAR/UCAR Whitepaper.

Barbara Losoff at CU-Boulder did a good job of explaining the libraries role in data curation? (Start at page 5.)

Love this quote - "Data preservation is communicating with the future."

Dr. Tim Killeen from the NSF provided a good overview of their vision (start at page 20) concerning data citation and curation. This book, Cyber Infrastructure Framework for the 21st Century, is worth a read.

I am still not quite sure what the NSF Earth Cube Project is all about.

NOAA gets a good amount of social media views and uses.(See page 10 of 11. For example, YouTube: ~ 715 subscribers, ~ 88,000 video views.)  This may be where the action is headed.

This observatory tracks how people cite their data in articles through WoS and Google Scholar.  We could do something like that here.

The big finale from Matthew Mayernik. 

We need to make things "Simple, Weak, Open, and Together"

Simple – Don’t overload citations
Weak – Make it easy for users, data users and data submitters
Open – easier to address problems and new cases
Together – Lots of interest in multiple communities
The idea came from From John Wilbanks – Designing for Emergence.

Poker and Artificial Intelligence

Today, I was able to go to a talk by Michael Bowling from the University of Alberta.  He was visiting the University of Denver, and he spoke to a crowd of CS and other science types in Olin Hall. 

He did a good job of explaining how the game of poker can be used in the course of programming artificial intelligence into computing systems.  This paper (Poker as a Testbed for Machine Intelligence Research PDF) from his lab in 1998 covers some of the basics.

He showed a good clip from the movie Rounders, and then he explained some of the basic rules of the game and some of the strategy involved.  (I still can't believe that Matt Damon didn't consider that KGB might have had pocket aces during their initial game in the movie....) Poker is more like real life for a number of reasons.  You have to deal with incomplete knowledge of the game (you can't see the cards dealt to your opponent), and the opponent can try to bluff his or her way out of a jam.  This is not the situation for chess and other types of board games.

Anyway, I learned that it now possible for computers to beat world class professional poker players on a head to head basis.  They programmed the Polaris system to have different personalities, to be agressive or passive or bluff sometimes or whatnot.  The Alberta folk will continue to work on poker games that involve three or more players.  The programming gets a bit more complicated with more players.  Polaris was programmed to work with Texas limit hold'em so that the raises were set at particular levels.  There are just too many raise variables to consider in no limit hold'em, but they could work on this for future projects. 

Other links to check out.

• Wired article - "Ante Up, Human: The Adventures of Polaris, the Poker-Playing Robot"
• The Second Man-Machine Poker Competition - http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/man-machine/
• At the Twenty-Sixth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada there will be the Seventh Annual Computer Poker Competition -  http://www.computerpokercompetition.org/ 
• Nash is still cited in their papers. Nash, J.F. 1950. Equilibrium points in n-person games.
  National Academy of Sciences of the USA. 
• Their various publications, http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications.html

Wrapping my brain around two posts, should we step in the way so we avoid the bullet?

I've got two blog posts to think about, and I am not quite sure how they support each other (or contradict each other) but I find both to be very interesting.

One is "Engineers Crashing Our Gates" which is a follow up of the Tennant post "You Never See the Bullet That Takes You Down" (found via Jason).  Essentially, companies and organizations do not see what hit them.  Did Blockbuster not see NetFlix?  Did the Travel Agent Industry not see the Internet coming?  Does Elsevier not see Open Access and Open Science coming? What of Librarianship?

Then, there is this post from Dave Puplett on "Academics must be applauded for making a stand by boycotting Elsevier. It’s time for librarians to join the conversation on the future of dissemination, but not join the boycott."  He notes in the comments section that "I [Dave] really do think Librarians have a huge role in advocating change in Scholarly Communication – please see a previous post of mine here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/10/28/championing-open-access/, or some of my other work: http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=VmFORfgAAAAJ&hl=en ....  My point is that if the Academic community is ready to use its voice to lead on this issue, it’s time for Librarians (who have been agitating for a long-time here) to joint the choir and not get in the way."

This logic just seems backwards.  Librarians are in the center of this scholarly communication battle, and we had better try to see what bullets are coming our way.  We need to have the best vision possible, hone our karate skills, and try to predict what the others are going to do to attack us.  For librarians to step to the side of the ring and let only the scholars duke it out with the publishers while we watch from the 17th row is plain stupid.  We need to be in the ring fighting for our patrons, fighting for what we do to serve humanity, and fighting to preserve culture and the record of knowledge.

The scholarly community should have a loud voice on scholarly communication issues (Duh), but they can often be focused solely on the authors and researchers and their interests.  The Library community has the interests of readers and undergraduates and staff and other information consumers at heart.  We are there to speak for them.  The librarians and our patrons should not be told to "not get in the way."  In short, we need to insert ourselves so that we can get in the way.  The more we get in the way of publishers and scholars, the less we are in the way of that bullet.

The clash of two cultures: Scientists, academics, scholars vs commercial publishing and Elsevier #RWA

I am not sure if this is the main root of the problem between scientists and some commercial journal publishers, but it seems to be a problem between the non-profit altruistic mindset vs the profit motive mindset.

For the most part, scientists and scholars want to publish articles to gain scholarly recognition, academic rewards such as promotion and tenure, and for the prestige of publishing in a high impact factor journal because they only accept 10-15% of papers, etc.  They are researching and writing for altruistic reasons such as advancing science, make the world a better place, helping others learn how the world works, etc.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, scientists started using many more commercial publishers because there was a lot more research being done and they needed outlets since society presses were not able to absorb the large increase of article submissions.  The commercial presses learned that libraries generally didn't cancel journal subscriptions because of institutional momentum, and an inelastic market for the articles existed.  (Academic libraries keep subscribing because the patrons keep on demanding access.  Patrons demand access even though they are not the ones paying for the content.)  So, publishers such as Elsevier learned that scholars publish and review articles and edit the journals for next to nothing because they want recognition, not money.  So, the publisher takes advantage of the situation, raises subscription rates because libraries want to please their patrons, so they don't cancel very often.

20-30-40 years ago, publishing information to hundreds or thousands of others was hard, printing and mailing was difficult, laying out articles was tough--particularly scientific content.

Then the Internet happened.

Scientists are smart and have figured out that global publishing is easier than commercial publishers let on.  They are starting to take advantage of new OA outlets such as PLoS and others.

But, the culture of scientific publication had been ingrained in scientists over hundreds of years, and it takes a while for some scientists to change their perspective.  They still want to get noticed, get scholarly rewards, get tenure, and get cited by others.  So, they have lists of journals that junior scholars are supposed to publish in.  However, some of the more forward thinking scientists understand that publishing in OA sources will increase their reach, increase their citations, and increase their standing in the academic community.  (The Wellcome Trust says “it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, that should be considered...") They do not need to submit their articles to closed-access (toll-access) journals.  There is a reason that PLoS One is the largest journal in the world with a solid impact.

The profit motive of some scientific publishers has skewed their perspective.  They do not really care about maximizing the reach of scientific knowledge.  They want to hide the articles and the research, because they are used to an age of information scarcity, but we no longer live in that time.  They are trying their best to hold on, and it shows.  They may claim that they support universal access or something like that with a sustainable business model, but that is code for--"We want to keep on sucking more and more money from libraries and subscribers for as long as possible. We like our 36% and 42% profit margins, thank you very much. We will provide access to a small segment of the developing world because it makes us look good, and we don't get much of an increase to our server load--all we have to do is turn on some software switches to some IP addresses."

I know that there are other variables and opinions, but this seems to be the crux of the problem.  Most scientists don't care about making a profit off the research, and they want to be cited and read by as many people as possible.  The commercial publishers that used to be seen as supporting the scholarly communication interests of scholars have diverged too much.  They want to lock away research and knowledge.  The two groups are diverging, and the scientists no longer need to support the aims of the for-profit commercial publishers.

Yet another great review of Reinventing Discovery

The book, Reinventing Discovery, is amazing!  Go out and buy yourself a copy RIGHT NOW!  Really, it is that good.

Considering how much this book covers the issues and problems of the modern scholarly communication industry, I was surprised to see that the term libraries only shows up once in the index of the book.  Even then, libraries are only mentioned in the notes section of the book.  He notes that academic libraries and publishers are not institutions that will be developing the new tools for the construction of knowledge in the future.  He says that "the right place for such tools to originate is with scientists themselves." He also noted that "libraries and scientific publishers are not, for the most part, set up to work on such risky and radical innovations."  For the most part, I agree with the statement that many librarians and library systems are risk averse, but there are many librarians (and some publishers) who have great ideas, insights and will provide innovative solutions for the long term advancement of scientific communication.

I know that Michael received a lot of advice and communication from members of the library and open science community, so I am a little surprised that libraries were not mentioned more often in the book.

The best chapter for me was Chapter 9: The Open Science Imperative.  Much of the book and much of the chapter is available online at Google Books, so go read some of it there.

I wish Michael would have talked a little more about some of the cultural issues that are holding scientists back from doing more open science. There are some positive financial and social incentives to encourage more scientists to do open science, but academic department administrators and deans still tell junior faculty that they have to publish in the closed access Journal of X, the limited access Journal of Y and/or the Transactions of Z in order to get tenure.  The academic bean counters may find it easier to evaluate a researcher based on the supposed quality of journal title containers, than it is to evaluate the quality of specific articles within those journals.  Mike Taylor noted that:

Because of the stupid way researchers are usually evaluated (and this is another whole issue), the intrinsic quality of our work matters less than the brand name of the journal it’s published in. So we have strong selfish reasons for wanting to get our work into the “best” journals, even if it is at the cost of effective communication.

and

Happily, there are signs of movement in this direction: for example, The Wellcome Trust says “it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, that should be considered in making funding decisions.” We need more funding and hiring bodies to make such declarations. Only then will researchers will be free of the need (real or apparent) to prop up parasitic publishers by sending their best work to big-name, barrier-based journals.

More change needs to take place within the hundreds of academic departments.  But, if the major funders such as the NIH and the Wellcome Trust (and many other funding organizations) can continue to provide money as the carrot for positive open science innovation, then we have a bright future ahead.  This is why I support the Federal Research Public Access Act. When this passes, this will encourage more scientists to do science in the open.

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?

My #libday8 post

Here is my LibDay8 post.

My day started with a 9am once-a-month PIRLS meeting.  (PIRLS is short for the Professional Information and Reference Library Services Team).  Some of the stuff we went over was: Brainstorm programs to accompany the October 3, 2012 Presidential Debate; in the renovated building, what should we call the "Access Services Desk" [Not that]; look at new mockup of ILL webpages and GIST; Law catalog merger issues and fixes; Genre now listed in the catalog; Policy Council and other team reports.

The meeting broke at about 10:15am, and then I was able to attack my email.  I only had about 30 emails that had come in over the last 16 hours.  (I usually don't check my email at home, since I want to deal with work problems while I am actually at work.)

Some of the things that I dealt with were:

• A question about the SLA All-Sciences Poster Paper Session. (An official announcement will go out tomorrow.)
• An ILL popout screen does not work properly in IE (but fine in Firefox and Chrome), so I reported it to the relevant fixit people.
• I started to draft out an email as a reminder to DU LIS students about the RMSLA Shirley Alldredge Lecture and Annual Business Meeting, but someone else beat me to it. I am the SLA DU Student chapter adviser.
• Forwarded information about the SLA Engineering Division $1200 SPIE DigitalLibrary Student Travel Stipend Award.
• One of our staff wrote a new blog post on the Academic Commons page, so I posted it to our Twitter, Facebook and our Google+ accounts. I finally set up the Academic Commons blog on TwitterFeed so it would autopost to Twitter.  I had been meaning to do that. I also FBed and G+ed some other items from our other blogs, the Penrose Pen and Good Answers.
• I am going to be speaking to science undergraduate students on the evening of February 15th (free pizza!), so I looked at a draft of a flyer that is going to be distributed to advertise the event. Looked fine to me.
• Sent out a draft of a future blog post on the Penrose Pen concerning the book display for February.  It will have a focus on "African Americans and the West."  Another Reference faculty member agreed to post it on Monday the 6th. [January is here.]
• Agreed to meet with the President of the Rocky Mt Chapter of SLA for a chat. (Hi Rachel!)  Recommended that some of the students in the SLA Student Chapter and some others from RMSLA should join us. She will send us a Doodle.
• My Chemistry Department Liaison had not heard of the Elsevier flap going on, so I sent him a mess of links concerning the issue.  I told him -- There are many, many news items. Here are some of the major ones in just the last week or so. 
• http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/01/publishing/petition-targeting-elseviers-business-practices-begins-to-snowball/ 
• http://www.economist.com/node/21545974 (The price of information - Academics are starting to boycott a big publisher of journals) 
• http://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/01/elsevier-needs-to-get-out-more.html 
• http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/01/31/why-boycott-elsevier/ 
• http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120130/13030217589/will-academics-boycott-elsevier-be-tipping-point-open-access-another-embarrassing-flop.shtml 
• http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/elsevier-publishing-boycott-gathers-steam-among-academics/35216
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/01/28/elseviers-publishing-model-might-be-about-to-go-up-in-smoke/ 
• http://the-scientist.com/2012/01/18/cracks-form-in-anti-open-access-push/ 
• http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/testify-the-open-science-movement-catches-fire/ 
• For a list of posts done before January 17th, see http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2012/01/around_the_web_some_posts_on_t_1.php  
• I heard back from the Chemistry Professor, and he noted some economic concerns in favor of the commercial publisher.
• I contacted a prominent scientist in the UK about arranging a meeting this fall for my sabbatical on scholarly communication issues, but I have not heard back from him yet.
• Chatted with one of our acquisition staff about two journals (One I ordered and one was supposed ot be cancelled, but it looks like we won't be able to get the new journal, because the new publisher won't let us cancel the old journal.  Long story. 
• Sent out this announcement about the Executive Director opening at the Alliance. Are you interested?
• Wrote this blog post concerning LibDay8.

I still have 34 minutes left to my day here, so I will try to spend a little time working on my article concerning OA resources that are used in Africa, maybe clean up my desk a little.

We are going to have a major snow storm tomorrow, so I think I will take my laptop home with me in case tomorrow is a work-from-home day. I am supposed to come in for a monthly Penrose Library Faculty Meeting, but that might be cancelled.  We will see.