“Making Things Generally Known”: Envisioning 21 st Century Scientific Publishing Marcus A. Banks NFAIS Open Access & Beyond Conference October 3, 2017
Agenda • Current Open Access Landscape • A Vision for 21 st Century Scientific Publishing • Working Toward Vision Through Lens of Open Access History
Definition
Part 1: Current Landscape
Current Open Access Landscape • Open Access: Plateau as of 2017 • Guarantee for Future Years • Uninspired Possibilities in Future Years • Exciting Potential in Future Years • Power to Realize this Potential
Plateau of Open Access Figure 7: Growth in estimates of the fraction of articles published as Gold open access (Van Noorden 2012a) Source: STM Report, 4 th Edition, 2015. (Ware and Mabe). http://www.markwareconsulting.com/the-stm-report/
Plateau of Open Access Source: http://icis.ucdavis.edu/?p=1072
Guarantee • Immediate open access publication will become default, first in STM and gradually expanding to other fields – Online access assured, but ability to participate fully in scholarly conversation continues to vary by available funds
Possibilities 1. Funders will assume role of publishing open access papers, undercutting established publishers in this regard 2. Publishers will continue to be principal providers of open access papers, relying on market position, name recognition and established cultural roles of journals NB: Either scenario privileges the “paper” deep into the digital age
Possibilities: Funders Usurp Publishers
Possibilities: Funders Usurp Publishers
Possibilities: Publishers Maintain Role Source: Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already? (Clarke, 2010). https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/01/04/why-hasnt-scientific-publishing-been-disrupted-already
Potential: Moving Beyond Papers • Transparency and collaboration rewarded, rather than competition and secrecy • Papers evolve into guides to openly available datasets and source code – “Publish or perish” becomes “share and prosper” • Scholars across the world would have an equal chance to participate in this conversation
Potential: Signs of Progress
Potential: Signs of Progress Source: https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/pages/About
Power to Realize Potential • Authors and funders have it • Publishers and librarians do not • An ethos of complete open science will only be achieved if authors insist upon it and funders pay for it. – Only then will publishers and librarians be in a position to build and sustain the essential tools and services that support open scholarship. – Cart before the horse: David Lewis, “2.5% Commitment” from libraries to support open scholarship tools
Part 2: Making Things Generally Known
A Vision for 21 st Century Scientific Publishing Vision: 21 st century scientific publishers will harness the internet to facilitate the transparent, open and collaborative work of science. • Detailing the vision • Essential role of publishing in realizing the vision • Emerging services that support this vision • How it would be funded • What you can do
Visions for 21 st Century Scientific Publishing The next three slides are different answers to a question posed by Lenny Teytelman of protocols.io: “If you’re allowed to dream, what do you see as the article of the future?” The full dialogue is available here: https://www.protocols.io/groups/protocolsio/discussions/if-youre-allowed-to-dream-what- do-you-see-as-the1
Visions for 21 st Century Scientific Publishing Scientific communication (primarily now done through a static narrative format) needs to harness current and developing technologies that embrace the complexity of our current research activities and allow the best means for researchers to find the specific components they need to advance their own work and allow them to easily bring together the larger whole of their areas of interest. In this regard, I hope the narrative style presentation of scientific discovery (the article), currently held up as the “gold” of research, disappears. Instead research information should be presented in a way that allows each component of the research process (methods, data, source code, narrative/description etc.) to be presented separately and in full detail . All of these components should be interconnected in two ways: (1) through a static link that persistently connects the research objects that encapsulate the whole of a work submitted by researchers at a specific time (the new ‘article’), and (2) through dynamic links that allow for versioning, forking, and (for narrative) threading. Peer-review will be carried out as an integrated part of a process set in place between the release of new information (an interconnected ‘preprint’) and a place where the information is marked as assessed (with reviews named and available). The printing press is hundreds of years old; and for the most part online articles are simply replicas of print. We have the technology to transform this. Laurie Goodman, Editor-in-Chief, GigaScience
Visions for 21 st Century Scientific Publishing I view the article as a collection of elements that can exist independently from each other but are robustly linked: narrative, protocols, code, data -- each presented in a way that is most relevant for the nature of the material, and ideally reusable by others. Data should be in the appropriate repository, code should be executable, so should protocols. The use of persistent identifiers for each element is critical, as well as the nature and persistence of the links between them. This would also provide the ability to assign more granular credit to contributors for different parts of the work. The use of persistent identifiers would extend to individuals (ORCID iDs for all!) and to other elements that need to be unambiguously identified, such as reagents. We end up with a big package of research objects and metadata well integrated with each other. With time, each element can evolve based on further work by the authors or community feedback —it’s a ‘living article’— and this evolution is tracked for the record and provides credit to the contributors. We are going to get there soon, right? Veronique Kiermer, Executive Editor, PLOS
Visions for 21 st Century Scientific Publishing To start with, every article would be written in an interface that generated structure and preserved links. To cite in the introduction, you'd just highlight text & paste in the identifier. For Methods, you'd link to a protocol resolver instead of an article resolver. Any reagent, construct, or other resource would be linked in the same manner via RRID to the appropriate canonical page for the resource. In the results field, you'd enter the code used to generate the image along with figure legends, etc. Journals (yes, they'd still exist) would provide guidance on preferred graphic styles and whether animations, audio, etc are acceptable. The discussion would not only describe the overall significance of the work, but also highlight where analyses were done differently from the pre-registered study plan. At submission, links would be checked to make sure they still resolve and code & data repositories exist. The document would be stored as XML or some other machine readable format, so the reader can be offered a choice of format. Notably, image manipulation would be a non-issue, because the author never touches the generated images. Code writing to the raw data would be a red flag. There would be versioning & privacy controls for sensitive data & the publisher would take on the responsibility to ensure the links all continue to resolve in partnership with repositories, commercial suppliers, etc. William Gunn, Director of Scholarly Communications, Elsevier
Visions for 21 st Century Scientific Publishing • Common threads of these visions: – Distinct parts of research process (methods, data, code) all available independently and linked together – Persistent identifiers to every element and artifact of the research process – This, my friends, is 21 st century publishing – It will cost a lot of money to do it right
Essential Role of Publishing in Realizing Vision • Making things generally known, especially when providing dynamic yet permanent access to every scholarly artifact, is a professional full-time ongoing responsibility • Researchers and authors still creating, librarians still preserving the record for the long-term • Publishing makes the record as it develops
Emerging Services that Support Vision
Emerging Services that Support Vision
Funding the Vision Proposed sequence of events: 1. Authors insist upon open science 2. Funders support it, both through sharp reduction of support for traditional PDF production and increasing support for open science tool development 3. Library budgets reflect this shift too – away from journals, toward open science tools. David Lewis is right, but early 4. Tools developed would be freely available to all to use, anywhere in the world, with support commitments scaled to ability to pay – This is how societies fund public services today. The argument here is for the scholarly community to make a similar commitment to its own common infrastructure. – This is an absolutely tremendous collective action problem, of course. But let’s not kill the mood just as we’re getting started.
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