What's wrong with scholarly publishing today? II

Whatiswrongwithscholarlypublishingtoday?
Björn Brembs, Freie Universität Berlin
http://brembs.net
http://www.slideshare.net/brembs/whats-wrong-with-scholarly-publishing-today-ii

Publishing yesterday…
1665: Onejournal: Philosophical Transactionsofthe Royal Society of London (Henry Oldenburg)

Publishing Today
24,000 scholarlyjournals
1.5 millionpublications/year
3% annualgrowth
1 millionauthors
10-15 millionreadersat >10,000 institutions
1.5 billiondownloads/year
Source: Mabe MA (2009): Scholarly Publishing. European Review 17(1): 3-22

Functionality
19thcenturypublishingfor a 21stcenturyscientificcommunity

Functionality
At least four different searchtoolstobesure not to miss any relevant literature?

Functionality
When we finally find the literature, we have to ask friends with rich libraries to send it to us?

Functionality
We have to re-format our manuscripts every time an ex-scientist tells us to submit to another journal?

Functionality
Every homepage has had an access counter since 1993 but we don’t know how often our paper has been downloaded?

Functionality
Nothing happens when we click on the reference after "we performed the experiments as described previously"?

Hyperlinks
Nothing happens when we click on the reference after "we performed the experiments as described previously"?
First demonstration: 1968
WWW: 1989
Stanford Research Institute: NLS
Tim Berners-Lee: CERN

Think…

Why?
Who‘stoblamethatourpublishingsystemis so lame?

We, thescientists!
We decide how and where to publish

We, thescientists!
We are producers and consumers in personal union

We, thescientists!
We chose to outsource scientific communication to publishers

Publishers
A publicgood in private hands

Elsevier
Name from Dutch publisher (1580): “House of Elzevir”
250,000 articles per year in 2000 journals
7,000 journal editors, 70,000 editorial board members and 300,000 reviewers are working for Elsevier
Part of Reed Elsevier group

Elsevier

Elsevier
Rofecoxib=Vioxx (Merck)

Elsevier
“Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of [Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine], a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles—most of which presented data favorable to Merck products—that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.”
“It was a stealth marketing campaign to Australian doctors under the guise of a regular journal. “
The Scientist
“In issue 2, for example, 9 of the 29 articles were about Vioxx, and 12 of the remaining were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions, and some were bizarre: like a review article containing just 2 references. “
Ben Goldacre, “Bad Science” The Guardian
“It has recently come to my attention that from 2000 to 2005, our Australia office published a series of sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures. This was an unacceptable practice, and we regret that it took place.”
Michael Hansen, CEO Of Elsevier's Health Sciences Division

The Big Three (2009/10)
(includes Springer)
Source:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/binary-data/ARTICLE_ATTACHMENT/file/000/000/127-1.pdf

Profits

Journals Crisis (not just Elsevier!)
% Change
Modifiedfrom ARL: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/arlstats06.pdf, http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/arlstat08.pdf

Subscription Pricing
KIT Library
10 Most expensive journal subscriptions 2010/11
http://www.bibliothek.kit.edu/cms/teuerste-zeitschriften.php

SOURCE:LJ PERIODICALS PRICE SURVEY 2010

MPG: 18 Mio €/y forliterature. 95% tothethreemainpublishers.
UK: 94.6 Mio £/y in subscription (2003/4)

What a magnificent ship! What makes it go?
Cartoon by Rowland B. Wilson

Library responses
Request increased budgets
Cut subscriptions
Collective purchase of electronic journals
Rely on document delivery or ILL
UC: boycott NPG!
Ray English

Scientific Publishing:

Survey: Journal Access
David Nicholas

Publishing yesterday…

Scholarship as a Public Good
Funded by Taxpayers

Supported publicly

Created in the non-profit sector

No profit for article authors

Profit for corporate publishers

Scholarship
A Public Good in Private Hands

Scientific Publishing:

Think…

Onesolution: Open Access
“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”
Peter Suber

Open Access
Gold OA
Publishing in an Open Access journal
Currently 6722peer-reviewed open access journals listed in the Lund Directory of Open Access Journals doaj.org
Green OA
Self-archiving in an institutional repository or PubMed Central
Over 1400 open repositories already established world-wide

Digital

But: Everything’s Gone Digital!
www.scopus.com
www.pubmed.gov
http://ukpmc.ac.uk
isiknowledge.com
scholar.google.com
Duncan Hull

Welcome to Digital
Isolation
different disciplines – different information silos

Welcome to Digital
Impersonal and unsociable
“who the hell are you”?
Where are “my” papers?
What are my friends and colleagues reading?
What are the experts reading?
What is popular this week / month / year?

Welcome to Digital
Obsolete models of publication
Not everything fits publication-sized holes
Micro-attribution
Mega-attribution
Digital contributions (databases, software, wikis/blogs?)

Welcome to Digital
Cold
Identity of publications and authors is inadequate

Open Access
Identity Crisis
Howcan I find anything?

Identity Crisis: Which publication?
http://pubmed.gov/18974831
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18974831
http://ukpmc.ac.uk/articlerender.cgi?accid=pmcA2568856
http://ukpmc.ac.uk/picrender.cgi?artid=1687256&blobtype=pdf
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000204
http://www.dbkgroup.org/Papers/hull_defrost_ploscb08.pdf
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204
One paper, many URIs. Disambiguation algorithms rely on getting metadata for each
Big problem for libraries is these redundant duplicates
Matching can be done by Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and PubMed ID (PMID);
these are frequently absent < 5% (Kevin Emamy, citeUlike)
Duncan Hull

Identity Crisis: Whichauthor?

Identity Crisis: Whichtopic?

Think…

Onesolution: Unique identifiers
Difficult with fragmented information silos

Several initiatives

Examples: PubMedID, DOI, ORCID, Semantic Web

Semantic Web
Machine-readablemeaning
Technically non-trivial
Promising progress
Tim Berners-Lee
http://www.w3.org/2000/Talks/1206-xml2k-tbl/Overview.html

The Semantic Web for Dummies (like me)
URIUniform Resource Identifier, like:
http://id.archeology.edu/weapon/spear
+ XMLCustomized tags, like:
<spear>Lance</spear>
+ RDFRelations, in triples, like:
(Lance) (is_spear_of) (Longinus)
+ OntologiesHierarchies of concepts, like
weapon -> projectile -> spear-> Lance
+ Inference rulesLike:
If (person) (owns) (spear), then (person) (throws) (spear)
= Semantic Web!

Digital dystopia
Information (Overload) Crisis
Or filter failure?

More scientists, morepublications

Information Crisis
1.5 millionpublications per year in 24,000 journals

Information Crisis
Finding ‘my’ publications is impossible!

Information Crisis
PublishorPerish: numberofpublications

Information Crisis
60-300 applicants per tenure-trackposition

Information Crisis
Reading enoughpublicationsisimpossible!

Think…

Onesolution: JournalRank
Source Normalized Impact per Paper
Thomson Reuters: Impact Factor
Eigenfactor (now Thomson Reuters)
ScImago JournalRank (SJR)
Scopus: SNIP, SJR

Onesolution: JournalRank
Onlyreadpublicationsfromhigh-rankingjournals

Job applications

Job applicationinstructions
Publikationstätigkeit
(vollständige Publikationsliste, darunter Originalarbeiten als Erstautor/in, Seniorautor/in, Impact-Punkte insgesamt und in den letzten 5 Jahren, darunter jeweils gesondert ausgewiesen als Erst- und Seniorautor/in, persönlicher Scientific Citations Index (SCI, h-Index nach Web of Science) über alle Arbeiten)
Publications:
Completelistofpublications, including original researchpapersasfirstauthor, seniorauthor, impactpoints total and in the last 5 years, withmarkedfirstand last-authorships, personal Scientific Citations Index (SCI, h-Index accordingto Web of Science) for all publications.

Metrics
Lies, damn lies andbibliometrics

Show of hands:
Who knows what the IF is?
Who uses the IF to pick a journal (rate a candidate, etc.)?
Who knows how the IF is calculated and from what data?

The Impact Factor
Introduced in 1960’s by Eugene Garfield: ISI
citations
articles
2008 and 2009
2010
IF=5
Articles published in 08/09
were cited an average of 5 times in 10.

The Impact Factor
Journal X IF 2010=
All citationsfromTR indexedjournalsin 2010 topapers in journal X
Numberofcitablearticlespublished in journal X in 2008/9
€30,000-130,000/yearsubscriptionrates
Covers ~11,500 journals (Scopuscovers ~16,500)

Main Problems withthe IF
Negotiable
Irreproducible
Mathematicallyunsound

Negotiable
PLoSMedicine, IF 2-11 (8.4)(The PLoS Medicine Editors (2006) The Impact Factor Game. PLoS Med 3(6): e291. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030291)
CurrentBiology IF from 7 to 11 in 2003
BoughtbyCell Press (Elsevier) in 2001…

Not Reproducible
Rockefeller University Press boughttheirdatafrom Thomson Reuters
Upto 19% deviationfrompublishedrecords
Second dataset still not correct
Rossner M, van Epps H, Hill E (2007): Show me the data. The Journal of Cell Biology, Vol. 179, No. 6, 1091-1092 http://jcb.rupress.org/cgi/content/full/179/6/1091

Not MathematicallySound
Left-skeweddistributions
Weakcorrelationof individual articlecitation rate withjournal IF
Seglen PO (1997): Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. BMJ 1997;314(7079):497 (15 February)
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/314/7079/497

Lord Kelvin
“Nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement”

Job applications

Message:
Where you publish is more important to us than what you publish!

Think…

Other solution: social bookmarks
refworks.com
zotero.org
mendeley.com
hubmed.org
2collab.com
connotea.org
citeulike.org
Re-couple metadata that has be de-coupled from data
www.mekentosj.com
“iTunes for PDF files”

Article-level Metrics
Your article:
Received X citations (de-duped from Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science)
It was viewed X times, placing it in the top Y% of all articles in this journal/community
It received X Comments
It was bookmarked X times in Social Bookmarking sites
Experts in your community rated it as X, Y, Z
It was discussed on X ‘respected’ blogs
It appeared in X, Y, Z International News media
Peter Binfield

PLoS ONE
4.5 years old
Almost doubling in volume each year
2007: 1,231 articles
2011: >12,000 articles
Largest journal in the world
Over 1,000 Academic editors
More than 30,000 authors
Fully peer reviewed
but the review / acceptance process does not concern itself with ‘impact’, ‘novelty’ (or other subjective measures)

Publications by PLoS ONE per quarter since launch

Albert Einstein
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

Metrics
Won‘tgoaway
Shouldalwaysbe a last resort
Theyaremuchtoovaluabletobesatisfiedwiththecurrentpitifulstateofaffairs
Let‘smakethemasgoodaswepossiblycan!

My Digital Utopia:
No more publishers – libraries archive everything according to a world-wide standard
Single semantic, decentralized database of literature and data
Personalized filtering
Peer-review administrated by an independent body
Link typology for text/text, data/data and text/data links (“citations”)
Semantic Text/Datamining
All the metrics you (don’t) want (but need)
Tagging, bookmarking, etc.
Unique contributor IDs with attribution/reputation system (teaching, reviewing, curating, blogging, etc.)
Technically feasible today (almost)
http://www.slideshare.net/brembs/whats-wrong-with-scholarly-publishing-today-ii

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What's wrong with scholarly publishing today? II

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