What's wrong with scholarly publishing today?

Björn Brembs, Freie Universität Berlin

How much does it cost to subscribe to 24,000 journals?

Serial & Monograph Costs, 1986-2002 North American research libraries ARL Statistics Ray English

Chemistry $3,254
Physics 1,756
Astronomy 2,850
Engineering 1,548
Geology 1,724
Biology 1,323
Math & Computer Sci 1,278
Zoology 1,259
Botany 1,238
Health Sciences 1,132
Library Journal Periodical Price Survey, April 2006
Ray English

People produce your product for you
They check it for quality
They’re even kind enough to give you their intellectual property
You polish it up and distribute it
And you charge those same people handsomely to make their product available back to them
They think they must have your product, even though they created it, so you’re free to raise prices

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

Request increased budgets
Cut subscriptions
Reduce monograph purchases
Cut subscriptions and reduce monographs
Collective purchase of electronic journals
Rely on document delivery or ILL
Ray English

Ray English

David Nicholas

Substantial portion is
funded by taxpayers
supported publicly
created in non-profit sector
Journal literature is freely given away by authors
But journal publishing is largely under corporate control
A public good in private hands
Ray English

“ By ‘open access’ to this literature [i.e. peer-reviewed journal articles], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.” (Budapest Open Access Initiative, www.soros.org/openaccess/ .)

First route : authors deposit copy of pre-print or post-print in an “institutional repository” or other open web-site
Over 600 open repositories already established world-wide
Second route : authors publish in peer-reviewed journals funded by publication charges rather than by library subscriptions
Over 1400 peer-reviewed open access journals now listed in the Lund Directory of Open Access Journals www.doaj.org
ROAR DOAJ RoMEO

Open access enables more people to read research reports
More readers lead to greater use and exploitation of research results (including higher numbers of citations), facilitating the funding of further research
Greater use of research results leads to more public awareness of the value of scientific research
More public awareness leads to a higher political profile for academic research
Repositories help university administrators to keep a record of university research reports
Frederick Friend

(“Online or invisible?”, Steve Lawrence in Nature 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001.)

Bits and bytes 1010100101000001101010 (not paper)
In pervasive cyberspace (not physical space)
Databases and/or Web identified by URIs: (not buildings)
Cost of distribution fallen by orders of magnitude
Read and indexed by machines like Googlebot et al (not just humans)
Increasingly public, available to everyone via Open-Access publishing (less private, less restrictive copyright)
Everything is great?
Alexander Griekspoor www.mekentosj.com Duncan Hull

www.scopus.com www.pubmed.gov http://ukpmc.ac.uk isiknowledge.com scholar.google.com Duncan Hull

Isolation
each discipline has its own data silo
Impersonal and unsociable
“ who the hell are you”?
Where are “my” papers? (authored by me, or of interest to me)
What are my friends and colleagues reading?
What are the experts reading? What is popular this week / month / year ?
“ Cold”: Identity of publications and authors is inadequate
Obsolete models of publication, not everything fits publication-sized holes
Micro-attribution
Mega-attribution
Digital contributions (databases, software, wikis/blogs?)
Duncan Hull

How can I find anything?

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

Or filter failure?

Publish or perish: number of publications
Where are you published?
~24,000 scholarly journals (~6,000 with IF)
~2.5 million publications/year
60-300 applicants per tenure-track position
Reading enough publications is impossible!

Thomson Reuters: Impact Factor
ScImago JournalRank
Eigenfactor

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: Complete list of publications, including original research papers as first author, senior author, impact points total and in the last 5 years, with marked first and last-authorships, personal Scientific Citations Index (SCI, h-Index according to web of science) for all publications.

As much as some may want metrics to go away entirely, that Genie is already out of the bottle and won‘t go back in.

Albert Einstein

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?

50,000 employees
US$600million profit/quarter
Thomson family owns 53%
$30,000-120,000/year subscription rates

Introduced in 1960’s by Eugene Garfield: ISI
2006 and 2007 2008 IF=5 Articles published in 06/07 were cited an average of 5 times in 08. citations articles

Journal X IF 2008= All citations from Thomsons Reuters journals in 2008 to papers in journal X Number of citable articles published in journal X in 2006/7

Negotiable
Irreproducible
Not mathematically sound

PLoS Medicine, IF 2-11 (8.4)
Current Biology IF from 7 to 11 in 2003
Bought by Cell press in 2001

Rockefeller University Press buys their data from TR
Up to 19% deviation from published records
Second dataset still not correct

Left-skewed distributions
Weak correlation of individual article citation rate with journal IF

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

Where the work is published
JournalRank
Citations
scholarly, hyperlinks, social bookmarks
Web usage
Publisher platform; 3rd party locations
Expert ratings
F1000; Peer Reviewers; Ed Boards etc
Community rating & commenting
Digging; Commenting; Rating etc
Peter Binfield

Media/blog coverage
Which sources are considered the most important?
Policy development?
Who published it?
And where do they work? What did they publish before? How ‘impactful’ are they?
Who is talking about it?
And what authority do they have?
Who is citing it ?
And what authority do they have?
Peter Binfield

“ Your article was published in a journal with an Impact Factor of X” Peter Binfield

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

Prestige of the publisher (if any).
Prestige of commenters/users
Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
Raw links to the document.
Valued links
Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments etc
Language in comments: positive, negative, clarified, reinterpreted.
Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s).
Significance of author's other work.
Amount of author's participation in other valued projects.
Reference network: the significance of all the texts cited.
Length of time a document has existed.
Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, etc
Types of tags assigned to it
Authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.
Peter Binfield

Discuss…

No more publishers – libraries archive everything
Single semantic, decentralized database of literature and data
Peer-review done by 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://kim.wits.ac.za	22
http://www.slideshare.net	9
http://ritan23asiaa.blogspot.com	3
http://library.infoupdate.csiro.au	2
http://library.infoupdate-test.csiro.au	2
http://paper.li	1

What's wrong with scholarly publishing today?

by Björn Brembs on Apr 15, 2009

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What’s wrong with scholarly publishing today? — Presentation Transcript