My slides from the session "New Models of Content Dissemination" - see http://lanyrd.com/2013/btpdf2/schedule/

1. Beyond the PDF: New modes of
dissemination
Experiments from PLOS
Theo Bloom, Editorial Director for Biology, PLOS
Amsterdam, March 2013

2. Take-home / talking points / provocation
• Trying to fix a big interconnected system - it‟s
not easy or fast
• One change at a time brings people along
• Steps are good if they‟re in the right direction
• Partner with others wherever it makes sense
• Experiments are good: adapt to the results
2

3. The idealised cycle of
research communication
Do some
science
Discuss ideas
Write a
description
Read/use other Share it with
people’s work the world
3

4. The real-life cycle is more complicated
Do some
science
Discuss ideas
Write a
description
Read / use other
people’s work
Rejection. Try Submit it to
another journal a journal
Get promoted
Do more work
as requested
Get grants Resubmit
Be judged by
publications
Publication

5. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5885/36.1.full.pdf

6. The real-life cycle has some big problems
Problem 4: poor
Problem 1: links from
Access to what underlying data and
Do some
you want to read science methods to write-up
and (re) use
Discuss ideas
Write a
description
Read / use other
people’s work Rejection. Try Submit it to
another journal a journal
Get promoted Problem 5:
Do more work
as requested
Problem 3:
Problem 2:
Get grants Resubmit because of
publication venue
Be judged by problem 2, repeat
as a measure of publications cycles at different
publication quality Publication
journals;
and/or impact
publication is
delayed

7. The real-life cycle has some big problems
Problem 4: poor
Problem 1: links from
Access to what underlying data and
Do some
you want to read science methods to write-up
and (re) use
Discuss ideas
Write a
description
Read / use other
people’s work Rejection. Try Submit it to
another journal a journal
Get promoted Problem 5:
Do more work
as requested
Problem 3:
Problem 2:
Get grants Resubmit because of
publication venue
Be judged by problem 2, repeat
as a measure of publications cycles at different
publication quality Publication
journals;
and/or impact
publication is
delayed
All subject areas; not assessing „impact‟

8. We haven‟t „solved‟ problems 1-3
• Beyond CC-BY: explore better ways to do
openness (metadata, data, reusability); and
accessibility
• Beyond ALMs: make altmetrics optimally useful
and encourage wider adoption
• Beyond PLOS ONE: more formal experiments
with peer review this year – increase openness;
structure reviewer information; portable reviews?
… We have made some progress in these areas
8

9. Problem 4: poor
links from
underlying data and
methods to write-up
Do some
science
Write a
description

10. Do some
science
Write a
description
Store some of the
data somewhere…

11. Do some
science
Integrated collection
of methods, results,
data, metadata
Write a narrative Store all of the
description that is data somewhere
inextricably linked to
the data and methods useful and link
to publication

12. Steps towards better data handling
What to do with „homeless‟ data?
Partnership with Dryad (www.datadryad.org)
• Unstructured data „packages‟ associated with published articles
• Freely available - CC0
• A unique identifier (DOI) for each package
• Statistics for access
• Seamless tying together of article and data
Partnership with figshare (www.figshare.org)
• figshare widget displays Supporting Information files directly in the article
• search, magnify, download singly or as a package
Planning in hand for „data papers‟ (www.ploscompbiol.org)
• Describes reusable dataset to support reuse
• Publishes associated metadata
• Ensures valuable data is actionable for reuse
• Data accessible in a recognized, stable repository

13. Can we revolutionize speed? Problem 5:
PLOS Currents: Influenza - Inspiration
Seeking Lessons in Swine Flu Fight
“Another problem is communication.
Officials and experts say they have learned a lot about human
swine influenza. But relatively little of that information...has
been reported and published. Some experts said researchers
were waiting to publish in journals, which can take months or
longer.”
New York Times, August 10th, 2009
Lawrence K. Altman, M.D.
13

14. Rapid technical and scope review
Authors may revise but can be published almost
immediately post-review
Content is peer-reviewed, citable, publicly
archived, and included in PubMed

15. What comes out: flexible (familiar) format

16. PLOS Currents as an experiment
• Swine flu epidemic faded away - then a new one
started
• We said “submissions do not have to be full-length
articles” – but what did we get?
• What use-cases make most sense for Currents?
• Can we try harder with non-traditional article formats?
– Single findings
– Negative results
– Replications
– Methods and protocols
• Publish all results with as little delay as possible
16

17. Back to issue 1: Access vs. accessibility
• Readable by machines as well as people
• Intelligible
17

18. Where do people go for information?
• open review via wiki
• PLoS Comput Biol article “version of record”
• A high-quality Wikipedia article that can be
edited and updated
18

19. Take-home / talking points
• Trying to fix a big interconnected system -
it‟s not easy or fast
• One change at a time brings people along
• Steps are good if they‟re in the right direction
• Partner with others wherever it makes sense
• Experiments are good: adapt to the results
• We need to work with real people – authors,
readers – as well as with machines
19

20. Open Access
tbloom@plos.org
20