Dec
30
Time is. Time Was. Time Will Be
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Resolution: whatever we do in 2017, let us not enumerate our actions. “20 new uses for AI”, “Six fastest ways of going broke online”, “9 rules for investment success Digitally”, “3 certain ways of employing the right strategies for…” Enough. ENOUGH!
What follows here will be some things I am tracking that may or may not happen in 2017. This piece will end when I am tired or you are bored. Neither of us is keeping score.
* I am using a keyboard to communicate with you. Why? Since the early 1980s when I had to persuade lawyers to use them (“you mean, like my secretary?”). I have annually forecast the end of the keyboard. It’s stubborn resistance is deplorable, given its slowness and inadequacy as an interface. Will 2017 see at least the beginning of its end?
* Voice is the natural and obvious way to address a machine. We now have really good technology to relate voice documents to text. We can even (Wibbitz) turn text into video. And we have made two decades of progress in annotating documents with rich metadata, telling us what they contain and linking them to other texts in whatever form they have when stored or originated. Yet we still cannot fluently “communicate” with them.
* Yet they are, these texts, gradually getting the ability to communicate with each other. 2017 will see further evidence of self-cross referencing and self-updating environments. These will be essential to a future based on machine learning and machine intelligence. Will 2017 see the beginnings of a greater fluency within knowledge systems, be they business environments, scholarly research or intelligence systems, than exists between the people using them? “Sorry, I can no longer explain to you what we know about that, so perhaps your machine would like to talk to ours and get the full picture?”
* Please can we start inventing words to describe the forms we are using, instead of importing into the virtual world the format hangovers from the past. Book, magazine, newspaper, journal, article. Especially that last one. We need new words for episodes of scholarly communication, for example, that indicate aspects of research reporting: “article” does not cut it where “results” could mean “patent” or “data” or other matter relevant to research outcomes but stored elsewhere, not searchable in the same context etc. And the same confusing, terminological poverty exists everywhere.
* We need more numbers. We have spent the past twenty years trying hard to identify content, sources and authors. Now, in the face of legal sanctions which will only get tighter, we face an urgent need to better identify users. The ability to follow, record and measure online activity, and the value of the individual research trail as a contribution to knowledge, now becomes so great that individuals will be constrained to surrender privacy rights of their own in order to benefit from the data created as a result of others doing so. Or they may even be paid to do so.
* Self-publishing goes further and faster next year. Every publisher will have a system. Much will have been increased in sophistication and many services will be free. Creating documents that automatically join the community of reference and talk to each other in ways that update and restore currency is a predictable outcome, towards which we shall see further progress in 2017.
* “Verticalization” is becoming a key theme. We have seen in 2016 how a number of major information industry players have begun to exit horizontal, multi-market portfolio holdings and try to regroup around vertically-integrated, enterprise-driven corporate structures. More of that in 2017, as content becomes more commoditised and shared more effectively amongst users, and the age of data leads beyond the democratisation of information to the idea that it is not the information that has value that you need to protect as much as the way you treat it and relate it – we should be heralding the Age of Analytics.
* Look to see this reflected in M&A. More divestments of content that does not fit the vertical interest. More acquisition of tools, process systems, data analytics, discovery instruments etc. Once we added value to the information: now we will seek to add value to the process of using it, building client reliance on our ability to outsource whole sections of workflow seamlessly. This changes the dynamics of client relationships in ways that many current information players are wholly unprepared, as yet, to confront.
* Some of the old sayings learnt and rehearsed in the past 25 years of mass online usage remain valid. “Nothing succeeds in the network until it has first failed in the network” (think about current commentary on Blockchain). “Change is infinitely and often imperceptibly slow… but then goes with a rush at the end” (think about networks and user populations and communities and brands). “Nothing is so funny to the coming generation as the old-fashioned and antediluvian way in which the immediately previous generation organised themselves in the virtual world” (think about My Space and Facebook, and then Facebook and…)
How many was that? No, do NOT count them. If you have reached this point please accept the profound good wishes of this writer for a peaceful, productive and overwhelmingly happy new year. And if you didn’t? Well, the interstices between wisdom and idiocy are wafer-thin, and we shall never know whether you will have been wiser for not reading it than I have been by virtue of writing it!
Dec
11
Author! Author! Its all about Author-ity!
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Great week to end a year of tumult. While politics is an aberration, the continued development of the electronic publishing networked world is a continuing delight. In a week I found myself starting the new London Info International meeting in the grey hinterland of London Dockland’s ExCel, and ending it speaking in an auditorium in the National Academy of Sciences Keck Centre in Washington DC. And the uniting theme was not for once despair at the prospects of Trump or Brexit. Instead what brought us all together was the advent of an author driven publishing world where self publishing is now the expected reality, and where the reality of toolkits to make acts of sophisticated self-publishing regularly possible is becoming more apparent daily.
Once again academic and research information leads the way, but what is happening there points as ever to wider societal changes. For me, a deeply prejudiced witness, the unifying thesis here is now clearly apparent. As I said in London and repeated in DC, the breakthrough age of Open Access is now past its zenith. This does not mean that it ends anytime soon or that it does not create new growth points in certain disciplines or geographies. It does mean however that the emerging “new normal” becomes getting an article onto a pre-print server, posting it on a repository or exposing it in services like figshare or F1000. Speed is important as is reputation. We lack good ways of underling authorial reputation, which is why services like Kudos are so important. Whether, in a world of post-publication peer review and networked assessment, we are published in a formal journal, open access or not, is becoming irrelevant. Indeed, the real emerging battleground is whether the article is the best way of communicating results, and I expect to see fragmentation around it continuing to grow. From sectors like cell signalling, where data analysis is cited, given a DOI and communicated to HSS disciplines where it remains a standard for posting results, through the many areas of life and social sciences where it is becoming hard to publish an article credibly without releasing evidential data, this pattern of differentiation is becoming obvious. Yet we still conduct discussions using format, ex-print, terms like journal, book and article as if they meant the same in all instances.
My day at London Info International was called “The Rise of the User”, which was hugely appropriate. But of course, the reason why scholarly communications is the first area always impacted by changes to the dynamics of communications is that it is here that the author and the reader are the same people. This is a world of researchers writing for the people that they themselves read. And, more obviously than elsewhere, writing, publishing and communication is an important part of the workflow of scholarship. As we know from B2B markets in particular, that workflow expression is vital. We can know see how the injection of critical information service organization into decision-making environments can have a profound effect on productivity and risk management. This is what we are squaring up to in research.
As we move to become a self-publishing society, we will automate the ways in which we add metadata and build our publishing into the knowledge structure around us. In the foreseeable future the self-publishing professor will add links which expose all of his previous communications, from blogs to books, and which also expose her experience or ranking or reputational data. It will take time for this to evolve, but as I travelled last week between places it was fascinating to see Wiley announcing a new Author Services deal to help authors get into journals, and Cambridge University Press team with Overleaf to do much the same. This is what we should expect as publishers see how far the barriers to self-publishing are diminishing. I have long watched services like www.wearefutureproofs.com work on smart applications for solving one of the bumpy parts of the road – proofreading – on the road to authorial self-relization. Librarians keep telling me how difficult it is to get researchers to engage in publishing tasks without apparently realising how large a part of librarianship in the future will be engagement in publishing support. And at London info International I was able to get some briefing upon www.authorcafe.com, a really interesting attempt to wrap up the whole package for the research team. These are early stages, but this week I have had a strong feeling of the decks being cleared for action.
And what happens in the longer term. All this week I have been repeating my October mantra from the STM conference at Frankfurt. When APCs get onerous enough Funders become publishers (F1000+ Wellcome). My 2027 market leadership forecast, that the biggest players will be IBM Watson Science, concentrating on experimental repeatability through data analytics (did anyone note the significance of the investment by Digital Science in Transcriptic?) and Gates, concentrating on a service defining reputation and trust in research, which I have nicknamed Guru until they oblige by inventing it!) remains on my slide deck. This week audiences were muted in their reactions: stunned that someone should be so dumb, or shocked at all those publishers getting sold or turned into services and solutions providers, I wonder? Thanks for reading me this year, if you have been and joyous festives before facing all-change 2017.