Aug
9
If Peer Review were a Drug-it wouldn’t get onto the Market
Filed Under Blog, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Somewhere in the UK’s Palace of Westminster, where members of Parliament and their lordships, the Peers of the Upper House, will be recalled to discuss Britain’s urban conflagration, a tiny group of MPs have until recently been locked in solemn conclave in a Committee Room to finalize a report on… (no, not the economic disasters, or the future of communication with the Murdochs, but…) …the future of peer review in scholarly research publishing in science. To the profound relief of traditional science journal publishers everywhere, the report concludes that nothing much needs to be done by anyone to anything at any great rate, especially if change requires investment (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmsctech/856/85602.htm). Yet some far-seeing and radical publishers are beginning to change traditional rules – so why do they see the need for action while others crave only for the status quo?
It may well be the case that the largest long term impact of Open Access on scientific research reporting is not on business models or usage rights but, as this report goes to great lengths to deny, on peer review. We now have a situation where growing volumes of articles, waiting at the gate for time consuming single or double blind reviewing by unpaid armies of academics, are increasingly able to move past the “does it have an impact on the study of this subject?” test and pass only the essential but simpler technical surveillance implied in a test which asks “is this good scientific method and is it reproducible?”. This is the revolution wrought by Plos One and which is now being followed widely (Nature Communications and elsewhere). The Select Committee enquiry, while paying lip service to this, never brought itself to the point of quite grasping what has happened, and the evidence of publishers allowed them to happily luxuriate in that innocence.
The title of this piece is a quote from an American commentator given in evidence. It is one of the few peripheral signs of a widespread fear that the game is up for peer review where that means journals that clique-ishly track one school of thought and exclude others, where originality and innovation may fail at the barrier of even double blind reviewing (in niche sub-disciplines of some life sciences, everyone knows everyone’s research areas, or can look them up, anyway). No more than passing reference was made to gender prejudice, or indeed the craving of some journals to deter BRIC-based research – and others to artificially encourage it.
Having taken its evidence from those on both sides anxious for the status quo to be preserved, it is not surprising that the Parliamentary Committee drew a blank. While it noted that the BMJ followed an Open Peer Review methodology, it did not appear to feel it necessary to recommend this to others. Yet an increasing body of opinion seems to be saying that while a simple set of technical tests may be all that is needed to get into the database, all of these processes must be completely open. Peers should be brave enough to stand behind their views, review notes and correspondence should be published, evidential data supporting the experiments should be available, and, post-publication, notes and correspondence relating to reproducibility of the experiment should appear alongside the article. At the same time bibliometrics relating to citation and to actual usage must also be maintained. It seems to some observers that Publishers might have to dismantle the cozy editorial relationships that surround current practice in favour of appointing some paid-for fulltime investigators to give a thorough and documented public technical report on whether the paper applies recognizable scientific method which aligns with accepted good practice, and then track and publish reactions to the work within the community. In other words, a different way of spending the £1.9 bn said in RIN’s 2008 report to be the cost of peer review.
And then you see publishers with a real sense of community ownership beginning to build the tools that will allow them to do this. This week the American Institute of Physics (www.aip.org) launched its iPeerReview tool, allowing authors and reviewers to download an app to their iPhone/iPad enabling them to review status and do work on articles submitted and in work in progress. This extends AIP’s existing workflow environments, Scitation and Peer X-Press. The day is not long off when this type of workflow tool will not only be omnipresent but also transparent, and while some competitive issues, especially around patents applied for, will need careful handling, so much of this research is pre-competitive that this may be less of a problem than first appears. Publishing evidential data may be more of an issue . Publishers and academic administrators currently chorus that the cost would be excessive, but surely they cannot be talking, as they did to the Parliamentary Committee, about the costs of storage, since those are a fraction of what they were a decade ago, and anyway the evidence is already stored by the research project – it just needs to be linked and accessible, and transparently available for other researchers, with permission, to use their own tools to search it and other experimental data with the range of mining and extraction tools now open to them. Publishers should perhaps be in the forefront of extending this service base to their communities of users: those giving evidence to the committee seemed more anxious to defend the journal, as if it were a craft skill like dry stone walling, hedge laying or wattle hurdle making.
And then I came across GSE Research.com, a new project in beta which will launch in the fall. It aims to provide an effective Open Access platform for research into Governance, Environmental Science and Sustainability, importantly relating research to practice and allowing users a full community participation alongside researchers and professionals. But it was not the built-digital features (how much easier without a print legacy!), or the social investment fund or even the Research Exchange that first attracted me. It was the emphasis on putting in, alongside the option for a traditional review model, a fast publication Open Peer Review system, in which the Editor makes the first decision, and the community is able to comment, build and improve the result. “We need to learn to include, not exclude, and give the peer community a chance to decide what is relevant, (not just a handful of individuals.” This is a project to watch, but also a trend to be noted. (www.gseresearch.com )
So should we be surprised or disappointed with the result of the Commons deliberations? As a UK taxpayer, I feel like asking for my money back, but as an observer of Parliamentary Committees, noting the number of times the Murdochs and their executives appeared before them before the Great Hacking Scandal broke, surprise would hardly be in the range of available emotional responses.
Jun
12
Cloud Lucky Seven
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
We have been doing Desert Island Discs in my family. For non-UK readers, this refers to a radio programme which for some 50 years has asked a guest each week to nominate 8 discs they would like to be washed up on a desert island with – and why. My sister, yanking us all back to our first wind-up gramophone of circa 1952, nominated Guy Mitchell singing “Cloud Lucky Seven”. You can find it on YouTube: a powerful demonstration of why it was necessary to invent Elvis Presley. But also a reminder, as I baked in 98 Fahrenheit New York this week under pitiless, cloudless skies, that it is often the case, once something has been invented, that it is necessary to discover it. And as Presley discovered in the ambient music of his culture what had been there in black and rhythm and blues for generations, so Steve Jobs announced the rediscovery of something very familiar to all of us, and rebranded it iCloud. It is very clever, this rediscovery, and often hugely successful.
Which is a natural segue to Steve Jobs and iCloud, a rediscovery so dramatic that a whole generation will grow up thinking that this great marketeer invented remote storage, despite the fact that everyday life, from Googlemail to Salesforce.com, would be unthinkable without remote storage, and that our future as information processors has nothing to do with local storage. But the real significance of the iCloud announcement is that it marks the end of the beginning of the end for personal computing. In 1981, the IBM PC enabled people like me to get into ePublishing by the fact of putting a real computer on every desk. In 2008 the PCs on desktops across the globe passed 1 Billion, but they will never sell another billion. We all know that after years of talking about the “thin client” environment, the time has now come to hold our programming and storage remotely, and carry around the lightest and slightest of interfacing technologies. Three years ago that was the notebook: since early 2010 it has been the tablet. The earth has truly moved.
But at the heart of all of this there is a contradiction. Despite all the things that came with the PC to make things easier for us (the mouse, the GUI – graphical user interface – the desktop, the floppy disc and the CD-ROM) we were aware that we were doing “proper” computing. Those like me who bought the BBC Micro and failed to teach themselves Basic programming in the early 1980s at least recognized that they were working, at a fixed place and in an office, in a very traditional way. In order to overcome the bandwidth problems of dial-up networking, we rapidly accelerated local storage – a brilliant man called Bela Hatvany walked into my office at Thomson’s Eurolex in 1984, showed me a silver disc, and proceeded to load the European Court of Justice judgements on it. So now we could carry storage around, or send it out to customers from the warehouse, packed like the book products we were familiar with, and pretend that the world had not moved at all. But it had at least begun, and this exposes the contradiction: if the tablet is to be our access to the Cloud, when can we expect the tablet to have all of the functionality we associate with desktop computing, as well as all of the on-the-move features we want to associate with work no longer fixed to workplaces. This has not happened – the executive in the conference room making notes on his iPad invariably has a laptop in his hotel bedroom – and it will never quite happen. Instead better functionality in the Cloud will plug us into commonplace desktop features, while the tablet itself concentrates on linking us with less effort to workplace solutions held in the Cloud. In this way we will attain a bi-focal view of the world: able in one aspect of the screen to use devices to communicate and run functions in networks, while replacing browsing by solutioning – using Apps to resolve content access into answers which can be framed and understood in the tablet context. And it is not Steve Jobs who is entirely driving this: it is the overloaded, overheated world of content itself that dictates that we cannot any longer, to use the popular metaphor, drink from the fire hose. And the corollary of all of this is that native Internet backbone becomes ever more important, at the expense of web services sitting on top of it. How soon before we click on a Cloud Services dashboard?
And as Mr Jobs claimed the Cloud, two other announcements last week suggested the future battlegrounds in those content sectors. In the first, FT.com announced its own app (and, surely co-incidentally, Apple announced a lightening of regulations for publishers, though not the full deal in terms of allowing content vendors to get fundamental information on users). The FT position is admirable. It supports an Apple App available through iTunes. At the same time it supports an app downloadable from the FT website which can be used in any tablet context, including the iPad. While a colleague commented that “a US provincial paper would never have got away with this”, the announcement does show that the attempt by Apple to control and discipline the content marketplace may be beginning to waver. And it also demonstrates, of course, that the FT “gets it” in this generation in a way that it did not in the past, and that it is one of few players who really do. We are on our way to the re-invention of the newspaper as a service: this is a non-stopping express, though since the windows are open (pun intended) some passengers may fall out on the curves.
As this column has said many times, surviving is about being big and getting bigger. So some were non-plussed at the Thomson Reuters announcement that their healthcare interests were to be sold by the end of the year (though they retain Web of Science and its related activities in their IP section). Yet this seems the inexorable consequence of their business logic. While healthcare is still a market full of buzz, with a huge information investment profile, Thomson Reuters were a trailing third in a market where solutions of the type described here as workflow are becoming vital. Without huge investment, or buying WK Health, great content like MicroMedex could not be fully optimized, though Thomson Healthcare have been making some good progress with care provider contracting. As a result of the divestment (and note the wonderful history of Thomson divestments as a guide to industry sentiment), a significant industry consolidation could take place, an existing player or a software vendor could reposition, or a new player with the investment needed could enter the US market. In current economic circumstances a private equity exit seems less likely than a strategic buyer with a healthy balance sheet. My bet in the past in these pages has been Springer, for which I have been soundly beaten around the head by all parties. We shall see.
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