May
18
Joining Up the Video Dots
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“Hey, we don’t use those words anymore!” And I wasn’t even paddling around in the minefields of sexual and racial nomenclature, where people of my age step at their peril in daily risk of standing on a verbal IED. My colleague had just used the expression “STM”, and I was hurrying to point out how limited, by domain, discipline and format, that expression now was and how little it contained of where “scholarly communications” now was. He looked grumpy on screen, and about to protest so I used newly acquired meeting management skills, muted him, and addressed the rest of the virtual room. “if we use expressions like STM, we not only ignore HSS, but we also live in the pretend world that says that communications can only be recognised if they are clothed in pre-digital forms like books or monographs or articles in journals. Academic research of all types has always been about much more in communication terms.”
If we look at the workflow of researchers, or indeed of most professionals and many business people, we quickly see, in a digitally networked age, that if the screen is the viewer then a whole mass of communications pass across it in the course of our work. Some of these are trivial in essence, though they may have vital importance in a moment. Others are important long form productions, though it is rare for us to deal with them at length. Thus while it can be important for a researcher to review a scholarly article from end to end, it is more likely to be found in searches that are directed at methodologies, or references and citations, or as a result of a concept search. And bobbing along in this broad bitstream with carefully crafted books and articles are items of less formal content: blogs, reviews, annotations (hypothess.is has now passed 10 million annotations as at 8 May), nuggets of micro-publishing of all types. And thanks to the efforts of the good people at ORCID and CrossRef and millions of individual scholars we can swim in this great river because good, not yet great, metadata exists to interconnect the items.
But some artefacts of scholarly enquiry have not fared so well. Evidential data is a prime example, though improvements are now taking place in some disciplines in the interconnection of articles to data held in repositories. But researchers do not only write: they also speak, present and debate. For a long time the content derived from this has been inaccessible. Any researcher who dreamt of a search in which one of the results would be a five minute relevant video extract from a conference speech was doomed to frustration. Despite the “when we return to paper post-pandemic” fogies, academics have been including programmable graphs, software, videos and audio in digital articles for many years. It was the conferences that got lost, or isolated and disconnected on the site of a scholarly society. Yet it is clear that in the conference workflow that we find the important early signs of results and early stage success indicators.
Now two young companies are making determined efforts to close the gap around conferences and bring the posters and all the other content into searchable view. I have mentioned morressier.com here, but this is what ACS, a recent partner, said: “Morressier was selected as the platform for SciMeetings due to their commitment to developing tools that enable conferences posters, presentations, abstracts, datasets, videos, and supporting files to be widely discoverable”. Moressier has gone through the long slog of building content scale, and can now reasonably expect the market, as we either move out of the pandemic travel restrictions or into a more virtual world of conferences, to flow in their direction.
All of which makes Underline Science (underline.io) even more interesting. Here is a conference platform built for science conference events. Nine months old, it’s appearance just as many scientific meetings were being cancelled or postponed was fortuitous. It’s early concentration has been upon meetings in AI and robotics, reflecting the research interests of its founder, Alex Lazinica, also co-founder of IntechOpen and himself a former researcher. Those who attended the virtual AAMAS conference in Auckland last week saw citable lectures, presentations and transcripts. The ability to move from language to language adds a necessary but impressive dimension, especially with key languages like Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and English. In a manner reminiscent of Vitek Tracz’s video interviews with great scientists, lectures will be divided into “chapters” (how the ghosts of those old formats linger!”). This will help ensure that elements are discoverable as packets. As it develops more functionality and more polish this service will turn into a basic way of providing conference searchability in an Open Science world. At the moment holding conferences at all is hard to justify unless you live in New Zealand. But in the development of these two companies it is easy to see parts of the research, alerting and intelligence cycle in scholarly communications that will have moved forward decisively as a result of the pandemic.
Apr
28
When we look back at Covid 19 in the Internet Archive, and I am hoping some of us will, then we will reflect amongst other things about our extraordinary tolerance about Lists. Yes, I do mean Lists. “Five hand sanitizers that break up the lipids without removing the skin”. “seven non-fatal ways of silencing small children in closed spaces” “fifteen ways to use a WhataApp group to persecute a family you no longer see anymore”. Well, gentle reader, now it is your turn. Here are “three ways to really add value to research without giving someone a pointless freebie”.
I am sure you have noticed the trend and been as impressed as I was though I am not sure who started it. All through March the press releases of virtuous giving tinkled into my inbox.” YZ Publishing are pleased to announce that they have collected together all of their Covid 19 research papers and made them FREE for researchers“. It turned into a minor epidemic in its own right. And it was done with the very best of intentions, by good people anxious to help. And my heart goes out to the PR directors. Once YZ had done it, how could BC not follow? But, typically of the gesture politics of our times, no one really thought through what this might mean for the end-user. While the wider public might stand in awe of the beneficence and public spiritedness of great publishing houses, researcher reaction was less certain. “It takes some nerve to take articles that I have already paid for through my library subscription, put them in a nice data file and then hand them back to me as a gift!” was one possible reaction. “if I want to search it has to be driven by my own parameters – who are these people to say what is relevant to me or to Covid 19″ was another.
And there was a third, worse possible reaction. For some researchers these well intentioned efforts acted as a sharp reminder that the research is not available from a single source, that you cannot text or data mine it universally, and that it is held behind paywalls and in siloes which have different rules of access, different data structures, different pricing formulae. In an age when traditional publishing is clinging to vestiges of the subscription world through transformative agreements to make the transfer to an Open Access world as slow and painless as possible, these are not good points to underline. And they did not show an industry deeply concerned about what researchers actually wanted in this moment of crisis, like faster processing of research findings already in the system, or the ability to more effectively cross reference and index the material available. Only three companies or groups passed the test of market-tuned usefulness, leaving aside the preprint servers (who have really demonstrated their usefulness in crisis, to the frustration of one traditional publishing critic who insists they will fall over tomorrow).
So my list of three now includes:
1. Cactus Communications https://covid19.researcher.life/ This application, powered by their recent acquisition of the AI company UNSILO brings together references to millions of potentially relevant resources. And not just articles: included here is less formal material, reviews, blogs, podcasts and problem solving exercises. “a platform that collates research and datasets from different countries, irrespective of the language in which they were published; allows researchers to ask questions and pose hypotheses to other researchers; and curates expert-driven editorial content that simplifies and explains the latest research.” So, a research aide that is practical, multi-lingual and targeted at the problems that researchers are really facing.
2. OASPA member response: ”Scholarly publishers are working together to maximize the efficiency of peer review, ensuring that key work related to COVID-19 is reviewed and published as quickly and openly as possible.
The group of publishers and scholarly communications organizations — initially comprising eLife, Hindawi, PeerJ, PLOS, Royal Society, F1000 Research, FAIRsharing, Outbreak Science, and PREreview — is working on initiatives and standards to speed up the review process while ensuring rigor and reproducibility remain paramount. The group has issued an Open Letter of Intent, https://oaspa.org/covid-19-publishers-open-letter-of-intent-rapid-review/, and is launching an initiative to ensure a rapid, efficient, yet responsible review of COVID-19 content.” Here again is a real willingness to grasp an issue of researcher concern – how much useful input is trapped in a three month or more peer review cycle – and do something about it.
3. Digital Science https://www.digital-science.com/blog/news/readcube-launches-the-research-pass-program This new program brings some publishers together, but there are huge omissions, notably Elsevier. It is a researcher-orientated initiative and deserves praise for that. Of course it is using “free” as a hook to attract people to material that the system has already acquired, and of course it does not reduce the underlying silo effect: it just disguises it intelligently. But you can hear the controlling voices of the publishers in the background “you can apply for text and data mining “means” we can elect…” Temporary URLs encompassing these data can be exported to social media and third parties (great) but you cannot download or print from them (we are in control). As ever, Digital Science thinks researcher first, but is limited by its data providers.
The proponents of traditional subscription publishing seem to believe that the hard times that are coming will kill preprints and freeze Open Access. They seem to forget that it will decimate subscriptions as well. Future research will more often be reference and data based, which these players in my list have grasped. Concept searching will grow in importance. We all have to get closer to thinking how we improve researcher workflow and outputs. There can be no doubt that in recession we shall create cheaper, quicker and easier ways of evaluating and reporting research. And if today’s publishers do not accomplish this, a raft of new players will emerge to do the job.
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