Category Archives: Open Access

General, Non-Profits, Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Missing the point?

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pendulum by sylvar

It has been about a month since Science published Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship by James Evans. I’ve waited some time to comment because the results were somewhat nonintuitive, leading to some deeper thinking.

The results seem to indicate that greater access to online journals results in fewer citations. The reasons for this are causing some discussion. Part of what I wlll maintain is that papers from 15 years ago were loaded with references for two reasons that are no longer relevant today: to demonstrate how hard the author had worked to find relevant information and to help the reader in their searches for information.

Finding information today is too easy for there to be as great a need to include a multitude of similar references.

Many people feel the opposite, that the ease in finding references, via such sites as PubMed, would result in more papers being cited not less. Bench Marks has this to say:

Evans brings up a few possibilities to explain his data. First, that the better search capabilities online have led to a streamlining of the research process, that authors of papers are better able to eliminate unrelated material, that searching online rather than browsing print “facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature.” The online environment better enables consensus, “If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles.” The danger here, as Evans points out, is that if consensus is so easily reached and so heavily reinforced, “Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly.” And that’s worrisome–we need the outliers, the iconoclasts, those willing to challenge dogma. There’s also a great wealth in the past literature that may end up being ignored, forcing researchers to repeat experiments already done, to reinvent the wheel out of ignorance of papers more than a few years old. I know from experience on the book publishing side of things that getting people to read the classic literature of a field is difficult at best. The keenest scientific minds that I know are all well-versed in the histories of their fields, going back well into the 19th century in some fields. But for most of us, it’s hard to find the time to dig that deeply, and reading a review of a review of a review is easier and more efficient in the moment. But it’s less efficient in the big picture, as not knowing what’s already been proposed and examined can mean years of redundant work.

But this is true of journals stored in library stacks, before online editions. It was such a pain to use Index Medicus or a review article (reading a review article has always been the fastest way to get up to speed. It has nothing to do with being online or not) and find the articles that were really needed. So people would include every damn one they found that was relevant. The time spent finding the reference had to have some payoff.

Also, one would just reuse citations for procedures, adding on to those already used in previous papers. The time spent tracking down those references would be paid out by continuing usage, particularly in the Introduction and Materials & Methods sections. Many times, researchers would have 4 or 5 different articles all saying the similar things or using the same technique just to provide evidence of how hard they had worked to find them (“I had to find these damned articles on PCR generated mutagenesis and I am going to make sure I get maximum usage out of them.”)

There are other possible answers for the data that do not mean that Science and Scholarship are narrowing, at least not in a negative sense. A comment at LISNews leads to one possible reason – an artifact of how the publishing world has changed.
The comment takes us to a commentary of the Evans’ article.While this is behind the subscription wall, there is this relevant paragraph:

One possible explanation for the disparate results in older citations is that Evans’s findings reflect shorter publishing times. “Say I wrote a paper in 2007” that didn’t come out for a year, says Luis Amaral, a physicist working on complex systems at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, whose findings clash with Evans’s. “This paper with a date of 2008 is citing papers from 2005, 2006.” But if the journal publishes the paper the same year it was submitted, 2007, its citations will appear more recent.

[As an aside, when did it become Evans’s rather than Evans’? I’d have gotten points of from my English teacher for that. Yet a premier journal like Science now shows that I can use it that way.]

The commentary also mentions work that appears to lead to different conclusions:

Oddly, “our studies show the opposite,” says Carol Tenopir, an information scientist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She and her statistician colleague Donald King of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have surveyed thousands of scientists over the years for their scholarly reading habits. They found that scientists are reading older articles and reading more broadly–at least one article a year from 23 different journals, compared with 13 journals in the late 1970s. In legal research, too, “people are going further back,” says Dana Neac u, head of public services at Columbia University’s Law School Library in New York City, who has studied the question.

So scientists are reading more widely and more deeply. They just do not add that reading to their reference lists. Why? Part of it might be human nature. Since it is so much easier to find relevant papers, having a long list no longer demonstrates how hard one worked to find them. Citing 8 articles at a time no longer means much at all.

That is, stating “PCR has been used to create mutations in a gene sequence 23-32” no longer demonstrates the hard work put into gathering those references. It is so easy to find a reference that adding more than a few looks like overkill. That does not mean that the scientists are not reading all those other ones. They still appear to be, and are even reading more, they just may be including only the relevant ones in their citations.

Two others put the data into a different perspective. Bill Hooker at Open Reading Frame did more than most of us. He actually went exploring in the paper itself and added his own commentary. Let’s look at his response to examining older articles:

The first is that citing more and older references is somehow better — that bit about “anchor[ing] findings deeply intro past and present scholarship”. I don’t buy it. Anyone who wants to read deeply into the past of a field can follow the citation trail back from more recent references, and there’s no point cluttering up every paper with every single reference back to Aristotle. As you go further back there are more errors, mistaken models, lack of information, technical difficulties overcome in later work, and so on — and that’s how it’s supposed to work. I’m not saying that it’s not worth reading way back in the archives, or that you don’t sometimes find overlooked ideas or observations there, but I am saying that it’s not something you want to spend most of your time doing.

It is much harder work to determine how relevant a random 10 year old paper is than one published last month. In the vast majority of cases, particularly in a rapidly advancing field (say neuroscience) papers that old will be chock full of errors based on inadequate knowledge. This would diminish their usefulness as a reference. In general, new papers will be better to use. I would be curious for someone to examine reference patterns in papers published 15 years ago to see how many of the multitude of citations are actually relevant or even correct?

Finally, one reason to include a lot of references is to help your readers find the needed information without having to do the painful work of digging it out themselves. This is the main reason to include lots of citations.

When I started in research, a good review article was extremely valuable. I could use it to dig out the articles I needed. I loved papers with lots of references, since it made my life easier. This benefit is no longer quite as needed because other approaches are now available to find relevant papers in a much more rapid fashion than just a few years ago.

Bill discusses this, demonstrating that since it is so much easier to find relevant article today, this need to help the reader in THEIR searches is greatly diminshed.

OK, suppose you do show that — it’s only a bad thing if you assume that the authors who are citing fewer and more recent articles are somehow ignorant of the earlier work. They’re not: as I said, later work builds on earlier. Evans makes no attempt to demonstrate that there is a break in the citation trail — that these authors who are citing fewer and more recent articles are in any way missing something relevant. Rather, I’d say they’re simply citing what they need to get their point across, and leaving readers who want to cast a wider net to do that for themselves (which, of course, they can do much more rapidly and thoroughly now that they can do it online).

Finally, he really examines the data to see if they actually show what many other reports have encapsulated. What he finds is that the online access is not really equal. Much of it is still commercial and requires payment. He has this to say when examining the difference between commercial online content and Open Access (my emphasis):

What this suggests to me is that the driving force in Evans’ suggested “narrow[ing of] the range of findings and ideas built upon” is not online access per se but in fact commercial access, with its attendant question of who can afford to read what. Evans’ own data indicate that if the online access in question is free of charge, the apparent narrowing effect is significantly reduced or even reversed. Moreover, the commercially available corpus is and has always been much larger than the freely available body of knowledge (for instance, DOAJ currently lists around 3500 journals, approximately 10-15% of the total number of scholarly journals). This indicates that if all of the online access that went into Evans’ model had been free all along, the anti-narrowing effect of Open Access would be considerably amplified.

[See he uses the possessive of Evans the way I was taught. I wish that they would tell me when grammar rules change so I could keep up.]

It will take a lot more work to see if there really is a significant difference in the patterns between Open Access publications and commercial ones. But this give and take that Bill utilizes is exactly how Science progresses. Some data is presented, with a hypothesis. Others critique the hypothesis and do further experiments to determine which is correct. The conclusions from Evans’ paper are still too tentative, in my opinion, and Bill’s criticisms provide ample fodder for further examinations.

Finally, Deepak Singh at BBGM provides an interesting perspective. He gets into one of the main points that I think is rapidly changing much of how we do research. Finding information is so easy today that one can rapidly gather links. This means that even interested amateurs can find information they need, something that was almost impossible before the Web.

The authors fail to realize that for the majority of us, the non-specialists, the web is a treasure trove of knowledge that most either did not have access to before, or had to do too much work to get. Any knowledge that they have is better than what they would have had in the absence of all this information at our fingertips. Could the tools they have to become more efficient and deal with this information glut be improved? Of course, and so will our habits evolve as we learn to deal with information overload.

He further discusses the effects on himself and other researchers:

So what about those who make information their life. Creating it, parsing it, trying to glean additional information to it. As one of those, and having met and known many others, all I can say is that to say that the internet and all this information has made us shallower in our searching is completely off the mark. It’s easy enough to go from A –> B, but the fun part is going from A –> B –> C –> D or even A –> B –> C –> H, which is the fun part of online discovery. I would argue that in looking for citations we can now find citations of increased relevance, rather than rehashing ones that others do, and that’s only part of the story. We have the ability to discovery links through our online networks. It’s up to the user tho bring some diversity into those networks, and I would wager most of us do that.

So, even if there is something ‘bad’ about scientists having a more shallow set of citations in their publications, this is outweighed by the huge positive seen in easy access for non-scientists. They can now find information that used to be so hard to find that only experts ever read them. The citation list may be shorter but the diversity of the readers could be substantially enlarged.

Finally, Philip Davis at The Scholarly Kitchen may provide the best perspective. He also demonstrates how the Web can obliterate previous routes to disseminate information. After all the to-do about not going far enough back into the past for references, Philip provides not only a link (lets call it a citation) from a 1965 paper by Derek Price but also provides a quote:

I am tempted to conclude that a very large fraction of the alleged 35,000 journals now current must be reckoned as merely a distant background noise, and as far from central or strategic in any of the knitted strips from which the cloth of science is woven.

So even forty years ago it was recognized that most publications were just background noise. But, what Philip does next is very subtle, since he does not mention it. Follow his link to Price’s paper (which is available on the Web, entitled Networks of Scientific Papers). You can see the references Price had in his paper. a total of 11. But you can also see what papers have used Price’s paper as a reference. You can see that quite a few recent papers have used this forty year old paper as a reference. Seems like some people maintain quite a bit of depth in their citations!

And now, thanks to Philip, I will read an interesting paper I would never have read before. So perhaps there will be new avenues to find relevant papers that does not rely on following a reference list back in time. The Web provides new routes that short circuits this but are not seen if people only follow databases of article references.

In conclusion, the apparent shallownesss may only be an artifact of publishing changes, it may reflect a change in the needs of the authors and their readers, it may not correctly factor in differences in online publishing methods, it could be irrelevant and/or it could be flat out wrong. But it is certainly an important work because it will drive further investigations to tease out just what is going on.

It already has, just by following online conversations about it. And to think that these conversations would not have been accessible to many just 5 years ago. The openness displayed here is another of the tremendous advances of online publication.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Open Access Textbooks

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flat earth by SoftPIX_Techie
Interview with Flat World Knowledge:
[Via Open Access News]

Dian Schaffhauser, Textbook Publishing in a Flat World, Campus Technology, August 6, 2008. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) An interview with Eric Frank, co-founder of OA textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge.

See also our past posts on FWK.

The idea of an Open Access textbook publisher seems foolhardy at first blush. But Flat Earth has a plan that just might be viable.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

The synthetic organization, part 2

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pencils 2 by Paul Worthington

{See The Synthetic Organization, Part 1 }

Pixar is different from every other movie studio. Why?

One aspect is mentioned in the article – a leader at Pixar for one movie becomes a follower and supporter for the next. They remain engaged in each other’s projects. The success of one helps the success of all.

But I also believe that there is a little more than this. Because each Pixar movie is more than just telling a story; it is adding to the tool box being used by all the innovators at Pixar. The impact of each movie to this continually enlarging storehouse of knowledge engages these innovators who work at the leading edge of technology.

There are other computer animated movies that are quite good. Kung Fu Panda , for instance. But many of these are really no different at their basis than regular 2-D animation. That is, the movie would not have been much different using classic cel-based animation. The gags would have been the same and just as funny.

On the other hand, each Pixar movie, besides the obvious need to create an enjoyable experience, seems to have another motive for being created. Each actually seems to be an exercise in solving a difficult technical question, one that can only be examined using computer animation.

Toy Story proved that a compelling story told by computer generated animation could actually be accomplished. A Bug’s Life examined the problem of opening up the world, from the relatively claustrophobic, medium shot world of Toy Story to an almost Cinerama widescreen not seen since How the West Was Won .

Toy Story 2 brought increased pathos and emotionality from animated characters, indicating that these completely virtual creations could twist our emotions like regular actors. Monsters, Inc. stretched the reality of the computer animated world, taking it into fantastical directions impossible in any other medium, while using increases in technology to address things like animated hair. Finding Nemo added the problematical world of water, something always very difficult to do with any animated approach.

The Incredibles began an examination of an effective animated caricature of the human form, something that had just looked too weird in previous movies (even Monster, Inc. covered up Boo in a costume for large periods of time) and was thus often avoided.

Cars demonstrated an increasing sophistication by creating normally inanimate objects that could actually act. That is, they only had eyes and mouths to convey emotion. No arms or legs to help demonstrate emotionality. It is as if an entire movie was made with only head shots.

Ratatouille now combined all the lessons previously learned into human characters that could emote. While the human figures in The Incredibles often acted in grand gestures and seemed larger than life (well, they were superheroes), the people who inhabited Ratatouille looked and acted much smaller, like regular people.

The characters did not have to ‘shout’ to convey action but could tell us what they were thinking by a subtle change in facial expression. Ratatouille was the first computer animated movie that seemed to have actual human beings occupying the screen.

And WALL-E is the solution to a dandy problem. Can a computer animated character be created that is emotionally engaging but has no human eyes or mouth, who does not speak? Essentially, could an animated movie be created combining a robotic Buster Keaton with the first 20 minutes of 2001:A Space Odyssey ?

Now illustrating a great story has been done with computers before and they can make enjoyable movies. But each Pixar movie has been on the path to creating singular movie characters that can emote on the same complex level as human actors. Pixar has put together a tool chest that no one else has.

So part of the way Pixar has kept its creative people engaged is to provide them opportunities to succeed at solving very difficult questions using tools no one else has. Recreating all of this elsewhere would be difficult.

Each of these very difficult questions (realistic animated characters, realistic surroundings, emotional connections, toolbox of techniques) had to not only be answered but had to be done inside a commercially successful creation. Simply solving these problems, as if they were some sort of Labors of Hercules, was not enough. Pixar movies also had to be have narrative that was worth the price of admission. Simply pushing the envelope would not be successful.

Pixar set itself up to attack very complex problems that required solutions at many different levels in order to achieve success, with the added problem that success would be measured by box office response. Success at just one of these levels only would result in failure.

Pixar has been able to do this because it seems to be designed along different lines than many multinational or MBA-driven companies. It is synthesizing the knowledge it learns to create something not seen before, and developing methods of organization to sustain this synthesis.

As discussed in the Harvard article , Pixar’s innovators lead some times and provide support at others. I’ll talk more soon but check out The Unplanned Organization by Margaret Wheatley to get a hint of where I am going…

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Open Access, Web 2.0

The synthetic organization, part 1

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pencil by Paul Worthington

I had dinner last night with my friend, Mark Minie, who has a tremendous range of experience in immunology, high tech and biotech. While these are always wide ranging discussions last night’s had some special resonance (e.g. WBBA, indirect costs at the UW, the paradigm shifting activities of Craig Venter, the boundary moving work of WALL-E).

The confluence of these topics, along with a host of others, led me to reflect on the changes that will take place in organizations that are supposed to support and germinate creativity.

Industrial and academic approaches towards teaching, learning and understanding have been analytical for most of the last century – breaking complex processes down into simpler units and then working to understand them. These approaches have been very successful, producing many of the scientific advances we now enjoy.

But we are more and more entering a time where synthesis (the Greek words making up synthesis accurately describe just what it is) becomes paramount. Modern organizational approaches have not been as successful here, mainly because synthesis requires a social aspect that is often not supported in academia, or in much of industry, at least the biotech industry.

Analysis can be accomplished by a single lecturer talking to a large group, breaking down complex knowledge into bite-size bits for the students. Synthesis is almost the reverse, the bite-size portions are built back up, to be used by the group to create knowledge. Few academic organizations can accomplish this easily.

Venter, throughout most of his career, has taken synthetic approaches to solving scientific questions. Others were isolating single DNA fragments individually from entire genomes(some with genes and some without), laboriously determining where on the chromosome the sequence resided, then what the actual sequence was in detail and then trying to determine just what the sequence did, if anything.

Venter cloned large numbers of gene fragments directly, rapidly sequenced them, then used computer programs to put all the pieces together and went from there.

He built up his knowledge from many different, small pieces in order to understand. His shotgun approaches revolutionized the manner by which the human genome was characterized and still has ramifications today.

But his approach, putting the pieces together to determine the whole, was met with a lot of controversy. Synthesis was just not a model for doing biological research. His work, and that of many others who understood the importance of this approach, was disruptive and paradigm-shifting.

Most organizations are great at analysis but few seem to do synthesis well. Yet, many of the problems we face today (i.e. climate change, energy use, cancer therapies) are synthetic in nature (pun intended). How does one create an environment that fosters synthesis?

Pixar is an example. Harvard Business Online has a great article detailing just how different Pixar is from every other movie studio. It has been able to maintain its innovative culture and keep its creative talent from leaving, all while delivering nine hit movies in a row.

Read about Pixar and I will have more later…

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Open Access

Oxford and OA

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Oxford by Dimitry B
Oxford’s Open Book on Open Access:
[Via The Scholarly Kitchen]

Claire Bird provides a refreshingly agnostic and evidence-based approach to open access experiments with Oxford University Press.

University presses are also seeing pressure from Open Access approaches. There will be a period of turmoil as business models readjust. It looks like the Oxford University Press nicely articulates some of the hurdles to overcome.

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Knowledge Creation, Open Access, Web 2.0

Just a taste

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atomium by txd
What Social Media Does Best:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]
Before Chris starts his list he has this to say:

If you’re still looking for the best ways to explain to senior management or your team or your coworkers or your spouse what it is that social media does, why it’s different than the old way people used to use computers and the web, why people are giving two hoots about it, here are some thoughts to start out the conversation. I look at this mostly from a business perspective, but I suspect you’ll find these apply to nonprofits and other organizations as well. Further, as I’m fond of saying, social media isn’t relegated to the marketing and PR teams. It’s a bunch of tools that can be used throughout businesses, in different forms. Think on this.

I’m not going to list all of Chris’ points but here are a few to whet your appetite.

Blogs allow chronological organization of thoughts, status, ideas. This means more permanence than emails.

The organizational aspects of blogs are one of their most overlooked features.

Social networks encourage collaboration, can replace intranets and corporate directories, and can promote non-email conversation channels.

Email is not optimized for the sorts information transfer that it is used for. It also makes it impossible to really know just who should see the information. Social networks open this up and make it highly likely that the right information to get to the right people.

Social networks can amass like-minded people around shared interests with little external force, no organizational center, and a group sense of what is important and what comes next.

Ad hoc group creation is one of the best aspects of social networks. Rapid dispersal of information amongst a small, focussed group can occur independent of the need for everyone occupy similar space at the same time, as is done in meetings.

Blogs and wikis encourage conversations, sharing, creation.

Facilitating conversations increases information flow, speeding up the creativity cycle

Social networks are full of prospecting and lead generation information for sales and marketing.

This applies to a much wider group than just sales and marketing because at some level, everyone at an innovative organization needs to look for leads.

Blogs allow you to speak your mind, and let the rest of the world know your thought processes and mindsets.

The personal nature of many social media tools helps enhance the ability of a group to innovate rapidly, without the feeling of a restricting hierarchy that can diminish creativity.

Tagging and sharing and all the other activities common on the social Web mean that information gets passed around much faster.

Web 2.0 approaches make it much easier to find information, even though there is more of it.

Innovation works much faster in a social software environment, open source or otherwise.

The diffusion of innovation throughout an organization is really dependent on the social network of that group, how well connected it is, how people communicate, etc. Social media allows innovation to spread much more rapidly, decreasing the rate of diffusion and allowing the creativity cycle to crank much faster.

People feel heard.

This is a big one. Studies have shown that if people feel that their viewpoint is not heard and do not understand the rationale for a decision they become the most upset. Having a chance to be a part of the discussion can make a big difference, even if they do not agree with the final decision.

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Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Now we have article 2.0

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ruby on rails by luisvilla*
I will participate in the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest:
[Via Gobbledygook]

We have been talking a lot about Web 2.0 approaches for scientific papers. Now Elsevier announced an Article 2.0 Contest:

Demonstrate your best ideas for how scientific research articles should be presented on the web and compete to win great prizes!

The contest runs from September 1st until December 31st. Elsevier will provide 7.500 full text articles in XML format (through a REST API). The contestants that creates the best article presentation (creativity, value-add, ease of use and quality) will win prizes.

This is a very interesting contest, and I plan to participate. I do know enough about programming web pages that I can create something useful in four months. My development platform of choice is Ruby on Rails and Rails has great REST support. I will use the next two months before the contest starts to think about the features I want to implement.

I’m sure that other people are also considering to participate in this contest or would like to make suggestions for features. Please contact me by commenting or via Email or FriendFeed. A great opportunity to not only talk about Science 2.0, but actually do something about it.

While there are not any real rules up yet, this is intriguing. Reformatting a science paper for the Internet. All the information should be there to demonstrate how this new medium can change the way we read articles and disperse information.

We have already seen a little of this in the way journals published by Highwire Press are able to also contain links to papers published more recently, that cite the relevant paper. Take for example this paper by a friend of mine ULBPs, human ligands of the NKG2D receptor, stimulate tumor immunity with enhancement by IL-15.
Scroll to the bottom and there are not only links in the references, which look backwards from the paper, but also citations that look forward, to relevant papers published after this one.

So Elsevier has an interesting idea. Just a couple of hang-ups, as brought out in the comments to Martin’s post. Who owns the application afterwards? What sorts of rights do the creators have? This could be a case where Elsevier only has to pay $2500 but gets the equivalent of hundreds if not thousands of hours of development work done by a large group of people.

This works well for Open Source approaches, since the community ‘owns’ the final result. But in this case, it very likely may be Elsevier that owns everything, making the $2500 a very small price to pay indeed.

This could, in fact, spear an Open Source approach to redefining how papers are presented on the Internet. This is because PLoS presents its papers in downloadable XML format where the same sort of process as Elsevier is attempting could be done by a community for the entire communtiy’s enrichment.

And since all of the PLoS papers are Open Access, instead of the limited number that Elsevier decides to chose, we could get a real view of how this medium could boost the transfer of information for scientific papers.

I wonder what an Open Source approach would look like and how it might differ from a commercial approach?

*I also wonder what the title of the book actually translates to in Japanese?

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Open Access

Using other scientific disciplines

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fractal fern by SantaRosa OLD SKOOL
Three Thoughts on Interdisciplinary Research:
[Via Michael Jubb’s blog]
Comments on Michael’s three thoughts following some meetings he has attended recently:

The first was a suggestion, perhaps a hypothesis, that interdisciplinary research will lead (has led?) to an increase in researchers’ interest in open access. The thought here is that researchers in some disciplines (notably some areas of the biosciences) are more inclined to adopt some form of open access in publishing their work; and that as researchers from other disciplines less inclined to open access join with, say, bioscientists in their research, they will be introduced to open access ways of thought. It seems a plausible hypothesis, and one that could fairly easily be tested. Does interdisciplinary research feature particularly prominently in OA journals, or in the contents of repositories?

I think part of this is that working in a interdisciplinary fashion fosters openness. That is, such researchers are often working in and relying on access to scientific disciplines other than the one that the researcher was trained in. If they can not access research from a discipline, they will not really be able to work in that discipline.

It would seem likely that collaborative efforts would most easily flow to those areas that foster open communication with collaborators. Hard to be multidisciplinary it there is not open collaboration with others.Thus open access becomes part of the culture of multidisciplinary research.

The second thought comes from a presentation by Carol Tenopir of the findings of the latest Tenopir and King reader surveys. One of the interesting findings is that interdisciplinary researchers are more likely than other researchers to follow citation links as their means of getting access to journal articles; and that the latest article they have read is more likely to be in digital, as distinct from print, format. Why that should be is perhaps worth some investigation.

Online is all about finding information quickly, incorporating it into the local community and then using it to create knowledge to make decisions. Rapid analysis followed by community synthesis. The collaborative cycle cranks much faster when online tools and Web 2.0 approaches are used. This allows multidisciplinary efforts to be launched that would be virtually impossible without these tools. This pace of collaboration can not be as rapidly sustained using paper means.

The third thought comes from a presentation by Mayur Amin of Elsevier about surveys of usage of journals in Science Direct. One of the interesting findings here is that while for researchers in physics and maths, 70% or more of usage is of journals within the discipline, for researchers in other disciplines, such including chemistry and environmental sciences, usage of journals within the discipline is at less than half that level. This may of course be an effect of the way in which Elsevier classify the journals. But it is at least open to the suggestion that researchers in some disciplines are more inclined to read beyond their own discipline. Is this evidence that some disciplines are more interdisciplinary than others? Is this something worth investigating?

One hypothesis is based on the hierarchy of science and the natural world. Math as a discipline is the most abstract; it can exist without any real need to be part of any other discipline but almost every other discipline needs math. Physics then comes next. It needs math to describe itself but little else other than physics.

Then comes chemistry and biology. Each level down involves lesser abstraction and closer dealings with the natural world. Each requires more and more simple experimentation and observation. Physics has gedanken experiments, which come close to the Greek ideal of not needing to do any experimentation. Math needs no experiments at all and can be done simply in one’s head.

I’m stretching a point but to really understand biology, you need to at least be familiar with chemistry, with physics and with math (not necessarily comfortable since I often think some people go into biology because the math requirements in college are easier than for physics). Physics, though, does not really require a knowledge of chemistry or biology. So, perhaps, this need to understand other fields in order to be trained in biology instills a little more attraction to interdisciplinary approaches, as can be seen in the journal usage seen by Elsevier.

Or maybe it is just sampling error.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Irony abounds

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thesis by cowlet
Case study of the IR at Robert Gordon U:
[Via Open Access News]

Ian M. Johnson and Susan M. Copeland, OpenAIR: The Development of the Institutional Repository at the Robert Gordon University, Library Hi Tech News, 25, 4 (2008 ) pp. 1-4. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of OpenAIR, the institutional repository at the Robert Gordon University.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper outlines the principles that underpinned the development of the repository (visibility, sustainability, quality, and findability) and some of the technical and financial implications that were considered.

Findings – OpenAIR@RGU evolved from a desire to make available an electronic collection of PhD theses, but was developed to become a means of storing and providing access to a range of research output produced by staff and research students: book chapters, journal articles, reports, conference publications, theses, artworks, and datasets.

Originality/value -The paper describes the repository’s contribution to collection development.

And it only costs £13.00. So an article describing an open archive is not itself open. What a shame because open archives will be the way to go. Learning how an organization put one together, especially one that contains more than just journal articles, would be useful.

But it did lead me to this which describes two organizations that will serve as open archives for any paper for which the authors has retained copyright. What it also makes clear is that most researchers still maintain the rights for any preprint versions of the work.

That is, the only copyright that is usually transferred is the one that was peer-reviewed and approved, Any previous version can be archived, At least for most journals. If the work was Federally funded, most journals permit archiving the approved version after a limited embargo time, such as 6 months.

There is a database that details the publication policies of many journals. Ironically, there is no copyright information for Library Hi Tech news, the publication containing the OpenAIR article.

Let’s look at some others.

For instance, Nature Medicine permits archiving of the pre-print at any time and the final copy after 6 months. They require linking to the published version and their PDF can not be used. So just make your own.

On the other hand, Biochemistry restricts the posting of either the pre- or post-print print versions. A 12 month embargo is imposed only for Federally funded research. Others apparently can never open archive. The only thing that can be published at the author’s website is the title, the abstract and figures.

Let’s see one journal allows reasonable use of the author’s copyright to permit open archiving and the other only permits what is Federally mandated. I’m going to investigate this database further because my choice for journals to publish in will depend on such things as being able to use open archiving.

If my work is behind a wall, it will be useless in a Web 2.0 world. Few will know about it and others will bypass it. Just as the work on OpenAIR is not as useful as it should be.

More irony. Susan Copeland, one of the OpenAIR authors, has done a lot of work on online storage and access to PhD theses. She is the project manager for Electronic Theses at Robert Gordon University and received funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), as part of the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Program(FAIR). She just received the 2008 EDT Leadership award for her work on electronic theses.

She has done a lot of really fine work making it easier to find the actual work of PhD students, something of real importance to the furtherance of science. Yet her article detailing some of her own work is not openly available to researchers.

And finally, ironically, the organization that funded some of her work, JISC, also funds SHERPA, the same database that I used to examine the publication issues of many journals.

In a well connected world, irony is everywhere.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Helping people change

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I was discussing with one of our execs the progress we’d been making on social media proficiency internally.

And he asked a great question that made me think:

“So, has anyone fundamentally changed their work processes because of the platform?”

And I realized this is the next frontier on what’s turning out to be a large-scale social engineering project.

Getting Business Value Out Of Our Social Software

As we make progress in this journey, I’ve got my eye out for different catagories of business value we’re seeing.  I suppose, at the same time, I should also be keeping my eye out for business value we’re NOT seeing yet.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re seeing business value — in many forms — across the board:

People with specific interests are finding other people with similar interests
Rather than searching big content repositories, people are asking other people for help and answers
A pan-organizational “social fabric” has been created that wasn’t really there before
Folks who spend time on the platform are better educated — and more engaged — in EMC’ business

And more And, just to be clear, there’s no shortage of business benefits — I still stand behind the broad assertion that this has been one of the most ROI-positive IT projects I’ve seen in my career.

Interesting “value nugget” of the week: 

EMC runs a healthy program to bring a large number of interns and co-op students into the company.  They started introducing themselves to each other on the platform.

What started with “name, rank, serial number” blossomed into a wonderfully diverse set of conversations about careers, favorite hangouts, what it means to work at EMC, what is everybody doing, and so on.

I would argue that — whatever millions that EMC spends on this intern/coop program — we’ve now made it 10-20% more valuable, simply because we connected people to each other, and connected them all to the broader company. 

At zero incremental cost.

But we want more. Much more.
[More]

Right up front EMC can demonstrate easily how new technologies save money and create new opportunities. The problem comes from actually getting people to use the technologies.

Many companies are process-driven. If the process is working, why change? Of course, buggy whip manufacturers probably had a great process also. But if they did not change, they disappeared.

What is driving the world more and more is the rate at which innovations diffuse through an organization. This is a fascinating subject because there are also some hard data behind it, some of it generated over 70 years ago.

Using the rate of adoption of hybrid corn by farmers in the early 1930s, Ryan and Gross were to derive some very important insights. These two researchers interviewed 345 farmers in Iowa about their use of hybrid corn, when the farmers first heard about it and when they started using it.

Here is a figure from their classic paper ‘The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities’. Even though the hybrid corn had many important advantages it took almost 13 years for this innovation to diffuse throughout the entire community. The actual adoption curve (from their 1943 paper) is compared with a normal distribution curve (in black).

corn curve

If the data are plotted as the cumulative adoption of the innovation, it looked like this:

cumulative

Both of these types of curves have been seen again and again when the diffusion of innovation is examined. They seem to be derived from basic forces present in human social networks.

Ryan and Gross made several key contributions besides the identification of the S-shaped curve. One was the process by which the innovation diffused. The other was the type of farmer who used the innovation.

They found that there were five stages in the adoption of an innovation by an individual: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. And there were at least 4 different types of farmers, of which the early adopters were the most important.

Early adopters heard about the corn from traveling salesmen and tried small plots to see how well it worked. Later adopters relied on the personal experience of other farmers, usually the early adopters. When there were enough positive reactions from the early adopters, when there were more stories of personal experience, the adoption rate took off.

It was the human social network that was critical for the rate at which the innovation was adopted. The more social connections an early adopter had, the more cosmopolitan they were, the more likely it would be that others would adopt use of the innovation.

Everett Rogers was instrumental in codifying many of the principles of innovation diffusion. Here is his famous rendition of the distribution:

Diffusionofinnovation

Only 16% of a population is usually made up of the early adopters, the ones that are critical for spreading the innovation to the early majority. The key to the adoption of any innovation is the rate at which early adopters can transmit the knowledge of the benefits to the early majority. In the case of the farmers, it would often take 4 or more years for this to be converted form awareness to adoption.

In many areas of our world today, this is much too slow. Technology is disruptive, meaning that the people who adopt this technology actually deal with the world in entirely different ways than those who do not. It is similar to a paradigm shift, in that those on either side of the shift have a hard time communicating with each other. It is almost as if they inhabit separate worlds.

Leap1-1

This can cause some problems because the early adopters are required to communicate with the early majority if an innovation is to diffuse throughout an organization. If they can not, it creates a chasm, which has been described by Geoffrey Moore in his book.

The organization has to take strong action to recognize that this chasm is present and to span it, either with training or, more effectively, with people who have been specially designated as chasm spanners. In many cases using Web 2.0 technologies, they are called online community managers.

Disruptive innovations seem to arrive almost yearly. Without a directed and defined process to increase the rate of diffusion in an organization, if just standard channels of communication are used, innovation will diffuse at too slow a rate for many organizations to remain competitive.


Innovationlifecycle


Because there is usually not just one innovation disrupting an organization at a time. Life is not that clean. There can be multiple innovations coursing through different departments, moving early adopters even further away from the rest of the group and expanding the chasm. This only makes communication harder.

So, a key aspect of being able to increase the rate of diffusion is to create a process where early adopters are identified and strong communication channels are created to permit them to pass information to the early majority.

It can no longer be possible to simply let the early adopters go through their 5 stages of adoption and then tell others about it at the water cooler. Designated online community managers, with the training needed to enhance communication channels, will be critical in getting this information dispersed throughout an organization.

Organizations need to take pro-active approaches to span the chasm. Otherwise they will lose out to the organizations that do take such approaches.

Identifying and nurturing the 16% of the organization that are early adopters will be critical for this process. Having community managers who are well embedded in the social structure of the organizations will also be needed to help increase the rates of innovation diffusion.

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