Scholarly Communications

• Bradley Hemminger

• Assistant (Associate) Professor

• School of Information and Library Science

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• bmh@ils.unc.edu

Big Questions

• What is scholarship?

• How do we measure the value of scholarship?

• What should we preserve?

• How should we design an ideal model, given that technology has freed us from the constraints of physical mediums?

Public Storehouse of Knowledge

• Multiple open digital archives, holding all the world’s knowledge. A single logical universal archive, created by dynamic federation of all public archives.

• Contains everything: archive holds grey literature (publicly deposited) and gold literature (refereed articles).

• No barriers to access. Knowledge is freely available to anyone, any time, anywhere.

• Access to information and knowledge correlates to society’s quality of life.

Archive Model (NeoRef)• All material and metadata are author contributed to a

public OAI archive (author retains ownership).• OAI archives have automated or manual moderator to

filter out “junk”.• Everything--articles, reviews, comments, indexings, etc.,

are stored as digital content items on archive using the same mechanism. Reviews contain quantitative score, qualitative grade, qualitative comments.

• All materials universally available via search engines that harvest metadata from OAI archives.

• Retrieval is through Google like one stop shopping search interface, with dynamic filtering based on metadata and reviews to limit hits to manageable number to review.

Challenges are in Retrieval

• All material is archived (good and bad)• Metrics (some new) are used to

differentiate type, content, and quality.• Dynamic Searching allows quickly finding

material of most interest. Search on– Type article=Review AND date > 1950– Content (schizophrenia AND GeneX)– Quality: Peer reviewed {journals}, citation rate

> XYZ

How Peer Review might work…

• Author submits article to her institution’s open archive (DOI uncch:sils/0007548.pdf).

• Author “submits” to journal EMEDICINE by providing DOI of article.

• Journal Editor schedules two reviewers. Reviewers review article, and submit their reviews (cornell:0191.pdf, ucb:0084.pdf).

• Author revises, and places revised article (DOI uncch:sils/0007957.pdf) on archive, and submits this final version to EMEDICINE.

• Journal submits review (EMED:0023424.pdf) which is final statement from journal (editor), and indicates acceptance of uncch:sils/0007957.pdf as EMED article).

Scholarly Communications ProcessToday’s Example

Idea

V1

Present to colleagues

V2

Present at conference

V3

Submit to journal V4

Referees Revision for journal V5

Journal Final Revision

V6

Revision to update analysis

V7

Revision to include additional new results V8

Scholarly Communications Process: What’s Captured Today

Journal Final Revision

V6

Only one version is captured, and the same community then pays to buy back access to article

Scholarly Communications Process

Idea

V1

Present to colleagues

V2

Present at conference

V3

Submit to journal V4

Referees Revision for journal V5

Journal Final Revision

V6

Revision to correct analysis

V7

Revision to include additional new results V8

formulate discussion discussion,revision

Two peer reviews

CopyproofingCriticisms, new thoughts,revision

new results,revision

commentscommentscomments

Author revision

Scholarly Communications Process:What I’d like to see saved!Idea

V1

Present to colleagues

V2

Present at conference

V3

Submit to journal V4

Referees Revision for journal V5

Journal Final Revision

V6

Revision to correct analysis

V7

Revision to include additional new results V8

formulate discussion discussion,revision

Two peer reviews

CopyproofingCriticisms, new thoughts,revision

new results,revision

commentscommentscomments

Author revision

Change the Process!

• Think of scholarly communication as continuous process instead of single product (journal publication).

• Capture significant changes/versions of a work.• Include all criticisms and comments about work (all

stages). • Support normal scholarly discourse, including authors

responses as well as others comments. • Add reviewer’s quantitative rating of material to allow

better filtering based on absolute quality metric during retrieval.

• Add machine (automated) reviews.• Represent and store more than just text (datasets, stats,

multimedia, etc). Capture over time (Memento).

Challenges

• Searching– DC metadata to allow coarse discovery.– Specialized searching within domain after locating material

(based on metadata field indicating appropriate search interface).

– Interactive searching to allow refinement to most desirable set within a few seconds. Use reviews to help filter search (Facultyof1000).

– Google searching on full text (covers all materials, but generates large number of hits, lower specificity).

– Automated agents to bring material of interest to your attention (California digital library).

• Example: article scores > 7.0, refereed, citation count above 10, type=research article, search terms = schizophrenia, geneX)

Challenges

• Knowledge Representation– Extend DC to include “concepts” and “claims” to allow

higher level searching compared to simple indexing.– Make OAI and DC representation more robust by

always supporting DOI to uniquely identify materials.– Support unique identification of authors as well.– Making all content items submitted permanent– Use DC fields to link related items, new version of

paper to old version.

Challenges

• Rights Administration– Support mechanisms to allow authors to set

permissions as they desire, and enforce this.

– Example is OAI recent support of rights administration using Creative Commons.

Challenges

• Peer Review– Make more public. Make available comments

on articles.– Add quantitative scoring as well as qualitative.

Overview of Peer Review(talk about single repository, PLoS One)

Review

Peer, Open, Machine

Accept, reject, revise with respect to XYZ standards

Comments to Author

Published Article

Article submitted

Send elsewhere

Filter

Reject

Quantitative Grade Score (1-10)

Qualitative

Quantitative

General Review Model Parallels

• In general, you have sample (material) which is judged/scored quantitatively and qualitatively by an identified observer with respect to some standard.

NeoRef for Movies, Products,…

• The same process used by NeoRef to support Scholarly Communication could be used for most any communication of information purpose. All that is required is storage of Digital Content Items, and linking of reviews, comments, etc to them.

• DocSouth: self cataloged and indexed items are Grey; librarian/archivist cataloged and indexed items are Gold.

• Movies: Grey is everyone’s reviews; Gold is Siskel and Ebert reviews.

• Consumer Products: product reviews by Consumer Reports (gold), user reviews (grey).

Current Peer Review Options• Human Judgement

– Expert peer review (status quo)– Certified expert peer review– Open Peer Review BMJ, BioMed– Open comment review psycprints

• Computer Judgement– Computer peer review

• Human Usage– Citation-based (CiteSeer)– Usage counts (CiteSeer) Example– Quantity of discussion

• Coarse Categorization– Two Tier (grey/gold)– Moderator (current arXiv)– No review (old arXiv)

Quantitative

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√

√√√

Qualitative√ (relative)√ (relative)√ (absolute)√ (absolute)

√

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What do users want?

ALPSP survey was intended to discover the views of academics, both as authors and as readers. Some 14,000 scholars were contacted across all disciplines and all parts of the world, and with almost 9% responding.

Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown. Authors and Electronic Publishing: The ALPSP Research Study on Authors' and Readers’ Views of Electronic Research Communication. (West Sussex, UK: The Association of Learned

and Professional Society Publishers, 2002).http://www.alpsp.org/pub5.htm

Importance of journal features

010

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

Citation links Additionaldata

Addit/colourimages

Manipulablecontent

Video/sound

Importance of the peer review process

0102030405060708090

100Peer-reviewed

Refs' commentspublished

Referees identified

Public commentary oneprints

Post-publication publiccommentary

Ability to submitcomments

Additional Surveys (Project Romeo)

• Authors want quick and convenient dissemination of their work– Free access to others papers– Not overly concerned about copyright unless

it stops them from freely distributing their work or accessing others.

Additional Surveys (Zhang 1999 survey)

• Permanence and Quality of electronically archived resources

• Better (faster, more accurate) searching capabilities

Change the Mindest: Open Commons

• Open Everything– Journal Articles– Datasets– Scholarly resources (think humanities,

papers,maps,images, films, artwork, etc)– Reviews/comments/annotations

What are the ramifications?

Who Holds the Materials?

• Publishers

• Universities

• Libraries

• Large private companies (like Google or Microsoft Health)

• Government (NLM)

Ramifications?

What does search look like?

• Real time dynamic search– Text search (Google)– Faceted search (commercial webpages)– Clustering of results

Main thing we’re missing is utilizing the metadata in search algorithms.

How do we measure value of scholarship?

• What is impact?

• For example, look at how research councils in countries like Great Britain and Sweden are trying to code this (formula for evaluating individuals and departments academic value, to tie to funding).

• Would this change in “open everything world”? If so, how?

Think bigger

• We are concerned because of tenure and promotion of academics in Research I institutions.

Think bigger

• We are concerned because of tenure and promotion of academics in research one institutions.

• There are many kinds of universities, many don’t value original research.

Think bigger

• We are concerned because of tenure and promotion of academics in research one institutions.

• There are many kinds of universities, many don’t value original research.

• Scholarship isn’t limited to universities, certainly not physical ones.– University of Phoenix– Virtual colleges– Interdisciplinary, inter-institution collaborations

Think bigger

• We are concerned because of tenure and promotion of academics in research one institutions.

• There are many kinds of universities, many don’t value original research.• Scholarship isn’t limited to universities, certainly not physical ones.

– University of Phoenix– Virtual colleges– Interdisciplinary, inter-institution collaborations

• Scholarship occurs in many forms– Funded patrons (Carnegie,now it’s Gates

foundation)– Free tools for Creation, Storage, Dissemination

can change what universities are and how teaching occurs (khanacademy, review, MIT Open courseware)

Think bigger

• We are concerned because of tenure and promotion of academics in research one institutions.

• There are many kinds of universities, many don’t value original research.• Scholarship isn’t limited to universities, certainly not physical ones.

– University of Phoenix– Virtual colleges– Interdisciplinary, inter-institution collaborations

• Scholarship occurs in many forms– Funded patrons (now it’s Gates foundation, Carnegie)– Free tools for Creation, Storage, Dissemination can change what universities are and how teaching occurs (

khanacademy, review, MIT Open courseware)

• So, in this future, what scholarly value metrics will we design to measure what kinds of value?

(i.e. independent of shackles to the current world like tenure and promotion ).

Extra Material….

Virginia Tech ETD

arXix University of CaliforniaElectronic Repository

psycprintsUNC Chapel Hill

Harvester(NeoRef)

Importance of publishers’ rolesFactor Responses as authors Responses as readers

Peer review 81 80

Gathering articles together to enable browsing of content

64 49

Selection of relevant and quality-controlled content

71 54

Content editing and improvement of articles

60 39

Language or copy editing 50 34

Checking of citations/adding links

46 28

Marketing (maximising visibility of journal)

44 20

Can we save the Gold and Grey?

Idea

V1

Present to colleagues

V2

Present at conference

V3

Submit to journal V4

Referees Revision for journal V5

Journal Final Revision

V6

Revision to correct analysis

V7

Revision to include additional new results V8

formulate discussion discussion,revision

Two peer reviews

Author revision

Criticisms, new thoughts,revision

new results,revision

commentscommentscomments

Copyproofing

NeoRef Storage Model

Conference paper (v3)

Comments on V6

Journal Submission V4

Journal Final Revision V6

Revision to include additional results and analyses V8

Auto-indexing

Material expressing content

Two peer reviewsLocal powerpoint Presentation v2

Comments on V3

Automated

Author Indexing

Recognized Expert

Open (anyone)Top Tier (Keep Forever)

Filter (Moderate)

Grey Literature

Author

Machine Review

ContentItem

Challenges

• Self Contribution– Author indexed– Author supplied metadata (Dublin Core)– Archive file(s) must be in standard open

format

NeoRef: PDF/A with DC elements in tags for automatic extraction of metadata

Challenges

• Archive Hosting– Off the shelf computer system with lots of disk

space and public domain archiving application (DSpace, Eprints).

– Who maintains the material? {Library (MIT DSpace), Grad School, University (California), Publisher (PLoS, BioMedCentral), Society (arXiv)}

– Where are comments and reviews held (after the fact content items that reference original)?

Challenges

• Make content universally available– Export OAI items so they can be harvested– Have public domain quality harvesters that

support quick and simple searching (i.e. Google for metadata).

http://www.update-software.com/Cochrane/MR000016.pdf

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) Survey

Authors and Electronic Publishing• Scholarly research communication has seen far-

reaching developments in recent years. • Most journals are now available online as well as

in print, and numerous electronic-only journals have been launched;

• The Internet opens up new ways for journals to operate.

• Authors have also become conscious of alternative ways to communicate their findings, and much has been written about what they ought to think.

Importance of future dissemination channels

Dissemination method Very important plus important

categories

Ranking

Traditional print + electronic journal 91 1

Discipline-based electronic reprint archive 78 2

Traditional print journal 77 3

Traditional electronic-only journal 66 4

Institution-based electronic reprint archive 60 5

New forms of electronic-only journal 49 6

Discipline-based electronic preprint archive

44 7

Institution-based electronic preprint archive

33 8

Cochrane Methodology Review

• Despite its widespread use and costs, little hard evidence exists that peer review improves the quality of published biomedical research.

• There had never even been any consensus on its aims and that it would be more appropriate to refer to it as ‘competitive review’.

Caroline White, “Little Evidence for Effectiveness of Scientific Peer Review,”BMJ 326 (February 1, 2003): 241

http://bmj.com/cgi/reprint/326/7383/241/a.pdf

Cochrane Methodology Review• On the basis of the current evidence, ‘the

practice of peer review is based on faith in its effects, rather than on facts,' state the authors, who call for large, government funded research programmes to test the effectiveness of the [classic peer review] system and investigate possible

alternatives. Caroline White, “Little Evidence for Effectiveness of Scientific Peer Review,”

BMJ 326 (February 1, 2003): 241http://bmj.com/cgi/reprint/326/7383/241/a.pdf

Cochrane Methodology Review• The use of peer-review is usually

assumed to raise the quality of the end-product (i.e. the journal or scientific meeting) and to provide a mechanism for rational, fair and objective decision-making. However, these assumptions have rarely been tested.

Tom O. Jefferson, Phil Alderson, Frank Davidoff, and Elizabeth Wager, Editorial Peer-review for Improving the Quality of Reports of

Biomedical Studies. (Middle Way, Oxford:Update Software Ltd, 2003).

http://www.update-software.com/Cochrane/MR000016.pdf

Cochrane Methodology Review• The available research has not clearly

identified or assessed the impact of peer-review on the more important outcomes (importance, usefulness, relevance, and quality of published reports)

• … [G]iven the widespread use of peer-review and its importance, it is surprising that so little is known of its effects

Tom O. Jefferson, Phil Alderson,Frank Davidoff, and Elizabeth Wager, Editorial Peer-review for Improving the Quality of Reports of

Biomedical Studies. (Middle Way, Oxford:Update Software Ltd, 2003).

http://www.update-software.com/Cochrane/MR000016.pdf

FURTHERMORE …• 16% said that the referees would no

longer be anonymous• 27% said that traditional peer review

would be supplemented by post-publication commentary

• 45% expected to see some changes in the peer-review system within the next five years

Fytton Rowland, “The Peer-Review Process,” Learned Publishing 15 no. 4 (October 2002): 247-258.

Report version: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/rowland.pdf

Provider Service Change

• What is worth paying for?– Quality review (Faculty of 1000)– Proofing, citation linking, professional presentation

(CiteSeer, Cite-base)– Marketing – Archival (JStor)

• Who hosts material:– Society (arXiv)– Commerical Publishers (Elesiever,BioMedCentral)– University Library (MIT Dspace)