Digital Scholarship and Open Science need a digital infrastructure

#dsos requires a digital infrastructure

Björn BrembsUniversität Regensburg

http://brembs.net

SCHOLARSHIP

Scientists produce publications, data and code

CROWN JEWELS

Scientists produce publications, data and code

PRECIOUS

Scientists produce publications, data and code

PROBLEM I

Dysfunctional scholarly literature

Antiquated Functionality• Limited access• No scientific impact analysis• Lousy peer-review • No global search• No functional hyperlinks• No flexible data visualization• No submission standards• (Almost) no statistics• No text/data-mining• No effective way to sort,

filter and discover• No networking feature• etc.

…it’s like the web in 1995!

PROBLEM II

Scientific data in peril

Small Data – Long Tail

Report on Integration of Data and Publications, ODE Report 2011http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.org/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=ODE+Report+on+Integration+of+Data+and+Publications

PROBLEM III

Non-existent software archives

Today‘s Institutional Dystopia

• Institutional email• Institutional webspace• Institutional blog• Library access card• Open access repository

• No archiving of publications• No archiving of software• No archiving of data

HISTORICAL LESSON

Don‘t let someone with orthogonal interests touch your precious

They don‘t know science

They support arms trade

They support collusion in torture

• 2013: US$86m of US$126m annual APA budget comes from publishing

They fake journals

They fake journals

“This was an unacceptable practice, and we regret that it took place.”

Michael Hansen, CEO Of Elsevier's Health Sciences Division

They prevent science (e.g., content mining)

They promote sexism

They pay politicians to make OA illegal

Your tax dollars at work!

They parasitize public funds

(Sources: Van Noorden, R. (2013). Open access: The true cost of science publishing. Nature 495, 426–9; Packer, A. L. (2010). The SciELO Open Access: A Gold Way from the South. Can. J. High. Educ. 39, 111–126)

Cost

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Legacy SciELO

They parasitize public funds

Cost

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Legacy SciELO(Sources: Van Noorden, R. (2013). Open access: The true cost of science publishing. Nature 495, 426–9; Packer, A. L. (2010). The SciELO Open Access: A Gold Way from the South. Can. J. High. Educ. 39, 111–126)

They sell bogus journal rankings

• Thomson Reuters: Impact Factor• Eigenfactor (now Thomson Reuters)• ScImago JournalRank (SJR)• Scopus: SNIP, SJR

Source Normalized Impact per Paper

Main Problems with the IF

• Negotiable

• Irreproducible

• Mathematically

unsound

Negotiable• PLoS Medicine, IF 2-11 (8.4)

(The PLoS Medicine Editors (2006) The Impact Factor Game. PLoS Med 3(6): e291. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030291)

• Current Biology IF from 7 to 11 in 2003– Bought by Cell Press (Elsevier) in 2001…

Not Reproducible• Rockefeller University Press bought their data from Thomson Reuters• Up to 19% deviation from published records• Second dataset still not correct

Rossner M, van Epps H, Hill E (2007): Show me the data. The Journal of Cell Biology, Vol. 179, No. 6, 1091-1092 http://jcb.rupress.org/cgi/content/full/179/6/1091

Not Mathematically Sound• Left-skewed distributions• Weak correlation of individual

article citation rate with journal IF

Seglen PO (1997): Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. BMJ 1997;314(7079):497http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/314/7079/497

OUR JOURNALS

Is journal rank like astrology?

Journal Rank and Citations

The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers' citations in the digital age (2012): George A. Lozano, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras arXiv:1205.4328

Journal Rank and Methodology

Brembs, B., Button, K., & Munafò, M. (2013). Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291

Journal Rank and Experimental Design

Munafò, M., Stothart, G., & Flint, J. (2009). Bias in genetic association studies and impact factor Molecular Psychiatry, 14 (2), 119-120 DOI: 10.1038/mp.2008.77

Journal Rank and Quality

Brown, E. N., & Ramaswamy, S. (2007). Quality of protein crystal structures. Acta Crystallographica Section D Biological Crystallography, 63(9), 941–950. doi:10.1107/S0907444907033847

Journal Rank and Fraud/Error

Fang et al. (2012): Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications. PNAS 109 no. 42 17028-17033

Journal Rank and Retractions

Data from: Fang, F., & Casadevall, A. (2011). RETRACTED SCIENCE AND THE RETRACTION INDEX Infection and Immunity DOI: 10.1128/IAI.05661-11

INCENTIVES

“High-Impact” journals attract the most unreliable research

Retractions on the Rise

2005

2013

2013

“Do you trust scientists?”

SO MUCH FOR THAT

The disaster that is our digital infrastructure

WHAT NOW?

Save time and money by making science open as an added benefit

Software to control the experiment and save the data

Software to analyze and visualize the data

buridan.sourceforge.net

GitHub

Scientific Code with Persistent Identifiers

Potential for Innovation

(Sources: Van Noorden, R. (2013). Open access: The true cost of science publishing. Nature 495, 426–9; Packer, A. L. (2010). The SciELO Open Access: A Gold Way from the South. Can. J. High. Educ. 39, 111–126)

Potential for innovation: 9.8b p.a.

Cost

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Legacy SciELO

1. International Coordination

2. Cancel all subscriptions

3. Implement current technology

INFRASTRUCTURE

Scientific source code

INFRASTRUCTURE

Research data

INFRASTRUCTURE

Narrative

The square traversal process has been the foundation of scholarly

communication for nearly 400 years!