(One Possible) Future of Scholarly Communication

(One possible) Future of Scholarly Communications

Prepared for The Scholarly Communications Symposium

Georgetown UniversityApril 2012

Micah Altman, Director of Research, MIT Libraries

Non Resident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution

Obligatory Disclaimers

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially

about the future!”*


*Attributed to Woody Allen, Yogi Berra, Niels Bohr, Vint Cerf, Winston Churchill, Confucius, Disreali [sic], Freeman Dyson, Cecil B. Demille, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Edgar R. Fiedler, Bob Fourer, Sam Goldwyn, Allan Lamport, Groucho Marx, Dan Quayle, George Bernard Shaw, Casey Stengel, Will Rogers, M. Taub, Mark Twain, Kerr L. White, etc.

Personal Biases:

Social/Information Scientist, Software Engineer, Librarian, Archivist

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Collaborators*• Leonid Andreev, Ed Bachman, Adam Buchbinder, Ken Bollen, Bryan Beecher, Elana Broch, Steve Burling, John M. Caroll, Tom Carsey, Thu-Mai Christian, Patrick Clemins, Kevin Condon, Jonathan Crabtree, Merce Crosas, Diane Fournier, Jeff Gill, Myron Guttman, Gary King, Patrick King, Tom Lipkis, Freeman Lo, Christian Laevert, Jared Lyle, Marc Maynard, Michael P. McDonald, Nancy McGovern, Emily Ann-Meyers, Kevin Novak, , Thomas Plewes, Andrew Reamer, Ken Rogerson, Lois Timms-Ferrarra, Akio Sone, Bob Treacy

• Research SupportThanks to the Library of Congress, the National Science Foundation, IMLS, the Sloan Foundation, the Harvard University Library, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


* And co-conspirators

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micah

Update

Related WorkReprints available from: micahaltman.com

• Board on Research Data and Information, Forthcoming, For Attribution: Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards, National Academies Press.

• Altman, M., & McDonald, M. P. (2012). Technology for Public Participation in Redistricting. In G. Moncrief (Ed.), Redistricting and Reapportionment in the West. Lexington Books.

• M. Altman, J. Crabtree, “Using the SafeArchive System: TRAC-Based Auditing of LOCKSS”, Proceedings of Archiving 2011, Society for Imaging Science and Technology.

• Novak, K., Altman, M., Broch, E., Carroll, J. M., Clemins, P. J., Fournier, D., Laevart, C., et al. (2011). Communicating Science and Engineering Data in the Information Age. Computer Science and Telecommunications. National Academies Press.

• M. Gutmann, with Abrahamson, M, Adams, M.O., Altman, M, Arms, C., Bollen, K., Carlson, M., Crabtree, J., Donakowski, D., King, G., Lyle, J., Maynard, M., Pienta, A., Rockwell, R, Timms-Ferrara L., Young, ) 2009. "From Preserving the Past to Preserving the Future: The Data-PASS Project and the challenges of preserving digital social science data.”, Library Trends

• M. Altman, Adams, M., Crabtree, J., Donakowski, D., Maynard, M., Pienta, A., & Young, C. 2009. "Digital preservation through archival collaboration: The Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences." The American Archivist. 72(1): 169-182

• Micah Altman, K. Rogerson. 2008. " Open Research Questions on Information and Technology in Global and Domestic Politics -- Beyond 'E-'", PS: Political Science and Politics.

• M. Altman and G. King. 2007. “A Proposed Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Quantitative Data”, D-Lib, 13, 3/4 (March/April).

• Altman, M., Gill, J., & McDonald, M. (2003). Numerical issues in statistical computing for the social scientist. New York: John Wiley & Sons


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http://micahaltman.com/

micah

Update

This Talk

Disruptions!

Could this be a good thing for science?

Community initiatives

Shameless plugs(One possible) Future of Scholarly Communications 6


Disruptions!"At the risk of stating the obvious, the complex system of relationships and products known as scholarly communication is under considerable pressure."

– Ann J. Wolpert* Nature 420, 17-18, 2002

* Director, MIT Libraries; Board Chair, MIT Press; my boss

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Observations• Practice of science – researchers, evidence base,

and publications are all shifting to edges • Filtering, replication, integration and reuse are

increasing in importance relative to publication


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Some Big Changes in ScholarshipShifting Evidence Base

High Performance Collaboration(here comes everybody…)

Lots More Data

Publish, then Filter

More Open


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NBT? … More, More, MoreMobileForms of publicationContribution & attributionCloudOpenPublicationsInterdisciplinaryPersonal dataMashupsStudentsReadersFundersEverybody 10

plus ça change, plus c'est la même folie*

(And BTW the regular stuff ain’t necessarily easy, either…)

•Budget constraints •Invisibility •Deadlines•Matching skillsets•Legacy systems & requirements•Personalities•Bureaucracy•Politics


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Could this be a good thing for

science?

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Observations• The publication is not the science – it is a

summary of it• Much of the record of science and the evidence

base for it is not well-maintained


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Problems with current practice…

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Unpublished Data Ends up in the “Desk Drawer”


Daniel Schectman’s Lab Notebook

Providing Initial

Evidence of Quasi Crystals

• Null results are less likely to be published• Outliers are routinely discarded

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Increased Retractions, Allegations of Fraud


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Erosion of Evidence Base


Examples

Intentionally Discarded: “Destroyed, in accord with [nonexistent] APA 5-year post-publication rule.”

Unintentional Hardware Problems “Some data were collected, but the data file was lost in a technical malfunction.”

Acts of Nature The data from the studies were on punched cards that were destroyed in a flood in the department in the early 80s.”

Discarded or Lost in a Move “As I retired …. Unfortunately, I simply didn’t have the room to store these data sets at my house.”

Obsolescence “Speech recordings stored on a LISP Machine…, an experimental computer which is long obsolete.”

Simply Lost “For all I know, they are on a [University] server, but it has been literally years and years since the research was done, and my files are long gone.”

Research by:

• Researchers lack archiving capability

• Incentives for preserving evidence base are weak

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Compliance with Replication Policies is Low


Compliance is low even in best examples of journals

Checking compliance manually is tedious

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Some possible publication forms of enhanced publication…

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Embed Real Data Archives in Journals

• Embed remotely managed data archive in journal

• Replaces “supplemental materials”

• Ads– Online analysis– Independent storage– Persistent identifiers and

citation– Data versioning– Enhanced discoverability and

interoperability– Fixity and replication


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Streamlined “Data Paper” Publication

• Data Paper = Data + Citation + Abstract + Docs

Tools can help• Standard templates & metadata

• Data citation and persistent ID

• Reviewer workflow• Overlay/embed data in journal system


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Enhanced Publication• Link from online journal

systems to data in repositories

• Connect tables and figures with abstracts, verifiably

• Enable on-line analysis• Showcase articles with

live data collections, updated results


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What will the map of science look like, when we can see also how all research contributions

connect?


Research & Node Layout: Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans (mapofscience.com); Data: Thompson ISI; Graphics & Typography: W. Bradford Paley (didi.com/brad); Commissioned Katy Börner (scimaps.org)

Seed Magazine, Mar 7, 2007http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/scientific_method_relationships_among_scientific_paradigms/ 23


Community Initiatives

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

-- attributed to Margaret Mead

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Observations• Since knowledge is not a private good

Pure-market approach leads to under-provisioning

• Planning for access to scholarly record should include planning for long-term access beyond the life of a single institution

• Important problems in scholarly communications, information science & scholarship increasingly require diverse multi-disciplinary approaches.


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Software

Software

Best Practice

Best Practice

Preserved

Digital

Content

Preserved

Digital

Content

Storage Provisioning

Storage Provisioning

Funding

(Thin Market

)

Funding

(Thin Market

)

Knowledge is not a Private good

Source: © Hugh Macleod, Gapingvoid Art, gapingvoid.com

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• Libraries often operate on “cost-recovery-minus”

• Subsidize knowledge production, long-term access, reuse

• Recognize costs necessary for broader impacts in research budgets

National Digital Stewardship Alliance


digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/

Stewardship Members of the NDSA are committed to managing digital content for current and long-term use. The members of the NDSA are actively ensuring sustained access to the digital content that constitutes our national legacy and empowers us as leaders in the global knowledge economy. Individually, these organizations support the management of digital resources; as an Alliance, we commit to protecting our nation's cultural, scientific, scholarly, and business heritage.\

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ORCID


orcid.org

ORCID aims to solve the author/contributor name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author ID schemes. These identifiers, and the relationships among them, can be linked to the researcher's output to enhance the scientific discovery process and to improve the efficiency of research funding and collaboration within the research community.

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LOCKSS & PLN Organizations


lockss.orglockss.org/community/networks/

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DataCite & CoData


datacite.orgcodata.org

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Shameless Plugs

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“A shill, plant, or stooge is a person who publicly helps a person or organization without disclosing that he has a close relationship with that person or organization. Shill typically refers to someone who purposely gives onlookers the impression that he is an enthusiastic independent customer of a seller (or marketer of ideas) for whom he is secretly working.”

-- Wikipedia

• Easy to use tools give curators the power to define replication policies, examine digital content and generate audit reportsEnsures replicated collection are geographically and institutionally distributed.

• Enables institutions in peer-to-peer networks to monitor replication.• Reduces threats to digital storage and replication.• Produces an auditing trail to support standards such as Data Seal of Approval,

Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification and ISO 16363.


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• Archive social science data collections at-risk of being lost.

• Catalog and promote access to archived collections in the Data-PASS shared catalog.

• Replicated preservation of archived collections.

• Advocate best practices in digital preservation.

data-pass.org

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Integrated Replication Data Publishing


Submission, review, and publication of articles & data together

+

thedata.orgpkp.sfu.ca

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Parting (Free) Advice

“Past returns are not a guarantee of future results.”

– Niels Bohr (?)

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Recap• Practice of science – researchers, evidence base, and publications are

all shifting to edges • Filtering, replication, integration and reuse are increasing in

importance relative to publication• The publication is not the science – it is a summary of it• Much of the record of science and the evidence base for it is not well-

maintained• Since knowledge is not a private good

Pure-market approach leads to under-provisioning• Planning for access to scholarly record should include planning for

long-term access beyond the life of a single institution • Important problems in scholarly communications, information science

& scholarship increasingly require diverse multi-disciplinary approaches.

• Understanding scholarly communications requires understanding the research information lifecycle


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Approaches

• Participate in collaborative multi-institutional efforts to improve scholarly communication

• Identify your organization’s core competencies at the most abstract level

• Prepare for new opportunities by betting on people


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Questions?

E-mail: [email protected] Web: micahaltman.comTwitter: @drmaltman


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(One Possible) Future of Scholarly Communication

Technology

s c i p li n aryp e

record of science

imaging science

political science

e b i g c h

digital social science

national science foundation

quantitative social