Post on 19-Aug-2014
description
What is wrong with scholarly publishing today?
Björn Brembs, Freie Universität Berlinhttp://brembs.net
http://www.slideshare.net/brembs/whats-wrong-with-scholarly-publishing-today-ii
Publishing yesterday…
1665: One journal: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (Henry Oldenburg)
Publishing Today• 24,000 scholarly journals• 1.5 million publications/year• 3% annual growth• 1 million authors• 10-15 million readers at >10,000
institutions• 1.5 billion downloads/yearSource: Mabe MA (2009): Scholarly Publishing. European Review 17(1): 3-22
FUNCTIONALITY
19th century publishing for a 21st century scientific community
Functionality
At least four different search tools to be sure not to miss any relevant
literature?
Functionality
When we finally find the literature, we have to ask friends with rich libraries to
send it to us?
Functionality
We have to re-format our manuscripts every time an ex-scientist tells us to
submit to another journal?
Functionality
We have to re-format our manuscripts every time an ex-scientist tells us to
submit to another journal?
Functionality
Every homepage has had an access counter since 1993 but we don’t know
how often our paper has been downloaded?
Functionality
Nothing happens when we click on the reference after "we performed the
experiments as described previously"?
Hyperlinks
Nothing happens when we click on the reference after "we performed the
experiments as described previously"?
First demonstration: 1968 WWW: 1989
Stanford Research Institute: NLS Tim Berners-Lee: CERN
Think…
WHY?
Who‘s to blame that our publishing system is so lame?
We, the scientists!
We decide how and where to publish
We, the scientists!
We are producers and consumers in personal union
We, the scientists!
We chose to outsource scientific communication to publishers
PUBLISHERS
A public good in private hands
Elsevier
• Name from Dutch publisher (1580): “House of Elzevir”
• 250,000 articles per year in 2000 journals
• 7,000 journal editors, 70,000 editorial board members and 300,000 reviewers are working for Elsevier
• Part of Reed Elsevier group
Elsevier
Elsevier
Rofecoxib=Vioxx (Merck)
Elsevier
“Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of [Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine], a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles—most of which presented data favorable to Merck products—that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.”“It was a stealth marketing campaign to Australian doctors under the guise of a regular journal. “
The Scientist
“In issue 2, for example, 9 of the 29 articles were about Vioxx, and 12 of the remaining were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions, and some were bizarre: like a review article containing just 2 references. “
Ben Goldacre, “Bad Science” The Guardian
“It has recently come to my attention that from 2000 to 2005, our Australia office published a series of sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures. This was an unacceptable practice, and we regret that it took place.”
Michael Hansen, CEO Of Elsevier's Health Sciences Division
Elsevier
“Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of [Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine], a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles—most of which presented data favorable to Merck products—that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.”“It was a stealth marketing campaign to Australian doctors under the guise of a regular journal. “
The Scientist
“In issue 2, for example, 9 of the 29 articles were about Vioxx, and 12 of the remaining were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions, and some were bizarre: like a review article containing just 2 references. “
Ben Goldacre, “Bad Science” The Guardian
“It has recently come to my attention that from 2000 to 2005, our Australia office published a series of sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures. This was an unacceptable practice, and we regret that it took place.”
Michael Hansen, CEO Of Elsevier's Health Sciences Division
Elsevier
“Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of [Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine], a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles—most of which presented data favorable to Merck products—that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.”“It was a stealth marketing campaign to Australian doctors under the guise of a regular journal. “
The Scientist
“In issue 2, for example, 9 of the 29 articles were about Vioxx, and 12 of the remaining were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions, and some were bizarre: like a review article containing just 2 references. “
Ben Goldacre, “Bad Science” The Guardian
“It has recently come to my attention that from 2000 to 2005, our Australia office published a series of sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures. This was an unacceptable practice, and we regret that it took place.”
Michael Hansen, CEO Of Elsevier's Health Sciences Division
Elsevier
“Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of [Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine], a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles—most of which presented data favorable to Merck products—that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.”“It was a stealth marketing campaign to Australian doctors under the guise of a regular journal. “
The Scientist
“In issue 2, for example, 9 of the 29 articles were about Vioxx, and 12 of the remaining were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions, and some were bizarre: like a review article containing just 2 references. “
Ben Goldacre, “Bad Science” The Guardian
“It has recently come to my attention that from 2000 to 2005, our Australia office published a series of sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures. This was an unacceptable practice, and we regret that it took place.”
Michael Hansen, CEO Of Elsevier's Health Sciences Division
The Big Three (2009/10)Employees Sales Net income Growth
57,900 $13B $1B 7.6%
33,300 $10B $0.6B 9.4%
19,030 $5B $0.5B 125.7%(includes Springer)
http://www.publishersweekly.com/binary-data/ARTICLE_ATTACHMENT/file/000/000/127-1.pdf
Source:
Profits
Journals Crisis (not just Elsevier!)
Modified from ARL: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/arlstats06.pdf, http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/arlstat08.pdf
% C
hang
e
19861987
19881989
19901991
19921993
19941995
19961997
19981999
20002001
20022003
20042005
20062007
2008-50
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
Subscription pricesCPI/inflationJournals purchased
Subscription Pricing
KIT Library10 Most expensive journal subscriptions 2010/11
Journal Price [€/a] PublisherBiochimica et Biophysica Acta 19,130.53 ElsevierChemical Physics Letters 15,577.06 ElsevierJournal of Organometallic Chemistry 13,664.97 ElsevierJournal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry 13,381.07 SpringerNuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research / A 11,958.32 ElsevierSurface Science 11,796.75 ElsevierInorganica Chimica Acta 10,703.21 ElsevierJournal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 10,692.75 ElsevierJournal of Coordination Chemistry 10,314.92 Taylor & FrancisJournal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials 10,047.30 ElsevierTotal top ten: 127,266.88
http://www.bibliothek.kit.edu/cms/teuerste-zeitschriften.php
Subscription PricingDiscipline Average Yearly Rate Per Title (US$)Chemistry 3,792Physics 3,368Biology 2,035Engineering 1,925Astronomy 1,921Botany 1,695Geology 1,607Math & Computer Science 1,541Zoology 1,532Food Science 1,530Health Sciences 1,398General Science 1,287Technology 1,237Agriculture 1,110Geography 1,094
SOURCE: LJ PERIODICALS PRICE SURVEY 2010
Subscription Pricing
MPG: 18 Mio €/y for literature. 95% to the three main publishers.
UK: 94.6 Mio £/y in subscription (2003/4)
What a magnificent ship! What makes it go?
Cartoon by Rowland B. Wilson
Library responses
• Request increased budgets
• Cut subscriptions• Collective purchase of
electronic journals• Rely on document
delivery or ILL• UC: boycott NPG!
Ray English
Scientific Publishing:
Survey: Journal Access
David Nicholas
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
lot worseworse same
better
much better
Compared to now, was journal access 5 years ago…
Publishing yesterday…
Scholarship as a Public Good
Funded by Taxpayers
Scholarship as a Public Good
Supported publicly
Scholarship as a Public Good
Created in the non-profit sector
Scholarship as a Public Good
No profit for article authors
Scholarship as a Public Good
Profit for corporate publishers
Scholarship
A Public Good in Private Hands
Scientific Publishing:
Think…
ONE SOLUTION: OPEN ACCESS
“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”
Peter Suber
Open Access
Gold OAPublishing in an Open Access journal
Currently 6722 peer-reviewed open access journals listed in the Lund Directory of Open Access Journals doaj.org
Green OASelf-archiving in an institutional repository or PubMed Central
Over 1400 open repositories already established world-wide
DigitalYesterday TodayPaper Bits and bytesBrick and mortar libraries CyberspaceInstitute library address Uniform resource identifiers (URIs)High cost of printing and distribution Publishing costs fallen by orders of
magnitude
Only comprehensible to a few humans Read and indexed by machines (e.g., Googlebot)
Restricted access to a few subscribers Increasingly public
But: Everything’s Gone Digital!
www.scopus.com
www.pubmed.gov
http://ukpmc.ac.uk
isiknowledge.com
scholar.google.com
Duncan Hull
Welcome to Digital
Isolationdifferent disciplines – different information silos
Welcome to Digital
Impersonal and unsociable“who the hell are you”?Where are “my” papers?
What are my friends and colleagues reading?What are the experts reading?
What is popular this week / month / year?
Welcome to Digital
Obsolete models of publicationNot everything fits publication-sized holes
Micro-attributionMega-attribution
Digital contributions (databases, software, wikis/blogs?)
Welcome to Digital
ColdIdentity of publications and authors is
inadequate
OPEN ACCESS
Identity CrisisHow can I find anything?
Identity Crisis: Which publication?
1. http://pubmed.gov/18974831 2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/189748313. http://ukpmc.ac.uk/articlerender.cgi?accid=pmcA25688564. http://ukpmc.ac.uk/picrender.cgi?artid=1687256&blobtype=pdf 5. http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000204 6. http://www.dbkgroup.org/Papers/hull_defrost_ploscb08.pdf 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204
• One paper, many URIs. Disambiguation algorithms rely on getting metadata for each– Big problem for libraries is these redundant duplicates
• Matching can be done by Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and PubMed ID (PMID); – these are frequently absent < 5% (Kevin Emamy, citeUlike)
Duncan Hull
Identity Crisis: Which author?
Identity Crisis: Which topic?
Think…
One solution: Unique identifiers
Difficult with fragmented information silos
One solution: Unique identifiers
Several initiatives
One solution: Unique identifiers
Examples: PubMedID, DOI, ORCID, Semantic Web
ORCID
Semantic Web
• Machine-readable meaning• Technically non-trivial• Promising progress
Tim Berners-Leehttp://www.w3.org/2000/Talks/1206-xml2k-tbl/Overview.html
The Semantic Web for Dummies (like me)
URI Uniform Resource Identifier, like:http://id.archeology.edu/weapon/spear
+ XML Customized tags, like: <spear>Lance</spear>
+ RDF Relations, in triples, like: (Lance) (is_spear_of) (Longinus)
+ Ontologies Hierarchies of concepts, like weapon -> projectile -> spear-> Lance
+ Inference rules Like: If (person) (owns) (spear), then (person) (throws) (spear)
= Semantic Web!
DIGITAL DYSTOPIA
Information (Overload) Crisis
Or filter failure?
More scientists, more publications
Information Crisis
1.5 million publications per year in 24,000 journals
Information Crisis
Finding ‘my’ publications is impossible!
Information Crisis
Publish or Perish: number of publications
Information Crisis
60-300 applicants per tenure-track position
Information Crisis
Reading enough publications is impossible!
Think…
One solution: JournalRank
• Thomson Reuters: Impact Factor• Eigenfactor (now Thomson Reuters)• ScImago JournalRank (SJR)• Scopus: SNIP, SJR
Source Normalized Impact per Paper
One solution: JournalRank
Only read publications from high-ranking journals
Job applications
Job application instructionsPublikationstätigkeit(vollständige Publikationsliste, darunter Originalarbeiten als Erstautor/in, Seniorautor/in, Impact-Punkte insgesamt und in den letzten 5 Jahren, darunter jeweils gesondert ausgewiesen als Erst- und Seniorautor/in, persönlicher Scientific Citations Index (SCI, h-Index nach Web of Science) über alle Arbeiten)
Publications:Complete list of publications, including original research papers as first author, senior author, impact points total and in the last 5 years, with marked first and last-authorships, personal Scientific Citations Index (SCI, h-Index according to Web of Science) for all publications.
METRICS
Lies, damn lies and bibliometrics
Show of hands:
• Who knows what the IF is?• Who uses the IF to pick a journal
(rate a candidate, etc.)?• Who knows how the IF is calculated
and from what data?
The Impact Factor
Introduced in 1960’s by Eugene Garfield: ISI
2008 and 20092010
IF=5Articles published in 08/09
were cited an average of 5 times in 10.
citations articles
The Impact Factor
Journal X IF 2010=
All citations from TR indexed journals in 2010 to papers in journal X
Number of citable articles published in journal X in 2008/9
€30,000-130,000/year subscription ratesCovers ~11,500 journals (Scopus covers ~16,500)
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):497 (15 February)http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/314/7079/497
LORD KELVIN
“Nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement”
Job applications
MESSAGE:
Where you publish is more important to us than what you publish!
Think…
Other solution: social bookmarks
mendeley.com
zotero.org
connotea.org
www.mekentosj.com
hubmed.org
Re-couple metadata that has be de-coupled from data
2collab.com
refworks.com
“iTunes for PDF files”
citeulike.org
Article-level Metrics
Your article:• Received X citations (de-duped from Google Scholar,
Scopus, and Web of Science)• It was viewed X times, placing it in the top Y% of all
articles in this journal/community• It received X Comments• It was bookmarked X times in Social Bookmarking sites• Experts in your community rated it as X, Y, Z• It was discussed on X ‘respected’ blogs • It appeared in X, Y, Z International News media
Peter Binfield
PLoS ONE• 4.5 years old• Almost doubling in volume each year– 2007: 1,231 articles– 2008: 2,722 articles– 2009: 4,310 articles– 2010: 6,784 articles– 2011: >12,000 articles
• Largest journal in the world• Over 1,000 Academic editors• More than 30,000 authors• Fully peer reviewed – but the review / acceptance process does not concern
itself with ‘impact’, ‘novelty’ (or other subjective measures)
Q1 2007
Q2 2007
Q3 2007
Q4 2007
Q1 2008
Q2 2008
Q3 2008
Q4 2008
Q1 2009
Q2 2009
Q3 2009
Q4 2009
Q1 2010
Q2 2010
Q3 2010
Q4 2010
Q1 2011
Q2 20110
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
3500
Publications by PLoS ONE per quarter since launch
ALBERT EINSTEIN
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
Metrics
• Won‘t go away
• Should always be a last resort
• They are much too valuable to be satisfied with the current pitiful state of affairs
• Let‘s make them as good as we possibly can!
My Digital Utopia:• No more publishers – libraries archive everything according
to a world-wide standard• Single semantic, decentralized database of literature and
data• Personalized filtering• Peer-review administrated by an independent body• Link typology for text/text, data/data and text/data links
(“citations”)• Semantic Text/Datamining• All the metrics you (don’t) want (but need)• Tagging, bookmarking, etc.• Unique contributor IDs with attribution/reputation system
(teaching, reviewing, curating, blogging, etc.)• Technically feasible today (almost)
http://www.slideshare.net/brembs/whats-wrong-with-scholarly-publishing-today-ii