Marcus' World

Thoughts on the Research Works Act

The Research Works Act, just introduced in the 2012 Congress, would gut the National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy. Furthermore, it would prevent other federal agencies from following the lead of NIH.  This is the latest incarnation of similar bills that appeared, but did not pass, in 2008 and 2009. If this passes taxpayers would always have to pay twice to access the research they funded--first via taxes, then via subscription or pay-per-view access to an article.

Advocates for open access are justifiably aghast.  As the always wise Kevin Smith points out, this is a brazen attempt to enshrine legacy publishing models into law.

So brazen, in fact, that I am not worried that the Research Works Act will pass.  I support discussion among parties that each have legitimate if irreconcilable views.  Librarians wish to maximize access, publishers must protect their business interests.  This has always been the problem. But this particular bill is stacked absurdly on one side of the ledger.

That said, there would be a silver lining if it actually becomes law.  The consequences would be so outrageous that authors may finally break free of the chains of a publishing model that dates from the 17th century.  Knowledge is what matters, not articles, and we now have new and exciting ways to spread knowledge.  Publishers should be careful what they wish for.

David Weinberger, "Too Big to Know": Talk at UC Berkeley School of Information

Last week I went to Cal for an afternoon talk by David Weinberger, author of several highly regarded books about the Internet age including The Cluetrain Manifesto and Everything is Miscellaneous. Next month his book Too Big to Know will appear, and in his talk Weinberger presented some of his ideas from that work.

You can listen to the audio file here; the full event was 80 minutes.  You can also read Quentin Hardy's write-up on the NYT Bits blog, and Weinberger's response to Hardy.  Herewith is my own take.

Weinberger's central point is that, thanks to the Web, knowledge is now lateral and associational rather than hierarchical and structured.  In an academic setting, hierarchy is asserted via peer review and the desire to appear in prestigious journals.  In a library, structure is maintained via classification schemes that attempt to render all aspects of human experience in relation to one another.  Thus, the trees and branchings of tools like the Dewey Decimal System or NLM's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). 

The thing is, a user needs to know a lot to make effective use of a classification scheme.  In MeSH it is good to know the difference between a major subject heading and subheadings.  In Dewey, scholars of Eastern religions must know that there is very little space for Buddhism because Melvil Dewey devoted almost all of the bandwidth for religion to Christianity. This is not to fault poor Melvil--we all harbor assumptions by which we make our way.  The point is that these seemingly objective bibliographic instruments are actually highly subjective markers of their place and time.  And they make many assumptions about how people should organize and perceive information.

Weinberger gave a good example of this.  In a library catalog, to find Moby Dick you need to know either the author (Herman Melville) or the title.  If all you know is the opening sentence--"Call me Ishmael."--you are sunk, even though this is one of the most famous sentences in American literature.  Online you are liberated from these constraints, and more able to approach the world in your own way.  Type "call me Ishmael" amd many representations of Moby Dick appear.  The difference between metadata (how cataloging fields are encoded) and data (what the user actually wants to see) is fading. Today it's all data.

As to peer review, Weinberger noted this fall's posting of the important news that neutrinos are faster than light.  This news arrived not via a peer reviewed journal article, but posted to ArXiv for all the world to see.  Sure, physicists have long embraced ArXiv more than chemists or biologists.  Sure, the deeper changes required to the peer review system are political and cultural rather than technological.  Weinberger's point was different--that the very ability to conduct online post-publication peer review is a game changer.  We no longer have to rely on the vetting mechanisms developed in the pre-Web era.  If we choose not to evolve, because of inertia, that's a different matter.

The Web is intentionally chaotic and "loosely joined," to use a Weinbergian phrase.  And so the Web's very nature will challenge attempts at order.  This could be good or bad, depending on your point of view; the reality is that it's a mixed blessing. But attempts to put the genie back in the bottle--to get people to use classification schemes developed by others when they can finally use their own--seem destined to fail.

I can hear the objections now.  What about authority? What about truth?  How can librarians possibly do their jobs in a world in which everyone writes their own rules?  One answer is that librarians will need to evolve.  Weinberger--who is also the co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School--suggests that librarians could move away from guiding people to particular resources and instead move people toward knowledge networks composed of other people within their communities.  I'm hard pressed to see a world in which the glorious stacks at Harvard's libraries remain standing unaltered in 50 years time. So librarians might become people brokers rather than organizers of information objects.  Maybe not, it is just one hypothesis.  Part of the solution to our future is being unafraid to try new ideas, whether or not they all pan out.

Another answer is that we've been down this road before.  Right now I'm reading Simon Garfield's fascinating book Just My Type, about the history of fonts.  Soon after Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1400s type setters and font developers appeared all over Europe--these were the entrepreneurs who brought Gutenberg's invention to life.  And before you knew it they were printing these dastardly things called...wait for it...books!  Books!! Who needs them when we already have scrolls?  Garfield quotes a scribe in 1470s Venice, worried he would soon be out of business because the city is "stuffed with books."  Or how about Hieronimo Squarciafico (what a name!), who argued that the "abundance of books makes men less studious."  Can you imagine?  Today we are despearately trying to get kids to read printed books, precisely because we want them to be studious.  But had we lived in Europe in the 1400s books would have been feared as scary interlopers. 

Eventually, of course, books became commonplace and modern research libraries--with their cataloging apparatus and copious shelf space--were born.  If we are open-minded this time around, suffused with a creative spirit about how best to maneuver in the digital age, libraries will prosper again.  This is the whole point of the Harvard Library Lab where Weinberger works...to bring a sense of adventure to the development of the next generation of libraries.

But we will only succeed at this if we're willing to challenge the status quo. As Garrett Hardin argued in "The Tragedy of the Commons," the status quo will forever have an unmerited edge.  Hardin was speaking of status quos in the natural sciences, but his point holds more broadly.  Here is Hardin, emphasis mine:

"It is one of the peculiarities of the warfare between reform and the status quo that it is thoughtlessly governed by a double standard. Whenever a reform measure is proposed it is often defeated when its opponents triumphantly discover a flaw in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed out (21), worshippers of the status quo sometimes imply that no reform is possible without unanimous agreement, an implication contrary to historical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection of proposed reforms is based on one of two unconscious assumptions: (i) that the status quo is perfect; or (ii) that the choice we face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is imperfect, we presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect proposal.

"But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produces evils. Once we are aware that the status quo is action, we can then compare its discoverable advantages and disadvantages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages of the proposed reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of experience. On the basis of such a comparison, we can make a rational decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that only perfect systems are tolerable."

And yet...I still love print and still treasure the feel of a book in my hand.  Part of me, therefore, loves the status quo.  But I also love the ability to download books wirelessly to my iPad within seconds; the night I heard Weinberger speak I did just that with the book Reinventing Discovery by Michael Neilsen, a book Weinberger recommended.  No waiting for it through the mail, no putting it on hold at the library, no dropping it in my backpack. Just there, right away, right now. 

Of couse, I could afford the download.  Librarians of now and the future have a HUGE opportunity in making sure that the e-reading market does not become fully commoditized and has a library/community role.  But to do this we'll have to let go of some of the practices and focus we developed over centuries of print.  We'll have to reshape our sense of purpose and in so doing forge a new (temporary) status quo.

Lastly, the Web is not wonderful in all respects.  Weinberger is among a group of thinkers--he cited Clay Shirky, who is another--who run the risk of being branded a digital cheerleader, with little awareness of the darker corners or potentially nefarious uses of the Web.  At the talk Weinberger squarely addressed this risk, acknowledging that much of how people use the Web is to watch pornography or to spawn racist, hateful theories.  People are base, and the Web makes that more plain than ever. 

This is distressing, but until humanity collectively evolves we'll be stuck with it.  In the meantime, we should embrace the liberating aspects of the Web, namely its power to gather people together and to let more voices be heard.  This is chaotic and confusing, but also wonderful.  I am not concerned that the world is too big to know. Instead I'm grateful to be living in the period of history in which I have so many new tools to learn about it.  Thanks to David Weinberger for a provocative and inspring talk.

Annotum: New Word Press Theme for Open Access Publishing

Yesterday a colleague informed me about Annotum, a new Word Press theme that facilitates open access publishing.  A great deal of technical expertise by people at Google, PLoS and NLM (among others) went into its development.  Learning about Annotum reminded me of my experience with Open Journal Systems several years ago.  Now you don't need a whole platform to make open access happen, you just need a WordPress extension.

This is all to the good.  But we can build as many tools as we want to facilitate open access and not actually get there.  Building software is hard, but it's much easier than changing the culture of publish-or-perish tenure.  That's about changing people's minds, not spiffy technology.  This is where we need to focus, no matter how slow the journey may seem.

"Decoupling the scholarly journal" by Priem and Hemminger

Over the past few years I've often returned to the topic of evolving the scholarly communication processes. In so doing I've referenced Michael Clarke's brilliant post about why scientific communication hasn't yet been disrupted.  Here's the thumbnail version (you should read Clarke's piece for the full argument):  the advent of electronic communication has not replaced all the functions of a peer-reviewed journal.  Yes, it is much easier to publish than it once was, and to note the existence of an article in an electronic database.  This solves the dissemination and registration functions of the scholarly communications chain. 

But we still have validation, filtration, and designation to contend with.  Validation is peer review; filtration slots the article within a recognizable, branded journal that scholars know to read; designation is the space on the CV where a scholar lists all their publications in high impact factor journals.  The impact factor may be highly dubious, but it is still highly used.  These latter three functions are less amenable to electronic solutions, which is why the scholarly communications system remains conservative.

These five functions are bundled together within every single journal, so any proposed change to one part of the chain must simultaneously account for all of the other functions to have an impact.  We have a systems problem on our hands.

Along come Jason Priem and Bradley M. Hemminger, with an innovative proposal to "decouple" the traditional functions of a scholarly journal as a means of solving this systems problem.   There is no reason that every single journal must continue to facilitate all of these functions, it is just the way it has always been done.  Priem and Hemminger note that our current template for scholarly communication dates to 1665, when scholars who had previously mailed letters to each other agreed to mail the letters to a central location so they could be bound together into the print journal.  That was very innovative then, less so now. 

Priem and Hemminger: "We should not expect a fully decoupled metajournal to emerge in the next year or even decade. However, neither should we expect the current system, based as it is on the paradigm of the 17th century, to continue with only small, evolutionary changes. There will be a revolution in scholarly communication, as the fundamental potential of the Web compared with traditional models puts increasing torsion on our system."

How do we embrace and harness this torsion?  By "decoupling" the functions now maintained journal-by-journal, using the Web to manage publication processes instead.  It would be very easy to post an article online, get initial feedback, and revise it before final "certification" by a qualified body. In this scenario there are three services--hosting the article; peer review; final certification.  But here they are managed in a "Web-like environment of loosely joined pieces," rather than in a vertically integrated publication process.

Separating the pieces of the scholarly communication system apart makes it possible to fix/improve/modify one element without disrupting everything.  The market can work its magic, as scholars pick and choose among registration services rather than simply submitting to the same old journals.  The unit of discourse becomes whatever the scholar wishes to share, rather than only the article.

There is a lot of interesting work for librarians in this vision, to manage a scholarly communications chain that facilitates the ebb and flow of discourse rather than only presenting polished final products.  One can quibble with the details Prier and Hemminger present. But their logic of separating out the functions of the system, to provide space for innovation, is unassailable.  This is much easier said than done, but first someone has to say it.

 

Moving Beyond Open Access

This week I'm in Philadelphia for the EDUCAUSE conference, and am very much looking forward to Seth Godin's keynote tomorrow morning. It will be a great meeting.

Just before wandering the exhibit hall today I caught up with Scott's post about the economics of open access. Scott's main point is incontestable--that some OA publishers are also doing well financially, so where's the librarian outrage?  Shouldn't we be consistent?  Yes, we should.

That said, I don't hear that much outrage against traditional publishers these days either.  We have entered a more quiet, measured phase in the open access debate. The revolutionary fervor has abated. 

That's a good thing.  Open access is a conservative proposition--you're making PDFs available for free to all, but they are still PDFs that hearken back to the print-only era.  How tame this revolution is. 

So let's get beyond the PDF already. It's time to figure out how to use the Web to create, nurture and preserve new types of research.  Why stress so much about "papers" in the digital age?

Scholarly Communication: Creating and Indexing Web-Native Research

As an Associate Fellow at the National Library of Medicine, I learned about the intellectual infrastucture that goes into indexing PubMed.  Coders (indexers) label the key concepts of every article "indexed for MEDLINE."  This is the backbone of how people search for articles, even if they do keyword searches and do not search for vocabulary terms directly. 

Indexers choose from a controlled vocabulary maintained by the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) section.  That vocabulary has grown considerably to accommodate changes in health care, but any term is added only after careful consideration.  MeSH is both conservative and expandable.  An indexer can suggest terms to add to MeSH, but this is taken under advisement and not a guarantee.

At the time I focused on the competing interests between the indexers and vocabulary maintainers--the indexers desired very expansive terminology, while the MeSH team felt they had to guard the integrity of the vocabulary.  I am sure this tension still exists.  But today what interests me is what this intellectual endeavor symbolizes.  All this bother is because the peer-reviewed scientific literature is deemed to be especially valuable, and thus worthy of discovery tools that are more sophisticated than a Google search.

In Michael Clarke's brilliant post about why scientific communication has not yet been disrupted, he points to four functions of the scholarly communications system: dissemination of a new idea; registration of that idea in the scholarly record; validation of that idea via peer review; and filtration of those ideas into recognizable buckets (journals), so that the research process is manageable. 

Within Clarke's framework, NLM's indexers and MeSH section provide the tools for registraton of new ideas.

Clarke's essential insight is that the Internet only solves the dissemination problem, which is why scientific publishing has yet to change fundamentally.  Just posting something online does not register it in the same way as having a citation in PubMed.  Posting without peer review does not offer validation, and proliferating online posts make the filtration of ideas ever more difficult.

Changing scientific publishing at the root will require something more than the Web alone.  First we need to get beyond the metaphor of the "paper" as the delivery mechanism for a piece of research, as this is tied to pre-Web times.  Events like this year's "Beyond the PDF" conference are a good place to start. And we need ways for scholars to utilize the unique capabilities of the Web to conduct and report research.   Peter Sefton's innovative work on scholarly HTML looks to be a way forward there.

As to peer review, NYU's innovation regarding open peer review is an exciting experiment. It is time for the lid of secrecy to be removed from the often suspect peer review process,  making it more transparent.

In a world of open peer review and scholarly HTML that has gone beyond the PDF, the dissemination function of scholarly communication will evolve and the validation function will remain intact.  That leaves filtration and registration.

Filtration first needs to be decoupled from the constraining idea of the journal, which is no mean feat.  But remember--in this universe we've gone beyond the PDF and are utilizing the native capabilities of the Web. That should mean greater focus on ideas and their merits, and less on the container in which those ideas appear.  Built-in filtration would be a natural byproduct of this evolution.

That leaves registration.  Here is where librarians come in.  We should build an index for born digital, scholarly HTML that is every bit as robust and sophisticated as the one we have built for journal articles.  Google won't cut it in this case, because it yields too much noise. We shouldn't wait for someone else to build this index or rely upon market demand to make it happen. Instead we should take the Steve Jobs approach and build something people didn't even know they wanted.  

Scientific communication returning to its roots

This week Richard Smith, a sometimes way-over-the-top advocate of open access, offers a nicely balanced blog post about how post-publication peer review is one way to return scientific publishing to its roots.  Extrapolating from the Economist's recent argument that the consolidation of news media was an historical anamoly, Smith argues that journals too will reclaim their foundations as a scholar-mediated form of discourse.

I hope so.

Of course, for this to happen the prestige and imprimatur functions that today's journals serve will need to be replicated in some other fashion.  Michael Clarke's brilliance on this point remains an essential read. The moral imperative for open access will not carry the day.

So I think a strategic imperative is in order, in which librarians stop allocating collection dollars to models of dissemination we do not support.  Not overnight and not in raging moralistic fashion.  But if we believe that scholarly communication should change and that post-pub peer review is worthy we should put our money where our mouth is.   We can't always allow fear of what our users might think to prevent us from making changes.  Advocacy and boldness are part of the job.

From the Better Late than Never Division: Summary of 2010 Research About Social Networking and Open Access

In March 2010 Anneliese Taylor and I presented a research paper at the Evidence-Based Scholarly Communication conference in Albuquerque, NM. On a personal level, I enjoyed the trip because I'd never been to Albuquerque (or Santa Fe, where I ventured afterwards.)  Also, Mom and Bob came along from Phoenix and attended the session where I presented the research.

Professionally, it was an interesting opportunity to expore whether scholars utilize social networking tools as part of their research, and also to gauge whether an open access journal receives more exposure than a traditional journal in the same field.  Anneliese and I wrote up our findings for the official conference proceedings, but then edits became due just as I started the job at Samuel Merritt. So the official publication never occurred, although our conference presentation is available.  Recently Jon Eldredge, one of the conference organizers, sent us a gentle nudge about the need to publish our results; herewith is an attempt to do so.

Questions: Does opening up access to scholarly literature increase the reach of individual articles beyond what can be expected of traditional, toll-access literature?  If publishers allow readers to share articles via social networking sites, does it enhance readership? 

Methods: We did a small study comparing articles from an open access journal and a subscription journal on similar topics in the field of translational medicine, in an effort to address these questions.   Journal of Translational Medicine (JTM) is published open access by BioMed Central, and Science Translational Medicine (STM) is a subscription journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

We studied ten articles from each journal, looking up their citation counts, sharing via blog and social bookmarking sites, as well as coverage in news stories. 

Results: Our findings revealed that the open access articles from JTM had more citations, possibly because of age compared to the more recently founded STM.   The STM articles were more frequently cited in news stories, despite being so recent.  The fact that STM is published by a high-profile organization may explain why its papers got more coverage than an open access journal.  Neither publication resulted in a significant number of social sharing via blogs or bookmarking sites, which suggest that readers of scholarly literature do not use these services for this particular kind of literature. The one exception was an article on sleep loss that got picked up by several news outlets and was widely shared on social media sites.

Discussion: This study was conducted in the beginning days of “Article-Level Metrics” (ALM).  The open access publisher Public Library of Science introduced ALM in 2009 as a way to measure the impact of an individual article by counting article-level downloads, citations, social bookmarks, and blog postings about the article.  ALM will be an important tool for improving the ability to evaluate the impact of individual articles regardless of where they are published.  This was a small study undertaken at just one moment in time. Further studies using these metrics will help us see how the landscape is being transformed by the finer level of detail than was previously possible with just the journal’s impact factor and the number of citations to the article.

That is all. But don't forget that the conference presentation is here.

Cost Sharing and Scholarly Communication

One consistent thread of the scholarly communication debate is that many titles--particularly Scientific, Technical, and Medicine titles--are far too expensive, much higher than the rate of inflation. But the assumption from there is that the library needs to trim away at the collection as much as possible, preserving whatever a particular campus deems to be essential.  It's always understood that the library will pay the full cost of whatever is ordered or licensed.

Why? As both John Wilbanks and Michael Clarke have pointed out, for reasons of tradition and institutional inertia our scholarly communiucation system has been impervious to the changes that have fundamentally changed the consumer market (Netflix, iTunes, etc.)  On the consumer level we've gotten away from the warehouse model (farewell Blockbuster) and in some cases have arrived at the unit of entertainment most people actually care about--the song, not the album.

But libraries still purchase/license complete runs of journals even though a handful of the articles in those journals will have a disproportionate influence.  We're buying the album when we could buy the song. 

And the faculty in our institutions continue to publish in journals even though it would be just as easy, and far more immediate, to release their work as a blog post.  So it seems we're all caught within a self-perpetuating inertial loop that reinforces the norms and values of the print model, just as the Web has made entirely new modes of discourse possible.

For as long as the current system endures, we could at least share the cost with our faculty. Libraries could still make titles available via the A-Z list and lock out unauthorized users of our holdings via EZProxy (one of the most distasteful of our current duties).  In essence, we would still manage the ejournal collection without paying the full cost.  Why not? If our users want to maintain the status quo they should help pay for it.

Scott Plutchak and Seth Godin--MLA '11

Every year I've attended the Medical Library Association meeting I've stayed through Wednesday, but this year I headed home Tuesday night. My loss--by all accounts Geoff Bilder of CrossRef was an engaging speaker Wednesday morning. Next year I'll stay for the duration.

I did have the fortune to hear Scott's Doe lecture on Monday, which was very strong.  This year's plenaries were strong in general, as Clay Shirky got us off to a good start Sunday. The Janet Doe Lecture is how MLA honors its own, offering a member who has exhibited long-standing creativity and dedication the opportunity to express their philosophy of health sciences librarianship.

Scott's main message, as he's argued on his blog and in other forums, is that this is a great age for librarians and not for libraries. The era of building great collections housed in impressive buildings is over.  If we continue to think of ourselves as collection builders, as dealers in materials and not in ideas, we are doomed. This existential threat to the purpose of libraries stems from the ease of online access to information, which will continue to reshape our world.

Humankind has been down this road before.  Scott referred to Andrew Pettegree's study of the book in the Renaissance era, to make the point that a truly mature print culture--the one we all grew up in--took decades to materialize post-Gutenberg. For the scrollmakers the printing press was an extremely disruptive and unwelcome technology, but eventually it prevailed.  One can foresee a similar course for ebooks, even if this takes decades. Scott's own prediction is that a truly mature digital culture is two generations away, which means nobody alive today will live to see it.

What does this mean for librarians?  We can guard the models of the past fiercely, thus sealing our doom. Or we can step into the future boldly, with an air of experimentation and a willingness to be wrong just as often (or even more often) than we are right. I'd like to see the library become much less of a warehouse and much more of a facilitator of new research and teaching that is only possible using digital tools.  This unwinding might take decades--so be it.  In the meantime we can shift our resources toward facilitation of new work and away from collection development.

This can seem scary to many librarians, and offensive to some.  You can hear the cries--"this isn't what I went to school for!"  But Scott is very excited by the prospect of shaping the digital future.  Just as the scholars who created journals in the 1600s created an entirely new information ecosystem, we have the chance to do the same.  The question is whether we want to do so.

On the same day Scott delivered his talk marketing expert Seth Godin posted a highly tweeted perspective on the future of the library.  Although Godin's focus is on public libraries, his themes resonate strongly with Scott's argument.  To close, some quotes from Godin:

"Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario."

"We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime."

Amen.