Posts Tagged ‘Academia’
Sunday, November 4th, 2018
For perhaps ten years now, the future of scientific publishing has been hotly debated. The traditional models are often thought to be badly broken, although convergence to a consensus of what a better model should be is not apparently close. But to my mind, much of this debate seems to miss one important point, how to publish data.
Thus, at one extreme is COAlition S, a model which promotes the key principle that “after 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results from research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.” This includes ten principles, one of which “The ‘hybrid’ model of publishing is not compliant with the above principles” has revealed some strong dissent, as seen at forbetterscience.com/2018/09/11/response-to-plan-s-from-academic-researchers-unethical-too-risky I should explain that hybrid journals are those where the business model includes both institutional closed-access to the journal via a subscription charge paid by the library, coupled with the option for individual authors to purchase an Open Access release of an article so that it sits outside the subscription. The dissenters argue that non-OA and hybrid journals include many traditional ones, which especially in chemistry are regarded as those with the best impact factors and very much as the journals to publish in to maximise both the readership, hence the impact of the research and thus researcher’s career prospects. Thus many (not all) of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) journals currently fall into this category, as well as commercial publishers of journals such as Nature, Nature Chemistry,Science, Angew. Chemie, etc.
So the debate is whether funded top ranking research in chemistry should in future always appear in non-hybrid OA journals (where the cost of publication is borne by article processing charges, or APCs) or in traditional subscription journals where the costs are borne by those institutions that can afford the subscription charges, but of course also limit the access. A measure of how important and topical the debate is that there is even now a movie devoted to the topic which makes the point of how profitable commercial scientific publishing now is and hence how much resource is being diverted into these profit margins at the expense of funding basic science.
None of these debates however really takes a close look at the nature of the modern research paper. In chemistry at least, the evolution of such articles in the last 20 years (~ corresponding to the online era) has meant that whilst the size of the average article has remained static at around 10 “pages” (in quotes because of course the “page” is one of those legacy concepts related to print), another much newer component known as “Supporting information” or SI♥ has ballooned to absurd sizes. It can reach 1000 pages[1] and there are rumours of even larger SIs. The content of SI is of course mostly data. The size is often because the data is present in visual form (think spectra). As visual information, it is not easily “inter-operable” or “accessible”. Nor is it “findable” until commercial abstracting agencies chose to index it. Searches of such indexed data are most certainly “closed” (again depending on institutional purchases of access) and not “open access”. You may recognise these attributes as those of FAIR (Findable, accessible, inter-operable and re-usable). So even if an article in chemistry is published in pure OA form, in order to get FAIR access to the data associated with the article, you will probably have to go to a non-OA resource run by a commercial organisation for profit. Thus a 10 page article might itself be OA, but the full potential of its 1000+ page data (an elephant if ever there was one) ends up being very much not OA.
You might argue that the 1000+ pages of data does not require the services of an abstracting agency to be useful. Surely a human can get all the information they want from inspecting a visual spectrum? Here I raise the future prospects of AI (artificial intelligence). The ~1000 page SI I noted above[1] includes e.g NMR spectra for around 70 compounds (I tried to count them all visually, but could not be certain I found them all). A machine, trained to identify spectra from associated metadata (a feature of FAIR), could extract vastly more information than a human could from FAIR raw data‡ (a spectrum is already processed data, with implied information/data loss) in a given time. And for many articles, not just one. Thus FAIR data is very much targeted not only at humans but at the AI-trained machines of the future.
So I again repeat my assertion that focussing on whether an article is OA or not and whether publishing in hybrid journals is to be allowed or not by funders is missing that 100-fold bigger elephant in the room. For me, a publishing model that is fit for the future should include as a top priority a declaration of whether the data associated with it is FAIR. Thus in the Plan-S ten principles, FAIR is not mentioned at all. Only when FAIR-enabled data becomes part of the debates can we truly say that the article and its data are on its way to being properly open access.
‡The FAIR concept did not originally differentiate between processed data (i.e. spectra) and the underlying primary or raw data on which the processed data is based. Our own implementation of FAIR data includes both types of data; raw for machine reprocessing if required, and processed data for human interpretation. Along with a rich set of metadata, itself often created using carefully designed workflows conducted by machines.
♥The proportion of articles relating to chemistry which do not include some form of SI is probably low. These would include articles which simply provide a new model or interpretation of previously published data, reporting no new data of their own. A famous historical example is Michael Dewar’s re-interpretation of the structure of stipitatic acid[2] which founded the new area of non-benzenoid aromaticity.
References
- J.M. Lopchuk, K. Fjelbye, Y. Kawamata, L.R. Malins, C. Pan, R. Gianatassio, J. Wang, L. Prieto, J. Bradow, T.A. Brandt, M.R. Collins, J. Elleraas, J. Ewanicki, W. Farrell, O.O. Fadeyi, G.M. Gallego, J.J. Mousseau, R. Oliver, N.W. Sach, J.K. Smith, J.E. Spangler, H. Zhu, J. Zhu, and P.S. Baran, "Strain-Release Heteroatom Functionalization: Development, Scope, and Stereospecificity", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 139, pp. 3209-3226, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.6b13229
- M.J.S. DEWAR, "Structure of Stipitatic Acid", Nature, vol. 155, pp. 50-51, 1945. https://doi.org/10.1038/155050b0
Tags:Academia, Academic publishing, American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie, article processing charge, article processing charges, artificial intelligence, Cognition, Company: RSC, Electronic publishing, G factor, Hybrid open access journal, Knowledge, Michael Dewar, Nature, online era, Open access, Predatory publishing, Publishing, researcher, Royal Society of Chemistry, Scholarly communication, Science, Technology/Internet
Posted in Chemical IT | 2 Comments »
Friday, November 25th, 2016
Another conference, a Cambridge satellite meeting of OpenCon, and I quote here its mission: “OpenCon is a platform for the next generation to learn about Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data, develop critical skills, and catalyze action toward a more open system of research and education” targeted at students and early career academic professionals. But they do allow a few “late career” professionals to attend as well!
I could only attend the morning session, for which the keynote speaker was Erin McKiernan
The presentation was entitled How open science helps researchers succeed, presented as an exploration of an article written by Erin and colleagues with the same name and published in eLife[1] Erin has created a support page at http://whyopenresearch.org to augment the presentation and it’s well worth a visit.
One striking point made was the assertion that Open publications get more citations!
As with many metrics of the impacts of the science publication processes, a citation itself lacks the context of why it was made (see this post for further discussion), but the expectation is that a citation is “good”. From my perspective as a chemist, I did wonder why molecular science was missing from the graphic above. Do open chemistry publications also get more citations?
Which brings me to another point made during the talk, the increasingly controversial aspect of (journal) impact factors and the pressure placed on early career researchers to publish only in those with “high” impact factors, and for their careers to be assessed at least in part based on these and the anticipated “h-index”. The audience was indeed encouraged to go visit http://www.ascb.org/Dora/ (Declaration on Research Assessment, or Putting science into the assessment of research). Have you signed it yet?
Another manifestation of the modern trend to analyse impact metrics is the site Impactstory.org. This is a scripted resource that starts from your ORCID identifier and (optionally) your Twitter account (yes, apparently Tweets matter!) to derive a more complex alternative metric of a individual’s impacts. I had not tried this one before and so I submitted my ORCID and my Twitter account, and watched as the system went off to http://orcid.scopusfeedback.com (Scopus is an Elsevier product) to attempt to create my profile. It ground for quite a while, reporting initially that I had no publications! This was followed by an unexpected error; I did not get my impact back! But this experiment served to highlight one aspect that was discussed at the meeting; data and other research objects. The graphic above refers only to the citation of journal articles, it does not yet include the citation of data. However ORCID DOES include data and research objects as works. And because the granularity of my data and research objects is very fine (one molecule = one work), I have quite a few. In fact ~200,000! ORCID gets to about 8000 before it gives up. I suspect http://orcid.scopusfeedback.com queries ORCID, gets back ~8000 entries and crashes. No doubt the programmer tasked with implementing this resource did not anticipate that any individual could accumulate 8000+ entries! Or probably factor in that the vast majority of these would of course not be journal articles but data. If the site gets back to me about the crash I experienced, I will update here.
Simon Deakin was the next speaker with (open) data as the focus and the worries many researchers have in being scooped by others who have re-used your open data without proper attributions. The discussion teased out that if data is properly deposited, it will indeed have full associated metadata and in particular a date stamp that could help protect an author’s interests.
It was really good to meet so many early career researchers who espouse the open ethos. Perhaps, in 20 years time, another graphic akin to the one above might demonstrate that open researchers get more promotions!
References
- E.C. McKiernan, P.E. Bourne, C.T. Brown, S. Buck, A. Kenall, J. Lin, D. McDougall, B.A. Nosek, K. Ram, C.K. Soderberg, J.R. Spies, K. Thaney, A. Updegrove, K.H. Woo, and T. Yarkoni, "How open science helps researchers succeed", eLife, vol. 5, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.16800
Tags:Academia, author, chemist, City: Cambridge, Company: Twitter, ELife, Erin McKiernan, keynote speaker, Max Planck Society, programmer, Simon Deakin, Social Media & Networking, speaker, Technology/Internet, Wellcome Trust
Posted in Chemical IT, General | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, August 17th, 2016
In the previous post, I noted that a chemistry publisher is about to repeat an earlier experiment in serving pre-prints of journal articles. It would be fair to suggest that following the first great period of journal innovation, the boom in rapid publication “camera-ready” articles in the 1960s, the next period of rapid innovation started around 1994 driven by the uptake of the World-Wide-Web. The CLIC project[1] aimed to embed additional data-based components into the online presentation of the journal Chem Communications, taking the form of pop-up interactive 3D molecular models and spectra. The Internet Journal of Chemistry was designed from scratch to take advantage of this new medium.[2] Here I take a look at one recent experiment in innovation which incorporates “augmented reality”.[3]
The title is interesting: “Combination of Enabling Technologies to Improve and Describe the Stereoselectivity of Wolff–Staudinger Cascade Reaction“. One of these technologies relates to “microwave-assisted flow generation of primary ketenes by thermal decomposition of α-diazoketones at high temperature”, but the journal presentation itself attempts the “faster interpretation of computed data via a new web-based molecular viewer, which takes advantage from Augmented Reality (AR) technology“. To access this component directly, go to the link https://leyscigateway.ch.cam.ac.uk/staudinger/ It is not incorporated into the journal infrastructures as the CLIC project attempted, but is perhaps closer to the model I noted in the previous post of supporting (FAIR) data associated with the article and hosted separately from the journal.
What happens next depends rather on the Web browser you are using. With many browsers and tablets, a conventional 3D molecular presentation appears; there is no button present where the red arrow points. You will find out this is because “Augmented Reality is not available in your browser, as the getUserMedia() API is not supported“
Some browsers (the latest Opera, FireFox, Chrome) do support this feature, and a new AR button appears. Selecting this now layers the video from the device camera onto the 3D molecular model; the molecule now floats in the scene captured by the camera (which in the case below is the room I am sitting in). After a few seconds you are urged to “point the camera towards the AR marker”. The supporting information contains such AR markers as a navigation aid for the 3D coordinates contained there. An example is:
If this marker is now brought into the camera view (by printing it, sic) and holding it in front of the camera image, the marker resolves into further data relevant to the molecule of interest, layered into the existing scene of the room and the molecule. For the marker above, it resolves to a reaction energy profile which reveals where the specific molecule sits energetically in terms of the overall reaction.
This layering of “heads up” molecular data into a scene comprising a 3D molecular model and the human viewer of that molecule captured in video is what defines the concept of “augmented reality” (the data being the augmentation, rather than the human).
Having now tried it out, I was left wondering whether this truly was a great advance in enabling technology for chemistry journals. The role of the camera seems primarily to capture the AR markers contained in the supporting information; the presence of the reader in the video image apparently inspecting the molecule could be regarded as a distraction. The AR markers (QR codes) are merely visual representations of a URL, which in the form of a DOI (as used in this blog) to locate data is rather more familiar to most readers. The DOI, by the way, carries further information in the form of metadata, and which when sent to e.g. DataCite, enables the data to be found. Does the data need to be layered onto the molecule (and apparently floating in front of the reader) to become usable? Could it instead be placed in a pop-up or separate window of its own (as the 1994 CLIC project achieved)? Do the AR markers enable the data to be FAIR? One can Find the data (albeit only by reading and printing the supporting information) and view it in the AR scene, but is it Accessible (can one access the underlying numerical data?) or Interoperable (place it into another program) or Re-usable?
As with all enabling technologies, one has to always ask if that technology helps or hinders. Or is the principle of KISS (keep it simple) sometimes better? It is however good to see research groups experimenting with these themes and meanwhile readers can judge for themselves whether “heads up” AR augmentation of the data describing research is indeed the next big thing.
References
- D. James, B.J. Whitaker, C. Hildyard, H.S. Rzepa, O. Casher, J.M. Goodman, D. Riddick, and P. Murray‐Rust, "The case for content integrity in electronic chemistry journals: The CLIC project", New Review of Information Networking, vol. 1, pp. 61-69, 1995. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614579509516846
- S.M. Bachrach, and S.R. Heller, "The<i>Internet Journal of Chemistry:</i>A Case Study of an Electronic Chemistry Journal", Serials Review, vol. 26, pp. 3-14, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2000.10764578
- S. Ley, B. Musio, F. Mariani, E. Śliwiński, M. Kabeshov, and H. Odajima, "Combination of Enabling Technologies to Improve and Describe the Stereoselectivity of Wolff–Staudinger Cascade Reaction", Synthesis, vol. 48, pp. 3515-3526, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0035-1562579
Tags:Academia, Academic publishing, Boom, Design, Design Services, Innovation, Internet Journal, online presentation, Preprint, Publishing, reaction energy profile, technology helps, Web browser, web-based molecular viewer
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Tuesday, August 16th, 2016
This week the ACS announced its intention to establish a “ChemRxiv preprint server to promote early research sharing“. This was first tried quite a few years ago, following the example of especially the physicists. As I recollect the experiment lasted about a year, attracted few submissions and even fewer of high quality. Will the concept succeed this time, in particular as promoted by a commercial publisher rather than a community of scientists (as was the original physicists model)?
The RSC (itself a highly successful commercial publisher) has picked up on this and run its own commentary. You will find quotes from yours truly there, along with Peter Murray-Rust, a long time ardent promoter of community driven open science. One interesting aspect is that the ACS runs around 50 journals, and the decision on whether each will accept preprints for publication will (shortly = next few weeks) be made by the individual editors. I wonder if the eventual list of those supporting the project will bring any surprises (bets on J. Am. Chem. Soc. preprints anyone)?
But I want to pick up on the declared aspiration “to promote early research sharing“. Here I couple research sharing with data sharing. If you share your research, you should also share the data resulting from that research. We are now entering a new era of data sharing (in part as a result of mandation by various funding bodies) and so one has to ask whether a pre-print server will encourage people to create and share FAIR data (data which is findable, accessible, inter-operable and re-usable) as a model to replace the current one of “supporting information” held in enormous PDF files (mostly unFAIR on at least three counts). This question is indeed posed in the RSC commentary. What I would like to see happen are projects such as that described here, which create what were described as “first class research objects”, and which I think amply fulfil the criteria of being FAIR. So, will ChemRxiv preprint servers help promote such FAIR data sharing as part of early research sharing? We will find out soon.
The ACS supports OA (Open Access) sharing of articles, provided the authors pay (or arrange payment of) the appropriate APC or article processing charge. These charges are complex, being subject to various discounts (for example if you as an author are an ACS member or not) but are generally not insignificant (> $1000). I wondered whether preprints might be subject to an APC, and so I asked the ACS. The response was “we don’t anticipate any submission or usages fees at this time“. I think that means free at point of submission, and free at point of readership “at this time“.
Finally, let me now summarise as I understand the current family of “research publications”:
- The preprint
- The final author version as submitted to a journal
- The “version of record” (VoR) as published by the journal
- Any FAIR published data associated with the article
All four of these are attempts at “research sharing”. Each may be located in a different location, and each may have its own DOI. And of course we cannot easily know how much overlap there is between each of them. Thus, how might 1-3 differ in terms of the story or “narrative” of scientific claims? Does 4 agree or support 1-3? Does 4 agree with perhaps data subsets contained in 1-3? If keeping abreast of the current research literature is a challenge, imagine having to cope with/reconcile up to four versions of each “publication”!
Lots of food for thought here. We have not heard the last of these themes.
Tags:Academia, Academic publishing, article processing charge, author, Data publishing, Data sharing, food, Grey literature, Open access, Open science, PDF, Peter Murray-Rust, pre-print server, Preprint, preprint server, Public sphere, Publishing, Scholarly communication, Technology/Internet
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Wednesday, August 5th, 2015
I recently received two emails each with a subject line new approaches to research reporting. The traditional 350 year-old model of the (scientific) journal is undergoing upheavals at the moment with the introduction of APCs (article processing charges), a refereeing crisis and much more. Some argue that brand new thinking is now required. Here are two such innovations (and I leave you to judge whether that last word should have an appended ?).
To set the scene for the first, I will quote the abstract: “The single figure publication is a novel, efficient format by which to communicate scholarly advances. It will serve as a forerunner of the nano-publication, a modular unit of information critical for machine-driven data aggregation and knowledge integration[1] The kernel of this suggestion is (again I quote) “We offer the idea of the micro-publication unit, the single figure publication (SFP), to provide scholars with a real-world, manageable method to inform research.” I was struck by the overlap between this suggestion and the one you may find on many of the posts on this blog, where what I refer to as FAIR Data is assigned a digital object identifier (DOI) and included in the citation lists at the end of the post. The key phrase in the above abstract is machine-driven data aggregation and knowledge, although the article does not really go into any mechanisms for easily achieving this. It is my argument that the act of assigning a DOI carries with it the association that there is machine searchable metadata which can be retrieved and used for the aggregation and knowledge mining. The authors of this article, Do and Mobley, advocate adoption of nanopublications defined by inclusion of just a single figure (notably, not a table of results!) and some accompanying context which they claim would reduce the unit of publication to a more tractable size. This does raise the question of whether science needs more publications (in chemistry alone there are said to be more than a million published each year) or whether we should instead be concentrating our efforts on improving the data side of things by increasing its semantic content and formalising its structures, its preservation and curation. I certainly argue that far too little effort has been poured into these latter activities. You only have to look at the typical SI (supporting information) associated with many chemistry articles to realise that in many cases they are still hardly fit for purpose. There is one concept introduced by Do and Mobley that also deserves mention. Their nanopublications are structured to be read by machines, not people. They will therefore not be refereed by people (my inference). They do not really discuss how else the quality will be assessed, but of course if you treat their nanopublication as essentially FAIR data, then it does become possible to develop methods of machine refereeing.
The second email alerted me to an article[2] in the Winnower, a forum that offers a bridge between “traditional scholarly publishing tools to traditional and non-traditional scholarly outputs—because scholarly communication doesn’t just happen in scholarly journals“. Here, the concept of scholarly communication is extended to the New Reddit Journal of Science and introduces the concept pioneered by reddit of the AMA, or “ask me anything” environment. I occasionally publish some of the posts on this blog to the Winnower, receiving in return the increasingly ubiquitous DOI. I have also occasionally quoted these DOIs in articles submitted to conventional chemistry journals. What we see now is the propagation of a Winnower DOI on to e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/ where anyone† can post a question related to the original research reporting. I must state that I do have some reservations about this. Whilst it is likely that the majority of traditional scholarly reporting is likely to receive no AMAs (just as a very high proportion of research articles attract few if any citations in other articles over a period of decades), it is also likely that the quality of posted AMAs may turn out to be very low. At which point the original researcher has to make a judgement as to whether to devote any of their increasingly precious and fragmented time to answering them. And if few if any answers are posted in response to an AMA, the system seems unlikely to flourish.
But what we see here are two serious attempts to develop new approaches to research reporting, and not doubt others will emerge. To quote Yogi Berra, the future is not what it used to be.
†Anyone can also post to this blog to ask similar questions. But note that associating an ORCID with such comments is highly recommended. I do not think that reddit currently supports ORCID, but I would argue if the intent is serious, it certainly should.
References
- L. Do, and W. Mobley, "Single Figure Publications: Towards a novel alternative format for scholarly communication", F1000Research, vol. 4, pp. 268, 2015. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.6742.1
- . RobustTempComparison, and . r/Science, "Science AMA Series: Climate models are more accurate than previous evaluations suggest. We are a bunch of scientists and graduate students who recently published a paper demonstrating this, Ask Us Anything!", The Winnower, . https://doi.org/10.15200/winn.143871.12809
Tags:10.15200, 143871.12809, Academia, Academic publishing, advocate, Citation, data mining, Digital Object Identifier, Do, Knowledge, knowledge mining, Microattribution, Mobley, original researcher, Peer review, Publishing, scholarly publishing tools, Technology/Internet, the New Reddit Journal, Yogi Berra
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Saturday, June 20th, 2015
The university sector in the UK has quality inspections of its research outputs conducted every seven years, going by the name of REF or Research Excellence Framework. The next one is due around 2020, and already preparations are under way! Here I describe how I have interpreted one of its strictures; that all UK funded research outputs (i.e. research publications in international journals) must be made available in open unrestricted form within three months of the article being accepted for publication, or they will not be eligible for consideration in 2020.
At the outset, I should say that one infrastructure to help researchers adhere to the guidelines is being implemented in the form of the Symplectic system. This allows a researcher to upload the final accepted version of a manuscript. At Imperial College, a digital repository called Spiral serves this purpose and also acts as the front end for collecting informative metadata to enhance discoverability. The final accepted version is then converted by the publisher into a version-of-record. This contains styling unique to the publisher and the content is subjected to further scrutiny by the authors as proof corrections. In an ideal world, these latter changes should also be faithfully propagated back to the final accepted version, as would all the supporting information associated with the article. Since most authors do not exactly enjoy the delights of proof corrections, this final reconciliation of the two versions may not always be assiduously undertaken.
I became concerned about the existence of two versions of any given scientific report and that the task of ensuring total fidelity in the content of both versions may negatively impact on the author’s time. Much better if the publisher could grant permission for the author to archive the version-of-record into a digital repository.
Some experiments were needed, and I decided to start them in reverse, by archiving my oldest publications. Since Symplectic now provides a system to do this, I began by using it. Symplectic identifies each publisher’s policies for archival, of which the most liberal are known as ROMEO GREEN. To quote from the definition, this colour allows the author to “archive pre-print and post-print or publisher’s version/PDF“. In an afternoon I had processed most of my ROMEO green articles. You know how it is sometimes, you do not read the fine print! And so the library soon informed me that archival of ROMEO GREEN was in fact only permitted on the author’s “personal web page”. Spiral, as an institutional repository, does not apparently constitute a personal web page for me and so none of my Symplectic submissions could be accepted for archival there.
Time to rethink the experiment. Firstly, I very much wanted the reprints to be held by a proper digital repository rather than a conventional web page. Why? I wanted my reprints to adhere as much as possible to FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable. Well, at least the first two of those (the last two relate more to data). A repository is designed to hold metadata in a formal and standards-based manner and metadata helps achieve FAIR. So I asked the Royal Society of Chemistry (as a ROMEO GREEN publisher) whether a personal web page hosted on a digital repository would qualify. I was soon informed that I had proposed a neat solution here, and they couldn’t see an issue.
Now, all I had to do is find a repository where I could create such a personal web page. The chemistry department at Imperial College has for ten years hosted a DSpace repository called SPECTRa[1] which already has the functionality for individuals to create personal collections. I had also picked up on the increasing attention being given to Zenodo, like the World-Wide Web itself an offshoot of CERN (of large Hadron Collider fame) and born from the need for researchers to more permanently archive the outputs of their researches. These outputs include software, videos, images, presentations, posters, publications and (most obviously for CERN) datasets. I thought I would include them in my experiment as well. There results are summarised below.
The last line of this table includes a link to another design feature of a repository, facilitating the ability to harvest the content. The ContentMine project (“The right to read is the right to mine!“) has shown how such harvesting of facts from the literature can be automated on a vast scale, and (IMHO) represents an example of those disruptive innovations that have the power to change the world forever. It also enshrines the idea that scientific facts funded by the public purse should be capable of being openly liberated from their containers. A harvestable repository seems an ideal container for achieving this.
My experiment is part of what might be seen as the increasingly subtle interplay between:
- scientific authors, whose creative endeavour research is and without whom scientific publishers would not exist
- publishers who create a business model from the content freely given them by authors but also (especially if a commercial publisher) need to be accountable to their shareholders.
- the funding councils, many of whom now wish the outcomes of the research they fund to be openly available to all
- the local libraries/administrators who have to adhere to/enforce all the rules contractually handed down to them by publishers whose direct customers they are, but who also need to serve their community of readers and authors.
- researchers who would rather do research than fret about the above, and who would rather spend limited resources doing that research rather than diverting an increasing amount of their attention into the above system.
- readers, who need unimpeded access to the research endeavours of others, but often have little influence on the policies and actions of all the other stakeholders, since they are NOT considered customers (of the publishers).
- etc. etc.
My experiment was in part designed to explore these rules, their interpretations and their boundaries. For the time being at least I seem to have found an arrangement that allows me to distribute versions-of-record of my own work, thanks to a generous and far-sighted learned society publisher. Watch this space!
References
- J. Downing, P. Murray-Rust, A.P. Tonge, P. Morgan, H.S. Rzepa, F. Cotterill, N. Day, and M.J. Harvey, "SPECTRa: The Deposition and Validation of Primary Chemistry Research Data in Digital Repositories", Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, vol. 48, pp. 1571-1581, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1021/ci7004737
- H.S. Rzepa, and B.C. Challis, "The Mechanism Of Diazo-Coupling To Indoles And The Effect Of Steric Hindrance On The Rate Limiting Step", Zenodo, 1975. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18758
- H.S. Rzepa, "Hydrogen transfer reactions of indoles", 1974. http://doi.org/10044/1/20860
- H.S. Rzepa, "Hydrogen Transfer Reactions Of Indoles", Zenodo, 1974. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18777
- H.S. Rzepa, "C 25 H 34 Cl 1 N 3 O 1", 2015. https://doi.org/10.14469/ch/191342
- H.S. Rzepa, A. Lobo, M.S. Andrade, V.S. Silva, and A.M. Lourenco, "Chiroptical properties of streptorubin B – the synergy between theory and experiment.", 2015. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18632
Tags:Academia, Academic publishing, Archival science, author, Data management, Digital library, EPrints, Institutional repository, Knowledge, Knowledge representation, Library science, metadata, Open access, PDF, personal web page, Preprint, Publishing, Repository, researcher, ROMEO GREEN, Science, Technology/Internet, United Kingdom, web server
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