Today I’m at ReCon 2017, giving a presentation later (flying the flag for the unconference sessions!) today but also looking forward to a day full of interesting presentations on publishing for early careers researchers.

I’ll be liveblogging (except for my session) and, as usual, comments, additions, corrections, etc. are welcomed. 

Jo Young, Director of the Scientific Editing Company, is introducing the day and thanking the various ReCon sponsors. She notes: ReCon started about five years ago (with a slightly different name). We’ve had really successful events – and you can explore them all online. We have had a really stellar list of speakers over the years! And on that note…

Graham Steel: We wanted to cover publishing at all stages, from preparing for publication, submission, journals, open journals, metrics, alt metrics, etc. So our first speakers are really from the mid point in that process.

SESSION ONE: Publishing’s future: Disruption and Evolution within the Industry

100% Open Access by 2020 or disrupting the present scholarly comms landscape: you can’t have both? A mid-way update – Pablo De Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian, University of Strathclyde

It is an honour to be at this well attended event today. Thank you for the invitation. It’s a long title but I will be talking about how are things are progressing towards this goal of full open access by 2020, and to what extent institutions, funders, etc. are being able to introduce disruption into the industry…

So, a quick introduction to me. I am currently at the University of Strathclyde library, having joined in January. It’s quite an old university (founded 1796) and a medium size university. Previous to that I was working at the Hague working on the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot (Open Aire) providing funding to cover OA publishing fees for publications arising from completed FP7 projects. Maybe not the most popular topic in the UK right now but… The main point of explaining my context is that this EU work was more of a funders perspective, and now I’m able to compare that to more of an institutional perspective. As a result o of this pilot there was a report commissioned b a British consultant: “Towards a competitive and sustainable open access publishing market in Europe”.

One key element in this open access EU pilot was the OA policy guidelines which acted as key drivers, and made eligibility criteria very clear. Notable here: publications to hybrid journals would not be funded, only fully open access; and a cap of no more than €2000 for research articles, €6000 for monographs. That was an attempt to shape the costs and ensure accessibility of research publications.

So, now I’m back at the institutional open access coalface. Lots had changed in two years. And it’s great to be back in this spaces. It is allowing me to explore ways to better align institutional and funder positions on open access.

So, why open access? Well in part this is about more exposure for your work, higher citation rates, compliant with grant rules. But also it’s about use and reuse including researchers in developing countries, practitioners who can apply your work, policy makers, and the public and tax payers can access your work. In terms of the wider open access picture in Europe, there was a meeting in Brussels last May where European leaders call for immediate open access to all scientific papers by 2020. It’s not easy to achieve that but it does provide a major driver… However, across these countries we have EU member states with different levels of open access. The UK, Netherlands, Sweden and others prefer “gold” access, whilst Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Greece, etc. prefer “green” access, partly because the cost of gold open access is prohibitive.

Funders policies are a really significant driver towards open access. Funders including Arthritis Research UK, Bloodwise, Cancer Research UK, Breast Cancer Now, British Heard Foundation, Parkinsons UK, Wellcome Trust, Research Councils UK, HEFCE, European Commission, etc. Most support green and gold, and will pay APCs (Article Processing Charges) but it’s fair to say that early career researchers are not always at the front of the queue for getting those paid. HEFCE in particular have a green open access policy, requiring research outputs from any part of the university to be made open access, you will not be eligible for the REF (Research Excellence Framework) and, as a result, compliance levels are high – probably top of Europe at the moment. The European Commission supports green and gold open access, but typically green as this is more affordable.

So, there is a need for quick progress at the same time as ongoing pressure on library budgets – we pay both for subscriptions and for APCs. Offsetting agreements are one way to do this, discounting subscriptions by APC charges, could be a good solutions. There are pros and cons here. In principal it will allow quicker progress towards OA goals, but it will disproportionately benefit legacy publishers. It brings publishers into APC reporting – right now sometimes invisible to the library as paid by researchers, so this is a shift and a challenge. It’s supposed to be a temporary stage towards full open access. And it’s a very expensive intermediate stage: not every country can or will afford it.

So how can disruption happen? Well one way to deal with this would be the policies – suggesting not to fund hybrid journals (as done in OpenAire). And disruption is happening (legal or otherwise) as we can see in Sci-Hub usage which are from all around the world, not just developing countries. Legal routes are possible in licensing negotiations. In Germany there is a Projekt Deal being negotiated. And this follows similar negotiations by open access.nl. At the moment Elsevier is the only publisher not willing to include open access journals.

In terms of tools… The EU has just announced plans to launch it’s own platform for funded research to be published. And Wellcome Trust already has a space like this.

So, some conclusions… Open access is unstoppable now, but still needs to generate sustainable and competitive implementation mechanisms. But it is getting more complex and difficult to disseminate to research – that’s a serious risk. Open Access will happen via a combination of strategies and routes – internal fights just aren’t useful (e.g. green vs gold). The temporary stage towards full open access needs to benefit library budgets sooner rather than later. And the power here really lies with researchers, which OA advocates aren’t always able to get informed. It is important that you know which are open and which are hybrid journals, and why that matters. And we need to think if informing authors on where it would make economic sense to publish beyond the remit of institutional libraries?

To finish, some recommended reading:

• “Early Career Researchers: the Harbingers of Change” – Final report from Ciber, August 2016
• “My Top 9 Reasons to Publish Open Access” – a great set of slides.

Q&A

Q1) It was interesting to hear about offsetting. Are those agreements one-off? continuous? renewed?

A1) At the moment they are one-off and intended to be a temporary measure. But they will probably mostly get renewed… National governments and consortia want to understand how useful they are, how they work.

Q2) Can you explain green open access and gold open access and the difference?

A2) In Gold Open Access, the author pays to make your paper open on the journal website. If that’s a hybrid – so subscription – journal you essentially pay twice, once to subscribe, once to make open. Green Open Access means that your article goes into your repository (after any embargo), into the world wide repository landscape (see: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/an-introduction-to-open-access).

Q3) As much as I agree that choices of where to publish are for researchers, but there are other factors. The REF pressures you to publish in particular ways. Where can you find more on the relationships between different types of open access and impact? I think that can help?

A3) Quite a number of studies. For instance is APC related to Impact factor – several studies there. In terms of REF, funders like Wellcome are desperate to move away from the impact factor. It is hard but evolving.

Inputs, Outputs and emergent properties: The new Scientometrics – Phill Jones, Director of Publishing Innovation, Digital Science

Scientometrics is essentially the study of science metrics and evaluation of these. As Graham mentioned in his introduction, there is a whole complicated lifecycle and process of publishing. And what I will talk about spans that whole process.

But, to start, a bit about me and Digital Science. We were founded in 2011 and we are wholly owned by Holtzbrink Publishing Group, they owned Nature group. Being privately funded we are able to invest in innovation by researchers, for researchers, trying to create change from the ground up. Things like labguru – a lab notebook (like rspace); Altmetric; Figshare; readcube; Peerwith; transcriptic – IoT company, etc.

So, I’m going to introduce a concept: The Evaluation Gap. This is the difference between the metrics and indicators currently or traditionally available, and the information that those evaluating your research might actually want to know? Funders might. Tenure panels – hiring and promotion panels. Universities – your institution, your office of research management. Government, funders, policy organisations, all want to achieve something with your research…

So, how do we close the evaluation gap? Introducing altmetrics. It adds to academic impact with other types of societal impact – policy documents, grey literature, mentions in blogs, peer review mentions, social media, etc. What else can you look at? Well you can look at grants being awarded… When you see a grant awarded for a new idea, then publishes… someone else picks up and publishers… That can take a long time so grants can tell us before publications. You can also look at patents – a measure of commercialisation and potential economic impact further down the link.

So you see an idea germinate in one place, work with collaborators at the institution, spreading out to researchers at other institutions, and gradually out into the big wide world… As that idea travels outward it gathers more metadata, more impact, more associated materials, ideas, etc.

And at Digital Science we have innovators working across that landscape, along that scholarly lifecycle… But there is no point having that much data if you can’t understand and analyse it. You have to classify that data first to do that… Historically we did that was done by subject area, but increasingly research is interdisciplinary, it crosses different fields. So single tags/subjects are not useful, you need a proper taxonomy to apply here. And there are various ways to do that. You need keywords and semantic modeling and you can choose to:

1. Use an existing one if available, e.g. MeSH (Medical Subject Headings).
2. Consult with subject matter experts (the traditional way to do this, could be editors, researchers, faculty, librarians who you’d just ask “what are the keywords that describe computational social science”).
3. Text mining abstracts or full text article (using the content to create a list from your corpus with bag of words/frequency of words approaches, for instance, to help you cluster and find the ideas with a taxonomy emerging

Now, we are starting to take that text mining approach. But to use that data needs to be cleaned and curated to be of use. So we hand curated a list of institutions to go into GRID: Global Research Identifier Database, to understand organisations and their relationships. Once you have that all mapped you can look at Isni, CrossRef databases etc. And when you have that organisational information you can include georeferences to visualise where organisations are…

An example that we built for HEFCE was the Digital Science BrainScan. The UK has a dual funding model where there is both direct funding and block funding, with the latter awarded by HEFCE and it is distributed according to the most impactful research as understood by the REF. So, our BrainScan, we mapped research areas, connectors, etc. to visualise subject areas, their impact, and clusters of strong collaboration, to see where there are good opportunities for funding…

Similarly we visualised text mined impact statements across the whole corpus. Each impact is captured as a coloured dot. Clusters show similarity… Where things are far apart, there is less similarity. And that can highlight where there is a lot of work on, for instance, management of rivers and waterways… And these weren’t obvious as across disciplines…

Q&A

Q1) Who do you think benefits the most from this kind of information?

A1) In the consultancy we have clients across the spectrum. In the past we have mainly worked for funders and policy makers to track effectiveness. Increasingly we are talking to institutions wanting to understand strengths, to predict trends… And by publishers wanting to understand if journals should be split, consolidated, are there opportunities we are missing… Each can benefit enormously. And it makes the whole system more efficient.

Against capital – Stuart Lawson, Birkbeck University of London

So, my talk will be a bit different. The arguements I will be making are not in opposition to any of the other speakers here, but is about critically addressing our current ways we are working, and how publishing works. I have chosen to speak on this topic today as I think it is important to make visible the political positions that underly our assumptions and the systems we have in place today. There are calls to become more efficient but I disagree… Ownership and governance matter at least as much as the outcome.

I am an advocate for open access and I am currently undertaking a PhD looking at open access and how our discourse around this has been coopted by neoliberal capitalism. And I believe these issues aren’t technical but social and reflect inequalities in our society, and any company claiming to benefit society but operating as commercial companies should raise questions for us.

Neoliberalism is a political project to reshape all social relations to conform to the logic of capital (this is the only slide, apparently a written and referenced copy will be posted on Stuart’s blog). This system turns us all into capital, entrepreneurs of our selves – quantification, metricification whether through tuition fees that put a price on education, turn students into consumers selecting based on rational indicators of future income; or through pitting universities against each other rather than collaboratively. It isn’t just overtly commercial, but about applying ideas of the market in all elements of our work – high impact factor journals, metrics, etc. in the service of proving our worth. If we do need metrics, they should be open and nuanced, but if we only do metrics for people’s own careers and perform for careers and promotion, then these play into neoliberal ideas of control. I fully understand the pressure to live and do research without engaging and playing the game. It is easier to choose not to do this if you are in a position of privelege, and that reflects and maintains inequalities in our organisations.

Since power relations are often about labour and worth, this is inevitably part of work, and the value of labour. When we hear about disruption in the context of Uber, it is about disrupting rights of works, labour unions, it ignores the needs of the people who do the work, it is a neo-liberal idea. I would recommend seeing Audrey Watters’ recent presentation for University of Edinburgh on the “Uberisation of Education”.

The power of capital in scholarly publishing, and neoliberal values in our scholarly processes… When disruptors align with the political forces that need to be dismantled, I don’t see that as useful or properly disruptive. Open Access is a good thing in terms of open access. But there are two main strands of policy… Research Councils have spent over £80m to researchers to pay APCs. Publishing open access do not require payment of fees, there are OA journals who are funded other ways. But if you want the high end visible journals they are often hybrid journals and 80% of that RCUK has been on hybrid journals. So work is being made open access, but right now this money flows from public funds to a small group of publishers – who take a 30-40% profit – and that system was set up to continue benefitting publishers. You can share or publish to repositories… Those are free to deposit and use. The concern of OA policy is the connection to the REF, it constrains where you can publish and what they mean, and they must always be measured in this restricted structure. It can be seen as compliance rather than a progressive movement toward social justice. But open access is having a really positive impact on the accessibility of research.

If you are angry at Elsevier, then you should also be angry at Oxford University and Cambridge University, and others for their relationships to the power elite. Harvard made a loud statement about journal pricing… It sounded good, and they have a progressive open access policy… But it is also bullshit – they have huge amounts of money… There are huge inequalities here in academia and in relationship to publishing.

And I would recommend strongly reading some history on the inequalities, and the racism and capitalism that was inherent to the founding of higher education so that we can critically reflect on what type of system we really want to discover and share scholarly work. Things have evolved over time – somewhat inevitably – but we need to be more deliberative so that universities are more accountable in their work.

To end on a more positive note, technology is enabling all sorts of new and inexpensive ways to publish and share. But we don’t need to depend on venture capital. Collective and cooperative running of organisations in these spaces – such as the cooperative centres for research… There are small scale examples show the principles, and that this can work. Writing, reviewing and editing is already being done by the academic community, lets build governance and process models to continue that, to make it work, to ensure work is rewarded but that the driver isn’t commercial.

Q&A

Comment) That was awesome. A lot of us here will be to learn how to play the game. But the game sucks. I am a professor, I get to do a lot of fun things now, because I played the game… We need a way to have people able to do their work that way without that game. But we need something more specific than socialism… Libraries used to publish academic data… Lots of these metrics are there and useful… And I work with them… But I am conscious that we will be fucked by them. We need a way to react to that.

Redesigning Science for the Internet Generation – Gemma Milne, Co-Founder, Science Disrupt

Science Disrupt run regular podcasts, events, a Slack channel for scientists, start ups, VCs, etc. Check out our website. We talk about five focus areas of science. Today I wanted to talk about redesigning science for the internet age. My day job is in journalism and I think a lot about start ups, and to think about how we can influence academia, how success is manifests itself in the internet age.

So, what am I talking about? Things like Pavegen – power generating paving stones. They are all over the news! The press love them! BUT the science does not work, the physics does not work…

I don’t know if you heard about Theranos which promised all sorts of medical testing from one drop of blood, millions of investments, and it all fell apart. But she too had tons of coverage…

I really like science start ups, I like talking about science in a different way… But how can I convince the press, the wider audience what is good stuff, and what is just hype, not real… One of the problems we face is that if you are not engaged in research you either can’t access the science, and can’t read it even if they can access the science… This problem is really big and it influences where money goes and what sort of stuff gets done!

So, how can we change this? There are amazing tools to help (Authorea, overleaf, protocol.io, figshare, publons, labworm) and this is great and exciting. But I feel it is very short term… Trying to change something that doesn’t work anyway… Doing collaborative lab notes a bit better, publishing a bit faster… OK… But is it good for sharing science? Thinking about journalists and corporates, they don’t care about academic publishing, it’s not where they go for scientific information. How do we rethink that… What if we were to rethink how we share science?

AirBnB and Amazon are on my slide here to make the point of the difference between incremental change vs. real change. AirBnB addressed issues with hotels, issues of hotels being samey… They didn’t build a hotel, instead they thought about what people want when they traveled, what mattered for them… Similarly Amazon didn’t try to incrementally improve supermarkets.. They did something different. They dug to the bottom of why something exists and rethought it…

Imagine science was “invented” today (ignore all the realities of why that’s impossible). But imagine we think of this thing, we have to design it… How do we start? How will I ask questions, find others who ask questions…

So, a bit of a thought experiment here… Maybe I’d post a question on reddit, set up my own sub-reddit. I’d ask questions, ask why they are interested… Create a big thread. And if I have a lot of people, maybe I’ll have a Slack with various channels about all the facets around a question, invite people in… Use the group to project manage this project… OK, I have a team… Maybe I create a Meet Up Group for that same question… Get people to join… Maybe 200 people are now gathered and interested… You gather all these folk into one place. Now we want to analyse ideas. Maybe I share my question and initial code on GitHub, find collaborators… And share the code, make it open… Maybe it can be reused… It has been collaborative at every stage of the journey… Then maybe I want to build a microscope or something… I’d find the right people, I’d ask them to join my Autodesk 360 to collaboratively build engineering drawings for fabrication… So maybe we’ve answered our initial question… So maybe I blog that, and then I tweet that…

The point I’m trying to make is, there are so many tools out there for collaboration, for sharing… Why aren’t more researchers using these tools that are already there? Rather than designing new tools… These are all ways to engage and share what you do, rather than just publishing those articles in those journals…

So, maybe publishing isn’t the way at all? I get the “game” but I am frustrated about how we properly engage, and really get your work out there. Getting industry to understand what is going on. There are lots of people inventing in new ways.. YOu can use stuff in papers that isn’t being picked up… But see what else you can do!

So, what now? I know people are starved for time… But if you want to really make that impact, that you think is more interested… I undesrtand there is a concern around scooping… But there are ways to do that… And if you want to know about all these tools, do come talk to me!

Q&A

Q1) I think you are spot on with vision. We want faster more collaborative production. But what is missing from those tools is that they are not designed for researchers, they are not designed for publishing. Those systems are ephemeral… They don’t have DOIs and they aren’t persistent. For me it’s a bench to web pipeline…

A1) Then why not create a persistent archived URI – a webpage where all of a project’s content is shared. 50% of all academic papers are only read by the person that published them… These stumbling blocks in the way of sharing… It is crazy… We shouldn’t just stop and not share.

Q2) Thank you, that has given me a lot of food for thought. The issue of work not being read, I’ve been told that by funders so very relevant to me. So, how do we influence the professors… As a PhD student I haven’t heard about many of those online things…

A2) My co-founder of Science Disrupt is a computational biologist and PhD student… My response would be about not asking, just doing… Find networks, find people doing what you want. Benefit from collaboration. Sign an NDA if needed. Find the opportunity, then come back…

Q3) I had a comment and a question. Code repositories like GitHub are persistent and you can find a great list of code repositories and meta-articles around those on the Journal of Open Research Software. My question was about AirBnB and Amazon… Those have made huge changes but I think the narrative they use now is different from where they started – and they started more as incremental change… And they stumbled on bigger things, which looks a lot like research… So… How do you make that case for the potential long term impact of your work in a really engaging way?

A3) It is the golden question. Need to find case studies, to find interesting examples… a way to showcase similar examples… and how that led to things… Forget big pictures, jump the hurdles… Show that bigger picture that’s there but reduce the friction of those hurdles. Sure those companies were somewhat incremental but I think there is genuinely a really different mindset there that matters.

And we now move to lunch. Coming up…

UNCONFERENCE SESSION 1 

This will be me, so don’t expect an update for the moment…

SESSION TWO: The Early Career Researcher Perspective: Publishing & Research Communication

Getting recognition for all your research outputs – Michael Markie

Make an impact, know your impact, show your impact – Anna Ritchie

How to share science with hard to reach groups and why you should bother – Becky Douglas

What helps or hinders science communication by early career researchers? – Lewis MacKenzie

PANEL DISCUSSION

UNCONFERENCE SESSION 2

SESSION THREE: Raising your research profile: online engagement & metrics

Green, Gold, and Getting out there: How your choice of publisher services can affect your research profile and engagement – Laura Henderson

What are all these dots and what can linking them tell me? – Rachel Lammey

The wonderful world of altmetrics: why researchers’ voices matter – Jean Liu

How to help more people find and understand your work – Charlie Rapple

PANEL DISCUSSION

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