ECSP2 Conference

Friday, 5 September 2008

2008-09-13T00:45:00.000-07:00

The first main session on Open Access, policy making and research was introduced by Dr Noorda; president of the Dutch Research Universities Association and chairman of the European University Associations’ steering group on Open Access.

Dr Noorda pointed out the importance of research digitization and data collection, and how it has improved research. Through digitization changes in the classroom have also occurred . Libraries have always been ahead in using the new technology, thus facilitating technological developments in research as well as in learning and teaching. This talk further developed the idea of scholarly communication being about bringing knowledge to everyone! Researchers should make all their works traceable and searchable. Researchers should be offered simple tools by the university; from CVs to the “right to publish” information! “Today, the users perspective is more than the academic community”, Dr Noorda says. We have to include the general public, the health professionals as well as business innovators. The digital mode includes many things for example, data sharing, virtual labs, co-laboratories, e-learning and so on. In March 2008, the EUA adopted a policy on public access to reviewed academic publications. This is only one of many examples globally, but there is also a European perspective in all this and Dr Noorda’s final message was that “we are many nationalities and cultures - we need to use the scientific English language and communicate. Being international means more than US and UK, thus Europe has to cooperate more!”.

Alma Swan from Key Perspectives Ltd gave the next talk, presenting the topic ‘What hinders and what helps OA? How can we get there?’
The helping factors are important and obvious: an increased awareness and understanding of what OA is all about, for example. OA can be achieved through deposition in a repository and getting the researchers to add their papers. It seems like there is an increased awareness amongst researchers according to the latest survey (40% of life science researchers are familiar with OA). Another factor is policy awareness, but this does not seem to change behaviour. Mandates raise awareness and also change behaviour. All the evidence and experiences available also help to take OA further for example, the increased visibility via Google searches which in turn leads to greater impact and citations. Alma Swan went on to discuss what hinders OA and identified the embargo factor; 24 months is not good but six months is bearable. (what helps is the immediate access to the final manuscript which most publishers agree to, metadata helps in indexing and there you are in Google! -then you make immediate contact with the author) Misinformation is a hinder. Alma Swan concluded with an appeal to young researchers to be more receptive to the changing publishing environment.

The next speaker was Robert Kiley from Wellcome Trust. He started by pointing out that the message is very clear for Wellcome-funded researchers - free accessibility in UK PubMed Central within six months of publication. The Trust is supporting OA to improve quality of research by maximising access to the research outputs, improving the research process by ensuring greater integration between the literature and the underlying data, develop repository-based services to meet the needs in the UK research community and, finally, for the sake of long-term preservation. Wellcome meets all publishing costs if there is an OA author-pay option, but publishers must give something in return, for example deposit the final manuscript in a repository. Now most publishers have agreed to Wellcome’s specification, regardless of their publishing models. Wellcome states that publication costs are legitimate research costs, but how do you meet the costs? The top 30 Trust-funded institutions get block grants from Wellcome to cover the OA publication costs. If block grants are not available, the Trust supplements individual research grants. One problem with the author-pay model is the risk for two/double payments that is subscription as well as author-pay fees. This could be the case, but Robert Kiley continued by pointing out that the evidence suggests that subscription costs are sensitive to OA payments. Robert Kiley finished off his talk with UK PubMed Central; being in service for 2 years, available for the research community. More funding has been approved in order to be able expose the contents of UKPMC to text mining solutions and add additional content like clinical trials, guidelines etc. Wellcome’s future plan is to work closely with the publishers to improve work flows for authors, work with authors and universities to improve the understanding of how to access Trust funding.

Stephen Pinfield from University of Nottingham gave his speech on how institutions can facilitate for authors to move on to OA and cover the costs.
UK research councils, Wellcome Trust, European Research Council, NIH and Australian Research Council have OA mandates.. The database SHERPA Juliet lists funders and their OA policies. SHERPA Romeo lists publisher copyright and self-archiving policies. All institutions should set up a repository and in fact, most have these days. The costs for OA should be covered by the institution rather than by the library. According to Pinfield, OA costs can be taken from project budgets and overheads to form an institutional funding stream for OA. For example, if publication occurs after a grant is closed then that is when the institutional funding stream kicks in. As pointed out earlier today in the discussion, researchers are unsure of the policies of their institutions. Again Stephen Pinfield points out that institutional publicity about OA publication funding is essential.

Kaitlin Thaney from Science Commons gave a talk on how Science Commons works with publishers, academics and institutions in order to make content and scientific data available.
Transition from the papers metaphor to papers as container of knowledge leading to networked knowledge known as the research web. We have to think from other perspectives and give authors control, they are the publishers of scientific data. The goal is tocreate legal zones of certainty for scientific data. The first publishers to have adopted the ‘research web’ idea are BioMed Central, PLoS and Hindawi. Academics need addenda and policies to help them retain rights to self-archive their work. Institutions who are looking to implement OA policies need OA policy guides and white papers.

Håkan Carlsson from Göteborg University in Sweden gave his talk on
‘Making the repository a researcher’s resource.’
We will soon be entering the post-repository era. The message is to shift focus to researchers! One should reuse the repository and a good example of this is the Lund Medical Faculty Monthly (LMFM). The repository has also the technology to preserve the publication. The data is connected to the publication as well as related material interlinked in the repository.
Information can also be reused for example, for publication lists, CVs for grant applications and so on. Self-evaluation for the researchers is another tool under development. The Web of science is fine for getting bibliometrics, but repository is 100% ok for looking up for example, your personal h-index. There is a registration mandate at Lund University and full texts are attached using SHERPA. Finally, Håkan Carlsson encouraged researchers in the audience to contact their library and give encouragement to develop the reuse of the repository in various ways – definitely a benefit for the researchers!

Barbara Kalumenos from STM gave a talk on ‘OA and the commercial biomedical publishers.’
IASTM stands for the International Association of Scientific, technical and Medical Publishers. Members are academic publishers, e.g. Biochemical Society, BMJ. 70% of members have publications in the biomedical field. OA is compatible with publishers. Publishers are pragmatic about their business models which must support and maintain academic freedom and quality.
The so called ‘Unfunded mandate’ is opposed by all STM publishers.Barbara Kalumenos mentioned the PEER (Publishing & Ecology of European Research) project whichs aims to get evidence about the effect of embargoes of varying lengths to the various stakeholders. Project start on 1st of September. It was pointed out by Alma Swan that there has been critique on the web about the project having a weak methodology. Barbara Kalumenos responded by saying that the PEER project is looking for evidence and not conclusion - you cannot change the system overnight.

Graham Lees editor and owner of The Scientific World Journal (TSWJ) gave a talk on ‘The Future of Journal Publishing’.
When starting a journal, who should pay readers or authors? Graham thinks both because not all authors can pay for OA. TSWJ has domains existing in an interdisciplinary context – and there are no clear-cut definitions for where an article should be listed. So it is organised like interdisciplinary scientific and medical research. The article can appear in relevant places on the website and increase visibility this way. The concept is very different compared to for example, BioMed Central. The format of the scientific journal has remained the same since 1665 and OA journals are not particularly innovative, according to Graham. Initiatives like Crossref navigating between articles and databases can have a great impact.
(My reflection: will the traditional journal titles be extinct in the future when published articles move on to subject related domains or clusters rather than being tied up to a specific journal title?).
Graham both seriously and humorously challenged the modus operandi of PubMed Central and the costs to the publisher of making their journals available on PMC when OA fees have not been paid and the publication not finacially supported. When one considers the developing world and medically relevant papers such as clinical case studies, the authors really do not have funds and cannot pay, but it is important these articles are published providing they pass peer review. Initiatives taken by DFG (DE), SURF (NL), JISC (UK) and DEFF (DK) wit hpan-country licences are an alternative strategy to OA across the board.

Extracts from the Round Table discussion:
Is there a citation increase in connection with OA publishing (includes self-archiving)? But citations are just one way of measuring the value of research. OA advantage is early availability. Informal non peer-reviewed preprints form part of scientific communication between researchers (my comment: Nature Precedings is one example) . Fragmentation can be a problem. Or maybe not? Can researchers archive their best work? Old famous publications should also be OA today. They are needed in order to be able to got back to original works – especially for the developing world.

Reflecting thoughts:
Repositories are here to stay. Most institutions have them and for those who don't, it should no longer be a matter of “if” but “when”!
The support for researchers to publish in the OA publishing environment has been offered at Lund University, Sweden, since 2002. The Faculty of Medicine at Lund University has their professional librarians supporting the researchers to self-archive. The “your article will be available in Google if you put it in a repository” argument helps! Another outreach is to give good examples when teaching PhD. students. Our experience with the PhD. students indicates that it is not controversial at all with OA publishing (so we have lost a great discussion topic in the PhD. course!) I support Alma Swan’s comment, that it is the young researchers we should point to. Furthermore, researchers need more service when it comes to be aware of OA publishing - do they need to know all this? Yes, and it is important to give the overall picture nationally and internationally leaving the detailed work in the repository to the professionals in the library. Further, pointing to a website with OA information is not enough. You need to be there face to face in workshops, courses, meetings and so on. Professional librarians have a central educational role when it comes to helping researchers understand about repositories, self-archiving, OA policies, Creative Commons, and taking a helicopter view of the publishing environment.

2008-09-05T06:34:00.000-07:00

One of the main sessions was on ‘Scientometrics, bibliometrics and quantitative evaluation of research: evaluating articles, people and institutes’. Anthony van Raan, Director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, gave a fact-packed presentation about his work on measuring citation patterns and impact, on the bases of articles, individual scientists and research groups and institutions. Different institutions can be assessed in a comparative way, for example, for the impact their astronomy programmes enjoy.

The tools that Anthony’s group have developed over the past two decades are extremely powerful. Until recently, the base data he and his colleagues have used came from Thomson Reuters (the ISI databases) but they are now also including data from Elsevier’s Scopus service. Anthony’s conclusions were that bibliometric analysis is a very useful, informative and penetrating methodology for assessing research effort, but that it should never be used in isolation, only in conjunction with other assessment regimens, particularly peer review.

He was followed on the programme by Mary Van Allen, Manager of the Research Services Group at Thomson Reuters (aka ISI). Mary’s talk title was ‘Beyond Impact Factors’, a topic that has long been awaited! She ran through the metrics produced by her organisation, familiar to frequent users of the Thomson Web of Science. Mary demonstrated some new functionality of the Web of Science service, including some neat displays – such as being able to track and display a paper’s ‘children’ and ‘grandchildren’, all tracked via citation analysis. A new website called Researcher ID allows researchers to create an authority file of their own papers and get a real-time display of their citations, h-index and so forth. The big idea here is to give the collaboration network diagram, displaying by geographic region or down to individual institution. Clearly, Web of Science is working hard on developing new metrics from its databases. A question from Matt Cockerill as to whether Web of Science is intending to give citations from different journals a different ‘importance’ was answered in the negative, partly because weighting is a subjective issue and partly because, as Anthony pointed out in the ensuing discussion, there is not a consistency to apply – many papers published in Nature and Science are never cited (apart from self-citation).

Richard Gedye, Chair of COUNTER and the UKSG Working Group on Usage Factors and Research Director in the journals division at Oxford University Press. Richard spoke on measuring usage of articles – or rather, of journals, since that is the base point that COUNTER has employed. He described the research programme that has been carried out by the UKSG on usage, including qualitative surveying of librarians and authors and large-scale online surveying of the same constituencies. The more metrics that can be brought into play were advisable. Richard reported that both UKSG’s survey and the previous one by the CIBER Group showed that 70% of authors are enthusiastic about a usage-based measure for assessing research journals. Librarians has a slightly different perspective, of course, but still exhibited a high degree of support for the notion, ranking the putative usage factor below only ‘feedback from library users’ as away of assessing journals. Richard also reported that plans are underway for a study to outline the metrics currently being assessed, whether any of them are suitable and how publishers can establish a consistency over how they report usage. There is a paper on this work here. There was some discussion over the significance of download numbers

Then we heard from Howard Browman, Principal Research Scientist at the Institute of Marine Research, Storebo in Norway, speaking on the use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance. Howard gave an overview of existing metrics, of 21 ‘problems’ with the Journal Impact Factor, and emphasised that ALL bibliometric indices have such limitations. Moreover, the practical application (i.e. assessment of an individual for promotion or tenure) of these indices should only be done by people with a thorough understanding of their limitations and never by uninformed panels of assessors. Howard showed data that confirm that the Pareto Principle holds for any individual scientist’s citations (i.e. a minority of articles get the majority of the scientist’s citations) and this also holds when whole journals are studied. He also showed that almost 50% of articles in the Web of Science database have never been cited at all. Journals with high JIFs have a high degree of editorial pre-screening (editors screen before manuscripts are sent out for review) and a relatively low acceptance rate. Howard’s questions: are we saying that 80% of articles published are of low quality? Are 80% of journals of little significance? Or is there something there that is not captured by citations? We are accustomed to focusing on the ‘quality’ (i.e. highly-cited) end of the published corpus, but what about the rest? Authors, according to the CIBER study, tend to agree that too much emphasis is given to impact measures based on citations, and other commentators too are recommending a more balanced approach to assessing research ‘quality’.

The final speaker was Ed Pentz, Executive Director of CrossRef, the facilitator of the reference-linking system of scholarly publishers (currently with 550 publishers and 15,000 journals; CrossRef now has 35 million items including, as well as journal articles, book, book chapters and so forth). Ed questioned whether journals and articles will continue to retain the significance and brand importance that they presently enjoy. The rise of informal ‘Web 2.0’ tools for communication and the linking to new kinds of content are changing the paradigm. So are new kinds of ‘publication’, such as databases (e.g. protein sequence databanks) that are already assigning DOIs to items and wikis as a platform for (almost-formal) publishing . The latter are not yet assigning DOIs but the indications are that they are moving in this direction. Blogs are citing DOIs, even if they are not assigning any, and we are now seeing aggregations of blogs (e.g. Science Blogs), and scientists looking to such developments to give recognition to their work outside of the traditional mechanism of citing journal articles.

The conference blog

2008-09-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

The Second European Conference on Science Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine begins today in Oslo, Norway. There is a full programme of talks and round-table sessions plus a series of workshops on Saturday. The primary themes of the main programme is Open Access - what it is, why it is necessary and how to achieve it - and the assessment of research (bibliometrics, scientometrics). The workshops cover many practical aspects including the use of biomedical databases, writing a scientific article and publishing Open Access journals.

We will be reporting here on the conference as it takes place, hoping to bring you a flavour of what people are talking about, what is exciting delegates and what they are saying about the future.