Plenary 1: The Conversation: Research and Scholarly Publishing in the Age of Big Data

Ziyad Marar is Global Publishing Director at SAGE Publishing. Chairing the first plenary session of the ALPSP conference, he engaged his colleague Ian Mulvany, Head of Product Innovation, and Fran Bennett, CEO and co-founder of a big data company Mastodon C in a conversation about publishing in the age of big data.

Is big data hype and nonsense - just an exciting term that let's an agency sell their services? Fran Bennett believes there are some fundamental things that have changed that mean it is so much more than that. It can help companies open up new insights, generate additional income and lower barriers to technology entry. As the technology gets better it can do different applications. There is more data and cheaper processing.

Big data challenges for #socialscience - is there a role for #publishers to better serve scholars "drenched in data"? @ZiyadMarar #alpsp16

— Lettie Conrad (@lyconrad) September 14, 2016

Mastodon C are working with the UK Government department responsible for animals and farming. They are collecting all the data of dead livestock. They don't have enough staff so sometimes patterns get missed. They use computers to identify any of these threads to analyse post mortem. They can take messy structural data and sorts it out so expert humans can use their time more effectively and in a targeted way.

Ian Mulvany thinks high quality content is what we do as an industry, but it's all digitally mediated content. All publishing organizations need to be technologically competent. We're in a mixed world of software solutions that are beginning to be commodified. But the variety of the services around them are living in a handwritten world: a dilemma he is endlessly fascinated by.

#alpsp16 Mulvany: The crucial thing is how you wrangle data ... the industry has been doing it for many years, but in different ways

— Research Information (@researchinfo) September 14, 2016

Corporate applications of big data can transfer to publishing in market projections, customer retention, internal SWOT analysis and with hiring. Mulvany asks how many publishers have tried to re-analyse their entire corpus using big data techniques? Not many hands went up... there are lots of opportunities here. Bennett observed that a good data scientist is a statistician who can code and understand the context of their data and warned against tracking things purely because you can: the risk is you create 'data exhaust' that you can't do anything with.

Here is the essay "Why software is eating the world" by Andreessen to which @IanMulvany just referred to: https://t.co/AxAencXIOJ #alpsp16

— Jasmin Lange (@JasminLange) September 14, 2016

Mulvany noted that some fields have long worked with big data and have good standards and procedures to deal with it. He is particularly interested in working with researchers that have realised they have a whole load of data and don't know what to do with it. There is a 'data under the desk' problem. Data is collected sporadically, is not necessarily kept well, and isn't large scale.

Caution was called for by delegates in the audience and on Twitter when using algorithms for peer review: it can and will be exploited by researchers. The panellists all agreed that machines can do the dirty work for us, but not all the work.

Marar outlined the work of the Berkeley sociologist, Nick Adams, who is using crowdsourcing and algorithms to look at reports on the Occupy movements in nine cities. Analysis that would normally have taken 15 years has actually taken one year, and is finding interesting patterns. He also cited the work of Gary King, a Harvard social scientist who is developing and applying empirical methods in many areas of social science research, focusing on innovations that span statistical theory to practical application.

Social researchers are coming more slowly to big data analysis, but are doing some unusual work with it. SAGE Publishing has conducted a massive survey into the area of data and social science with over 13,000 responses. It's something they are focusing on as a priority.

An interesting side issues when looking at social data is sometimes, when you look at the data, you find that the quality of it is not what it might be, with potential to lead to data protection breaches on a grand scale. There are differences between ethical and legal behaviour concerning datasets. it may be cheap to capture and hold data, but expensive to extract, clean and deliver it.

Mulvany closed with the observation that there are researcher needs, potential development tools, but why should the industry care about these things? Because at our heart we are about democratising knowledge and finding the right solutions and people around that knowledge. If we look purely at their purpose it will give us the realisation on how we make it happen. Those tools are becoming cheaper to experiment and innovate with. So we should do so.

Ziyad Marar is Global Publishing Director at SAGE Publishing where Ian Mulvany is Head of Product Innovation. Fran Bennett is CEO and Co-Founder of Mastodon C. They took part in a panel discussion at the ALPSP Conference 2016.

ALPSP Awards Spotlight on… eLife Lens: a new way to read research online

In this, the third of ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing finalists' posts, Ian Mulvany from eLife, talks about their submission eLife Lens: a new way to read research online.

Tell us a bit about your company

eLife is the unique, non-profit collaboration between funders and practitioners of research to improve the way important results in life sciences and biomedicine are selected, presented, and shared. eLife was established in 2011 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust.

Our mission is to help researchers accelerate discovery. For us, realising that mission is about looking to innovate across all areas of the publishing process -- from peer review and the experience of publishing with us, right through to the final look and feel of the published content. We want our innovations to have broad impact, and are very happy when we see our efforts being adopted by others in the industry.

What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

We submitted our eLife Lens: a new way to read research online.

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it

The project is a pretty cool one. It uses modern browser technologies to take the XML of a research article and convert it to a novel two-pane view that allows readers to look at article figures while at the same time reading what the article says about those figures.

It doesn't sound like much, but this is the first time that a reader can nicely replicate the experience of flipping through a manuscript, while still reading that manuscript online. The tool also supports cross-linking references, equations, and it can be extended by publishers to make their content work really well on the web.

The original idea for the project came from Ivan Grubsic, who was a PhD student at Berkeley at the time. At eLife we immediately saw its potential and we worked with Ivan and the developers at Substance to go from an early prototype to a launch of version one in just fourteen weeks.

Ivan was working on San Francisco time, and the Substance guys were working on Austrian time. Once Ivan was finished with an iteration of the data model, at the end of his day, the Substance developers would just be waking up and could do the corresponding UI and integration iteration. So they worked really well together. Often projects where teams are globally distributed can take a lot longer to complete, but in this case it really worked in our favour. I think that's because the vision of what we wanted to achieve was so clear.

eLife carried out a lot of user testing, and contributed some development to the project, and we were so happy with the outcome that we incorporated it into our journal very quickly.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

eLife Lens demonstrates innovation on a number of levels. From a pure product development perspective we used a very lean agile approach, and did a lot of user testing along the way, both with people inside of eLife and with academics in their offices. You don't need to test a feature with a huge number of people before you find if there are any usability issues. After all, you get infinitely more feedback by testing with one person than by testing with no one. Of course user testing can only tell you if what you have built is usable; it can't tell you what to build.

On another level, with Lens we are using HTML5 and javascript, really close to the limits of what those technologies will allow. The conversion from XML to the front end is done in the user’s browser; the whole project is only possible because of the advances in the power of web browsers that have happened over the last couple of years -- in particular the improvement in the power of javascript engines.

This does mean that eLife Lens won't work on old browsers, but that's part of the process of innovation: asking what does technology allow us to do now, and exploring where that can take us over the next few years.

There is huge potential in the browser as an application platform, especially for document-oriented industries that require tools that support structure and collaboration. eLife Lens is an experiment that points us firmly in that direction.

What are your plans for the future?

We want to use Lens as a platform for learning about what is possible to build in this space. We have already created Lens Browser, which could allow you to host an entire journal, once you have your article XML. We are currently looking at how a Lens-like view can be used in the author proofing state for submissions, and whether it can be a platform for editing manuscripts, too.

We are delighted to see that eLife Lens has been adopted by a number of other publishers, and are about to release an even more modular and easier to develop on version of eLife Lens.

Ian Mulvany is Head of Technology at eLife Sciences Publications Ltd.

The winner of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by Publishing Technology, will be announced at the ALPSP Conference. Book now to secure your place.