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.

Spotlight on SAGE Publishing's An Adventure in Statistics by Andy Field - shortlisted for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

This is the penultimate post in a series of interviews with the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing finalists.

Mark Kavanagh from SAGE Publishing talks about An Adventure in Statistics.

What is the project you submitted for the Awards?

Traditional methods of teaching and learning are in flux, partly because attention in the digital age is a scarce resource and engaging students is an increasing challenge. When Andy Field presented his ideas for a new approach to writing a textbook, we saw the opportunity to promote innovation within our textbook programme, specifically using Research Methods as our sandpit to play with pedagogy and better understand student engagement and learning styles.

A reinvention of the classic textbook model, An Adventure in Statistics demonstrates SAGE’s commitment to putting the authorial voice, ideas and talents at the heart of what we do, and to responding to the changing needs of students today.

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

It is designed to work in the same way any textbook would. There are chapters on all the key areas covered on typical introductory statistics courses, there are pedagogical features throughout, and there is an online website offering complementary teaching and learning resources.

Where it departs from the traditional textbook model is in conveying statistical concepts through the interactions of characters in a novel length story – a science fiction love story in which Zach searches for his beloved Alice in a futuristic world, where every character he meets in his quest wants to teach him stats!

Great focus was placed both on the visual and story elements of the text to ensure that it worked as ‘academic fiction’. Andy always had the student reader firmly in mind from the beginning, but when he delivered the script, the SAGE product development team adopted a “bottom up”, user focused review process to better learn how this unique approach worked in practice, to build up student testimonials, and to help create more innovative sales and marketing strategies.

Andy engaged an Illustrator – James Iles, of Doctor Who fame – who helped initiate bringing the story to life. In house, Ian Antcliff worked on creating a design consistent with the artwork, adding value to the visual experience.


The array of illustrations bring another dimension to the figures, tables and pedagogy scattered throughout the book, fully immersing students into Zach’s world and making a one of a kind reading and learning experience.

In addition Andy worked with fiction editor, Gillian Stern, who provided feedback on the story elements of the text, helping to release Andy’s hitherto latent literary talents.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

An Adventure in Statistics rethinks the way that knowledge can be acquired, embedding statistical concepts into a highly illustrated, fictional narrative to motivate student learning. Using the medium of a science fiction love-story – not explored within teaching before – Andy have taken a creative approach to a long established model to create a more effective learning experience.

We’ve invested significantly in adapting a traditional model and format of dissemination to appeal both to changing learning styles and the ways in which students want to engage with educational content. It puts the reader at the centre, challenging their preconceptions about style and learning habits, appealing to their creative nature, demystifying content and teaching through a novel format.

In addition the story element of the product gives us much more scope to play with new ways of engaging students via social media, fostering and sustaining “fandom” and product discoverability.

An Adventure in Statistics is the expression of Andy’s vision for better engaging students and symbolises our willingness to invest significantly in the ideas of those at the forefront of HE teaching.

What are your plans for the future?

An Adventure in Statistics represents our most far reaching foray into understanding better student engagement, but we’re undertaking a range of innovation in pedagogy initiatives of varying scale throughout our textbook publishing programme. Adopting the “digital” mind-set of learning by doing and iterating, we’re conducting a series meaningful experiments across print and digital to learn more about how to be as relevant as possible to students at a time when they are increasingly influential in what teaching material they use.

Tell us a bit about your company.

SAGE Publishing is a leading independent academic and professional publisher founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune. SAGE is widely credited with helping to found early fields in Research Methods, and over its 50 year history has developed to further support the field in academic content, teaching resources, and innovative new products (e.g. SAGE Video Research Methods). We are committed to continuing our tradition of innovation within the Research Methods sphere, and the new textbook by award winning author Andy Field is a key example of how SAGE’s textbooks are breaking the mould of pedagogy, research methods and teaching.

This post was updated 5 September 2016.

Mark Kavanagh is Executive Publisher at SAGE Publishing. You can watch Mark present during the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing lightning sessions at the Conference in September, where the winners will be announced. Further information and booking available online.

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2016 are sponsored by MPS Ltd.

Can you hear me now? Ongoing conversations with the “researcher of the future”

Lettie Conrad, Executive Program Manager for Discovery & Access at SAGE Publishing reflects on the recent early careers researcher seminar.

"A lively full-day ALPSP seminar in London last month featured a most productive knowledge exchange among early-career researchers, publishers, librarians, and other experts in scholarly communication. Our focus was to raise awareness among information providers about the experiences and needs of today’s researcher – and we gathered a packed roomful of engaged and eager participants to hear from a panel of doctoral researchers and students.

We heard about their frustrations with peer review, their thoughts about open access, and the ways in which faculty play a starring role in shaping their publication and career decisions. We then heard about how librarians and publishers are working to integrate an understanding of the researcher experience (RX) into their innovative solutions and programs.

But, Dear Reader, we managed to achieve something else that we hadn’t expected. The researchers came away with their own lessons and insights into the realities of today’s information provider! 

What a bright light to see such excitement from scholars at being asked for their input and realizing the ways in which we symbiotically need one another along the supply chain of academic publishing and research! What a refreshingly collaborative and solutions-oriented response to such a stimulating event!

These insights punctuate the importance of publishers and libraries being vocal and eloquent and proactive about communicating our value within the research workflow and broader scholarly enterprise, in everything we do, great and small. Let this serve as a call to each of us actively engaging on a routine basis with those academics who want to maintain an open dialogue about scholarly communications.

And this type of discussion and collaboration represent a growing trend within scholarly communication community – from joint research efforts, events geared toward education and open conversation, user-centered design projects, and longitudinal studies. In part, these efforts are answering the call for greater cooperation across the academic supply chain and greater sensitivity to the user experience.

This ALPSP seminar gives me hope that a collaborative movement is well underway and includes a deeper understanding of the experiences of librarians and publishers too."


Lettie Conrad chaired the seminar Are you ready for the Researcher of the Future? Understanding the researcher experience in London last month. You can follow her on Twitter via @lyconrad.