Welcoming the robots

Mark Bide, Chairman at the Publishers Licensing Society chaired the penultimate panel at the ALPSP International Conference on text and data mining (TDM).

Gemma Hersh, Policy Director at Elsevier talked through the Elsevier TDM policy. It has been controversial with calls to change it. Central to their policy is the use of the ScienceDirect API, designed to help preserve the performance of website for everyone else.

One controversy is that a license is Elsevier's way of exerting control. However, they have a global license (which complies with the UK copyright exception and balances with copyright frameworks). Another complaint is around the click through agreement: critics believe it controls what researchers are doing and takes control away from libraries to place liability on researchers. However, it is an automatic process, there is no additional liability, it is aligned with institutional e-amendment, provides guidelines on reuse and can offer one to one support.

Another complaint is that they didn't allow text mining of images. The reason was they did not hold copyright in all the images so they would do it on request. However, they now do it automatically and include terms of use flagging when they need to contact the copyright owner where it doesn't lie with Elsevier.

There were criticisms that they were trying to claim copyright over TDM output. This was inadvertent and they have adjusted the policy to be a little more flexible and take this into account. A final misconception was that the policy was rigid.

In Europe, they have signed a commitment to facilitate TDM for researchers, but their policy is global. They are also a signatory of CrossRef and think the new service is good.

Mark Bide introduces the panel

Lars Juhl Jensen, based at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen, provided an academic perspective on TDM. He considers himself a pragmatic text and data miner. The volume of biomedical research that he has to read is huge. Making sense of structured and unstructured data is key. All he wants to do is data mine. It enables him to do things such as associate diseases and identify conditions. Once you've got the data from text mining, you can then bring it together with experimental data, and from other sources.

As a researcher doing text mining, he needs the text. He doesn't want much else. The format doesn't matter too much. If he can get it in a convenient format, great. The licence has to be reasonable.

Andrew Clark, Associate Director Global Information and Competitive Intelligence Services at UCB,  articulated what TDM means and the part it plays in the scientific industry. He recounted the work of the Pharma Documentation Ring (P-D-R). Their aims are to:

• Promote exchange of experience/networking among members
• Encourage commercial development of new information services and systems
• Jointly assess new and existing products and services
• Provide a forum for the information industry

Gemma Hersh, Lars Juhl Jensen and Andrew Clark

Literature patent analysis, sentiment analysis and drug safety are just a few of the benefits of TDM. One of the challenges is around the unstructured format that the data comes in at. They need several aggregators to make the data mineable. It's not always easy to get the datasets - from small publishers to large ones. It's quiet expensive and labour intensive.

There are high costs for setting up your data mining. There are a lack of technical skills in the organisation.

There are benefits to TDM that include a managed and in some cases auditable processes for protecting IP. It provides added value and potential new revenues streams. Clark closed with a call for industry collaborations and asked everyone to watch this space.

The e-volution of publishing: what's new, what's changing and what's staying the same

Youngsuk 'YS' Chi, Chairman, Elsevier

The keynote opening talk at the Association of Subscription Agents annual conference was from Youngsuk 'YS' Chi, Chairman of Elsevier. he reflected on what has changed, what continues to evolve and what stays the same in the publishing industry.

The role of academics in research and teaching is evolving. There are parallels with publishers who face increasing criticism about the value they provide. Many people perceive publishers as relics from the past.

With the pace, breadth and complexity of change, the community of publishers is becoming more inclusive, more flexible and yet more nebulous. Tech companies are increasingly called publishers.

Readers habits and expectations are changing. They read an ebook and expect it to be available on any tablet format anywhere in the world at the same price.

So what does this mean for publishers' new roles? They need to provide:

• experiential content
• social media and social networks
• digital tools and solutions
• big data
• text and data mining.

Content-based experiences
The value of raw content will continue to decline with abundance. People will pay for 'content based experiences' (as compared to a football match where you pay more for a pitch-side seat for an immersive experience rather than in the 'nose bleed seats'.) With content this is happening in ways such as integrating note taking, multi-media, annotated links. All this turns content from static or dead into live and interactive.

Importance of social media and social networks
There are a number of social networks for our communities and not just Twitter (e.g. growing community of researchers on academia.edu/, ResearchGate Scientific network, Mendeley, etc). These site users can connect and come together to share papers. There is a role for publishers to facilitiate this sort of interaction for their audiences.

Digital tools and solutions
Content will always be king. However, publishers will increasingly develop tools, solutions and experiences around content. Many publishers are now technology providers, particularly in STM where they are developing digital tools to help researchers research (e.g. Digital Science exploring workflow efficiencies in science research).

Big data
Publishers must use power of big data to their advantage - to understand consumer and viewer preferences then use this insight to help improve use of content in fresh ways and understand more about the communities they serve.

Text and data mining
Increasingly more publishers are opening up content to text and data mining. Examples include CrossRef's Prospect linking text to license service, PLS Clear, a digital clearing house to allow researchers to request rights from multiple publishers from one easy to use form, and CCC has service linking to repository of XML content. This will ensure a role for publishers moving forward.

Publishers are experimenting with agile publishing, subscription models, technology, business models. Experimentation is key. We need to fail, do it often, but do it early. Innovation always moves faster than adoption. Consider where will technology exist and pave the way for the future. Chi reflected on slower take up of ebook readers than expected - according to Digital Book World statistics, 20% of US adults have downloaded an ebook; 21% in UK - where there is still lots of print use.

Chi quoted Michael Mabe about scholarly publisher functions in a digital environment:

• Registration - e.g. DOI
• Certification - e.g. CrossCheck
• Dissemination - e.g. ScienceDirect, ProQuest
• Preservation - e.g. Portico, CLOCKSS

The value of publishing: is it mind the gap or fill the gap? There's a balancing act between innovation and improvement.

The peer review landscape – what do researchers think? Adrian Mulligan reflects on Elsevier's own research.

Adrian Mulligan ponders: what do researchers think?

What do researchers think? Peer review is slow. Generally in STM journals, average peer review is 5 months. Social sciences can go up to 9 months. From when you submit an article through to final submission. Peer review can be prone to bias and can hold back true innovation (here he cites the Nature articles from October 2003, Coping with peer rejection: Accounts of rejected Nobel-winning discoveries highlight conservatism in science).

There is a small group of people who decide what is happening with a manuscript and they tend to be quite conservative. It's time consuming and redundant and does not improve quality. This view was reflected in The Guardian article by Dr Sylvia McLain 'Not breaking news: many scientific studies are ultimately proved wrong!' 17 September 2013. Jeffrey Brainard reported in The Chronicle in August 2008 'Incompetence tops list of complaints about peer reviewers' on how there are too few qualified overworked reviewers.  Recently, The Scientist article 'Fake paper exposes failed peer review' by Kerry Grens (October 6, 2013) highlighted how peer review may not be good at preventing fraud or plagiarism.

Elsevier undertook a research project to find out What do researchers think? From author and reviewer perspective. They surveyed individuals randomly selected from published researchers and received 3,008 responses. Most researchers are satisfied with current peer review system: 70% in 2013 (1% higher than in 2009 and 5% higher than in 2007). The satisfaction level is higher among chemists and mathematicians, and lower among computers scientists, social scientists (inc. arts, humanities, psychologists and economists). Chinese researchers are the most satisfied and there is no difference by age.

Most believe that peer review improves scientific communication. Almost three quarters agreed that the peer review process on unsuccessful submissions improved the article. The amount of researchers who had gone through multiple submissions is relatively low (29% submitted to another journal, article submitted average of 1.6 times before accepted). Few believe peer review is holding back science, but the amount is growing: in 1997 - 19% agreed, in 2009 it was 21%, and in 2013 it had risen to 27%.

Pressure on reviewers is increasing including time and a lack of incentives. Some reviewers lack the specialist knowledge required and it could be argued that too many poor quality papers are sent for review.

Mulligan observed that on a national level, the contribution in terms of submissions should be equal in terms of a country's contribution of reviews. China publishes far fewer papers compared to reviews and the reverse is true for the US. He noted that Chinese researchers are more likely to accept an invitation to review.

Over a third of those who responded believe peer review could be improved. Reviewers need more guidance, researchers are less willing to volunteer their time to conduct reviews and the fact that the system is biased/needs to be completely anonymous should be reviewed. Another challenge for the industry is whether or not peer review can genuinely detect fraud and plagiarism.

More people are shifting to open peer review, however, the preference in North America is for more traditional peer review (single blind and double blind). So what is Elsevier doing? They are reducing the number of reviews - transferring from one journal to the next. They are recognising reviewers' contributions - rewarding reviewers with certificates awards. And they are getting reviewers together to improve speed and quality.

The ALPSP International Conference debate ‘Who is the Publisher?’

Jane Tappini from Publishing Technology will be chairing a panel session later this year at academic and scholarly publishing event the ALPSP International Conference.  

Titled “Who is the Publisher?”, the session, which takes place from 14.00 – 15.30 on Thursday 12 September will focus on the changing role of publishers in a dynamic content world and discuss the challenges facing them in their battle to stay relevant.

The panel will take a look at how skillsets are set to continue to evolve and how publishers can deal with flexibility in content and pricing mechanisms, the implications they have on rights and royalties and the impact on licensing, author relations and reader expectations. The expert panel will include some leading lights in academic and research publishing.

Ziyad Marar

Deputy Managing Director and Executive Vice President of Global Publishing at SAGE Publications, Ziyad Marar has a BSc in Psychology and a Ma in the philosophy and psychology of language. Marar is also a successful author. Having had three books published over the last decade, he has become an authority on how philosophy and psychology can create a better understanding of a modern identity as well as having extensive knowledge of SAGE’s reference works, humanities, social sciences, technology and medicine publishing programs.

Dr Timo Hannay

Managing director of Digital Science, a division of Macmillan and a spin off from the Nature Publishing Group, Dr Timo Hannay specialises in providing software and data solutions for scientists and others involved in the research process. With a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College and a DPhil in Neurophysiology from Oxford University, Hannay has worked on sophisticated data management platforms like SureChem, BioData and Symplectic. Hannay is also involved with the Science Foo Camp, co-organising the collaborative event between Nature, O’Reilly Media and Google. Bringing together between 200 and 300 leading scientists, technologists, writers and other thought-leaders, the Science Foo Camp is a recurring weekend of unbridled discussion, demonstration and debate.

Dr Victor Henning

Co-Founder and CEO of Mendeley, as well as Vice President for Strategy at Elsevier, Dr Victor Henning understands the role of emotion in consumer decision making, intertemporal choice and the theory of reasoned action. Holding a PhD from the Bauhaus University of Weimar, Henning has had research published in Psychology & Marketing and Culture & Society. He won the Overall Best Conference Paper Award at the AMA’s in 2005 and was granted a doctoral dissertation scholarship in 2006 by the Foundation of the German Economy. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has since gone on to join academic social network tool Mendeley with academic publisher Elsevier in the heavily discussed merger from earlier in the year.

Louise Russell

Former COO at Publishing Technology, Louise Russell held the Senior Vice President position at the company’s Scholarly Division and was Head of Client Management at Ingenta, before leaving the company earlier this year to become a Consultant. Having graduated from the University of Liverpool, Russell specialises in publishing, strategic planning and product management.

With such a high calibre of speaker on board and a fascinating topic to explore, the panel is set to be one of the ALPSP Conference’s signature events. To book your place at the conference register here and we look forward to seeing you there.  

Breda Corish: From 20 Million Pieces of Content to a New Clinical Insight Engine: ClinicalKey

The first session at To Measure or Not to Measure: Driving Usage to Content - Marketing, Measurement and Metrics seminar was presented by Breda Corish, Head of Clinical Reference for UK and Northern Europe at Elsevier.

The focus was on publisher products that drive users to content. ClinicalKey is Elsevier's 'clinical insight engine', designed to think like a physician and provide information for diagnosis at point of care, the ability to share relevant answers and a resource to maintain knowledge with.

It took three years development work to develop a product platform to answer questions posed within a clinical care context. The scale of information overload is immense: back in the early 90s, the challenge for doctors was that medical knowledge doubled every 19 years. In 2008 this was down to 18 months. Now the forecast is that by 2020, it will double every 73 days.

This creates the doctor's dilemma: how to access trusted information quickly with a seamless experience. The challenge for Elsevier was how to unite 20 million pieces of content into one seamless experience including existing products such as MD Consult, Journals Consult, Procedures Consult, etc.

They started by understanding users. The 'mechanics' are driven by visual procedural content. Doctors are extremely time-pressed, require pre- and post-procedural care resource, with well-defined, fairly narrow, but deep information requirements.

They focused on understanding the patient care management workflow: from diagnosis to creating a care plan, from medical treatment to after-treatment care plans and patient education and compliance. They also identified collateral workflows for doctors on keeping current, sharing information and not working in isolation, but as part of a multi-disciplinary team.

Using this knowledge they moved from unstructured content to structured content and turned it into smart content and made it work in the clinical setting. They created the Elsevier Merged Medical Taxonomy (EMMeT) using 250,000 core clinical concepts, 1 million+ synonyms, 1 million+ hierarchical relationships and 1million+ ontological relationships.

Through concept mapping they focused on making vast amounts of content easily discoverable using speciality-specific navigation, dynamic clinical summary creation and meaningful related content recommendations. The semantic taxonomy was adapted for the clinical setting and semantic relationships are used to suggest other content (e.g. clinical condition, procedures, etc). Weighted tags are their 'secret sauce for better search'.

The smart content infrastructure is based on four areas:

Product development and enhancement

• more accurage search results
• faceted navigation
• improved content discoverability

Content analytics

• greater insights into what we publish
• identification of co-occurring terms
• link to related external content and data

Personalization

• individual content recommendations
• targeted individual marketing
• contextual advertising

Editorial productivity

• flexible product types - new collections, image banks, etc.
• increased speed to market

Usage tracking is based on usage events rather than page views. They have COUNTER-compliant content reports and monthly institution reports based on COUNTER filtering rules. They produce usage reports for different content types e.g. books, full-text articles, FirstConsult, Medline, Guidelines, etc. Every piece of content is tagged so they can produce usage reports. Usage event reports by month include analysis of: discovery (search, browse); content usage; and Advanced Tools usage.

With performance metrics they want to keep the number small for searches per content view as this is key to delivering relevant content quickly. They take insight from the usage reports on what search terms people are searching with and add them back into the product.

A recent Outsell report identified that the 'development of such taxonomies and their use to power the semantic enrichment of collecitons and aggregations of content will increasingly need to become core competencies for publishers further along the digital transition to higher value-added services.' This is something that Elsevier have engaged with directly.

Their plans for the future involve adapting for international markets using same content and powerful functionality, but adding in geographic-specific publications content. They are also looking at developing different interfaces for local languages. Even in cash-strapped health care systems around the world, there is still investment in IT. There is potential for mobile devices and tablets being used in hospitals. Doctors need information when they are on the move and not desk-bound.

They want to do more with content, more with features and functionality for doctors and end users, and develop product further for use any time, any place, any where. They are looking at how they can integrate their clinical or patient records portal or system so it's not disruptive to the experience e.g. developing query buttons to ping off to the other database. Something like 80% of hospitals in the UK are still in early stages of developing these services so there's great potential.

They are currently selling to institutions, but have recently launched a service for individuals - which focuses on their particular clinical specialism, with the option to add on. Overall, their aim is to hit the 'sweet spot' of being at the heart of comprehensive, trusted and speed to answer.