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.

Steve Pettifer's break-up letter: Dear Publisher...

Pettifer: with a break-up letter to the journal

Steve Pettifer, from the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, offered a break-up letter to the journal for the audience of Ignore Your Authors at Your Peril seminar today. Pettifer believes that there's a simple equation for his career:

Ability to do science = funding x cleverness

Likelihood of funding =
(previous ideas x prestige) + new idea

Is it about ego? Possibly. This is where scholarly communications come in. As an academic and researcher he has to convince funders that he is a good person to take an idea forward that will help change the world. When he started as a researcher, it was the end of the old style of publishing, a time when it felt weird when things started to go online.

The challenge now is that researchers operate in a landscape of goodness or importance and managing the transition from one to another without dropping your research status is tough. Every now and again, something comes along that changes the environment, that enables them to get to their goal. Open access might just be that disruptive force (for publishers) that works (for researchers).

So what are the things that publishers tell him that they do for him?

• peer review
• copyediting
• typesetting
• visibility
• legal support.

Yet for each of these valuable services, there are poor examples that undermine the statement. A recent study into peer review demonstrated that only one third agreed on the science with one third signal to two thirds noise. That is itself not a bad thing, but it's not compelling evidence of the value and efficacy of peer review for the scientific record. (Source: Peer Review: Welch, Ivo. 12 October 2012 Referree Recommendations, Social Science Research)

Pettifer quoted Kent Anderson from a recent post on Scholarly Kitchen that asked how science can maintain integrity if papers are buried in 'mega journals' and don't have full peer review? In reality, Pettifer says, he has never cited a paper because of its peer reviewed status. He then went on to mention Alan Singleton in a recent Learned Publishing article. In it, Singleton had paraphrased feedback during peer review, as the essence of its definition. It was something along the lines of: 'the methods are OK, I don't agree with the result, so it should be published for others to repeat or test the experiment.'

Pettifer went on to discuss copyediting: it's not always great, there are numerous examples available of poor grammar in headings from great and good publications. There are some fundamental errors that are made in typesetting, for example, the confusion of German ß rather than β. These things stand out and undermine claims of a valuable, quality service to authors.

He asked publishers to be clear about the relationship between them both. Understand that sometimes it is almost impossible for authors to comply with even the most basic requirements (with ebooks or epapers, it is impossible to comply with making only one copy, as soon as you download, your devices will sync).

He asked publishers to embrace new things. He called for them to move on from the journal impact factor. Many think it is rubbish. And there are lots of other exciting things coming along that are great measures for a researcher including: Impact Story, DataONE, figshare, Altmetric, ORCID, using DOI, and Dryad, that aim to make papers more readable.

He also stated that the object of record is for machines. While he is nerdy, and it matters a lot to him, it is not for humans. Make it available for machines to reference and search.

Pettifer wants publishers to recognise he is an individual and author, reader, editor and reviewer. Help him communicate his work, and help him to make his work better. He believes that BioMedCentral has not moved on much; PLOS is still quite traditional; eLife is too, but is aiming for higher quality. PeerJ is exciting, and arXiv - while just a way to put pre-published papers online - works for physicists. PeerJ and eLife have set the bar high in technology (readability and downloadable objects) with a combination of good technology and presentation.

What do all publishers need to do? Make publishing a service, not an ordeal.

Authors: The Publisher's Perspective by Timo Hannay

Hannay: authors have more economic power now

Timo Hannay, Managing Director at Digital Science believes the relationship with authors is a complicated issue with numerous opinions. His view? The economic power is shifting to the author, having historically been with the reader, and publishers should be in the business of getting the right information in the hands of researchers and authors.

What is a publisher? Hannay doesn't feel like one. He sees himself as scientist who is passionate about technology, who runs a software company within a publishing business. It's interesting to note his company has a portfolio of technology companies that are run like start-ups. This is unusual for publishing.

One of the major purposes of journals is to help researchers learn about discoveries. So the nature of the (traditional) relationship has been between readers and institutions with:

• a reader service
• highly filtered content, but inefficient (high rejection rate and editorial input, peer review adds a lot of value, but takes a lot of time and resource for all involved)
• the reader has little economic power - beyond subscription, very few ways of getting hold of the content other than asking author for copy of paper.

Open access delivers the concept of author as a customer for publishing discoveries. PLOS, BioMedCentral and Scientific Reports are examples of organisations that have pioneered this approach. They have much more of an author service and recognise the need of the author to publish, rather than know what is in the fields. They use lighter peer review (which is still inefficient) and the author has more economic power. For Hannay: it is about supply and demand: an increase in the demand to publish, and a decrease in the demand to read.

However, the author experience sucks. Publishers provide a clunky interface, opaque processes, are slow, slow, slow, and create Sisyphean experience for their authors. The publishing industry and the people in it, are not without innovation, but there is not enough of it and it tends to come from large, established players.

We are starting to see new entrants who display different relationships. Examples of new start-ups where innovation comes from outside the industry include:

• f1000 Research
• Rubriq
• Frontiers - developed different model of peer review
• PeerJ

There are two perspectives to take into account: publishing discoveries (author relationship) and learning about discoveries (reader relationship).

For authors its about career path and development of reputation. Journal publishing isn't everything to this. Metrics also help. Getting information isn't everything, it's about exposing your institution and peers about what you are doing. The different stages are:

• Gaining a reputation
• Finding collaborators
• Finding a job
• Obtaining funds
• Planning experiments
• Learning about discoveries

One of the challenges in the past is that the act of publication is the only thing you can measure. However, companies are now providing tools to show what you are doing. When developing tools online, they are more accurate and can be measured so credit can be given where due. Examples include: Altmetric, Symplectic, and Thomson Reuters. Finding collaborators has also changed with projects such as Research Gate and Frontiers facilitating this.

For the researcher, the cycle is:

• learning about discoveries
• planning experiments
• conducting experiments
• evaluating results
• sharing results
• publishing discoveries

Publishers should be in the business of putting the right information in the hands of researchers and authors. In a networked digital world, much more that can be done if we think about it in the right way. Publishers also need to get skilled up in the right way. If researchers are your main market there is so much more that can be done.

Publishers are in fear of Google, Apple and Amazon and lump them all together. They are all very different business: one is a retailer, one is an advertising network and one is a hardware company. Their common success factor is that they are amazing at technology. There is a direct correlation to mastering technology and success.

Publishers should own their technical development for their markets.