Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference 2013: Part 1 - setting the scene

Setting the scene at the ALPSP conference

This is the first in a series of reflections on the 2013 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite, save the date for the 2014 conference, 10-12 September, Park Inn Heathrow London.

"Page fright: where to begin? Six plenaries and six parallel sessions in this sixth ALPSP International Conference, with six x six papers presented in all. How to make sense of all this in a number of screens small enough to entice anyone to venture beyond screen one? We shall see. Suffice to say that the 250 or so registrants had a varied, instructive and enjoyable time in the big marquee outside, and other facilities inside The Belfry near Birmingham and each will have carried away new insights, contacts and friendships, repaying the three days spent away from the office.

Inevitably this account of the conference is but a sketch. Detailed presentations can be viewed on the ALPSP website and YouTube channel. Early accounts were posted on the ALPSP blog.

Unsurprisingly this conference was all about change – technical change, changing customer profiles, changing participants in the great scholarly publishing endeavour, changing needs. Nothing new then, as the predecessor conferences and seminars have also been about change, albeit at a slower pace, and change and uncertainty will continue to be with us. One reason for the success of these conferences is that they allow us to take comfort from the support of our fellow publishing professionals and their willingness to share their experiences with us.

Setting the scene

‘Waving – or drowning?’ was how Tim Brooks, CEO of BMJ, headed his keynote talk opening the conference, adapting the title from a poetry collection by Stevie Smith. From his experience of the newspaper industry and his membership of the Cabinet Office’s digital advisory board he was able to draw lessons from other fields.

Waving - or drowning? asked Tim Brooks.
Other Belfry visitors may agree.

Modern life is very complex and change is not always predictable.

While leadership may have a vested interest in stability and the status quo (cultural obstacles to change), change requires agile responses: multi-level, high-speed, self-correcting.

“Doubt is not a pleasant state, but certainty is a ridiculous one” Voltaire

The newspaper industry has been and still is responding to the digital revolution and different publishers are coming up with different business models: the traditional, paper-based one is still durable but not eternal, and it is not yet entirely clear whether pay walls (The Times) or free access (The Guardian) will be the best approach. Nor is it clear which of the available structural options will be most viable. Even the metrics can fool you: new services will not outperform established ones on old-service metrics like profit, at least initially.

Some “surfing tips for the digital breakers”:

• Ensure those who know, have a voice – the Inuit have known about climate change since the 1960s but nobody listened.
• Get all publishing functions involved and enthused and get them to imagine the future.
• Get people in with outside experience.
• Treat staff as volunteers: explain what they do and why they do it and celebrate outcomes. Look after the team and yourself!
• Keep talking and listening, especially when things go wrong: the good news culture is unhelpful.
• Honour the rule of five: Five positives against one negatives is a good indicator of success.

Some of these tips recurred in other sessions."

Rapporteur
Kurt Paulus, Bradford-on-Avon

Colin Meddings: Why data quality matters.

Colin Meddings is the Client Director at DataSalon. Colin will be one of the speakers at the forthcoming ALPSP seminar Data, the universe and everything taking place in January.

Here, in a guest post, he reflects on why good quality customer and internal data is important for scholarly publishers.


'Only four types of organisations need to worry about data quality: Those that care about their customers; Those that care about profit and loss; Those that care about their employees; and Those that care about their futures.' – Thomas C. Redman (2006)

Over recent years publishers have had to overcome many hurdles in the digital world, such as making content available online, managing complex consortia deals, creating new packages of content and tracking usage statistics. The result of all this digital activity is vast amounts of data. However, the pace of change can often distract from the careful governance of this data, leading to gaps, inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

But why does the quality of all this data matter so much? Good data is your most valuable asset, and bad data can seriously harm your business and credibility…

What have you missed? 
At a management level, poor data quality equates directly to poor visibility of key trends in the growth or decline of certain products or markets. At the contact level, you may miss out on valuable sales opportunities if email address fields aren’t filled out correctly or customer names are wrong. Having good data will help deliver better customer service and enhance your reputation, and it means you can make better selections for targeted prospecting, cross-selling and up-selling.

When things go wrong.
Bad data can lead to ‘accidents’ and wrong decisions or actions which can affect customer confidence. You’ve spent time building up a valuable customer list – so it’s important not to waste this by sending campaigns to the wrong people, or with messages which don’t match their interests, or to out-of-date or deceased contacts. Data quality issues can also cost you money directly – for example if invoices or renewal notices are sent to the wrong recipient, or at the wrong time.

Making confident decisions. 
Data quality matters most of all because it enables your staff and management team to really trust the accuracy of the reports and analysis they’re given. Without that confidence, apparent trends or new opportunities will always leave you wondering whether they really present a true picture. But with a complete and accurate view of your customers and prospects, comes the confidence to make well informed business decisions and commit fully to your strategic planning.

So, data quality is a very important foundation for a publisher’s entire business planning process and customer contact strategy. Good data quality will allow your business and its reputation to grow and flourish.

Data quality is just one of the topics in the forthcoming ALPSP seminar Data, the universe and everything. Other areas covered will include the use of institutional and personal identifiers in the scholarly publishing supply chain, publisher metadata, data relating to open access publishing and some case studies from publishers who have tackled data issues.

This post originally appeared on DataSalon’s own blog From the Armchair.

Frank Stein on Watson and the Journey to Cognitive Computing

Frank Stein on cognitive computing

Frank Stein from IBM outlined their project Watson and the Journey to Cognitive Computing at the STM Innovations seminar. Data is exploding driven by unstructured data (in descending order: video, image, audio, text, structured data). How do we build a system that can take all this info and build something useful for researchers, doctors, etc?

The Watson and Jeopardy! example shows how they have developed a programme that can match deeper evidence and use temporal reasoning, statistical paraphrasing and geospatial reasoning. The evidence is still not 100% certain, but it is about about likelihood and confidence.

What they learned in Jeopardy
The DeepQA approach can accurately answer single sentence queries with confidence and speed. It is highly dependent on content, content quality, and content formats. They need a combination of technologies to get satisfactory performance (semantic technology, machine learning, information retrieval/search technology, databases and high performance computing techniques). Both structured and unstructured content need to be combined for best results. They now need to extend Watson to handle richer interactions and continuous training/learning.

Here's the IBM video about Watson and the game show Jeopardy!


Watson Decision Advisor in medicine
A data-rich, societally important field helping Watson change how medicine is:

• Taught and researched (Major Cancer Center, students learn from and 'teach' Watson at the Cleveland Clinic)
• Practiced (Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Community Cancer Care Centers)
• Paid (WellPoint & Utilization Management)

IBM used to produce typewriters
When Stein started, IBM produced typewriters. Now they have 10,000+ products. Their sales agents need help. IBM is building out a portfolio of Watson Solutions including Watson Engagement Advisor for use in situations in which you need stronger ties with constituents and better automated or agent-facilitated conversations. Examples include: bank outreach to customers for cross-sell, cable operator services and support, tax agency advice, etc. 

What's next - Cognitive Computing
Watson is ushering in a new era of computing. We have transitioned from the tabulating systems era to programmable systems era. Now we are moving into a world called cognitive systems era. This is a key technology for a new era of computing that takes into account:

• Content and learning
• Visual analytics and interaction
• Data centric systems
• Cognitive architecture
• Atomic and nano-scale.

Sayeed Choudhury reflects on the research data revolution

Sayeed Choudhury

Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Research Data Management, Johns Hopkins University, kicked off the STM Innovations seminar reflecting on 'The Research Data Revolution'.

There is a new economy of sources of data. The challenge as publishers is to develop services.

Data Conservancy is a community that develops solutions for data preservation and sharing to promote cross-disciplinary re-use. It is about preservation - collect and take care of research data; sharing - reveal data's potential and possibilities; and discovery - promote re-use and new combinations.

Is data different?
Data is the new oil (stated in Qatar, European Commission, etc). McKinsey claimed that data is 4th factor of production and estimates a potential $3 trillion of economic value across seven sectors within the US alone. Todd Park estimates location sensitive apps generate $90 billion of value annually. Policy movements reflect its importance: the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy Executive memorandum and White House Open Government Initiative are two key initiatives.

Collections
Data are a new form of collections though they are fundamentally different in nature. They are created or converted to digital format for processing by machines. Entirely new methods are required to deal with them. They are, in effect, a new form of special collections.

Do librarians and indeed publishers have the skill set to really grapple with data? data architects/scientists/modellers/visualisers #ukinno
— David Smith (@drs1969) December 4, 2013

What is 'Big Data'?
There are definitions based on the V's of Big Data (e.g. volume, velocity, variety). What is clear is that it's different from 'spreadsheet science' (or long-tail science). For Choudhury, if a community's ability to deal with data is overwhelmed, it is 'Big Data' - and it's more about 'M's' (methods of lack thereof) than 'V's'.

Services
There's a core of services that span across data from different disciplines and contexts. Archiving is a good example. However, if data collections are basically open, libraries may need to differentiate themselves by the services they offer. They should provide a combination of machine and human mediated services. There will be a set of services that only 'experts' will be able to offer.

Data management layers: curation, preservation, archiving, storage

Understanding infrastructure
Data will require fundamentally new systems and infrastructure. Institutional repositories can be useful gateways, but are not long-term solutions (particularly for 'Big Data'). Libraries will need to operate at scale through an integrated, ecosystem approach to infrastructure. Customised 'human mediated' services are most effective as an interpretative layer on machine based services.

What about publishers?
No one can claim a specific role or act with a sense of entitlement when it comes to data (whether publishers or librarians). The future of data curation is a competition between information graphs. 'Publishing is about content, not format.' - Wendy Queen, Associate Director of Project Muse, Johns Hopkins University Press

International Publishers Association Call for Nominations: 2014 IPA Freedom to Publish Prize

The closing date for nominations for the 2014 IPA Freedom to Publish Prize is 6 January 2014.

The Prize will be awarded on 27 March 2014, during the IPA Congress in Bangkok, and the recipient will receive CHF20,000, thanks to the generous sponsorship of the following publishers: Albert Bonniers Förlag, Elsevier, HarperCollins, Kodansha, Macmillan, OUP, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster.

Nominees can either be publishers who have recently published controversial works in the face of pressure, threats, intimidation or harassment from government or other authorities; or publishers with a long and distinguished history of upholding the values of freedom to publish and freedom of expression.

IPA member organisations, members of the IPA Freedom to Publish Committee, individual publishers, and international professional and non-government organisations working in the field of freedom of expression can nominate candidates for the IPA Freedom to Publish Prize.

Those nominating must explain the reasons behind their choice of candidate in writing (in English, French or Spanish) using the attached form as a template. Nominations should be submitted to the IPA’s Policy Director, José Borghino (borghino@internationalpublishers.org) no later than close-of-business (Geneva time) on 6 January 2014.

More about the 30th IPA Congress and the IPA Freedom to Publish Prize Ceremony: 

The 30th IPA Congress will be held in Bangkok, Thailand, on 25-27 March 2014, and will be hosted by the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand (PUBAT) under the auspices of HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. To see the Program, go to the Congress website.

On the eve of the Bangkok Book Fair (28 March to 8 April), hundreds of publishers from all over the world will participate in the Congress, together with authors, copyright specialists, librarians and officials from around 50 countries and international organisations.

The 2014 IPA Freedom to Publish Prize will be awarded during the Congress on 27 March 2014. Aung San Suu Kyi has been invited to give the keynote speech and award the Prize.

Earlybird online registration for the Congress is available from the Congress website.

'Scientifically sound' What does that mean in peer review? Cameron Neylon asks...

Cameron Neylon, Director of Advocacy at the Public Library of Science, challenged the audience at The Future of Peer Review seminar.

He suggested that if we're going to be serious about science, we should be serious about applying the tools of science to what we (the publishers) do.

What do we mean when we say 'scientifically sound'? Science works most of the time, so we tend not to question it because of this. Should we review for soundness, as a pose to reviewing for soundness and importance.

How can we construct a review process that is scientifically sound? The first thing you would do in a scientific process is to look at the evidence, but Neylon believes the evidence is almost totally lacking for peer review. There are very few good studies. Those that exist show frightening results.

We need to ask questions about the costs and the benefits. Rubriq calculated there are 15 million hours of lost time reviewing papers that were rejected in 2012. (This video post illustrates the issues they raise). This is equivalent to around $900m if you calculate reviewers' time. How can we tell this is benefitting science? We need to decide whether we would be better spending that money and time on doing more research or improving the process.

Neylon asked what would the science look like to assess the effectiveness of peer review? There are some hard questions to ask. We'd need very large data sets and interventions including randomised control trials. But there are other methods that can be applied if data is available. Getting data about the process that you are confident with is at the heart of problem.

The obvious thing is to build a publishing system for the web. Disk space is pretty cheap and bandwidth can be managed. Measure what can be measured. Reviewers are pretty good at checking technical validity of papers. Importance is more nebulous. Taking this approach, Neylon believes that you end up with something that looks like PLOS One.

The growth curve for PLOS One is steep as it tackles these issues. In addition to this growth trajectory, 85% of papers are cited after 2 years: well above average for STM literature. There still remains a challenge of delivering that content to the right people at the right time. Technical validity depends on technical checks. PLOS One has six pages of questions to be answered before it goes to an editor. How much could we validate computationally? Where are computers better than people?

What has changed since similar talks 5 years ago? New approaches that were being discussed then are happening now (e.g. Rubriq). The outside world is much more sceptical about what happens with public funding. According to Neylon, one thing is for sure when it comes to peer review. The sciences need the science.

These notes were compiled from a talk given by Cameron Neylon at ALPSP's The Future of Peer Review seminar (London, November 2013) under CC-BY attribution. Previous presentations by Cameron can be found on his SlideShare page.

Ulrich Pöschl on advancing post-publication and public peer review

Ulrich Pöschl

Ulrich Pöschl is based at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and is professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. 

He initiated interactive open access publishing with public peer review and interactive discussion through the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and the European Geosciences Union.

In his talk at The Future of Peer Review seminar, he presented a vision of promotion of scientific and societal progress by open access and collaborative review in global information commons; access to high quality scientific publications (more and better information for scientists and society); documentation of scientific discussion (evidence of controversial opinions and open questions); and demonstration of transparency and rationalism (role model for political decision process).

Pöschl believes the most important motivation of open access is to improve scientific quality assurance. Why is it not a threat to peer review? Traditional peer review is fully compatible with open access. Information for reviewers is strongly enhanced by open access. Collaborative and post-publication peer review can be fully enabled by open access. Predatory open access publishers and hoaxes are a side-issue: a transition problem and red herring (partly caused by the vacuum created by the slow move of traditional publishers).

Pöschl went on to outline a range of problems that affect peer review. Quality assurance can be an issue with manuscripts and publications often carelessly prepared and faulty. The tip of the iceberg can be fraud. Common practice can lead to carelessness. Consequences can be waste and misallocation of resources.

Editors and referees may have limited capacity and/or competence. Traditional pre-publication review can lead to retardation and loss of information. Traditional discussion can be sparse and subject to late commentaries. For Pöschl, he doesn't have time for pure post-publication review (open peer commentary) as he has enough to do with his scientific work.

The dilemma at the heart of peer review is speed versus quality. There are conflicting needs of scientific publishing: rapid publication versus thorough review and discussion. Rapid publication is widely pursued. The answer? A two stage process. Stage 1 involves rapid publication of a discussion paper, public peer review and interactive discussion. Stage 2 comprises review completion and publication of the Final Paper.

The advantages of interactive open access publishing are that it provides an all win situation for the community of authors, referees, editors and readers. The discussion paper is an expression of free speech. Public peer review and interactive discussion provides lots of benefits, but in particular, they foster and document scientific discourse (and save reviewer capacities).

Four stages to interactive open access publishing

Pöschl outlined a multi-stage open peer review in a paper in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience (2012). These stages are:

1. Pre-publication review and selection
2. Public peer review and interactive discussion
3. Peer review completion
4. Post-publication review and evaluation

This needs to be in combination or integration with repositories, living reviews concept, assessment house concept, ranking system/tiers and article level metrics.

At Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the rejection rate is as low as 10%. Submission to publication time is a minimum of 10 days and up to 1 month. The publication charge is 1000 euros and they have up to 50% additional comments pages. The achievements for combining these approaches include top speed, impact and visibility, large volume, low rejection rates and costs. The journal is fully self-financed and sustainable.

Pöschl passionately believes that these stages can be adjusted to other priorities and can therefore work for other disciplines and research communities. Future perspectives to take into account include an efficient and flexible combination of new and traditional forms of review and publication, as well as multiple stages and levels of interactive publishing and commenting.