'Because it's there'

New technologies, eh. The LIBER conference, which has just finished in Tartu, focused quite a bit on QR codes, augmented reality, mobile platforms and other whizzy tools. Librarians seem to be taking the kind of interest in these technologies that we saw in relation to Web 2.0 a few years ago. But their approach seems to be much more strategic.

Librarian use of web 2.0 sometimes felt rather like George Mallory's approach to climbing Everest: ‘I’m going to do it because it’s there’. Now, this kind of attitude might be alright for mountains, which don’t tend to care whether they’re climbed or not. But we know from research that academics aren’t really engaging with social media for professional purposes, so one has to question the value of librarians picking up their crampons and ice axes and setting out for the Twitter base camp to climb a mountain that doesn’t actually exist. 

A lot of librarians also struggled to fully understand how social media works, and how best to engage with it on its own terms. A 2009 study, which looked at librarian use of Facebook, found that most librarians spend 0-20 minutes a week on their Facebook page: definitely not enough to keep up the steady stream of information and interaction that underpins a successful social media presence. 

But – at least from the small sample of presentations at the LIBER conference – the library approach to new technologies seems to be much more organised and strategic. And it thinks about how people use their smartphones and mobile devices, and links this into library services and content, to produce tools that will actually get used.

Let me mention a few examples, most of which come from Ellyssa Kroski’s excellent presentation. People use their smartphones to physically locate themselves, often in relation to something else that they can’t find. So it makes sense for a local library to provide maps and directions that respond to where their users are: it makes sense for a big university library to use QR codes on library shelves to direct users to the book they want. People use their smartphones to organise their various contact streams: emails addresses, phone numbers, social media. So it makes sense for librarians to display QR codes that directly transfer their contact details into a user’s mobile phone.

Other projects had thought about how to use mobile technologies to bring collections to life in a new way. People use their smartphones to take pictures of their local environment: why not overlay those pictures with augmented reality that links to library images, documents and multimedia? Or even recreate structures that no longer exist, using historic images from the library collection? The Bavarian State Library has done both these things in an incredibly successful app on King Ludwig II. 

There are still areas of gimmick which smack of ‘because we can’. The Ludwig II app, for example, allows users to scan their entry tickets to the king’s fairytale castles of Herrenchiemsee, Neuschwannstein and Linderhof in order to get a 3D visualisation of the attraction: something that feels a bit redundant considering that the users are probably standing right in front of the real thing!

But on the whole, these services are considered: they look at the possibilities offered by social media, and think about how these might interact with library collections to deliver relevant information in new ways. Which can only be a good thing.

Measuring up

It’s a funny old business, research. There cannot be another industry that so obsessively tracks its outputs, corporately creating measure upon measure to try and establish some sense of hierarchy. Like a deranged marketing team, we produce ever more complex statistics to understand how we relate to our competitors – as journals, funders and individual scholars.

Yet, when you get down to it, the tools we have at our disposal are fairly crude. Most measures rely upon the published journal article as a proxy for ‘achievement’ or ‘discovery’, and most traditional measures (and some of the newer ones) rely on citations as a way of understanding how significant that article has been. Based on his or her authoring record, then, a researcher might be invited to deliver the keynote speech at a conference, given a grant or offered a job.

Now, that is all fine in a system where you have a handful of authors on a paper, and each of them has contributed in a way that’s proportionate to their position on that paper. Hah! In general, of course, the authorship of a paper is much more complex, particularly since each discipline has its own conventions, which can be incomprehensible to an outsider, especially when the number of authors can run into the thousands. And in some cases ‘author’ may not even be the correct word to apply any more. Is someone who creates data an ‘author’? What about someone who writes code? Their contributions are vital, but perhaps underplayed within the current system.

This is why I was really interested to learn about a recent workshop, funded by the Wellcome Trust and held at Harvard last month, which looked at contributorship and scholarly attribution. (Note that deliberate rejection of ‘authorship’ in the title, by the way.)  The programme incorporated a number of perspectives, including authors, editors and funders, and looked at many of the factors that might influence the development and uptake of new ways of tracking contributorship. What kind of taxonomies and ontologies might we need, if we are to reflect new ways of doing research and the new roles that are emerging? How would new conventions be introduced and implemented, and what might be the reaction of scholars? And how would a new way of tracking contributorship intersect with other developments in the scholarly communications environment, especially that old favourite, the article of the future? It’s too soon to say what will come out of this workshop, but apparently there is interest in taking some kind of action based on the discussions so I’ll look forward to developments.

Another project, mentioned at the workshop, is more advanced, and it’s worth taking a brief look at it before winding up this post. FundRef is an initiative from the clever people at CrossRef (could you tell?). Funders and publishers are collaborating to create a standardised way to acknowledge funders within published articles: a kind of ORCID for funding bodies. This will make it much easier to track the outputs from individual research projects: for outputs published in some scholarly journals, at least. Perhaps in time we will see the FundRef ID popping up at conferences, in data centres, even on blogs, to track the wider effect of research funding.

Just think of the impact measures we could start to build then…

Article of the future, part 3,981

If I could reclaim all the time I’ve spent talking about the article of the future in the last few months, I could probably – I don’t know –watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. Extended Edition. Twice. I have to say, I’m not sure I was any the wiser for all these discussions, but something I saw this week at UKSG has helped me clarify what a, if not the, article of the future might look like.

The organisation producing these articles is the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), the only PubMed listed video journal in the life sciences. I must say, it’s pretty nifty. Articles are submitted as text and sent out for peer review. If they’re accepted, the JoVE video team get to work. A PhD-qualified scientist/director produces a script, which is sent back to the authors for review and validation, and then filmed by high-quality videographers. The video is returned to JoVE for editing and post-production (including, in some cases, whizzy 3D), then sent out for a second round of peer review and then, finally, published. The whole business takes 6-9 months, making it roughly comparable with other life science journals.

Now, lots of that sounds really Star Trek. Video! 3D! But what I think makes this model so compelling is that the innovation exists, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the science. Video is a great way to explain complicated techniques and procedures, and many JoVE publications are focused on methods. (This presents some problems in terms of citation measures, but that’s a separate issue.) The results seem impressive: reproducibility of research is a major problem in life sciences, with a 70% failure rate being fairly common in commercial labs, but JoVE has reduced this to around 35% when scientists use their video articles.

The insistence on peer review at several stages of the process also shows the underlying commitment to research outcomes. Apparently the peer review of the final video is a relatively recent addition, done in order to qualify for an impact factor rating, but to this laywoman the videos didn’t look like promotional tools; they certainly looked like Proper Science. And their insistence on underlying text, published alongside the video article, suggests that the video is seen as an enhancement, rather than a replacement, for traditional content.

The journal’s also exploring Web 2.0 functionality for its video articles, allowing readers to mark points in the video and link them to other relevant content. Again, this reflects a desire to improve the value of the articles, so that they sit within their scholarly context. I’ll be interested to see, though, whether researchers use this functionality, as studies tend to suggest that they’re not too keen on enhancing/marking up content for others to see.

As you might expect, the cost of producing a JoVE article is staggeringly high, and their prices undoubtedly reflect this; for a new, young journal, they are pitching themselves alongside some fairly big hitters. That said, the time saved by researchers who were trying, and failing, to reproduce experiments might justify the cost, especially since prices are fixed at the time of subscription so there are unlikely to be year-on-year rises: JoVE are certainly trying to make themselves affordable. Furthermore, this money question is one that all ‘future articles’ are probably going to have to answer: when you’re doing things in new ways, creating your own infrastructure rather than outsourcing it to established intermediary businesses, how can you become self-sustaining?

If this is going to be an article of the future, the scholarly communications system is going to have to adapt to accommodate it. I’ve mentioned the issue of citations – that’s a problem that we’re aware of in all disciplines with complex technical methods to explain, and which researchers are already trying to address. There are also questions about the skills needed to peer review and edit a video article – are we training those researchers and professional editors to work within the boundaries of a non-textual medium? I look forward to seeing what kinds of answers JoVE and other ‘new’ journal formats come up with….

The future of editing is...prehistoric?

Last Friday, I was at a fascinating meeting at the BMJ looking at the future of journals. Incidentally, I think it’s interesting how many publishers are starting to think about how their services fit into the workflows of readers and authors, not just about how readers or authors respond to the services they provide. Is this a new thing, or just new to me?

Anyway, one thing that came up at the session was the role of the editor in 20 years time. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and, with the caveat that I know predictions about the future can end up looking a bit like this, I’d like to use this post to ponder a few ideas. I’m borrowing a framework suggested at the meeting by Ginny Barbour, which she calls ‘hunter-gatherer-farmer’, and using it to explore some thoughts.

In my imaginings of the future, the hunter is roughly equivalent to the current model, which I don’t think will completely die out (although others aren’t so sure). Editors will continue to stalk the academic landscape searching for the plumpest, juciest, most impact-heavy authors. Their bait will, as now, be high impact factors, quick publication times and a large readership. Though I think new temptations – the ability to publish data, good performance on more sensitive measures of impact and probably some that haven’t even been thought of yet, will also be important lures for those future authors.

The gatherer is a bit different from the hunter. This editor isn’t really interested in the thrill of the chase, or acquiring authors that needs to be ‘caught’. Rather, they’re after content that need to be discovered, dug up and brought into the light. They’ll use knowledge of their scholarly domain to seek out interesting stuff that’s currently ‘in the wild’ – outside the formal scholarly publishing system. This might be blogs, datasets, interesting bits of code, informal notes – anything, really. The gatherer’s job is to know where to find something useful and to guide their information-hungry readers towards it. And also to let them know it’s not poisonous: recommending something will no doubt involve some element of quality assurance so that the journal brand isn’t damaged by association, although it’ll probably be pretty light touch.

The farmer is different again. This type of editor is also interested in the kind of wild content that the gatherer likes, but they want to ‘cultivate’ it so it’s more useful to readers. This might involve working with authors to turn blogs into more formal, quality assured outputs. Or it might be about providing additional services overlaid on wild content – for example, markup, annotation facilities, linking, aggregation.

In my future landscape, most editors will need to have all of these skills if they are to keep their platforms current and relevant to researchers. The balance might be different from journal to journal, but already we’re starting to see a diversification of services in some online offerings. I think the next step is to stop being so rigid about ownership of content, and to start exploiting the enormous amount of ‘stuff’ that academics make available for free on the internet. Yes, let the journal promote its own Twitter feed, but why doesn’t it also recommend the tweets of an academic, practitioner or even journalist in its field? This will need to be done carefully, to protect the platform’s reputation, but we know that researchers are very keen on tools that put everything in one place for them.

To bring the prehistoric metaphor, gasping, to its logical conclusion, future editors need to put down their bows and arrows, settle into their scholarly geography and start to make use of its rich offerings. They are the conduit between the nourishing content available in the wilds of academia, and the hungry readers lighting a fire back in the cave, ready to consume whatever the hunter-gatherer-farmer can bring them.

Hello world...

Shamelessly pinching the WordPress opener to introduce myself...

My name's Ellen Collins and I'm a social researcher who has, for the past couple of years, worked on scholarly communications and information. I'm particularly interested in how researchers access and use information, and on what their changing (or in some cases, relentlessly unchanging) behaviours might mean for the future of scholarly communications.

I'm starting this blog to share some of my thoughts and ideas. It's not a place for finished products, and in fact I hope that the process of blogging will help me to better formulate my more formal outputs. I'd like it to become a place of conversation which helps me to refine ideas, sparks new ones and is generally a fairly interesting place to waste an occasional couple of minutes.

Hope that sounds good to you too!