Highlights from APM – Day 2

The second day of the Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean region (APM) conference started with a session (entitled Strength in numbers) on cooperation between and the (future) role of university presses.

 

The first speaker was Roman Schmidt (Sens Public, editor-in-chief of crossXwords), who, in his very inspiring lecture entitled Request for comments: discussing the role of the University Press within the university, took on the role of an observer who is working on media change, but not necessarily within the university press.

Schmidt argues that we need to stress for formalized criteria when it comes to Internet standards concerning academia, being an inaugural act of science where deliberation is a pivotal point. This approach has two problems however. The first problem is concerned with the publish or perish paradigm, which is especially urgent amongst young scholars. Schmidt calls this a structural problem of the university system, where oral presentations, discussions, comments, blog entries etc. do not pay off career wise, where much time is actually invested in them. What does pay off is the writing of an article or a book. The question is however if these are still the preferred formats of communication for (young) scholars.

In this respect the university press could play a role in establishing a relationship with the university to facilitate these kind of more discursive, non ‘academic’ (non peer reviewed) academic discourses. Schmidt argues that we need an epistemological shift out of this intramural space to break the publish or perish spiral. We need a new ecology of scientific publications. This shift to editorial models needs to be accompanied in a good manner however, and in this aspect European university presses could play a big role in new ways of knowledge production and experimentation. They could form experimental labs for the future of academic publishing.

 

Schmidt mentions 3 aspects of a possible relationship between an university press and an university:

 

1. Quality management and specialization: university presses could focus on the formation of thematic research hubs, replacing the university in the Humboldian sense. Specialization could in this sense both lead to economies of scale and to quality labels, by means of cooperation and combination (Schmidt mentions the OAPEN project in this context). Another interesting initiative connected to this that Schmidt mentions is ADONIS in France, an overall portal of research in the HSS field.
2. Training of university staff. According to Schmidt training and mentoring is a much neglected area of media change. How should we train (scientific) content producers? The prosumer paradigm does not make this distinction obsolete he argues. For good stilistic and qualitative high scientific writing the university press is still needed. And this is a role that is especially well suited for university presses and less for publishers. This training is an investment in human resources, preparing them for a variety of editorial roles. Schmidt mentions for instance the website Hypothèses, which hand picks quality scientific blogs. He argues that these kind of initiatives are excellent platforms for learning to write smaller pieces as a natural evolution to learning to write a monograph.
3. International credibility and translation. University presses are not only facing a problem of scale but also of international visibility of their titles. This is closely connected to the problem of European multilingualism. Schmidt quotes Umberto Eco: translation is the language of Europe. Scale and cooperation could assist: university presses could get funding for translations as a consortium. Schmidt mentions the journal Eurozine as a good example of this policy. One could also adopt this model to monographs. As Schmidt says, these kind of initiatives correspond very well to the post national constellation, following Rimbaud’s adagio to create a new medium, il faut être absolument moderne.

 

Gonzalo Cappellàn from the University of Cantabria Press, talked about the situation of the Spanish university presses (consisting of  at the moment 60 public university and research centers), their strenghts and weaknesses and the need for quality assesment. The Spanish universities differ very much when it comes to size, specialisation and the way they rule their presses. Initiatives have arisen for Spanish publishers to join together, in 2007 UNE (Spanish university publishers association/ Unión de Editoriales Universitarias) and, more recently, the G9 group of universities.

These cooperations offer the presses greater presence on a national level as a collectivity, a strategic alliance which can present joint measures which are almost impossible to achieve for small publishers. The collaborations also function on an international level: international catalogues, media, newsletters, promotion lobbying on an higher level for their authors etc.

Another benefit has to do with the fact that, as Cappellàn states, Spanish university presses are very much focused on their own institution, which has lead to the feeling that their quality check is not that great. Editorial boards are becoming increasingly important however, as is formalized peer review.

 

The G9 group consists of public universities in autonomous communities. They develop joint electronic projects. Editorial cooperation takes place on two levels: first step is to create a distinctive label, which is growing further with joint publishing. This is also a quality label, it consists of an editiorial board with representatives of the 9 universities, so no editoiral board consisting of the staff of one university. A scientific board can be set up with expertise in a certain field, functioning as referees to evaluate the scientific quality. In this way the combined group of 9 can be a distinctive pressence in the Spanish publication landscape. On another level the group could focus on interesting publications that are not published by the 9 but that are interesting because of their quality. This is a totally new experience in Spanish publishing. The G9 will start up in April and experiment. It will be open spirited, inter-university and internationally focused, concludes Cappellàn.

 

Werner Mark Linz from the American University in Cairo Press (AUC) talked about the differences of academic publishing in the Arab world and the cooperation between mediteranean and Arab publishing. The main goal of AUC is the dissemination of ideas and knowledge about the arab world to the english reading public. They mainly publish books in the Humanities in 6-7 areas, mainly arabic literature in translation, but also on archaeology in ancient Egypt, Islamic art and architecture. Linz states that in the Arab market not much is being published and their exists not much of an infrastrucute (bookstores etc.). Linz recalls how AUC needed to develop a booktrade in order to function. In Egypt for instance the printer/publisher/bookseller is still one trade, there is not so much differentiation. The focus is also mainly on religious books (Koran and Koran related books). Next to that one can also see much translations: a lot of energy is spend in translating books into Arabic (instead of the other way around). Arab countries are financing these translations, which thus form a big market for publishers.

 

Saskia de Vries from Amsterdam University Press (AUP) gave a presentation on the OAPEN project, in which OAPEN functions as an EU presses cooperative publishing network. She sees the public function of the press as a mission, to experiment with new modes of book publication, as for example Open Access.

De Vries, quoting the American Association of University Presses (www.aaupnet.org), states the value of university presses as follows:

 

 

 

-         University Presses add value to scholarly work through rigorous editorial development; professional copyediting and design; and worldwide dissemination.

-         University Presses, through the peer review process, test the validity and soundness of scholarship and thus maintain high standards for academic publication.

-         University Presses sponsor work in specialized and emerging areas of scholarship that do not have the broad levels of readership needed to attract commercial publishers.

-         University Presses make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty.

 

University presses have always been a service provider for the academic world, mostly in the HSS. In this respect Open Access publications are a very important new way of disseminating research, argues De Vries. It gives academics new possibilities to publish their research. De Vries mentions the Ithaka report. University presses need to look to the dissemination side, they need to make a renewed commitment to publishing. De Vries also refers to Robert Darnton’s pyramid model as set out in his article The new age of the book (from The New York Review of Books). The OAPEN project is a direct result of these two developments. De Vries also mentions the possibility to create an European University Press Association and plans that are being made in this respect.

 

In the afternoon session on the outreach of scholarly publishing, Stephen Barr from SAGE talked about SAGE’s experiments in Open Access publishing and their collaboration with Hindawi.

When it comes to Open Access Barr states that SAGEs mission is to be ‘the natural home for authors, editors and societies’. The journals landscape is changing however and we have to change with it. As Barr states, in order to maintain the high quality service they provide, SAGE has constantly embraced new technology and business models. And in the journal environment part of this is now Open Access. Barr talks about the different Open Access models and options, mentioning Open Archiving (Green OA, Mandates, Peer project), the hybrid option (SAGE Open) of which the take up so far has been limited and restricted to biomedical disciplines, funder policies such as the Wellcome Trust’s and many more funding agencies which are now allowing a portion of grants to be used for OA financing, and finally, gold Open Acces publishing: author side charges in the form of article processing charges. In this area PLoS and BioMed Central are of course the big players.

SAGE wanted to find a way to experiment with gold OA publishing that would not detract from its other priorities and would complement its existing operations. It decided, says Barr, to get into OA publishing through strategic partnerships, in this case with the Hindawi  publishing agency.

Barr mentions some reasons why SAGE partnered with Hinawi: synergy in organisational philosophy, low risk experiment with new business model, minimum organisational risk, access to Hindawi’s technology and low cost base, complementary, the advantage to Hindawi is SAGE’s reputation, marketing abilities and editorial reach and experience. Barr’s conclusion is that SAGE is embracing new business models and that this is necessary in order to keep up with developments.

 

 

Highlights from APM – Day 1

 

Last week, on the 19^th and 20^th of March, the first Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean Region (APM) conference was held, an offshoot of the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference, which was held for the fourth time last January in Berlin. Both conferences want to transgress the traditional sectoral boundaries that exist in scholarly communication, where the scholars, publishers, policy makers, middlemen and librarians all have their separate gatherings and meetings. APE and APM are independent and international conferences about all aspects of academic publishing, to foster knowledge exchange and dialogue between the different stakeholders in scholarly communication. The APM, held in Florence, specifically focused on the diversities and particularities of the Mediterranean region with its many languages and its focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and monographs. Culture, tradition, books and manuscripts are still very important in the Mediterranean region, as the opening speaker Augusto Marinelli (the rector of the University of Florence) remarks. However, electronic experiments and digitization projects are also inceasingly undertaken. These innovations are however taking place in the context of the current financial crisis, which is hitting hard on the Italian publishing and library industry, says Mauro Guerrini, from the Italian Library Association (AIB – Associazione Italiana Biblioteche). He states that where in a knowledge economy knowledge is the key to innovation and development, decreasing (library) resources and cutbacks in science and scholarly communication might be detrimental to the overall economic development.

 

One of the possible solutions to this impasse might lie in what Maria Cristina Pedicchio (President of the Technology District in Molecular Medicine and Professor of Algebra at the University of Trieste) calls private-public partnerships in research. Referring to the knowledge triangle from the Lisbon Strategy; research, education and innovation should lead to growth and jobs, as was the expected scenario. Public private partnerships could be a powerful tool for innovation in this respect. When knowledge and research are the key issues for economic and social development and governements do not invest in them, they will fall even further. We need to invest in research and human capital in order to stay competitive says Pedicchio. Part of the EU strategy is focused on clusterpolicies to develop innovative clusters. But there is no single model, we need different clusters operating in different models. The specific local aspects also play a large role. Pedicchio says that in order to obtain open innovation, we need open clusters. Innovation can only be created in visible dynamic environments, not in isolated organisations. For this to come about we need the support of the triple helix: academic research, private sectors and public administrations. Innovation depends on the interaction between strong academic research (universities), dynamic entrepreneurship and the availability of risk capital (private sector) as well as public administration.

 

Pedicchio goes on to discuss different kinds of cluster experiments in various European countries. From these experiments she concludes we need a multidisciplinary cultural approach. Pedicchio shows that these kind of collaborations can lead to the development of cultural open spaces which can foster and enhance research and innovation and can attract human resources, companies and financing.

 

The prerequisites for these kind of open collaborations, says Pedicchio, are the possibility of international and intersectional mobility, the availabilty of knowledge by means of open access policies for the dissemination of science and frontier knowledge, the investment in young people, and the dissemination of knowledge to society at large. We need to make national clusters but at the same time we need to try to integrate them. National policies need to be involved in this process, as locality is a physical request for clusters; they need to be local, physically based adhering to regional policies. This means a constant changing and adaption between European policies and national policies.

 

 The second keynote, delivered by Andrea Bozzi (Director of the Institute for Computational Linguistics) focused on the scholarly editing of old manuscripts in digital library collections by means of computational tools. Bozzi explained the connection between computer science and the tradition of text transmission, focussing especially on texts that are transmitted by manuscripts. As Bozzi explained, we can now make a model for digital philology, developing integrated tools for scholarly editing. This can lead to a new kind of historical publication which can be enriched and which adds new value to the publication which hitherto has been static. Bozzi asked what the dimension of these integrated tools can be for a new kind of library and its users. He mentioned several digital tools for scholarly editing, such as an integrated open source environment for images and/or texts, image enhancement (within this environment), text indexing and concordance (by means of free web services), collaborative textual criticism, stemmatology and NLP tools (lemmatization, morphological analysis, treebank construction, comparison, meaning extraction, etc.). These are all new tools for studying manuscript archives in a collaborative way. They need to be combined with scholarly editing criteria. An example of a digital annotation tool is the Pinakes Text-architecture, which is a web based relational database application (Pinakes was the first library catalogue system, developed in the Library of Alexandria by the Greek poet Callimachus of Cyrene). From the website:

“Pinakes is a non-commercial tool the aim of which is to offer a renewed historiographic approach to the classification of the scientific heritage. Thanks to the integration of different types of objects, such as instruments, manuscripts, texts, iconography a.o., Pinakes aims at transforming the traditional approach to the primary sources of the history of science into a sort of archeology of scientific knowledge.”

 

As Bozzi stated, it is a highly flexible system and can find its application in for example Greek papyrology, egyptology, Roman philology and general philology. It can also be applied to different languages and documents. As an example of what Pinakes can do as a tool for the textual criticism of Medieval manuscripts, Bozzi showed how it can for example link to collated sources. In this way one can make an analysis of the variants in the collated source. Differences and variants can be retrieved in the critical apparatus, which is a very important aspect of historical linguistics. Framing tools can remember the encoding and record the variants in the critical apparatus: in this way you have enriched the text by using these specific tools. This technique could also be applied to old print books says Bozzi, where one could find different editions and detect the differences between them.

 

 

In the future Bozzi wants to focus on the integration with other NLP tools and on the application of the system to cuneiform texts on tablets. Most importantly he wants to develop a way to export the edited texts, critical apparatuses, annotations and indexes, to a print publication under agreement with publising houses via POD.

Pinakles can become a specialized scholarly editing tool and an integrated web-based platform within the electronic publishing roadmap of Interedition (an interoperable, supranational infrastructure for digital editions). Bozzi reflected on what the role of libraries can be in building this infrastructure and which role publishers could play. For one, libraries also need to receive tools to offer them to their users. In this respect Bozzi argued that it is very important that we have standards for these kind of research infrastrucutres, also for primary sources.

The ultimate goal should be a digital infrastructure for the Humanities: we need to enrich the European research by cooperation and in this respect the setting of standards is fundamental, as Bozzi concludes.

 

 From the afternoon session on the Mediterranean region and its diversities I would like to focus on Andrea Angiolini’s (Società editrice il Mulino, Italy) lecture on The Darwin Project, a publishing infrastructure and working space for monographs & textbooks. As Angiolini argues, the differences between HSS and STM are fading out. This means new challenges for the publisher and new needs for our scholars and students. Angiolini clarifies that Mulino is a very traditional publisher, who believes that physical books are still the best thing to publish especially when it comes to reading them. In this respect Mulino is quite slow in the whole digital process. As Angiolini says, they would like to stay in between scholars, librarians and the market. However, something is gradually changing in Italy, both in the university and in the market. HSS research is increasingly moving from monographs to both monographs and journals and from a generalist approach to a more specialized one. There is also a visible shift from Italian to mixed language communication and from a less formal career and texts evaluation process to a more formalized one.

As the bookstores are buying less and acquisition budgets for libraries are decreasing, the break-even point for publishers is moving further away. This, combined with a research style that is increasingly being conducted online, has led Mulino, in order to stay effective (to reach a public, to service the scholar and the market) to move to the online domain and develop the Darwin (Digital Archive for Web Integrated Networks) project. Darwin is an integrated system for the online publication of digital editions. It can be seen as an infrastructure aimed at adding value to printed books. In this resepect Angiolini says it wants to meet the needs and demands of the users, based on standards.

 

Within the Darwin project, monographs will be published both in print and in digital editions. Abstracts and DOI will be added at the chapter level and all the books will be fully quotable. New is that texts are based on docbook and not on PDF, where docbook is a better format for searchability etc. It is a richer format that can do anything the paper can. Some more functions include opening and collapsing comments within the text. You can also interact with the text and annotate it and make the note public or private. You can search different parts of the publication and highlight certain parts (semantic search). In this respect Angiolini argues that Darwin is not only designed for reading and searching but also for studying and collaborating while doing research.You can make it into a workspace, with public or private note taking and public or private bookmarks. The project will be online in autumn 2009.

 

It will be an open project claims Angiolini, adoptable to different texts and formats, and different access models (though it will be based on and start off as a subscription model). As Angiolini states, if we want to publish research and be effective at the same time, we must take a mixed way, otherwise soon monographs will no longer exist. We are moving from contents to contents plus editorial services. This produces a new publishers profile.This change is almost mandatory if publishers want to be part of the solution and not of the problem in the digital age.

After Angiolini’s lecture a remark was made from the public, whether Angiolini thinks people would annotate (on) a propriatory platform? How to combine Darwin with other platforms and will Darwin be compatible with other publishers websites and will it let scholars mix their notes? Wouldn’t users rather use Zotero, or other browser based environments? Angiolini replied by stating that Darwin is still an experiment and that he does not know how scholars will exactly go about and use it.

 

Highlights from day 2 of APM will follow soon.

 

Highlights of APE 2009 – Day 2

On the second and final day of APE, Sebastian Mislej of the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, talked about videolectures.net, a website streaming online video lectures that can be viewed for free. All the content on videolectures.net is scientifically approved (it has been peer reviewed) so in its entirety it forms a complete scientific repository of free top conferences’ content. The site is hosted and supported by well known academic institutions, where some of the content partners and contributors are for instance MIT Open Course Ware, the Mellon Foundation and the University of Cambridge. The site makes use of semantic web applications and additional functionalities like streaming video with synchronized slides. They also add links to other resources. As Mislej states, the website functions as a learning culture, the links that are necessary to understand the topic will and can be added. In this way videolectures.net can be seen as a kind of scientific YouTube, a portal to high quality scientific video content on the web.

As Mislej explains, 99% off all people giving the lecture are very interested in putting their video online; they really want to put their videos online. Publishers of conference proceedings are also positive, since it is good promotion for their content. In the future videolectures.net will improve the web portal (redesign, improve navigation, automatic knowledge object linking), it will be extracting semantic information (speech indexing, text mining, video mining, automatic ontology construction, user tracking and profiling) and it will focus on solving some important issues regarding intellectual property on content, and problems regarding video formats, mobile platforms and accessibility.

 

Hans Pfeiffenberger, from the Helmholtz Association, gave a lecture on publishing data, focusing specifically on “Earth System Science Data”, a data publishing journal. As Pfeiffenberger stated, in polar research the incentive is to preserve the data and their meaning for centuries in the future. This data preservation is best done by publishing them. The question is how publishing can help comply with the requirement of quality assurance for research data. As Pfeiffenberger remarks there are of course different kinds of data and this means we will also need different methods to take care of them. According to him review guidelines for data should focus on originality, significance and data quality. The peer reviewers will have to look into the data itself and look at its quality and the connection to the article. Articles can then be seen as interpretations of the data.

Pfeiffenberger states that it is also important to have incentives for researchers to publish data. We need to have rewards for data publication, it needs to be citable and it needs to be part of the impact factor. And, as stated before, it needs to be quality assured data. Preservation and (open) access to data are also critical issues. The aim should be to reuse and reproduce the data. The data will be provided by the scientists but who will provide the infrastructure? And what about licensing and long-term preservation? Pfeiffenberger concludes that these are issues that we will need to consider in the future.

 

 

During the afternoon panel on Open Books, three panellists from the publishing world, Eelco Ferwerda from Amsterdam University Press, Frances Pinter from Bloomsbury Academic and Barbara Kalumenos from STM publishers, where asked to discuss two questions.

The first question focused on the Academic book in the digital age: What it is now and in 5 years – what will users expect?

Eelco Ferwerda first said a few introductory words about the OAPEN project and afterwards replied to the first question by stating that users will in the future expect to find, access and search within books online. He stated that it was Google that changed the whole idea of books for us. Because of Google, books have now become an integral part of the Internet and in this way have gained a new future. Now where is the book heading? Ferwerda recalls Robert Darnton’s pyramid model, in which the book is seen as a pyramid consisting of different layers: the book itself and comments, updates, e-learning, primary sources and datasets in other connected layers. Ferwerda gave the example of the Driver II project, focusing on enhanced publications, where research data, extra materials and post-publication data will be added to the primary publication. The moment scholars recognize the value of these types of additions, they will become the norm.

 

Frances Pinter from Bloomsbury Academic went on to compare the old publishing model with a new future model, The old model is based on printed content, on publishers as gatekeepers who verify and brand the work, and on publishers as bankers. In this model costs can be a barrier to dissemination together with a limited range of formats. In the new model however, she states that there can be multiple versions and formats of content, on different locations and channels. In this new model here will be competition with free versions and it will be uncertain who will pay for the publishing process.

One existing online business model revolves around publishers charging for the premium content and putting free content around the premium content in order to generate the traffic. Pinter asks what would happen if you inverted that model? What if you would offer the free premium content online (with a CC license) and then would charge for the activities around it, like the print edition and a variety of other services and activities.

According to Pinter, this is what academic authors will want because they do not need publishers anymore. Publishers need to find some new models that sustain the user needs whilst still upholding the quality added value system and rewarding structure.

 

Barbara Kalumenos from STM Publishers, states that STM has focused mostly on journals. The problem, as she sees it, with future forecasts when it comes to digital books has to do with the fact that there is still way too little hard factual material available on digitized books. She also states that the term books is way to general, we need to differentiate between textbooks, monographs etc. and then focus on these categories specific. What Kalumenos especially regrets is the lack of numbers on the amount of books that are already digitized. As she states, we need to do some basic empirical research on what the status quo is at the moment. Only then can we speculate what will happen in five years. And it also depends heavily on the discipline. The users however are in the centre of this development. What does the user want? The user wants its content easy, directly and with very few clicks, as Kalemunos remarks, you loose users after more than three clicks as user interaction research has shown. This kind of research can also show how the users search and interact with the material. Kalemunos doubts that monographs in HSS will only be used in digital environments, which means that web 2.0 tools will be developed for books too, but maybe not for the full catalogue of books. So she concludes that we should look at user behavior and what they expect of electronic books in the digital age.

 

During the discussion that followed after the first question remarks where made about the book format, the development to more article use and production in HSS and the possibility of the emergence of a middle category in between the article and the book.

Next to that the funding possibilities of monographs were discussed. As Eelco Ferwerda remarked, the book is different in this respect: the economic model of distributing books is becoming impossible. Academic publishers suffer selling proper monographs. An Open Access motive for books might be to come up with a new business model to keep the book alive as a research format. Frances Pinter made the point that with books, whether they are expensive or not, we need to look at, what are the actual costs of reading a book in print and online.

 The second question focused on Open Access publishing models for books:  How will they work, change scholarly communication and change the market?

Eelco Ferwerda starts by talking about the IMISCOE series. The basic Open Access model for this kind of series, he remarks, is a hybrid model, where on both focuses on online and print. The basic online edition is free and the printed edition is sold, where the author retains the copyright. OAPEN wants to expand this model; they want to develop a common approach or model to fund the Open Access edition, in collaboration with research councils. In their view a network is needed and funders need to see this as a service. Funding model will revolve around a fee for direct costs and revenues from additional services.

 

As Frances Pinter remarks, the situation for Bloomsbury Academic is rather different. Bloomsbury Academic is a commercial company so needs to cover its costs completely. Printing editions appear simultaneously with the online edition. They are offering traditional publishers service along with free online access and added value services.

As Pinter mentions, this is also a start up: additional added value services to sell around the content still need to be developed on top of that. What about licensing contracts? Authors do no longer need the publishers, so we will no longer have exclusive licenses between author and readers in both ways. The big question is whether people will really pay for the added services. According to Pinter that is a risk for the publisher to take. But who is going to fund the added value services that the publisher provides? Pinter asks what would happen if we would not see publishers as people who take the risk? What if they become more like the service arm for scholarly work? Pinter imagines an independent party that tenders between different publishers for a service contract to put in that added functionality. It would be a more streamlined system in this way according to her.

Barbara Kalumenos however remarks that putting a layer between publishers as Pinter says, might not work well in a system made up of all kinds of different country policies and it will probably only lead to extra bureaucracy. Kalumenos thinks more in the lines of Open Access as part of the research costs. Open Access should be paid as part of this process. Afterwards remarks were made concerning the degrading of the publisher in these kinds of new models from the value adding / risk taker to a service offering party. Important in this respect is the second process of reviewing for the commercial sustainability of a monograph. This also has an added value for it helps to bring out the better publications. What will happen with this when publishers will be service providers: what about the needed commercial filter to see if this book is fit to be published? Finally Eelco Ferwerda remarks that publishers will always be in competition for content, based on their reputation.

Highlights from APE 2009 – Day 1

The first day of the APE conference in Berlin, which, as mentioned before, focused on the impact of publishing in the digital age, started with a keynote by Georg Winkler from the European University Association (EUA), entitled Universities in the 21^st century. Winkler started off by asking the question of what makes an university unique, quoting Ralf Dahrendorf’s conception of a university as “a ragbag of institutions with no clearly defined boundaries and no substantive core”. After a historical overview of different types of universities and different kinds of university reform, Winkler asked what we want to achieve for the university of the 21^st century, which is now functioning more and more in a digital system. While sketching his vision for a future university, Winkler made a plea for the relevance of “open science” for knowledge societies. As Winkler states, in knowledge societies the bulk of new knowledge should be generated and disseminated via rapid publication by giving up the rights over it. This will not only facilitate the generation of further knowledge, but it will also help students to be equipped with the best and latest knowledge and it allows the latest results to feed into the innovation system. According to Winkler, open science is justified by the huge positive external effects it will have in knowledge societies. But as a counter note he states that this ideal can clash with the academia-business relations, and can create problems with the incentive to do research and to publish (the principal agent dilemma). Winkler however strives for coexistence of these matters. The question remains how to give incentives and set the mechanism in such a way without obstructing the scientific freedom of the researchers. Winkler concludes that the future definition of universities can be seen as the outcome of these kind of discussions.

 

A nice flashback to the preconference day occurred with yet another lecture on the Semantic web, as the second keynote lecture was delivered by Rudi Studer from the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) on Semantic web applications and tools. Studer starts by comparing the classical web, which focuses on humans as consumers of (semi-structured) content and in which the meaning of information is not accessible to computers and search is keyword-based, with the semantic web, which publishes data in structured and linked formats, specifies the meaning of data and their relationships with formal models (ontologies) (meaning that application systems of computers are able to understand, capture and process the meaning ) and focuses on technical standards as set out by the W3C.

 

Studer goes on to discuss RDF (Resource Description Framework) as a common data model of the Semantic web. RDF gives a natural representation of all kinds of data and it is graph based, which means it is made for integration. The Semantic web can thus be seen as a global database, as a web of data and data models and the interlinks between them. Data integration can than take place using triples. They allow information to be combined in a very flexible way. The question now is how to generate these triples? Studer explains that we can generate semantic web content by using semantic wikis. He states that Web 2.0 approaches can be used to generate ontologies in a Semantic MediaWiki. Through this Semantic MediaWiki you can specify the specific property in the RDF and than connect it in the ontology, which allows you to add semantic annotations to the wiki content. In this way mashups can be created in a Semantic MediaWiki. The Web 3.0 thus becomes a big knowledge mesh connecting people and information to create and share knowledge. Using semantic wikis enables the producing of semantic content collaboratively and more easily.

 

 

Creative Commons also uses powerful semantic models which allows search for works based on their licenses and allows for precise definitions of desired rights (e.g commercial use etc…). This can of course be very helpful to help solve the problems coined on integration and standardization of licenses at the preconference day.

 

 

In the second session, on usage and impact, Ian Rowlands (CIBER Group) talked about Electronic journals: modeling journal spend, use and research outcomes. CIBER is a research group at the University College London (UCL) that studies the digital transition to scholarly communication and more in specific scientist’s information behavior in this respect. What do scientists do online? How do they behave and how do they use the online content? They conducted a study framed around two very important research questions:

 

How have researchers responded to the unprecedented levels and convenience of access to scholarly journals?

How has enhanced access to the literature affected the research process and research outcomes?

 

According to the study, Google is hugely popular and influential, it is the first choice of preference for scholars and so it drives a lot of content to journals. Opening up journal content to Google is thus a way to get more traffic to your journal. Now does this continued or enhanced access lead to greater productivity, Rowlands asks? According to the study, the work activity of researchers increasingly goes on beyond the working week. Working days becomes elongated and one third of the searches on which the study was based were made outside the working week. What does this mean: does this mean scholars are much more pressurized? Does this mean that information consumption and production are in some way related to each other? Is there a link between efficient search and successful research? According to Roland we still need to explore these questions more thoroughly. What was clear however from the study, was that the most successful research institutions tend to use gateways more often and this is reflected in much shorter sessions on the publishers platform. Does this mean that super-users are also super-producers? Yes, says Rowlands, they found a tentative link between e-journal consumption and research outcomes. Rowlands concludes by mentioning that this is still a preliminary report, primarily used also to frame (upcoming) questions for the stakeholders in scholarly communication. The study will be published on the CIBER website in 4 weeks.

 

Highlights of the second day of APE will follow soon.

Highlights from APE 2009 – Preconference Day

From the 19^th to the 21^st of January I was in Berlin to visit this magnificent city and to go to the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference. From their website:

 

“APE Conferences encourage the debate about the future of scientific publications, information dissemination and access to scientific results. They offer an independent forum for ‘open minds’ with a free exchange of opinions and experiences between all stakeholders.”

 

This year’s edition was themed “The impact of publishing”. The Preconference day, which focused on information competence, was organized by Anthony Watkinson of University College London and Matthias Wahls of Brill Academic Publishers. I will focus here on what I deemed the most interesting parts. The first panel was on Licensing: collective and specific and featured Wilma Mossink from SURF and Marc Bide the incoming director of EDItEUR, who both talked about licensing schemes. Mossink focused on national and international initiatives and possibilities for cooperative licensing schemes and frameworks like Knowledge Exchange (a cooperation of JISC, DEFF, SURF and DFG) to enhance access to scholarly information on the Internet. These initiatives want to help out the smaller publishers who don’t have much money and time to invest. Knowledge Exchange serves as an umbrella organization aimed at supporting the use and development of ICT infrastructure.

 

Where Mossink went on to discuss initiatives like AGORA and HINARI and different Open Access frameworks for licensing models, Mark Bide focused mainly on the challenge of how to communicate these licenses in their new technical environment. Problems like correct interpretations of licenses and how to express licenses in machine-readable forms in order to support machine to machine communication (especially important when using a search engine like Creative Commons when searching for certain kinds of CC licensed material) are important to consider. The goal is to communicate clearly what you can and can’t do with the digital content the license refers to. Bide stressed that we need a method of communicating publishers policies that is flexible and extensive and that supports any (future) business model. Because, he warns, if publishers don’t care about communicating licenses, nobody will, especially not the search engines.

One of these publisher initiated initiatives is ACAP: Automated Content Access Protocol, which was launched in 2007. This is an initiative that focuses on machine to machine licensing (where for instance Creative Commons focuses on machine to person licensing communication). Like Creative Commons, ACAP is a general protocol for all kinds of content where initiatives like ONIX (books) and PLUS (photography) are more sectoral.

Bide argues that the need for standardization of licensing protocols, particularly of their semantics, needs to be recognized. Convergence is needed: there are too many standards and we need to get them out of their sectoral seclusions. It is all about the communication of licenses and permissions, not about their enforcement. This convergence of standards applies also to Open Access licenses, which are creating difficulties on how to define open access. We need to make clear with which particular kind of license content is truly Open Access and with what license it is not.

 

Another interesting panel focused on Discovery: helping users find what is appropriate and featured Jan Velterop. He focused on what one can do to make scientific literature even more useful. Since we have access to too much information, we need to find a way to navigate the information. In order to do this, we need to connect elements of knowledge to each other: we need to publish articles and visualizations.

This requires new skills, not only for the researcher (who needs to become a real knowledge worker), we also need a change in culture. Velterop argues that we need to focus on concepts: it’s all about concepts (and thus about meaning) and not about keywords. He mentions for instance the word ‘Jaguar’. As a keyword this refers to both cars and animals. If you focus on the concept you take out the ambiguity. Now, when you search for information you want to connect these concepts. This is what, as Velterop explains, semantic relationships and semantic highlighting do. Concepts are interconnected and interlayered. Velterop’s company, Knewco, offers a free service that does exactly that, so he states.

From the Knewco website:

 

“Where search engines are concerned with the whereabouts of information, Knewco is concerned with the meaning, significance and connection between elements of knowledge. Knewco offers – free – services based on putting knowledge from different and disparate sources together, in a conceptually coherent and consistent way. The knowledge is disambiguated, redundancies are removed, and keywords and terms are normalized into concepts.”

 

As Velterop explains in his lecture, Knewco wants to remove the ambiguity and redundancy. They do this by making so called ‘smart triplets’ in concept spaces on an ontological, observational and hypothetical level. Velterop argues that by using this functionality, scientific publishers can add semantic functionality to their material by way of highlighting.

As Velterop concludes: the basic idea is just to make relationships between stuff, to bring back the serendipity, enabling you to find the things you did not even know you were searching for. This introduces new ways of thinking about information and this technology can have direct consequences also for the way researchers might be writing their articles in the future. You can find more about Knewco here and here.

 

More information about the APE conference will follow soon.