Perspectives in Scientific Communication: Publishing in Transition

Alexander GrossmannHTWK Leipzig &ScienceOpen

DPG Annual MeetingRegensburg, 7. März 2016

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Too much information?

Over 2m new papers per year in STM only

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Too much information?

…and about 4m submissions per year…

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Scientific Publishing: Present Status

� Problems:

� too much information

� slow publication process & high rejection rates

� anonymous & non-transparent reviewing process

� no credits for reviewers

� expensive subscription pricing

� IF-driven „glamorous journals“ (R. Schekman)

� …

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Scientific Publishing: Present Status?

R. Schekman:

The Guardian

Dec 9 (2013)

Is this the present status…?

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Scientific Publishing: Present Status?

R. Schekman:

The Guardian

Dec 9 (2013)

…do we need a new culture of sharing?

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New culture of sharing…

Sharing rather than

ownership:

the new normal for

the next generation.

Creative Commons

CC-BY licenses

supports sharing vs.

ownership model of

copyright.

Image Credit: Bike Sharing Shanghai, John Flickr CC-BY

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New culture of sharing…

Social Networks

Communities

Crowd-sourcing

Open DataOpen Access

Repositories

Altmetrics

Open Peer Review

Science 2.0

Could we use this in science?

Perspectives in Scientific Publishing DPG Regensburg 2016

CC0 Pixabay

Alexander Grossmann

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Publishing in transition...

1991 2000 2005 2008 2010 2012 2014

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Publishing in transition...

� Ways to publish research today

� Directories (linking lists)

� Repositories or pre-print server

� OA journals (subject-based)

� Journal databases (‚mega journals‘)

� Aggregation networks

How about scientific communication?

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Scientific Communication today…

Peer Review

Scientists

= Authors

= Readers

= Reviewers

?

?

?

?

How to set up such a novel workflow?

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Scientific Communication today…

Peer Review

Scientists

= Authors

= Readers

= Reviewers

?

?

?

?

Scientific communication tomorrow…?

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Scientific Communication tomorrow…?

arXiv

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Scientific Communication tomorrow…?

arXiv

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Scientific Communication tomorrow…?

arXiv

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Scientific Communication tomorrow…?

arXiv

Dr. C. Conrad

Overlay journal principle

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� Concept in principal discussed byTimothy Gowers

� University of Cambridge, UK

� Fields Medal 1998

� Elsevier Boycott 2012 (Cost of Knowledge project)

� Massively collaborative Math project Nature 461 879 (2009)

� Ideas: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/how-might-we-get-to-a-new-

model-of-mathematical-publishing/.

� Launched Discrete Analysis 2016 as an arXiv-based overlay journalhttps://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv-overlay-journal

Overlay Journal Principle

Quality assessment: peer review

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� Concept in principal discussed byTimothy Gowers

� University of Cambridge, UK

� Fields Medal 1998

� Elsevier Boycott 2012 (Cost of Knowledge project)

� Massively collaborative Math project Nature 461 879 (2009)

� Ideas: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/how-might-we-get-to-a-new-

model-of-mathematical-publishing/.

� Launched Discrete Analysis 2016 as an arXiv-based overlay journalhttps://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv-overlay-journal

Overlay Journal Principle

Public post-publication peer review

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� Open and public process

� Fully transparent:

� Who?

� Which experience?

� What?

� Comments and Replies are openly shared

� Reviewing not limited to a narrow time frame

� Report can be cited (credited by DOI)

� Reviewer is acknowledged

Post-publication peer review (PPPR)

N. Kriegeskorte: Front Comput Neurosci. 6 (2012) 1–18

Concept has been deployed at ScienceOpen

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� Concept has been implemented for all disciplines

at ScienceOpen

Overlay Journal and PPPR Principle

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Case study: ScienceOpen

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� ScienceOpen is a next generation Open Access indexing platform

� Aggregating arXiv and journal content

� Over 11 million article records yet

� 2m open access articles with full text

� All articles are open forpublic post-publication peer reviewing (PPPR)

� Further information provided per article: � # social mentions (Altmetric)

� # open access citations (Open Citation Index)

� related articles (Discovery section)

Case study: ScienceOpen

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ScienceOpen … discuss + review

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ScienceOpen … user profiles

Does post-publication peer review work?

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ScienceOpen … peer review statistics

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Sort by rating, citations, altmetric,…

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ScienceOpen … peer review statistics

…to find relevant papers – for you/your peers

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ScienceOpen … peer review statistics

…or to set up or curate your Collection

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ScienceOpen… start a Collection

Collections: how does it work?

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� Editor(s) can start a Collection on ScienceOpen

� Selecting papers from a list of over 11m articlerecords yet (arXiv plus PMC)

� Commenting these papers as Editor

� Invite peers to review (or wait for volunteers)

� Examples:

� Topical Collections

� Conference Collections

� Poster Collections…

ScienceOpen… Collections

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ScienceOpen… Poster Collection DPG‘15

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ScienceOpen… Paul Drude Institute

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Collections

CC-BY SA 3.0 Wikimedia by Acdx

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� A new way to filter content

� Independent of journal or publisher

� Filtering to narrow complexity of current researchoutcome in different aspects: topic, institution,…

� Not pre-selective but consists of those papers which arerelevant to your peers

� Flexible: not limited by (publication) dateand resource (journal) but a ‚living‘ list

� Incorporate existing resources as (OA) journals, pre-print servers or repositories (non-redundancy)

� Engages transparent and open quality assessment: public post-publication peer review process (PPPR)

� To replace classical journals…?

Collections: Advantages

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� A new way to filter content

� Independent of journal or publisher

� Filtering to narrow complexity of current researchoutcome in different aspects: topic, institution,…

� Not pre-selective but consists of those papers which arerelevant to your peers

� Flexible: not limited by (publication) dateand resource (journal) but a ‚living‘ list

� Incorporate existing resources as (OA) journals, pre-print servers or repositories (non-redundancy)

� Engages transparent and open quality assessment: public post-publication peer review process (PPPR)

� To replace classical journals…?

Collections: Advantages

Principle of future scientific communication?

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Scientific Publishing: Perspectives

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Literature

www.scienceopen.com/collection/Science20

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Scientific Publishing: Perspectives

Traditional Publishing Current Trends

journals = content containers interdisciplinary databasefor specific discipline = „megajournal“ or Collections

IF does not provide information article level metrics (altmetrics)about relevance of research

no data available open data

limiting article type to open to reproduction papersoriginal or „new“ research and negative results studies

static publication „living“ document; versioning

closed peer-review open evaluation; anonymous reviewers post-publication peer-review

no credits for reviewer acknowledgement of reviews

no interaction between (open) communication andauthors and readers active feedback

content is paywalled open access (OA)

library pays for APCs paid by governmentaljournal subscriptions or institutional funding partners

authors prefer prestigous andhighly ranked journals to publish ?

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Thank you!

Alexander GrossmannProf. Dr. rer. nat.

HTWK LeipzigUniversity of Applied Sciences

@SciPubLab

Alexander.Grossmann@htwk-leipzig.de