Scholarly Communication Disruption and Transition

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Scholarly CommunicationDisruption and Transition

• CS 431 20040412
• Carl Lagoze Cornell University

Acknowledgements Les Carr Herbert Van de
Sompel MacKenzie Smith Paul Ginsparg
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Disruptive Technologies

• C.M. Christensen. The Innovators Dilemma When
  new Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.
  Harvest Business School Press, 1997.
• Failure of established organizations to adopt and
  react to new technologies
• Current success and quality is not a predictor of
  the future
• Characteristics of disruptive technologies
• Initially underperform established products
• Enable new applications for new customers
• Performance improves rapidly

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Encyclopedia Britannica

• Two centuries of tradition as the most scholarly
  and complete of English-language encyclopedias
• Confronted with lower quality but more accessible
  and cheaper CD-ROM encyclopedias
• Business model collapsed almost instantly

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Scholarly Communication vs. Popular Publishing

• Small, uniform author reader community
• Authors and readers often the same
• Reliance on volunteerism and community
  responsibility
• Short-term readership interest

• Diverse and relatively large author reader
  community
• Distinction between authors and readers
• Money and fame are motivating factors
• Interest often persists

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Why do scholars publish?

• It is the tangible product of our work
• Our funders expect it big publication lists
  always look good on reports
• It is our responsibility to our colleagues
• It is good for our egos
• It is the/a key to tenure, promotion, and hiring

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In a world ruled by publish or perish, what
perishes first, it turns out, are trees and
library budgets. Policy Perspectives To Publish
and Perish
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How the system works
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Who are the role players

• Scholars
• Faculty
• Researchers Commercial, Academic, Government
  Labs
• Publishers
• Big for-profits Elsevier, Kluwer,
  Springer-Verlag
• Learned and Professional Societies
• ACM, APS, AMS
• Publishing operations often subsidize other
  operations
• Some are hard to differentiate from for-profit
  publishers e.g., IEEE
• Libraries
• In paper system the sole distribution point for
  publications

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Scholarly publishing is extremely hierarchical
Premier Sources
Second Tier
Might as well be People
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Twin Peaks Problem
Harvards
Access
Impact
Have-Nots
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Issues and Changes

• Exponentially increasing amount of information
  produced by scholars
• Growth in both dimensions
• Horizontal
• Increased specialization
• New and more specialized journals
• 5000 peer reviewed journals in education research
• Vertical
• Diminish single source reliance
• Facilitate multi-uses for single source
• Compressed time for relevance of results,
  increased demand for rapid delivery

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Broken Economics
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Some reflections on subscription prices

• Average journal subscription price has gone up
  7-10 over the past 10 years
• Some journals have gone up 20-40 of the past 5
  years!!!
• Some journals cost 5K-10K per year
• Many societies have raised subscription prices
  20-25 over the past several years
• Catch up to the private publishers
• Fund research into digital initiatives
• Cover the rest of their operations
• Elseviers price rise per year equates to one
  less faculty member per year (according to Bill
  Arms)
• http//www.earlham.edu/peters/fos/newsletter/04-0
  2-04.htm

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Assumptions in current scholarly publishing system

• Publications are difficult to produce
• Publications are difficult to distribute
• Readership is by closed community
• Archiving and management is by closed community

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Some side effects of the current system

• Rich get Richer!
• Global scholarly divide worsens
• Research institutions in developing countries
  cant afford subscriptions
• Intellectual capital flees
• Hierarchy gets more stratified
• Unpublished papers disappear
• Entry into the system is difficult

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Per article costs and revenues
Acks. P. Ginsparg
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Where are the costs in the print system

• Publishers
• Copy-editing
• Production
• Administration of review system
• Production
• Distribution
• Libraries
• Cataloging
• Preservation
• Binding
• Shelving

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What do these economics tell us?

• Distribution in electronic system is basically
  free
• Fundamental assumption of paper system is
  eliminated
• Publishing by everyone should be encouraged and
  supported
• Services need to be disambiguated from
  distribution
• Free distribution doesnt mean that there isnt
  an economic model
• Systems like review, filtering, awareness can be
  built on top of a free distribution system

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Acks. P. Ginsparg
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What are the implications of this model?

• A marketplace of ideas
• People choose appropriate entry points into the
  system
• Troll for free at the lowest layers
• Pay for guided entry at upper layers
• Money can be made for synthesizing information
• Standards for interchange amongst layers are
  important (e.g., OAI-PMH)

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Signs of Change - Readers
theres a sense in which the journal articles
prior to the inception of the electronic
abstracting and indexing database may as well not
exist, because they are so difficult to find.
Now that we are starting to see full-text
showing up online, I think we are very shortly
going to cross a sort of critical mass boundary
where those publications that are not instantly
available in full-text will become kind of
second-rate in a sense, not because their quality
is low, but just because people will prefer the
accessibility of things they can get right
away. Clifford Lynch 1997
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Signs of Change - Publishers

• Electronic versions of existing journals
• Licensing arrangements to libraries
• http//campusgw.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/dj.cgi
  ?sectionejournalURLSerialsSearch
• Problems
• License bundling
• Inflate costs and maintain economic model
• Force libraries to subscribe regardless of
  interest
• Longevity dependent on license continuity
• Specialty portals
• Scirus (http//www.scirus.com)

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Signs of Change - Publishers

• Electronic Journals
• D-Lib Magazine http//www.dlib.org
• Journal of Digital Information (JODI)
  http//journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/jodi/
• Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP)
  http//www.press.umich.edu/jep/
• The economic models are not established

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Signs of Change Publishers and Libraries

• JSTOR
• http//www.jstor.org
• Recognition of reality
• Archival journal storage is expensive for
  libraries
• Shelf space crisis forces libraries to choose
  between
• Keeping archival issues to serials
• Continuing subscriptions for new issues
• Building expensive new buildings
• Archival copies have limited economic value to
  publishers
• Cooperative non-profit model among
  publishers/foundation (Mellon)/libraries
• Sliding window to digitize old issues of serials
  and provide ready access services

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Signs of Change Libraries Professional
Societies

• HighWire Press http//highwire.stanford.edu
• Realities
• Many professional societies and journals are Mom
  Pop operations
• Technical and economic cost of electronic
  publishing is often prohibitively high
• Solution
• Highwire acts as a brokering service to provide
  electronic publishing technology for small
  professional societies and journals
• Pooling technology allows creation of higher
  level services (e.g., reference linking amongst
  journals)

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Signs of Change - Scholars

• Eprint respositories
• Author-self archiving gives scholars control over
  their intellectual output
• Harnads subversive proposal
• Direct descendant of traditional pre-print
  sharing in print form among scholars
• Examples
• arXiv http//arxiv.org
• ePrints http//www.eprints.org
• California Digital Library scholarly publishing
  archive - http//repositories.cdlib.org/
• Related Issues
• Publisher agreements some journals refuse to
  publish anything that has been posted as an eprint

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E-Prints Publishing Timeline
An article is not a single event. Technical
Report Conference Paper Journal Article
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Signs of Change Computer Scientists

• Automatic creation of traditional journal
  services
• ResearchIndex http//researchindex.org
• Selective web crawling to gather CS resources
• Heuristics and AI techniques to establish
  services
• Searching
• Reference linking
• Research in automatic reviewing techniques
• Collaborative quality filtering
• http//www.cs.berkeley.edu/tracyr/project/
• Scientometrics
• Paper ranking by citation analysis

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Signs of Change Institutional Repositories

• Institution-based
• Scholarly material in digital formats
• Cumulative and perpetual
• Open and interoperable
• DSpace (http//www.dspace.org)
• Institutional Repository for MIT facultys
  digital research materials
• MIT Libraries - Hewlett Packard Research Labs
  collaborative development project
• Open Source system
• Federated system
• Preservation archive

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DSpace Technology - Standards-based

• Modular architecture, well-defined APIs
• 100 open source
• Programmed in java
• RDBMS and SQL for metadata
• CNRI handles for persistent identifiers
• X.509 certificate-based access control
• OpenURL linking
• OAI-PMH for exposing metadata

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DSpace Technology Stack

• Apache, Tomcat, OpenSSL/mod_ssl
• Java 1.3, JSP 1.2, Servlet 2.3
• PostgreSQL 7, JDBC (rdbms)
• CNRI Handle System 5 (persistent ids)
• Lucene 1.2 (index/search)
• Jena (RDF History system)
• JUnit (testing), Log4j (logging)
• HP/UX, Linux, Solaris, etc.