Open science: change is coming to how scientists communicate research findings

Image via WikipediaAuthor - art designer at PLoS, I converted a pdf into svg http://www.plos.org/

How Scientists Communicate Affects How Research Results Are Applied …as FDA approved drugs, nutrition values, violence prevention, and climate change models

Past blog postings (see below) here have often touched on the difficulties of  obtaining recent scientific and medical findings in original biomedical articles.  Most of these research articles are only found in journals that charge high annual subscription rates ($600.00/ year and up) or an access fee of about $20.00 per article.

Not only is this pricing arrangement making it difficult for scientists to get needed information, but it is becoming nearly impossible for even university and research libraries to buy subscription to the journals their customers want. Additionally article authors must pay publication fees to the journals which range from $1,000  to $5,000 per article.

Most stakeholders (researchers, librarians, publishing companies) believe that the relatively high costs of publishing articles is a major flaw of the current publishing system. These publishing costs used to be born by the researcher in centuries past and were relatively cheap and involved much fewer scientists in tight knit groups. But with the sheer numbers of those wanting information, the many biomedical specialities, and the sophistication of article content (images, videos, and audios), the cost per article has dramatically risen.

Some related statistics (from the posting How many science journals at Science Intelligence and InfoPros)

• Estimation: <> 25-40,000 journals
• 96% are published online
• 8-10% are published under Open Access models
• 20% of science articles are available free of charge
• How many articles have been published ever (means since 1665)? est. 50 millions
• Growth: 1.4 million of articles per year
• There are 2,000 publishers but Top 3 (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley)  account for 42% of articles published

The open science model is one initiative which may reduce costs and increase readership. This approach may well also drastically reduce the time from article completion by the scientist to article publication. It is currently not uncommon for an article in a peer reviewed journal to take up to  1 1/2 years to be published after submission.

In a recent New York Times article (Cracking Open the Scientific Process), the conservative culture of science is outlined, as well as the plausibility of using social media as vehicles of communicating research results. The article also summarizes another fear of scientists. While social media is a less costly and speedier way to communicate research approaches and results, it currently lacks the quality control and trustability of the peer review process in selecting and editing articles for publication.

While Open Science overwhelmingly is geared for  scientist participation only, the way scientists communicate does ultimately affect the application of research. Examples in consumer health  include the drugs we take, the way treatments are prescribed, and the make up of a well balanced diet.  Current questions about the Open Science model include how wise is the scientific equivalent of crowdsourcing? and who will pay for the costs involved and how much?

Some excerpts from the article

The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”

Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and thePublic Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers….

…a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity…

  …On Thursday [January 19] , 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, “because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.”…

…[The Research Gate] Web site is a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and “like” and “follow” buttons (but without baby photos, cat videos and thinly veiled self-praise). Only scientists are invited to pose and answer questions — a rule that should not be hard to enforce, with discussion threads about topics like polymerase chain reactions that only a scientist could love….

Related past postings at Health and Medical News…

• The White House Calls for Information on Public Access to Publications and Data  (via The Scholarly Kitchen)
• Many NIH-funded clinical trials go unpublished over two years after completion (with ClinicalTrials.gov link for many trial study results)
•  Impact of free access to the scientific literature, including empowerment of health care consumers

Related articles (basically an indicator of how hot this topic is)

• ‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration – Thomas Lin via NYTimes.com (stoweboyd.com)
• Advocates For Open Science Say Systemic Change Is Inevitable (keptup.typepad.com)
• Cracking Open the Scientific Process (InnovationToronto.com)
• ‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration (nytimes.com)
• ‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration (nytimes.com)
• Open science: change is coming… (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
• ‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration – NYTimes.com (policyabcs.wordpress.com)
• Open science: why is it so hard? (downes.ca)
• Open science: why is it so hard? (lemire.me)
• Michael Nielsen: SPARC Innovator [Confessions of a Science Librarian] (scienceblogs.com)
• Taking a Closer Look at Peer Review (r-bloggers.com)
• I’m on peer review strike! (ucfagls.wordpress.com)
• Cracking Open the Scientific Process (3quarksdaily.com)
• University PR offices need to make peer review process clear (jodymacpherson.wordpress.com)
• The Research Works Act: Is It Time For a Rally To Restore Sanity? (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)
• Open Science And The Econoblogosphere (krugman.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Elsevier and Federation of Biochemical Societies Launch New Journal: FEBS Open Bio (prnewswire.com)
• Scientists, Share Your Secrets Or Lose Funding (junkscience.com)
• Publishing and the open-access model (bindingobsession.com)
• How many science journals? (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
• Are publishers the enemies of science? (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)

Bad science hunters

From the article Bad science hunters at the blog  Health Services Authors

I discover on the web many of those bad science hunters whose ultimate goal is to spread the knowledge of scientist’s misconducts, false statements and false results, methods or contents.

In their blogs they point the responsibilities of bad authors.

Retraction watch unmasks the articles retracted for a wide range of reasons.

Embargo watch describe the cases where authors had already published their data without telling it to the editor.

Abnormal science blog is a German blog (in English) dedicated to bad behaviour in science.

Rédaction Médicale et Scientifique is a French blog describing the bad habits of the medical scientific writing.

The Gary Schwitzer’s blog reveals the marketing and advertising hidden behind the appearance of science and tackles the disease mongering.

I respect highly all those persons involved for the best interest of science in a daily battle against bad science. Their disinterested independence is a shield in a world of egoism, financial and political greed and protect us against those who misrepresent scientific facts for political or financial gain.

Related articles

• Correcting Bad Science (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)

Elsevier wants to create an incubation environment

From the 8 August 2011 Science Intelligence and InfoPros blog posting

In this podcast from Copyright Clearance Center, Rafael Sidi, Elsevier talks about a new app ecosystem.

Sidi explains that “as a scientific publishing company, we are moving to a solution space and we don’t want to be just an information provider, but we want to also provide solutions to our customers, to our market… We want to go to the community, collaborate with the community and build the solutions together with the community.”

In order to have their “data easily remixable, reusable,” they are “going to the crowd.  We are letting them play with our data and build on top of our data stuff that they need to build, because at the end, scientists and researchers, they know their problem better than us.”

With the main goal to accelerate science, Elsevier reaches out to the community in hopes to collaborate to find new solutions. “We want to create an incubation environment for the scientific and research community.  [In some case], we providing some seed funding to startup companies… Our goal for the future, definitely, we want to create an Elsevier incubation environment.”

The podcast and transcript are available at:

 http://beyondthebookcast.com/exploring-apps-ecosystem/

 http://beyondthebookcast.com/wp-images/SidiTranscript.pdf

Related articles

• New Study on Integrated Oil Reservoirs Pushes Science Forward (prweb.com)
• Elsevier Announces Winners of the Executable Paper Grand Challenge (prnewswire.com)
• Elsevier Introduces Genome Viewer (prnewswire.com)
• Elsevier Upgrades Illumin8, Enhancing Access To Critical Information At The Front End Of Innovation (dailymarkets.com)
• New: Elsevier Enriches Online Articles with Google Maps ” INFOdocket (infodocket.com)

Journal of Visualized Experiments

The Journal of Visualized Experiments is a peer reviewed, PubMed indexed journal devoted to the publication of biological, medical, chemical and physical research in a video format.

The editors believe that videos of techniques and procedures will greatly aid scientists in learning and keeping abreast of new advancements in scientific methods. They will be able to focus their time and thought more on other experimental aspects and thus speed up the process from hypothesis generating to publication.

Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research (A Unique Public Debate Site)

Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research (British Library)

[From the About Page] “Showcasing some never-seen-before research tools, thought-provoking content and futuristic design in as fully interactive research environment, Growing Knowledge aims to challenge our audiences on how research is changing and ask what they want to experience from the library of the future.”

All are welcome to be part of the conversations and  ongoing discussions through surveys, blogs, and Twitter.
Scholars, information science specialists, and other commentators are part of the conversations, a unique feature among online science discussions open to all.

Current Projects are library, scientist, and information science based, as the British Library Search Catalog,  Nature Network, and the Journal of Visualized Experiments.

 

 

“This website has engaging and thoughtful conversations about what research will be like in the coming years and decades, and that’s what won us over at the Scout Report. The conversations with scholars, information science specialists, and other commentators distinguish this site from others. Visitors are encouraged to chime in via the Twitter feed here and they can also follow posts by “Researcher in Residence” Aleks Krotoski. Also, don’t miss the “Explore the Projects” area where people can have management research updates sent right to their desktop.

How will research change and evolve in the 21st century? It’s a broad question, and the British Library has created this website to offer insight into the world of innovative research tools. First-time visitors will want to watch the video on the homepage that features commentary by various scholars and professionals on “The Modern Library”, “Information Overload”, and “Digital Research”. All of the offerings on the website complement an existing in situ exhibit that includes multimedia research stations and a “collaborative zone”. In the “Start Researching” area of the site, visitors can look at standout examples of recent collaborative digital projects that push the contemporary boundaries of research. Further along, visitors shouldn’t miss the “Tools” area which brings together high-quality online tools that can make the research process much easier and streamlined. Finally, the site is rounded out by a range of social media tools that users can use to stay on top of the latest posts and materials added to this site.

Related articles

• British Library partners with Google to bring European history online (preternaturalpost.com)
• British Library Encloses the Public Domain (opendotdotdot.blogspot.com)

Making Scientific Research Accessible to All

 

Melissa Hagemann. Photo: Laura Brahm for the Open Society Foundations

 

 

[Related to recent posting here Access to Knowledge for Consumers]

Excerpts from the interview with Melissa Hagemann about the Open Access Movement.
She is program manager in the Open Society Foundations Information Program. She’s also on the advisory board of theWikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia

What is “Open Access”?

Open Access refers to the free online availability of research literature. It was first defined at a meeting organized by the Open Society Foundations in 2001, which led to the Budapest Open Access Initiative.  This initiative outlined two strategies for developing OA:

• Open Access Journals, which are journals, freely available worldwide, which do not rely upon the traditional subscription-based business model to generate their revenue; and
• Open Repositories, or archives where all scholarly research articles published by those associated with a university or within a discipline can be deposited.

In 2003, we added a third strategy, which is to advocate for public access to publicly funded research.

What are some of the most notable accomplishments of the open access movement so far?

Probably the single most important victory was a mandate adopted by the U.S. Congress which stipulates that all research funded by the National Institutes of Health (about $29 billion annually) be made freely available online.

While the NIH is the largest funder of research in the world, the OA movement has worked with governments and universities throughout the world to adopt similar mandates, and today there are 230 of them. In addition, there are over 5,500 OA journals and over 1,700 open repositories.

What major obstacles does the movement face at this moment?

As Open Access is so new, one of our main challenges is simply raising awareness of it and explaining the benefits of this new model.  At the same time, you can imagine that many within the publishing industry haven’t always been keen supporters of OA.

But I’m curious: How can the publishing industry benefit from Open Access? Wouldn’t they say they need the money to continue publishing? How do you persuade them that OA is a good thing?

While OA journals are freely available online, about half of them charge a processing fee (anywhere from $500 to $3,000 or so) per article. So there are commercial OA journal publishers which are doing quite well. Actually one of the largest OA publishers, BioMed Central, was purchased by Springer (the second largest scientific journal publisher) in 2008, and Springer pledged to keep all of the journals OA.

How can others get involved in advancing the issue?

Participating in an event during OA week is a great way to start! Then I would suggest learning more about OA, and OASIS is one of the best resources for information on the OA movement.

• If you’re a student, I recommend connecting with the Right to Research Coalition.
• If you’re an academic, you can self-archive copies of your research articles in your institutional repository or submit your article to anOA journal. You can also advocate for your institution to adopt an OA mandate at your university; 230 mandates have been adopted worldwide (see www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup).
• If you’re in a developing or transition country, the EIFL Open Access Program offers a wealth of support and services for librarians, academics, policymakers, and funders in these countries to tap into.
• If you’re based in the United States, you can support the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, which advocates for public access to publicly funded research in the U.S.