From: OpenCafe-l <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Toby Green (He - Him)
Sent: Monday, March 4, 2024 4:49 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [OPENCAFE-L] European Policy Shifts

On 4 Mar 2024, at 12:45, Jean-Claude Guédon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

Now that we have all read To by's anecdote - one institutional example - are we going to treat it as an established law?

I agree with Toby is his first point. Or rather I would rephrase it as follows: if journals are going to be meaningful in a fully digital environment (outside of its present role as a commercial object seeking market shares in a market structured by impact factors), they have to play a real role for the construction of knowledge. They used to in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when they acted as the megaphone of small research communities organized in societies. What journals should be in a time of ultra-big science and in a fully digitized context is something to think about, but starting from communities of research and linguistic boundaries is a start.

Jean-Claude

On 2024-03-03 08:53, Toby Green (He - Him) wrote:

As many of you know, I used to work for a large, economic and public policy research organisation. It produces ~600 new reports and working papers every year. None is now published in a journal. Indeed, the few journals they had when I joined in 1998, were closed by 2010 in favour of simply sharing research findings as papers and reports, online.

 

I was hired to ’sort out’ their publishing operation in 1998. And, boy, did it need sorting. When I arrived, fewer and fewer people were reading their research, fewer and fewer libraries were adding it to their collections. Worse, the funding available to cover the cost of publishing was being cut and there was no money to invest in switching to digital publishing (remember, this was 1998).

 

My brief was to ‘maximise the dissemination’ of its outputs. Rather than put any new money on the table, the organisation’s funders decided that all costs had to be recouped and we were on our own when it came to investments. 

 

To do the former, we had to make the content free to read online. To do the latter, we had to charge someone, somewhere a meaningful sum of money because the bill was running at ~€10m per annum. We succeeded because we adopted a ‘commercial’ approach to the way we ran the ‘business’. We kept a firm grip on costs, ensured we had money for capital investment, and had a team dedicated to generating revenues (most from sales to libraries). Slowly, with a lot of hard work, we constructed a successful, non-journal, model that boosted readership and paid the bills.

 

Why am I sharing this story? Because when I read threads like this one, I usually have the same two reactions.

 

1. Why is it always about journals? Other forms of publishing are available. 

 

2. Publishing isn’t cheap and it's hard to build a sustainable, long-term, model. So taking a ‘commercial/business-like’ approach is a necessity not a choice. I’ve seen quite a few initiatives that skimped on fundraising/sales efforts, with sadly inevitable results.

 

I’d also like to share another reflection. 

 

In Table 3, I was pleased to see that ‘Improving the visibility of non-journal research work (industry white papers, government studies etc) is ‘high or must-do’ for 55% of researchers because that is exactly what I am trying to do with my new project, Policy Commons. (For those not familiar with it, Policy Commons is a discovery and preservation service for ’non-journal research work’ aka grey literature.) 

 

However, what readers of this listserv may not realise is the scale of 'non-journal research work’. 

 

When I started Policy Commons, I imagined we might find several thousand research institutions like think tanks, NGOs, IGOs and similar living outside the journal world. This was a serious under-estimate. We’ve added over 30,000 such organisations to the Directory in Policy Commons and we’re still finding and adding new ones every week. The non-journal research world is large, very large. 

 

Wrangling all this non-journal research work into Policy Commons shows that these organisations could learn a lot from the journal world about the way content could be captured and wrapped in metadata. But I often think the reverse is also true: universities and other journal-centric organisations could learn that research work can be published quite successfully without the need for a journal.

 

Toby

 

 

 

Toby GREEN
Publisher, Policy Commons
https://policycommons.net

Director and Co-Founder
COHERENT DIGITAL LLC
https://coherentdigital.net

[log in to unmask]
+33 6 07 76 80 86
Twitter: @tobyabgreen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobyabgreen/ 

 

On 2 Mar 2024, at 22:44, Jean-Claude Guédon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

Not an ideal state for scholarly publishing; rather an fundamental framing of scientific publishing, i.e. putting human knowledge (and all of its necessary imperfections) at the centre. 

Jean-Claude

On 2024-03-01 11:27, Glenn Hampson wrote:

Hi Sara,

 

These are wonderful points. An iterative approach is very realistic and business friendly. And as you said, it can get us a long way toward change, albeit imperfect (at least along the way).

 

“Siding” with Jean-Claude here, though---not just for the sake of argument but because I think these approaches are worth discussing---I think it might help our efforts if we have a clearer end goal in mind. The problem with this approach, of course, is agreeing on the right goal (and also agreeing on who gets to decide that goal, and why, and for which groups, etc.).

 

The alternative is to think of more objective, research-centric goals. As I noted in my speech at SciELO20, open can’t be the reason we’re all here. Open is a tool for helping research; it isn’t the end goal. 

 

So here’s what I mean by all this. I think both Jean-Claude and I are proposing a Theory of Change approach to reform. Jean-Claude’s goal is achieve an ideal state for scholarly publishing. OSI’s goal (as described in our Policy Perspective 4), is to help research succeed: For example, agree to help researchers find a cure for pediatric cancer, and to this end, work together across the spectrum of publishers and policies to create new and better ways of sharing information that get us closer to a cure. Along the way, the “missing middle” will fill in with all kinds o f new tools, policies, alignments, and incentives, and these new systems can be picked by other researchers who are pursuing other goals. Over time, this ecosystem of goal-driven best practices can get us closer and closer to an Open Renaissance (slide 12).

 

So, rather than zig-zagging toward some unclear goal (the iterative approach) or boldly going toward a goal with unclear impacts (the goal of rebuilding all publishing in an “ideal” image), working together on big research goals helps both research and open on many levels, allowing us to discover in real time what works and what doesn’t, what else is needed, and so on. It also unites in all open solutions (data, code, etc.). And oh yeah---it also makes huge contributions to research and society along the way.

 

There’s room for both the iterative and the goal-driven approaches, of course, but at minimum, I think the former will be more effective working together with the latter. Submitted for your consideration.

 

With best regards,

 

Glenn

 

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)

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From: OpenCafe-l <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Sara Rouhi
Sent: Friday, March 1, 2024 7:10 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [OPENCAFE-L] European Policy Shifts

 

Meant to send this to the whole group and instead just sent to Jean-Claude:

 

Hi Jean-Claude,

 

Thanks for sharing this framing. I find it very interesting. I think the challenge with your statement: "The alternative - much better IMHO - is to imagine the best possible state for scientific publishing, and then try to chart a path from the what is  o that best possible state" is that it's very hard to establish what that best possible state is as we simply don't have all the inputs to do it (maybe there's an AI that will tell us!) and we would never all agree on what that paradigm would be. (I also think a "waterfall" approach of "knowing the end and then building it" always lets us down because very change we make unfurls unintended consequences.)

 

Iterative approaches from big players can go a long way towards change – albeit imperfect change. Some examples:

 

What if Science/Nature/Cell – all the prestige folks – simply stopped sharing their impact factors? 

 

Better yet, what if society publishers agreed they were no longer submitting their journals to WOS for a JCR calculation?

 

What if top researchers in high-profile fields announced en masse that they would no longer publish/edit/review for prestige journals? They'd stick only with society journals? Or open journals?

 

What if consortia of influential institutions - the Ivies, the Big Ten, etc - all announced in concert that they were rolling out new tenure/promotion guidelines for various fields – start with biomedical – that shifted away from prestige metrics to more DORA-aligned evaluation methods?

 

What if NIH partnered on a small pilot with a major biomedical institution – JHU for example – to test drive a shared DORA-based assessment paradigm for funding biomedical research, where tenure/promotion and grant funding were tied together?

 

What if a major funding body like NIH paid for shared infrastructure andonly  publishers who met certain non-profit/open criteria could participate? These would be the only outlets where funded authors could disseminate their work? For profit publishers could not participate.

 

All of these ideas have aspects that wouldn't work, unintended consequences, and winners and losers, but they all get us closer to a publish paradigm LESS captured by commercial interests and more grounded in building the communities of knowledge we all purport to be committed to. 

 

Iteration gives us the possibility to adjust course as we go to get to a shared ecosystem everyone can live with. Again, I point to Latin America as a region that has done this successfully (but unfortunately is being co-opted by global north practices and struggling to resist the undertow of commercial interests).

 

My two cents. Really enjoying this forum for conversation!

 

 

 

Stay healthy and well,

Sara​

 

Sara Rouhi

Regional Director, Publishing Development, The Americas

Directora Regional, Desarrollo de Revistas, Las Américas

+1 202 505 0814 

 

ORCiD: 0000-0003-1803-6186

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sararouhi/

X: @RouhiRoo

 

Remote based in Washington, D.C.

Remota, basada en Washington, D.C. 

 

Working days: Monday-Friday EST

Horario laboral: lunes-viernes EST

 

PLOS

Empowering researchers to transform science

 

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From: OpenCafe-l <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Jean-Claude Guédon <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2024 2:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [OPENCAFE-L] European Policy Shifts

 

[CAUTION: External email. Proceed with Caution. ]

Like you, I will end with just a couple remarks:

1. Re: "I’m also filled with spit and vinegar about how things work in scholarly communication. I just channel my energy differently than you.".

I am not filled with spit and vinegar. I am simply and deeply worried about the state of knowledge production. Identifying processes and some "culprits" is not being full of spit and vinegar; it is the result of long and hard thinking about scientific publishing and communication. The commercialization of scientific publishing after WWII deeply changed the scientific landscape, and saying so is simply the role of a historical perspective intent on correctly interpreting the processes leading from the recent past to the present.

2. "Can we do things better, cheaper, more efficiently, and more equitably, with more inclusion, less bias, easier access, and more integrity? Absolutely. How? Not only, I suggest to you, by burning everything down and starting over."

Hampson often calls for cooperation, working together, etc, and this is fine. But then, he should not mischaracterize various actors as he does just above. Diamond OA advocates are not incendiary types.

To change situations, one can either try to nudge the what is and see, but that is often paramount to charting a course without a compass. The cubic zirconium image, however amusing it was, perfectly reflects that problem and that is why I suggested translating this statement into "Que sera, sera". The alternative - much better IMHO - is to imagine the best possible state for scientific publishing, and then try to chart a path from the what is to that best possible state.

Jean-Claude

 

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