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New Directions in Scholarly Communication
William Gunn
Head of Academic Outreach
Mendeley
@mrgunn
Three perspectives on scholarly communication
•Early career researchers
•Librarians
•Web technology
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A historical perspective
• I grew up with the internet
• Chatting over ICQ and Usenet with people anywhere
• Reaching beyond my local environment
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Change and Disruption
• The music industry was first
• futile resistance
• worst fears not confirmed
• providing a project very many people want is in fact quite sustainable
• IF you don’t try to control how they use it.
More Change and Disruption
• Blogging changed how we communicated
– but not as drastically as some predicted
• business models shifted
• A service that gives people what they want is a quite sustainable business model
• IF you don’t try to control the channel through which they receive it.
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Social Networks
• loose connections become more tangible
• personal content filters
Watching the ship sail away
After all this, scholarly publishers were still debating:
– Should we put our work online?
– Should we allow search engines to index us?
– Should we use DRM on PDFs?
– Should we dictate both how content is used and the channel through which they receive it?
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Will we learn from the past?
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Librarian
• We never went into the library
• We did use library services all the time
• I initially blamed the library for my frustrations with scholarly communication
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Librarian
• How wrong I was!
– big deals, monopolies, hands tied
• Library technology is empowered by Open Access
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From consumer to provider
• Mendeley was neither from libraries nor from publishers.
• Bringing tools and user experience from other parts of the web to scholarly communication.
• People expected to easily share and discover music and photos, why not academic papers?
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Building an open infrastructure
• Web native tools expect that data has no strings attached.
• Mendeley had to create an open sharing platform to deliver the experience we wanted.
• A free desktop manager got us on desktops around the world.
• This got us the unrestricted, license free data we needed.
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Instrumenting the research workflow
• 2.6 Million users
• 4.7 M documents
• 4-700K uploads per day
• 90% coverage of Pubmed
– Long tail
• Developers learned about our open data
– built applications, both niche and general
• Accessible alternative to citations
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Guess who’s often in the Top 10?
Relative downloads per day
What would people build if they could get the data?
• Impact Story – get credit for all your work
• PLOS ALM – article-level metrics for papers
• Plum Analytics – bespoke analytics for libraries
• Altmetric.com – altmetrics for publishers. (from Digital Science/NPG)
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Our platform will remain open
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Looking ahead
• Open Access will broaden readership to non-authors and the walls of the Ivory Towers will open to the community.
• New measures of research impact will lead to more rich ways to discover research.
• The limitations of the data encoded in publications will lead to incorporation of new data sources to better recommend and assess scholarly output.
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Altmetrics
• Scientometrics and bibliometrics lead to altmetrics, building on open sources of data to empower scholars
drawing attention to where the international spotlight rarely shines
freeing researchers from being assessed based on journal brand
“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that
counts can be counted.” – William Bruce Cameron (1967)
Reproducibility
• What happens when everything is open access? Journal brand will persist, but will be based on different criteria.
• Funders look past these proxy measurements
• Looking within the literature to find quality signals is like looking at successful companies for traits of success.
– survivorship bias
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Reproducibility
• Helsinki guidelines on human subjects research call for study pre-registration and disclosure of all data.
• Full-circle: I once struggled to replicate findings, now I’m working to make science more reproducible via the Reproducibility Initiative and Center for Open Science
• Reproducing 50 landmark cancer biology studies
– releasing as open data set
