new ways to communicate in science: perspectives from biodiversity research

Virtual BiodiversityViBRANT

New ways to communicate in science:perspectives from biodiversity research

Vince SmithNatural History Museum, London

[email protected]

ViBRANTVirtual Biodiversity

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Talk outline

• Background: trends in scholarly communication

• Challenges for biodiversity science

• ViBRANT: virtualising biodiversity research

• Approaches in ViBRANT: one size does not fit allo Low cost journal infrastructure

o Community web publishing

o Observation data publishing

o Next gen. publishing

• Incentives & metrics

• Future directions

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Trend 1: the death of paper

• 90% of all scholarly journals are online (2008)

• Subscriptions are increasingly ‘e’ only (UK > 75%)

• Compound growth in ‘e’ usage 21% (UK HE 2003/4-2006/7)

• Transition driven by cost (implications for niche publishers)

• Open Access is not (the biggest) issue driving ‘e’ onlyo Issues of confidence, scholarly culture & cost (VAT)

Data from “E-only scholarly journals:overcoming the barriers”. RIN Nov. 2010http://bit.ly/5uOSML

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Trend 2: the death “the” paper

• The article was (is) the unit of scholarly comm. (350yrs)

• Research practices have moved ono Highly collaborative, data intensive & networked

• Scholarly communication has not adapted (e.g. the PDF)

• Published “knowledge” hides “dark data”

• Need a natively digital scholarly communication systemo Must support end-to-end the lifecycle of data, information & knowledge

“the future scholarly communication system should closely resemble—and be intertwined with—the scholarly endeavor itself, rather than beingits after-thought or annex” Van de Sompel et al 2004.

http://bit.ly/a3o9UX

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Communicating biodiversity science

An enormous goal…

• 1.8 M described spp. (10M names)• 300M pages (over last 250 years)• 1.5-3B specimens

A vast complex data set…

Distributed contributors…• 4-6,000 scientists• 30-40,000 “pro-amateurs”• Many more citizen scientists?

• Inventory the Earth’s species• Document their relationships• “Publish” & apply these data

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ViBRANT: virtual biodiversity research

17 partners in 9 countries(universities, museums & SMEs)

Building a natively digital scholarly communication system for European biodiversity research

(Interoperability, workflows, service sharing & information modeling)

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Main publishing components of ViBRANT

• User access point for ViBRANT services • Hosted websites for taxonomists• Ecosystem of communities (230+)• Research & publication platform • Modular (Drupal) & flexible • Supports the taxonomic workflow• 3,000 users, 300k pages (unpaid, 2007)

• Index of a database network for primary biodiversity data • Mainly museum specimens & field observations• >276M data records in 12k datasets by 336 publishers

Specialist, low cost, innovative, openaccess biodiversity science publisher

Publishing services

o Low cost journal infrastructure

o Community web publishing

o Observation data publishing

o Next gen. publishing

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Low cost journal infrastructure

o Scratchpads used to publish PDF (1,000’s)

o Independent editorial control & peer review

o Free to publish, open access, no page limits

o ISBN’s, but no doi’s, PubMed or ISI impact

o No online submission (e-mail), just a static PDFs

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http://scratchpads.eu

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Community self publishing, beyond the PDF

o Scratchpads support many data types

o Community editing & community peer review

o Free, open access, Creative Commons, highly used

o Author reputation governs quality

o No wider publication (e.g. formal data repositories)

Observations, specimens, maps, DNA sequences, phylogenetic trees, image galleries, identification keys, species descriptions, checklists, bibliographies, biographies…

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http://scratchpads.eu

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Third party data publishing

Specimen recordson Scratchpads

Automatically pushed to 3rd party specialist data publishers

>18K specimen records(local small scale coverage)

>276M specimen records(worldwide coverage)

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http://scratchpads.eu > http://gbif.org

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Third party data publishing

Specimen recordson Scratchpads

Pushed by author to 3rd party specialist data publishers

>18K specimen records(local small scale coverage)

>56k species assessed, 18k threatened(worldwide coverage)

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http://scratchpads.eu > http://iucn.org

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Next generation article publishing

Paper assembled from Scratchpad database

XML submission, peer review & marked-up publication by Pensoft

5-step workflow for selecting data, adding metadata & previewing

Published in Zookeys & Phytokeys(worldwide coverage)

PD

FH

TM

LX

ML

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http://scratchpads.eu > http://pensoft.net

doi:10.3897/zookeys.50.539

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Incentives and metricsWhat makes a “publication”

o Registration (establish precedence)

o Certification (establish validity, e.g. peer review)

o Awareness (findability & promotion)

o Archiving (preservation)

o Rewarding (credit, e.g impact metrics)

• Traditional reward via article metrics (Jnl. Impt. factor, H-Index…)

• Need to reward other units based on citation & reuse

• Build in a “reward hub” with author-ID

• Paves the way for social acceptance

ViBRANTVirtual Biodiversity

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Future directions• Expand the unit of publication beyond the article

• Build in mechanisms of rewardo Build in metrics of citation & reuse via Author-ID

• Support for a wide range of synthetic datasetso Taxonomic checklists, identification keys, species threat assessments…

• Formally “publish” metadata descriptions of datasetso Provide a mechanism for citation

o Incentivize authors

o traditional metrics of tracking (DOI’s, ISI impact)

• Special Pensoft journal for data publication in 2011

• One size does NOT fit all

• Specialist needs essential for social acceptance

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new ways to communicate in science: perspectives from biodiversity research

Technology

data records

primary biodiversity

dark data

lifecycle of data

biodiversity science

virtual biodiversity

vast complex data

community self publishing