Life is an approximation of reality. What we know and what is possible are two different things. Experiments help test and bridge the gap. With that spirit, I’m experimenting on this blog with Twitter now. You can find a link to my Twitter feed at the bottom of the right-hand column.
This is a bit off-topic for this blog, but of interest to scholarly publishers, and I found myself doing a lot of thinking and digging about this for some reason. The announcement by Rockefeller Press that they will leave copyright with authors, let authors do what they will with their work, allow “noncommercial” entities to adapt and use things, and put works effectively in the public domain after six months has me a bit perplexed. Their policy stipulates that after six months, works will be available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike provisions.
Now, I’ve always been skeptical about the assertion that authors want their copyright. I predict that once some important materials get abused or over-used, and an author or author group finds out what it takes to protect, defend, prosecute, and/or enforce their copyright, and learns the difference between statutory and actual damages and how they did or didn’t position themselves properly for either, and learns about the varied copyright laws at play internationally and in various countries, suddenly having a publisher fighting on your side won’t look so bad.
Beyond this, there is a perplexing and, I think, maybe not completely thought-out part of the policy regarding mirror web sites. It reads:
No Mirror Sites. The user may not create, compile, publish, host, enable, or otherwise make available a mirror site of the RUP web site, any of its constituent journal web sites (The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, and The Journal of General Physiology), or any subset of the RUP or journal web sites. A “mirror site” is a web site that contains the same content as a parent web site but is located at a different geographic location from the parent site. This prohibition applies regardless of the commercial or non-commercial nature of the mirror site.
Now, I’m sure I’m taking this way too far, but did I just violate it? After all, I just published a “subset of the RUP or journal web sites” on another site, right? If Rockefeller journals are crawled by Google, doesn’t the mirror of RUP content in Google violate this clause as well? What about an RSS feed? A gadget on iGoogle?
And there’s yet another perplexing aspect. As the press release states, “Citing the growing demand from the public” . . . have you tried to read these articles? They’re pretty hard sledding for even a layperson like me who has edited scientific prose professionally. The issue isn’t access. It’s that these are written for scientists in the upper echelons. You can make these things free until the cows come home, they will become no more understandable or comprehensible to the non-specializing scientist, forget about “the public.”
Finally, the term “noncommercial” isn’t as unassailable as you might think. While I’m sure the intent is to prevent direct resale of content, there are active discussions about what “noncommercial” actually means. Is a major private university with an endowment of $X billion and real assets greater than those of most corporations, even most countries, not a commercial venture? Even Creative Commons has trouble with this one. In their licenses, they tell you what commercial uses are, and define noncommercial uses as things that aren’t commercial. But, in a blog entry about trying to deal with this issue in Sweden, they state, “This is a negative definition, limiting the scope of rights granted through the license agreement. Still, we can not be sure what non-commercial is supposed to mean.” I searched for a good meaning, but it’s pretty hard to come by. The blogger above goes on:
I suspect that Creative Commons is trying to make sure no “unjust” or “unfair” use of the works will occur. I can imagine that Creative Commons’ chairman professor Lawrence Lessig would suffer from severe nightmares, should for example the Disney Corporation be able to capture and kidnap and make commercial use of content licensed as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0. Even though preventing such “unfair” use of works may be the purpose of the “non-commercial” clause, it is not fully clear what uses of works is restricted, as pointed out above. It is probably that from the public’s view a huge amount of uses shall be restricted if “non-commercial” use of the works is prohibited. Should you for example be able to put a number of Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0-licensed weblogs’ RSS-feeds on a web-page packed with advertisements?
This is a can of worms, but it needs to fully addressed. The legal definition of “commercial” is not clear. There are not precedents where the meaning of “commercial” has been tried. Yet. But one might suspect that the interest of profit or other market advantage will matter in a legal perspective on the word “commercial”. However, when interpreting the license agreement, the courts will also look on what the parties did reasonably expect and what the circumstances concerning the formation of the contract were and how the parties have acted on the market. Hence, the word “commercial” may even have different meanings in different cases when interpreting the same license. If, for example, one author tells a licensee that he may use the work for educational purposes in his private school, this will make the use of the work permissable even though others should interpret the use as commercial use.
There you have it. While Rockefeller University Press certainly has its heart in the right place, I’m uncertain that they are accomplishing what they intended as far as service to authors, protecting materials from abuse, and increasing access. Some parts of the policy may have an unintended chilling effect in the age of Web 2.0, the noncommercial aspect leaves plenty of doors open, accessibility has more dimensions than just the ability to get something, and authors may not benefit in the long run by keeping their copyrights.
Impact factors have been increasing by 2.6% per year, on average. While this is lower than most economies’ inflation rates, it’s indicates a growing economy. But is the growth caused by supply or demand?
Essentially, the researchers find that the source of impact factor inflation is the gradual increase in the number of reference citations in articles. It is essentially inflation caused by increases in demand (each published paper cites more articles), and not supply (there are more papers citing articles).
For instance, if there had only been more articles published (supply), there would have been some deflation of impact factors because citations would have spread out over more papers. The authors calculate that the longer reference lists are the major factor contributing to impact factor inflation.
In fact, as the authors explain, more papers alone would be self-neutralizing relative to impact factor inflation:
The basic intuition underlying this result is as follows: first, note that larger fields do not have higher impact factors by shear virtue of their size. While more articles are published in larger fields and thus more citations are given out, those citations are shared among a larger pool of papers.
In short, more papers alone dilute impact factors. If you’ve ever analyzed a set of impact factors, you see this on the micro level. It’s interesting to see calculations showing its effect on the macro level, as well.
One other variable the authors identify as contributing to impact factor inflation is the churn and burn and creativity of the journal economy. During the years studied (1995-2004), journals with low impact factors were shut down, and new journals entered. The journals that failed had low impact factors. The new entrants came in with and attained impact factors lower than average as well, but grew at a rate nearly twice as high (6.0%) as overall inflation. Like the money economy, this “NASDAQ” of journals fuels growth with smaller but faster ascendancies.
Impact factor inflation makes a lot of sense, and isn’t disturbing to me in the least. It’s good the scholarly economy is growing with modest inflation. There are more scientists and researchers producing more papers and citing more papers. The availability of information is apparently quite high, and researchers have many outlets for their reports.
Morgan Stanley has updated its Internet trends report. You can view it below:
Some interesting items stand out on what has become the de facto publishing medium for scholarly publishers:
Consumers rule! Not only will consumer Internet bandwidth traffic surpass business, consumer software available publicly now often beats enterprise software for reliability, features, and sophistication.
Email is increasingly archaic, as it ages with its primary user group. Younger users prefer other messaging techniques.
The Internet now beats personal sources as an important source of information. We rely on it more now than we do on people we know. This is a major difference.
The widgetization and componentization of the Web means more disparate presentations of previews and specialized applications in customized environments.
Amazon.com dominates online retail — by a large margin.
YouTube has grown in both raw traffic and the time each user spends on the site. TV executives are probably quite nervous about this trend.
Mobile is a major, rising source of complementary and even primary information access.
The message I take from all of this? Mainly, I feel a sense of urgency. Our users are ahead of us, and moving faster than we are. The software they are becoming accustomed to using online is more robust and stable than high-end enterprise software.
In an environment where users are morphing, their changes are well-supported, and there is no intrinsic switching cost from one form of usage (old) to another (new), the risk to current brands seems to me very high. Marginalization is a real potential. Invisibility due to technological irrelevancy (not being where people are or usable in ways people prefer) is an emerging threat.
Get busy. This is no time to be paralyzed in old mental models of online, or tentative about experiments. This is only speeding up, and the U.S. recession may actually accelerate the transformation. Consumers are getting and using the best software for video, audio, telephony, shopping, and sharing. The commercial systems of PayPal, Amazon.com, eBay, and others are slick and reliable.
We are going to look like comparative cavemen if we continue to push content via HTML and email.
SUSHI (the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) was launched in 2005, and is now well on its way to becoming a NISO standard. A new article in Learned Publishing by Oliver Pesch from EBSCO outlines the history, purpose, workings, and future of the protocol, which basically automates the gathering and consolidates the presentation of usage statistics in a more scalable, ERM-based way. It is a request-response protocol.
In the move from manual review of statistics to a services-based SOAP protocol integrating with enterprise data systems, we’ve come a long way. But where are we headed?
It’s interesting to contemplate what might come next. In the case of retail, EDI systems have been used by Wal-Mart and the like to drive efficiencies from wholesalers and other providers, anticipate replenishment needs based on buying patterns, and tighten the supply chain. It’s not clear to me what SUSHI provides buyers of institutional licenses other than convenience (which, by the way, may be enough). Scholarly publishing is not driven by customer needs in the short-term. Digital supplies are measured more by service-level agreements than by scarcity principles. And I doubt the phenomenon of a journal being purchased for niche users will be much moderated by aggregated usage statistics. After all, online usage statistics are only the tip of the entire user lifecycle measure of value (i.e., one PDF download distributed to users inside an institution via email will only count as one PDF download).
So, what could SUSHI unleash once rolled and sliced?
Well, if combined with semantic resources, it might be able for sophisticated users to compare the usage of comparable articles. Imagine a comparison of articles conceptually very similar but with widely disparate usage patterns, all revealed by the deep integration of data and semantics. What level of knowledge gap would this reveal in user preference studies?
If deployed widely, it might make it more possible for the Usage Factor to become a robust and nearly real-time measure of a journal’s importance to users beyond the traditional measures of impact.
Institutions may be able to construct dashboards from the live data feeds, providing Web 2.0 functionality to users, listing “most popular” articles or other resource-level items for users at that institution, and increasing engagement levels.
Whatever the future of SUSHI, it ranks in my book as one of the best acronyms of all time.
A great video on YouTube shows what it would be like if Facebook were made real. It’s very funny and a little bawdy by my prudish American standards, so don’t watch with your kids, and turn your speakers down to the right level if you don’t want to attract unwanted attention.
Kudos to Idiots of Ants, the comedy sketch group that made the video. Thanks to AY for the awareness.
Hearst Magazines recently announced it’s rolling out ShopText, a system that uses text messaging to link print products with online. Readers of print can text a keyword to a number, and receive samples, buy products, or access services.
ShopText claims that more people 45-54 text than teens age 13-17. I would bet that’s true. There are more people in a 10-year Baby Boomer age spread than in a smaller population and half the range, so even if a smaller number per-capita text, a larger number in aggregate is likely. Even discounting this numbers game, it seems clear that texting is a more normal behavior than ever, and this is a smart way to integrate print and online.
How could scholarly publishers use this, or something like this, to increase interactions with our media-bridging audiences? Will advertisers adopt it? Can it be used to increase engagement with our services?
While it may be a fluke, it may be meaningful that, as Hitwise notes, Twitter has hit the hockey stick in growth, a tipping point of adoption and use that may herald a more mainstream place for the micro-blogging platform.:
“Wikidemia” is a term I hadn’t heard before I read this very interesting roundtable discussion from the UPenn Department of Romance Languages. At the heart of the discussion is the notion that scholarship without the Internet and its collaborative tools would be radically deprived today. It’s a thoughtful roundtable on many levels, with three different perspectives fleshing it out.
For example, here is a quote from Michael Solomon, an Associate Professor of Romance Languages:
We would like to assume that scholarly writing is primarily about the exchange of information. It’s not; it is about the scholar and his or her status in the academic community. The material culture of scholarship has been radically threatened by the Internet because it threatens the status of the author. Scholarly work on the Internet gets cut, pasted, modified, and destroyed much faster than material scholarship. It pushes us toward evolutionary collective scholarship rather than fossilized individual achievement. We like to think of our scholarly work as the product of our own ingenuity and knowledge. Paper journals confirm this by providing us with palpable and tangible objects that we can “cherish” as our own. The Internet, however, is not a touchy-feely medium. What we think is ours quickly belongs to everybody.
Kent Anderson
