Innovations in publishing; giving control back to authors
Virginia Barbour, Executive Officer, Australian Open Access Support Group (ORCID)
Lovely slide comparing a title page for the 1665 Phil.Trans of the Royal Society vs a 2014 Royal Society Open Science article on the web including a YouTube movie of the subject seadragon.
What’s worked well and not-so-well? Online > free > data > attribution > authorship > open
(Difference between ‘free’ and ‘open’ is important!)
We’ve changed the philosophy. We’ve begun to understand what we can do with the web. We’ve seen an explosion of models – not just for open, but also for toll. We’ve begun to ‘harness collective intelligence’. We’ve got the technology and processes to do open access, so with Creative Commons we can clearly label what people can/can’t do with something.
So have we fixed publishing? Hmm.
We need new thinking in peer review. Example of CERN paper appearing to find faster-than-light results and putting it up on arXiv for peer review so that someone could figure out what they’d done wrong. But also post-publication peer review – ~”the terrifying thing of publishing OA is that if you’re wrong someone will tell you about it on Twitter five minutes later”. PubMed Commons
Claiming contributions and identity. Disambiguating multiple authors with same name. Technology catching up with this. Hugely empowering for especially women whose names may change pre/post marriage/divorce.
What’s the right version of an article? Can provide “CrossMark” telling you if there’s an update – even works on downloaded PDFs on your computer.
But most of the debate around open access is driven by publishers. How do authors get control? Knowledge.
Areas where wants authors to have knowledge:
- where to publish
- understanding peer review and the black box of publishing
- understanding how open something is and what can be done with it (eg data mining)
Susan L Janson “research is not finished until it’s published”
Authors need to care as much about publishing as about researching.