by James Hendler

Here’s a pre-edited preprint of my editorial for the next issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems. I welcome your comments - Jim H.

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Intelligent Readers,

While it is generally considered tacky to quote one’s self, recently I’ve been involved in several activities and discussions I’d like to share with you. These largely arose from a column that Tim Berners-Lee and I coauthored in Nature back in 2001 [1]. In that column, which appeared as part of a series of opinion pieces about the future of academic publishing, we discussed how the Semantic Web might impact on this issue, and we ended with the somewhat brash statement that

The semantic web will provide unifying underlying technologies to allow these concepts to be progressively linked into a universal web of knowledge, and will therefore help to break down the walls erected by lack of communication, and allow researchers to find and understand products from other scientific disciplines. The very notion of a journal of medicine separate from a journal of bioinformatics, separate from the writings of physicists, chemists, psychologists and even kindergarten teachers, will someday become as out of date as the print journal is becoming to our graduate students.

Interestingly, in the past year, I have found that that quote is resonating more and more, and that some of the big players in the academic publishing are starting to think along these lines (perhaps not yet the kindergarten teacher part, but that will come). While not all of them are considering use of Semantic Web technology, inspired instead by the community-oriented features of Web 2.0, the notion of breaking down the lines between traditional disciplines and of reaching out to audiences beyond the academic bench scientist is becoming an important “meme” in the academic publishing world.

One of the leaders in this area has been Nature itself, which launched the “Nature Network” (http://network.nature.com), a social networking/blogging site aimed primarily at scientists. Users can create a social network, can share forums and blogs, and can use tags to attempt to create some semantics. Given Nature’s early interest in RDF and Semantic web technologies, I hope some ontologies might be added to improve more linking between tags and to help provide a mechanism for cross-disciplinary searching, but that is not yet there. How successful the network has been depends on whom you ask, but it is a clear indicator of thing to come when a major force in scientific publishing is exploring how to enhance scientific communication using Web technologies.

Lately, I’ve been hearing from a number of other publishers and magazines that they are also considering doing more to enhance their online sites with community-oriented features. These publishers have been motivated in part by Nature’s lead, in part by users’ increasing reluctance to pay for hardcopy articles when so much is available on line, and in part by the increasing facility that young scientists, the desirable demographic for the future of the industry, have with Web technologies. Some of these publishers are just “jumping in,” throwing up sites to see what happens, and others are taking a more cautious approach. This latter, it seems to me, is warranted – because the success of a few Web 2.0 sites is causing too many people to think it is a silver bullet, without really considering the nature of the success, and failure, of this technology.

It is becoming clear that making a successful community-oriented Web site requires more than just the technology. As a cautionary anecdote, consider the success of Wikipedia, and the lack of success of a number of other sites that have tried to use Wikis in a similar way. Many of these sites used virtually identical technology, the MediaWiki.org code from which Wikipedia is built, but have not had anything near the success of the original. Some studies have begun to explore why this is the case, but anecdotally it appears that the key is somehow in the social structures the successful sites have created. Similar stories arise in exploring Flickr, YouTube and other Web 2.0 marvels – while these sites have taken off, others have languished due to misunderstanding the mismatch between the technology and the community they want to reach.

Which brings us back to the issue of academic publishing. As publishers try to promote new models of communication among scientists, with an eye towards finding some new role in the process, there is a respect that needs to be paid to the way science works. While this, like many other things may be changing due to the impact of the Web, there’s some natural points of resistance that must be overcome before new, more community-oriented, interdisciplinary scientific sites succeed. While scientists have gloried in the disruptive effect that the Web is having on publishers and libraries, with many fields strongly pushing open publication models, we are much more resistant to letting it be a disruptive force in the practice of our disciplines.

At the recent “Science FOO camp” (tagged on many blogging sites as “scifoo”), held at Google in August 2007, there were a number of sessions relating to the future of academic publishing. The topics included open-source publishing, publishing “pre review” (or with community reviewing of some sort), and of the use of blogs, wikis and other new technologies to enhance scientific communication. However, motivated by comments arising the first day, the second morning featured a session entitled “Culture of Fear: Scientific Communication and Young Scientists.” This session, led by two post-doctoral researchers, Alex Palazzo of Harvard and Andrew Walkingshaw of Cambridge, explored some of the issues that face those starting out in scientific fields, when using these new technologies. In the tight job market for scientific positions, especially in academia, there are a number of issues that must be faced. For example, how do a team of scientists, sharing partial results pre-publication, assign credit? Authorship gets quite blurred when small amounts of information, which may contain key insights into making processes successful, are shared in public. How does a blogger get credit for the information that lead to an eventual publication at a competing lab?

Another theme of the session was the role that peer-review plays in scientific fields. While many of us have been accosted by pseudo-scientists claiming that we use peer-review as a way to keep their brilliant insights out of our precious literature, there is a real appreciation among most scientists of the importance of the peer-reviewed literature in providing a filter. The high standards maintained by publications are a useful way to make sure that ideas are both well argued and strongly evaluated before being published. On the other hand, there has always been some feeling that, especially with respect to funding, the peer review process may tend to be overly constraining and cause considerable delay in new ideas coming to the fore. The difficulty and delays that promising young scientists must face in the current system also has an impact on hiring and promotion. These factors have motivated many in the community to discuss new mechanisms, based on emerging web technologies, to allow more ideas to be communicated faster. For example, there has been discussion of moving to a model, being explored in some on-line journals, of publishing after some sort of minimal peer-review, and creating some sort of post-publication metrics as to the value of the paper. However, as Alex put it in his blog (http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2007/08/scifoo_day_3_well_that_was_yes.php), “Until the scientific establishment reaches a consensus as to whether these post-publication metrics are indeed useful for determining the credentials of a scientist in the shorter term (<2 years post-publication) it is unlikely that any scientists would risk publishing their findings in a minimally peer-reviewed journal.”

Which gets us to the crux of the issue facing many of us, whether the EIC of a magazine like Intelligent Systems, or the head of a major press or publishing house. That is, how do we embrace the new technology, and encourage more of the sharing that Tim and I were calling for, without causing career risk to the very people to whom the technology is most familiar – the younger scientists? If we don’t think through the social issues of usage, the technologies alone will not have any significant impact, and will go largely unused.

One option, and I’d like to see more effort expanded in this area, is that this is a case where innovation needs to come “from the top.” Eventually, as these young scientists become the leaders of our fields they would bring these new technologies with them, but with the world in its current shape, we can’t afford to wait that long. Rather, we need to find ways to bring more senior scientists into contact with the positive side of these technologies. In computer science, where the barrier has been lower than in some fields for senior people to learn to use new computer technologies, we’ve seen some of this happen. For example, Tim Finin has been instrumental in bringing bloggers to the AAAI conference, and this has caused others to read, and in some cases create, blog content. Tim Berners-Lee’s first blog was greeted by stories in newspapers around the world, making it that much easier for the rest of us to legitimize the time we spend sharing our thoughts in this lightweight way. When young scientists see the leaders of their field embracing new technologies, it is that much easier for them to demonstrate to the rest of us what these technologies can do without fear of retribution.

I believe it is time for us as computer scientists to take a leading role in helping to create innovation in this area. Some ideas are very simple, for example providing overlay journals that link already existing Web publications together, thus increasing the visibility (and therefore impact) of research that cuts across fields. Others may require more work, such as exploring how we can easily embed semantic markup into authoring tools and return some value (for example, automatic reference suggestions) via the use of user-extensible ontologies. In part II of this editorial, next issue, I’ll discuss some ideas being explored with respect to new technologies for the future of academic communication that we as a field may be able to help bring into being, and some of the obstacles thereto. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the subject.

Yours,

Jim Hendler

[1] T. Berners-Lee and J. Hendler, Publishing on the semantic web, Nature, 410:6832, April 26, 2001
Available on line at: http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/bernerslee.htm

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