Reinventing Academic Publishing – Part II
A preprint of my next editorial for IEEE intelligent systems — part III coming one of these days 
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Reinventing Academic Publishing – Part II
Intelligent Readers,
Last issue, my letter <
An obvious question to ask is “haven’t we already?” That is, Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web, coupled with Brin and Page’s PageRank algorithm that powers Google, has led to a world where scientists publish preprints and papers on the Web and can find each others’ results without having to subscribe to the same journals. Doesn’t that solve the problem? Just pick your favorite chemical, check it out on Google (or even better, Google Scholar) and there’s the paper you need. What more is there to be said?
Unfortunately, the reality of sharing papers on the Web doesn’t live up to this ideal. With rare exceptions, Web-based journals and open-source publications and preprint servers have been modeled on the same field and subfield considerations that have been used for decades in print journals and scientific communication. (For example, in our field, the Journal of AI Research, one of the best online journals today in terms of impact and reputation, is not organized very differently than the traditional print Artificial Intelligence journal.) So while we have made journals electronic, with positive results on distribution, we still have not really done much to revolutionize the scientific communication aspects of scientific publication. If a computer scientist searches for some term of the art, say “case-based reasoning” in an online journal, he or she is likely to find papers of interest. However, they’re not likely to find, say, a Science paper written by a chemist who used a similar approach to do data provenance in a lab setting. Despite the prevalence of online literature, and the ability to search with great ease, jargons – the different ways similar things are described in different fields – still gets in the way.
This is true even of sites that have tried hard to provide organizational structures that will help people find each other’s work. Scientific publication sites like PubMed or arXiv, for example, organize papers based on disciplinary terms familiar to the scientists who use them. Papers on similar topics can be found via common web mechanisms (hyperlinks to related papers, menus representing ontological categories, etc.) in a browsing manner, making up for some of the domain specific aspects of search. However, these sites still tend to be of greatest use to those in a particular field, who know the terms and can navigate the terminologies. The significant effort put into these sites does help build bridges, especially between subdisciplines, but they still primarily use the same jargon-y terms used in searches.
This is particularly troubling because if one talks to thought leaders in science, or explores the sorts of problems described in the UN’s millennium development goals (www.un.org/millenniumgoals/) – such as eradicate hunger and ensure environmental sustainability – it becomes clear that many, if not most, of the key scientific discoveries of the next generations require interdisciplinary approaches, Funding agencies, although still organized along disciplinary lines, are putting more money up for projects that cross the traditional lines. Biotechnology Centers are flourishing at many universities and encouraging biologists, computer scientists and others to work together. New organizations, created to develop technologies that span fields are growing in academia and industry at an increasing rate. Unfortunately, despite the growth in these larger science projects, the publishing still tends to be in traditional journals, arranged along disciplinary lines, and reviewed by experts in the traditional fields. As a result, large interdisciplinary projects tend to be published in bits and pieces, with each part published in an article that briefly reviews the overall project, but primarily discusses the particular disciplinary aspects of interest to that audience.
It is exactly this need for better support for interdisciplinary work that is motivating many of the new solutions being considered on line. Rather than simply replacing print journals with online journals of the same ilk, people are considering new models that can more easily cross disciplines and find papers (or projects, etc.) that relate to their interest areas. One of these that is becoming more common is that of an “overlay” journal (sometimes called a “deconstructed journal” after Smith, 1997). The idea is to create an online publication by taking some cross cutting theme, and providing a web site that links to papers that have been published elsewhere. By providing links, rather than republishing, the overlay journal provides a service both for the reader, by linking to many publications, but also to the publishers, since it brings more “eyeballs” to their sites.
A key feature of the best of these overlays is that they can provide an organization scheme based less on the disciplinary jargons than on features of a domain. For example, the Virtual Journal of Quantum Information (http://www.vjquantuminfo.org/quantuminfo/) is an example of a well-respected overlay journal. The virtual journal provides links to papers appearing in a large number of specialized disciplinary journals (Low Temperature Physics, Optics Express, Science, Physical Review A, etc.) organized by themes relating to quantum processing like “Information Theory” and “Algorithms and Computation.” Thus, the jargon of the one field (quantum theory) is used to help organize the materials appearing across a wide swath of other more specialized fields (physics, optics, mathematics, computer science, etc.)
Overlay journals are becoming more popular, and the Web’s odd economy makes them very feasible. Basically, the profits from downloads, if they aren’t free, go to the original publisher of the material. The site itself makes its profit (or provides its service) through being a repackager – getting many eyeballs on the site and selling advertising, or promoting the new field. Authors get tremendous benefit since more people are directed to their papers (increasing citation counts and visibility), and readers get the benefit of having relevant material culled from a wider range of publications than they could monitor on their own. Win-win-win-win, how often do you see that?
Currently, there are a number of different models being explored for how best to “curate” such overlay publications. One approach is to have the overlay journal function as an independent publication in its own right. Such an approach is being taken by the IEEE Computer Society, which is working on the creation of Computing Online (CO), which will be a site that serves a number of purposes. One of these being considered is for this site to provide an overlay functionality across the different magazines being published (including IEEE Intelligent Systems, of course). The new “virtual” magazine will thus provide a means for the papers and columns appearing in our magazine to be seen by a wider audience, and we will be providing articles to that site, reducing their need to solicit and produce as much new material. The curation looks like it will be through an editorial board, with liaisons to the magazines, thus giving CO dedicated staff and function as a separate publication.
Another model being explored has a more open Web feel to it. For example in the Web Science overlay being created by Les Carr of Southampton, is a submitter-based one. Submitters can fill in a simple form (or share metadata from other publishers) to have a paper listed on the site. The submitter points to the original publication, proposes where to link it into an evolving hierarchy of terms (basically a “folkonomy” seeded by a set of terms from a domain ontology, thus providing Semantic Web metadata), and provides a short comment on why this paper should be included. The submitter may be the author of the paper, or may be someone else who feels the paper will be of value to the community. Mechanisms for determining how to moderate the site (whether by having a process to screen the submitters, or a process to review the submissions) are still being discussed, but this mix of submission with overlay is an idea that seems to combine the best of several worlds.
Oh dear, I’ve run out of space, and I was just getting warmed up. Beyond the overlay journal we start to look at more novel ideas that depart further from traditional publishing. Ideas such as blog-based scientific publication, “Web 2.0″ based community sites, and sites enhanced by the Semantic “Web of Data” are also being explored. More on this when we get to Part III.
Jim Hendler, EIC
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