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Virtual BiodiversityViBRANT
New ways to communicate in science:perspectives from biodiversity research
Vince SmithNatural History Museum, London
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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