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Publishing in the future: is the Global South leapfrogging? Jan Velterop – 20 June 2014
Publishing in the future: is the Global South leapfrogging?
Jan Velterop – 20 June 2014
“It is possible to find good typesetting suppliers in many countries, and locations such as India, Malaysia, Hong Kong and the Philippines also host high-quality suppliers. And offshore suppliers now offer a wide range of services, not just page layout.
Many UK typesetters have gone out of business as a result. We, too, lost work to typesetting companies overseas who charged lower rates than us (and which we couldn’t match), but outsourcing has never threatened our core business, namely project management and editing.”
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A UK-based publishing services company:
Dream on
Where would we be without quasi slave
labour?
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Outsourcing
Most of what science publishers do is done
in emerging economies
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By the way…
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made in China
made and branded in China
Why is it not happening in
science publishing?
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Beall-effect?
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beallious – bealligerent – beallicose
Publishers with foreign* names being seen as “predatory”
*non-English, non-European
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[which are practically invisible in Google]
arXiv:1406.4331
Vestiges of a world of empires and colonialism
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10http://www.agenciasinc.es/Noticias/El-mapa-de-la-investigacion-mundial-mas-completo-divide-el-planeta-en-tres-grandes-bloques
Western countries allocate more resources to biomedicine; Russia and former Soviet countries excel in physics, mathematics and engineering; and a third group of countries strongly focus on agriculture and fisheries science.
Research is
spreading to the
global South…
…and so is
publishing
Two examples
• Hindawi
• SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online)
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Publisher
Publishing ‘approach’
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In September 2012, Ahmed Hindawi revealed: “Our results for the first half of 2012 show revenues of $6.3m with a net profit of $3.3m.”
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Not so much a ‘publisher’ as a ‘publishing
approach’Deposit
Hosting/Delivery
Preservation
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of Collections of Journals*
* SciELO Brasil also books
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Cost of publications: Authors are encouraged to submit color illustrations when the color conveys essential scientific information. Color reproduction will be subsidized by the publisher, reducing author costs to US$300 per page. (Articles in black and white = US$250). All articles including the translation of the summary to Spanish will be reviewed at a rate of US $50- per article.
(Chile)
Journals in SciELO are not ‘published by’ SciELO, but are independent entities
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Much interest in South American science, currently
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Pure coincidence, of course
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NewScientist 14 June 2014
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Nature 14 June 2014
24http://figshare.com/articles/Culture_change_in_academia_Making_sharing_the_new_norm_/1053008
25http://figshare.com/articles/Culture_change_in_academia_Making_sharing_the_new_norm_/1053008
26http://figshare.com/articles/Culture_change_in_academia_Making_sharing_the_new_norm_/1053008
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Reading is on the wane
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Embarras du
choixEven just reading
everything that’s
relevant has
become humanly
impossible
What do we do?What do we need?
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First
Overview
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Then
Detail
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An approach:extract significant assertions/statements
Predicate ObjectSubject
Lazarus:
identifying assertions of ‘scientific significance’…
… semantically normalising them and finding them in other articles
What if we had vast numbers of those
assertions/statements, “semantically normalised”, available and suitable for
machine-reading?
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• They could be ‘harvested’ from open access literature
And ‘crowdsourced’ – via researchers and students – from paywalled literature
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Getting the picture from a large number of data points
‘Whole-o-gram’
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Getting a better picture from even more data points
Homing in
on detail
My expectationIt will be outfits from the Global South that…• substantially grow open access publishing• comprehensively aggregate knowledge in the
form of machine-readable assertions• fundamentally change peer-review practices
Why? They are not impeded by legacy issues the way publishers in the US and Europe are!
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Thank You
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