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“Re-engineering the scholarly journal”

Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing

Arcadia Seminar, Cambridge: Nov, 2010

Committed to making the world’s

scientific and medical literature

a public resource

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The functions of journals

• Registration– Who’s done what and when?

• Certification– Is the work sound?

• Dissemination– The right information to the people who need it

• Preservation– Archiving for future generations

Roosendaal and Geurts

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Journals are a giant sorting mechanism

Organization

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Re-engineering

• Dissemination– Open access

• Organization of content– Impact and audience

• Authoring and certification– Eliminating all unnecessary delays

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Re-engineering dissemination

Open Access

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Open access≠Free

access

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What is open access?

• Free, immediate access • Unrestricted reuse• Deposition in a digital public

archive

Bethesda definition, 2003

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Creative Commons Attribution License

Copyright: © 2004 Moorthy et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Goal: make clear to humans (and machines) what can be done

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No permissionrequired

for any reuse

Translation

Redistribution

Photocopying

Coursepacks

Reproductionof figures

Deposit indatabases

Downloadingdata

Text mining

What is open access?

• Free, immediate access online

• Unrestricted use

What is open access?

• Free, immediate access online

• Unrestricted use

What is open access?

• Free, immediate access online

• Unrestricted use

What is open access?

• Free, immediate access online

• Unrestricted use

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A network of literature

Document

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A network of literature and data

Document

Database

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Silos of information

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Open access• Free, immediate access • Unrestricted reuse

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PLoS Founding Board of Directors

Harold VarmusPLoS Co-founder and Chairman of the BoardPresident and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

Patrick O. BrownPLoS Co-founder and Board MemberHoward Hughes Medical Institute & Stanford University School of Medicine

Michael B. EisenPLoS Co-founder and Board MemberLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory & University of California at Berkeley

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• Establish high quality journals– put PLoS and open access on the map

• Build a more extensive OA publishing operation– an open access home for every paper– publication fee business model– achieve sustainability

• Make the literature more useful – to scientists and the public

PLoS publishing strategy

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€

Publisher

Reader

Pay-per-view SubscriptionLibrary

Subscription journals

GovFundersInstitutionsIndustry

€€€

Researcher

€

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Open access journals

Publishing is the final step in a research project Public

DigitalLibrary

GovFundersInstitutionsIndustry

€Publisher

Reader

Researcher

€

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PLoS BiologyOctober, 2003

PLoS MedicineOctober, 2004

PLoS Community JournalsJune-September, 2005 October, 2007

PLoS ONEDecember,2006

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PublicationsSubmissions

Growth in submissions and publications

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Financial growth

% Operating expense covered by operating revenue

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2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

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Re-engineering organization of

content

The life cycle of a research article

Journal name is keyPublication

Research

Submission

Peer review

Reje

cts

2-3 Experts Is it rigorous?Good enough?Right audience?Takes months/years

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What do we need to do before research is

published?

What is best left until after publication?

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• Editorial criteria– Scientifically rigorous– Ethical– Properly reported– Conclusions supported by the data

• Editors and reviewers do not ask– How important is the work?– Which is the relevant audience?

• Use online tools to sort and filter scholarly content after publication, not before

PLoS ONE’s Key Innovation – The editorial process

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Year Submissions Publications % of annual PubMed

2006* 473 138 0.02%

2007 2497 1231 0.16%

2008 4401 2723 0.34%

2009 6819 4404 0.52%

2010** 10526 5265 Y/E 0.8%?

*Started publishing Dec 20th, 2006**Up to Oct 31st

Community acceptance– largest peer-reviewed journal– >50,000 authors– >1300 Academic Editors

PLoS ONE – statistics

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What do we need to do before research is

published?

What is best left until after publication?

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Who cares about

measuring researchimpact?

InstitutionsResearchers (authors and

readers)

Publishers

Funders

The public

Librarians

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How do we measure ‘impact’?

The impact factor of the journal in which an article is published.

Recommended reading:Adler, R., Ewing, J. Taylor, P. Citation statistics. A report from the International Mathematical Union. http://www.mathunion.org/publications/report/citationstatistics/

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How could we measure ‘impact’?

• Citations• Web usage• Expert Ratings• Social bookmarking• Community rating• Media/blog coverage• Commenting activity• and more…

Current technology now makes it possible to add these metrics automatically

At the ARTICLE LEVEL, we could track:

(http://tiny.cc/ALM1)

CrossRef Landing Page

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CiteULike Landing Page

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Downloading the data

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Evaluating the (usage) data

Evaluating the (usage) data

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“The Dirty War Index (DWI) method has been adapted for use in NATO military environments to monitor civilian, woman and child casualties. This version of the DWI is called a ‘Civilian Battle Damage Assessment Ratio’ (CBDAR). Since October 2009, the CBDAR methodology has been used by NATO forces in Southern Afghanistan in order to reduce the possibility of injuring Afghan civilians. The methodology has identified a number of military activities that historically lead to civilian mortality that has led to NATO changing procedures.”

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Next steps for article-level metrics

• More data sources– F1000, Mendeley, media coverage, tweets

• Impact that is hard to measure• Expert analysis and tools• Broader adoption

– By publishers– By tenure committees, funders etc

• Develop and adhere to standards

The goals of PLoS Hubs

• Aggregate open access content – Wherever it is published

• Add value to content by connecting with data

• Build communities around content

Demonstrate the power of open access

ITIS

Flickr

Wikipedia

NCBI

GBIF

Next steps for PLoS Hubs

• Enhance and automate content enrichment• Develop Hubs community

– allow users to ‘follow’ a curator

• Extend literature sources beyond PMC– ideally to non-OA content

• Extend Hubs concept to other disciplines• Make Hubs easy to replicate

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Re-engineering authoring and certification

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New models of scholarly communication

1 year

100 days

1 day

Conventional PLoS ONE PLoS Currents

Publication

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• An innovative forum for the rapid exchange of results and ideas

• Registration– Articles are date-stamped and citable

• Certification– Reviewed by expert researchers

• Dissemination– All content is open access

• Preservation– Archived at PubMed Central

PLoS Currents: Key features

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Seeking Lessons in Swine Flu Fight

“Another problem is communication.Officials and experts say they have learned a lot about human swine influenza. But relatively little of that information...has been reported and published. Some experts said researchers were waiting to publish in journals, which can take months or longer.”

New York Times, August 10th, 2009Lawrence K. Altman, M.D.

PLoS Currents – Inspiration

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Google Knol: Author(s) assemble content and control access and editing. Authors submit content to PLoS Currents.

PLoS Currents: Expert reviewers control posting of content, commenting and version control.

PubMed Central: Immediate transfer from PLoS Currents site; stable identifier and permanent archiving.

PLoS Currents – Workflow

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• Prescreen by Editors

• Submission sent to Board of Reviewers.

• Does the work contain any obvious methodological, ethical or legal problems?

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From submission to publication in a few days

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PLoS Currents• Very fast• Cost-effective• Reviewed by experts • Citable• Version control• Archived at PubMed Central• Included in PubMed• Flexible and easy to replicate

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PLoS Currents – New sections

• Launched on Sept 2nd

– PLoS Currents: Huntington Disease (produced with support from CHDI Foundation)

– PLoS Currents: Evidence on Genomic Tests (in collaboration with the CDC)

• To be launched in a few weeks– PLoS Currents: Tree of Life (phylogenetic

analyses)

The life cycle of a research article

Journal name is keyPublication

Research

Submission

Peer review

Reje

cts

2-3 Experts Is it rigorous?Good enough?Right audience?Takes months/years

New models of scholarly communication

Focus on the articlePublication

Research

Submission

Peer reviewReje

cts

2-3 Experts Is it rigorous?Good enough?Right audience?Takes weeks/months

Enhanced article Article-level metricsIntegrated with dataOrganization in Hubs

PLoS Currents

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The landscape is changing

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