I attended APE2015 for 75%, i.e., I missed the second afternoon, the sessions I attended got of course my full attention. My report touches upon some highlights, for full coverage, please check the recordings or slides that will be put online later.
Open access as a means, not a goal
Quite some presentations made of course reference to open access, starting off with Martin Grötschel, incoming President of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, who stated that “everything should be available at your fingertips” and that “openness is the best possible way to foster high quality science”. And ending (well at least for me) with Jan Velterop, as independent Advocate and Advisor on open access and open science: “The goal is optimal dissemination of knowledge”. He referred to the term “lamp post research”, because with the publication overload researchers might only be looking where the light is (but not necessarily where the key is). I come back to that later. Celina Ramjoué, Head of Sector, Open Access to Scientific Publications and Data, European Commission, talked about Open Science. She also emphasized the importance of free circulation of knowledge, and explained the actions of her department by four issues, i.e., 1. e-infrastructures (big data); 2. evidence-based policy making; 3. open access to research results and processes; and 4. citizen engagement .
The dotcoms-to-watch session Eefke Smit was chairing carried the title “sharing is multiplying”, which also nicely catches the goal of open access in it, resembling our library’s vision that “if you share, you grow”. For circulation of samples, Olivier Acher (www.sampleofscience.net) wants to connect scientists creating samples with scientists who can use them. Descriptions are put in journal Sample of Science, and each disseminated sample becomes a citable item. I did remember readcube.com, but I did not realize that there were the launching partner of the shareable, read-only articles that Nature Publishing Group has on its website and that can be used for sharing peer to peer and media referral as Nicko Goncharov (Digital Science) talked about. David Sommer (Kudos): was back from last year, and after their launch in April 2014 they have 29000 author registrations. Authors can explain, enrich, share and measure what happens with their articles. New is an institutional partnership and proof that enriched articles are read and cited more.
From knowledge maps to knowledge vault
Hans Uszkoreit, Professor of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University at Saarbrücken, referred to the highest level of offering information resources, with new structured knowledge. Uskoreit, Jan Velterop and David Wade referred to knowledge maps or graphs. How these are already the basis of current Google or Bing services, and how they can be improved or sharpened by adding other “more closed” content. As Velterop put it: “Make sure that we at least get access to meaningful stuff in the articles. The more we have, the sharper the knowledge picture.” Wade is Director Scholarly Communication at Microsoft Research. He had some advice for the (mainly publishers) audience: “get crawled and indexed, get a sitemaps.xml, and mark up your content”. Interestingly he showed us that Microsoft is using these knowledge maps “behind the screen”, and that a new feature of Word is a direct reference to Word online (a sort of extended autosuggest), and you can also search for online pictures (with CC-BY licenses) in Powerpoint or search for data via an online search in Excel.
Making it happen, reaching our goal
Obviously if you want something, you should try to get there, and there might be more ways to reach your goal than you can think of yourself. In The Netherlands we have just reached an agreement with Springer. At APE Veronika Spinka (Open Access Manager) showed us how Springer is working on automating the process of identification and verification of author/institution for the apc’s deposit. Richard Wynne, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Aries Systems Corporation, explained that we really should leave metadata and business rules separate from each other, as was the case with the subscription model. Strikingly I thought was the author landing page Jake Kelleher (Senior Director of Licensing and Business Development, Copyright Clearance Center) showed us, where an author (or institute) can see what the agreed fee to be paid is, consisting of an apc and all sorts of surcharges (for supplementary data, colour and CC-BY license).
Ramjoué made reference to a possibility the EU now created where apc’s are also applicable for two years after a project has ended (in relation with FP7).
Frederick Dylla (see also last year) updated us on CHORUS: they now have 100 plus signatories and it is growing. CHORUS builds on existing infrastructure, and consists of a landing page (popular term, I must say!) for public access on the publisher’s site and progress can be followed via a live dashboard. In the US they chose the green road, and CHORUS is the publisher’s solution. For the library side of it, there is SHARE (working together, with CHORUS, e.g. on identifiers), the shared access research ecosystem.
(I need to) Come back to this later, or remember these phrases!
- Research pad (convert all open content to ePub format)
- Utopiadocs.com (I already heard about it, but should check it again, about “resurrecting knowledge”)
- Corona, your personal digital research assistant (Microsoft)
- Uszkoreit : “Owners of the texts do not own the facts”
- Dirk Pieper referring to an open access clearing centre to pay for apc’s and a landing page for their authors/publications
- Phil Archer (W3C): “a book is a broken, dead thing for youngsters.” “Semantics matters, otherwise machines cannot read it efficient, if models are different, again you make it difficult for machines”
- Kent Anderson about what peer review is about: “Is this new, done well, important? First, best or last?”, and provoking the publishers: “Investing in peer review is investing in your core function”
- Velterop: “You don’t get answers, but hints”
- Follow what happens in the CC-BY discussion, is it true that authors need to pay more in this license? Should we add ND to this?
