Talk by Ramy K. Aziz in the second TWAS/BioVisionAlexandria.NXT in Alexandria- Egypt (10-11 April 2010) about "Open Acess and The Next Revolution in Scholarly Publishing".
The slides are also contributed by Mark Patterson, Björn Brembs, and Peter Binfield.
1. Open Access and The Next
Revolution in Scholarly Publishing
The PLoS Experience
Ramy Karam Aziz
TWAS/NXT Workshop. April 10, 2010
www.plos.org
2. Acknowledgments
The following people contributed
significantly to this presentation:
• Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing,
PLoS
• Björn Brembs, Freie Universität Berlin
• Peter Binfield, Managing Editor, PLoS ONE
www.plos.org
3. Outline
• Prologue: Why do we publish?
• Part I: The current paradigm and its
shortcomings/anomalies
• Part II: Alternative paradigm
– II.A. How Open Access addresses the current
anomalies
– II.B. How PLoS, in particular, addresses these
anomalies
• Epilogue: Paradigm shift Publishing
utopia?
www.plos.org
4. Prologue
Why do we publish scientific
papers?
www.plos.org
5. Audience opinion
Why do you (want to) publish in
scholarly journals?
– Name the single most important reason
www.plos.org
6. The current paradigm
Publish
or perish
=
Survival for the most
published
www.plos.org
7. Let me start by telling you a story…
SURVIVOR!
slightly modified from my PhD seminar, Dec 2004
www.plos.org
8. Scientists under selection pressure
Courses
Exams Prelim
Project
Life surprises
PhD Defense Not the end
www.plos.org
of the story
9. Scientists under selection pressure
$$
Threshold
Real
World
trap
Opportunity
And (s)he lived happily
www.plos.org
ever after
10. Test yourself…
• Are you ready to just put your laboratory
data or research results online to share
them with the scientific community (open
science)?
• If you have the choice to put your
scientific product in ONLY ONE venue,
what will be your choice, and why?
– CNN
– Your local newspaper
– Nature/Science magazines
– Your website
– Other sources…
www.plos.org
11. Test yourself…
• What is the primary reason for choosing a
journal to publish your work?
– Journal‟s topic/ specialty
– Journal‟s impact factor
– Journal‟s prestige
– Open-access journal
– Least accessible journals (to hide some weak work?)
• If you have a limited amount of money,
would you rather:
– Pay to read a paper
– Pay to publish a paper
www.plos.org
12. Reminder…
Theoretically, at least:
• We do research to fill gaps in
knowledge, to improve human life
and health, to satisfy our curiosity
• We publish to share knowledge with
peers, students, and the
community
• Publishing is a means to an end.
Yes, really!
www.plos.org
13. Problem:
anomalies in the current publishing
paradigm
Credits: Several slides in this part are
contributed by Björn Brembs
www.plos.org
14. Publishing yesterday…
1665: One journal: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
www.plos.org
Society of London (Henry Oldenburg)
15. Publishing today
• 24,000 scholarly journals
• 1.5 million publications/year
• 3% annual growth
• 1 million authors
• 10-15 million readers at
>10,000 institutions
• 1.5 billion downloads/year
Source:
Mabe MA (2009): Scholarly Publishing. European Review
17(1): 3-22
www.plos.org
16. Let me tell you the rest of the story…
SURVIVOR!
Part II: Post-survival syndrome!
www.plos.org
17. Publishing these days
I see you have done some
great work. I can publish it for
you!
Finally, someone
appreciates our
great work!
Publishing
enterprise We, the scientists
www.plos.org
18. Publishing these days
I will need your help though.
Please format it EXACTLY as
follows: 1… 2… 3… 15…
!! Can’t we just
put it on our
website?
www.plos.org
19. Publishing these days
Oh, no! We give you
credibility and guarantee you
wide readership?
Credi…
Huh! I thought what?
Internet nowadays Credit?
has the widest
readership….
www.plos.org
20. Publishing these days
Please also tell me who
among your peers can
review it, of course
according to MY OK… X &Y are
conditions and criteria my friends.
Please exclude
Z!
www.plos.org
21. Publishing these days
The anonymous
reviewers liked your
work, but
Is that what they
recommended 15 more
would have done?
experiments to confirm
Can they even do
the results of your 3
these experiments?
experiments.
www.plos.org
22. Publishing these days
Congratulations.
After thorough peer review (using
someone else’s time and effort), we
agree to publish YOUR revised work but
you have to give us the permission to
OWN and redistribute YOUR work
www.plos.org
23. Publishing these days
All you need to pay is $500 for two color
figures. We send you a free copy of the
journal and a PDF of the article
How
generous!
www.plos.org
24. Publishing these days
The paper looks great. Can we
access the final online full-text
version?
Well… Sorry you
cannot access
YOUR full-text article
online. Your
institution needs to
pay $10,000 a year.
Unless you’re willing
to pay only $200
annual personal
subscription
www.plos.org
25. Publishing these days
You have to be "then the best journal
grateful that WE would by logical extension
accepted to publish be the one that accepted
YOUR article. We nothing at all!"
proudly reject 90% www.clinchem.org/cgi/issue
of submitted articles. _pdf/backmatter_pdf/27/
We are that good 4.pdf
and wanted!
www.plos.org
26. Publishing these days
Oh Please.. Can we publish
another one?
Yes sure. But… With
this crumbling
economy, prices are
now up. You’ll have
to pay more to
publish. You’ll have
to pay more to read!
www.plos.org
27. Publishing these days
We, scientists, editors, and publishers, are so addicted to
a broken, old system that the more we’re aware of its
limitations, the more we seem willing to “game” the
system!
$$ $$
€€ €€
promotion
Together
forever
www.plos.org
28. Current Problems
• We have to use least three different
search tools to be sure we have not
missed any relevant literature.
www.plos.org
29. Current Problems
• When/If we finally find the literature, we
often have to ask friends with rich
libraries to send it to us?
www.plos.org
30. Current Problems
• During the lengthy, painful process of
submitting a paper (remember: to share
exciting data with the community), we
have to re-format our manuscripts every time
an editor tells us to submit to another journal
that (s)he thinks is more relevant for OUR work.
www.plos.org
31. Current Problems
• With submissions and resubmission, the
data become old; the findings become
less exciting; even worse, time and
money is wasted as dozens of peers are
asked to review and (often) re-review the
same manuscript in different journals.
www.plos.org
32. Current Problems
• We have to pay ridiculously high amounts
of money just to find out who cited us,
instead of having that list directly on our
papers.
– Note that every homepage has had an access
counter since 1993; but we usually have no way
know how often our paper has been downloaded.
www.plos.org
33. Current Problems
• A one-dimensional, over-interpreted
journal ranking and evaluation system
The Journal Impact Factor:
Introduced in 1960‟s by Eugene Garfield: ISI
citations articles
2008 2006 and 2007
IF=5 means that articles published in 06/07
were cited an average of 5 times in 08.
www.plos.org
34. Solutions?
How does PLoS address these
anomalies?
Credits: Most slides in this part are
contributed by Mark Patterson and
Peter Binfield
www.plos.org
35. PLoS Founding Board of Directors
Harold Varmus
PLoS Co-founder and Chairman of the
Board
President and CEO of
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Patrick O. Brown
PLoS Co-founder and Board Member
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
& Stanford University School of
Medicine
Michael B. Eisen
PLoS Co-founder and Board Member
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
& University of California at Berkeley
www.plos.org
36. PLoS core principles
1. Open Access
2. Excellence
3. Scientific integrity
4. Breadth (expansion of scope)
5. Cooperation
6. Financial fairness
7. Community engagement
8. Internationalism
9. Science as a public resource
Source: http://www.plos.org/about/principles.php
www.plos.org
37. PLoS core principles
1. Open Access
2. Excellence
3. Scientific integrity
4. Breadth (expansion of scope)
5. Cooperation
6. Financial fairness
7. Community engagement
8. Internationalism
9. Science as a public resource
Source: http://www.plos.org/about/principles.php
www.plos.org
38. PLoS publishing strategy
• 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
– achieve sustainability
• Make the literature more useful
– to scientists and the public
www.plos.org
39. PLoS Biology
October, 2003
PLoS Medicine
October, 2004
PLoS Community Journals
June-September, 2005 October, 2007
PLoS ONE
December,
2006
www.plos.org
42. 1. PLoS and Open Access
• Open Access ≠ free of charge
• Open Access ≠ open science
• Open Access means:
– Immediate access on publication
– The reader pays no charges.
– In most cases, unrestricted use and reuse
• Open Access is being color-coded:
– Gold
– Green
www.plos.org
44. Translation Coursepacks
Photocopying Deposit in
databases
No permission
required
for any reuse
Downloading
data Reproduction
Text mining of figures
Redistribution www.plos.org
45. Benefits of Open Access
• Public enrichment: taxpayers can see
the results of what their investment in
science.
• Improved education: teachers and
students rarely have access to
subscription journals/ Unrestricted reuse
helps educators prepare lectures and
students deepen their assignments.
• Accelerated discovery
Source: PLoS Progress report- June 2009, Freely available at:
http://www.plos.org/downloads/progress_report.pdf
www.plos.org
46. Do developing countries get a
waiver?
• Author pays but, in PLoS journals, no
author will EVER be denied publication if
she or he cannot afford the fees (whether
from a rich or richer country). And this
message is coming from the PLoS CEO.
www.plos.org
47. Arguments against Open Access
• Sustainability of the author-pay model
• Vanity publishing
• Are we going to end with as many
journals as authors?
• Isn‟t “green OA” enough?
www.plos.org
48. 2. PLoS ONE and an innovative
view of peer review
In PLoS ONE, peer review is split into
two phases:
• Pre-publication peer review:
objectively focuses on scientific rigor, but
not on subjective criteria such as
importance and newsworthiness.
• Post publication peer review:
continuous, multi-dimensional
assessment of the importance, value, and
impact of the paper
– Web 2.0 tools for evaluation
– Coverage in classical media, blogosphere, and social
networks
www.plos.org
50. PLoS ONE‟s Key Innovation –
The editorial process
• 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
www.plos.org
51. What else is different?
• Inclusive scope
– all science and medicine
• Encouraging discussion and debate
– at PLoS ONE: commenting, rating and annotation
– elsewhere: Editorial Board discussion forum;
EveryONE blog; Twitter; FriendFeed; Facebook
• Streamlined production
– publication on every weekday
www.plos.org
52. PLoS ONE – statistics
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%
* Started publishing Dec 20th, 2006
Community acceptance
– third largest peer-reviewed journal
– 50,000 authors
– 1000 Academic Editors
www.plos.org
54. 3. Article-level metrics
• In the 21st century, the published unit
is/should be (?) the articlenotthe
journal (the song not the album, the
show not the TV station, etc.)
• Let the community, not just an editor and
2-4 reviewers, decide what is important
and what is not
www.plos.org
55. Researchers
(authors and
Institutions
readers)
Librarians
Who cares
about
Funders measuring
research
The public
impact?
Publishers
www.plos.org
56. How do we measure „impact‟?
The worth of a paper tends to be
judged on the basis of the impact
factor of the journal in which it was
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/
www.plos.org
57. How could we measure „impact‟?
At the ARTICLE LEVEL, we could track:
• 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
www.plos.org
58. Article-Level Metrics at PLoS
• A range of additional measures which provide
insight into „impact‟ - not just citations and
usage
• Metrics/indicators at the article-level, for all
journals
• Not just for scholarly evaluation – also a way to
filter and discover content
• The idea is not new, but PLoS is the first
publisher to provide this range of data
transparently and immediately.
Michael Jensen, The New Metrics of Scholarly
Authority, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15, 2007
www.plos.org
67. Next steps for article-level
metrics
• More sources for each data type
– Citations, blog coverage
• New data sources
– F1000, Mendeley
• Expert analysis and tools
• Broader adoption
– By publishers
– By tenure committees, funders etc
• Develop and adhere to standards
www.plos.org
68. Next steps for article-level
metrics
Metrics are good
BUT
NO ALTERNATIVE FOR
READING
www.plos.org
70. 4. PLoS and internationalism
• PLoS ONE articles (Jan 1 2010)
www.plos.org
71. 4. PLoS and internationalism
• PLoS ONE editors (Jan 1 2010)
www.plos.org
72. Do authors from developing
countries get a waiver?
• In PLoS journals, no author will EVER be
denied publication if she or he cannot
afford the fees (whether from a rich or
richer country), and you can hold me to
my words.
www.plos.org
73. Epilogue
Shaking the boat
Shifting the paradigm
www.plos.org
74. Summary… PLoS and the next
revolution
Anomalies in the How PLoS addresses
current paradigm these anomalies
Access, Accessibility Open Access, CC Attribution
License
Literature mining, creative Open Access, CC Attribution
reuse License
Peer review (slow, PLoS ONE, Post-publication
subjective, etc.) peer review
Articlesare static: Papers, Dynamic “papers”: html-
PDF files based, Web 2.0 tools,
comments and notes
One-dimensional, distorted Article-level,
metrics multidimensional metrics
High costs, financial viability PLoS ONE, Non-profit, PLoS
Currents (?)www.plos.org
75. The current paradigm
Publish
or perish
=
Survival for the most
published
www.plos.org
76. Let‟s shift (reset?) the paradigm
Do good science Publish
or perish
=
Survival for the most
published fittest
www.plos.org
77. Declaration of “scholarly rights”
• All human beings are born equal and are
entitled to the following rights whether
they can or cannot afford journal-
subscription or article-processing fees
Everyone has the right to:
• access scientific knowledge freely and
promptly
• perform scientific research and publish its
results, regardless of his/her affiliation or
lack thereof
• to reuse scientific data to benefit
humanity, Earth, and the universe
www.plos.org
78. Thank you
• Thank you for your time and attention. I
would like to get your feedback and
questions.
• contact: ramy.aziz@salmonella.org
• azizrk on Twitter
www.plos.org