Transforming Scholarly Communication -- the next step

The distribution of scientific information is changing... everything from how data are collected, analyzed, reported and archived so says, Lee Dirk, in a fascinating talk about Transforming Scholarly Communication.

In this talk he describes new tools that allow scientists to discover and share data and scientific outcomes in ways that look more like social networking and Amazon book recommendations than scientific meetings and scholarly journals.

I am struck that the behavioral and social sciences would benefit the most from this level of transformation, yet our work seems the least influenced by these trends.

I also find myself asking questions about how educating students and the general public will change with these new methods of science communication. How do we build these science communication tools into our educational platforms?

Scholarly Publication-- Michael Jensen

Jensen has been consistently at the forefront of thinking about how the publication of scientific information and scholarship can take advantage of new technologies. In a recent speech, he makes the following points:

"In a world of an ever-growing surfeit of content and distraction, when the clamor of voices for simplistic solutions to systemic problems, we must:

Promote our value to society, to justify our continued existence.

Further, we must:

Brand ourselves as becoming part of the CO2 solution, to our administrators and institutions, as part of *their* external messaging campaigns

Brand ourselves with the public as a key part of a civilized world trying to save itself

Brand ourselves as rethinking our relationship to scholarly communication

Brand ourselves as quality in a sea of content, by being openly accessible digitally

Brand ourselves as promoters of intellectual rigor and quality, online"

These last two points are worth repeating over and over. This is the difference that university faculty can make in regards to participating in the online world. It should also serve as a reminder that the point of new media is not to be "cool," but to produce high quality work.

Should Faculty be required to Publish on the Web for Promotion?

Most of the discussion regarding the web and issues of tenure and promotion have asked questions like:

1. Will web-based contributions count for promotion and tenure?
2. What are the equivalences between traditional scholarly work and web-based work?

But maybe we should be asking another question:

Why shouldn't faculty be required to distribute their work via the web? In an age in which a significant amount of information is available in various online venues, shouldn't scholars be expected to contribute to the intellectual discussions in their fields? Don't scholars also have an obligation to participate in the public discussion of scientific issues?

In addition to asking scholars about their production of journal articles and books, perhaps we should begin reviewing their web-based contributions.

What's wrong with this expectation?

Science as the Evolution of Structuring Knowledge

"Science, says Kevin Kelly, is the process of changing how we know things."

So begins a lecture by Kevin Kelly in 2006 that is available in a 1 1/2 hour podcast that provides a very interesting look at the history of the development of the scientific method.

For a shorter but still interesting summary of his ideas Kelly has written about the evolution of the scientific method and gathered the views of scientists about the last 50 years.

Kelly gives an interesting perspective on the development of scientific methods. He is less interested in the minutiae of specific scientific findings, but more interested in the broad trajectory. He notes that inventions about how we store and communicate scientific information has been critical to the advancement of science.

He notes that the library with an index emerged in 280 BC, in 1410 the first cross-indexed encyclopedia was created, in 1750-1780, journals and peer-review became a part of our scientific knowledge system. In more recent times there are the developments of scientific abstracts and the electronic indexing of scientific abstracts within the last 20 years.

He summarizes the views of several scientists about the most recent developments in communicating about science noting:

"E-print -- Electronic publications and dissemination by PDF files is a major innovation. (TE) This really speeds the process up. LANL's x-server and archive of not-yet-published work was a truly revolutionary innovation. (GD) Downstream, we might hope of getting rid of proprietary, expensive journals that limit the flow of knowledge. Varmas’s technical journal for the web funded by the Gordon Moore foundation could be a biggie in this regard. (GB) A more recent and more benign change is the publication of research papers on the web. This practice is rapidly making printed journals obsolete. It has the great advantage of making research results more promptly and more widely accessible. It has the disadvantage of depriving the learned societies that publish the printed journals of their main source of income. (FD) The biggest change I experienced is the enormous increase in accessibility and speed of scientific information through the Internet (papers' immediate availability on http://arXiv.org for example, which thereafter may still be published in regular journals. (GB) Electronic publication. (BS)"

Kelly also speculates about the next level of communication in regards to what he terms "wikiscience" which he describes as "perpetually edited papers." Obviously, there are increasingly online communities of scientists working in new ways and creating new ways of communicating about their work.

Open Science--A Medical Research Example

This week the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. published an editorial criticizing the influence of the pharmaceutical and medical devices industries on research.

In an article this month, Catherine D. DeAngelis and Phil B. Fontanarosa write:

The profession of medicine, in every aspect—clinical, education, and research—has been inundated with profound influence from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. This has occurred because physicians have allowed it to happen, and it is time to stop.

Two articles in this issue of JAMA provide a glimpse of one company's apparent misrepresentation of research data and its manipulation of clinical research articles and clinical reviews; such information and articles influence the education and clinical practice of physicians and other health professionals.

This editorial and the specific research studies reported in the April 16, 2008 issue of JAMAfunders, scientists and perhaps scientific journal editors have worked together to report favorable scientific findings that distort the real scientific evidence for the effectiveness of drugs and other medical devices.

This is stunning and this practice harms all legitimate efforts at scientific understanding. The editors of JAMA go on to suggest 11 basic practices that would help to prevent this type of scientific fraud. What is amazing about these recommendations is that they are not currently in practice. Here a couple of their recommendations:
provide compelling evidence that indicates that corporate

All individuals named as authors on articles must fulfill authorship criteria. Journals should require each author to report his or her specific contributions to the article, and should consider publishing these contributions.

All individuals who were involved with the manuscript or study but who do not qualify for authorship (such as those who provided writing assistance) must be named in the acknowledgment section of the article, with reporting of their specific affiliations and contributions and whether they were compensated for those contributions.

All journals must disclose all pertinent relationships of all authors with any for-profit companies, and must publish all funding sources for each article.

To maintain a healthy distance from industry influence, professional organizations and providers of continuing medical education courses should not condone or tolerate for-profit companies having any input into the content of educational materials or providing funding or sponsorship for medical education programs. Individual physicians must be free of financial influences of pharmaceutical and medical device companies including serving on speaker's bureaus or accepting gifts.

These reports on scientific fraud make a strong case for the need to make scientific research more open. It is important to be able to have a better idea about the working process in science labs so that others can examine the methods and processes. Publications increasingly need to include the data, the technical details of the data analysis and other materials that provide the basis for scientific conclusions. These steps will make it more difficult for scientists to cover up faulty science.

datebases and scholarly communication

The primary way in which scholars have communicated new scientific knowledge and to the advancement of science has been through the publication of research findings. (this ignores theoretical contributions, but that matters also.)

It seems to me that the vast increase in the ability to store large amounts of information affords the opportunity to ask the question what other ways might scientific scholarship be advanced in addition to publishing findings.

One idea that intrigues me is the sharing of data sets with others and developing interactive data analytic tools to explore these databases. Here is one nice example. The KidsCount Data Center keeps track of over 100 child and family indicators of well-being. At the data center you can select indicators, create comparision's and compare data in a variety of other ways. By making the data available in this fashion, other researchers or even the public at-large can answer questions using this data. No one is going to make scientific breakthroughs with this data, but all of us can find answers to questions that may be of interest to us: Are the trends in teen pregnancy in my state above the average in the US? Are children's reading scores improving? What has happened to teen drinking in the US?

With more powerful tools it would be possible to look at correlations, compare whether differences between counties or states were statistically significant, and so forth.

Imagine if more specialized data collected by scientists were routinely available to other researchers and the general public, wouldn't this advance science all the more quickly?