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ICSTI Public Conference: Speakers’ abstracts, profiles and presentations
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ICSTI Public Conference
21-22 June 2007
 Richard Akerman, CISTI
Title: "Web tools for peer reviewers...and everyone"
- Abstract
The formal process of peer review benefits from some technology enhancements, such
as automated tracking of review status and built-in citation linking. Beyond these, we can
think about automated tools to help locate peer reviewers. But ultimately in the online, digital environment, everyone is a potential consumer and reviewer of scientific content. What tools currently exist, and what future types of content certification and metrics can we imagine?
- Profile
Richard Akerman is a technology architect and Information Systems Security Officer at the National Research Council Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC CISTI), Canada’s National Science Library and Publisher. He often writes in his ’Science Library Pad’ blog and elsewhere about the impact of new technologies on scholarly communication, and has a particular interest in Service-Oriented Architecture for academic libraries and publishers. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics with a minor in Computer Science from Mount Allison University.
Johan Bollen, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Title: “Scholarly impact: from ranking to assessment" - Abstract
This presentation will discuss the MESUR project’s efforts to survey a range of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact by means of a large-scale semantic network representing the scholarly communication process. This semantic network is created from the aggregation of large-scale usage, citation and bibliographic data obtained from a variety of publishers, institutions and aggregators. The MESUR project will investigate the properties of a range of metrics of scholarly impact that can be derived from this network in order to issue guidelines with regards to their validity and proper applications. The presentation will outline the project’s main objectives and methods, and discuss relationships of this work to other research being conducted at LANL that pertains to the more general issue of scientific certification and validation.
- Profile
Johan Bollen is a staff researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library (Digital Library Research & Prototyping team). He was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University from 2002 to 2005. He was a research assistant at the Modeling, Algorithms, and Informatics Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1999 to 2002, after working as a researcher at the University of Brussels (VUB). He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Brussels in 2001 on the subject of cognitive models of human hypertext navigation. He has taught courses on Data Mining, Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, Library of Congress, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His present research interests are usage data mining, computational sociometrics, informetrics, and digital libraries. He has extensively published on these subjects as well as matters relating to adaptive information systems architecture. He is presently the Principal Investigator of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded MESUR project which aims to expand the quantitative tools available for the assessment of scholarly impact.
Tim Brody, University of Southampton
Title: "Institutions, Repositories and Research Assessment"
- Abstract
The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is a major driver of university-based research activities in the UK; it determines a significant proportion of University funding for many years. For RAE 2008 a number of institutions have made use of their repositories to gather information to support their RAE returns. More than that, an increasing Open Access literature holds the promise of Open Research Metrics, based on citation and usage analyses and taking into account other measures of esteem (honours, awards and positions of prestige). This presentation will cover the use that the University of Southampton has made of its repository in this RAE, and the OAI services it runs which could provide Open Research Metrics for the future.
- Profile
Tim Brody (PhD in 2006, University of Southampton) is a Research Assistant in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group at the University of Southampton. Tim has worked on a number of open access-related projects including working on the GNU EPrints software tool, PRESERV (digital preservation for eprints), TARDis (investigated methods for filling institutional repositories) and the Open Citation Project (providing citation linking for eprint archives). Tim has developed and supports the Citebase Search (citation-ranking search engine), Registry of Open Access Repositories and Celestial (OAI-PMH caching and analysis) tools.
Christine Chichester, Knewco, Inc
Title: "Community peer review in Wiki environment" - Abstract
The volume of data generated in biological research is too large to manage without the aid of computer applications. We are developing an innovative interactive approach in a Wiki environment to dramatically accelerate community participation in annotation. Obviously, formal peer-review is one of many processes of legitimating scientific contributions and most if not all scientists view peer review as the best defense against inaccurate, misleading information. Therefore, within this Wiki system, a new type of peer review service will be incorporated whereby scientists can take the initiative to send new annotations to their appropriate colleagues. The distribution lists for this feature will be automatically created based on the Knowlet™ technology of Knewco, Inc. Knowlets will be generated for approximately 1 million active scientists based on the abstracts of their publications in PubMed. Then the likelihood of association between the Knowlet of the person and Knowlet of the annotated scientific information will be calculated and appropriate information will be pushed to the relevant specialists in the field for comments and review.
- Profile
Christine Chichester is the Knewco’s Director of Scientific Content where she oversees the consortium for deposition of life science data in the Wiki environment. Previously, she worked at GeneBio, alongside the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, to promote the adoption of the Swiss-Prot database in industrial pharmaceutical settings. Christine was educated as a molecular biologist at Stanford University and the University of California.
Jean Dercourt, Académie des Sciences
Title: "Bibliometry : a way to assess scientific activity"
Lee Dirks, Microsoft
Title: "Open Access, Data-Driven Science & The Impact on Research Communication" - Abstract
In the near future, scientific research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of groups of researchers around the globe needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to multi-national specialized facilities or sensor arrays (such as telescopes, accelerators, etc.) and specialist data archives. There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research, facilitated by developments in social networking – fueled by an explosion in the amount of scientific data collected in the next decade. These requirements of scientific research in the future form the ’e-Science’ agenda. Robust middleware services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to constitute the necessary ’cyberinfrastructure’ to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community. This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe how the scientists and engineers are collaborating with computer scientists and the IT industry to create this Cyberinfrastructure. A key part of this Cyberinfrastructure will also be services accessing digital repositories containing both scientific data and full-text publications. Open access (in some form) to these repositories is likely to underpin scientific research in the future and this talk will give some examples of open access repositories, speculate on the future of research libraries, and discuss the impact on evaluation and peer review, namely the quality and assessment of scientific research – and the implications for science moving forward.
- Profile
Lee Dirks is the Director of Scholarly Communications for Microsoft’s Technical Computing Initiative, where he manages research programs related to open access to research data, interoperability of archives and repositories, and the preservation of digital information. Lee holds an M.L.I.S. degree in from the Univ. of North Carolina—Chapel Hill as well as a post-masters degree in Preservation Administration from Columbia University. In addition to positions at Columbia and then with OCLC (Preservation Resources), Lee has held a variety of roles at Microsoft since joining in 1996.
Bruno Granier, Université de Brest
Title: "Impact of research assessment on scientific publication in Earth Sciences"
- Abstract
Bibliometric factors were originally used as a means for measuring the impact of a single paper or the importance of a scientific journal. There are good reasons to believe that these means are not necessarily the best tools to evaluate scientific work in general, and that of some fields in particular, including those of a laboratory or individual researcher. For instance, the resulting visibility is commonly based on the proprietary data of publishing companies that may be both “judge and party”. However, at least in France and certainly with respect to the speaker’s field of interest (earth sciences), such factors are (mis-)used in the evaluation of institutional research, either by persons or teams. In any case, as they provide the key to opening the funding door that will determine the amount of support their projects receive, everyone has to deal with this fact. This talk does not pretend to compile an exhaustive list of the harmful effects or to give a set of effective safeguards but will illustrate cases at the actors’ (author, reviewer, editor, journal, etc.) level showing where and how information can be truncated or manipulated (lifting, slicing, duplication, autocitation, etc.) to artificially augment their scientific visibility.
- Profile
Before joining Academe in 2004, Bruno GRANIER worked over a decade and a half for the oil industry. He is now full professor and the chair person in paleontology and sedimentology at the University of Brest (W Brittany, France). To date he has written or contributed to more than 60 publications related to these fields of interest. Bruno holds a PhD in Stratigraphy (1987) as well as the Habilitation in Earth Sciences (2003) from P. et M. Curie University – Paris. He is also the editor of the open-access geoscientific e-journal « Carnets de Géologie », that he launched by the end of 2002, and the administrator of the portal « Geoscience e-Journals ».
Stefan Hornbostel, DFG, Institute for Research Information and Quality Assurance
Title: “From ad hoc evaluation to monitoring systems”
- Profile
Professor Stefan Hornbostel is director of the Institute for Research Information and Quality Assurance (IFQ), established by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) in 2005. He is also professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin and an acknowledged expert in the field of research assessment. Stefan Hornbostel studied social sciences at the University of Göttingen and received his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin. He has worked at the universities of Kassel, Cologne, Jena, Dortmund and at the Center for Higher Education Development, studying the development and assessment of science. His long-standing expertise has led to his involvement in a number of German Science Council working groups and advisory boards for the German Rectors’ Conference.
Denis Jérome, CNRS, Académie des Sciences
Title: "Evaluation based on scientific publications: experiences in physics"
- Abstract
The situation of physics publications in Europe is facing a paradox: our continent is the main provider of scientific knowledge in this field, but has become a dwarf at the publishing level. We attribute this situation to a large extent to the process of evaluation of the research outcomes which is still driven by the popularity of the journals, instead of being based on the actual scientific impact.
We suggest that a bibliometric examination of the impact can be performed and provides reliable results provided it is conducted under the supervision of scientists. A preliminary study on a small ensemble of researchers will illustrate this proposal.
- Profile
Denis Jérome is Emeritus Director of Research at CNRS and Member of the French Academy of Sciences.
He is an experimental physicist, and a well-known expert for electronic properties of molecular materials in particular.
Dr. Jérome has a long experience of serving as Editor in Chief of several physics journals (Journal de Physique, Europhysics Letters,...) and is the founding editor of the European Physical Journal B.
Donald W. King, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Distinguished Research Professor
Title: "Alternative Metrics from a Publishers’ and a Librarians’ Perspective"
- Abstract
This presentation discusses metrics which can be used by publishers and librarians to make strategic and operational decisions. Examples show that such decisions can have unanticipated and unintentional consequences. Publishers decide on acceptance rates, editing and review policies, non-article content, journal and article size, etc. They also must decide on journal format and whether to migrate to author-side payment. Individuals decide to subscribe (in print or electronic) or rely on their library collections. Librarians decide to purchase (in print and/or electronic) or to use interlibrary loan or document delivery. Each publishing decision has an effect on cost and price which in turn has a ripple effect on personal and library circulation, information-seeking and reading patterns, and outcomes from reading. Numeric examples are given which should help librarians understand publisher decisions and publishers understand the consequences of their decisions.
Catriona MacCallum, Public Library of Science
Title: "Ratings, reviews and repercussions: PLoS meets Web 2.0" - Abstract
PLoS launched its first publishing venture in 2003. Its two flagship journals, PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine achieved acclaim through rigorous peer review, stringent selection and a radical new publishing model to reflect the changing nature of scholarly communication on the internet. The growth of social networking and ’Web 2.0’ technology since then has provided further challenges and opportunities for scholarly publishing. In response, PLoS’s new initiative – PLoS ONE - provides a means for commenting on and rating of articles, that continues after peer review and acceptance. All technically sound science should be published, be available to read and reuse, and be the springboard for researchers and readers to continue a scientific discussion. The repercussions of such change mean 1) we have an opportunity to provide alternatives to the journal ’impact factor’ as a measure of the importance of an individual article and 2) that the traditional scholarly journal, which sets up artificial barriers between subject areas and limits discourse around the content, has a limited life expectancy.
- Profile
Catriona MacCallum has a background in both science and in publishing. She grew up in Scotland and studied Zoology at Edinburgh University, remaining there to do a Ph.D. on the genetics and ecology of speciation. She continued with research in South Africa, before returning to a teaching post in Edinburgh. In 1998, she decided she wanted to be more involved in science communication and joined the Elsevier journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution as assistant Editor, becoming Editor in 1999. She resigned to join the Public Library of Science in July 2003 just before the launch of their first journal PLoS Biology. She sees her role with the Public Library of Science as a unique and challenging opportunity to help change the nature of scientific communication.
Adrian Mulligan, Elsevier
Title: "Perceptions and Misperceptions - Attitudes to Peer Review"
- Abstract
Peer review has been the cornerstone of scholarly publishing for a number of years, but how important is peer review to the research community today? What do researchers think peer review is? Technological changes have impacted peer review, but what is the reaction to some of the proposed changes? Drawing upon various research projects conducted by Elsevier in partnership with different research agencies over the last several years, we examine the motivations of reviewers, identify obstacles to peer review and attempt to clarify the purpose of peer review. Our research uncovers at times some surprising results. In the context of a changing environment we identify best practices that hopefully ensure the continued integrity of peer review.
- Profile
Adrian Mulligan is an Associate Director of research at Elsevier Ltd. His background is in archaeology with a B.A. degree and M.Sc from Leicester University, he is an associate member of the Market Research Society. He has worked in publishing for a number of years in various management positions within Elsevier. During the last 6 years he has worked in research and is currently responsible for a number of research projects run within Elsevier.
Ulrich Pöschl, Max Planck Society
Title: "Interactive Open Access Publishing and Collaborative Peer Review for Improved Scientific Communication and Quality Assurance"
- Abstract
The traditional forms of closed peer review and publication are insufficient for quality assurance in today’s highly diver¬se and rapidly evolving world of science. They need to be complemented by interactive, transparent, and well-documented forms of review, publication, and discussion, which are open to the scientific community and to the public (collaborative peer review).
Open access is instrumental for improving scientific quality assurance. It enables collaborative peer review; it gives reviewers more information to work with; and it facilitates the development of improved metrics to assess the impact and quality of scientific publications.
The advantages of open access and collaborative peer review can be efficiently and flexibly combined with the strengths of traditional publishing and peer review. Among the initiatives pursuing this approach and proving its viability, are the interactive open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP, www.atmos-chem-phys.org) and a growing number of sister journals published by the European Geosciences Union (EGU, www.egu.eu).
These journals are practicing a two-stage publication pro¬cess with public peer review and interactive discussion, which effectively resolves the dilemma between rapid scientific exchange and thorough quality assurance. The same or similar concepts have recently also been adopted in other disciplines including the life sciences and economics. The principles and achievements of interactive open access publishing (top quality & impact, high efficiency, low cost) will be outlined and discussed.
Pöschl, U., Interactive journal concept for improved scientific publishing and quality assurance, Learned Publishing, 17, 105-113, 2004. (www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/poeschl_learned_publishing_2004.pdf). - Profile
Ulrich Pöschl is heading a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Biogeochemistry Department, in Mainz, Germany. He has studied chemistry at the Technical University of Graz, Austria, and he has worked as a postdoctoral fellow, research scientist, group leader, and university lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Technical Universities of Munich and Vienna, and the University of Mainz. His current research and teaching are focused on the properties and interactions of aerosols and their effects on atmospheric chemistry and physics, the biosphere, climate, and public health (field measurements, laboratory experiments, and numerical modelling). Moreover, he is the initiator and chief executive editor of the interactive open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP, www.atmos-chem-phys.org), and he chairs the publications committee of the European Geosciences Union (EGU, www.egu.eu).
Jerry Sheehan, National Library of Medicine
Title: "Research Evaluation: Evolving Policies and Practices for Assessing Impact"
- Abstract
Research funding agencies in most leading scientific nations face mounting pressure to assess the quality and impact of supported research. Increases in public funding are frequently tied to changes in the governance of public research organizations, with the twin objectives of enhancing the quality and relevance of research and accelerating its translation into social and economic benefits. The heightened scrutiny of research impact, along with a commensurate expansion in the types of research programs supported by funding organizations, creates new challenges for evaluation that scientific and technical information can help address. More sophisticated indicators can improve the measurement of research impact and enable funding agencies to better tailor their research portfolios. This presentation will provide a broad overview of changes in the governance of public research and their implications for evaluation, highlighting the role of scientific and technical information. It will draw from the experiences of a number of OECD countries and provide insight into related activities at the US National Institutes of Health.
- Profile
Jerry Sheehan is Assistant Director for Policy Development at the National Library of Medicine. He advises NLM officials on a broad range of issues related to scientific, technical and medical information and health policy. Mr. Sheehan came to NLM from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris where he served as a Principal Administrator/Senior Economist in the Science and Technology Policy Division. He led OECD work on innovation and technology policy, including studies of policy evaluation and preparation of the biennial Science, Technology and Industry Outlook. Previously, Mr. Sheehan served as a Senior Program Officer with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council where he directed two influential studies commissioned by NLM: For the Record: Protecting Electronic Health Information, which served as a blueprint for the development of the privacy and security regulations; and Networking Health: Prescriptions for the Internet, which had an impact on HHS activities related to a nationwide health information network. Mr. Sheehan holds BS (Electrical Engineering) and MS (Technology and Policy) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Peter Shepherd, Project Counter
Title: "Usage Factor: a new insight into the value of journals"
- Abstract
Since Release 1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases was published in January 2003, COUNTER has continued to expand the scope of its coverage, both in terms of the number of publishers that have become COUNTER compliant and in terms of the categories of content it covers. COUNTER has also participated in a number of initiatives to increase the value of usage statistics as a management tool for librarians and publishers. A particularly significant development in this respect has been SUSHI, a new NISO protocol to facilitate the automated harvesting of usage statistics.
This paper will describe the achievements of COUNTER so far and will demonstrate how it is providing new insights into the value of journals. It will also address the practical challenges faced by vendors and librarians in implementing COUNTER, and will conclude with a discussion of issues COUNTER is currently addressing and its role in the possible development of a new metric – the journal Usage Factor.
- Profile
Over a 25-year career, Peter Shepherd has gained experience in all aspects of STM journal, book and database publishing, initially with Wiley and subsequently with Elsevier and Harcourt. During that time he has launched a wide range of products, and has been actively involved in the development of new online publishing models.
Dr Shepherd is now an independent publishing consultant. Since 2002 he has been Director of COUNTER, the international initiative to improve the reliability of online usage statistics.
Peter Shepherd received a PhD in chemistry in 1978 from St Andrews University and joined the publishing industry in 1980, following a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Under his nom de plume, Tom Angus, he also writes fiction and in 2005 published a satirical novel based in the STM publishing world – Let Them Eat Cake.
Pritpal S. Tamber, Faculty of 1000 Medicine
Title: "Faculty of 1000 Medicine: Post-publication peer selection"
- Abstract
As the number of journals and articles continue to increase, readers are faced with the so-called ‘information paradox’ – despite there being an apparent wealth of information, people are unable to find the things that matter to them. In healthcare, the problem is compounded by research often not being easily translated into clinically useful information and clinicians not having the time or training to perform this translation. “Faculty of 1000 Medicine” attempts to provide a solution – selections of articles that matter, with short synopses of what they may add to our clinical knowledge.
- Profile
Pritpal S Tamber is the Managing Director of “Faculty of 1000 Medicine”. A physician by training, he has worked as Editorial Director of BioMed Central, an open access publisher, and a Senior Editor of the BMJ. He is also the Secretary of the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), and a Council Member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a group that tries to raise ethical standards within biomedical publishing.
Mary Van Allen, Thomson Scientific
Title: "Bibliometric Approaches to Evaluation, with an overview of French Scientific Research" - Abstract
The scientific community and its funding bodies are increasingly challenged to (1) keep current on new science, (2) nurture new research talent, (3) measure the impact of scientific efforts, and (4) provide clear information on these efforts to decision makers. This presentation will first discuss bibliometric concepts and how the scientific literature informs on more than just the science by revealing relationships and opportunities. It will focus on application of citation analysis to evaluation and assessments, providing international examples and a focus on activity in the French scientific research community.
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