PLOS Biology: Architecting the Future of Research Communication: Building the Models and Analytics for an Open Access Future

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-11-01

Summary:

Use the link to access the full text article from PLoS Biology, "We live in an exciting time. There are huge opportunities starting to open up for more effective research communication. The massive progress towards Open Access [1] is a core part of this. At the same time, the tools we have to display, manipulate, and interact with this content have become not just incredibly powerful, but easier to use. And as the web in general provides new kinds of services, new ways of communicating, telling stories, and manipulating data there is a profound cultural shift occurring as our expectations of what should be possible, indeed what should be easy, grow. But as this vista opens up, we also have to make choices. The possibilities are multiplying but where should we focus our attention? More particularly, in a world of limited research resources where are the most important opportunities for greater efficiency? The Open Access movement has changed from a small community advocating for change, with successes in specific disciplines, to the centre of research policy making. But as we move into implementation, disagreements on details and priorities come to the surface. These choices and the attendant disagreements are important and will occupy our attention for the next few years. But we also need to look beyond them. We need to ask ourselves what our overall priorities are for research and research communication. And we need a framework that we can use to critique the opportunities and costs that will arise as we look to extend the principles of Open Access from articles to books, grey literature, data, and materials, indeed to all the outputs of research. Increasingly researchers, institutions, and funders will be asking the question: with these resources for communication, how do I maximize the value of this research? Understanding how to answer these questions is possibly the core challenge for the next decade of scholarly communications. To meet this challenge we will need better frameworks to understand how scholarly communication works in a networked environment ... If the opportunities that we have today to re-think and mould the architecture of our communication and sharing systems are huge, then the challenges are also significant. Resources for research will continue to be flat or falling for the foreseeable future as the global economy stutters towards recovery. We will need to make difficult choices on resource allocation, and particularly to understand the balance between supporting the research itself and its communication.

These choices are not about which projects to fund or which infrastructure to build. We are bad at picking winners and show no signs of getting any better. The choices we should make are rather about how to configure the systems, how to design the processes by which we make choices, so as to optimize the overall outcome. But at the moment we have neither the models to help us do this design work, nor the data to test such models.  It is not simply, as Jeff Hammerbacher once pithily stated that 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads' [9]. Those 'best minds' also have much better data on information flow and usage than we have in the research community. The data we have are poor and expensive, the analytics limited at best. Compare the sophistication that free tools such as Google Analytics provide in dissecting how well an advertisement with two subtly different borders performs with our ability to understand whether citations refer to the argument in a paper or the use of its data ..."

Link:

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001691

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.comment oa.open_science oa.tools oa.infrastructure oa.floss oa.data.analytics oa.social_networks oa.rdm

Date tagged:

11/01/2013, 13:25

Date published:

11/01/2013, 09:25