Standing on the Digits of Giants: Another Excellent Cross-Stakeholder Discussion in Scholarly Communication - Digital Science

"Last week, I spoke at an ALPSP seminar that was jointly organized by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and ably moderated by William Kilbride, who’s the Executive Director of the DPC. Kilbride stated two of the challenges that the DPC faces in its mission to ensure preservation of the scholarly record, are difficulties in engaging with publishers and getting caught up in the Open Access (OA) debate. Specifically, he was interested in knowing how publishers think about preservation of the scholarly record. Does the industry think that the problem is solved? Does it need to be solved? Obviously, it does. The subject of my talk was, Transformations in Scholarly Communications. That’s a pretty broad title given the storied history of the industry. I eschewed the temptation to give a history lecture and chose instead to focus on how scholarly communication is currently changing. Specifically, I talked about the growth of open science and open data, the reasons why there is currently a surge of interest, and how we might change current workflows and incentive structures to enable it. Specifically, I make the argument that data sharing workflows have to be as simple and intuitive as possible, and fully integrate things like metadata creation and structure compliance from the point at which data is created. The slides for my talk as well as the audio is available, along with all the others from the day, at the event page on alpsp.org. You can play a fun game of guess when the slide transition happened ..."