This document discusses principles of agile publishing and how they could be applied to scholarly communication. It outlines stages of research, authoring, assessment, publishing/producing, reading, and curation/annotation. It provides examples of tools that enable more collaborative, iterative, and immediate sharing of research at each stage, from open data repositories and collaborative authoring platforms to annotation tools and reputation systems not based on traditional journals. The goal is to explore how applying agile principles could change scholarly publishing to better satisfy researchers' needs.
2. What is Agile?
The philosophy behind agile software development:
• satisfy the customer
• welcome change
• iterate frequently
`
• build on a growing base
• promote dialog
If we were to adopt these principles, what would scholarly
communication look like?
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20. PLOS Labs: Alternate Evaluation
• Design and testing of novel evaluation system:
– Simple and Fast
– Structured
– Transparent with open data
– Potential for larger number of peers providing
feedback
– Can be collected pre- or post publication
– General to scientific research outputs
21. Collection areas
Factors connected to journal titles:
1 Personal interest
2 Importance to Science & Shared Knowledge
Factors connected to traditional peer review:
3 Validity and Scientific Merit
4 Writing, Presentation, and Clarity
22. 2
Importance to Science & Shared Knowledge
This work makes little to no
contribution to science knowledge
This work makes a minor
contribution to the field of study
If the user selects either of these two
options, display the following:
I think this work was not worth doing
This work makes a significant
contribution to science knowledge
This work advances the field
If the user selects either of these two
options, display the following:
This work is a major scientific breakthrough
This work has an important or novel method
This work will lead to reinterpretation of wellestablished findings
This work opens a new area of inquiry in the field
This work has an important or significant conclusion:
28. “If you put an author and a reader in a
room together would the author read
her article to the reader?”
-John Sack
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29. HighWire user research
Reading Isn’t What It Used To Be:
• 2002: “I read 3-4 journals regularly”
• 2012: “I read 8-10 journals regularly”
Huh?
HighWire
|
Stanford University
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30. Email TOC is reading
HighWire
|
Stanford University
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37. With all these rapid and immediate
forms of authoring, curating and
collaborating, will future generations
of scientists will wait for us to publish
anything?
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40. ALM Reports
alm.plos.org
Allows researchers, institutions &
funders to:
• create a report of the ALMs for a
single or set of PLOS articles
• view a summary of the metrics
along with an accompanying set of
data visualizations.
Search based on:
• keyword
• author name & country
• affiliation
• publication date
• subject areas
• funder
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Agile manifesto in 2001, came along wit hnew languages and web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, PhythonDjango, as well as an increase in oepn source software, and the whole notion of not reinventing wheels but collectively building on work
The first stage of conducting research data and analyzing is rapidly evolving. There has been a rise in open and collaborative approaches, grants specifically requireing collaboration, and sites and services that facilitate that. More and more researchers are sharing data early and often.
Evolutionary biologists
Researchers are doing it for themselves
Interstingly, authors may be underatking novel methods of gathering and sharing data, but they continue to set all that aside, open up a blank Word document and start typing a paper much as they have for decades.
Lots of experiments, crowd-sourcing, peerage, Rubriq
No change to current peer review – this is an alternate systemParallel, separate, different than how peer review works now. (hard to get people to understand this)“Structured Peer Evaluation” just an internal name – leads to initialism “SPE” + too long, clunky, naming still TBDNOT intended as a replacement for peer review. Different! But if successful will make peer review faster, easier to find reviewers, and provide far more data about the factors researchers need about published works.
Interest: do you care about this work?Importance: how important is this?Merit: Do you believe this work?Clarity: Did they present it according to community norms?Note: no where in the tool do we ask questions. We present a context and allow the peer evaluator to frame a graded response within that context. Intentional – discuss question/framing workload issues
Perhaps the scariest trend of allAuthoring and publishing are becoming oneMany ways to output work
Reading is no longer passive:Fanfic – way young people are reading now. Sharing books w/ each other. 4.7M uploads, 60% growth in 2012Booktype – move from reader to collaborative knowledge producers
The site saw 400 million unique visitors and 37 billion page views, two numbers that place it easily in the world's most trafficked sites. Additionally, the site says there were 30 million posts made to the site, and 4 billion up and down votes were made to said posts. Reddit: the rise of Reddit is 'facilitating conversation in interesting ways'like no other service online. it's success points to a few things weknew: people like being pseudo-anonymous, they like having some levelof interactivity or input into the conversation, large crowds whenorganized well can create some great filtering systems, and peoplewill give tons of effort for magic Internet points.
This is why they continue to come. They have to.
Break down the silos and offer more cross-publisher services (text mining, discovery, submissions)REduce the overhead to sharing researchImprove peer reviewImproved data sharing and reporducibilityWork on the things that matter to our core stakeholders – researchers (and the people who fund them)