plos - why it is a model to be emulated
DESCRIPTION
Joint ICTP-IAEA-UNESCO Workshop on New Trends for Science Dissemination, Trieste Italy Sept 26, 2011TRANSCRIPT
The Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Why it is a Model to be Emulated
Philip E. Bourne
University of California San Diego
www.sdsc.edu/pb
My Two Lectures
1. The promise - Open Access, Open Science with particular reference to PLoS
2. The fulfillment - What Open Access facilitates and examples of how it benefits science
The promise - Open Access, Open Science with particular reference to PLoS
• What you might get from this lecture:
– Further insights into open repositories– Further insights into open access– What is happening with open journals– Some ideas for how you might proceed …
My Perspective
• I am a domain scientist (computational biology)• I got involved with the Public Library of Science
(PLoS) and subsequently the promise of open access
• I co-founded a company, SciVee Inc., that is attempting to leverage the perceived changes in scholarly communication
• I support a small academic scholarly communication group
Scholarly Communication Group
• Can we improve the way science is disseminated and comprehended?
• Through openness can we increase the number of people interested in science?
What is Open Access?
• A spectrum of things!• Free, relatively fast online access• Usage with less restrictions• Author retains copyright• Attribution must be given• Green – Authors make papers publically
available• Gold – Publishers make papers publically
available
Why is Open Access Important?
• Authors access to the largest possible audience
• Readers access to the entire literature
• Reuse of articlesdownload, copy, print, archive
• Full-text searching and mining beyond Boolean text searches
Journal prices
CPI/inflation
Journalspurchased
The journals crisis
Source: Association of Research Libraries
Examples of International Support for Open Access
• Berlin Declaration on Open Access– Dozens of major European Funders– Stipulates that articles’ copyrights should permit
virtually unrestricted redistribution
• NIH proposal to increase access, investment in PubMed Central
• UN’s World Summit on the Information Society endorses open-access publishing
Publishing is the final step in a research project
Researcher
Publisher
Reader
£
PublicDigitalLibrary
GovFundersCharityBusinessInstitutions
£Sources of Funding
The Human Face of Open Access
Josh Sommer – A Remarkable Young ManCo-founder & Executive Director the Chordoma Foundation
http://sagecongress.org/Presentations/Sommer.pdf
Chordoma
• A rare form of brain cancer
• No known drugs• Treatment – surgical
resection followed by intense radiation therapy
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Chordoma.JPG
http://sagecongress.org/Presentations/Sommer.pdf
http://sagecongress.org/Presentations/Sommer.pdf
http://sagecongress.org/Presentations/Sommer.pdf
Adapted: http://sagecongress.org/Presentations/Sommer.pdf
Isaac
If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants
Isaac Newton
From Josh’s point of view the climb up just takes too long
> 15 years and > $850M to be more precise
http://sagecongress.org/Presentations/Sommer.pdf
http://sagecongress.org/Presentations/Sommer.pdf
http://fora.tv/2010/04/23/Sage_Commons_Josh_Sommer_Chordoma_Foundation
Committed to making the world’s
scientific and medical literature
a public resource
PLoS Represents the Purest Form of Open Science – CC-BY
Some PLoS History…
PLoS Founding Board of Directors
Harold VarmusPLoS Co-founder Nobel Laureate, Director NCI
Patrick O. BrownPLoS Co-founderHoward Hughes Medical Institute & Stanford University School of Medicine
Michael B. EisenPLoS Co-founderLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory & University of California at Berkeley
What is the Public Library of Science?
• By driving a change in the publishing model to open access publishing
• By generating tools for mining the scientific literature
• By making it comprehensible to the non-specialist
A nonprofit organization of scientists committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource
PLoS – A Brief History• Founded in October, 2000• Circulated an open letter urging publishers
to increase access to research literature • >30,000 signatories• Some positive effects, but overall response
from publishers fell short of demands• In December, 2002, $9 million grant from
Moore Foundation to launch open access journals.
PLoS BiologyOctober, 2003
PLoS MedicineOctober, 2004
PLoS Community JournalsJune-September, 2005
& October, 2007 (NTDs)
PLoS ONEDecember, 2006
“a very large compendium of papers that have been vetted for scientific quality, but which will not be confined in terms of their likely importance." Harold Varmus, Oct 2005 on PLoS ONE
IF ~12 $$$
IF 5-10$$
IF ~4 $
PLoS ONE is the first so-called “mega journal”
• Covering all of Science (but mostly bio and health sciences)• Rapid editorial decisions• Publishing daily (currently ~70 per day)• Full colour throughout (no extra charge)• Papers of unlimited extent (no extra charge)• Unlimited supplementary materials (no extra charge)• Utilizes many ‘Web 2.0’ features (Comments, Notes, Star Ratings)• Utilizes many web 2.0 tools (Editorial Board discussion forum;
everyONE blog; Twitter; FriendFeed; Facebook)• Encouraging of debate and commenting• Uses the most liberal ‘CC BY’ copyright license• Open source platform & 2 ‘open’ APIs (Search and ALM)
Some of the Features of PLoS ONE
• Objective Editorial criteria
– Scientifically rigorous ; Ethical ; Properly reported ; Conclusions supported by the data
– Accepts negative results
• Editors and reviewers do not ask subjective questions such as:
– How important is the work?
– Which is the relevant audience?
• Everything that deserves to be published, will be published
– Therefore the journal is not artificially limited in size
• Online tools are used to evaluate, sort & filter the content after publication, not before
The ‘full’ PLoS ONE Model
• Looking at all PLoS ONE articles one year or older:– 76% already have at least one citation– 20% have 9 or more citations– 10% have 15 or more citations – Some articles already have more than 200 citations
(n=16,976 articles. Citation data from Scopus.)• 250 articles have more than 10,000 downloads• Many Nobel Laureates have published (and one Ignobel!)• Several articles have won ‘best of’ awards from their
societies
Quality Output
What is PLoS Doing With Its Open Access Content?
• Collections– A journal within a journal
• Hubs– Virtual aggregations– Using expert selection
• ‘Alt Metrics’ (aka Article Level Metrics)– Automated quality indicators– Integrated into search / browse
Article Level Metrics
The PLoS/PMC Corpus – Under the Hood
• Conforms well/partially to the NLM DTD – little markup of content
• PMC – some PDFs !
• The lack of conformance will come back to haunt us!
What is PLoS Computational Biology Doing Specifically?
• Mission:
• To serve the community of computational biologists by providing a means for communicating their best research
• To serve the community of life scientists by making them aware of the power of computation in advancing their science
• Introduce innovation in education, software, and data to these communities
The Wikipedia Experiment – Topic Pages
• Identify areas of Wikipedia that relate to the journal that are missing of stubs
• Develop a Wikipedia page in the sandbox
• Have a Topic Page Editor Review the page
• Publish the copy of record with associated rewards
• Release the living version into Wikipedia
PLoS Comp Biol Software
• Requires source be deposited in an open source public repository
• Encourages a copy of record be deposited with the article
• Requires that the reviewer be able to test the software if they wish (implies data, documentation, test parameters and output be provided for checking
Motivation: S.Veretnik, J.L.Fink, and P.E. Bourne 2008 Computational Biology Resources Lack Persistence and Usability.
PLoS Comp. Biol. . 4(7): e1000136
PLoS Comp Biol Software
Guess What We Don’t Have Many Papers So Far!
PLoS Comp Biol – Lessons Learned
• It takes a lot of time
• You have to believe (publish) in it
• The community has to believe in it
• Dedicated editors are a must e.g. Fran Lewitter (Education)
What About the Future?
A paper when complete is thrown over a high wall to a publisher and essentially forgotten – Perhaps it is time to climb the wall?
uzar.wordpress.com
The Future – Requires a different kind of publisher than we have today
My Wish…
• As a scientist I want an interaction with a “publisher” that does not begin when the scientific process ends, but begins at the beginning of the scientific process itself
What I want from a Publisher of the FuturePLoS Comp Biol 2010 6(5): e1000787
UKSG 2011
What Does That Mean? The “Publisher” becomes Part of the
Scientific WorkflowScientist
Idea
Experiment
Data
Conclusions
Publish
Laboratory
Publisher
Maybe The Line is Somewhere Else?45UKSG 2011
uzar.wordpress.com
Maybe The Line is Somewhere Else?
Scientist
Idea
Experiment
Data
Conclusions
Publish
Laboratory
Publisher
Institution?
Lab Notebook
46UKSG 2011
?
Scientist
Idea
Experiment
Data
Conclusions
Publish
Laboratory
Publisher
Institution?
Lab Notebook
Maybe The Line is Somewhere Else?
UKSG 2011 47
?
If All This is Realized What Could the Future Hold?
• The worlds scientific literature delivered to all at a minimal cost
• The ability to make the most of that knowledge by all concerned