Access to Scientific Research

David J. Brown

• Publisher: De Gruyter Saur
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110396393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The debate about access to scientific research raises questions about the current effectiveness of scholarly communication processes. This book explores, from an independent point of view, the current state of the STM publishing market, new publishing technologies and business models as well as the information habit of researchers, the politics of research funders, and the demand for scientific research as a public good. The book also investigates the democratisation of science including how the information needs of knowledge workers outside academia can be embraced in future.

Chapter 1
Background

This book reports on the current state of scientific publishing. It is a study about reinvention of corporate roles in the global scholarly communication industry set against a background of a migration from a print to a digital world. It is a description of a transformative process still underway. It involves a clash between strong legacy in support of a traditional print-based approach, as against new innovative procedures which adopt emerging digital work practices, powerful communications and networking technologies. Specifically it reviews claims of dysfunctionality in the present publishing system and its inability to cater for researchers’ future information needs. The former offers the researcher values such as authority, quality and safety; the latter greater speed, more transparency, lower costs and greater reach into new areas of usage.

This is a significant issue. Effectiveness in the communication of research results from scientific effort is at stake. Research is at the heart of a growing economy and inefficiencies or dysfunctionality in the dissemination of output comes at a huge social and economic cost.

This book also reflects on the trend whereby new forms of scientific communication are being led by scientists who combine their knowledge of their scientific discipline with an appreciation of the specific needs of their peer group. New services are emerging at grass roots level. On the other hand it has been suggested that existing publishers and librarians provide steady improvements and local enhancements to the legacy research system. They are not organised or empowered to adopt risky and innovative processes. Nevertheless, what is developing, slowly, is the potential for a more democratic information system, based on rapidly developing communication and computer technologies, which supports interactivity, collaboration, openness, and sharing. It could enable a much wider audience to take part in the broadest aspects of science research and communication.

This book begins with an analysis of how publishers and librarians currently face the changing business environment, and how they need to adapt in order to remain significant players on the information scene in the next two to five years. It remains to be seen whether they will become leaders in the drive towards an effective scholarly communication system or remain merely bit-part players in sustaining successful new ventures. Whether they will be sidelined completely as new ventures, supported directly by end users, emerge to create new competitive services that meet more timely needs, are also considered. There is a ‘valley of death’ syndrome which existing stakeholders need to cross, from the downward slope of print to the upward climb of the digital. The valley floor itself involves cultural change and adoption of new business practices which publishers may find difficult to take on board (see chapter 7).

Scientific communication is manifesting change in a number of ways: not only in the extent to which electronic publishing and network technology is being adopted; and not only in coping with the administrative changes which have come into play as focus is applied to ensuring research efficiencies are introduced; but equally significantly how the current players react to the change in the sociology of science and market behaviour. There are many unanswered questions about the interaction of all these issues and how answers to these questions will impact on the future model for scientific communication. There are many unknowns and few knowns on how print versus digital scenarios will be played out.

There is an additional facet which this study adds to the above complexity. There are opportunities for private individuals to benefit from access to findings of scientific research, but because of current technical, social, administrative and business constraints, they are denied ease of access. The study explores whether external-sourced changes will enfranchise these individuals, or keep them as now on the outside of the scientific publishing process looking in. The ultimate aim would be to enfranchise the disenfranchised, affiliate the unaffiliated, and make science more democratic and less elitist. Interest in science output is no longer confined to the 7–12 million researchers worldwide in academia and corporate R&D. Instead an estimated 600–800 million knowledge workers are potentially interested and could become enfranchised albeit at lower levels of research intensity (see chapter nineteen).

Who are these knowledge workers? There is no precise or accepted definition of them as a group or community largely because of the diversity in their backgrounds and different levels of academic achievement. Studies have cast the net wide to include any job or occupation which has a ‘cerebral’ content – approximately 50% of the labour force is included in such classifications (Drucker, 1973; Porat, 1977).

For the purpose of this report, a narrower definition is applied which places emphasis on getting access to ‘high-level scientific’ research information which would be relevant to individuals in their professional or personal lives. The term ‘unaffiliated knowledge workers’ (or UKWs) will be used to describe members of these groups who find themselves outside the mainstream scientific publication system. Scientific in this context are findings which have traditionally been reported in research articles in the hard sciences (beta sciences) published in reputable peer-reviewed journals for a global research audience. Present and future research outputs can take a much broader range of formats, from datasets to video clips, from preprints to e-prints, from moderated bulletin board items to blogs and wikis, from mash-ups to webinars. These could be the avenues along which UKWs could march to gain future access.

The term ‘unaffiliated knowledge workers’ excludes those individuals who are part of academia, large corporate research centres or research institutes which are ‘affiliated’ in the sense that they do not have the same constraints in accessing scientific literature which face those outside such institutions. These large ‘affiliated’ research institutions are likely to have their own research libraries and professional information support staff. These library staff are tasked with providing access to relevant research literature for their affiliated patrons by purchasing the items (mainly journals, serials or books, printed or electronic) out of their annual collections budget. Those individuals who are outside such an institutional purchasing mechanism are in effect disenfranchised from the mainstream of published research output and are categorised as UKWs. The situation facing UKWs is an example of the ‘dysfunctionality’ which is targeted at scientific journal publishers in particular.

The preferred business model supported by most journal publishers does not treat individuals outside the research library sector as a significant and commercially viable target audience. Hence, their needs are not taken into account and ever since the decline of the personal (journal) subscription (Tenopir & King, 2000) they have been excluded from easy access to relevant scientific output published in scientific journals. The scientific journal reigns supreme and is heavily protected despite a growing litany of complaints about its present and future role, and also criticism about the defensive postures adopted by some leading publishers in protecting the commercial interests of their stockholders.

‘Communication’ comes in many forms, of which journal publishing is one small part. Researchers are enveloped by new informatics services which increase the speed and relevance of information-seeking and reporting activities. Their reliance on traditional forms of publication declines in favour of becoming sophisticated ‘digital consumers’. ‘Big Science’ has become a growing part of the scientific research effort, and this has spawned new ways of cooperating and sharing. Collaboration and communication, global in extent, is being conducted through services such as Skype, Viber, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, FaceBook, blogs, webinars and listservs rather than through the pages of the scientific journal. Many researchers are lost and confused by such changes, particularly with respect to what they can and cannot do as openness clashes with ownership of intellectual property in the dissemination of formalised research output (Cox & Cox, 2008; Morris, 2009). The position which learned societies have in providing their professional members with information support services will also be addressed. Though this does not cover all the UKWs, the link between many learned societies, professionals, and the latest applied research relevant to their areas is strong. Learned societies represent a core market sector of UKWs. Their specific information needs will be highlighted, and their differences from affiliated academic users will be described.

The basic argument put forward in this book is that rapid change is underway, and the past and current system for scientific information dissemination may not necessarily be appropriate for the future where bigger and new mass audiences could be reached using different access procedures to research outputs. The diversity of such new audiences can be exemplified in Fig. 1.1. Not only are there many professions with their associated learned societies, there is also a large category of SMEs (small and medium enterprises) which are unable to get regular access to the range of scientific output that may help such entrepreneurs and innovators in setting their business strategies and operations. Other disenfranchised areas will be commented on as part of the ‘long tail’ of U.K. knowledge workers, and include the growing number of ‘citizen scientists’ who participate in many global research challenges (see chapter 22).

Fig. 1.1: Overview of Unaffiliated Knowledge Worker sectors

However, there is a constraint facing the objective set for this book. Though scientific research and publishing research outputs are important to society, there is a dearth of reliable, consistent and comprehensive data on which to build effective national or international information strategies and policies. Pockets of statistics do exist in the U.K., from agencies such as Office of National Statistics (ONS), Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, LISU and agencies such as Eurostat and National Science Foundation on a broader international setting. But these are not joined up, rarely share common definitions, and merely accentuate the poverty of quality macro level data available within this industry.

It has led to controversy about the value contributed by various players in the overall STM publication process.

But salvation may be in sight. This confluence of unmet information needs within a changing research environment has come at a time when ‘open access’ has emerged as a potentially viable business model. Open Access (OA) provides the means whereby those who have been excluded, the UKWs, could now be included in the formal research communication process as no paid subscription to access is required. A leading barrier created to access – financial controls – is removed. An international infrastructure is built around the alternative Open Access (OA) methods of Green, Gold and Hybrid (see chapter 25). Despite the attractions of OA, there is still some resistance to its universal adoption. This is currently being debated often with high emotion among and between the information industry’s stakeholders. New, untapped markets for research outputs have so far not been effectively targeted by OA as the latter’s supporters seek to use the new business model as ways to assist the ‘affiliated’ rather than reach out to unknown markets. Nor has OA been universally accepted by the researcher community itself who are still – as prospective authors – displaying a conservative approach in adopting this new business model.

This book goes one step beyond OA by exploring the scale and different current information needs and habits of those who constitute the ‘long tail’ of scientific information. The key element of this study is that it highlights that a new approach which does not just involve an extension of traditional practices is needed. How researchers in all types of organisations are adapting their research activities in response to the ‘perfect storm’ (chapter 4) which is facing them in the work-place becomes important. Support for new market scenarios needs to be built on solid evidence and hard fact wherever possible, even though such evidence is currently fragmented, spasmodic and inconsistent. Nevertheless, for the future, reliable data underlying demographics and sociological trends are essential in understanding the changing information habits of the total research industry.

One specific aim from this book is to provide tangible evidence on the nature of the UKW communities in the U.K., sufficient to enable new and viable business models to be developed, which would enfranchise such non-academia-based professional knowledge workers. But more data and evidence needs to be created. As William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, wrote in 1883:

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

This study attempts to fill in some of the gaps in knowledge through measuring and pulling together evidence from a variety of qualitative and quantitative sources. However, firstly, there are a number of terms which are used in the study which require definition and the approach taken outlined. This is the topic of the next chapter.

Chapter 2
Definitions

Approach

Several issues are involved in this analysis.

–The book focuses on science, technology and medicine (stem, S&E or STM) rather than broader scholarship. These acronyms will be used interchangeably, with ‘STM’ being the most used. It is however recognised that there is a highly fragmented approach by disciplines in their respective approaches to digital information. A physicist is a different social animal, in information terms, from a humanist; a biologist from an econometrician. Even within scientific disciplines there are different sub-cultures each with differing approaches in adopting scientific publishing practices.

–In terms of academic discipline, the study is about information science. However, it also straddles informatics, sociology of science with behavioural economics. Psychology, social psychology, and social networking all have their parts to play in coming to terms with the strength of emerging informal social media and other alternatives to online text as platforms for scientific communication.

–The study is both commercially focused and strategic rather than purely academic in its approach. An assessment of market size, trends, and prevailing business models would be essential in understanding the interaction and significance of features involved in the change taking place in the publication of results from scientific research. Over time it is hoped, as suggested above, that gaps in data collection can be filled, and future iterations of this project will enable effective market data to be produced for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About IFLA
• Foreword — Why This Book?
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations used in the Text
• Chapter 1: Background
• Chapter 2: Definitions
• Chapter 3: Aims, Objectives, and Methodology
• Chapter 4: Setting the Scene
• Chapter 5: Information Society
• Chapter 6: Drivers for Change
• Chapter 7: A Dysfunctional STM Scene?
• Chapter 8: Comments on the Dysfunctionality of STM Publishing
• Chapter 9: The Main Stakeholders
• Chapter 10: Search and Discovery
• Chapter 11: Impact of Google
• Chapter 12: Psychological Issues
• Chapter 13: Users of Research Outputs
• Chapter 14: Underlying Sociological Developments
• Chapter 15: Social Media and Social Networking
• Chapter 16: Forms of Article Delivery
• Chapter 17: Future Communication Trends
• Chapter 18: Academic Knowledge Workers
• Chapter 19: Unaffiliated Knowledge Workers
• Chapter 20: The Professions
• Chapter 21: Small and Medium Enterprises
• Chapter 22: Citizen Scientists
• Chapter 23: Learned Societies
• Chapter 24: Business Models
• Chapter 25: Open Access
• Chapter 26: Political Initiatives
• Chapter 27: Summary and Conclusions
• Chapter 28: Research Questions Addressed
• Bibliography
• Index
• Endnotes