Scholarship 2.0: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Peer Review Highly Sensitive To Poor Refereeing, Claim Researchers

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 22:41:00 +0000

Just a small number of bad referees can significantly undermine the ability of the peer-review system to select the best scientific papers. That is according to a pair of complex systems researchers in Austria who have modelled an academic publishing system and showed that human foibles can have a dramatic effect on the quality of published science.

[snip]

While the concept of peer review is widely considered the most appropriate system for regulating scientific publications, it is not without its critics. Some feel that the system's reliance on impartiality and the lack of remuneration for referees mean that in practice the process is not as open as it should be. This may be particularly apparent when referees are asked to review more controversial ideas that could damage their own standing within the community if they give their approval.

Questioning referee competence

Stefan Thurner and Rudolf Hanel at the Medical University of Vienna set out to make an assessment of how the peer-review system might respond to incompetent refereeing. [snip]

The researchers created a model of a generic specialist field where referees, selected at random, can fall into one of five categories. There are the "correct" who accept the good papers and reject the bad. There are the "altruists" and the "misanthropists", who accept or reject all papers respectively. Then there are the "rational", who reject papers that might draw attention away from their own work. And finally, there are the "random" who are not qualified to judge the quality of a paper because of incompetence or lack of time.

[snip]

Within this model community, the quality of scientists is assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution where each scientist produces one new paper every two time-units, the quality reflecting an author's ability. At every step in the model, each new paper is passed to two referees chosen at random from the community, with self-review excluded, with a reviewer being allowed to either accept or reject the paper. The paper is published if both reviewers approve the paper, and rejected if they both do not like it. If the reviewers are divided, the paper gets accepted with a probability of 0.5.

Big impact on quality

After running the model with 1000 scientists over 500 time-steps, Thurner and Hanel find that even a small presence of rational or random referees can significantly reduce the quality of published papers. When just 10% of referees do not behave "correctly" the quality of accepted papers drops by one standard deviation. If the fractions of rational, random and correct referees are about 1/3 each, the quality selection aspect of peer review practically vanished altogether.

"Our message is clear: if it can not be guaranteed that the fraction of rational and random referees is confined to a very small number, the peer-review system will not perform much better than by accepting papers by throwing (an unbiased!) coin," explain the researchers.

[snip]

Don't forget the editors

But Tim Smith, senior publisher for New Journal of Physics at IOP Publishing, which also publishes physics world.com, feels that the study overlooks the role of journal editors. "[snip]. In relation to this study however, one shouldn't ignore the role played by journal editors and Boards in accounting for potential conflicts of interest, and preserving the integrity of the referee selection and decision-making processes," he says.

Michèle Lamont a sociologist at Harvard University who analyses peer review in her 2009 book, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, feels that we expect too much from peer review. [snip]

When asked by physicsworld.com to offer an alternative to the current peer-review system, Thurner argues that science would benefit from the creation of a "market for scientific work". He envisages a situation where journal editors and their "scouts" search preprint servers for the most innovative papers before approaching authors with an offer of publication. [snip]

[snip]

Related

"Peer Review And Journal Models" / Paolo Dall'Aglio

[http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0608307]

About the author

James Dacey is a reporter for physicsworld.com

[http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/43691]

!!! Thanks To Antonella De Robbio For The HeadsUp !!!

The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:28:00 +0000

The Idea of Order explores the transition from an analog to a digital environment for knowledge access, preservation, and reconstitution, and the implications of this transition for managing research collections. The volume comprises three reports. The first, "Can a New Research Library be All-Digital?" by Lisa Spiro and Geneva Henry, explores the degree to which a new research library can eschew print. The second, "On the Cost of Keeping a Book," by Paul Courant and Matthew "Buzzy" Nielsen, argues that from the perspective of long-term storage, digital surrogates offer a considerable cost savings over print-based libraries. The final report, "Ghostlier Demarcations," examines how well large text databases being created by Google Books and other mass-digitization efforts meet the needs of scholars, and the larger implications of these projects for research, teaching, and publishing.

The reports are introduced by Charles Henry; the volume includes a conclusion by Roger Schonfeld and an epilogue by Charles Henry.

June 2010 / 123 pp. / $25 / ISBN 978-1-932326-35-2 / CLIR Reports 147

Source And Full Text Available At

[http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub147abst.html]

NISO, IU Receive Mellon Grant to Advance Tools for Quantifying Scholarly Impact From Large-scale Usage Data

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:44:00 +0000

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., and BALTIMORE, Md. -- A $349,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Indiana University Bloomington will fund research to develop a sustainable initiative to create metrics for assessing scholarly impact from large-scale usage data.
IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing associate professor Johan Bollen and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will share the Mellon Foundation grant designed to build upon the MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (MESUR) project that Bollen began in 2006 with earlier support from the foundation. Bollen is also a member of the IU School of Informatics and Computing's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) and the IU Cognitive Science Program faculty.

The new funding for "Developing a Generalized and Sustainable Framework for a Public, Open, Scholarly Assessment Service Based on Aggregated Large-scale Usage Data," will support the evolution of the MESUR project to a community-supported, sustainable scholarly assessment framework. MESUR has already created a database of more than 1 billion usage events with related bibliographic, citation and usage data for scholarly content.

[snip]

The project will focus on four areas in developing the sustainability model -- financial sustainability, legal frameworks for protecting data privacy, technical infrastructure and data exchange, and scholarly impact -- and then integrate the four areas to provide the MESUR project with a framework upon which to build a sustainable structure for deriving valid metrics for assessing scholarly impact based on usage data. Simultaneously, MESUR's ongoing operations will be continued with the grant funding and expanded to ingest additional data and update its present set of scholarly impact indicators.

[snip]

Data from more than 110,000 journals, newspapers and magazines, along with publisher-provided usage reports covering more than 2,000 institutions, is being ingested and normalized in MESUR's databases, resulting in large-scale, longitudinal maps of the scholarly community and a survey of more than 40 different metrics of scholarly impact.

Sources

[http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displaytext.pl?RC=15037]

[http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/15040.html]

NYTimes > Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:38:00 +0000

[snip] Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

[snip]

That transformation was behind the recent decision by the prestigious 60-year-old Shakespeare Quarterly to embark on an uncharacteristic experiment in the forthcoming fall issue — one that will make it, Ms. Rowe says, the first traditional humanities journal to open its reviewing to the World Wide Web.

Mixing traditional and new methods, the journal posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts — what Ms. Rowe called “our crowd sourcing” — were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.

The Shakespeare Quarterly trial, along with a handful of other trailblazing digital experiments, goes to the very nature of the scholarly enterprise. [snip]

[snip].

Each type of review has benefits and drawbacks.

[snip]

Clubby exclusiveness, sloppy editing and fraud have all marred peer review on occasion. Anonymity can help prevent personal bias, but it can also make reviewers less accountable; exclusiveness can help ensure quality control but can also narrow the range of feedback and participants. Open review more closely resembles Wikipedia behind the scenes, where anyone with an interest can post a comment. This open-door policy has made Wikipedia, on balance, a crucial reference resource.

Ms. Rowe said the goal is not necessarily to replace peer review but to use other, more open methods as well.

[snip]

The most daunting obstacle to opening up the process is that peer-review publishing is the path to a job and tenure, and no would-be professor wants to be the academic canary in the coal mine.

The first question that Alan Galey, a junior faculty member at the University of Toronto, asked when deciding to participate in The Shakespeare Quarterly’s experiment was whether his essay would ultimately count toward tenure. “I went straight to the dean with it,” Mr. Galey said. (It would.)

Although initially cautious, Mr. Galey said he is now “entirely won over by the open peer review model.” The comments were more extensive and more insightful, he said, than he otherwise would have received on his essay, which discusses Shakespeare in the context of information theory.

Advocates of more open reviewing, like Mr. Cohen at George Mason argue that other important scholarly values besides quality control — for example, generating discussion, improving works in progress and sharing information rapidly — are given short shrift under the current system.

“There is an ethical imperative to share information,” said Mr. Cohen, who regularly posts his work online, where he said thousands read it. Engaging people in different disciplines and from outside academia has made his scholarship better, he said.

To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 24, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html/]

Letters To The Editor > 08-30-10

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/opinion/l30review.html]

See Also CHE > Leading Humanities Journal Debuts 'Open' Peer Review, and Likes It

[http://chronicle.com/article/Leading-Humanities-Journal/123696/]

BTW: I Profiled Several Innovative Alternative Initiatives Several Years Ago > For Example

"Alternative Peer Review:

Quality Management for 21st Century Scholarship"

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/APR-1.ppt]

> >> It's A Large PPT (200+ Slides) >>>

>>> But IMHO ... Well Worth The Experience [:-)] <<<

See Also (My) Other Works Listed / Linked At

The Scientist > August 2010 > Peer Review Rejected

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2010/08/scientist-august-2010-peer-review.html]

NPR > An Un-'Common' Take On Copyright Law

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:49:00 +0000

It's safe to say that most Americans don't spend much time thinking about intellectual property law. But in Common As Air, Lewis Hyde explains why these laws profoundly affect our culture -- and how they are based on assumptions that are artificial, illogical and outdated.

[snip]

.... [I]ntellectual property laws affect our culture profoundly, in ways that go beyond college students being taken to court for downloading songs. Some people believe that not only are current copyright laws too stringent, but that the assumptions the current laws are based on are artificial, illogical and outdated.

Among them is Lewis Hyde, a professor of art and politics who has studied these issues for years. In his new book Common As Air, Hyde says he's suspicious of the concept of "intellectual property" to begin with, calling it "historically strange." Hyde backs it up with an impressive amount of research; he spends a significant amount of time reflecting on the Founding Fathers, who came up with America's initial copyright laws.

Hyde is a contrarian, but he's not a scorched-earth opponent of all copyright laws. He does believe the national paradigm for intellectual property issues should be changed, though, at one point offering several examples of the absurd situations the current laws have created. [snip]Hyde advocates for a return to a "cultural commons" and quotes, approvingly, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that "ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man."

[more]

Source / Excerpt Available At

[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129299939]

>>> Slide Show >>>

[http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/23/common_as_air_lewis_hyde/slideshow.html]

Teacher Magazine / AP > Net-Age Students Have Different View of Plagiarism

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:18:00 +0000

Published: August 16, 2010 > EASTON, Pa. (AP) — Last year, students in an Easton Area High School entrepreneurship class were assigned to write business plans. While reviewing them, teachers quickly realized one student had copied entire portions of his from a plan posted on the Internet.

[snip]

"There is a blurred vision by many in this digital age because there's just so much information they have access to," Koch said. "It's very difficult for them to filter what is mine and what is yours. It's all out there for you to utilize."

Although local educators said they haven't seen any rise in plagiarism cases lately, many found students from a generation raised on the Internet have a different perspective on what constitutes plagiarism.

[snip]

"Some students seem to think that whatever is out there is free to take," said Ed Lotto, director of first-year writing at Lehigh University. "They seem to think it's common knowledge and they can cite common knowledge without citation."

Plagiarism is a cultural, nationwide phenomenon. The problem is not limited to the Lehigh Valley.

[snip]

Lotto said the problem may manifest, in part, from the way the Internet has changed young people's perspective about digital media.

[snip]

"It's the culture they grew up in," Lotto said. "And that would affect their perception of ownership of things in the world."

[snip]

Part of the problem, he said, is students learn at a young age to use the Internet as a research tool, but are not necessarily instructed early on what requires a citation and how to cite it.

"I think it's a problem in the curriculum for younger grades," Ziegler said. "There has to be a way to better transition those kids from middle school reports to high school reports."

Other local educators don't necessarily see a connection between students raised in the digital age and plagiarism.

Hannah Stewart-Gambino, dean of Lafayette College, said students are instructed as thoroughly as ever about what constitutes plagiarism and most know the difference between what is right and wrong.

"Even as humans were scratching rudimentary writing into tree bark, the inclination to claim work that is not one's own has been human nature," Stewart-Gambino said. "I'm not convinced technology or the Internet has altered human nature or that temptation substantially, frankly."

Editorial Comment > Are You Serious ???

But she does believe students have difficulty differentiating between legitimate sources on the Internet and nonacademic sources.

[snip]

Just as music companies and film studios have had to change their online sales models in response to illegal downloading, Lotto said some educators have suggested schools will have to change their views of what constitutes plagiarism due to the rise of the Internet.

"I've heard it argued a change in perspective of plagiarism is coming, that we shouldn't be too hard-nosed about it," he said. "I'm an older guy, so I don't really buy it so much, but I do hear it sometimes from younger teachers and graduate students."

Lotto added, "It's going to change. I don't know how or in what way, but you can see it."

Information from: The Express-Times [http://www.lehighvalleylive.com]

Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Source > Available To Subscribers / Registered Guests At

[http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2010/08/16/netstudentsplagiarism_ap.html]

The P-Word II > The Ontology of Plagiarism: Part Two > Get A Clue

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:23:00 +0000

Colleagues/

In response to comments on his recent NY Times Opinionator Piece > Plagiarism Is Not A Big Moral Deal

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2010/08/p-word-stanley-fish-and-i-agree.html] ,

Stanley Fish has authored "The Ontology of Plagiarism: Part Two "

[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/the-ontology-of-plagiarism-part-two/].

IMHO > Most Still Do Not (Really) Recognize/Understand The Issue(s) > Please (Do) View / Read My Perspective On The Issue >>>

A few years ago I gave a keynote at the 3rd International Plagiarism Conference / 23 - 25 June 2008 / City Campus East, Northumbria University / Newcastle-upon-tyne, UK /

"Disruptive Scholarship: An Idea Whose Time Has Come: (Re)Use / (Re)Mix / (Re)New"

Abstract

Hadrian's Wall is a stone and turf fortification built by the Roman Empire across the width of modern-day England. ... [It was] 117 kilometres long,

... [I]ts width and height [were] dependent on the construction materials [that] ... were available nearby.

... [T]he wall in the east follow[ed] the outcrop of a hard, resistant igneous diabase rock escarpment ... Local limestone was used in the construction, except for ... section[s] in the west ... where turf was used instead ... .

The Broad Wall was initially built with a clay-bonded rubble core and mortared dressed rubble facing stones, but this seems to have made it vulnerable to collapse, and repair with a mortared core was sometimes necessary.... [I]n time ... [Hadrian's] Wall was abandoned and fell into ruin. Over the centuries and even into the twentieth century a large proportion of the stone was reused in other local buildings.

Throughout history, humans have (re)used local resources to create not only buildings and fortifications, but monuments, roads, and a wide variety of other structures. For countless generations, artists, composers, and writers have freely incorporated elements from local and distant cultures to create new visual, musical, and textual forms.

In The Web 2.0 World, the open (re)combination of multiple media has become commonplace in many venues, practices that Lawrence Lessig [snip], founder of Creative Commons [snip]and others, would characterize as emblematic of a 'Remix ' or 'Read/Write' culture. Indeed, from his point of view, “the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process” [snip]

In the recently-released Horizon Report 2008 - a joint publication of the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), six emerging information technologies and practices that are expected to significantly impact educational organizations are profiled: Grassroots Video, Collaborative Webs, Mobile Broadband, Data Mashups, Collaborative Intelligence, and Social Operating Systems.

In this presentation, we will review the Read/Write Traditions of the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences; analyze key Past / Present / Future Participatory Technologies; and explore the potential of Web 2.0 for creating/fostering Disruptive Learning / Scholarship / Teaching in the 21st century.

The Director's Cut of the (150+ Slides) PPT is available from my _Scholarship 2.0_ blog at

[ http://bit.ly/9riXmc ]

I hope The Title and Abstract indicate That I Have A Different View Of The P-Word [:-)]

/Gerry

Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s > "The Future of Research and Scholarship - Open, Social, Semantic, Mobile"

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 13:51:00 +0000

Colleagues/

On Augst 12 2010, The NYTimes piblished an article titled "Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s" >>>

In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain.

[more]

Source

[http://nyti.ms/9mgrCc]

As Expected > Observed > Predicted >>>

BTW: Not Only Did The Irish Save Civilization

[http://amzn.to/17Kp7] [http://nyti.ms/9DhC1T]

We Also ForeSaw / Foresee The Future [:-)]

>>> They Are A-Changin' > The Future Of Research And Scholarship: Open / Semantic / Social / Mobile <<<

There are four major themes that are and will become the context and framework of research and scholarship in the 21st Century: Open / Semantic / Social / Mobile

> Open > Open Access / Open Data / Open Peer Review / Open Research

>> Semantic > Audio / Interactivity / Supplemental Content / Video

>>> Social > Science Blogging / Social Bookmarking / Social Networking / Social Software

>>>> Mobile > Mobile Access / Mobile Content / Mobile Data / Mobile Research

In scheduled presentation(s), we will briefly profile select developments related to these major themes and speculate on their potential evolution and impact on research and scholarship in the coming decade(s).

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/05/paradigms-they-are-changin-open.html]

BTW For A summary of my presentation at the National Univerity of Ireland, Galway SEE John Brelsin's blog entry at

[http://bit.ly/9xmGe5]

Thanks, John !!!

BTW: John is the co-author of The Social Semantic Web. Springer, 2010

[http://bit.ly/12TJTX]

JOY !

/Gerry

The P-Word > Stanley Fish And I Agree? > Plagiarism Is Not A Big Moral Deal

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 23:42:00 +0000

Colleagues/

New York Times columnist, Stanley Fish, " ... a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago," recently published his most recent NY Times Opininator column titled >

Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal

[snip]

Whenever it comes up plagiarism is a hot button topic and essays about it tend to be philosophically and morally inflated. But there are really only two points to make. (1) Plagiarism is a learned sin. (2) Plagiarism is not a philosophical issue.

[snip]

Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s obsession. If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic historian, or a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist, the game you play for a living is underwritten by the assumed value of originality and failure properly to credit the work of others is a big and obvious no-no. But if you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although there certainly are some) ... .

[snip]

And if you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself.

It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.
[more]

[http://nyti.ms/cAa1WF]

See Also >The P-Word II > The Ontology of Plagiarism: Part Two > Get A Clue

[http://bit.ly/aI2mmE]
As Some May Know I Have A Different View On The P-Word >

NYTimes > Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

[http://bit.ly/bEYvK7]

/Gerry

_NatureNews_ > Special > Science Metrics

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:38:00 +0000

Assessing Assessment > Transparency, education and communication are key to ensuring that appropriate metrics are used to measure individual scientific achievement / 16 June 2010

Do Metrics Matter? > Many researchers believe that quantitative metrics determine who gets hired and who gets promoted at their institutions. With an exclusive poll and interviews, Nature probes to what extent metrics are really used that way / 16 June 2010

A Profusion Of Measures > Scientific performance indicators are proliferating — leading researchers to ask afresh what they are measuring and why. Richard Van Noorden surveys the rapidly evolving ecosystem / 16 June 2010

Science Economics: What Science Is Really Worth > Spending on science is one of the best ways to generate jobs and economic growth, say research advocates. But as Colin Macilwain reports, the evidence behind such claims is patchy / 9 June 2010

How To Improve The Use Of Metrics >Since the invention of the science citation index in the 1960s, quantitative measuring of the performance of researchers has become ever more prevalent, controversial and influential. Six commentators tell Nature what changes might ensure that individuals are assessed more fairly / 16 June 2010

Let's Make Science Metrics More Scientific > To capture the essence of good science, stakeholders must combine forces to create an open, sound and consistent system for measuring all the activities that make up academic productivity, says Julia Lane / 24 March 2010

[more]

Source And All Links Available From

[http://bit.ly/a91Gjn]

Related > UnRelated > Related

WP > Why We Get Things So Wrong > Books by Kathryn Schulz and David H. Freedman

[http://bit.ly/d6H1fM]

The Vanguard Factor > Metrics For Ideas Before Their Time(s)

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:14:00 +0000

Colleagues/

I am posting to ask if you are aware of any efforts that have/seek to create (a) metric(s) that measure the The Prescience Of Citations(s) > Publication(s) > Research > Scholarship > Work > Etc. Relative To Current / Recent Citations(s) > Publication(s) > Research > Scholarship > Work > Etc.

That Is >>>

Are there Measures of Previous Activities that have / now been (more) widely Cited > Quoted > Etc > ?

In Short >

Are There Any/All Measure(s) Of The Impact of Those Who Knew / Saw The Future > Before Their Time ? (But Enough About Me [:-)])

Certainly Citaton Analyses / Studies Are One Metric > > >

And I am aware of "A Principal Component Analysis of 39 Scientific Impact Measures", which I blogged just over a year ago >>>

Bollen J, Van de Sompel H, Hagberg A, Chute R, 2009 A Principal Component Analysis of 39 Scientific Impact Measures. PLoS ONE 4(6): e6022. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006022

Background

The impact of scientific publications has traditionally been expressed in terms of citation counts. However, scientific activity has moved online over the past decade. To better capture scientific impact in the digital era, a variety of new impact measures has been proposed on the basis of social network analysis and usage log data. Here we investigate how these new measures relate to each other, and how accurately and completely they express scientific impact.

[more]

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/06/principal-component-analysis-of-39.html]

[BTW: Thanks Stevan Harnad For The Reminder / I Will ReVisit]

But ...

>>> What I Sense Is Much More Dynamic And Broader >>> Here Goes >>>

To What Degree Can One ***Measure and Incorporate*** >>>

The *Weight* of a subsequently highly-cited ; highly-linked ; highly-shared ; etc. Article / Idea / Work >>> That Was Initially Dismissed or Rejected

For Example >

[snip]

Rejecting Nobel-Class Papers

On some occasions, referees have advised editors to reject papers which reported findings that eventually earned the Nobel Prize for their authors.

Documented cases of such rejection include Severo Ochoa’s work on polynucleotide phosphorylase (Ochoa 1980); Hans Krebs’ account of the citric acid cycle (Dixon 1989); Rosalind Yalow’s initial work on radioimmunoassay (Yalow 1982); Murray Gell-Mann’s work on quarks (Crozon 1987); and Harmut Michel’s research on photosynthetic processes (Garfield 1989a). [snip]

Juan Miguel Campanario, “Commentary: On Influential Books and Journal Articles. Initially Rejected Because of Negative Referees' Evaluations," Science Communication 16 no. 3. (March 1995): 306-325.

[http://www2.uah.es/jmc/ai2.pdf]

BTW: We would not only focus on Nobel Prize winners; certainly less Noble [:-)] individuals should be considered >>>

And

Would Not The ***Number of Rejections*** prior to eventual publication and high-citations / Etc. be an Indicator of

??? >>>Prescience <<< ???

And

Could Other Negative Actions (Criticism ; Protests ; Bad Reviews ; Etc.) Of A Work That Subsequently Became Widely Recognized As Innovative / Insightful / Pioneering / Etc. [?] Also Be Another Component Of

??? >>> The Vanguard Factor <<< ???

And

Could The Lag Time Between Original Publication / Presentation / Etc. And Subsequent Adoption (At Various Thesholds) Be Useful, That Is >>>

The Longer It Took For An Idea To Become Widely Accepted (At Specific Thesholds), The Greater The Vanguard Factor ?

Others ? >>>

Your (Prescient [:-)] Thoughts ? / Please Leave As A Comment >>>

BTW: I've been/will be in touch with The Usual Suspects > Stevan, Gene, Barry, two of whom are native Bronxites like myself [To my knowledge Stevan is not [:-)]

!!! Thanks A Million !!!

/Gerry

" There Is Nothing More Powerful Than An Idea Whose Time Has Come!" / Victor Hugo

[http://bit.ly/b2i4Yl]

"There Is Nothing More Powerful Than An Idea Whose Time Has Come!"

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 14:53:00 +0000

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla]

"Its Not About Publication; It's About Ideas !"

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 14:45:00 +0000

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison]

The Scientist > August 2010 > Peer Review Rejected

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 22:25:00 +0000

The August 2010 Issue Of The Scientist Features

Great Articles About Peer Review

Editorial > Peer Review and the Age of Aquarius / Sarah Greene

[snip]

More than 300 years since the invention of peer review and 30 years post-Web, it’s time to act. Lest we forget, the Web was originally designed to disrupt scientific publishing, as recently noted by Michael Clarke in the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

The first major disruption has been open access (OA) publishing, a prerequisite for the new metrics, which thrive on increasing numbers of papers and data. And despite its fledgling status, OA has ushered in a second major disruption to the scientific establishment: post-publication peer review (PPPR), in a variety of experiments and formulations, pioneered by BioMedCentral and PubMedCentral.

[snip]

Thus, transparency and ongoing scrutiny by a much wider community can minimize the failures of traditional peer review (depicted on the cover of this issue), and can also bring to light innovations and discoveries that may have been ahead of the curve at the time of publication. Robust involvement by the community is required, and proposed “reputation systems” may be the key to ensure rewards for commenting and revising.

[more]

[http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57580/#ixzz0vqVNNNyq]

Article 1 > Breakthroughs from the Second Tier / The Scientist Staff

Peer review isn’t perfect— meet 5 high-impact papers that should have ended up in bigger journal

[snip]

One of the most commonly voiced criticisms of traditional peer review is that it discourages truly innovative ideas, rejecting field-changing papers while publishing ideas that fall into a status quo and the “hot” fields of the day—think RNAi, etc. Another is that it is nearly impossible to immediately spot the importance of a paper—to truly evaluate a paper, one needs months, if not years, to see the impact it has on its field.

In the following pages, we present some papers that suggest these two criticisms are correct, at least in part. These studies were published in lower-profile journals (all with current impact factors of 6 or below), suggesting they should have had less of an impact. But these papers eventually accumulated at least 1,000 citations. Many were rejected from higher-tier journals. All changed their fields forever.

Twenty years ago, David Kaplan of the Case Western Reserve University had a manuscript rejected, and with it came what he calls a “ridiculous” comment. “The comment was essentially that I should do an x-ray crystallography of the molecule before my study could be published,” he recalls, but the study was not about structure. The x-ray crystallography results, therefore, “had nothing to do with that,” he says. To him, the reviewer was making a completely unreasonable request to find an excuse to reject the paper.

[more]

[http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/8/1/30/1/]

Article 2 > I Hate Your Paper / Jef Akst

Kaplan says these sorts of manuscript criticisms are a major problem with the current peer review system, particularly as it’s employed by higher-impact journals. Theoretically, peer review should “help [authors] make their manuscript better,” he says, but in reality, the cutthroat attitude that pervades the system results in ludicrous rejections for personal reasons—if the reviewer feels that the paper threatens his or her own research or contradicts his or her beliefs, for example—or simply for convenience, since top journals get too many submissions and it’s easier to just reject a paper than spend the time to improve it. Regardless of the motivation, the result is the same, and it’s a “problem,” Kaplan says, “that can very quickly become censorship.”

[more]

[http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/8/1/36/1/]

Associated Podcast / Comments Available At

[http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/8/1/36/1/#audio1]

Article 3 > Is Peer Review Broken?

Submissions are up, reviewers are overtaxed, and authors are lodging complaint after complaint about the process at top-tier journals. What's wrong with peer review?

[http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23061/] / Subscriber Access

Related > Citations: Too Many, or Not Enough? / William J. Pearce

[snip]

The introduction of PubMed in the mid-1990s revolutionized the process of finding and retrieving relevant literature. With much of the drudgery and inconvenience gone, long lists of potentially important publications could be compiled quickly and easily on any computer with an Internet connection. The parallel development of reference database management software further expanded the ability to compile and organize large numbers of abstracts, and ultimately article PDFs.

On one hand, these impressive tools greatly facilitated preparation of comprehensive literature reviews with unprecedented breadth. On the other hand, easy access to so many publications reinforced the temptation to read each paper cited less critically, and sometimes not at all. Thus was born the practice of citing numerous diverse publications to support a point of discussion, instead of citing the one or two most relevant publications with the greatest impact on a field, as if quantity and quality of citations were interchangeable and equally persuasive. [snip]

[more]

[http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/8/1/29/1/]

>>> As Some May Know I've Long Had An Interest In Alternative Peer Review >>>

"Alternative Peer Review: Quality Management for 21st Century Scholarship"

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/APR-1.ppt]

> >> It's A Large PPT (200+ Slides) >>>

>>> But IMHO ... Well Worth The Experience [:-)] <<<

A Synopsis Of The Presentation In Article Form >>>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Easy_Pieces]

"Peer Review in the Internet Age: Five (5) Easy Pieces," Against the Grain 16, no. 3 (June 2004): 50, 52-55.

Self-archived at

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/FiveEasyPieces.pdf]

See Also

> Invisible Hand(s): Quality Assurance in the Age of Author Self-Archiving

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2007/11/invisible-hands-quality-assurance-in.html]

>> Quality Assurance in the Age of Author Self-Archiving

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/ACRL2005.ppt] / 110+ Slides

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/ACRL2005.pdf]

"It's Not About Publication; It's About Ideas"

NYTimes > Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 21:16:00 +0000

Friends/

[snip]

TRIP GABRIEL / August 1, 2010 / NYTimes

[snip]

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

[snip]

Ms. Brookover, who works at the campus library, has pondered the differences between researching in the stacks and online. “Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily.”

[snip]

In an interview, ... [Susan D. Blum University of Notre Dame anthropologist ... and author of "Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture" [Cornell Universiy Press, 2009], said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

[snip]

In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

[more]

Source

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html]

A few years ago I gave a keynote at the 3rd International Plagiarism Conference / 23 - 25 June 2008 / City Campus East, Northumbria University / Newcastle-upon-tyne, UK /

"Disruptive Scholarship: An Idea Whose Time Has Come: (Re)Use / (Re)Mix / (Re)New"

Abstract

Hadrian's Wall is a stone and turf fortification built by the Roman Empire across the width of modern-day England. ... [It was] 117 kilometres long,

... [I]ts width and height [were] dependent on the construction materials [that] ... were available nearby.

... [T]he wall in the east follow[ed] the outcrop of a hard, resistant igneous diabase rock escarpment ... Local limestone was used in the construction, except for ... section[s] in the west ... where turf was used instead ... .

The Broad Wall was initially built with a clay-bonded rubble core and mortared dressed rubble facing stones, but this seems to have made it vulnerable to collapse, and repair with a mortared core was sometimes necessary.... [I]n time ... [Hadrian's] Wall was abandoned and fell into ruin. Over the centuries and even into the twentieth century a large proportion of the stone was reused in other local buildings.

Throughout history, humans have (re)used local resources to create not only buildings and fortifications, but monuments, roads, and a wide variety of other structures. For countless generations, artists, composers, and writers have freely incorporated elements from local and distant cultures to create new visual, musical, and textual forms.

In The Web 2.0 World, the open (re)combination of multiple media has become commonplace in many venues, practices that Lawrence Lessig [snip], founder of Creative Commons [snip]and others, would characterize as emblematic of a 'Remix ' or 'Read/Write' culture. Indeed, from his point of view, “the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process” [snip]

In the recently-released Horizon Report 2008 - a joint publication of the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), six emerging information technologies and practices that are expected to significantly impact educational organizations are profiled: Grassroots Video, Collaborative Webs, Mobile Broadband, Data Mashups, Collaborative Intelligence, and Social Operating Systems.

In this presentation, we will review the Read/Write Traditions of the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences; analyze key Past / Present / Future Participatory Technologies; and explore the potential of Web 2.0 for creating/fostering Disruptive Learning / Scholarship / Teaching in the 21st century.

The Director's Cut of the (150+ Slides) PPT is available from my _Scholarship 2.0_ blog at

[http://bit.ly/9riXmc]

I hope The Title and Abstract indicate that That I Have A Different View Of The P-Word [:-)

Regards,

/Gerry

Article-Level Metrics And The Evolution Of Scientific Impact

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:39:00 +0000

Neylon C, Wu S (2009) Article-Level Metrics and the Evolution of Scientific Impact. PLoS Biol 7(11): e1000242. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000242 / Published: November 17, 2009

Formally published papers that have been through a traditional prepublication peer review process remain the most important means of communicating science today. Researchers depend on them to learn about the latest advances in their fields and to report their own findings. The intentions of traditional peer review are certainly noble: ... . In principle, this system enables science to move forward on the collective confidence of previously published work. Unfortunately, the traditional system has inspired methods of measuring impact that are suboptimal for their intended use.

Measuring Impact

Peer-reviewed journals have served an important purpose in evaluating submitted papers and readying them for publication. In theory, one could browse the pages of the most relevant journals to stay current with research on a particular topic. But as the scientific community has grown, so has the number of journals—to the point where over 800,000 new articles appeared in PubMed in 2008 ... and the total is now over 19 million ... . The sheer number makes it impossible for any scientist to read every paper relevant to their research, and a difficult choice has to be made about which papers to read. Journals help by categorizing papers by subject, but there remain in most fields far too many journals and papers to follow.

As a result, we need good filters for quality, importance, and relevance to apply to scientific literature. There are many we could use but the majority of scientists filter by preferentially reading articles from specific journals—1those they view as the highest quality and the most important. These selections are highly subjective but the authors' personal experience is that most scientists, when pressed, will point to the Thomson ISI Journal Impact Factor [1] as an external and “objective” measure for ranking the impact of specific journals and the individual articles within them.

Yet the impact factor, which averages the number of citations per eligible article in each journal, is deeply flawed both in principle and in practice as a tool for filtering the literature. It is mathematically problematic ... with around 80% of a journal impact factor attributable to around 20% of the papers, even for journals like Nature ... . It is very sensitive to the categorisation of papers as “citeable” ... and it is controlled by a private company that does not have any obligation to make the underlying data or processes of analysis available. [snip]

Though the impact factor is flawed, it may be useful for evaluating journals in some contexts, and other more sophisticated metrics for journals are emerging ... . But for the job of assessing the importance of specific papers, the impact factor—or any other journal-based metric for that matter—cannot escape an even more fundamental problem: it is simply not designed to capture qualities of individual papers.

Article-Level Metrics

If choosing which articles to read on the basis of journal-level metrics is not effective, then we need a measure of importance that tells us about the article. It makes sense that when choosing which of a set of articles to read, we should turn to “article-level metrics,” yet in practice data on individual articles are rarely considered, let alone seriously measured.

Perhaps the main reason for this absence is a practical one. Accurate determining the importance of an article takes years and is very difficult to do objectively. The “gold standard” of article impact is formal citations in the scholarly literature, but citation metrics have their own challenges. One is that citation metrics do not take the “sentiment” of the citation into account, so while an article that is heavily cited for being wrong is perhaps important in its own way ... , using citation counts without any context can be misleading. The biggest problem, though, is the time-delay inherent in citations. [snip]

The Trouble with Comments

A common solution proposed for getting rapid feedback on scientific publications is inspired by the success of many Web-based commenting forums. Sites like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, and Hacker News each have an expert community that contributes new information and debates its value and accuracy. It is not difficult to imagine translating this dynamic into a scholarly research setting where scientists discuss interesting papers. A spirited, intelligent comment thread can also help raise the profile of an article and engage the broader community in a conversation about the science.

Unfortunately, commenting in the scientific community simply hasn't worked, at least not generally. [snip]

[snip]

Part of this resistance to commenting may relate to technical issues, but the main reason is likely social. For one thing, researchers are unsure how to behave in this new space. We are used to criticizing articles in the privacy of offices and local journal clubs, not in a public, archived forum. [snip]

Another issue is that the majority of people making hiring and granting decisions do not consider commenting a valuable contribution. [snip]

Then there is simply the size of the community. [snip] But it also means that if only 100 people read a paper, it will be lucky if even one of them leaves a comments

Technical Solutions to Social Problems

Given the lack of incentive, are there ways of capturing article-level metrics from what researchers do anyway? A simple way of measuring interest in a specific paper might be via usage and download statistics; for example, how many times a paper has been viewed or downloaded, how many unique users have shown an interest, or how long they lingered. [snip] These statistics may not be completely accurate but they are consistent, comparable, and considered sufficiently immune to cheating to be the basis for a billion dollar Web advertising industry.

A more important criticism of download statistics is that it is a crude measure of actual use. How many of the downloaded papers are even read, let alone digested in detail and acted upon? What we actually want to measure is how much influence an article has, not how many people clicked on the download button thinking they “might read it later.” A more valuable metric might be the number of people who have actively chosen to include the paper in their own personal library. [snip]

Examples of such tools are Zotero, Citeulike, Connotea, and Mendeley, which all allow the researcher to collect papers into their library while they are browsing on the Web, often in a single click using convenient “bookmarklets.” The user usually has the option of adding tags, comments, or ratings as part of the bookmarking process. [snip]

Metrics collected by reference management software are especially intriguing because they offer a measure of active interest without requiring researchers to do anything more than what they are already doing. Scientists collect the papers they find interesting, take notes on them, and store the information in a place that is accessible and useful to them. [snip]

Part of the solution to encouraging valuable contributions, then, may simply be that the default settings involve sharing and that people rarely change them. A potentially game-changing incentive, however, may be the power to influence peers. [snip]

It is too early to tell whether any specific tools will last, but they already demonstrate an important principle: a tool that works within the workflow that researchers are already using can more easily capture and aggregate useful information. [snip]

The Great Thing about Metrics…Is That There Are So Many to Choose From

There are numerous article-level metrics ... and each has its own advantages and problems. Citation counts are an excellent measure of influence and impact but are very slow to collect. Download statistics are rapid to collect but may be misleading. Comments can provide valuable and immediate feedback, but are currently sparse ... .. Bookmarking statistics can be both rapid to collect and contain high quality information but are largely untested and require the widespread adoption of unfamiliar tools. Alongside these we have “expert ratings” by services such as Faculty of 1000 and simple rating schemes.

[snip]

“Other Indicators of Impact” include ratings and comments, which, like page views, are immediate but may offer more insight because users are more likely to have read the article and found it compelling enough to respond. Additional other indicators are bookmarks, used by some people to keep track of articles of interest to them, and blog posts and trackbacks, which indicate where else on the Web the article has been mentioned and can be useful for linking to a broader discussion. It is clear that all of the types of data provide different dimensions, which together can give a clearer picture of an article's impact.

[snip] As recently shown ... , scientific impact is not a simple concept that can be described by a single number. The key point is that journal impact factor is a very poor measure of article impact. And, obviously, the fact that an article is highly influential by any measure does not necessarily mean it should be.

Many researchers will continue to rely on journals as filters, but the more you can incorporate effective filtering tools into your research process, the more you will stay up-to-date with advancing knowledge. The question is not whether you should take article-level metrics seriously but how you can use them most effectively to assist your own research endeavours. We need sophisticated metrics to ask sophisticated questions about different aspects of scientific impact and we need further research into both the most effective measurement techniques and the most effective uses of these in policy and decision making. For this reason we strongly support efforts to collect and present diverse types of article-level metrics without any initial presumptions as to which metric is most valuable. [snip]

As Clay Shirky famously said ... , you can complain about information overload but the only way to deal with it is to build and use better filters. It is no longer sufficient to depend on journals as your only filter; instead, it is time to start evaluating papers on their own merits. Our only options are to publish less or to filter more effectively, and any response that favours publishing less doesn't make sense, either logistically, financially, or ethically. The issue is not how to stop people from publishing, it is how to build better filters, both systematically and individually. At the same time, we can use available tools, networks, and tools built on networks to help with this task.

So in the spirit of science, let's keep learning and experimenting, and keep the practice and dissemination of science evolving for the times.

References

Source

[http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000242]

!!! Thanks To / Garrett Eastman / Librarian / Rowland Institute at Harvard / For The HeadsUp !!!

>>> While These Insights and Suggestions Are An Important Contribution To The Conversation , In Many Ways The Views And Recommendation Are Far From Radical <<<

See My Presentation Delivered At the Workshop On Peer Review, Trieste, Italy, May 23-24 2003

"Alternative Peer Review: Quality Management for 21st Century Scholarship"

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/APR-1.ppt]

>>> See In Particular > 'Seize The E! Section >>> Embrace the potential of the digital environment to facilitate access, retrieval, use, and navigation of electronic scholarship.

>>It's A Large PPT (200+ Slides) But IMHO ... Well Worth The Experience [:-)]<<

AND

The Big Picture(sm): Visual Browsing in Web and non-Web Databases

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm]

To ReQuote T.S. Elloit >

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge that we have lost in information?"/ T.S. Eliot / The Rock (1934) pt.1

To Quote Me >

"It's Not About Publication, It's About Ideas"

>> We Now Have The Computational Power To Make Real-Time Conceptual Navigation An EveryDay Occurrence <<<

!! Let Us Use It To Navigate Ideas !!!

Indeed Let Us Continue "... experimenting, and keep the practice and dissemination of science evolving for the times."

See Also/Related

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/09/article-level-metrics-at-plos-addition.html]

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/06/article-level-metrics-at-plos-and.html]

eCAT: Online Electronic Lab Notebook For Scientific Research

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:54:00 +0000

Nigel H Goddard , Rory Macneil and Jonathan Ritchie / Automated Experimentation / 2009 / 1:4 / doi:10.1186 /1759-4499-1-4 / Published: 29 October 2009

Abstract (provisional)

Background

eCAT is an electronic lab notebook (ELN) developed by Axiope Limited.

[http://www.axiope.com/electronic_lab_notebook_index.html]

It is the first online ELN, the first ELN to be developed in close collaboration with lab scientists, and the first ELN to be targeted at researchers in non-commercial institutions. eCAT was developed in response to feedback from users of a predecessor product. By late 2006 the basic concept had been clarified: a highly scalable web-based collaboration tool that possessed the basic capabilities of commercial ELNs, i.e. a permissions system, controlled sharing, an audit trail, electronic signature and search, and a front end that looked like the electronic counterpart to a paper notebook.

Results

During the development of the beta version feedback was incorporated from many groups including the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research, Uppsala University, Children's Hospital Boston, Alex Swarbrick's lab at the Garvan Institute in Sydney and Martin Spitaler at Imperial College. More than 100 individuals and groups worldwide then participated in the beta testing between September 2008 and June 2009. The generally positive response is reflected in the following quote about how one lab is making use of eCAT: "Everyone uses it as an electronic notebook, so they can compile the diverse collections of data that we generate as biologists, such as images and spreadsheets. We use to it to take minutes of meetings. We also use it to manage our common stocks of antibodies, plasmids and so on. Finally, perhaps the most important feature for us is the ability to link records, reagents and experiments."

Conclusions

By developing eCAT in close collaboration with lab scientists, Axiope has come up with a practical and easy to use product that meets the need of scientists to manage, store and share data online. eCAT is already being perceived as a product that labs can continue to use as their data management and sharing grows in scale and complexity.

The complete article is [now] available as a provisional PDF

[http://www.aejournal.net/content/pdf/1759-4499-1-4.pdf]

The fully formatted PDF and HTML versions are in production [10-29-09]

Source

[http://www.aejournal.net/content/1/1/4]

!!! Thanks To / Garrett Eastman / Librarian / Rowland Institute at Harvard / For The HeadsUp !!!

Article-Level Metrics At PLoS > Addition Of Usage Data

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:25:00 +0000

Submitted by Mark Patterson on Wed, 2009-09-16 11:10.

As part of our ongoing article-level metrics program, we’re delighted to announce that all seven PLoS journals will now provide online usage data for published articles. With this addition, the suite of metrics on PLoS articles now includes measures of: online usage; citations from the scholarly literature; social bookmarks; blog coverage; and the Comments, Notes and ‘Star’ ratings that have been made on the article.

As discussed recently, we at PLoS feel that there is much to be gained from assessing research articles on their own merits rather than on the basis of the journal (and its impact factor) where the work happens to be published. [snip]

[http://www.plos.org/cms/node/478]

PLoS has therefore embarked on a program to aggregate a range of available data about an article and place that data on the article itself. The data are found on the new tab called ‘Metrics’, available on all articles. A reader can now scan the various metrics to determine the extent to which the article has been viewed, cited, covered in the media and so forth. With the addition of usage data to the article-level metrics we have taken another step towards providing the community with valuable data that can be used and analyzed.

In order to make article-level metrics as open and useful as possible, we are providing our entire dataset as a downloadable spreadsheet and we encourage interested researchers to download the data and perform their own analyses.

[http://www.plos.org/downloads/plos-alm.zip]

We will be updating this spreadsheet periodically, but on launch the data it contains are correct up to July 31st, 2009. Future developments in our article-level metrics program will include the provision of more data for each metric ... and new indicators as they arise, as well as the development of more sophisticated display and analysis tools on the site itself.

We believe that article-level metrics represent an important development for scholarly publishing[snip].

It’s also important to emphasize that online usage should not be seen as an absolute indicator of quality for any given article, and such data must be interpreted with caution. To provide additional context and to aid interpretation, we have provided a series of summary tables indicating the average usage of categories of article (grouped by age, journal and topic area).

[http://www.plosmedicine.org/static/journalStatistics.action]

Users will also notice that a number of articles do not have any usage data, because of problems with the log files. We are working hard to add data for these articles, and we also encourage readers to let us know if they find any anomalies or have any questions about the data. More information about our article-level metrics program can be found in our FAQ,

[http://www.plos.org/about/faq.html#metrics]

this explanatory website,

[http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/]

as well as in this page of descriptive text for each journal (e.g for PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE). We look forward to your feedback, and to further developments in article-level metrics.

[http://www.plosbiology.org/static/almInfo.action] / [http://www.plosone.org/static/almInfo.action]

Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing

Media and other enquiries to Liz Allen, Director of Marketing, Tel (001) 415 624 1218

Source

[http://www.plos.org/cms/node/485]

Related/See Also

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/06/article-level-metrics-at-plos-and.html]

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/11/article-level-metrics-and-evolution-of.html]

YouTube Video (Thanks To Garrett Eastman / Librarian / Rowland Institute At Harvard / For The HeadsUp)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHUqwxIxgZQ]

Article-Level Download Metrics—What Are They Good For?

[http://www.plos.org/cms/node/487]

Berkman Center Lecture / Webcast > Transforming Scholarly Communication | September 18 2009 |

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:30:00 +0000

Lee Dirks / Director, Education & Scholarly Communication / Microsoft External Research

Friday/ September 18, 1:15pm / Pound Hall Room 100 (Map) / Free and Open to the Public /

In Person > RSVP Requested / Webcast > Live at 1:15 pm ET.

This event is co-sponsored by the Harvard Business School Knowledge and Library Services, Harvard Law School Library, and the Office for Scholarly Communication.
In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives.

There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research – from bio-informatics and earth systems science to social science and archeology. There will also be an explosion in the amount of research data collected in the next decade - petabytes will be common in many fields. These future research requirements constitute the 'eResearch' agenda.

Powerful software services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to form the necessary 'Cyberinfrastructure' to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community.

The difficulties in combining data and information from distributed sources, the multi-disciplinary nature of research and collaboration, and the need to move to present researchers with tooling that enable them to express what they want to do rather than how to do it highlight the need for an ecosystem of Semantic Computing technologies.

Such technologies will further facilitate information sharing and discovery, will enable reasoning over information, and will allow us to start thinking about knowledge and how it can be handled by computers.This talk will review the elements of this vision and explain the need for semantic-oriented computing by exploring eResearch projects that have successfully applied relevant technologies — and anticipated impact on scholarly communication as we know it today.
It will also suggest that a software + service model with scientific services delivered from the cloud will become an increasingly accepted model for research.

About Lee

Lee Dirks is the Director of Education & Scholarly Communications in Microsoft’s External Research division, where he manages a variety of research programs related to open access to research data, interoperability of archives and repositories, preservation of digital information as well as the application of new technologies to facilitate teaching and learning in higher education.An 20-year veteran across multiple information management fields,

Lee holds an M.L.S. degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as well as a post-masters degree in Preservation Administration from Columbia University. In addition to past positions at Columbia and with OCLC (Preservation Resources), Lee has held a variety of roles at Microsoft since joining the company in 1996 - namely as the corporate archivist, then corporate librarian, and as a senior manager in the corporate market research organization.In addition to participation on several (US) National Science Foundation task forces, Lee also teaches as adjunct faculty at the iSchool at the University of Washington, and serves on the advisory boards for the University of Washington Libraries as well as the iSchool's Master of Science in Information Science program.

During his career, his team's work on the library intranet site at Microsoft was recognized as a "Center of Excellence Award for Technology" in 2003 by the Special Library Association's (SLA) Business & Finance Division. Additionally, Lee was presented with the 2006 Microsoft Marketing Excellence Award by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer – for a marketing & engineering partnership around a breakthrough market opportunity analysis process which is now a standard operating procedure across Microsoft.

Source

[http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/09/dirks]

!!! Thanks To Peter Suber / SPARC Open Access Forum / For The HeadsUp !!!

In Person > RSVP Requested / Webcast > Live at 1:15 pm ET.

EtherPad Notes

[http://etherpad.com/ULH4DIAd1i]

Twitter HashTag

[http://twitter.com/search?q=%23transcholcomm]

PostRank™ > Online Content Ranking

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:25:00 +0000

PostRank™ is a scoring system developed by AideRSS to rank any kind of online content, such as RSS feed items, blog posts, articles, or news stories. PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found an item or category to be.

[http://www.postrank.com/]

>>> Best Viewed In Firefox <<<

Examples of engagement include writing a blog post in response to someone else, bookmarking an article, leaving a comment on a blog, or clicking a link to read a news item.

PostRank measures engagement by analyzing the types and frequency of an audience's interaction with online content. An item's PostRank score represents how interesting and relevant people have found it to be. The more interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are weighted higher.

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the "5 Cs" of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. By collecting interaction engagement_metrics in these categories the overall engagement score is calculated and the PostRank value is determined.

The 5 Cs of Engagement

Creating
The strongest form of engagement is demonstrated by using an item as inspiration to create your own, for example, writing your own blog post that responds to or refutes someone else's blog post. Creation requires the most thought and investment of time, actively generates conversation, and therefore indicates the highest level of engagement.
Critiquing
Reading a blog post and then leaving a comment requires an investment of time, thought and effort (or sometimes just typing and name-calling...), and is a form of conversation. However, it requires less effort than writing a whole blog post. So while it is an important action, it does not indicate as much engagement as Creating.
Chatting
Sharing and discussing information can often be started with one click, so it doesn't require a major investment of effort. However, a desire to share is a strong indication of relevance, and the act of sharing and its ensuing discussion are acts of conversation. Use of social media applications like Twitter encourage both the sharing of information and the resulting conversations. As a result, social media "chatting" indicates a good level of engagement.
Collecting
Bookmarking or submitting items to social sites also tend to be "one-click" actions. They are intentional acts of archiving and sharing, but don't require much time or effort. However, the sharing that occurs often sparks conversations, so Collecting does demonstrate some engagement.
Clicking
Activities like clicks and page views indicate lower engagement because they're passive interactions. Clicking a link to read a blog post doesn't require much work, and you're not giving anything back except your reading time. It is an intentional act, however, and thus indicates a mild level of interest and engagement. Which may grow after the item is read.

[snip]

Engagement Sources We Track

Engagement sources evolve as new and interesting ways of interacting with with online content evolves. Here are several examples of engagement data sources that are included in PostRank:

Views - Real-time > Pageviews within RSS readers and via PostRank widgets

Clicks - Real-time > Clicks within RSS readers and via PostRank widgets

Comments - Periodic updates > The number of comments on the item

Google Trackbacks - Periodic updates > The number of links to the item from other websites

FriendFeed - Real-time >The number of comments and likes on the item

Digg - Real-time > The number of diggs, and comments on the item

Reddit - Real-time > The number of comments and votes (up and down) on the item

Tumblr - Real-time > The number of Tumblr mentions

del.icio.us - Real-time > The number of bookmarks saved

Ma.gnolia - Real-time > The number of bookmarks saved

Diigo - Real-time > The number of bookmarks saved

Furl - Real-time > The number of bookmarks saved

Twitter - Real-time > The number of Twitter mentions

Jaiku - Real-time > The number of Jaiku mentions

Identi.ca - Real-time > The number of Identi.ca mentions

Brightkite - Real-time > The number of Brightkite mentions

Twit Army - Real-timec > The number of Twit Army mentions

Blip - Real-time > The number of Blip mentions

Feecle - Real-time > The number of Feecle mentions

MexicoDiario - Real-time > The number of MexicoDiario mentions

Source

[http://www.postrank.com/postrank#what]

FAQ

[http://blog.postrank.com/faq/]

Getting Started

[http://blog.postrank.com/getting-started/]

Press & Web 2.0 Media Coverage

[http://blog.postrank.com/media/]

Subscriptions

[http://www.postrank.com/subscriptions]

Company Information

[http://blog.postrank.com/about/]

New Journal Models And Publishing Perspectives In The Evolving Digital Environment

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:16:00 +0000

Cassella, Maria and Calvi , Licia New journal models and publishing perspectives in the evolving digital environment., 2009 . In IFLA 2009 : Libraries Create Futures : Building On Cultural Heritage, Milano (Italy), 24-27 August 2009. (Unpublished) [Presentation]

Abstract(s)

Open access combined with Web 2.0 networking tools is fast changing the traditional journals’ functions and framework and the publishers’ role. As content is more and more available online in digital repositories and on the web an integrated, interconnected, multidisciplinary information environment is evolving and Oldenburg’s model disintegrates: the journal is no more the main referring unit of the scholarly output, as it used to be mainly for STM disciplines, but scholars attention is deeply concentrated on article level.

New journal models are thus evolving. In the first part of this presentation authors discuss these new experimental journal models, i.e. - overlay journals - interjournals - different levels journals In the second part of the presentation authors drive readers’ attention on the role commercial publishers could play in this digital seamless writing arena. According to the authors, publishers should concentrate much more on value-added services both for authors, readers and libraries, such as navigational services, discovery services, archiving and ex-post evaluation services.

La crescita della letteratura scientifica ad accesso aperto e i nuovi strumenti del Web 2.0 stanno rapidamente cambiando le tradizionali funzioni del periodico scientifico. Il modello di Henry Oldenburg si disintegra e la rivista scientifica cessa di essere il principale output intellettuale della ricerca, dal momento che l’attenzione degli studiosi è ormai tutta concentrata a livello dell’articolo (dalla ricerca fino alle nuove metriche di valutazione).

Le riviste tradizionali conservano un valore che è legato in modo prevalente ormai all’avanzamento nella carriera accademica più che all’aggiornamento scientifico. Nuovi modelli di riviste stanno emergendo in questo contesto: gli "overlay journals", gli "interjournals" e i "different levels journals". Dal momento che il contenuto non è più il valore aggiunto di una pubblicazione, quale ruolo spetta agli editori scientifici oggi? Gli autori sostengono che il futuro dell’editoria scientifica è legato al contesto digitale ovvero all’offerta di servizi a valore aggiunto differenziati per autori, lettori e biblioteche.

Source and Full Text Available At

[http://eprints.rclis.org/16741/]

!!! Thanks To Garrret Eastmam, Librarian, The Rowland Institute At Harvard For The HeadsUp !!!

Podcast > Open Access And The Future Of Scholarly Communication

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:55:00 +0000

Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Dissemination, Prestige, and Impact

14 August 2009 / Dr David Prosser Director, SPARC Europe

The internet is having a profound impact on the 300-year-old model of scholarly communication. New technologies allow for new modes of interaction between researchers, and a wider audience of administrators, funders, governments and the general public. The lines between formal and informal communication are becoming increasingly blurred and publishers and librarians find themselves playing new roles in the scholarly communication chain.

One of the most powerful new ideas to emerge with the development of the internet is open access - the notion that the scholarly research literature should be made available to readers free of charge. This presentation described current developments within the scholarly communications landscape and provides an indicator of possible future directions.

This lecture was part of ... [The Austrailian National University] ANU Public Lecture Series 2009, presented by ANU Division of Information and the National Library of Australia.

Lecture Recording (MP3, 56.2MB) [01:01:24]

[http://www.anu.edu.au/mac/podcasts/Audio/Prosser_ANU_14082009.mp3]

Source

[http://www.anu.edu.au/discoveranu/content/podcasts/open_access_and_the_future_of_scholarly_communication/]

!!! Thanks To Garrret Eastmam, Librarian, The Rowland Institute At Harvard For The HeadsUp !!!

Citation Distortions > Unfounded Authority

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:09:00 +0000

How Citation Distortions Create Unfounded Authority: Analysis Of A Citation Network / Steven A Greenberg / Associate Professor Of Neurology

Children’s Hospital / Informatics Program and Department of Neurology / Brigham and Women’s Hospita / Harvard Medical School / 75 Francis Street / Boston MA / 02115 / USA / sagreenberg@partners.org

BMJ 2009;339:b2680 / Published 21 July 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b2680

Objective

To understand belief in a specific scientific claim by studying the pattern of citations among papers stating it.

Design

A complete citation network was constructed from all PubMed indexed English literature papers addressing the belief that β amyloid, a protein accumulated in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, is produced by and injures skeletal muscle of patients with inclusion body myositis. Social network theory and graph theory were used to analyse this network.

Main outcome measures

Citation bias, amplification, and invention, and their effects on determining authority.

Results

The network contained 242 papers and 675 citations addressing the belief, with 220 553 citation paths supporting it. Unfounded authority was established by citation bias against papers that refuted or weakened the belief; amplification, the marked expansion of the belief system by papers presenting no data addressing it; and forms of invention such as the conversion of hypothesis into fact through citation alone. Extension of this network into text within grants funded by the National Institutes of Health and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed the same phenomena present and sometimes used to justify requests for funding.

Conclusion

Citation is both an impartial scholarly method and a powerful form of social communication. Through distortions in its social use that include bias, amplification, and invention, citation can be used to generate information cascades resulting in unfounded authority of claims. Construction and analysis of a claim specific citation network may clarify the nature of a published belief system and expose distorted methods of social citation.

Source And Full Text Available At

HTML [http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/jul20_3/b2680]

PDF [http://www.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/339/jul20_3/b2680]

News Coverage

Diversion, Invention, and Socialized Medicine

[http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/07/30/diversion-invention-and-socialized-medicine/]

From Publishing to Knowledge Networks: Reinventing Online Knowledge Infrastructures

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 16:41:00 +0000

Alexander Hars / Berlin: Springer/ 2003 / ISBN 3-540-01250-8 / $US 104

Today’s publishing infrastructure is rapidly changing. As electronic journals, digital libraries, collaboratories, logic servers, and other knowledge infrastructures emerge on the internet, the key aspects of this transformation need to be identified. Here, the author details the implications that this transformation is having on the creation, dissemination and organization of academic knowledge.

The author shows that many established publishing principles need to be given up in order to facilitate this transformation. The text provides valuable insights for knowledge managers, designers of internet-based knowledge infrastructures, and professionals in the publishing industry. Researchers will find the scenarios and implications for research processes stimulating and thought-provoking.

Source

[http://www.springer.com/business/business+information+systems/book/978-3-540-01250-4]

Content Overview

1. Leveraging information technology for science 1
1.1. Motivation 1
1.2. Analytical focus 5
1.3. Objectives 7
1.4. Approach 7
2. Characteristics of scientific knowledge infrastructures 9
2.1. Theoretical analysis 10
2.2. Empirical analysis: Emerging knowledge infrastructures 34
2.3. Visions of scientific knowledge infrastructures 55
2.4. Synthesis 57
3. Structure of scientific knowledge 83
3.1. Objectives 83
3.2. Theoretical foundations 87
3.3. Object-oriented model of scientific knowledge 102
3.4. Elements of scientific knowledge 124
4. Implications 187
4.1. Feasibility: IS Cybrarium 187
4.2. Conclusion 196

Source and Detailed Table Of Contents

[http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783540012504-t1.txt]

[http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783540012504-t1.pdf]

Google Books

[http://tinyurl.com/nye3aa]

Review

[http://tinyurl.com/l83e3c]

The Scientific Paper in the Age of Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Gerry McKiernan) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:44:00 +0000

Walter Benjamin and Biz Stone

The FASEB Journal / 2009 / 23 / 7 / 2015-2018

Biz Stone: (dryly) In the middle of what?

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for 'letters to the editor.' And today... at any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.

Maureen Dowd: If you were out with a girl and she started twittering about it in the middle, would that be a deal-breaker or a turn-on?

Maureen Dowd: Why did you think the answer to e-mail was a new kind of e-mail?
Biz Stone: With Twitter, it’s as easy to unfollow as it is to follow.
—The New York Times, 2009 (1)

—Walter Benjamin, 1931 (2)

All registered users are able to add Notes, Comments, and Ratings to any article...Highlight the text to be annotated, and then click the 'Add a note to the text' link in the right-hand navigation menu of the article ...Notes can be started at any point within the text, but for ease of reading we ask that you do not begin Notes in the middle of words.
—Public Library of Science, 2009 (3)

THE SANDBOX OF IDEAS

It’s reassuring to read that our colleagues at The Public Library of Science have remained true to the integrity of the word, if not the sentence or thought. PLoS One has raised this banner for verbal integrity in a cheery commercial entitled "PLoS Journals Sandbox: A Place to Learn and Play (3) ." The new format, which permits instant interruption of on-line, formal scientific papers, is certainly in keeping with the temper of our time. Were this to have been the practice in old-fashioned print libraries, many of our journals would by now resemble kitty litter.

In the Age of Twitter we’ve become accustomed to bell-tones and roving thumbs in every venue of human life. We call it social networking when we summon up Facebook, YouTube, or MySpace—and it’s no longer limited to teenagers. Twitter and the other social networks have been used by nearly one in five of online adults ages 25 to 34 (4) . Nowadays, in the plenary sessions of national scientific meetings, one sees heads bowed in homage to the Holy Book of Face or tweeting to Twitter in fewer than 140 characters of text.

Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, explains:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? (5)

[snip]

And as for science: what are we doing? Today, on screens large and small, every online scientific paper is just a cursor stroke away. That makes it possible, as Benjamin predicted, for any reader to turn into a writer. No surprise, then, that PLoS and other new venture journals encourage us to adorn the digital text with notes and comments, blogs and tweets. [snip] Right on to the Public Library of Science! How fitting it is that PLoS, the youngest kid on the block of reputable science journals, is out to compete in the sandbox of ideas (3) .

ENDANGERED SPECIES OF PRINT

It’s no secret that scientific journals have been losing readers of their printed versions to the greater audience on the web. For many scientific journals, the number of "hits" they receive daily online is a factor or two greater than their monthly print circulation. [snip]The printed word still retains a good chunk of older devotees, but even these are as likely as their younger colleagues to prefer electronic to printed copies of their favorite journals (8) . [snip]

This sea change in the way that information is handled and supported has worried many and frightened a few (9) . We might recall that scientific journals as we know them are relatively recent arrivals on the scene and have moved along paths trod by the general culture. [snip]. Science and publishing became professionalized at the dawn of the Enlightenment. The two oldest scientific journals on record are The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London) and the Journal de Scavants (Paris), both founded in 1665. Originally filled with material of general interest for fellow citizens of "the republic of letters," they soon morphed into publications that reported the most rigorous science of the day (10) . [snip]

IT HAS NOT ESCAPED OUR NOTICE

The mold was struck for the modern scientific paper between the two world wars. [snip] .Today the acronymic IMRaD formula (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) is now required by all reputable journals, including this one. But there’s always been wiggle-room around the canonical IMRaD format; most journals are enlivened by letters to the editor, rebuttals, conference proceedings, abstracts of meetings, news reports, etc. Walter Benjamin’s description in 1931 of the marketplace of print still applies to the market in scientific ideas:

Today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character (13).

He would have loved texting and Twitter; I can imagine his pleasure at running his thumbs over the passing comments and pertinent grievances as he "follows" and "unfollows" as both author and reader

In this context, one can only imagine what the epochal Watson-Crick paper would look like these days on PLoS. Their 1953 paper was written as a "Letter to the Editor" in Nature and never underwent peer review. John Maddox, editor-in-chief at the time, later admitted that "the Crick and Watson paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident." That’s a matter of dispute, as we’ll see (14) . The Watson-Crick paper begins with:

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest...
The ending of the paper is of course perhaps the best known in scientific prose:

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
But for many of us, the real action is in the acknowledgments at the end:

We are much indebted to Dr. Jerry Donohue for constant advice and criticism, especially on interatomic distances. We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London (15).
One need only to imagine what tweets, twoops, formal corrections, and comments might decorate these passages on PLoSOne today. Pauling, Chargaff, Avery, Meselson, Cairns, Donohue, Perutz, Franklin, and Wilkins would have had their say:

This structure has novel features COMMENT: YEAH! HYDROGEN BONDING, LINUS!) which are of considerable biological interest. COMMENT: FOR WHICH I WROTE THE CHEMISTRY, ERWIN FORMAL CORRECTION: IT’S THE GENETIC MATERIAL, YOU FOOLS!, GENES! OSWALD
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing FORMAL CORRECTION: BASE PAIRING A/T=G/C, ERWIN we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. COMMENT: LIKE WHAT? CONSERVED? SEMI? MATT COMMENT: MORTAL OR IMMORTAL? CAIRNS
We are much indebted to Dr. Jerry Donohue for constant advice and criticism, especially on interatomic distances. FORMAL CORRECTION: SEZ YOU! I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE KETO TO ENOL TAUTOMERS. YOU KNEW SQUAT FROM THE CHEMISTRY! JERRY We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature FORMAL CORRECTION: I SHOWED YOU THEIR PICTURES, MAX of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin FORMAL CORRECTION: YOU PEEKED, "DARK LADY" and their co-workers at King’s College, London COMMENT: OUR TWO FOLLOWING PAPERS ARE DATA, YOURS IS A LEAP, MAURY.
ARCADES TO THE BORDER

Walter Benjamin, (1895–1940) the quintessential European intellect and literary omnivore, would have loved having a COMMENTS and FORMAL CORRECTIONS option at his finger-tips. [snip]

More to the point: much of the Arcades Project prefigures the home page of a social network on the Web. Benjamin literally explores a network: the linked indoor shopping arcades of nineteenth century Paris, the Passages (16) . I imagine a Benjamin today, reincarnated as the perennial flaneur; who follows a path in the Arcade of Panoramas. He stops occasionally at one site or another site. The flaneur ambles (surfs) along a protected space (MySpace) in which bustling crowds are reflected in shiny Windows. He adjusts his cravat in a store-front mirror (Facebook), and when the bell-tone rings in his pocket, he takes out his timepiece (Blackberry). He looks past his mirror image (YouTube), to find two generations of followers (Twitter).

Were Benjamin to log on to Twitter, he’d have thousands of tweets on hand to send to generations of followers. [snip]In the century of the common man film was art without "aura" and accessible to all:

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web...Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment (2) .
I can see Benjamin now tweeting, now twoopsing, now blogging, now surfing, now scrolling. His thumbs move quickly over the tiny keys—the sandbox of images in sight. He tweets directly to Biz Jones and the other followers of WB (his nom-de-tweet), an upbeat quote from Paul Valery (1928). Valery and WB were sure that other great gadgets would soon supplant celluloid film:

Pretty good prediction, no? Isn’t that "simple movement of the hand" what the thumbs are doing these days on a Blackberry. The quote is also about twice the 140 characters that Biz Stone permits, but heck, WB could have split it in two.

[snip]

It’s less than 140 characters. I’d bet that Benjamin would have been at home in our new world of texting and tweets, blogs and hand-helds. In the Age of Twitter, he’d be ready to play in the sandbox of ideas, and we wait for his FASEB Journal essay in "Milestones."

Source and Full Text (Open Access?)

Full Text Available

HTML [http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/23/7/2015]

PDF [http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/reprint/23/7/2015]

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign (17) .