Societies (like AIAA) are kvetching about their bottom lines, but this is really much more troubling than just the fiscal health of the societies given how important conferences are in keeping up in the field.

Scientists and engineers use conferences to meet potential collaboration partners and funders, to learn about new work, to maintain relationships formed at previous conferences, and to get feedback on their own work. Distance does still matter and in-person meetings are still important.*

Moreover, in some fields (**) conferences are archival and are relied upon for certification and distribution purposes. Other conferences are the first place new results are mentioned and many authors modify their work based on interactions at meetings ***.

We all complained bitterly during the previous administration about the funding of science and the suppression of some scientific results... but is this much better? How can government regulate well without being up on the science? Maybe this is temporary... but it doesn't look good.

__

* Olson, G. M., & Olson, J. S. (2000). Distance matters. Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2-3), 139-178. doi: 10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4 ( there are definitely better citations for this now,... but time is limited)

** Drott, M. C. (1995). Reexamining the role of conference papers in scholarly communication. JASIS, 46(4), 299-305.

*** Garvey, W. D., Tomita, K., Lin, N., & Nelson, C. E. (1972). Research Studies in Patterns of Scientific Communication .2. Role of National Meeting in Scientific and Technical Communication. Information Storage and Retrieval, 8(4), 159-169. doi:10.1016/0020-0271(72)90001-0

note: it took me like weeks to write this because i kept (squirrel) getting distracted... hopefully it makes sense even if it's probably abbreviated from what I originally intended to write.

Here are my thoughts in brief:

• What we pay for each download/view is actually pretty low
• Our researchers have immediate access to lots of obscure things we never thought they'd need
• Our researchers are accessing things we'd never subscribe to if offered separately
• Even crap journals may have some good content from time to time (El Naschie not withstanding)
• We don't have to take the bundle. We can always just subscribe to just those journals we want. Many libraries have cancelled their big deals.

Bad things:

• Supporting some crap journals
• Some jerk editors of crap journals advertising that we subscribe to their crap journal
• Inflation in the cost of the big deals eating up the serials budget leaving less and less for smaller publishers or individual subscriptions.

This last thing is really bad, but it's not only the case in bundle situations. The big fancy science and technology journals are crazy expensive whether you purchase them in a bundle or individually. Our budgets are decreasing - we're cutting 5% here or 10% there when we're not facing 25% cuts - and as I said in an earlier post, 15% increases are not doable, even if new journals are added to the package.

So anyway, call me brainwashed or whatever, but I'm just trying to get the content our folks need for the money we have to spend (or, in most cases, the money our parent institution has to spend 'cause mpow is cut to the bone).

Citation managers have been around since at least the 1980s if not before. They're really a no-brainer for people who need to write about their research (attributing ideas gotten elsewhere) and it always surprises me that not every scholar has one set up. They're simply a database that's smart about citations/references/bibliographies. All viable ones right now take imports from research databases, the web, and digital libraries; let you search; and let you reuse information by inserting citations into documents and formatting them in your preferred format. In the past 5-10 years, newer ones are web-based or at least back-up/sync over the web, and offer some social or collaboration features.

The web-based citation managers provide a ton of very interesting data to their companies:

• What are people reading?
• Where are they searching (where is their data coming from)?
• How are they reading - what in documents do they find interesting (for services that provide annotation tools)?

You start to see, then, why for-profit publishers would find this very interesting indeed.

At the same time, the publishing market is growing at a set rate, so to increase profits, publishers need to branch out into different services. Hosting pre-prints? Indexing or hosting data (too expensive)? Expanding presence into other parts of the scientist's workflow (ding!)?

By expanding their brand's presence into the writing process and the reading and analyzing the literature process, companies gain a few possible benefits:

• more places to put ads, better data to sell more relevant (thus acceptable and profitable) ads
• lower the friction to submit valuable articles into their journals
• get submissions with better markup so editing and typesetting are easier (may be a pipe dream)
• more brand loyalty?

What's in it for us? Some of these big corporations actually have very functional UX teams and have the potential of really making some improvements. Better integration of these tools with the research databases and whatnot you already use could be useful.

With respect to Elsevier and Mendeley. Sure Elsevier is evil... BUT... they do actually have some really great products and they do spend a ton of money improving them. Some of their competitors are also evil, but do not put any money back into improving their interfaces.

Your data going to help Elsevier (and a fuss coming from a Microsoft employee - give me a break!)? Yeah, well, I guess I'm of the school that I'm willing to give up some things to get better and more relevant services. To be honest, Elsevier is a known entity and that's slightly more comfortable than a start-up on venture capital looking to turn a buck. Maybe less uncertainty is better? (bring on the pitchforks and torches!)

Other acquisitions: Springer and Papers - I actually missed this news last Fall.

Also: ACS and ChemWorx (not an acquisition but a partnership, I believe).

Of course Thomson Reuters bought ProCite, EndNote, Reference Manager ages ago and now offer EndNote Web to Web of Science subscribers.

Edit 4/30: I forgot to mention that ProQuest bought RefWorks a while ago. I just read today (via) that there's now a free version of EndNote Web. Competition is good!

You might have seen the many calls to sign the We the People petition on Open Access (many tweets were tagged #OAMonday because there was a big push on a Monday to get the signatures rolling in). OSTP (the office of science and technology policy in the White House) has responded here: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/increasing-public-access-results-scientific-research

The OSTP Open Access memo is here (pdf): http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf

So exciting, so happy. Now back to work!

News via John Dupuis who is retweeting a lot of things from around the web.

I immediately got all excited - sounds a lot like pubmed central and woo-hoo because DOE funds a lot of research in diverse fields.

Then I read down a little ways and saw some strange caveat-like things or, well, not really weasel words but look here (emphases mine):

PAGES is designed to take advantage of the public access efforts of publishers by linking, via digital object identifiers (DOIs), to DOE articles they make publicly accessible.  Each such article serves as the Version of Record, and it is hosted by the publisher.  Thus, PAGES will avoid duplicating the public access efforts of publishers.

When DOE articles are not publicly accessible, PAGES will focus on accepted manuscripts.  Specifically, after an embargo period, it will link, via URLs, to publicly accessible manuscripts hosted by institutional repositories.  For those instances where free public access is offered neither by a publisher nor by an institutional repository, the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information will host the accepted manuscript and display it after an embargo period.  In both of these cases, PAGES will still provide DOI links to publishers’ websites, where articles may be accessed with a subscription or other transaction, thus maintaining a pathway to the Version of Record.

So this sounds very much like the authors were talking to the Executive Director of AIP, who was a DOE physicist (and administrator) prior to taking over at AIP. In his presentations and contributions to committees on scholarly communication he has put forth rental models, FundRef (a way to track research funding through CrossRef metadata), and links to the "version of record" at publishers all as ways to provide public access. I've already commented on rental models and knowing something exists and looking at the abstract may be intellectual access but it's not the real access that someone trying to do science needs. Publishers have long (and continuously) maintained that scientists are perfectly content with access and that, in general, access to the literature is just fine thank you very much.

So that's why I say "publisher-sensitive."

A couple of other weird things - we don't know the embargo period and it seems excessive not to even link to institutional repository copies until after the embargo. If the publisher allows immediate posting of the work in an institutional repository, then why wait? Seems strange.

Also no discussion of carrot, stick, mandate, or whatever. Will this be a condition of funding? Are they just going to crawl the web or whatever open repository harvester thingy to find these things? Hope authors volunteer publication information? Hmmm.

It looks like a similar presentation was given to CENDI.

In that presentation there's also this other thing that could have been written by publishers

Preserves the freedom of researchers to promote and disseminate their research, i.e., preserves researchers’ choice in selecting the journal to which they wish to submit manuscripts.

A bit of fud (maybe?) that publishers have been using in anti-mandate press releases is that mandates would force scientists to only publish in journals that would allow depositing of the manuscript thus taking away their freedom to select an appropriate venue. (seems to me if you publish a journal with lots of stuff funded by a mandate-having agency then you probably need to support compliance with the mandate, but that's just me.)

The original announcement also had this information:

Regardless of where DOE-sponsored articles or accepted manuscripts are hosted, PAGES will enable readers to search them all via a single search box.  Among the metadata thus returned by PAGES will be the DOI for the published article once that DOI is posted by the publisher.  PAGES will also be integrated with other DOE publicly-accessible R&D information and products, such as the 330,000 technical reports in the DOE Information Bridge

Over all definitely a good thing. I'm actually rather amused at how much they're trying to placate publishers. I guess they really don't want to get in to the lobbying and NIH-like battles. I can't say I really blame them. Limited money is best used elsewhere. I guess the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. It would be awesome if this got taken up by DOD. Really would be fabulous.

I recently noticed that v25 n1 (1991) of the Journal of Composites is missing from the Sage website. We've licensed the whole backfile for this journal and we need an article from it.

I contacted technical support and their response was:

SAGE did not publish JOURNAL OF COMPOSITE MATERIALS in 1991.  I checked with our Publishing Technologies Department and the 1991 content you asked for is not available in our archives because the previous publisher did not have all past issues on hand when the title was transferred to SAGE.

I suggest that you look for the back issue at the Periodical Service Company.  This company has permission to sell back issues of our journals which are older than 2 years old.  They are major reprinters of academic journals and specialize in the supply of back volumes and back issues of out-of-print journals and serials.

We have one publisher of ebooks with a 13% increase. A journal publisher with a 7% increase. Another journal publisher with individual titles with as much as a 20% increase (promptly cancelled!).

THERE IS NO MORE MONEY.

THERE IS NO ... MORE ... MONEY...

NO MORE MONEY.

Sequester? Government science cut backs? Military O & M money shorted? RDT&E money shorted?

No. More. You're gonna get cancelled and we'll have to deal with the pitchforks and torches. Hell, I have a travel ban on now even if the kids weren't preventing me from going to SLA and whatnot.

It's not just the small undergrad colleges. It's across the board.

End of Rant.

Now, 9 years later, it's still running and it is even used to populate an external publications area on our expertise search app.

By its nature and how it's populated, there's absolutely no way it could be totally comprehensive and it is also time-delayed. It's probably a little better now with how fast the databases have gotten and because Inspec and Compendex now index all author affiliations and not just the first author.

Anyway, our leadership is on an innovation kick and looking at metrics to see how we compare to our peers and also if any interventions have positive effects. The obvious thing to look at is patents, but that's complicated because policies toward patenting changed dramatically over the years. They're looking now at number of publications - something I think they probably ought to note as part of being in the Sci/Tech business. My listing has been looked at, but that only started in 2003/2004. From here forward the public release database can be used... but what about older stuff? Well, in the old days the library (and the director's office) kept reprint copies of everything published. Awesome. Well, except they're kinda just bound volumes of all sorts of sizes and shapes of articles. I guess these got scanned somehow and counted, but they ended up with a few articles with no dates or citations (title and author but not venue). Three of these got passed to me to locate. They're not in the above mentioned research databases, but we know they were published (as re-prints were provided) and not in technical reports.

The answer? Google. Of course. The first was a book chapter that was cited in a special issue of a journal dedicated to the co-author. The second was a conference paper that appeared on the second author's CV (originally written in 1972 - thank goodness for old professors with electronic CVs!). The third was a conference paper cited by a book chapter indexed by Google Books. BUT to find the year, I have to request the book from the medical library... which I have done.

At least back in the day the leadership understood the value of keeping a database (print volumes) of our work. From at least 2003 until 2012, there was no such recognition. Now that I will be benchmarking us with peer organizations, I wonder if they're in the same boat or if they've keep their house in order with respect to their intellectual contributions?

Other suggestions were to use funding data from Web of Science or elsewhere (soon to be part of CrossRef data), but that really only gets the science team for the instrument. Our main point is to find out who is downloading the data from the NASA site (or elsewhere?) and doing good science with it.

Heather Piwowar has done a lot of research on data citation (is it done, how do you find it), but I believe mostly with life sciences data. Joe Hourclé has also presented several times on data citation and there is the DataCite organization to work on this issue. But this is all future stuff. Right now it's the wild west.