The SSRN Blog

Geoff Bilder, CrossRef’s Director of Strategic Initiatives, and others discussed Trust during their CrossRef Annual Meeting presentations earlier this week and I’ll discuss more on this topic next week.  What I was most impressed with in Bilder’s talk was the list of new projects, such as TOI DOI (a DOI shortener).

I have often thought of CrossRef being a bit old school and it is great to see them sharing its cool new ideas.  Plus, they are making them available at the new CrossRef Labs.  Keep up the good work!

Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting & Preserving Scholarship

Stacy Righini (SSRN’s Social Media Specialist) will be attending Utah State University’s Regional Institutional Repository Conference: Disseminating, Promoting, & Preserving Scholarship.  The conference is sponsored by Utah State University, Berkeley Electronic Press, and the Utah Academic Library Consortium.  The conference will be on the Logan campus of Utah State University on September 30, 2009.

Stacy will be presenting an electronic poster “Institutional Repositories & Discipline Repositories: The IR Horizon.” Her poster will be available for viewing at the conference:

8:30 AM - 4:30 PM Merrill-Cazier Library Room 101
Institutional Repositories & Discipline Repositories Eposter, Stacy Righini, Social Science Research Network

The EPoster will also be available for viewing at this blog the day of the conference.

Description:
Institutional Repositories (IRs) have played an important role in promoting and expanding the pathways to scholarly content. Most IRs reside in universities providing valuable services to faculty, researchers, and administrators who want to archive research, historic, and creative materials.

The increasing awareness that universities and research institutions were losing valuable digital and print materials began driving the establishment of IRs and provided the changes in scholarly communication needed to remove the barriers to access. The primary purpose of the early IRs was to aggregate and preserve the intellectual output of a laboratory, department, or university. The incentives and commitments to change the process of scholarly communication have also begun serving as strong motivators for continuing and expanding the building of them. Presently there is a “bandwagon” approach to mandating submissions to “your school’s” IR. For universities, repositories are marketing tools communicating capabilities and quality by showcasing faculty and student research, public service projects, and other important activities and collections.

However, there are real limitations. Funding, especially in the current economic climate, poses a serious challenge. There are small aggregate amounts of submitted content overall and it is sparse in many areas. In addition, there is a general lack of knowledge amongst many scholars as to why an IR is valuable. Scholarly societies have been establishing discipline-based repositories to preserve the history and literature of a particular subject area and address some of these limitations. In the future, we see IRs partnering with disciplinary repositories (DRs) by playing a key role in providing a bountiful location harvest.

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Stacy will be “live blogging” during the conference, follow her tweets: http://twitter.com/srighini She will be using the hashtag #IRUSU, unless another tag is given the day of the conference - in that case she will let all her followers know and post it in the blog.

Additionally, Stacy will be available throughout the conference to speak with individuals regarding SSRN and its services. If you would like to set up a meeting, please email Stacy_Righini@ssrn.com

Stacy is looking forward to the conference and meeting everyone there!

As many of you know, we have worked closely with The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to create our Entrepreneurship Research & Policy Network (ERPN). Earlier this year, they held the first Economics Bloggers Forum and I was fortunate to be able to participate.  It was a wonderful event and a great opportunity to meet and learn from some very intelligent people, a few of which are included in the Renewal of Entrepreneurial Capitalism video below.  Other than my friends at the Kauffman Foundation inserting the wrong blog URL for me, I was very impressed with the quality of the videos and the professionalism of the staff.

Overview - Economic Bloggers and the Renewal of Entrepreneurial Capitalism

Gregg Gordon - Entrepreneurship Research and Policy Network

Gregg Gordon - Building the Field of Entrepreneurship Research

Please let me know what you think about the videos and what changes are occurring in your discipline.

Here is the latest announcement from SSRN:

Announcing EFA 2009 Annual Meeting Abstracting Journal

In cooperation with the European Finance Association (EFA), the Financial Economics Network (FEN) is pleased to announce the 2009 European Finance Association (EFA) Annual Meeting abstracting journal. The abstracting journal is available to all users at no charge and contains abstracts of the meeting papers with links to the full text within the SSRN eLibrary.

View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/EFA-2009-Bergen.html
Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=EFA-2009-Bergen
Conference URL: http://www.efa2009.org
Recent Issue: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/sample_issues/1279763_CMBO.html

The European Finance Association (EFA) was founded in 1974 in collaboration with the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) and the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM). The aim of the Association is to provide a professional society for academics and practitioners with an interest in financial management, financial theory and its application. EFA serves as a focal point of communication for its European and international members. It also provides a framework for better dissemination of information and exchange on a global scale.

The Association’s Annual Meeting is one of its main activities. Since 1974, the meetings have been organized each year in different cities all over Europe. They provide the opportunity to present research work in the field of corporate finance, investment, financial markets, money and banking. (View full announcement)

When John Palfrey wrote his keynote for this year’s Computer Assisted Legal Instruction’s (CALI) 19th Annual Conference for Law School Computing about the legal education revolution, I doubt he included anything about the technological revolution occurring in Iran. However, Palfrey, Professor of Law and Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, as well as a Faculty Co-Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was obviously excited about what is happening in Iran and very effectively wove this into his presentation about the future of legal education and legal information.

As Dean of the Harvard University’s Law Library, he wants to “listen” to what students are doing. More and more students are acquiring information digitally, and no longer visiting the library’s stacks. They are the “digital natives” he spoke about in “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives.” He said the role of the library and the librarian will change in the 21st century. The Library will be a place to “reintroduce contemplative spaces for students.” A message repeated from the celebration of the newly renovated and expanded space of Duke University’s J. Michael Goodson Law Library and included in “The 21st Century Law Library: A Conversation,” where Palfrey discusses the future of the library with Richard A. Danner and S. Blair Kauffman. In this conversation, Kaufmann refers to the 21st century law library as a “third place:”

“Interestingly, the born digital students tend to be even more frequent users of libraries. The people who guard the entrance to the Yale Law Library tell me that our current 1Ls are the heaviest library users they’ve seen yet. It’s an interesting situation that during the digital age, students are flocking to libraries. I think it’s because libraries, as Dick has pointed out in previous talks, are what architects call a ‘third place’ - where your home is your first place, an office or a classroom is a second place, and social places, like dining halls and lounges and coffee shops and bookstores and libraries are a third place.”

However, one of Palfrey’s greatest emphasis in his keynote speech was the library’s role in collaboration - in both research and in collecting and storing information. He called it “radical collaboration.” “What can we do together?” he asked. Instead of libraries competing on collection size - he says libraries should collaborate on what each buys and shares - especially during these economic times. This was once again a revisit to the conversation with Kauffman and Danner:

“Palfrey: Let’s say you’ve got an empiricist who is doing work on data sets related to something in the business world or corporate world, and the Yale School of Management has all the materials that they need. Do you buy it at the Yale Law School library, and likewise, do you repeat the things that the Yale School of Management has in skill sets?

Kaufmann: … we duplicate as little as possible, and we coordinate with the other libraries on campus to get those information resources where we can. And we think very carefully about how we expand our services.”

I found the use of new technology to further the revolution in Iran to be an effective beacon and metaphor for the change that needs to occur in the way we think about information collection and storage. Law schools shouldn’t follow the same old path of trying to win by having the most books in their law library. They need to see the light and win by producing the brightest minds that will make a real difference in the world … maybe even in Iran.

“Brave NOW World” was the theme at the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting in Baltimore last week where several ideas were presented for new publishing models and technologies. Geoffrey Bilder (CrossRef) returned this year proselytizing the same model he presented at last year’s meeting. In his usual dry, in-your-face style, he revisited his “iPub” model including some of the same jokes about publishers and librarians. If one reads excerpts from last year’s meeting, it tells the same story but no where near as enjoyable as watching him present the arguments.

Bilder envisions an “iPub” searchable database for research papers similar to that of the iTunes music database. iTunes, with its “critical mass of content, simple interface,… and disaggregation of content…,” he argues, lends itself to a scholarly publishing model. He sees that a huge challenge facing researchers today is gathering research that is now available from so many different sources. “Library silos aren’t much better than publisher silos,” he comments. Bilder envisions one location for research storing, which would make it easier for researchers to find and gather data. iPub would contain many research papers from many different disciplines and provide a friendly user interface to search for this research. Much like iTunes, where many types of music are located and can be “searched” by Genre, Artist, or Title; on iPub, a user would be able to search for papers by discipline, key words, Author, Title, or Journal. Then, analogous to iTunes users creating their own music libraries and playlists, iPub users could create their own research libraries from their already existing papers on their hard drive, plus retrieved papers from iPub database. However, the one aspect of the iTunes model that Bilder views as not being compatible with the “iPub” model is cheap, simple pricing (i.e., $0.99 downloads). He believes that “iPub” would have to incorporate a system of variable pricing for monopoly pricing reasons.

Bilder says iPub would be “scary” if this envisioned system were built by someone not in scholarly publishing. But perhaps this system is already built…

During this same conference, Victor Henning, co-founder of Mendeley, presented Mendeley’s research/collaboration tool. Mendeley is based on a different music industry sharing model, Last.FM. In fact, two out of the 13 members of Mendeley’s staff were once part of Last.FM’s staff, including Stefan Glaenzer, Last.FM’s former Chairman. Mendeley’s goal is to provide a tool that “makes research social.” Mendeley provides stats about your own research library, discussions, and recommendations about research papers, and provides trends and charts about readers, authors, and titles.
So, does Mendeley have many of the qualities of the “iPub” model that Bilder envisions?

• Critical Mass of Content: Right now a researcher can “gather” papers from a number of databases - including PubMed, PLOS, and arXiv to name a few (complete list of databases that are compatible with Mendeley’s interface.) But maybe more important than the databases from which one can gather research articles is the database that Mendeley itself is currently building. In April, Mendeley had its one millionth article uploaded to the database. And in Victor’s own words:

“…we’re not hoarding all that data just because we can, no Sir! Our vision is to create the largest open, interdisciplinary and ontological database of research - as crazy as that sounds, remember that Last.fm (whose former chairman and COO are our co-founders and investors) pulled it off in the space of music within just three years, using the same user data-aggregation model that Mendeley is built on.”(One Million Articles Uploaded to Mendeley!)

• Simple Interface: Gathering research articles into one’s own personal library is very easy with Mendeley. It’s as easy as clicking on a “bookmarklet” while on the web page of the research article. However, as of right now, I do not see any search capabilities onto Mendeley’s own database for research articles, nor onto partnering databases. I am willing to bet that database search is in Mendeley’s future as a Premium service.

• Disaggregation of content: Right now, users on Mendeley are divided into 25 disciplines, including Biological Sciences and Humanities. Statistics regarding papers on Mendeley’s database and in user’s libraries can be filtered by discipline. As Mendeley’s database grows, I am sure that more granular subdisciplines will be added. It is assumed that in the future, Mendeley users will be able to search Mendeley’s database by discipline, key words, Author, Title, or Journal (or any other capturable metadata.)

Would Mendeley’s model lend itself to “cheap pricing” and “simple pricing”? When Henning was asked about how this model could generate revenue, he mentioned a few ideas including “premium services” and “site licenses”, but during his presentation he also mentioned “personalized recommendation” statistics and other services that could lend themselves to “adaptive pricing tools.”

Much conversation after this presentation was centered on “optimal pricing” for pay per download papers. The core question remains if publishers are ready to follow Bilder’s advice about pricing and pay per downloads? Perhaps other revenue models would be more feasible and have lower perceived risks for publishers.

Mendeley says that they want to make research social and I think they have a great concept, the question is whether the publishers are likely to support the concept or take a Recording Industry Association of America type stance. It is surely an exciting time in scholarly publishing …

I am at the Society for Scholarly Publishing 2009 Annual Meeting.  It is very interesting and exciting to see the changes in the view of publishers.  Several years ago I sat in a keynote session where a publisher was explaining their incredibly high first copy costs and justifying them based on the value they provided to scholars (primarily access in a scarce universe).  This year’s meeting has a wonderfully diverse agenda, including the following sessions this afternoon:

• Building Social Collaboration Tools: A Practical Guide for Scholarly Publishers
• Brave Adventure: New Publishing Models for the “Now” World
• Scholarship 2.0: Creating an Online Community

Several of the people here were also at the Open Repository conference last week at Georgia Tech. Both were Tweeted (#SSP09 and #OR09), but the tone is clearly different.  Last week, there was an undercurrent of creativity and imagination.  Several presentations outlined cool new things to do and the audience was scribbling notes and asking questions about what they needed to do to try them.  The group appeared willing to experiment to try to find better solutions.  So far, SSP has a few similar themes, but there is a definite wait and see approach.  I think the blinders have come off most of the publishers, but they appear to be waiting for the new age to be proven before they actually change.  I guess born digital and gone digital are still two completely different things.

Gregg Gordon (President/CEO) and Diane Baltadonis (Director of Sales & Marketing) will be attending the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International Conference and Annual Meeting, April 26-28 in Orlando, FL.

Gregg will be presenting a session entitled “The Future of Scholarly Publishing”, which will offer insight into trends, technologies and advances associated with scholarly publishing.

Session: A2
Date: Monday, April 27, 2009
Time: 10:30am to 12pm

Description: The senior executives of two independent commercial publishing organizations present their views on the industry, its trends and likely direction. The scholarly publishing industry both mirrors, and shapes, the business school industry, and many of the same pressures and influences play on both — the relevance/rigor debate; role in wider society; globalization; impact of technology; and others. From different standpoints, the presenters will explain some of the workings of the industry, the factors which are shaping it, and what the future for publishers, scholars and students of business might hold.

Presenters: Gregory J. Gordon, president, Social Science Electronic Publishing, and John Peters, chief executive officer, Emerald Publishing

Additionally, Gregg and Diane will be available throughout the conference to speak with individuals regarding SSRN and its services. If you would like to set up a meeting, please email Diane_Baltadonis@ssrn.com.