Jason Priem asked me to give a keynote at the altmetrics12 workshop at Northwestern on 21 June. Unfortunately, the timing of #altmetrics12 isn’t very convenient. I was supposed to be on a plane on my way to #ALA12 in Anaheim. But, I think metrics are important and have written about what SSRN is doing in this space.

I have been anxious this week because I need to submit an abstract by 18 May. There are a lot of interesting things happening in metrics and I’m not sure what I’ll talk about. At first, I thought I would discuss the importance of being succinct and not using tools just because you can (e.g, Prezi vs Powerpoint) but that doesn’t seem very exciting. And the stuff happening in altmetrics is pretty exciting.

A few days ago I was interviewed at the American Anthropological Association and I said, referring to grey literature, that Grey is the New Black. I explained how my publisher friends used to ask me why anyone would want grey literature or if I thought there really was any value in it. Heck, it wasn’t peer reviewed, printed and distributed … several months to years after it had been written. I see altmetrics as being a lot like working papers 20 years ago. Maybe we should call them grey metrics …

It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but I know what I’m going to talk about

Kirby Ferguson is a quirky New York-based filmmaker with an interesting idea. He wanted to show copying was often part of the creative process by providing popular examples of remixed content. The research and examples from different types of media have been aggregated into an extremely well done, short video series titled Everything Is a Remix. Since I’ve blogged about plagiarism and Open Access in the past, a few people recommended the series to me and it got me thinking about scholarly research in a new and different way.

In the first of the (very soon to be) four videos, he jumps in with recognizable audio examples from Led Zeppelin in the 60′s to Sugar Hill in the 70′s. Sugar Hill’s early example of “sampling” a base line from Chic’s “Goodtimes” has been remixed dozens of times since then. Kirby suggests that remix techniques (collecting material, combining, transforming, and distributing) are the same ones used in any other creative process. In effect, he argues, everything is a remix.

This was an eye opening perspective for me.

I immediately drew several correlations between Kirby’s premise and what I have been seeing and speaking about over the last few years. The SSRN eLibrary provides simple, easy, Open Access to scholarly research in a way that wasn’t previously possible. And, this new level of access allows researchers to remix different perspectives from different disciplines into new innovative research.

My simple definition of innovation is

the ability to create new things by being exposed to broader and deeper set of existing things.

One of the core ideas behind SSRN is that scholarly research relies on previous research to identify new problems, develop solutions to problems, or empirically test those solutions. We created CiteReader and continue to update it so that readers can easily go backwards and forwards through the scholarly literature.  We provide tomorrow’s research today so that it can be used to create new, innovative research faster.

Larry Lessig, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard Law School Professor and former SSRN Editor, discusses remix from another perspective in his TED talk about copyright laws choking creativity and finding a balance. His concern is limiting creativity and innovation by constraining how content can be used.

The question of whether remixing content is part of the creative process or stealing someone else’s work is a very interesting topic that we will continue to explore in the future, but I think Carl Sagan probably summed it up best:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

I’m looking forward to delivering the keynote, Searching and Accessing the Right Content, in the Right Place at the Right Time, tonight at the Searle Center’s Second Annual Conference on Internet Search and Innovation at Northwestern Law School.  The Searle Center runs several conferences each year related to the impact of laws and regulations on economic growth.  Professor Daniel F. Spulber, Research Director of the Searle Center, has put together an impressive group of presenters (PDF Agenda) that I’m looking to forward to hearing.

If you’re at the Conference or around Northwestern today or tomorrow, please stop by to say hello.

I’m speaking at the ORCID (Open Research and Contributor ID) Meeting at Harvard on May 18th. ORCID is a global initiative tackling the author name ambiguity issue, with over 200 participating organizations including academic institutions, publishers, societies, corporate, non-profit and government organizations.

Author names create a lot problems for repositories like SSRN. We often find errors and inconsistencies with common, hyphenated, and non-English names, especially those with foreign characters. The problem grows exponentially when you accept submissions from a variety of sources, each with their own quality criteria.  It is no longer accurate or reliable to depend on first name/last cataloging. Even before the dawn of the digital age, scholarly research and publishing struggled with this challenge and now, it has become an issue that needs to be resolved.

ORCID is a community of minds working to create a central registry/ID, where each author/contributor would have their own unique ID.

“Accurate identification of researchers and their work is one of the pillars for the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature.”

A well written article released in WIRED explained that an ORCID ID would accumulate credit beyond published papers. For example, speaking, data, public outreach and blogging would be attributed to a single source or individual, basically “…anything that helps science but currently goes unrewarded.”

Beyond The Book recently interviewed Amy Brand, a member of the ORCID Initiative’s Board of Directors (and Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments at Harvard University). Amy provides a thorough overview of ORCID’s principles, vision and explains how it would improve efficiencies for all.

I’ll be discussing SSRN’s view on researcher ID systems – how a paper submitted by an author, their academic institution, a co-author or another publisher could be linked across all digital platforms. The real benefit of ORCID is that we will easily be able to connect the dots and allow readers to see author’s full body of work, the big picture … all in one picture.

Last week we released a project update to our reference and citation technology, CiteReader.  CiteReader allows readers to view the references within a paper submitted to SSRN and the citations from other papers in the SSRN eLibrary, making it possible for users to easily go backwards and forward in the literature.

Here is SSRN Chairman, Michael Jensen’s message about the CiteReader Project:

SSRN’s CITEREADER™ REFERENCE AND CITATION PROJECT

We have been working on extracting references from all SSRN papers for 5 years as part of the CiteReader™ project that SSRN has undertaken with our development firm, ITX Corp. We have created a system to extract references and footnotes from PDF files on SSRN and to have that extracted data proofread by human beings. While this project is not yet complete, we are now announcing the release of over 6.7 million references extracted from the reference sections of over 182,000 papers on the SSRN site as well as over 4.2 million citations that we have linked to SSRN papers.

• The references from each SSRN paper (where we have been able to extract them) can be found on the REFERENCES tab on the public abstract page for each paper.
• The citations we have matched to each SSRN paper are available on the CITATIONS tab on the public abstract page for the paper.
• These reference links provide an excellent way for any reader to go back in the literature in any area, and the citation links provide an excellent way to go forward in the literature.

Data on the Current State of SSRN’s CiteReader™ Project

• Papers with Resolved References: 182,645 out of the 270,109 full text papers on SSRN
• Total References Resolved: 6,689,847
• SSRN Papers with Resolved Citations: 180,339
• Total Citation Links between the Cited and the Citing Paper: 4,277,354
• Papers with Resolved Footnotes: 60,721 (we are giving footnote extraction priority to papers with no reference section)
• Total Extracted Footnotes: 6,899,585

NOTE: References in those papers on SSRN that do not have a Reference section have not been fully extracted as yet. We are working on this. These papers (primarily law papers) have their references in footnotes. This means that citations from law papers are currently dramatically undercounted in SSRN citation statistics.

SSRN is now extracting footnotes from all papers while giving processing priority to those papers with no reference section. We have extracted over 6.9 million footnotes from over 60,000 papers with no Reference sections thus far. These footnotes and the references we extract from them will also be appearing in tabs on SSRN’s abstract pages. SSRN is now perfecting the algorithms for extracting references from these footnotes. The undercounting of citations from and to law papers will be resolved over the next year as our algorithms are perfected and references from papers with no reference section are extracted from footnotes and linked to the papers being cited.

Sincerely,

Michael C. Jensen
Chairman
Social Science Research Network

We’ve been talking a lot about the wealth and overabundance of information at our digital fingertips.  Last week we discussed  the increase in academic plagiarism and paper mills as a possible result of the pressures of endless information.

Then I read this article on automated reporting.  Statsheet.com has fed sports fans scores, stats, and other data for years. Now they’re going a step further and creating a narrative recap of team games via automated software. While the  team sites are still in beta, it’s clear that these “robo-journalists,” spitting out stats and highlights, could soon compete with your local, run-of-the-mill sports reporter.  When Statsheet.com founder Robbie Allen was asked about the future, he suggested the Holy Grail of data analysis: financial news.

Is there a place for fact-based, automated data reporting?  What subject areas would benefit most?

Does automated content creation mitigate or increase the overabundance of information?

Is robo-journalism the first step toward robo-ghostwriting?

Two outcomes are possible: readers tire of consuming auto-generated content and return to human generated reporting or robo-reporting becomes popular for data focused subjects areas.  I also wonder if (when?) we will see companies, in an effort to keep to reduce their costs and provide new content quickly, automating the creative portion (imagery, video, etc.) of content?

Automated reporting is a very interesting and cost-saving move that I appreciate from a business perspective.  However, I personally enjoy reading well written, thought provoking articles and somewhere along the way this method feels like something is lost.

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A few months ago, Peter Shepherd, Project Director at Project COUNTER, asked me to contribute an article to Against The Grain (librarians, publishers and vendors) for their Special Issue on Metrics – The Importance of Being Measured.

I wrote about article level metrics at SSRN and how we view the changing world of information overabundance.  Here is the abstract:

Do you read everything in your field today? Do you even know what everything means any more? Readers of scholarly research are faced with an overabundance of information due to interdisciplinary subject areas, access to research at earlier and multiple stages, and simply more research from more scholars. My simple definition of innovation is the ability to create new things by being exposed to a broader and deeper set of existing things, but broader and deeper have their limits. There is no substitute for reading and truly comprehending a specific article, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to read everything. We need better tools to know what research we need to read. We need to know what we don’t know.

The issue has been published and you can download my article here.

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The number of “power users” in the discipline—those who said they are quick to adopt and make significant use of multiple digital technologies in their research and publishing—was quite small, comprising just 4.3 percent of the respondents. But more than two-thirds of the faculty in history departments could easily be classified as “active” users of new media. These historians said they regularly use online sources for their work, employ a variety of different technologies for their research and writing, and tend to adopt new technologies with some regularity and teach themselves how to use them.