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

It is hard to believe SSRN began two decades ago. And today, SSRN has become something beyond our dreams. Mike Jensen shared his thoughts on this milestone and our commitments to all of you.

In light of our anniversary and we thought we’d share wear the love. Head over to our Facebook page or Twitter (or both!) to win one of our limited edition “I <3 SSRN” t-shirts!

On Facebook, simply like us and share the photo on your page. If you’re already a fan, just share the photo on your wall and leave a comment.

OR

On Twitter, follow us and RT our most recent tweet regarding the giveaway.

Winners will be picked weekly. Keep sharing the scholarly research love and you could be wearing it.

I’m at the  SPARC 2012 Open Access Meeting (#sparc2012) in Kansas City this week where John Willbanks (Kauffman Foundation, Creative Commons) is the keynote along with many others -  discussing how to expand the dissemination of scholarly research and open access.

Later this month, I’ll present at the UKSG Annual Conference (#uksglive) in Glasgow. In it’s 35th year, the conference will aim to “connect the information community and encourage the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication”.

The conference will be held at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre and the UKSG promises “Big thinking + practical learning = unmissable programme”. I’m looking forward to interacting with publishers. Between #OA in KC and publishers in Scotland, it will be an interesting month.

If you find yourself in Glasgow later this month and would like to connect, please  contact me. If you do not find yourself in Glasgow but are interested in the discussion, all presentations will be uploaded here during the conference.

Sustainability is one of the hottest areas of scholarly research, and SSRN’s newest research network. GSE Research sponsors our Sustainability Research Policy Network. I’ve known its founder John Peters for a few years and recently caught up with him to ask a few questions about the what, how, and why of sustainability and working with SSRN.

Q: Tell us about yourself & GSE Research

I am the founder and Chief Executive of GSE Research. My background is inconsultancy, publishing and higher education. Until the end of 2010 I was CEO of Emerald Group Publishing
and Emerald Inc but felt by then that I really wanted to embark on a new challenge, one with a focus on the issues I believe matter most to the world today. I started GSE Research early in 2011 as a scholarly publisher with a philosophy of inclusivity and integrity. The focus is clear: Governance, Sustainability and Environment – the key areas in which we need more and better research in order to overcome the crises currently facing the planet.

I try to keep connected with higher education, and have visiting roles with two UK universities.

Q: Why did you choose to focus on sustainability?

We need to learn to live and work sustainably if we are to survive as a species. With over 7 billion people alive on the planet, the challenges of feeding, housing, educating and employing them are intense. The pressure on resources – natural, economic and social – is unprecedented and it will take massive commitments of time, money and ingenuity to relieve some of that pressure. But I’m a natural optimist and I have real faith in the ability of intelligent people, with sufficient good will and determination, to solve the most difficult problems and to give humanity (and the planet we depend on) a viable long-term future.

Q: What is sustainability research?

A question with probably as many answers as there are researchers in the field! For me sustainability research is research which looks for solutions to some of the problems I’ve alluded to before: research into alternative energy sources; into recycling and waste management; into establishing social and organisational structures free from the corruption that keeps so much of the world in poverty.

There are many of the world’s smartest people working in the world’s universities, and I believe part of the role of a publisher today is to connect that research with policymakers and practitioners.

Q: How does it impact the world?

Profoundly! This stuff matters – probably more than anything else at this moment in history. We have to solve the world’s biggest and most intractable problems – not just for today or tomorrow but for the long term. If the smartest, best educated people we have aren’t focusing their minds on making that happen, then what are they doing?

Q: You are a successful publisher, why partner with SSRN?

GSE’s publishing philosophy is very close to that of SSRN and we believe that real synergy is possible between the two organisations. Like SSRN, we want to encourage the profusion and promulgation of ideas. We share a belief that publication shouldn’t be solely about the final output of a shiny academic paper, which has taken three years to see the light of day, but should include the opportunity to bring ideas into the public domain in order to engage in debate and discussion to strengthen those ideas and to allow others to use them, sooner rather than later, in order to find the next phase of solutions to our problems.

We are delighted to be publishing the SRPN in partnership with SSRN as part of our commitment to innovation in publishing and scholarship in this area.

Thanks John, we are excited to be working with you!

SSRN delivered its 50,000,000 full-text download!

On 12/26/11 a major milestone occurred when Jan Bena, UBC Professor downloaded “Economic Nationalism in Mergers & Acquisitions“ by Isil Erel and Serdar Dinc. It was the 50 millionth full text PDF delivered from the SSRN eLibrary. Congratulate Jan if you see him because he will receive free subscriptions to all the SSRN eJournals for life!

The SSRN eLibrary currently has 375,000 paper abstracts from over 175,000 authors and has received 60,000 new submissions during the year. SSRN’s Citereader project with ITX Corp. has extracted 7.4 million references, 4.7 million citations, and 7.7 million footnotes from our 306,000 full text papers.

SSRN’s CEO, Gregg Gordon is headed to the AFA 2012 Chicago Meeting and will congratulate Jan personally. Thank you all for making this possible.

There are a lot of people changing the world of scholarly communications and I’m looking forward to the 2011 JISC Geospatial Innovation Meeting (Joint Information Systems Committee) at Ravensborough College and Online Information 2011 at the Olympia Exhibition Center. Both of these meetings will highlight important new ways to use data and other tools to create innovative research.

Gregg Gordon is available to connect during either conference,  send us a message.

Open Access Week, now entering its fifth year, is just around the corner. It is a global event which promotes the benefits of open access publishing via free, immediate and online access of scholarly research (#OAW2011).

I will be celebrating the week by speaking at MIT on 10/26. I will discuss how scholarly communications has changed in recent years and the need for article level metrics to help identify what we don’t know, we don’t know.

My presentation, The Scholarly Communication Collider, will also explore how bringing together the right content, in the right place at the right time, helps create scholarly research.

Members of the MIT community are welcome to attend, Wednesday, October 26 from 11:30-12:30 in 3-270.

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 flying to Berlin, Germany this weekend for the third international PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference (#pkp2011) and looking forward to presenting on SSRN’s Open Access approach and the benefits of article level metrics.  The PKP conference attendees are a broad group of publishers and others interested in Open Source software, new publishing models and providing greater access to scholarly research.

PKP developed the Open Journal Systems (OJS), an Open Source journal management and publishing system, to expand and improve access to research.  There are over 7500 journals using OJS.

If you are attending the conference or want to meet in Berlin to talk about SSRN or scholarly research in general send me a message.