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

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!

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.

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.

image via

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.

I received a call from Nick Nash, Indira Foundation, a few minutes ago telling me about a very interesting symposium tomorrow.  Harvard University’s Division of Social Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences along with the Indira Foundation are convening a symposium of multidisciplinary experts to identify the world’s hardest unsolved problems in the social sciences (along the lines of the 23 Hilbert Problems).

They have an impressive list of speakers and an innovative voting approach that I will write more about next week.  I can’t make it tomorrow but let me know your thoughts if you attend or watch the webcast.

The symposium is open to the public, will be recorded, webcast live, and archived at http://socialscience.fas.harvard.edu/hardproblems. It will take place from 10:00 am EDT to 5:00 pm EDT, at Harvard’s Northwest Science Building (52 Oxford St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States).

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.

Dorothea Salo is the Digital Repository Librarian for the University of Wisconsin. She claims that, “[The institutional repository] is like a roach motel. Data goes in, but it doesn’t come out.” This description is much more derogatory than Geoffrey Bilder’s description of the Institutional Repositories (IR) as a silo. So what exactly is the problem with IRs that produces such critics?

There are many concerns but one of the basic underlying problems for IRs is a lack of funding to make them an outstanding operational unit.  Surveys from the Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States indicate that “funding comes or will come [for IRs] from the library… They also agree that funding is not coming from academic units.” This means that institutional libraries will have to balance an already strained budget to incorporate a new cost entity.

Another challenge that IRs face is the numerous different IR software that is available. These many software systems are not always interoperable with each other. In an Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), at least ten different IR software systems were evaluated in order to identify the system that will eventually be used by the NLM. Although all IRs must be OAI compliant – this compliance only guarantees that IRs will have interoperable harvesting of metadata. For a repository to be truly functional and highly valuable to researchers, the digital objects that they are storing (full text documents, etc.) need to be accessible and exchangeable. OAI has recently developed the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) specifications to address this issue. But most of the available IR software was developed prior to the development of these specifications. Therefore, once an IR has begun to use such software, “… migrating existing items from any system or service to another – when migration is even possible… locks libraries into an initial decision that in hindsight may have been a poor one.” (Salo, 2007)

Unfortunately, due to these and other issues the IRs are largely empty and presently not for use or reuse to the general public. In a recent study done by Peter A. Zuber, out of 17 universities that had an IR, only 7 of them had over 1,000 holdings, the other 10 all had less than 1,000 holdings.  And the amount of holdings is not correlated to the age of the IR. (Markey, et. al., 2007)

Since most IRs do not have the critical mass to be a viable solution for sharing open access content, what are the alternatives? A solution that Salo proposed takes advantage of the success of disciplinary repositories:

Moreover, as funder mandates such as that of the National Institutes of Health become more numerous and cumbersome, a campus service automating the deposit process into disciplinary repositories (and incidentally snagging a copy for the institutional repository) should make friends quickly among beleaguered faculty. (Salo, 2007)

This combination approach seems to be the path that Columbia University has decided to take. Columbia University’s Economics Department joined NEEO and will be submitting their research to their repository too. Deputy University Librarian’s, Patricia Renfro, comment about this was:

Columbia has already found it very rewarding to be part of this innovative initiative and to have an opportunity to work with European colleagues who are exploring the harvesting of local institutional repositories into a subject-based resource.

A combination approach certainly allows the content to serve both disciplinary and institutional masters.

In the November 2002 Open Archives Forum’s Interim Review of Organisational Issues, a concern was raised about Europe’s role in adopting Open Archives Initiative’s (OAI) protocols and standards because of “the preponderance of U.S. members, and the dependence on U.S. sources of funding for the OAI.”  This concern appears to have been met head on as the European Union has taken the OAI baton and is running full speed with it.

The EU has established the Digital Repository Infrastructures Vision for European Research (DRIVER) “whose vision and primary objective is to create a cohesive, robust and flexible, pan-European infrastructure for digital repositories, offering sophisticated services and functionalities for researchers, administrators and the general public.”  DRIVER’s search portal contains documents “harvested’ from over 200 institutional repositories from 23 European countries in 25 languages. DRIVER is a large scale project that is funded by the European Commission under the auspices of the “Research Infrastructure” unit.  This collaborative and coordinated effort is an impressive one and appears to be lacking in the US.

In a paper written by Christopher Armbruster from the Max Planck Society, he states that this will give the EU a “competitive advantage” over the US:

“Strategy in the US is not as comprehensive as in the EU… Although innovation has occurred in the US (besides the repositories mentioned, JSTOR and ARTSTOR are also significant central solutions), the present situation is characterized by a lack of coordination and a multitude of solutions that make it difficult for anyone outside the cartel of participating institutions to launch new services. For the EU, this situation allows for the opportunity to increase its competitive advantage by coordinating and implementing a distribution of functions that enables more innovation to happen faster.” (A European Model for the Digital Publishing of Scientific Information?, p. 12)

While Kansas University became the first US public University to join Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and others in adopting an OA policy, the question still remains if adopting OA policies and OAI protocols is enough to make the content readily available. As quoted in a previous post, “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,’ [Geoffrey Bilder commented during this year’s Society for Scholarly publishing meeting.]”  Although all OA through University repositories are OAI-compliant, there is still a lack of an united infrastructure in most countries to aggregate this data. In addition, there remains a question of who would fund such an infrastructure.

I guess the proof that Europe is taking the lead globally is in the OA pudding. Columbia University’s Economics’ Department joined a collection of European repositories, NEEO. When asked to comment on Columbia’s joining NEEO, Patricia Renfro, Deputy University Librarian of Columbia University, had this to say:

“A goal for NEEO and its related Nereus consortium is indeed to increase access to European research in economics, but the invitation to Columbia to join represented a decision to extend the scope of the group and of its developing product, Economists Online, worldwide. Nereus will be inviting other US institutions to join and to contribute to EO and already has one Australian member, Monash University.

Columbia has already found it very rewarding to be part of this innovative initiative and to have an opportunity to work with European colleagues who are exploring the harvesting of local institutional repositories into a subject-based resource. Economists Online will further expose full text Open Access economics content that we are adding to Columbia’s institutional repository, Academic Commons.”

SSRN supports OA, and I think it provides real value to the scholarly community, but have been concerned about making Open Access more Accessible. DRIVER and NEEO are exciting efforts in this very exciting area. I hope they continue to expand and spur others on to join them.