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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I was at MIT a few days ago and had the opportunity to participate in Erik Brynjolfsson‘s class at Sloan School of Management. It was a fun class.  We discussed the early days of SSRN, bundled services, and electronic resources in general. During the conversation, I asked the MBA students if they knew where the library was and received many blank stares.  Maybe it was because MIT has a a lot of them, but more likely it was the fact that students’ relationships with their library has changed.

While the gap between students and stacks continues to grow, several libraries are building bridges. Personal Librarian Programs are being rolled out by a small number of universities across the country, including Drexel University and Yale. Essentially, these programs assign incoming students a personal librarian to serve as a direct access point in the library.  I haven’t looked at it from a cost perspective but from a customer service perspective, I think it is great.

Today, many of us understand and appreciate the overwhelming abundance of information available at our fingertips.  There is too much content to consume and crucial educational resources can get lost in the pile.  Librarians have a wealth of knowledge and specifically know:

• How to research & evaluate content
• How to use different resources for different purposes
• How to determine validity and appropriation
• How to think critically

Several months ago I spoke with Susan Gibbons, a forward-thinking librarian from the University of Rochester. She understands the challenge and provided some insight into how she has been able to enrich and simplify students’ experience at the UR library.  One idea that stuck with me was noting the library’s front desk phone numbers at the end of each stack, allowing students to get help immediately.

In addition to valuing libraries by their resources, Susan explained that important learning functions like camaraderie and group work are also fostered by the library structure.  Building learning communities is one of a library’s most important core missions.

For Susan’s view of the future, watch the video below:

Earlier in the day at MIT I had a conversation with a librarian and asked if students knew where to find the library. She replied, “Of course they know where it is, that’s where they go to sleep in between classes.”

I hope the Personal Librarian Programs and other initiatives are a success.  Students need to learn how to manage the overabundance of information today and it would be a shame for them to spend more time with their eyes closed than open in the library …

We recently expanded the Share functionality on the top of our abstract pages by adding Facebook and Twitter to the Digg, Delicious, and CiteULike options.  Our community asked for the ability to easily post or tweet about research that was important to them and has already created thousands of SSRN links on Facebook and Twitter.

This ease of linking and accessing content is beginning to create interesting opportunities.  Google* and Bing are continually adding features to enhance their results but it has become a cat and mouse game trying to provide the best, non-manipulated results.  We are starting to see a lot of interesting research regarding the use of social networks to provide recommendations using a “wisdom of friends” approach.  It makes a lot of sense to us.  When you think about it, don’t you value the recommendation of a trusted friend more than a search engine algorithm?

* I love the 40th Anniversary Sesame Street doodles this week, especially today’s Cookie Monster!

From Octane magazine: “Keeping Up With the Cyber Current”:

In the June 2009 issue of Octane, Entrepreneurial Organization’s quarterly magazine, I outlined SSRN’s “three-step approach” to expanding our online presence through social media.  The approach is an ongoing process that allows us to evolve and accommodate the needs of our users as technology evolves.  As part of this expansion, SSRN added sharing technology for popular sites, such as Digg and Del.icio.us, and joined Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  Our three-step approach is:

It is definitely a learning experience for us and I look forward to your feedback about how we can improve.  Please comment below or write to me Gregg_Gordon@SSRN.Com .

Richard Stacy had an interesting blog post about journalism and the sanctity of publication. In this post he discusses the indignant attitude of journalists as it relates to the social media and how traditional journalists view traditional publications as the only forms of discourse to be valued.

I am excited that we are seeing a contrary attitude in scholarly publishing. I have participated in two very forward thinking blogger symposiums: Bloggership – How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship* at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School in April 2006 (yes, 2006!), and the more recent Economics Bloggers Forum at the Kauffman Foundation. The participants of both symposiums accepted social media as being part of the discourse and Bloggership produced several interesting papers. Even the staid, traditional group of scholarly publishers at the Society of Scholarly Publishers Meeting in Baltimore had a Twitter following with 170 Tweets during the conference, and about 40 since the conference.

There is a lot of change needed in scholarly publishing but at least some in scholarly publishing are not looking at social media with an indignant attitude.

“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 …