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.

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.

SSRN recently released our Purchase Bound Hard Copy Service. Authors and readers can now order printed copies of select papers in the SSRN eLibrary, which provides another format for users to access research papers.

The reader will receive a black and white printed and “perfect bound” copy of the PDF document with a glossy color cover. The cover includes the title of the paper, and the authors with their affiliations. Additional details about the service, including details on which papers are eligible, are available on our FAQ.

Users of the service include authors sharing their research with friends and colleagues, conferences providing hard copies of proceedings, and consultants giving research to clients and prospective clients. We invite you to try this new service and share your experience with us.

This week I’m attending the JCDL 2011 (ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) in Ottawa, Canada and presenting during the Thinking Back and Looking Forward session of the Disciplinary Repositories Workshop.  This year’s theme is “Digital Libraries: Bringing Together Scholars, Scholarship and Research Data” and our workshop will give anyone the chance to see how disciplinary repositories really work.  This is your chance to ask real questions to real people that are running real DRs.  Here is a list of presenters.

If you too are attending and would like to meetup, send me a message.

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

I’m in Kansas City today looking forward to attending the Kauffman Foundation’s Economic Bloggers Forum. I met some great thinkers and friends at the inaugural conference in ’09 and I am sure this year will only be more of the same.

Stream the presentations live today (Friday, April 1 2011) from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. (CST)

The Kauffman foundation explains:

The Forum brings together select economics, finance, and technology bloggers for an event in Kansas City to discuss key policy issues and cutting-edge research on topics related to entrepreneurship, innovation, and growth. It will feature a dozen talks by well-known bloggers, including Tyler Cower, Virginia Postrel, Felix Salmon, and Dean Baker.

The current economic climate is causing many institutions to re-evaluate their role and approach to doing business, including business schools themselves. Best Colleges Online recently posted an article 10 Predictions for the Future of B-schools that discuss several important points and identifies some general trends for business schools like globalization and distance learning.  Schools are moving away from traditional b-school approaches, shifting from finance-focus to self-focus, and are now encompassing leadership,  creativity, values, and ethics. These efforts are already showing up in new communication, new curriculum, and the MBA Oath. The overall message is that b-schools are, and must, change their strategy to regain the luster they have lost in recent years.

The Economist article Changing course adds, “‘VALUES’ are all the rage at business schools nowadays.” Many programs are now on the quest to restructure their curriculum, including eliminating traditional subjects. Students are looking at their education as a tool to truly change a culture, and influence society.

While I am not sure if there is any correlation, more women than ever are enrolling in undergrad business and MBA programs.  According to a recent Forbes article, the diversity and versatility of a business degree is considered to be very helpful in this economy.  And, a lot of women are using their degrees for not-for-profits, starting businesses, or raising a family.

With this shift in curriculum and attitudes, our future graduates will be more equipped than ever to venture into our dynamic, ever-changing business world.  Maybe they can even help resolve the student vs. customer debate …

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of speaking at Academic Publishing Europe (APE 2010) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences about article level metrics.  APE 2010 was a very interesting conference with a wonderfully diverse audience.  The sharing was open and the discussions were quite frank, especially considering the number of competitors in the room.

During my conversation (watch) about how each of our perspectives and experiences influence our ability to find solutions in this changing climate, I shared a brief overview of SSRN, our perspective on usage as it relates to downloads, and a few anecdotal stories. Additionally, several other discussions from the conference can be found here. Despite the jet lag and freezing cold temperature, Arnoud de Kemp and the Organising Committee did a great job.  I really enjoyed the experience and look forward to a hopefully warmer APE 2011.