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.

I am looking forward to speaking on Saturday at this year’s Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Conference and Annual Meeting, in New York this weekend (4/29-5/1). It will be a great opportunity to talk with several business schools and discuss the scholarly continuum, current research trends and the future (and beyond) of scholarly publishing.

Our Panel Description:

The Impact of Research How our businesses, governments and other institutions are managed, influences our world. If our research institutions produce useful, relevant, readable and rigorous research then they can influence management practice. There is a clear and persistent need for business school research and teaching to meet the needs of business and society better. This presentation looks at the factors and challenges which create impact of research in business and management, and the factors which can mitigate against impact. The session aims to both challenge the audience, and to provide some useful guidelines for those seeking to create and disseminate research with impact.

Speakers:
Gregg Gordon, President & CEO, SSRN
John Peters, President, GSE Research Limited
Howard Thomas, Dean and LKCSB Chair in Strategic Management, Singapore Management University

Date: Saturday, April 30, 2011
Time: 10:30am to 12pm

I will be discussing what we are seeing at SSRN,including the importance of article level metrics and am available during the conference to meet – to connect,  send me a message.

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.

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.