dreamingspires posterous

Publishing companies are going through a period of existential angst.  Well, those that are paying attention are.

 The future of e-publishing – that is the title of my presentation to the powers that be on Monday.  It’s vague enough to cover a multitude of sins, and in it is a slide on Competition.  I list the usual suspects for Healthcare Publishing here – WileyBlackwell, Pearson, ThomsonReuters… except I don’t believe they are the serious competition -- we are all in the same boat. It’s the brainwaves other companies that I am looking at, those who facilitate social learning.

Look at Flatbooks and their video, publishing content directly for undergraduate students

“Our solution to crazy expensive – Free books, online, anywhere, anytime.”

Existential angst seems to have communicated itself through the ranks.  In the meantime there is a strategy to finish and a sense of identy to be found.

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GPeerReview are bringing out a peer review tool in a social networking environment.  From a user point of view it looks very good and could have major implications for academic houses and institutions who have business models based on peer review. 

The aim:
“We intend for the peer-review web to do for scientific publishing what the world wide web has done for media publishing”

This is what GPeerReview say about their product and they are none too gentle with traditional academic publishing houses:

“GPeerReview is a command-line tool that makes it simple to write a review of someone's work and digitally sign them together.

How does it work?

1. First, you read someone's paper.
2. Next, write a review. (The review is just a simple text file that contains a few scores and your opinions about the paper.)
3. Use GPeerReview to sign the review. (It will add a hash of the paper to your review, then it will use GPG to digitally sign the review.)
4. Send the signed review to the author. If the author likes the review, he/she will include it with his/her list of published works.
5. Prospective employers or other persons can easily verify that the reviews are valid.

Why?

• Peer reviews give credibility to an author's work.
• Journals and conferences can use this tool to indicate acceptance of a paper.
• Researchers can also give credibility to each other by reviewing others' works.
• This enables researchers to publish first, and review later.
• It meshes seamlessly with existing publication venues. Even the credibility of works that have already been published can be enhanced by obtaining additional peer reviews.
• A decentralized social-network of reviewers and papers is naturally formed by this process. The structure of this network reflects that of the research community.

Graph Analysis
Analysis of the network/graph of reviewers and papers can provide an automated technique for evaluating how well-connected a particular author is with the research community. For example, one analysis algorithm might work as follows:

1. Seed the analysis with a set of well-established researchers in the field. (These might include the chaired professors at your university and a few of their peers that they select.)
2. Use a max-flow/min-cut algorithm to determine the smallest set of reviews that must hypothetically disappear in order to sever the individual being analyzed from the research community.
3. The sum strength of these hypothetically severed reviews now serves as an indication of how well-connected that individual is with the research community.

Of course, this is not the only graph-analysis technique available. There are numerous algorithms and metrics for measuring the connectedness, centrality, or other aspects of an individual's relation to a community. Further, the reviews themselves contain evaluations of significance, novelty, quality, and other values that may assist an evaluation. You can design your analysis to emphasize your own preferences. Thus, there is no single magic formula that can be gamed!

Ultimate Goal
We intend for the peer-review web to do for scientific publishing what the world wide web has done for media publishing. As it becomes increasingly practical to evaluate researchers based on the reviews of their peers, the need for centralized big-name journals begins to diminish. The power is returned to those most qualified to give meaningful reviews: the peers.

As long as big journals provide a useful service, this tool will only enhance their effectiveness. But the more they take months to review our publications, and the more they give unqualified reviews, and the more they force us to clear irrelevant hurdles prior to publication, and the more they lock up our works behind fees and copyright transfers, the more this tool will provide an alternative to their services.

With GPeerReview, you can:

• Publish immediately (and get reviews later),
• Seek an unlimited number of reviews,
• Verify the integrity of the reviews,
• Verify the credibility of the reviewers,
• Publish without limitation on format, style, or number of pages,
• Maintain complete copyright ownership of your works, and
• Enhance the acclaim of your already-published works.”

Looking at this objectively I can't help but think that this is could be a good thing for the dissemination of research and content in a social networking environment from a users perspective. Especially as it can be done alongside traditional publishing review processes in the interim. In the long term I suspect these traditional peer review processes will disappear with major implications for academic publishing companies.

We could of course just bury our head in the sand -- with regard to book sales strategy I heard one Publisher say in a recent Sales Conference:

"We must be doing it really well because it's still working"  Nothing could be further from the truth.

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For your information it was a Large Flat White coffee which is just as well as we did cover rather a lot of ground.  See, the thing is I have come to expect things I read on the internet for free. And Publishing Houses tend not to give things out for free.

I expect to be able to find information, good quality information mind, and then I want to pass on that information to others.

Snippets of information are read and digested like electronic grazing.  I cannot recall a period where I have learned so much in so short a time. In Marie Curiesque fashion (who did not patent her radium-isolation process enabling others to use it) information is gained and passed on.

Publishing houses like to argue that they are there to provide the peer review process, guarantee quality, publicize….No longer, with the Wiki model peers review peers and quality comes to the surface – whether being noticed from blogs, nudges, digs, stumbles, twitter...  It's fast and powerful.

My friend, Jolyon, made some comments & predictions:

Journal articles will be published pre-review by their authors online for a small fee and be available almost instantly.  Then they will be reviewed by peers who will comment, rating it and giving suggestions for change. As articles are written by researchers and read by researchers most of the reviewers comments will be relevant, and an anonymous review will carry far less weight than a public one.

Very different from the traditional subscription model as it stands where aricles are sent to the Publishing House and not published until they have gone through quite a tortuous review process for all.

Universities will be able to have unlimited numbers of students because students no longer need to physically attend class.  Study material will be sourced by students from wherever they decide, and it will be free. 

Students may opt not to enroll for courses at all deciding instead to study independently and when they are ready register (and pay) to take the exam, irrespective of whether they have studied with that University or not. 

Students will opt for those Universities who are regarded as top in their field such as Harvard/Oxford/MIT and take their exams, although they may only have a limited number of attempts at passing.

Good news for the larger 'Ivy League' Universities as their student numbers could be greatly increased, less so for the smaller Universities who may see students prefer to take exams elsewhere.

The choice is now more with the users than the institutions.

It really was a very good cup of coffee

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At the beginning of every year most publishing companies have a sales conference where sales teams and staff come together for a few days to look at the year ahead and get reflective on how they're doing.

Managers stand up and rally the troops, Publishers present new books to the Sales Team, the Sales Reps snap back that the books are Late, Again. – can't we get the Authors to get their manuscripts in on time -- how come Oxford University Press always manage to get it right…. Sigh.

My manager announces he would like me to present the new elearning nursing strategy (the one that doesn't exist yet) at the upcoming sales conference.
'Sure' says I, feigning nonchalance as he hands me some slides 'Use these from the last couple of years to put something together'.
'Oh', says I, nonchalance no longer feigned. Surely a 'Publishing Strategy' not based on evidence is a Wish List? 

A Publishing Strategy is a term thrown around with great abandon in publishing circles -- we have 'publishing strategies' for medicine, for nursing, the health professions… and I'm sure the same slides appear in all of them with the colors of the bar charts changed.  But we've just been reorganised, so I judge it wise to not say anything.

Lets see… research.  I know!  I'll use Twitter! Those guys are always posting interesting info….No wait, they are all Medic Types and random people from New York. 
Damn. I'm in the wrong Twitter group.

Maybe if I do the #thingie and put Nurse after it… that might work. Wait! There's @NurseDan (note to self, always be nice to @NurseDan)

But for now it's laptop in hand and back to Government Nursing Statistics (which are really rather good) & a cup of coffee at one of Sydney's best café's with the guys ready to serve.
I suppose I could actually talk to some nurses….

     

Click here to download:

A_Publishing_Strategy_Without_.zip (4928 KB)

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The day after a Company Publishing Meeting is a little like the aftermath of a world shattering event.   People begin to smile, realize that life is good, and the next meeting is a whole month minus one day away.

Your Manager thinks the project is a good idea after all, the Marketing guys are happy, the Sales Team think they can do a good job and importantly the Chief Finance Officer has all his boxes ticked and has decided it's not too much of a risk.

Publishing Directors are more than ever focussed on spreadsheets and targets, whereas us Publisher types (being of a more creative ilk) are focussed on the Idea, the Writer, the Project, and want it to see the light of day, not least because it's a privilege to be involved with the Idea and work with the Writers.

The Chief Finance Officer, however, is looking at it from an entirely different point of view -- and he now gets to call the shots.

Why is it all about finance? Just like the Music Industry, Publishing is going through a metamorphosis, Clinicians, Students, Writers, Educators are asking what we can offer and (heaven forbid) deciding that maybe they can do it themselves.  Writers are taking much more control and ownership of their work.

The challenge for Publishers is to ask their own Publishing House to change their way of thinking and look at how to add, enable, fund an Idea... or maybe that can all be done by Writers themselves now with the advent of Blogs, Twitters, Social Bookmarking, Sharing, Networking, Virtual worlds.  After all who needs paper, typesetters, printers when you can self-publish electronically?

Personally I love the move to individual ownership of work, open access, and self publishing in the virtual real world.... bring on the next meeting.

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