Clash of the business models

by Lenny Montana
PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing : Nature News:
[Via Nature]
This is a very provocative article, especially since it starts this way:

Public Library of Science (PLoS), the poster child of the open-access publishing movement, is following an haute couture model of science publishing — relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals.

It is a little unseemly for a for-profit publisher with a closed access approach to openly attack an open access competitor. Especially since many of the PLoS journals have very high impact factors and are widely read for their important articles.

The comments are a lot of fun to read and demonstrate where online conversations are taking us. An example:

Editor Clarke, Perhaps you could then elaborate on just what the intent with this piece? Clearly many of those reading it saw it as a naked and blatantly self-serving screed against open-access publishing. In short, an attempt to undercut the business of a competitor by the method of reputation-trashing. Can you confirm or deny that this was the intent? If you confirm that this was the intent, please let us know why it was ethically sound not to make a firm declaration of COI in the piece? If you deny this was the intent, by all means please let us know what the intent actually was…?
Posted by Drug Monkey

Drug Monkey has some more discussion at his own site, especially the lack of a conflict of interest statement (ironic since every scientist who publishes in every journal today, including Nature, must sign such a statement delineating all conflicts of interest.). Also he has some more links to other bloggers, including the Online Community Manager for the PLoS journals who is taking a “Don’t feed the trolls” approach.

Then there is this little bit of dead-on snark:

Apparently the “bulk, cheap … lower quality papers” published by PLoS aren’t beneath the notice of Nature. Three of the Research Highlights articles in this issue (p 5) report on articles published in PLoS journals (two from PLoS One! and one from PLoS Genetics). If it is not interesting enough to publish in Nature, at least it provides enough free copy to help round out an issue.
Posted by Scott Ramsey

So, Nature is perfectly happy to use the freely available information from the competitor it trashes, in order to make sure it has enough content for its own journal.

Finally, it is a little weird for a commercial company that makes a profit to criticize the business model for a non-profit organization. I mean, horrors, they get grant money. That is what a non-profit can do. Many do not set themselves up to be commercial in the sense of a company like Nature.

Here are the stated mission and goals of PLoS:

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource.

Our goals are to:

• Open the doors to the world’s library of scientific knowledge by giving any scientist, physician, patient, or student – anywhere in the world – unlimited access to the latest scientific research.
• Facilitate research, informed medical practice, and education by making it possible to freely search the full text of every published article to locate specific ideas, methods, experimental results, and observations.
• Enable scientists, librarians, publishers, and entrepreneurs to develop innovative ways to explore and use the world’s treasury of scientific ideas and discoveries.

Here are Nature’s:

First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life.

Nature does really well at the first section but does it really ensure that the results are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world? Or does charging for access fulfill the ‘fashion that conveys their significance’? if you pay for something does that enhance its significance?

Interestingly, Nature did not make a profit of more than 30 years.

Despite the boom in periodical publishing in Victorian Britain in the 1860s, the fledgling Nature did not make a profit for more than 30 years and only survived because of the commitment and belief of its first publisher, Alexander Macmillan, co-founder of Macmillan Publishers, and the hard work of the first editor, Norman Lockyer.

Sounds like charity to me. Yet it is critical of PLoS after 6 years!

I guess there is one thing positive for Nature. While it might be a little unseemly for such a hit piece to come from Nature, they deserve kudos for sticking around for the conversation. even one that takes them to task.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Web 2.0

Will we drink their milkshake?

More bubblin crude:
[Via Deep Sea News]

Unlike people in the glamour states of Florida and California, folks here in Texas don’t mind a little offshore oil development. We view the petroleum industry as two parts necessary evil and one part benevolent overlord. And, we feel this way for free. We don’t get paid off like the lucky folks in Alaska. Our complacency is almost a kind of nostalgia. You might say Big Oil has it pretty easy here in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2001 there were 46 deep water rigs operating in the Gulf and the mood was one of cautious optimism. Now, thanks to escalating oil prices, the mood is more like a rich man’s bliss.
[More]

There is some discussion about our ability to suck oil that is under Mexico’s water. Many of the Mexican’s are afraid we will drink their milkshake. (Spoilers: See here for the video and here for a translation.)

But there are a couple of things. First, Mexico does not have the capability to do this type of drilling. And it may not represent a milkshake drinking proposition. From the LA Times:

It’s unclear whether big shared deposits even exist in the Gulf of Mexico. Historically, the region’s deepwater finds have been isolated pockets of petroleum, not mega-fields.

Officials at the U.S. Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that regulates U.S. offshore production, said they had no knowledge that any gulf reservoirs now under development crossed the international divide.

Shell, which is developing its Perdido platform with Chevron and BP, said the deposits they were targeting were confined to U.S. territory.

I would expect that if there does turn out to be a big reservoir and oil is sucked out of Mexico, then there will a diplomatic solution (i.e. we can get access to some of the oil across the border by sharing some of it).

I was disappointed the article did not really say how much oil was going to come out of the three fields :Silvertip, Tobango and Great White. While no one really knows until they get the drilling done, from what I could find, the fields will produce about 130,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day at their peak. The rig should be ready to start next year.

Technorati Tags: Environment

Scientific community building

by …†∆†¡∆µ∆ 
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
Building scientific communities:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]
Here is an interesting point that should be discussed more, especially with scientific community building (my bolding).

I will start with something I have quoted all too often

Data finds data, then people find people

That quote by Jon Udell, channeling Jeff Jonas is one that, to me at least, defines what the modern web is all about. Too many people tend to put the people first, but in the end without common data to commune around, there can be no communities.

A community needs a purpose to exist, a reason to come together. Some communities arise because of similar political or gardening interests. Most research communities come together for one major reason – to deal with data.

Now data simply exists, like grains of sand. It requires human interaction to gain context and become information. In social settings, this information can be transformed into the knowledge that allows a decision to be made, decisions such as ‘I need to redo the experiment’ or ‘I can now publish.’

It used to be possible for a single researcher, or a small number, to examine a single handful of sand in order to generate information needed to answer scientific questions. Now we have to examine an entire beach or even an entire coastline. A much larger group of people must now be brought together to provide context for this data in any reasonable timeframe.

However, standard approaches are too slow and cumbersome. When one group can add 45 billion bases of DNA sequence to the databases a week, the solution cycle has to be shortened.

Science is an intellectual pursuit, whether it is formal academic science or just casual common interest. That’s where all the tools available today come into the picture. The data has always been there. Whether at the backend, or at the front end, we can think about how to get everything together, but being able to discovery and find some utility is very important. One of the reasons the informatics community seems to thrive online, apart from inherent curiosity and interest in such matters, is that we have a general set of interests to talk about, from programming languages, to tools to methods, to just whining about the fact that we spend too much time data munging. Successful life science communities need that common ground. In a blog post, Egon talks about JMOL and CDK. Why would I participate in the CDK community, or the JMOL one? Cause I have some interest in using or modifying JMOL, or finding out more about the CDK toolkit and perhaps using it. Successful communities are the ones that can take this mutual interest around the data and bring together the people.

Part of what is being discussed here is a common language and interest that allows rapid interactions amongst a group. In some ways, this is not different than a bunch of people coalescing around a cult TV show and forming a community. A difference is that the latter is a way to transform information that has purely entertainment value.

The researchers are actually trying to get their work done. What Web 2.0 approaches do is permit scientists to come together in virtual ad hoc communities to examine large amounts of data and help transform that into knowledge. Instead of one handful at a time, buckets and truckloads of sand can be examined at one time, with a degree of intensity impossible for a small group.

The size and depth of these ad hoc communities, as well as their longevity, will depend on the size of the beach, just how much data must be examined. But I guarantee that there will always be more data to examine, even after publication.

So my advice to anyone building a scientific community (the one that jumped out at me during the workshop was the EcoliHub) is to think about what the underlying data that could bring together people is first. Data here is used in a general sense. Not just scientific raw data, but information and interests as well. Then trying and figure out what the goals are that will make these people come together around the data and then figure out what the best mechanism for that might be. Don’t put the cart before the horse. In most such cases, you need a critical mass to make a community successful, to truly benefit from the wealth of networks. In science that’s often hard, so any misstep in step 1, will usually end up in a community that has little or no traction.

EcoliHub is a great example of a website in the wild that is supported almost entirely in an Open Source fashion. This is a nice way to create a very strong community focussed on a single, rich topic. On the wide open Internet, though, it may be harder for smaller communities to come into existence, simply because of how hard it might be for the individual members of the community to find one another.

But there are other processes allowing other communities to come together with smaller goals and more focussed needs. The decoupling of time and space seen with Web 2.0 approaches, frees these groups from having to wait until the participants can occupy the same space at the same time. These group can examine a large amount of data rapidly and move on. There is not the need to assure the community that it will be around for a long time.

This is the sort of community that may be more likely to come into existence inside an organization. There are other pressures that drive the creation of these types of groups than simply a desire to talk with people of similar interests about some data.

A grant deadline for example.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0