Altmetrics Correlations: We need to think about n-dimensional impact space, taken from a slide presentation by Jason Priem

“See the mind at work and see the mind in work…”
(from REMIXTHEBOOK review)

“Until quite recently the complete justification for even the most complex scientific facts could be understood by a single person,” Michael Nielsen reminds us before describing science today as graspable beyond individual understanding. If one person can no longer understand the ways of science, then, perhaps, “a group of people” may “collectively claim to understand all the separate pieces that go into the discovery, and how those pieces fit together.”

How do we correlate members of this group, are some members closer to each other, how can they collectively claim what they collectively communicate, and what pieces hold them together? This is what the altmetrics group tries to explore, and teaches the machine to seek. This is what “changes the game”, and the reason why we came to play has recently been interpreted by Jason Priem, a PhD student, whose work is focused on improving scholarly communication.

Communicating is Doing the Science

In a speech presented at the Purdue university, Jason aims at deciphering what is crucial for the Second scientific Revolution; that is, altmetrics, rediscovering impact, and decoupling of the journals. “Communicating is the doing of science,” he quotes Montgomery. The “conversation,” he continues, “is arguably the most important work we do in science,” added to it that it is easier than ever to make it visible – we have ways of publishing and growing it in patterns, through social networks, reference managers, blogs, social bookmarking systems.

At Research Remix altmetrics group, they claim: “By analyzing patterns in what people are reading, bookmarking, sharing, discussing, and citing online we can figure out what kind – what flavor – of impact a research output is making.” As opposed to what we would expect, “the goal isn’t to compare flavors: one flavor isn’t objectively better than another. They each have to be appreciated on their own merits for the needs they meet.”

To Each His Flavor

Priem mentions the example of Twitter feeds that solely accumulated to over 58k citations from Twitter to scholarly articles in just one month, that is, a certain dataset listed 58k tweets that mentioned a scientific article (broadly speaking anything with a DOI, PMID or arxiv ID) between the 1st and 31st of July 2011.

Recently, an altmetrics bookmarklet was launched, that you can easily add to your browser toolbar, that will “on the push of a button” count the number of Tweet mentions, mentions on Facebook, CiteULike, Connotea or Mendeley for any article, again, with DOI, PMID or arxiv ID.

Altmetrics Bookmark to add to your Toolbar

“The local genomics dataset has moved to an online repository, and now, we can track it,” it is written in Altmetrics Manifesto. “Altmetrics are fast, using public APIs to gather data in days or weeks. They’re open–not just the data, but the scripts and algorithms that collect and interpret it. Altmetrics look beyond counting and emphasize semantic content like usernames, timestamps, and tags. Altmetrics aren’t citations, nor are they webometrics.”

“Now we can listen in,” the manifesto reminds us. “In growing numbers, scholars are moving their everyday work to the web. Online reference managers Zotero and Mendeley each claim to store over 40 million articles (making them substantially larger than PubMed); as many as a third of scholars are on Twitter, and a growing number tend scholarly blogs.”

Altmetrics are not limited to one type of person – academics, one kind of resource – scholarly article, and one kind of use – using to support a scholarly article, and while, in words of Jason Priem, “we started to confuse “the kind of use we can track” with use, and “citation impact” with impact,” we still struggle to mine the first scholarly web, instead of mining “the next one.” Even worse, our system is “the best scholarly communication system possible using the 17th century technology.”

Time to Listen In

With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review; taken from Altmetrics Manifesto

Jennifer Howard writes for the Chronicle: “Peer review has served scholarship well but has become slow and unwieldy and rewards conventional thinking. Citation-counting measures such as the h-index take too long to accumulate. And the impact factor of journals gets misapplied as a way to assess an individual researcher’s performance, which it wasn’t designed to do.”

Priem explains how looking into the next web will be done from a different angle: “Altmetrics impact is mostly orthogonal to traditional citation impact. We need to think about n-dimensional “impact space”, articles that fit into clusters by type of uses. Altmetrics can provide rich metadata, not just counts.”

Some of the tools that are already available (bearing in mind that altmetrics are in their early developing phase) were presented by Priem:

• PLoS Article-level metrics
• CitedIn
• ReaderMeter
• altmetric.com
• ScienceCard
• Total-impact

Priem concludes the first part: “Quantifying impact means we can teach machines what’s important. This changes the game, and the game needs to be changed.”

Decoupling Journals

The next thing Priem discusses is the decoupling of the journals. At this point, we may ask ourselves what highly relevant research result today really – is. Is it scholarly article, or rather a separate piece of information?

“First journals went hand in hand with the Scientific Revolution and applied the most advanced technology available to the problem of spreading scholarship at the time,” Priem suggests. In fact, all scientific progress is limited to the best technology available and, if this was once printing press, today it is the technology of the world wide web.

As a consequence, the current system has problems, it is “slow, restrictive in format, closed, inconsistent and hard to innovate on”. The new system, will however, need to do all that current system does, only better. It will need to connect all members through a “live CV” that shows altmetrics, and this, according to Priem, has already started, given the examples of:

• Faculty of 1000 Research
• the blog-o-sphere
• SSRN
• ArXiv
• Math Overflow

The most compelling among Priem’s conclusions is that “once we have alt-citation data, it’s too useful to ignore” and “alternative filters and even certification paths based on this data will open.” He even borrows a theater reference from Peter Winkler, related to citation graph data: “It is like Chekhov’s gun: once on stage, it has to be fired.” Finally, Priem suggests, “new revolution will not be about homogeneity but about diversity of outputs and this is easier to do on the web then between covers.”

Find the entire video presentation by Jason Priem here.

From Sinfest comic titled "Yarny" by Tatsuya Ishida - click to link

The Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced to the White House on February, 9 by representatives Doyle, Yoder, and and Lacy Clay. Exactly what Research Works Act wanted to prohibit, the FRPAA would require, or the open access policies that RWA aimed to eliminate, FRPAA would expand on.

The Yarn

As clearly stated in the full text of the proposed Act (FRPAA):

(1) the Federal Government funds basic and applied research with the expectation that new ideas and discoveries that result from the research, if shared and effectively disseminated, will advance science and improve the lives and welfare of people of the United States and around the world; and
(2) the Internet makes it possible for this information to be promptly available to every scientist, physician, educator, and citizen at home, in school, or in a library.

Basically, FRPAA would make free online public access to publicly funded research mandatory. However, not to be confused with policies such as NIH, the FRPAA wouldn’t specify the OA repository in which authors must deposit their manuscripts, the way the NIH specifies PubMed Central, and it mandates deposits in OA repositories, not submission to OA journals, and as such it focuses on green Open Access and does not provide funds for publication fees at fee-based OA journals (it ignores the Gold OA). FRPAA applies to the version approved by peer review but not yet copy-edited and it permits embargoes up to six months. Finally, it does not tell any kind of journals what their access policies or business models ought to be, it regulates grantees, not publishers. All these reminders about the past experience of the introduction of a similar bill, are explained through Harvard Open Access Project page, managed by Peter Suber.

Irreversibility

Kakaes writes for the Slate magazine on how proposing a bill that would oppose such practice, as Research Works Act does, that would actually prohibit making publicly funded research publicly accessible, is about playing “the shell game, the oldest one in politics: an attempt to pass off the parochial interest of the few (journal publishers) as a broader societal benefit.” He further comments on Elsevier’s act of backing up the Research Works Act: “Elsevier and other commercial publishers have an incentive to encourage the publication of as many papers as possible, regardless of the quality. In a statement, Elsevier says laws like FRPAA could undermine the sustainability of the peer-review publishing system. These claims are easily mocked.” Kakaes finally concludes optimistically: “the movement toward open publishing now seems irreversible,” regardless of whether the FRPAA is passed, or not.

Most string tricks revolve around the same premise: The magician will appear to cut the string into two pieces and then somehow put them back together as one. As with most magic tricks, the secret lies in the preparation before the performance along with some sleight of hand.

It may seem that we have unfolded that old desire of string theorists who made up the mailing system for themselves that finally became an archive (arXiv), which “was a way for the theorists to communicate with one another,” as Kakaes reminds us, and expanded it to a desire to make this research results promptly available, as FRPAA clearly states (see above). Since arXiv, we have seen PubMed, its offspring, flourish.  In addition, universities such as Harvard or MIT are adopting OA policies. It seems only logical for this “open organism” to breed, and for us, to pull this string until it is long enough to see before us all of its elements stretched – until all federally funded research is available to all who could benefit from it, and not only in specific fields. If they’ve tried to cut it, it is no wonder that the string will be put back in one piece, like in that old magic trick where secretly, it is held in a loop.

Further Action

“Open access legislation like FRPAA doesn’t just happen in a vacuum,” Michael Nielsen reminds us. “The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) is a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that works to promote open access policies within the US Government.” Find your way to support them, here.

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InTech sponsors the 7th Int. Symposium on Agriculture

InTech’s headquarters home country, Croatia, is about to hold the 47th Croatian and 7th International Symposium on Agriculture, to take place in Opatija on February 13-17.

As the official sponsor of the event, InTech and its team will join researchers, scientists and professionals in the field of Agricultural Sciences for the conference. Official participants and lecturers will present to relevant stakeholders and the general public the results of scientific and professional work of Croatian and international specialists to enable a better transfer of scientific and professional achievements into agricultural production.

As the global population grows, food demand rises

The growth in numbers of the global population has been and is pressuring the agriculture industry to meet the rising food demand. According to ReportLinker, by 2050, there will be 3 billion more people to feed and farmers will have to rely more and more on technology and mechanisation to supply.

Paul MacKenzie Cummins, Head of Corporate Communications at InTech, joined by Sara Uhač, Head of Journal publishing, will hold a presentation on February 16th at 12.30 pm on Open Access publishing and its benefits for the whole scientific community, giving all participants a comprehensive insight into sharing free knowledge and reaching a globally wider scientific audience.

Paul shares his thoughts on the importance of embracing OA and disseminating free knowledge to push the frontiers of science to new levels:

“We live in a digital age where the internet has changed not only the way we communicate with one another but also how we share information. Open Access publishing breaks down the traditional barriers to publishing that many researchers, scientists and other leading industry specialists have faced. And it serves as a vehicle by which knowledge is accessible and freely shared throughout the wider scientific community.”

International Journal of Agricultural Chemistry

Furthermore, in the presence of InTech’s Head of Journal Publishing, Sara Uhač, Paul will also talk about InTech’s Open Access International Journal of Agricultural Chemistry, edited by Dr. Margarita Stoytcheva, from the Autonomous University of Baja California, Mexico. The journal offers a selection of peer-reviewed manuscripts about the latest scientific advances in the field of agricultural chemistry. Most importantly, it discusses ongoing developments within this scientific area, as well as their impact on the environment, addressing both practicing professionals and researchers in the field of agricultural chemistry, professionals in academia, PhD students and other specialists interested in the results of research in agricultural chemistry.

InTech officially invites all parties to join the conference to drop an email to Stella Lutz, Media Executive, lutz@intechweb.org, if interested in visiting InTech’s headquarters in Croatia and get further information on Open Access publishing and all InTech’s activities in the research field of agriculture and beyond.

47th Croatian and 7th International Symposium on Agriculture

To learn more about the conference, its program and location,  please visit the conference’s official web page at 47th Croatian and 7th International Symposium on Agriculture

Sources:
1. http://www.reportlinker.com/ci02001/Agriculture.html
2. http://www.reportlinker.com/p0701070-summary/World-Agricultural-Equipment.html

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