The Emerging Framework for Scholarly Communication

1
The Emerging Framework for Scholarly Communication

• Steve Hitchcock
• The Open Citation Project (OpCit), Southampton
  University
• These slides prepared for The Future of Journal
  Publishing
• at Nottingham University, 22 March 2002
• OpCit is a joint JISC-NSF
• International Digital Libraries Project 1999-2002

2
Emerging framework the hypothesis Scholarly
electronic information will be seamless and
integrated

3
Scholarly electronic information will be
seamless and integrated

• The provable truth, using Google
• seamless integration of information
• 500 results, mostly companies offering network
  and inter-application software
• seamless access to information
• almost 1000 sites, portals and gateways to the
  fore
• seamless linking
• 450 sites, leading with journal publishers and
  databases
• Results based on Google searches November 2001

4
What is seamless integration?

• From any given document the user might expect to
  be able to retrieve any related document within
  one mouse click.
• Typically what is related is defined, and linked,
  by the author or publisher or other service
  provider, and is constrained by the tools and
  information services at their disposal.
• Longer term the relation may be anything the user
  might consider to be related.

5
Achieving seamless integration Web services

• Emerging Web services standards are motivated by
  the need to connect business processes,
  especially databases, across the Web. The basic
  platform for Web services is XML plus HTTP,
  maintaining the ubiquity and simplicity of the
  Web. Web services are based on three mechanisms
• to register a service (e.g. Web Service
  Definition Language, WSDL)
• to find a service (e.g. a registry such as
  Universal Description, Discovery, and
  Integration, UDDI)
• to communicate (e.g. Simple Object Access
  Protocol, SOAP)
• http//www.w3.org/2002/ws/
• Digital library architectures are evolving to
  include Web services-like components, and may
  ultimately migrate to these emerging standards

6
Is seamless integration possible for the refereed
scholarly literature?

• For scholarly research papers - those destined
  for peer reviewed journal publication, by authors
  who have no intention of receiving direct payment
  for publication for the work they produce - this
  prospect raises two subsidiary questions about
  the seamlessly integrated literature
• Will it be complete (from the viewpoint of every
  user)?
• Will it be free (or appear to be free)? A work
  may appear to be free to the user when it is
  accessed via a library, for example.
• The refereed scholarly literature will need to be
  complete, everywhere, if seamless integration,
  even on a modest scale, is to be achieved.

7
Progress in libraries

• Site licenses for electronic journals, and more
  aggregated content from database services
• Alternative journals, e.g. support for the
  Scholarly Publishing Academic Resources
  Coalition (SPARC), to increase competition in the
  journal market by facilitating partnerships with
  publishers and other journal producers
• Open Archives Initiative, interoperability
  standards to facilitate the efficient
  dissemination of content
• Fast-track standardization of OpenURL, to link
  users to these subscription and document
  services, recognising this vast new array of
  electronic content would need to be accessible
  and navigable by users within the librarys
  information environment

8
Site licences

• By licencing access to bundled collections of
  e-journals, libraries can claim to have satisfied
  their objective of better value for money in
  terms of cost per page delivered to users.
• The site from which users access content could
  be an institution, a state-wide group of
  institutions (e.g. OhioLINK), a national
  collective, such as in Canada, or even all the
  people of a nation, as in Iceland. The UK has the
  National Electronic Site Licence Initiative
  (NESLI), which brokers deals between publishers
  and participating institutions.
• The OhioLINK strategy Enablers rather than
  gatekeepers
• OhioLINK claims to have overcome the
  library-imposed, self-limiting, collection
  development mentality of information rationing
  that pervades our community. Thomas Sanville,
  Executive Director, OhioLINK

9
Making appropriate connections

• Site licenses give libraries access to more
  journal titles. Another outcome of the serials
  crisis is that fewer, non-core journals are
  subscribed to and libraries have resorted to
  just-in-time document delivery and collections
  from licensed full-text aggregators.
• Library users may thus have authority to access a
  paper free of charge via one library subscription
  or another. This has become know as the
  appropriate copy problem.
• OpenURL is a generalized framework for
  communicating and resolving links and supports
  software solutions to the appropriate copy
  problem. OpenURL is described as an
  interoperability specification.

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Syntax of OpenURL

•  http//(who you are, where you are, your
  institution)/(where you want to go)
• A
  B
  C
• An OpenURL is mediated by the HTTP protocol
• BASEURL, data about the user, typically inserted
  during transport between servers. One interim
  mechanism is to store the BASEURL as a cookie in
  the users browser. The cookie identifies the
  resolver that provides context-sensitive services
  for the user.
• QUERY, points to the referenced object, which
  might be an identifier, e.g.
• Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
• Metadata derived from an authored reference
• Partial metadata - a secondary service identifies
  the required document
• OpenURL has been proposed as a National
  Information Standards Organization (NISO)
  standard http//library.caltech.edu/openurl/

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Example OpenURL architecture

• OpenURLs might be based on CrossRefDOI services
• (from Beit-Arie et al., 2001, D-Lib Magazine,
  September) http//www.dlib.org/dlib/september01/ca
  plan/09caplan.html

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The Open Archives Initiative (OAI)

• The OAI (http//www.openarchives.org/) defines
• A Metadata Harvesting Protocol (MHP), an
  application-independent interoperability
  framework that can be used by a variety of
  communities engaged in publishing content on the
  Web
• Two classes of participants
• Data providers expose metadata about content
• Service providers issue protocol requests to data
  providers
• OAI is a very simple, low-barrier-to-entry
  interface, shifting implementation complexity and
  operational processing load away from the data
  repositories to the developers of federated
  search services, repository redistribution
  services, etc.

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OAI service providers an example

• The Open Citation project interposing an OAI
  service provider between document (eprints)
  source and user interface

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Creating information interfaces portals

• We have to manage the underlying complexity in
  the form of interfaces. Portals have become
  important interfaces in the scholarly
  environment. Portal strategies
• by publishers (e.g. Elseviers ScienceDirect)
• by associated networked information services
  (e.g. Ingenta),
• by library resource discovery networks (e.g.
  JISCs RDN)
• have yet to establish a pre-eminent model. This
  is because all have concentrated on content,
  mostly owned content. The best next-generation
  portals will build services on top of content,
  and for researchers will become the starting
  point for all lines of enquiry.

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Information interfaces RDN example

• JISC RDN is a good example of building on content
  to provide new services and adaptable interfaces.
  The individual subject networks, in medicine,
  engineering, humanities and others, can be
  searched as though they were one unified
  repository, and an interface presenting users
  with this search facility can be embedded in any
  library Web page.

Guiding the implementation of these services is
the JISC Information Environment (from Powell and
Lyon 2001) http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-syst
ems/dner/arch/dner-arch.html
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Multiple cooperating services in the
communication chain
FROM
Documents
User interface
http
Server
Client

• TO
• OpenURL,
• OAI,
• JISC IE
• MEDIATING CONTENT
• Site licenses,
• eprint archives,
• etc.

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Access and interfaces implications for journals

• Digital information, rich in media and resources,
  formal and informal, mediated by multiple
  services, presents the user with an array of
  choices that might answer his or her queries most
  efficiently.
• Those queries might be expressed as input to a
  search engine, or by selecting a link. Where
  might these citations come from? Personal emails,
  discussion lists, open access services such as
  OAI, eprint archives, newsletters, library
  services, Z-gateways and academic subject
  portals, as well as formal research papers and
  commercial indexing services. There will be many
  more.
• The journal package has traditionally been bound
  in issues and volumes. With the advent of
  multiple networked sources mediated by services
  such as OpenURL, the binding has been unstitched.

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What are digital journals for?

• Journals will be scaled back to the single
  essential function of quality control, in the
  form of managed peer review
• Access to journal contents will be mediated by
  multiple interfaces - open access services,
  portals and information interfaces, other than
  just the journal.
• Journals cannot remain the exclusive provider of
  peer-reviewed papers

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A post-Google information environment

• Electronic journals exist in a post-Gutenberg and
  a post-Google information environment
• By March 2001 the Internet Archive had stored 10
  billion Web pages (100 terabytes of data)
• The ability to locate a specified item of
  information precisely and instantly among the
  mass of information available on the Web has
  profound implications. In the electronic
  environment the search engine has become the de
  facto interface to information, rather than the
  fragmented packages that have migrated from the
  print world.

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Building eprint archives

• EPrints.org software for building institutional
  eprint archives for author self-archiving
• Version 2.0 February 2002
• OAI-compliant
• Free open source software
• Developed at the Electronics and Computer Science
  Department, University of Southampton
• http//www.eprints.org/

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A maximising strategy for authors

• Authors who self-archive their papers in
  OAI-compliant institutional or discipline-based
  eprint archives will
• Maximise interfaces to their work
• Maximise access to their work
• Maximise impact of their work

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Maximising access arXiv example

• Decreasing citation latencies The latency of the
  citation peak has been reducing over the period
  of the archive, i.e. each year papers are cited
  sooner and more often
• Mining the Social Life of an Eprint Archive
  http//opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/

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Maximising impact arXiv example

• More highly cited papers show higher and more
  sustained download frequencies
• Mining the Social Life of an Eprint Archive
  http//opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/

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Maximising interfaces

• Measuring arXiv access and impact data the Open
  Citation project has mined
• Usage data from selected arXiv mirror server
  logs
• Reference lists from 155,000 arXiv papers to
  build CiteBase, an open citation database

• CiteBase, a new interface to the refereed
  literature http//citebase.eprints.org

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Initiatives promoting open access to scholarly
research papers

• Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), funded
  by George Soros' Open Society Institute. Open
  access "gives readers extraordinary power to find
  and make use of relevant literature, and gives
  authors and their works vast and measurable new
  visibility, readership, and impact. February
  2002, has received almost 1800 signatories to
  date
• http//www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
• Public Library of Science, scientists urge
  publishers to allow the research reports that
  have appeared in their journals to be distributed
  freely by independent, online public libraries of
  science. Open letter March 2001, received almost
  30 000 signatories
• http//www.publiclibraryofscience.org/

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A dynamic digital archive

• Scientists and researchers, Nobel Laureates among
  them, have produced the clearest declaration of
  their requirement for access to published
  research papers a comprehensive collection that
  can be efficiently indexed, searched, and linked
• Unimpeded access to these archives and open
  distribution of their contents will enable
  researchers to take on the challenge of
  integrating and interconnecting the fantastically
  rich, but extremely fragmented and chaotic,
  scientific literature.
• Roberts et al. (2001) Science, 23rd March, 2001
  http//www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/551
  2/2318a

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Credits

• The Open Citation project is a collaboration
  between Southampton University, Cornell
  University and arXiv
• The project is lead by Stevan Harnad and Carl
  Lagoze
• Technical development at Southampton is directed
  by Les Carr
• EPrints.org software is being developed by Chris
  Gutteridge
• CiteBase is produced and managed by Tim Brody
• A copy of these slides can be found on the OpCit
  Web site
• http//opcit.eprints.org/. Look for Papers and
  Presentations
• Contact Steve Hitchcock sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk