Industry Trends FEATURE Access, review and changing brains


Developments in the internet are enabling new approaches to access, peer review and even changing the ways our brains work. Siân Harris reports back from the STM Frankfurt meeting


‘W


e are still thinking of this internet revolution in terms of a 1998/99 Bill Gates vision,’ stated Frank Schirrmacher, publisher


of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and keynote speaker at the STM Frankfurt conference in October. Schirrmacher believes that the internet has


been transformed by the use of algorithms. ‘With algorithms it’s possible to get meaning out of everything,’ he said, giving the example of Google News as a very powerful tool. It is often used as a source by news rooms but across Europe it is only staffed by three people. All the rest is done by algorithms, he said. And this approach could lead to bias. For example, recently Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt jokingly revealed a potential bias in that one of the Google developers on the product loves cricket – and Schirrmacher commented that coverage of the sport in Germany far surpasses the national level of interest in it. Of course, hearing about a sport you have no particular interest in is nothing more than slightly annoying but there is a potentially more sinister side to it. ‘How information distributes itself today depends on algorithms,’ he said. ‘It is possible that a major search engine, by switching a tiny bit of code, could make certain products


or companies threat even


impossible to fi nd.’ There is another from


whole almost new


technology too: it’s changing our brains. Schirrmacher likened the challenge to the early days of the industrial when


people


had been engaged in manual labour found themselves instead operating machines all day; after a while the workers began to suffer from fatigue because their muscles were not getting exercise. Similarly, studies have revealed that digital communication is changing our brains, with a bigger focus on the short-term reward part of our brains and a weakening of the long-term reward part. ‘Digital devices are changing deep brain processes very deeply. Forgetfulness seems to be the new fatigue of our age,’ he observed. In the days of the industrial revolution,


the new phenomenon of fatigue was tackled by bringing in sport in schools and opening gyms to encourage exercise. ‘The best way to compensate for the challenges of the digital age,’ Schirrmacher concluded, ‘will be deep reading and writing things by hand with pen and paper.’


Opening access sustainably Part of the picture of being able to do deep reading is access to content so it was little surprise that the topic of open access


‘We can manage


the transition from library pays to


funder pays but it


will require close engagement and we need to articulate clearly the services


revolution who


www.researchinformation.info


we provide’ Steven Hall


(OA) was again up for discussion at the STM meeting. IOP’s managing director Steven Hall likened traditional publishers’ relationships with OA to the stages of grief. He noted that most have moved on from the denial stage, although some are still at the anger stage, and that the next stage was bargaining, to try to buy some time: ‘We as an industry got this very wrong by


facilitating green OA while resisting gold,’ he argued. ‘We chose not being paid for our work over being paid and said that our role was simply doing things like type setting, rather than in managing the peer-review process etc.’ He did not think there was a need for publishers to fall into a depression stage that it will be the ‘end of publishing as we know it’ though. ‘I believe if we engage effectively with OA


we’ll still have food,’ he said. ‘We must engage with funding agencies that are pushing for OA otherwise they’ll force their own agenda. We can manage the transition from library pays to funder pays but it will require close engagement and we need to articulate clearly the services we provide.’ Part of this involves working with the


repository model but having clearly-delineated policies for different versions. This might mean, for example, allowing the author’s original version to be posted with no embargo but with no journal name attached. Another issue is for publishers to work to assure libraries and researchers that they are not double dipping – taking subscription fees at the same level even if a signifi cant proportion of the articles in a journal become OA. Daniel Hulls, director of Cambridge Economic Policy Associates, spoke about a recent study by Research Information Network (RIN) in the UK into OA, which, he said, revealed a pretty clear favoured option: gold OA. ‘It’s the only sustainable OA model,’ he


said, although he cautioned that the study was done for the UK and the economic factors involved in OA depend considerably on whether a country is a net exporter or importer of scholarly papers. And there are further potential complications too, as Michael Jubb, director of RIN, revealed. ‘The attractiveness of gold depends critically on price,’ he observed. In addition, Jubb continued, ‘researcher


DEC 2011/JAN 2012 Research Information 17


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40