Event review: ALPSP 2015 Conference A ‘FANTASTIC TRANSFORMATION’
Anurag Acharya, co-founder of Google Scholar, told delegates why researchers are no longer limited by what their library shelves can hold
S
ince Anurag Acharya’s early days at graduate school in 1990 research has undergone huge changes, delegates at the ALPSP 2015 Conference – held at Heathrow’s
Park Inn – were told. Twenty-five years ago print was the dominant format, browsing was the common way to find research, and concepts such as full-text search and relevance ranking were non-existent, Acharya said: ‘You were limited in every way; by shelves, by budgets, and by that which you did not know about.’ These days, of course, nearly 100 per cent of journals are online, Acharya reported, with ‘online shelves having no end’, all articles equally easy to find, and all parts of specific articles being accessible including research methods and conclusions. ‘If you can get online you can join the entire global research community,’ stated Acharya.
These developments have led to a steady and sustained growth per user as well as in diversity of areas per user compared to
the growth in related areas queries. Users read much more since the advent of online libraries; this is illustrated through the growth in both abstracts and full texts. One further development is that good ideas and research are no longer restricted to elite journals; while they still publish the most important papers, that number has dropped from 84 per cent in 1995 to 75 per cent in 2013.
Microsoft’s academic vision Large amounts of content and behavioural data has led to new interdisciplinary research activities in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, behavioural studies, social computing and data mining, according to Kuansan Wang, director of the Internet Service Research Centre at Microsoft Research. Wang considered the impact for the publishing and consumption of content, drawing on observations derived from a web scale data set, newly released to the
Michael Jubb and Kudos scoop awards
The winners of the 2015 ALPSP Awards were announced at the ALPSP Conference Dinner in September. The ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing for 2015 was won by Michael Jubb.
Jubb has held a distinguished career in research policy, funding and administration, as well as scholarly communications. In particular, he has led Research Information Network (RIN) since its inception in January 2005.
Prior to RIN, Jubb was deputy
secretary of the British Academy and deputy chief executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, overseeing its transition to Research Council status in 2005. Jubb was awarded an MBE in the 2015 New Year’s Honours for his services to social sciences.
Peter Ashman, chair of ALPSP Council said: ‘The scholarly publishing industry has benefited greatly from Michael’s knowledge and insight and Council was delighted to make this award in recognition of this. Sadly, with Michael’s impending and much deserved retirement, comes the closure of RIN and the industry will be a little worse off as a result. We hope this award goes some way to recognising all that Michael has achieved and his service to the scholarly publishing community.’ The winner of the 2015 ALPSP
Awards for Innovation in Publishing, which celebrate and highlight the best innovators in the industry, was Kudos.
Kudos is a web-based toolkit for researchers and their publishers to increase the visibility and impact
18 Research Information OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015
public. He explained that if the web can be considered the library of the future, then the semantic web should probably be considered to be the librarian.
‘Wang also spoke of a paradigm shift in discovery’
He said that the semantic web requires humans to define a standard for data formats and models. It has an explicit and precise specification of knowledge representation that everyone has to agree upon. Wang also spoke of a paradigm shift in discovery, illustrating the difference between traditional web search involving index keywords in documents, matching keywords in queries and having the relevance of ‘10 blue links’. Knowledge web search, however digests the world’s knowledge and matches user intent, he said.
David Sommer, Melinda Kenneway and Charlie Rapple of Kudos
of published research. The judges were particularly impressed with the fact it is not a closed community – it can be used for any publication with a CrossRef DOI, works across all publishers and platforms and offers a single view for the author and publisher to see which
communications channels are most effective.
The judges awarded Highly Commended to JSTOR Daily, which uses high-quality journalism to drive awareness and increase usage of scholarly outputs, and Overleaf – a collaborative cloud based tool.
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
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