Public Articles
Linking Visualization and Understanding in Astronomy
This post accompanies a talk by the same name and author, presented at the 223rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, at 11:40 AM on January 6, 2014. Talk slides will be online after noon on January 6 at http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/seamlessastronomy/presentations.
In 1610, when Galileo pointed his small telescope at Jupiter, he drew sketches to record what he saw. After just a few nights of observing, he understood his sketches to be showing moons orbiting Jupiter. It was the visualization of Galileo's observations that led to his understanding of a clearly Sun-centered solar system, and to the revolution this understanding then caused. Similar stories can be found throughout the history of Astronomy, but visualization has never been so essential as it is today, when we find ourselves blessed with a larger wealth and diversity of data, per astronomer, than ever in the past.
In this talk, I will focus on how modern tools for interactive “linked-view” visualization can be used to gain insight. Linked views, which dynamically update all open graphical displays of a data set (e.g. multiple graphs, tables and/or images) in response to user selection, are particularly important in dealing with so-called “high-dimensional data.” These dimensions need not be spatial, even though, e.g. in the case of radio spectral-line cubes or optical IFU data), they often are. Instead, “dimensions” should be thought of as any measured attribute of an observation or a simulation (e.g. time, intensity, velocity, temperature, etc.). The best linked-view visualization tools allow users to explore relationships amongst all the dimensions of their data, and to weave statistical and algorithmic approaches into the visualization process in real time.
Particular tools and services will be highlighted in this talk, including: Glue (glueviz.org), the ADS All Sky Survey (adsass.org), WorldWide Telescope (worldwidetelescope.org), yt (yt-project.org), d3po (d3po.org), and a host of tools that can be interconnected via the SAMP message-passing architecture.
The talk will conclude with a discussion of future challenges, including the need to educate astronomers about the value of visualization and its relationship to astrostatistics, and the need for new technologies to enable humans to interact more effectively with large, high-dimensional data sets.
Example Article: Geoscientific Visualization in Authorea with iPython Notebooks
Ok, I can’t stand to try it out and test Authorea with a visualization I made for a former lab report. Let’s go.
At first, we have to create a Notebook file. I took the data and Python script that I made for the lab report and put it in a local folder called ipython. Using the terminal, I switched into this folder and called ipython notebook %matplotlib inline
. The latter argument is used to have my plot show up in ipython itself underneath the code cell that runs the plot. I also splitted up the code in smaller chunks and converted some of my code comments into Markdown cells. That makes it nice to read the Notebook and structures the code.
Afterwards I ran every code cell from top to bottom using the Shift + Enter keys. The plot the plot appearing under the last cell was then saved to the folder containing the Notebook file.
Ok, now I have some files containing my code (the Notebook file), the rendered plot image, and the raw data in an Excel Sheet.
To use the image in Authorea, I just need to upload it and reference it inside my latex document. But as a scientist standing for open research, I also want my colleagues and readers to be able to access the raw data and algorithms used to produce the plot, so I upload them, too.
So I created a folder inside my document structure in Authorea called depth-plot and put all files in it. Inside my structure.md file I referenced the image with the relative path and now it shows up at the corresponding position of the document structure (below this text). Because the image and the Notebook file are in the same folder, hovering over the image shows a “launch ipython” button, that anybody can use to open the Notebook inside the browser and play around with it.
Nice, isn’t it?
(At the moment, Notebook sessions opened inside the browser get killed automatically after 5 minutes. I think that’s due to the fact that Authorea is still quite new and should be seen as Beta software. If you want to have a closer look at the Notebooks, you still can download it and play around locally.)
LaTeX was not built for the web
One of the questions we get more often from our users at Authorea is:
Why is my LaTeX command not working?
The short answer to that is:
Because that LaTeX command was not intended for a webpage; it was intended for the printer. :(
The longer answer.
Authorea understands and renders markup languages such as Markdown, and LaTeX. But it does not rely on a compiler which takes TeX and spits out PDF. All the content created on Authorea is web-native. As we create more and more content on the web, we think that scholarly articles, too, should live on the web.
That said, we do enjoy and use LaTeX frequently at Authorea. This post for example, was written in LaTeX! Want to see? Let’s grab a pre-baked equation, for example this Fourier transform and render it below:
a \Leftrightarrow 2\pi a\sum\limits_{k = - \infty }^\infty
{\delta (\omega + 2\pi k)} ,( - \infty < n < \infty )
\begin{equation} a \Leftrightarrow 2\pi a\sum\limits_{k = - \infty }^\infty {\delta (\omega + 2\pi k)} ,( - \infty < n < \infty ) \end{equation}
We decided to support LaTeX from the very beginning, as it is the document preparation toolkit of choice for many (most?) researchers in the hard sciences. We think LaTeX is still the best programming language to tell a computer how to place text on a page. But the TeX project started pre-web, in 1978, and its scope and function are tightly linked to the printed page, not the webpage. Take, as an example a table definiton that begins with \begin{table}[ht]
. This table command instructs TeX to put the table in the page, here, where the table is declared (h
) AND at the top of the page (t
). The list of examples could go on and on — think of minipage environments, page margins, text width parameters... all LaTeX notation that does really not make sense for a webpage.
Is CSS the next LaTeX?.
What does the future hold for academic writing? We like to think that a few years from now we will format our research papers with the web version in mind, rather than the printed PDF. And we are not alone! LaTeX will very likely be used many years from now, but, we think, in a much more stripped-down, web-friendly incarnation, like the subset that Authorea currently supports. (We use some amazing tools like Pandoc and MathJax to convert between formats and render equations). Or maybe someday we will just format papers using CSS stylesheets?
The Fork Factor: an academic impact factor based on reuse.
and 1 collaborator
How is academic research evaluated? There are many different ways to determine the impact of scientific research. One of the oldest and best established measures is to look at the Impact Factor (IF) of the academic journal where the research has been published. The IF is simply the average number of citations to recent articles published in such an academic journal. The IF is important because the reputation of a journal is also used as a proxy to evaluate the relevance of past research performed by a scientist when s/he is applying to a new position or for funding. So, if you are a scientist who publishes in high-impact journals (the big names) you are more likely to get tenure or a research grant. Several criticisms have been made to the use and misuse of the IF. One of these is the policies that academic journal editors adopt to boost the IF of their journal (and get more ads), to the detriment of readers, writers and science at large. Unfortunately, these policies promote the publication of sensational claims by researchers who are in turn rewarded by funding agencies for publishing in high IF journals. This effect is broadly recognized by the scientific community and represents a conflict of interests, that in the long run increases public distrust in published data and slows down scientific discoveries. Scientific discoveries should instead foster new findings through the sharing of high quality scientific data, which feeds back into increasing the pace of scientific breakthroughs. It is apparent that the IF is a crucially deviated player in this situation. To resolve the conflict of interest, it is thus fundamental that funding agents (a major driving force in science) start complementing the IF with a better proxy for the relevance of publishing venues and, in turn, scientists’ work.
Research impact in the era of forking. A number of alternative metrics for evaluating academic impact are emerging. These include metrics to give scholars credit for sharing of raw science (like datasets and code), semantic publishing, and social media contribution, based not solely on citation but also on usage, social bookmarking, conversations. We, at Authorea, strongly believe that these alternative metrics should and will be a fundamental ingredient of how scholars are evaluated for funding in the future. In fact, Authorea already welcomes data, code, and raw science materials alongside its articles, and is built on an infrastructure (Git) that naturally poses as a framework for distributing, versioning, and tracking those materials. Git is a versioning control platform currently employed by developers for collaborating on source code, and its features perfectly fit the needs of most scientists as well. A versioning system, such as Authorea and GitHub, empowers forking of peer-reviewed research data, allowing a colleague of yours to further develop it in a new direction. Forking inherits the history of the work and preserves the value chain of science (i.e., who did what). In other words, forking in science means standing on the shoulder of giants (or soon to be giants) and is equivalent to citing someone else’s work but in a functional manner. Whether it is a “negative” result (we like to call it non-confirmatory result) or not, publishing your peer reviewed research in Authorea will promote forking of your data. (To learn how we plan to implement peer review in the system, please stay tuned for future posts on this blog.)
More forking, more impact, higher quality science. Obviously, the more of your research data are published, the higher are your chances that they will be forked and used as a basis for groundbreaking work, and in turn, the higher the interest in your work and your academic impact. Whether your projects are data-driven peer reviewed articles on Authorea discussing a new finding, raw datasets detailing some novel findings on Zenodo or Figshare, source code repositories hosted on Github presenting a new statistical package, every bit of your work that can be reused, will be forked and will give you credit. Do you want to do a favor to science? Publish also non-confirmatory results and help your scientific community to quickly spot bad science by publishing a dead end fork (Figure 1).
Authorea raises a seed round of investment.
We are very excited to announce that Authorea has recently raised its first round of funding for a total of $610k with a joint investment by ff Venture Capital and NY Angels!
ffVC is an institutional venture capital investor in seed-stage companies based in New York City. NY Angels is the largest and most active technology-focused angel investment organization on the East Coast.
This investment is important for Authorea on many levels.
First of all, we are solidifying and growing our team. We're hiring! If you are interested in making science better, you will enjoy working with us. Drop us a line.
A bigger team means that Authorea will get better faster.
We will keep working toward our mission to accelerate science, to improve dissemination and quality of research results and to promote Open Science. We look forward to making Authorea your platform of choice for scholarly writing, research collaboration, and data sharing.
We are also thrilled to announce that our brand new Board of Directors will welcome John Frankel, CEO of ff Venture Capital, and Brian Cohen, Chairman of NY Angels. Together with John and Brian, the board will also be composed of Matteo Cantiello (formerly Authorea's Scientific Advisor) and us, the two co-founders, Nathan and Alberto. We will be announcing our full team and advisory board in the next few weeks.
Happy writing!
---Nathan and Alberto
First evidence of Quantum Gravity? Ask the dust
Rise and fall of the biggest discovery of the century highlights the importance of open, collaborative science.
On 17 March 2014 BICEP2, a South Pole based experiment aimed at studying the very first moments of the universe, made a sensational announcement. They claimed to have detected for the first time the signature of an extremely rapid expansion of space that occurred right after the universe’s birth. This expansion, also called inflation, is believed to be responsible for the existence of large-scale structures like clusters of galaxies, as well as to explain why the properties of the universe appear to be the same for all observers. If confirmed, the existence of inflation would represent the first evidence of a fundamental connection between gravity (general relativity) and quantum physics.
How Can Authorea Help University Students and Professors Writing and Reviewing Papers?
Simple, mundane tasks can take huge tolls on our productivity. A growing body of research is quantitatively demonstrating the existence of willpower depletion, so don’t be a statistic. Authorea helps cut out friction associated with academic writing and editing, so you can get back to doing what you love instead of just writing about it.
Here’s the situation:
You’ve spent months (or even years) running and reproducing experiments, keeping meticulous notes, collecting and annotating data, writing code, writing grant applications, presenting your progress and, occasionally, sleeping. All for that slam-dunk publication. Which, finally, you are writing up.
But there are some problems.
From stylistic preferences and building consensus with your colleagues, to back-up paranoia, to re-re-re-formatting your article for the reach, next best, achievable, journal of last resort, Authorea has you covered.
An Authorea-tative Difference
As the recent over 200-author CERN paper demonstrates, Authorea can really kill it when it comes to collaborating, on any scale. This is particularly powerful, given the well-feared notion that communication complexity increases as the square of the number of people on a project. Regardless of your level of distribution (worldwide or just down the hall), with Authorea, everyone you care to include can view, edit, comment, commit, and even upload and review data, code, and figures.
Let’s consider that last point for a minute. No longer will you have to fumble for flash drives, attach and contextualize via email, or compile, edit, and view in separate programs. All the data and code associated with your figures is online in the upper left-hand folder for your collaborators to play with. Further, if your document is public, members from the wider Authorea community can comment, verify, and even fork it - increasing your FF and contribution to science. Pretty sweet.
Authorea, given the oft-made comparisons to GitHub and Google Docs, also helps with versioning updates and the distributed editing of your manuscript. Let’s say your PI isn’t thrilled with your phrasing or explanation in the Discussion. With Authorea, you can: lock the section while you edit it (i.e. no one is looking over your shoulder, judging); commit the update for all to see (oh, how they will marvel); get real-time feedback through additional comments and edits; and, when your PI has a change of heart, you can easily revert back to the section’s previous version (by clicking on that handy “History” clock icon).
So, Authorea provides a platform for collaborative writing and review of your manuscript, an easy and automated citation mechanism, a one-stop repository for all your figures’ data, code, and editing, and even lets you get pre-publication feedback from your peers. What’s more, Authorea will also format your manuscript for the journal of your choice - text, figures, bibliography and all - at a click of a button.
Two questions:
Why wouldn’t you use Authorea for your next collaborative publication?
What would you do with the time saved when you’d otherwise be emailing around drafts and data, sharing and modifying code, clarifying, citing, and formatting?
Let us know in the comments!
EU's Breakthrough in Clinical Trial Transparency
In a breakthrough victory for open access, the EU’s European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved a system last week that provides researchers and the public with the vast majority of data from clinical trials. While generally resistant to such developments, some pharmaceutical companies are already opening up their data to scrutiny. In the US, NIH’s clinicaltrials.gov hosts a similar database for voluntary submission of public and private clinical trial results. By January 1, 2015, however, all companies in the EU will be required by law to submit trial data for newly approved drugs. FDA is considering adopting such a policy, with safety and efficacy data-mining projects in mind.
As the analysis from ScienceInsider notes:
Published journal articles often contain the main outcomes, . . . but lack detailed data and information about study design, efficacy, and safety analysis, which might shed a different light on the results when analyzed by others; moreover, some trials aren’t published at all. The AllTrials campaign has argued that the details of every trial should be publicly available for anyone to study.
Traditional publication formats disconnected from modern needs? A move toward data-rich scientific content? Opening up the process of verification and analysis to a wider audience? It’s as if science was always meant to be open, or something.
Naturally, there are caveats to the ruling. Only identified researchers can download searchable trial results and data, while registered public users can only view results on-screen. Further, certain types of commercially relevant data may be redacted by companies, with the EMA providing an 18 month window before completed trial results are finalized and posted. Still, however, this represents a huge step forward for widespread access to and synthesis of information that could be critical for improving patient outcomes.
Long-sought by many researchers, the beneficial network effects of open trial data have been lauded in the literature, with comparisons made to successes in the open-source community \cite{Dunn_2012}. In one example, data-sharing led to rapid analysis and determination of treatment for a deadly e coli outbreak in 2011. By broadly applying standard protocols to ease the access and use of clinical trial information, researchers contend we will see huge health care improvements. Results include learning what treatments are best in which circumstances, determining contraindications faster, and increasing adoption and innovation rates in treatments.
Here’s to hoping EMA’s actions are successful, FDA approves similar measures, and science in aggregate opens up to take advantage of these synergetic network effects.
Mysterious Particle Discovered
In 1937, just one year before suddenly disappearing under mysterious circumstances, a brilliant italian physicist named Ettore Majorana predicted the existence of a very peculiar particle. Having the exciting property of being its own antiparticle (that is it simultaneosly behaves as matter and anti-matter) the elusive “Majorana particle” has been finally observed by a group of scientists at Princeton University \cite{Nadj_Perge_2014}. To achieve the important result they used a two-story-tall microscope to observe the end of a superconducting wire.
Network models to evaluate reproducibility in biomedical research _or, The Future of Science
and 2 collaborators
The traditional way to publish scientific work is to write a narrative describing the performed experiments and related conclusions. Nowadays, the pressures for funding and journal impact factor generate a vicious circle promoting, at the very least, an increase in the minimum number of relevant findings required for publication and the over-stretching of claims. As a consequence, the problem of reproducibility in science has surged to the attention of the media, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Interview: Long-time LaTeX User
Christina Laternser has a B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Economics. An experienced LaTeX user, she wrote her thesis on hyperbolic geometry using it, as well as her economics thesis. She has worked in data analytics, application development, and lectured in mathematics. She finds some time to do academic research as well.
While Christina has developed and managed global intra-company team collaboration tools over LAN, effectively a stripped-down version of Authorea, this is her first introduction to the collaborative platform for research.
Racist Polio Vaccines and Scientific Credit
Who gave summer back to children of the 50s and 60s?
Yesterday was Dr. Jonas Salk’s 100th birthday. The Google Doodle celebrating it was profiled in The Guardian, which acknowledged:
The story of Salk’s search for a vaccine isn’t one that should be told in isolation, stopping with the elimination of polio in the US. Instead, it sits within a rich tapestry of stories about scientific discovery and progress.
Except that Salk’s treatment wasn’t responsible for eradicating polio in the US. His treatment was too expensive for millions of Americans at a time when children were kept indoors during summer to prevent infection. Despite the oft-repeated Salkian quote, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”, adminstrative powers above Salk (his involvement is unclear) determined they could not legally patent the vaccine, given previous works. Still, three vaccine shots and a booster priced polio protection only within the reach of middle class Americans and above.
So infection rates dropped among demographics that could afford the Salk vaccine, while rates expanded in lower income communities, especially among under-served minority groups. This was an economic as well as access problem: pediatricians could command higher prices as there was high demand for the multi-course regimen. Dr. Albert Sabin, another polio researcher, knew that Salk’s vaccine was not the best possible solution or even sufficiently safe. His arguments for impartiality and caution were largely ignored by the council backing Salk’s vaccine (see link below), yet Sabin labored on. He developed a single orally-dosed drug that allowed low-cost, wide-scale distribution of this life-saving treatment.
As described in the aptly titled review, The Myth of Jonas Salk, Sabin’s treatment was truly responsible for ending polio in the US (and is currently the one in use to eradicate polio across the globe):
Beginning in January 1962, pediatricians in two Arizona counties ... conducted separate but similar voluntary mass immunizations using Sabin’s vaccine. “Previous programs using the Salk vaccine had failed to bring polio immunization to a satisfactory level,” they reported a year later in the Journal of the American Medical Association.... More than 700,000 people were immunized – 75 percent of the total population in both counties. The vaccine was given at the cost of 25 cents, for those who could pay. It was given to population groups that were socially, racially, and culturally diverse, on Indian reservations and military posts and in urban and rural areas. The program became a model for subsequent U.S. mass-immunization programs. By the mid-1960s, Sabin’s vaccine was the only one in use in the United States. It was the Sabin vaccine that closed the immunity gap and effectively put an end to polio in the States.
Of course aspects of Sabin’s work were built off the work of Salk - all of science is inherently iterative. But we as a community and society at large need to have systems in place to ensure credit is given where credit is due. Thanks to a half-century of good PR and first-mover advantage, Dr. Salk is heralded as the vanquisher of polio, while it was Sabin’s dogged persistence at achieving a better solution that tipped the scales (not to mention countered an economically and racially-biased course of treatment).
There is an entire subset of scientists who passed through history largely undetected, while making tremendous impacts. Female scientists have made up a disproportionate amount of this subset, routinely discouraged from research (e.g. see comments in this post). For every triumphant Salk, there is almost always a Sabin (or Rosalind Franklin, et al) who deserves equal if not more recognition. Hopefully with improved access and documentation, the scientific community can better allocate credit, resources, support, and realize improvements faster.
Share this on Facebook to extend Salk’s celebration to Sabin (and the other researchers who contributed to the polio vaccine), and to serve as a reminder of the less-than-famous scientists who are giants in their own right.
ASU and the New American University
In this week’s Nature, a special issue on the evolution of modern academic institutions, Arizona State University (ASU) President Michael Crow and his vision of the New American University are profiled. Appointed President in 2002, previously Executive Vice Provost at Columbia University, Crow began restructuring ASU. His goal: to shape it into a hub of multidisciplinary research, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
12 years into Crow’s tenure, ASU has expanded its campus, forming and constructing new research institutes like the Biodesign Institute, School of Earth and Space Exploration, and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. The University’s growth in funding and collaboration are also remarkable. From the Nature piece:
ASU’s funding numbers show that grant-givers find the cross-disciplinary approach attractive. From 2003 to 2012, the university’s federally financed research portfolio grew by 162%, vastly outpacing the average increase seen at 15 similar public institutions. ... The number of funded projects with principal investigators in two or more departments rose by 75% between 2003 and 2014.
While the article further notes that ASU’s publication rate has more than doubled, it asserts its scientific profile has hardly been raised. Citing largely unchanged proportions of publications in high-profile journals or with high numbers of citations, this analysis doesn’t account for some important factors.
Since ASU’s funding at present has more than doubled, one should expect an explosive BOOM in publications and citations over the next few years;
Collaborating, whether in the same institution or across the world is fraught with challenges, so pace may lag;
The research from ASU’s new institutes and far-reaching collaborations is inherently different (innovation is, by definition); like Crow said, “We don’t want to ask the same questions as other institutions,” so there aren’t yet large circles to cite these early works;
Building off the above point, it can take years for journal articles to accumulate even a portion of their lifetime citations (an argument against impact factor);
Even without these caveats, ASU’s progression and the essence of Crow’s New American University model presciently anticipated recent developments in the modern university. Observing ASU’s emphasis on cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship and innovation (E&I) through research, one notes similar trends at top-tier universities across the world. With job markets in flux, a rapidly changing economy, and an ever-increasing focus on science and technology, schools attract students and build connections to business through E&I hubs, an explicit goal of Crow’s vision for ASU.
Rethinking and reimagining research and education at academic institutions is critical for universities and their students to remain competitive. Best of all, science and society will both benefit. Here’s to hoping the New American University expands beyond Phoenix, Arizona.
Bill Gates on the Future Wall-Free College in Your Pocket _no books or 8am class, just learning
Bill Gates has some thoughts about education.
Specifically, how its future might look.
He recently visited Arizona, where Rio Salado College and University of Phoenix are broadening access to education.
improvements include:
Low costs (compare Rio Salado’s $84/credit-hour vs the 2011 average $250/credit-hour for in-state, public tuition);
flexibility (many classes start new sections every week);
online and mobile integration (U of Phoenix offers an app for studying and course management from anywhere, anytime).
These innovative offerings help solve practical problems for modern education. Given the 40% college dropout rate, ever-rising costs of tuition, associated increases in post-college debt, the need to stay competitive, and the desire to explore new areas of knowledge, anything that lowers friction is certainly welcome. Given that these two institutions alone serve over 350k students, you also can’t argue with demand that’s clearly there.
Authorea launches #institutions
We’re launching #Institutions today! Since the beginning of Authorea, it’s been our mission to work closely with universities, departments, research labs, and libraries to help them manage and curate scholarly content.
So, what’s new? You can now:
Browse institutions and find yours! If it’s missing, let us know and we’ll add it.
Add your affiliation(s) to your profile. Just log in and click on User Settings in your profile.
Let your librarian or PI know about #institutions at Authorea, so that they can claim and manage their institutional page.
Authorea HQ moves to Gramercy Park area, NYC.
Goodbye Soho, hello Gramercy! Today we move Authorea’s HQ to a new office in the Gramercy Park area of New York City. We’re excited to move to a bigger, brand new office (with windows!) in this “exclusive neighborhood boasting cute shops, cool taverns, and one very special members-only park” (yep, this is how Airbnb depicts Gramercy Park). Update your address book and come say hi.
Authorea’s new address is:
Authorea
120 E 23rd Street
5th Floor
New York, New York 10017
Authorea sponsors student travel grants for APS conferences
We’re very happy to announce a special Travel Grant for European FGSA and FIP members attending the American Physical Society APS March Meeting 2015, in San Antonio, Texas.
Authorea is committed to helping the advancement of scientific collaboration and this travel grant aims to foster the interexchange between young EU and US members, helping students and postdoc to integrate in the international APS community and to share their different experiences.
These travel grant will be recognized at the Student and FIP Receptions, during the March Meeting 2015.
For more information on the travel grant and application instructions please visit http://www.aps.org/units/fgsa/travel/ and http://www.aps.org/units/fip/awards/travel-grant.cfm.
Authorea Australia Tour 2015
G’day- Authorea’s Australia Tour (Au♥Au) starts next week! Our co-founders, Nate and Alberto, will be down in Oz for the Research Bazaar conference at the University of Melbourne. We’re so very excited to hang out with our friends at UniMelb and make some new friends in the Melbourne area (and beyond!).
We’re working on completing our schedule of speaking engagements. Below is a rough schedule of events/talks/demos that will take place during the tour. We will be updating it as we go along.
Authorea at SxSW 2015
Who’s going to be at SxSW this weekend? Matteo and Alberto will be there as part of an event called ffMassive. If you are going to be in Austin, TX on Sunday March 15, stop by for drinks, life size jenga, and to learn more about music, tech, and science, of course. Here’s the RSVP link: https://ffmassive2015.eventbrite.com/
We have a couple of VIP tickets left for the after party (invite-only). Interested? Just let us know at [email protected]
Joys of Pi: A test server and monitor host for the startup developer
and 2 collaborators
I work at a startup. We get things done on a budget.
This is a summary of how I got:
A new test server for my local dev machine
An extra monitor for my dev setup
Tons of fun!
And all for less than $100.
Authorea's APS Travel Grant Winners
and 1 collaborator
Today we are proud to announce the winners of our travel grant for European student attendees of the APS March meeting in San Antonio, TX.
Why did Authorea sponsor these travel grants? At Authorea, we want to build bridges between scholars, disciplines, and cultures in order to form a collaborative scholarly community at a global scale. Sometimes, face-to-face meetings are the best catalysts for sharing and creating new connections. Two of us at Authorea - Alberto and Matteo - are from Italy. They have benefited from academic careers abroad (postdocs at Harvard and University of California, Santa Barbara, respectively) also thanks to important connections they made at international conferences in the early stages of their academic career.
Our winners for the March Meeting are Alberto De La Torre and Juan Trastoy Quintela, both from Spain. We hope that the connections they made at the March Meeting will bring fruitful collaborations.
SOLVE, four days that could change the world
and 1 collaborator
Tens of thousands of innovators met in Austin, Texas last week to discuss emerging tech, science, and innovation. It was the Interactive portion of South by Southwest (SxSW). Authorea was there.
Among many great events, the MIT Media Lab presented “SOLVE”, an initiative set to bring together the most gifted researchers and innovators to identify and tackle challenges where new thinking and emerging technologies have the potential to make the world a better place. SOLVE identified four main themes: Learn, Cure, Fuel, Make.
The Uncomfortable Calculations of Publisher-Library Relations
A study published in July 2014 used the Freedom of Information Act to request access to contracts between academic publishers and 55 university and 12 consortia of libraries \cite{Bergstrom_2014}. 360 contracts were received, documenting prices and bundling of deals from 9 major publishers (including Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, ACS, and Oxford University Press).
The contracts show the result of opaque sales practices, manipulation, and varying degrees of negotiation skill: publishers can charge vastly different prices for the same products and services. Keep in mind they are selling to nonprofit institutions whose members
conduct groundbreaking and lifesaving research (often taxpayer-funded)
volunteer their time and talent to the publishers’ peer review process
pay for the submission of articles published in journals
and are now buying it all back.
Also keep in mind that top publishers have profit margins on the order 30% or more.
In the mid 1990s, with the shift from print-only to digital distribution, economic formulations changed. No longer would a research university need to subscribe to multiple copies of in-demand journals. No longer would storage space play a significant role in decisions (e.g. storage and maintenance costs for a 2500 page journal volume range from $300-1000). No longer would impact be a limiting factor for purchased titles, or as it’s now emerging, should it even be. And publishers could now offer their whole catalog of journals at one discounted “Big Deal” price. In the words of Derk Haank, then Elsevier and current Springer CEO:
But what it [electronic publishing] does do is to dramatically lower the marginal costs of allowing access.... [The cost for each new users] is virtually nil and that means that we should be more creative in the business model.... where we make a deal with the university, the consortia or the whole country, where we say for this amount we will allow all your people to use our material, unlimited, 24 hours per day. And, basically the price then depends on a rough estimate of how useful is that product for you; and we can adjust it over time. [emphasis added]
Here, “adjust it over time” means mandate an average 5-6% price increase annually. Bergstrom, et al calculate:
“A bundle whose price increased by 5.5% per year would double its price between 1999 and 2012, whereas over the same period the US consumer price index rose by 38%.” [emphasis added]
What’s more, such “creative” business models force library administrators to try to quantify abstractions like the value of information. Information, however, is context dependent. The difference of opinion on a paper’s importance could range from “meaningless” to a critical insight for unraveling a disease pathway.
At the end of the day, an all-inclusive “Big Deal” bundle may be easiest – if funds are available. When cost limits access, however, researchers may rely on e-mailed PDFs from helpful colleagues at better-equipped campuses. Another solution, when access is out of reach or publication slow (e.g. a year from initial acceptance to publication is common for some Statistics journals), is pre-print repositories like arXiv. Unfortunately, the articles aren’t peer-reviewed, a reason big publishers can charge so much.
This is also a reason we think researchers (and journals!) might want to try their own pilot study of Authorea-as-interactive-repository or submission platform.
This is the 21st Century, scientists should be writing and disseminating like it!
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