\label{sec:strategies}
Mirroring our identification of the six impediments to our vision that lie in the two dimensions of technology and society, we here make specific recommendations for change in these two dimensions.
\label{sec:strats-formats}
\label{sec:strats-exp}
At the foundation of any change is the infrastructure to support that change. One must no longer think of the journal article or research paper as the standard unit of currency by which knowledge is exchanged. Now it is but one among many forms. In the most generic sense, the new form of knowledge exchange centers on the research object, a container for a number of related digital objects—for example a paper with associated datasets, workflows, software packages, etc., that are all the products of a research investigation and that together encapsulate some new understanding. Publishing of research objects is not necessarily publishing as we know it today, achieved by the same mechanisms as used for traditional scholarly articles. It consists of providing free and open access to the component parts of the research object, that may or may not have been individually reviewed by others either pre- or post-publication.
Arriving at a suitable definition of research objects requires work on standards and provenance, and conformance to general principles, some of which are suggested here:
Support for multiple media types—text, images, podcasts, videos, etc.
Recognition that raw and derived data, data processing procedures, computational models, experimental protocols and workflows all need to be preserved as part of the research object, and shared publicly.
Support for access to content at varying granularities of detail.
Support for the automatic extraction of information from research objects at these varying granularities, and its integration with third-party information.
Support for uniquely identifying all elements of the research object.
Support for both human and machine access, including access by disabled humans.
Support for existing and emerging web and semantic web standards surrounding data representation and linking.
Inclusion of social media as legitimate components within the world of the scientific discourse.
The research object per se does not necessarily capture the processes by which research leads to new knowledge. There is a temporal aspect to research and the scholarly lifecycle that also needs to be recorded, either within research objects or between research objects, and that should also be capable of being reproduced.
Developing the tools to support these changes, if undertaken from scratch, would be an immense undertaking. Thus, where possible, existing tools should be adapted and integrated within the new open infrastructure. Several classes of tools that exist and could be considered as components for this infrastructure are detailed in the “Tools” section of the Force11 web site (http://force11.org).
The following are examples of technological changes associated with new forms of scholarship.1
Hypothesis/claim-based representation of the rhetorical structure of a scientific paper \cite{dewaard2009}.
Modular formats for science publishing \cite{dewaard2010}.
Developments of metadata standards and ontologies for describing publishing activities and publications, for characterizing citations between them, for identifying their structural and rhetorical components, and for describing discourse elements within the text.
Semantic publishing initiatives and other enriched forms of publication.
Change is likely to occur gradually through a series of incremental steps, most of which will not be driven by the technology. Rather, the technology should respond to the recognized requirements of scientists for improved dissemination, reproducibility, recognition, etc. These requirements need to be assessed and formalized. The very existence of Force11 is an acknowledgement of the need for changes, but these changes need to be quantified and specifications drawn up for their solution.
\label{sec:strats-inf}
As scholarship in all fields increasingly becomes undertaken online, new tools and technologies are required to support the whole scholarly lifecycle from initial hypothesis to results publication. We are already seeing:
the emergence of workflow systems;
the emergence of data repositories within which datasets have globally unique identifiers and explicit links to journal articles, which by necessity provide some form of attribution and provenance information;
the emergence of citation ontologies and corpora of open citation data;
the emergence of software repositories with good versioning support; and
the increasing use of online services for collaborative work: file exchange services such as Dropbox, collaborative note-taking environments such as EtherPad, and collaborative authoring environments such as Google Docs.
Nevertheless, these systems are acknowledged to be inadequate and cumbersome in their use. We require:
better systems to permit collaborative work by geographically distributed colleagues;
better systems to permit collaborative writing, with fail-safe versioning;
better tools for richer interactive data and metadata visualization, enabling dynamic exploration; and
easier data publication mechanisms, including better integration with data acquisition instrumentation, so that the process becomes automated.
To begin with, we want the scholarly community to be concerned with modes of archiving and sharing papers, data, workflows, models and software, and with the creation of research objects as part of their daily research routines. Other questions to explore include:
What are the features of the research lifecycle and how do they impact the contents of and relationships between the artefacts that constitute digital research objects?
How can existing tools be adapted to fit the specific workflow requirements of different scholarly domains?
How can these tools be optimally integrated with environments to read, write and edit publications, and to create and evaluate research data?
\label{sec:strats-data}
Clearly, data in 21st Century science are almost always subjected to transformation by software, that undertakes either individual transformation processes, or links these into processing workflows. A full record of the research undertaken requires preservation of these processing steps and software tools employed, in addition to the datasets upon which they acted.
Exemplars of repositories for research datasets, software and workflows include Dataverse \cite{king2007,crosas2011}, the Dryad Data Repository \cite{dryad2008,greenberg2009}, and myExperiment, a social network relating to workflows \cite{goble2007,deroure2009}.
Efforts at archiving, retrieving and citing digital research objects in standardized ways should be closely linked with open data and open-source software publication approaches, and should converge on common standards and practices. Citations to datasets and other digital research objects within publications should be treated on a par with the current treatment of bibliographic citations. Citations to these in the text should be made with a standard reference mark (in-text reference pointer) and the full reference should be given in the reference list of the publication, using a resolvable globally unique identifier (URL, DOI, HDL). Additionally, a formal semantic representation in OWL/RDF of the metadata describing these research objects, their provenance, their relationships to and citations of one another, etc., would be very useful and is now achievable. However, improved tools are required to reduce the labour of creating such metadata.
\label{sec:strats-acc}
The emergence of the open access (OA) publishing model for the traditional scientific product, the journal article, has been a major driver in the emergence of Force11. OA provides the gateway to new modes of scholarly communication, and is the cornerstone that must be promoted and extended if significant change to the scholarly publishing ecosystem is to take place. But OA per se is not enough. It must be shown to be sustainable through new business models, and must be weaved into the academic funding and reward system; neither will be easy. Here is what Force11 advocates to achieve the necessary change to this ecosystem through OA:
Advocacy for OA through interactions with all the stakeholders mentioned in this document.
Encouragement of conformance to OA licenses.
Commitment to make all one’s own scholarship as open as possible under the most liberal of those licenses.
Education of others concerning the features and nuances of OA-based scholarship
Development of new technologies that assume OA.
Recognition that OA applies not just to research articles, but also to data, software, bibliographic and citation metadata, books and other components of the scientific process, and the whole scholarly enterprise.
Recognition that OA applies just as appropriately to emergent research objects.
Recognition that OA requires sustainable business models, and commitment to work towards achieving those new business models, that are likely to focus less on the content itself and more on the provision of revenue-generating services that facilitate discovery and reuse of that content in ways that advance scholarship.
The following exemplify that change in the scholarly publishing world is already taking place and is likely to accelerate over time. It is the mandate of force to facilitate that acceleration:
The increasing number of OA journals, including some that are regarded as comparable with the most highly regarded subscription access publications.
The emergence of ORCID2 as a system for creating unique personal identifiers, and hence for author disambiguation and better tagging of all aspects of scholarship.
The creation of new tools that leverage content e.g. SciVerse3 and Utopia4 albeit neither yet in the open access/open source space.
The development of new article-level metrics and other tools for assessing scholarship.
The greater sense of awareness to be found within promotion committees concerning the value of alternative forms of scholarship.
Force11 members are stakeholders in all aspects of the scholarly enterprise and can influence it in different ways, but all start from the vision outlined above. Some specific steps we now need to take are:
Start open enterprises that foster change: e.g., new data and software journals, institutional repositories that enable straightforward content exchange.
Develop tools that highlight non-traditional forms of scholarly output such as database annotations created, blog posts written, and software developed.
Develop means to assess and highlight the quality of OA content and other non-traditional forms of scholarly output.
\label{sec:strats-bus}
Current business models for scholarly publication face significant disruption due to many factors: the growth in open access, the advent of alternative publication platforms that exploit new technologies for inexpensive communication and information exchange over the internet, a widening view of what constitutes a publishable research object (e.g. data, workflows), and the challenges of curating, linking and preserving the wider world of digital research objects. Furthermore, it is anticipated that the overall funds dedicated to scholarly communication may well become more restricted in future, at least on a per researcher basis. Both the major customers (research libraries) and brokers (currently, publishers) have an interest in being an active party in shaping the transition to new, sustainable business models, to ensure that the transition is a smooth one.
The overall market for scholarly communications is on the order of $10 billion per year. The market is not a monolithic one, and disruptions are likely to be somewhat different in different disciplines. For example, there is an important distinction between those disciplines where publications are primarily in the form of books rather than journal articles. Also, researchers are growing accustomed to relying on an increasing number of freemium services. These pose both sustainability risks and opportunities. While freemium services typically manage to recruit only a few percent of users, some of these services can be sustained by a wider marketplace.
Some of these functions face significant challenges. For example, archiving and preservation of research objects, despite its high potential cost, is unique in not directly contributing to reward for producers. For this reason, it will likely be the most difficult to sustainably fund, and may require higher public investment.
To be financially viable, new communication modes will need to demonstrate tangible value to both producers and consumers. To be sustainable, the cost recovery streams will need to be aligned to perceived value. An additional factor that should be taken into account is that there are at least three different market sectors to which new products and services may be targeted: tools for producers (aka researchers), enhanced products for consumers (researchers again), and reputation management (for individuals, institutions, and funding bodies).
In Dagstuhl, the Force11 group started to work on a more detailed business model, based on the Business Model Generation methodology \cite{osterwalder2010}. The results of this work will be made available on the Force11 web site http://force11.org
\label{sec:strats-ass}
Scholarly practices and the way that science is undertaken is changing, as are the possibilities and associated activities of scholarly communication. Yet measures of assessment and impact have not caught up with these changes. Impact is a measure of change. Since these changes can be arbitrarily removed from the immediate outcome, one cannot always easily attribute the changes solely to the action performed. Measuring impact is complex because it depends on context, on purpose, on audience. It can have different effects for different individuals. Similarly, a communication can have different degrees and even polarities of effect. For example, a research paper might be simplified and published by newspapers to make headline news with great societal impact, but be roundly criticized or even ignored by academic colleagues.
Presently, online versions of ’scholarly outputs’ have tended to replicate print forms rather than exploit the affordances and functionalities of the digital terrain. The historical limits of print space are one reason, amongst others, that traditional journal articles tend to represent truncated versions of findings. The assumption is that technology will enable more effective enhanced papers. In addition, scholarly outputs will broaden to include, for example, software tools and social media channels. Work is being undertaken (e.g. in Alt-Metrics http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/) to develop metrics which can be generated in an open and scalable way, and which will be simple to use. This has implications for policy. The challenge will then be how to get these metrics accepted by universities, funders and national decision makers.
It is accepted that metrics are still needed; however better mechanisms of measurement need to be put in place, that allow for different types of impact and influence.. A multi-dimensional measurement instrument would be useful. It needs to be customisable for specific situations and individual and it must be easy to use both for the individual academic and for the reviewer or decision-maker. What is being measured could include:
Quality (exploiting new forms of measurement mechanisms)
Influence (using new forms of alternative metrics)
Social impact (measured, for example, through development goals)
Economic impact
Contribution to education (use in lectures, reading lists etc)
Openness, making scholarly resources shareable, accessible, and re-usable
Mechanisms for measuring need to be reviewed in an age where traditional forms of peer review are also under critical scrutiny. Work being undertaken under the Alt-metrics 5 umbrella pertains here and is to be supported.
Although work has been undertaken to formalise these alternative notions of impact, none are directly applicable today. On the Force11 website, we make some concrete proposals for describing and utilising such new metrics.
Readers should also consult our online collection of links to related activities and examples at https://sites.google.com/site/futureofresearchcommunications/links/links.↩
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/↩