T. Scott

facts and opinions

(Published in Against The Grain, v.30,#5)

How good do you think you are at distinguishing between statements of fact and statements expressing opinions?

The Pew Research Center issued a report last June studying that very question.(1)  How well could a sample of Americans distinguish a series of factual statements (whether or not they believed them to be true) from a series of opinion statements (whether or not they agreed with them)?  What factors might be at play in affecting one’s ability to make those determinations correctly?

The results weren’t surprising.  They used five fact statements, five opinion statements and two “borderline” statements, drawn from current topics in the news and found that only 26% labelled all five fact statements correctly and only 36% were right with the five opinion statements.  Sizable percentages (28% and 22%) got them all wrong.

The study defined statements as being “factual” if they were capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence and “opinion” as something “that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it.”  Note that they weren’t asking if the respondents thought the factual statements were true, only if they were capable of being proved or disproved.

That so many of us can’t readily distinguish statements expressing facts from those of opinion is certainly one of the reasons our political discourse is so toxic.  The oft quoted remark from Moynihan is that you’re entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.  So what happens to discussion when most of us can’t tell the difference?

The report was in the back of my mind when I followed a thread on ACRL’s SCHOLCOMM discussion list in July.  Robin Sinn had posted expressing concern (annoyance? outrage?) at Taylor & Francis referring to their option for making an article freely available in a hybrid journal as “gold open access.”(2)  Her assumption (as clarified in a later post in the thread) had been that “gold open access” referred at the journal level, not the article level and that T&F was therefore misusing the term (presumably for nefarious purposes).  Over the next two days, most of the comments supported the notion that “gold open access” could be applied to individual articles as well as to journals, and examples were given of other such usage besides T&F’s.  Comments came from a variety of people including librarians, a T&F rep and others who’ve been deeply involved in scholarly communication discussions and debates over the years.  Sinn appeared to accept that consensus view.

Then Jean-Claude Guédon weighed in: “Gold open access (not open access as a stand-alone _expression_, but gold open access) refers to journals, and exclusively to journals. … On the other hand an open access article in a hybrid journal is simply an open access article, and that is not - repeat NOT - gold open access.”(3)  That ended the discussion.

So is Guédon stating what he believes to be a fact or is he expressing an opinion?  I’ll leave you to ponder that for a bit, but I’ll come back to it.

Consider some of the other statements that show up in scholarly communication discourse:

“…the profit margins of many academic publishers are simply not defensible…”(4)  In this case, the quote is from a comment made by Pamela Benjamin to a post on The Scholarly Kitchen, but it’s easy enough to find other versions of the sentiment.  Is it a fact statement or an opinion statement?  Keep in mind that the Pew categories don’t require fact statements to be true – at issue is whether there is sufficient objective evidence to prove or disprove them.  Opinion statements are reflections of beliefs and values.  I don’t want to ascribe to Benjamin views she may not hold, but on the face of it, you could interpret the statement as either fact or opinion.  As fact, however, it is simply untrue – that is, those margins certainly can be defended, which is all “defensible” means.  Whether one accepts those defenses becomes a matter of opinion.  Read as an opinion statement, it appears to be saying something like, “Because of the values that I hold regarding scholarly communication, I will not accept any justification offered for those profit margins.  I consider them to be antithetical to my values.”  The distinction matters because if the person making the statement believes it to be a fact, when it is actually an opinion, and the person they’re talking to treats it simply as a fact rather than addressing the values inherent in the opinion, then they’re talking past each other rather than to each other.  Indeed, that’s what happens in that particular comment thread and the discussion ends, having gone nowhere.

There’s a similar phrase that one hears often – that the increases in journal prices are “unsustainable.”  This phrase is used in two ways – it may be referring to a local situation, meaning, “In my library, given my budget, I can’t afford these price increases and I’m going to have to cancel stuff I’d rather keep.”  But here I’m interested in how it’s used globally, when the claim, in effect, is that the whole subscription-based system is going to collapse because of these “unsustainable” price increases.  This is an example of the third type of statement referred to in the Pew study – the “borderline”. 

Borderline statements may be based in objective evidence (the factual element) but have vague or predictive language that makes them hard to prove definitively (the opinion element).  This is the case with statements predicting the global unsustainability of the subscription model.  I’ve been hearing dire warnings about the unsustainability of the current system for decades.  And yet, despite budget cuts, academic libraries continue to operate; despite mergers and acquisitions, the scholarly publishing industry remains robust; and despite decades of open access activism, the subscription model remains dominant.  Does this mean the system will never implode and completely collapse? No.  But the uncertainty makes it impossible to classify the statement as purely factual.

A similar situation pertains to the debates about embargoes when posting OA copies of journal articles in repositories.  Those arguing for embargoes claim that without them publishers would be exposed to an unacceptable financial risk.  Those arguing for the elimination of embargoes claim that there is no evidence that current embargoes have resulted in significant cancellations.  This is a fact statement which, at present, appears to be true.  But it does not lead inexorably to the conclusion that elimination of embargoes will not result in significant cancellations or even that six month embargoes won’t result in significant cancellations in the future as the volume of material available under those conditions expands.  When the people making the statements believe they’re making strictly factual statements, they are once again talking past each other.

So, back to Guédon and his insistence that “gold open access” refers to journals only.  Is he making a statement of fact or expressing an opinion?  If it’s a fact, then it should be verifiable by objective evidence.  But what counts as objective evidence in determining the meanings of words?  Grammarians have endlessly debated the purpose of dictionaries – are they to describe the way that language is actually used or to proscribe the way that it ought to be used?  If it’s the latter, who gets to decide?

If anyone can claim the right to be the authority on the terminology of open access it would be Jean-Claude Guédon.  One of the original participants in the BOAI declaration, he has written voluminously and persuasively for many years.  If your inclinations are toward the proscriptive camp of grammarians, Guédon’s pronouncement may be sufficiently definitive.  Personally, however, I’ve always favored the descriptive side and if you look at how the term is actually used,  for many people “gold open access” quite comfortably describes an article where the version of record is made immediately available upon publication.  Guédon wants the usage to be less ambiguous, and in the abstract I agree with him.  But in actual practice I don’t think we’re there yet.

So I’d be inclined to label Guédon’s pronouncement borderline – possibly subject to verification by objective evidence, but thwarted by the ambiguity in what counts as objective evidence.

One of the more fascinating findings of the Pew study is that one is more inclined to judge an opinion statement incorrectly as factual if one agrees with the opinion expressed.  In other words, to use one of the previous examples, if your values lead you to the judgment that corporations should not be producing large profit margins from publishing activities, you’re more likely to incorrectly classify the opinion statement “large margins are indefensible” as a fact statement.  If Guédon’s definition comports with your own, you’re inclined to take it as fact.

The Pew study was concentrated on statements in the news and there are no doubt limits to how far one can extend its findings into the debates and discussions around scholarly communication.  But it’s a useful exercise nonetheless.  Much of the smoke and heat generated by scholcomm debates is driven by people taking their opinions as facts.  They attempt to convince others with appeals to objective evidence when careful discussion of the values we hold and the implications of those values might be more productive.  It’s easy to assume that others must share our values because they’re so evidently true that they don’t require much discussion.  Aren’t they? 

Sorting our way through the opportunities and perils of the flux of scholarly communication in the digital age is important.  We’ll do a better job of making sense of it all and making decisions that are in the best interests of society if we pay close attention to the differences among the statements that we make.  I believe that’s a fact.  I think.

Endnotes

1. Pew Research Center. “Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News.” June, 2018. http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2018/06/07161621/PJ_2018.06.18_fact-opinion_FINAL.pdf

2. Sinn, Robin. “[SCHOLCOMM] Taylor & Francis and their ‘gold OA’ definition.” [email protected]. July 12, 2018.

3. Guédon, Jean-Claude. “Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Taylor & Francis and their ‘gold OA’ definition.” [email protected]. July 14, 2018.

4. Benjamin, Pamela. “Comment on: Anderson, Kent. ‘The Core vs. the Crowd — Why Barriers to Entry May Help Restore Trust.’” The Scholarly Kitchen. July 2, 2018. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/07/02/the-core-vs-the-crowd-why-barriers-to-entry-may-help-restore-trust/#comments

 

 

Against the Grain column

Katina and the crew at Against the Grain have graciously (or recklessly?) given me leave to write a column for each issue.  The first one (April issue) is up now.

I've written a small handful of pieces for them over the years and Katina has always encouraged me to do more.  Last fall I was inching toward my official retirement date.  I knew I wanted to do more writing, touch on some topics of professional interest, some more personal.  And I need deadlines.  I thought maybe Katina would be willing to let me write regularly for ATG.  That's six deadlines a year.  As the Charleston conference approached, I considered how to pitch it to her.  I thought she'd be receptive but I didn't want to be presumptuous, or set up a situation in which it'd be awkward for her to turn me down.

I went to the Vendors' Showcase, and she was the first person I saw.  We talked a bit about how we were each handling retirement.  I said I was intending to do more writing and before I could say anything else she quickly said, "Would you like to do a column for Against the Grain?  You could write about whatever you want."

So much for me trying to figure out how to pitch it.  I'm calling the column "Epistemology."  The things that are of most interest to me these days (both within the world of scholarly communication and beyond it) often have to do with notions of what we know and why we think we know it and how we come to have the beliefs we have about what we think we know.  And that's epistemology -- the study of knowledge.

In this first piece I go back to some of the issues I wrote about previously concerning beprexit, and try to put those into a broader context.  In the June issue, I tackle blockchain and technophilia.  I haven't decided what to focus on next, but the deadline is June 25, so I'd better get on it.  I'm open to suggestions.

 

There’s Nothing Quite Like @CHSCONF

The short answer, obviously, is: Katina. 

I’m standing at the refreshments table with a colleague who’s just told me this is the first time she’s come to the Charleston Conference.  I say, “There really isn’t any other event quite like it” and she asks, “What makes it so different?”

She hasn’t seen the differences yet.  When you’re standing in the middle of that ballroom, surrounded by exhibit tables staffed by eager, smiling sales reps making their pitches, the Vendor Showcase looks much like any other exhibit hall at any other library conference.  But that’s just the first day. 

On Vendor Showcase day, the buyers and sellers may be on opposite sides of the tables, but after that wraps they’re equals.  Librarians,  publishers and the other vendors of products aimed at librarians are all full program participants.  They’re all speakers and listeners and questioners, in the conference rooms, the bars, the hotel lobbies, the receptions, the restaurants.  (Oh yes, the restaurants! It’s Charleston.)

Back in 1980, unable to afford to go to ALA, Katina Strauch, then at the College of Charleston, invited a couple dozen people to join her for a day of discussions about “Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition.” They had a good time, so they did it again the next year and a few more people came.  By the time I first went, in 2002, there were hundreds of people packed uncomfortably into the anachronistic Southern elegance of the Francis Marion hotel and the adjoining conference center.  A couple of years later, the conference center closed, so Katina and crew expanded into two other nearby hotels, sending attendees scurrying across Marion Square or up along Calhoun.  Now, with the Gaillard Center nearby, the physical crowding has been greatly relieved, even though attendance is bumping up against 2,000.  The intellectual crowding dizzies more than ever.

There’s no association or membership organization behind it.  It’s just Katina and the brilliant crew of Conference Directors and staff she’s assembled over the decades.  They’re nimble, creative, highly professional.  Beholden only to their vision of the conference they can innovate in session design, be flexible in handling themes and content.  It’s extremely well run (much of the credit for that going to Exec Director, Leah Hinds), and the range of topics covered is staggering.  The tagline is still there – Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition – but it is so much more than that.

I went that first time because Ramune suggested I propose something – she was trying to get more medical librarians to go.  I’d just written a JMLA editorial about the retraction debacle surrounding the deletion of an article from Human Immunology and the letter that had been sent to subscribers asking them to remove the article from the print copies.  I put together a presentation outlining the issues.  I was particularly critical of the policy that Elsevier had drafted after the fact to address possible similar situations in the future.  During the Q&A, Michael Mabe, then working for Elsevier, stood up and said, “I drafted that policy.”  We had a lively exchange – lively exchanges being very much a hallmark of the Charleston Conference.  We became friends and when Michael moved on to head the STM Association he opened many doors for me in the publishing world, for which I will always be grateful.  It was also at that first meeting that I met Anthony Watkinson (aka the Connector – he seems determined to make sure that every interesting person he knows meets every other interesting person he knows).  More gratitude.

The web of connections grew.  I think now of the people who’ve been so influential in my life and in my understanding of the complexity of  the world of scholarly communication; so many of them people I met at Charleston or through someone that I met at Charleston.  It’s the opportunity for making those sorts of relationships that’s a big part of what makes the Charleston Conference so different, too.

I don’t go back every year, but most years.  I’ve done some concurrent sessions, a plenary or two, hosted some panels, been interviewed for the Penthouse series.  These last couple of years, though, I haven’t wanted to be on the program.  My neurologically challenged body doesn’t handle the stress as well as it used to.  The ratio of work to fun in putting together and delivering something that I’m proud of is no longer in my favor.  So now I go to mingle with people I’ve come to know, meet new people, have my brain tickled by ideas.  It never gets old (although we do).

It comes back to Katina.  Certainly there are many people who deserve a lot of credit for making it what it’s become.  But it’s her curiosity about the field, where it’s going, how it works, and the people who comprise it, that infuses the spirit of the conference and makes it the uniquely challenging, stimulating, and energizing event that it is.  For anyone interested in the future of scholarly communication, the business of scholarly communication, and the myriad ways people are trying to shape that future, it shouldn't be missed.  There isn’t anything else quite like it.

What Comes Next

"Are you moving?"

It's a common question when I tell people I'm retiring from UAB this fall.

I explain that we moved into Lynn's dreamhouse 17 years ago, that it's stuffed with artwork and books, perched up above a pretty little lake with swans and great blue herons, that Marian and Josie live just 20 minutes away, and that for all of our state's flaws, we're very happy in Alabama.  Plus, Lynn just installed a touch-action faucet in the kitchen.  She's quite giddy about it.

So no, we're not moving.

"What are you going to do?"

That's the other obvious question.  I point out that I'm retiring from UAB, but not from the rest of my life.  I'm still on the editorial boards of several journals and I enjoy that quite a bit.  I'll be able to spend more time on OSI.  There's the steering committee for Metadata 2020, a project that I think is very important.  I'll keep pushing for open data and a more open, affordable and transparent scholarly communication ecosystem.  I'm not going to go looking for consulting gigs, but if some interesting projects came my way, I'd certainly be open to them.

I hope to do more writing, both professional and personal, starting with posting on the blog more often.  And see what else develops.

I'll gradually increase my daily exercising.  I'm very consistently doing 25-30 minutes a day of stretching and leg strengthening and it makes a tremendous difference.  I'd like to increase that to an hour.  My goal is to walk with confidence for two to three blocks using only the walking stick for support.  That won't happen soon, but there's no reason to think I can't get there eventually.  "Neuroplasticity."  My favorite word.

I'll have more time for guitar and harmonica.  I can awkwardly strum my way through Helpless and Bird On A Wire now, although I wouldn't want to do it in public.  That's another goal.

I'll pick up making dinner another night each week (I do two nights a week now) and I'll take over most of the kitchen cleanup.  I still don't have enough touch sensitivity and hand dexterity to trust myself with the good glassware, but I can handle the rest and it's a chore that Lynn really hates.

All that being said, having watched a good number of my friends retire in the past few years the one constant seems to be that the reality is different from whatever it is they thought it would be.  So I have plans -- I don't want to wake up one morning wondering, what now?  But I'm not going to hold myself too tightly to any of them.

Except that I did promise Lynn about the dishes.

 

I'm On An Anthropological Expedition

"Of the dozen cases of possible research misconduct I've looked into in the last ten years, I was able to retrieve the original data in exactly two." This from a colleague (I won't say with which university) bemoaning the state of current data management practices. When I quote this to some of the Data Wranglers here they're not at all surprised.

On the other hand, when I mentioned it to another colleague, a historian, she was rather shocked. In her field, keeping meticulous records and clear documentation of every statement of fact that goes into an article or book is standard practice.  That there's a research world that has such an apparently casual attitude towards the data is foreign to her.

But in the biomedical research world, as the hapless teddy bear researcher in the brilliant NYU Library video says, all the data you need is in the article.  You do your experiment, you extract the data you need for your article, you move on, leaving your data behind.  ("So many boxes!")  Changing that mindset is just one of the fundamental hurdles.

Each investigator looks at the world through the lens of their own practices, as if all of science and scholarship behaves the same way. I move through it like an anthropologist, trying not to let my own biases about the world color my perceptions of what the natives are doing and why.

When I embarked on this full-time gig fourteen months ago as the mysteriously titled Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies I believed I had a very good high-level understanding of the issues involved. I'd been dabbling in this space for many years, through the Open Access wars, my involvement with the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable and an increasing understanding that open access to data held far more potential for revolutionizing science than open access to journal articles. I knew that addressing the challenges at the institutional level would require bringing people together from all across the institution, that it wasn't a library problem amenable to a library solution. Indeed, it wasn't a problem localized in any unit of the university.  Given the way our research institutions are organized, there isn't a unit within the typical university that obviously has primary responsibility for figuring this out.  Most often, it's librarians who have taken the lead, but they can only touch a portion of the problem.

I still believe that I was correct. I did have a very good high-level understanding. But I did not imagine how delightfully complex it would be once I started to dig in.

I'm starting to get to know some of the #datalibs and a fascinating, brilliant and passionate tribe they certainly are.  I'm learning a lot and enjoying that tremendously.  

My perspective is a little different, though.  I remain the quasi-outsider, observing through my anthropological lens.  Since I'm no longer in the library, I'm not preoccupied with building a library service and marketing it to my research community.  In Charleston, one of the panelists in the "Making Institutional Repositories Work" session was explicit that once you have developed a solid institutional repository service, the next step is to engage with the faculty to see what problems the IR can solve.

At the monthly Data Wranglers sessions, and in the numerous conversations I have with individuals throughout the campus, I'm mostly trying to listen.  I want to understand what the problems are first.  What do investigators need in terms of services & infrastructure to comply with the data management requirements of funders and publishers?  How do we develop institutional policies that assist researchers rather than creating more administrative headaches?  How do the needs of the social scientists and historians differ from the epidemiologists and brain mappers?

If we can map that out, then we can start to identify roles.  What can the Office of Sponsored Programs take on?  How do the libraries contribute?  What do we need in terms of IT infrastructure?  How do we incorporate effective data management practices into the various graduate and post-doc training programs?  We'll probably identify the need for an institutional data repository of some sort at some point.  But we haven't gotten there yet.  I have much more field work to do.

 

 

What We Share

I was in Frankfurt in 2006, having been invited to speak at the annual meeting of the STM association. It was a heady experience. I don't remember what I talked about (I hope it was useful) but I certainly learned a lot. I came away with the understanding that the commercial publishers were already knee-deep into the reinvention of scholarly publishing and they were eager to partner with librarians in that great adventure. But they weren't going to wait for the librarians to show up.

Sadly, the librarians never did. It was still the early days of Open Access publishing. But Mabe was at great pains to point out that STM was officially agnostic on the subject. I met Hindawi, who had recently joined. I had a long conversation with Velterop, full as always with his enthusiasm for what might be achieved with some goodwill and creativity and daring. Even Erik Engstrom, then CEO of Elsevier, told me in conversation that he was not at all opposed to Open Access. He just needed to figure out how to make it work as a business.

But in the years that followed, the librarians didn't show up. Led by ARL/SPARC they manned the barricades, determined to make this a holy war between good and evil. Fueled by anger over the affordability problem, stoked with rhetoric that characterized Elsevier's profit margins as typical of the entire industry, and willfully oblivious to the economic realities of publishing, the librarians found emotional satisfaction in castigating the evil publishers, writing letters to congress and investing portions of their scant resources in institutional repositories that their faculties have little interest in supporting.

Where are we now, nearly ten years later? The commercial publishers have turned OA into the business model they were beginning to envision back in Frankfurt. Springer claims to be the largest source of OA articles in the world. Elsevier launches a new OA journal practically every week. Every major STM publisher has a PLoS One clone.  The OA partisans conspicuously have nothing to say about PLoS's revenues.   It's become a huge publisher by adopting the strategies and utilizing the talents of some of the best in the publishing industry. It's now running a surplus that bests that of most of the commercial small fry and the OA partisans can't figure out if PLoS is still one of the good guys.

The partisans retrench into the incoherence of green OA. Since they can't stomach making payments of any kind to the commercial publishers (Harnad's painful pun of "Fool's Gold") they fly the flag for green, continuing to manage a splendid feat of cognitive dissonance by ignoring the fact that green is entirely dependent on the existence of a vibrant, healthy, subscription-based publishing infrastructure -- the very system they want to eradicate.

The partisans lob their attacks on liblicense-l. The latest comes after Robert Glushko posts a message asking if we can't all recognize that despite our differences we are all still in this together. "I'm hopeful that we can work to find common areas of interest, and that we can all work together to promote those areas. At our best, we do so much good."

The critics are quick to disparage such foolish idealism.  Prosser says,  "Gosh, I wish this was true. I wish that we were all just one big happy family striving to promote scholarship. But I don’t think we are. We all have different priorities and drivers and sometimes those drivers and priorities clash."  Guédon quickly chimes in:  "Hear, hear, David! The notion that publishers/libraries/scholarly are close relatives is completely fanciful."  Later, in his long post, he seems to temper this somewhat, "Let us concentrate our fire on the few, multinational, baddies and the rogue scientific associations, and let us see how we can repatriate publishing capacity within academe."  So not all publishers are evil -- it is the multinational baddies that we must go to war with.  I'm sure this is comforting to the struggling commercial and society publishers trying to avoid being caught in the crossfire.

At UKSG 2013 I gave the closing plenary, arguing that publishers and librarians share the same overarching  commitment to advancing scholarship through the distribution of new knowledge.  It's our view of the role of the market that puts us at odds.  Librarians see market forces as the impediment to distributing knowledge.  Commercial publishers see market forces as the mechanism for distributing knowledge.  This fundamental disconnect will continue to make our business relationships more difficult than they need be. And librarians are at a particular disadvantage because of our unwillingness to learn to deal realistically with the economics of publishing. 

But surely there can be more to the relationship than that.  The publishers themselves are fiercely competitive with each other, but still managed to get together to create CrossRef, which has done more to facilitate efficient movement through the scholarly literature than anything that librarians have put together.

I still believe that the best way forward is for librarians, publishers of all stripes, researchers, academics and members of the public to engage and argue and work together to build a scholarly ecosystem that works for the public good. Something that I believe we all want. The people who work in those companies that the partisans castigate as "the baddies" (and worse) are, by and large, good people who are committed to doing a good job and advancing scholarship.  They also want their organizations to be successful.  A sentiment that I believe is shared by every librarian I know.

There are some positive signs. While I'm still not seeing as much positive energy from the library community as I would like, the Library Publishing Coalition is doing very good work.   I'm still optimistic that SHARE can achieve some useful things, particularly as it works more closely with CHORUS. The deal that CHORUS just signed with ORCID is very positive and should give librarians something to get behind.

Most promising of all perhaps, is the energy I saw at the Society for Scholarly Publishing meeting in Arlington in May. SSP, more than any other association, has made a major commitment to bringing publishers and librarians together. They have just elected a librarian as president. Rick Anderson generates a lot of skepticism among librarians but he is librarian through and through.

The way forward will continue to be difficult.  But if librarians are going to influence that future they're going to have to show up and find ways to work with the people in publishing.  Writing them off with the kind of demeaning and insulting rhetoric that characterizes so much of what the partisans write doesn't advance anything but the would-be revolutionaries' sense of self-satisfaction.  A dose of humility and a willingness to listen would serve the cause much better.

 

Data Wranglers in the Edge of Chaos

I love these lines from Rex Sanders:

If the data you need still exists;

If you found the data you need;

If you understand the data you found;

If you trust the data you understand;

If you can use the data you trust;

Someone did a good job of data management.

It encapsulates the goal as well as anything I've seen.

I used it to lead into the first of what I intend to be more or less monthly informal discussion sessions with the folks I'm somewhat tongue-in-cheek referring to as Data Wranglers.  We gathered in the Café at the Edge of Chaos (conveniently just a few steps from my office).   I scheduled it for 4:00 with beer in the fridge and wine on the counter, gave a five minute intro to some of the issues (essentially, what does the institution need to do to facilitate good data management) and opened it up for discussion.  These folks are not shy.

Included among the dozen who came were an Institute of Medicine member who is a staunch OA advocate and leads several biostatistics groups, the PI of a very large multi-institutional longitudinal study of stroke risk factors, a computer scientist who runs a multidisciplinary team engaged in brain mapping, the director of the clinical data warehouse, an expert in decision support systems, and a woman working with NASA to link satellite, EPA and public health data.  The others were equally diverse and distinguished.  A fascinating group, all of whom have a keen interest in how we manage research data.

We touched on a number of key themes:

• Concerns about data sharing contrasted with the value of data sharing
• The limitations of metadata in supplying sufficient context for data re-use
• The dangers of one-size-fits all policies
• The need to provide good information support to investigators in response to imminent federal funder requirements for open data
• Information sharing vs data sharing
• Role of commercial interests

I have an ever expanding list of (currently about 40) people from across the campus that I'm inviting to these sessions.  My overarching goal is to build a community of interest, make connections among people who have similar concerns but may not know each other, and use these discussions to drive priorities and strategy.  It's a Wicked Problem, which is what the Edge of Chaos is all about.

After 15 years of working on these issues around the demands of my day job as LHL director, for the past nine months or so I've been able to dig in full time.  It's become clearer than ever that it requires strong collaborative efforts that cross institutional boundaries.  That is very tough to do, given the way that research institutions are organized and the siloed culture of those institutions.

In most places, it's the librarians that have taken the lead, usually in developing services around DMP requirements and, increasingly, tracking the new federal funder requirements for public access to publications and data.  But this is much more than a library problem.

I have been quite struck by how much my perspective has been shifted by the fact that I am doing this out of the Provost's Office rather than out of the library.  My focus is on engaging intensively with researchers across disciplines, the folks in IT and OSP and compliance, and using a very organic approach to surface issues and needs.  Out of that, we'll try to identify the things that the various components of the university can do to help us all do a better job managing research data.  My monthly Data Wranglers discussions are a key component of that approach.

I've come to appreciate that the challenges in achieving Rex Sanders' vision across the entire institution are practically insurmountable.  I've always had a deep empathy for Don Quixote's battle with the windmills.  That must be why I'm having such a good time.

 

 

Conversation in Charleston: Public Access and Data

"Promote ORCID."

That was Greg's "if you take just one thing from this session" recommendation.  Howard agreed, but added, "...equally promote having your researchers submit their funder information when submitting manuscripts for journal publication.  Having the Researcher ID and Funder ID together married up to the article DOI is a powerful combination."

On the other hand, just having Howard & Greg chatting together on the same stage was a pretty powerful combination.   When SHARE & CHORUS were first launched, just a few months after the Holdren memo was released, many observers saw them as competitive.  In this corner, the publishing lobby making a policy end run to try to maintain their market dominance; and in this corner the combined might of the research libraries and universities seeking to leverage their investments in institutional repositories into some greater relevance.  Which of these mutually exclusive solutions would the federal funding agencies settle on? (Or would PMC simply vacuum everything up into an expansive PubScience Central)?

Fortunately, it didn't take too long for the developers to see where the projects overlapped and where there were advantages to be gained for both projects by sharing expertise and perspectives.  By the time I had lunch with several of my Roundtable colleagues at the AAAS meeting last February those conversations had gotten to the point where a joint appearance at Charleston was starting to look like a real possibility.  I immediately thought of Greg as a potential participant.  He's a Charleston regular and has been working with SHARE as a consultant.  Turns out that he had been having discussions with Judy Ruttenberg about a similar panel proposal and when the Charleston directors got wind of all this, they put us together.

Bringing Howard in was a natural given his role with CHOR., and I wanted to include John Vaughn, whose experiences with handling scholarly commnications issues for the AAU go back many years, and whose roles in chairing the Roundtable and in helping to develop the SHARE concept have amply demonstrated his commitment to including the views of all stakeholders in working through these very complicated issues.

The concept that Greg & Judy were developing was broader than just SHARE & CHORUS, however, and when the three of us spoke by phone over the summer we agreed on the necessity of bringing in a data person.  We were very fortunate that Laurie Goodman, editor-in-chief of Gigascience, was able to join us.

I've done several sessions like this over the years -- "facilitated conversation".  No presentations.  Some informal agreement among the participants about the likely themes.  I prepare half a dozen or so questions ahead of time, but once we get to the event, I rarely use more than two.  With the right people, the conversation flows naturally and takes its own course.  My job is just to keep it moving.

With this group, my task was extremely easy and the 45 minutes went by in a flash.  Of course we could have gone on much longer, but I'm happy with the range of topics that we were at least able to touch on.  (The session was recorded, so there will be a link on the Charleston website at some point). 

One of the most striking moments was when Greg asked how many in the audience were involved in managing institutional repositories.  Half the people raised a hand.  Then he said, "Keep your hands up. Now how many of you are successful in getting your authors to submit directly to your IR?" Only 2 hands were left up and one of the two was wavering in uncertainty.

Reshaping the scholarly communication eco-system is a massive job.  As John said, developing achievable policy will require adult deliberations and negotiations among all the key players – universities, libraries, publishers, and government.  It is also clear that a focused effort in data access and interpretation, management, and preservation will become increasingly important, and is one of the areas that currently is both most volatile and most challenging.

So in addition to promoting ORCID, noting funding sources, sharing best practices for effective IR management, and a whole host of other things that came up during the session, John suggests getting one of the nifty yellow Data t-shirts like the one Laurie wore.  Cafe Press has some nice options.

 

The New Job

"Effective September 8, I'll be Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies reporting to the office of the Provost."  I've started sending this announcement around to the discussion lists, alerting the far-flung professional network to my change in circumstance.

There's been a nice assortment of congratulations and well-wishes.  But what has surprised me have been the comments from people who assume that this means they won't see me at the usual library conferences anymore.  What?  I'm still a medical librarian.  I'm still a member of MLA & SCMLA & MCMLA & ALHeLA.  I won't be representing UAB at the AAHSL meetings anymore, it's true, but I'll continue to go to the other conferences.  And given the increasing importance of data curation at research institutions I expect to be more involved with the work of some of my librarian colleagues rather than less.

Lynn reminds me that she went through a similar thing 25 years ago when she left UAB to work for EBSCO.  She had to work very hard to get people to understand that she was no less of a librarian just because she was no longer working in a traditional library job.  I guess I'll have to do the same thing.

John Meador, most recently Dean of Libraries at SUNY-Binghamton, picked up the reins as UAB Dean of Libraries August 5.  The challenge he has accepted is to merge the two existing library organizations -- Lister Hill and Mervyn H. Sterne -- into a single organization serving the entire university community.  Unlike some recent reorganizations (UNC & Florida come to mind), UAB's roots as a primarily biomedical research institution offers some unique opportunities.  The two libraries are similar in size of staff and budget, are located just a few blocks from each other on a compact urban campus, and serve an increasingly multidisciplinary institution.  So while services will continue to be delivered from both buildings, we anticipate that, over time, a single, seamless organization will be formed to provide those services.

It's a bit of a conceptual leap because even though most of the important work that librarians do now takes place outside of the building, we still think of the library organization and the library building as occupying the same space.  As I was trying to explain the goals of the merger to a faculty member he said, "But the biomedical literature will still be based at Lister Hill, won't it?"  I had to tell him, gently, "Actually, since we spend less than 1% of our content budget on print, that hasn't been the case for five years now."  The reference librarians do far more of their work by chat, email, phone, webinar, office hours in classroom buildings, or meetings & workshops around campus than they do in person in the building.  The building is still very important, of course, but basing the organization on the physical limitations of the building is an anachronism.

One consequence of the merger is that the two Director positions go away.  The Director, Lister Hill and Director, Mervyn Sterne functioned as deans, although we didn't have that title.  But we met as part of the Deans Council and had the same level of budgetary and personnel authority as the deans.  Now that there is a single individual with the title, as well as the authority, of Dean, those two director positions are superfluous.

So what has opened up for me turns out to be quite marvelous.  Every research institution in the country is trying to figure out how to effectively manage research data.  What services should the institution provide?  How do you effectively manage security?  How do you establish policies and monitor compliance with the full range of increasingly complex federal requirements?  How do you make data available for reuse in clean and well-structured contextualized environments?

A number of institutions have made some headway in sorting this out, but part of the challenge is that there isn't really a single entity within the modern research university that is the logical home for the full range of issues that need to be addressed and coordinated.  It requires true collaboration among the libraries, IT, the research office and the various pockets of excellence and expertise that exist across the campus -- often unknown to each other.

My task, for the next several months, will be to map what exists at UAB, to figure out who is doing what, to identify where there are significant gaps, and then to work with all of the various players to help develop strategies for pulling all of the pieces together into a coordinated whole.  From this vantage point it looks ridiculously complex.  

I plan to have a lot of fun with it.

 

 

What are librarians' views of Open Access issues?

I've cooked up a little survey that you can get to here.

Later this month I’ll be speaking at the AAAS meeting on this topic.  Although I know what the positions of our library organizations are, and what some individual librarians might think, I’ve never felt that I had a good grasp of what librarians in general think.  I suspect the range of opinion is pretty wide.  So I’ve come up with a list 15 statements that people can indicate their level of agreement with.  They're the sort of statements one reads and hears in presentations, blogs and discussion lists.  In some cases they may be too broad or simplistic for simple agreement or disagreement so I’ve included a comment block that people can use to amplify their answers or explain why they can’t agree or disagree with the statement as written.

I don’t expect to draw any general conclusions from this, but I hope that it will be useful in illustrating some of the breadth of opinion that exists in the library community.  I'll post a summary of the results here.

The survey shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete – although you can certainly take longer, depending on how much you choose to comment.

And, of course, if there are other things you think I should be telling the AAAS audience about what librarians think, I'd love to hear about it.