Creative Destruction by Social Network

Academia.edu bills itself as a platform for scholars to share their research. As a start-up, it still provides mostly free services to attract more users. Last year, it tried to make some money by selling recommendations to scholarly papers, but the backlash from academics was swift and harsh. That plan was shelved immediately. [Scholars Criticize Academia.edu Proposal to Charge Authors for Recommendations]

All scholarly publishers sell recommendations, albeit artfully packaged in prestige and respectability. Academia.edu's direct approach seemed downright vulgar. If they plan a radically innovative replacement for journals, they will need a subtler approach. At least, they chose the perfect target for an attempt at creative destruction: Scholarly communication is the only type of publishing not disrupted by the web, it has sky-high profit margins, it is inefficient, and it is dominated by a relatively few well-connected insiders.

If properly designed (and that is a big if), a scholarly network could reduce the cost of all aspects of scholarly communication, even without radical innovation. It could improve the delivery of services to scholars. It could increase (open) access to research. And it could do all of this while scholars retain control over their own output for as long as feasible and/or appropriate. A scholarly network could also increase the operational efficiency of participating universities, research labs, and funding agencies.

All components of such a system already exist in some form:

Personal archive. Academics are already giving away ownership of their published works to publishers. They should not repeat this historic mistake by giving social networks control over their unpublished writings, data, and scholarly correspondence. They should only participate in social networks that make it easy to pack up and leave. Switching or leaving networks should be as simple as downloading an automatically created personal archive of everything the user shared on the network. Upon death or incapacity, the personal archive and perhaps the account itself should transfer to an archival institution designated by the user.

Marketplace for research tools. Every discipline has its own best practices. Every research group has its preferred tools and information resources. All scholars have their idiosyncrasies. To accomplish this level of customization, a universal platform needs an app store, where scholars could obtain apps that provide reference libraries, digital lab notebooks, data analysis and management, data visualization, collaborative content creation, communication, etc.

Marketplace for professional services. Sometimes, others can do the work better, faster, and/or cheaper. Tasks that come to mind are reference services, editorial and publishing services, graphics, video production, prototyping, etc.

Marketplace for institutional services. All organizations manage some business processes that need to be streamlined. They can do this faster and cheaper by sharing their solutions. For example, universities might be interested to buy and/or exchange applications that track PhD theses as they move through the approval process, that automatically deposit faculty works into their institutional repositories, that manage faculty-research review processes, that assist the preparation of grant applications, and that manage the oversight of awarded research grants. Funding agencies might be interested in services to accept and manage grant applications, to manage peer review, and to track post-award research progress.

Certificates. When a journal accepts a paper, it produces an unalterable version of record. This serves as an implied certificate from the publisher. When a university awards a degree, it certifies that the student has attended the university and has completed all degree requirements. Incidentally, it also certifies the faculty status of exam-committee members. Replacing implicit with explicit certificates would enable new services, such as CVs in which every paper, every academic position, and every degree is certified by the appropriate authority.

A scholarly network like this is a specialized business-application exchange, a concept pioneered by the AppExchange of Salesforce.com. Every day, thousands of organizations replace internal business processes with more efficient applications. Over time, this creates a gradual cumulative effect: Business units shrink to their essential core. They disappear or merge with other units. Corporate structures change. Whether or not we are prepared for the consequences of these profound changes, these technology-enabled efficiencies advance unrelentingly across all industries.

These trends will, eventually, affect everyone. While touting the benefits of creative destruction in their journals, the scholarly-communication system successfully protected itself. Like PDF, the current system is a digitally replication the paper system. It ignores the flexibility of digital information, while it preserves the paper-era business processes and revenue streams of publishers, middlemen, and libraries.

Most scholars manage several personal digital libraries for their infotainment. Yet, they are restricted by the usage terms of institutional site licenses for their professional information resources. [Where the Puck won't be] When they share papers with colleagues and students, they put themselves at legal risk. Scholarly networks will not solve every problem. They will have unintended consequences. But, like various open-access projects, they are another opportunity for scholars to reclaim the initiative.

Recently, ResearchGate obtained serious start-up funding. [ResearchGate raises $52.6M for its social research network for scientists] I hope more competitors will follow. Organizations and projects like ArXiv, Figshare, Mendeley, Web of Knowledge, and Zotero have the technical expertise, user communities, and platforms on which to build. There are thousands of organizations that can contribute to marketplaces for research tools, professional services, and institutional services. There are millions of scholars eager for change.

Build it, and they will come... Or they will just use Sci-Hub anyway.

Let IR RIP

The Institutional Repository (IR) is obsolete. Its flawed foundation cannot be repaired. The IR must be phased out and replaced with viable alternatives.

Lack of enthusiasm. The number of IRs has grown because of a few motivated faculty and administrators. After twenty years of promoting IRs, there is no grassroots support. Scholars submit papers to an IR because they have to, not because they want to. Too few IR users become recruiters. There is no network effect.

Local management. At most institutions, the IR is created to support an Open Access (OA) mandate. As part of the necessary approval and consensus-building processes, various administrative and faculty committees impose local rules and exemptions. After launch, the IR is managed by an academic library accountable only to current faculty. Local concerns dominate those of the worldwide community of potential users.

Poor usability. Access-, copy-, reuse, and data-mining rights are overly restrictive or left unstated. Content consists of a mishmash of formats. The resulting federation of IRs is useless for serious research. Even the most basic queries cannot be implemented reliably. National IRs (like PubMed) and disciplinary repositories (like ArXiv) eliminate local idiosyncrasies and are far more useful. IRs were supposed to duplicate their success, while spreading the financial burden and immunizing the system against adverse political decisions. The sacrifice in usability is too high a price to pay.

Low use. Digital information improves with use. Unused, it remains stuck in obsolete formats. After extended non-use, recovering information requires a digital version of archaeology. Every user of a digital archive participates in its crowd-sourced quality control. Every access is an opportunity to discover, report, and repair problems. To succeed at its archival mission, a digital archive must be an essential research tool that all scholars need every day.

High cost. Once upon a time, the IR was a cheap experiment. Today's professionally managed IR costs far too much for its limited functionality.

Fragmented control. Over the course of their careers, most scholars are affiliated with several institutions. It is unreasonable to distribute a scholar's work according to where it was produced. At best, it is inconvenient to maintain multiple accounts. At worst, it creates long-term chaos to comply with different and conflicting policies of institutions with which one is no longer affiliated. In a cloud-computing world, scholars should manage their own personal repositories, and archives should manage the repositories of scholars no longer willing or able.

Social interaction. Research is a social endeavor. [Creating Knowledge] Let us be inspired by the titans of the network effect: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Encourage scholars to build their personal repository in a social-network context. Disciplinary repositories like ArXiv and SSRN can expand their social-network services. Social networks like Academia.edu, Mendeley, Zotero, and Figshare have the capability to implement and/or expand IR-like services.

Distorted market. Academic libraries are unlikely to spend money on services that compete with IRs. Ventures that bypass libraries must offer their services for free. In desperation, some have pursued (and dropped) controversial alternative methods of monetizing their services. [Scholars Criticize Academia.edu Proposal to Charge Authors for Recommendations]

Many academics are suspicious of any commercial interests in scholarly communication. Blaming publishers for the scholarly-journal crisis, they conveniently forget their own contribution to the dysfunction. Willing academics, with enthusiastic help from publishers, launch ever more journals.[Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke] They also pressure libraries to site license "their" journals, giving publishers a strong negotiation position. Without library-paid site licenses, academics would have flocked to alternative publishing models, and publishers would have embraced alternative subscription plans like an iTunes for scholarly papers. [Where the Puck won't be] [What if Libraries were the Problem?] Universities and/or governments must change how they fund scholarly communication to eliminate the marketplace distortions that preserve the status quo, protect publishers, and stifle innovation. In a truly open market of individual subscriptions, start-up ventures would thrive.

I believed in IRs. I advocated for IRs. After participating in the First Meeting of the Open Archives Initiative (1999, Santa Fe, New Mexico), I started a project that would evolve into Caltech CODA. [The Birth of the Open Access Movement] We encouraged, then required, electronic theses. We captured preprints and historical documents. [E-Journals: Do-It-Yourself Publishing]

I was convinced IRs would disrupt scholarly communication. I was wrong. All High Energy Physics (HEP) papers are available in ArXiv. Being a disciplinary repository, ArXiv functions like an idealized version of a federation of IRs. It changed scholarly communication for the better by speeding up dissemination and improving social interaction, but it did not disrupt. On the contrary, HEP scholars organized what amounted to an an authoritarian take-over of the HEP scholarly-journal marketplace. While ensuring open access of all HEP research, this take-over also cemented the status quo for the foreseeable future. [A Physics Experiment] 

The IR is not equivalent with Green Open Access. The IR is only one possible implementation of Green OA. With the IR at a dead end, Green OA must pivot towards alternatives that have viable paths forward: personal repositories, disciplinary repositories, social networks, and innovative combinations of all three.

*Edited 7/26/2016 to correct formatting errors.

Amazon Floods the Information Commons

Amazon is bringing cloud computing to the masses. Any individual with access to a browser now has access to almost unlimited computing power and storage. This may be the moment that marks the official beginning of the end of the desktop computer, which was already on a downward slide because of the rise of notebooks, netbooks, tablets, and smartphones.

For managers of computer labs, this technology eliminates a slew of nitty gritty management problems without good solutions. When a shared computer is idle, do you take action after 5, 10, or 15 minutes? If you wait too long, you annoy users who are waiting for their turn, and you invite unauthorized users to sneak into someone else's session. If you act too soon, you ruin the experience for the current user. Should you immediately log off an idle user or do you lock the screen for a while before logging off? Again, you balance the interests of the current user against those of the next user. Which software do you install where? Installing all software on every computer is usually too expensive. But if each computer in the lab has its own configuration, how do you communicate those differences to the users? The ultimate challenge of the shared computer is how to let students install software that they themselves are developing while keeping the computer relatively secure, usable to others, and free from pirated software.

Amazon has solved all of this and more. With cloud-based computers, there is no such thing as an idle computer, only idle screens. Shutting down a screen and turning it over to another user does not ruin a session in progress. It is more like turning over a printer. The cloud-based personal computer is configured for one user according to his or her requirements. Students and faculty can install whatever software they need, including their own research software. As to the usual suite of standard applications, cloud services like Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Apps, and Windows Azure have eliminated software installation and maintenance entirely.

The potential of cloud computing in the Information Commons is more than substituting one technology with another. Students and faculty suddenly have their own custom computing laboratory with an unlimited number of computers over which they have complete control. One can imagine projects in which cloud-based computers harvest measurements from sensors across the globe (weather-related, for example), read and analyze the news, and data mine social networks. All of this data can then be fed to high-performance servers running research software for analysis and visualization.

Currently, retail pricing for a cloud-based personal computer starts at $35 per month. This is already a very good price point, considering that it eliminates the hardware replacement cycle, software maintenance, security issues, etc. One can also add and drop computers as needed. Moreover, this is a price point established before competitors have even entered the market. 

When computing and storage become relatively inexpensive on-demand commodity services, computing labs are no longer in the business of sharing computing devices, storage, and software; they are in the business of sharing visualization devices. Currently, Information Commons provide large-screen high-resolution monitors attached to a computer. As large-scale, high-performance, big-data projects grow in popularity across many disciplines, there will be increasing demand for more advanced equipment to visualize and render the results. Today's computing labs will morph into advanced visualization labs. They will provide the capacity to use multiple large high-resolution screens. They may provide access to CAVEs (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment) and/or additive-manufacturing equipment (which includes 3-D printing). The support requirements for such equipment are radically different from those for current computer labs. CAVEs need large rooms with no windows, multiple projectors, and a sound system. Additive manufacturing may be loud and may require specialized venting systems.

For managers of Information Commons, it is not too early to start planning for this transition. They may look forward to getting rid of the nitty-gritty unsolvable problems mentioned above, but integrating these technologies into the real estate currently used for computing labs and libraries will require all of the organizational and management skills they can muster.