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Ed Pentz - Miles Conrad Lecture 2024-4K
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Ed Pentz - Miles Conrad Lecture 2024-4K
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Segment:0 .
And the last thing for this program is to award the Miles Conrad award. We've already announced Ed Pentz as this 2024 recipient of the Miles Conrad award. I'll give you a little background. Many of you might not be familiar with Miles Conrad, so I'll provide a little bit of context. In the 1950s, Miles Conrad was director of biological abstracts.
Now, biosis reviews part of Clarivate. In 1957, Conrad organized a meeting of the 14 A&E services at the time to discuss the implications of new government investments in science that were resulting from the Soviet launch of the Sputnik spacecraft in the Soviet Union. And this led to the formation of NFAIS in 1958. And unfortunately, Conrad passed away a few years later at the age of 53 in 1964.
Following his death, the NISO and the interface board of directors established an annual lecture series named in his honor, which will be a central feature of the annual conference. And since NISO and interface merged in 2019, we're continuing this tradition. I think it's super important that we recognize leaders in the information space. Some previous recipients over the years have been CEOs of major organizations in our community, leaders of national libraries.
It has been an opportunity for us to recognize true leadership in our space. And so I didn't want to have this up for too long propped up there. This is award reads the NISO Board of directors presents the 2024 Miles Conrad award to Edward Pentz for his lifetime achievements in the information community. And on behalf of the Board of directors, I'm so pleased to present this award to Ed, I wrote in the press release that announced Ed's.
Recognition here that it's difficult to overstate his impact in scholarly communications and infrastructure, not only through his work at crossref, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with, but also his leadership and involvement in so many other initiatives in our community. Ed has been a tremendous supporter and advocator for identifiers, for the quality of metadata in our community, for interoperability generally.
He's been he's served as a leader at organizations as well as getting down deep into the weeds in terms of what a standard should say and how it should be identified and how it should be managed. His collaborative style has grown and shaped a leading infrastructure organization over his the entire existence of Crossref for the past 25 years. So on behalf of the Board of directors, I'm so pleased to congratulate and Thank Ed for all of your service to the information community and to introduce Ed, I'd like to bring to the stage Robin Dunford, who is at advanced wireless solutions to the stage to introduce Ed.
Thanks, Tom. Yeah I'm grateful to NISO for this opportunity to say a few words on behalf of our sponsors of this awards lunch and the Miles Conrad lecture. By way of introduction to a few of us are blessed with the vision and the drive and insight to shape the entire landscape in which we work.
And we've recently lost one of those people in Bruce Rosenblum. I think a lot of you will know Bruce as a colleague and a friend over the years. He was a great supporter of the work of niso and a former niso fellow and a towering influence on the world of scholarly information. I was fortunate to work with Bruce and Ainara for 10 years. And one thing in this, in this world of standards that rubbed off on me from Bruce was the standard where it's high.
So I've done that his honor today. I'm sure Bruce would be delighted to know that this award goes to another of those people who has been instrumental in establishing a world of information infrastructure that we all benefit from today. Bruce, of course, would have had a timely anecdote relating to add, and I was very fortunate this morning that it happened to let slip that he was a little concerned he wouldn't be allowed in today because he forgot to register his resume.
As Todd has said, a roll call of significant infrastructure initiatives over the last 20 years. In many cases, such as crossref, albeit raw, he's been there from the start, as it was as academic press when he launched their first online journal 30 years ago. In each of these roles, as championed the need for openness, interoperability and consensus building considerations that have been fundamental to the success of many of these pillars of today's information infrastructure.
And he has done so by making much more use of the carrot than the stick. So I think it's therefore entirely appropriate that Ed's talk today will chart his journey as a builder of open scholarly infrastructure, and I'm delighted to introduce him to the stage. Thank you.
Well, Thank Thank you very much. That's a great honor. And Thank you to the board for the award and the recognition and Thank you for the great introduction. And yeah, it's looking back at the previous recipients of the award. It is it is really humbling. So I hope I can do it justice today. And just talking back, talking about looking back over my career and how Crossref and some of these other initiatives and developed and yeah, to talk about that journey of collaboration and diplomacy.
So I've spent most of my career working at crossref, but I've also worked on many other collaborative initiatives. And so it is really nice to get this award in the context of NFAIS and NISO and Miles Conrad. Legacy, which was about bringing together different organizations and stakeholders to collaborate. And the founding of NFAIS was, as Todd noted, was around an inflection point.
Right things had changed with the launch of Sputnik and the investment in the US space program, and I'm going to be talking about inflection points today and how collaborative efforts and diplomacy are critical to taking advantage of those inflection points. I've had the privilege of working with and for a great people and everything I've worked on has been collaborative. So and it has involved many people, some of them, many of them in the room today.
But so I'm not claiming individual credit for anything that I'm going to talk about. So talk about today. I did want to note that since the award was started in 1968, I think about 56 people have received it. 44 men, including me and 13 women. So there's a little bit of an imbalance there. In the last 10 years or so, since 2013, it has been a lot better.
Six women and five men. But I do just want to note that the issue of privilege and, you know, as a straight white man, that's a privilege I've had and it has benefited my career. The other thing I wanted to note is just to say Thank you to my wife, who when we had kids, she decided to take a career break and we decided together to do that.
And so that enabled me actually in the early days of crossref, to really focus and to travel a lot. And you know, that that's made a big difference. I just wanted to say Thank you to her. And that was another privilege to be able to be in that position. So just noting that. But you know, another sorry.
So I chose the title for my talk today because I'm most proud of having helped launch, run and build critical, open, scholarly infrastructure. And all of these things have involved extensive collaboration and diplomacy, as well as patience and focus. So my professional journey has been from working at a big commercial subscription based publisher to a nonprofit open organization, and that's sort of a crossroads journey as well, because it started off solving a narrow, narrow problem with limited metadata, and it's grown into providing infrastructure based on open metadata, with over 20,000 members from 160 countries around the globe.
So last year's lecture, the miles Conrad lecture by Dr. noble on decolonizing standards was really inspiring. So a couple of things that resonated with me were her points about rethinking who gets to control knowledge and information, and that during the Cold War and the National Science Foundation's early years, the approach was to keep knowledge away from scientists in nations of color.
So I think we want to keep that in mind. And I think open scholarly infrastructure really has a role to play in addressing some of those issues that she raised. Also in 2021, recipient Heather Joseph highlighted the importance of open knowledge and open access to knowledge, citing article 27 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancements and its benefits.
She also highlighted the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. They're an action plan through 2030 for ensuring a better future for all citizens of the world. And scholarly publishers are signing up to the stem Association's SDG publisher compact this explicitly so they explicitly tie their publishing activities to helping achieve the SDGs. And so I just wanted to note those things because I think that the foundational, open, scholarly infrastructure that I'm going to be talking about that supports open research is vitally important to achieving these larger goals.
So there really are moral imperatives and critical to advancing human knowledge. So and like Heather Joseph noted, I didn't start my career thinking about these larger goals, but I've been on a journey to get to a point where I now see these as really important and really been lucky to be able to contribute to advancing them. So looking back at the organizations and projects I've been involved with, there are some important themes to solve collective problems.
It takes collaboration and diplomacy, bringing together different stakeholders, balancing out different concerns and building trust and reaching consensus. This does take patience and focus. The gestation period can be quite long and it takes lots of discussions and meetings. I think this is true in the standards world as well. The results aren't always perfect, but if you get some things right at the beginning, then things can evolve over time.
I think also being a non-profit has been essential for many of these initiatives and projects. But related to this is sustainability because of course, being able to generate mission appropriate income and having surplus for investing back into new projects and for weathering unexpected events and things like that is also really, really important. So I'm going to be touching on some initiatives and talking about some of these inflection points.
And when things have catalyzed action. So I've been involved in scholarly publishing for about 30, 32 years, and February 1st was my 24th anniversary. And I was lucky at the beginning of my career because I got involved in publishing just around the time of a big inflection point. And that was the arrival of the world wide web and the rapid expansion of electronic publishing, particularly online publishing on the web.
Although I did have a little detour into putting encyclopedias onto cd-roms that didn't last very long. But you can see here, this is the proposal from Tim berners-lee for a distributed hypertext system, which was the world wide web, and that was 1990, got going. And then really took off with the launch of the Mosaic browser and then the Netscape browser.
But I had an editorial role at the time working on some journals at academic press, and we had a project to get the tables of contents listed on bubble, the bulletin board for libraries. It was a gopher service. If anybody here remembers gopher, if you don't look it up on Wikipedia. But this got me interested in online things, and I started to read Wired magazine, which was launched in 1993.
And one day at my desk at lunch, I was reading wired magazine and Chris Gibson, who was the senior person in production at the time, saw me reading it and stopped for a chat. And then not long after that, he offered me a job as an electronic publishing assistant in the brand new electronic publishing department. So that was a chance. The thing that changed my career really, because being involved in electronic publishing in the mid 90s, there was a lot of experiments.
Nobody knew anything. This was this was all new. But one of the key benefits of, well, one of the main first things was getting journals online. And then one of the things that people wanted to do after getting the journals online in HTML was to link the references because that was a huge benefit to the readers and the researchers to be able to follow, follow the references.
So publishers started to do this, but every publisher had their own domain names and URL naming schemes. They changed often, and so it wasn't a scalable solution. But publishers were signing bilateral linking agreements with each other. I mean, these were actual legal agreements. So thinking back on it now, it's kind of crazy. But the it just wasn't scalable.
Obviously, if you have hundreds and thousands of journals and hundreds of thousands of publishers. So this was a problem that could only be solved through collective action and no one publisher could solve it on their own. So working through the Association of American publishers, their enabling technologies committee, there was a small group of publishers who collaborated on the prototype system.
And using digital object identifiers and metadata in XML. And this was originally called the DOI-X. And it created a prototype proof of concept system that was announced at the STM meeting at the 1999 Frankfurt book fair, and it was announced by Howard Ratner, who's here, who's here today and was a previous miles Conrad recipient.
But you can see here, there was an article in d-lib magazine, which is nicely archived but no longer extant. And you can see again, there were many, many people involved. There's also Chris shillam, who's also here today. So so this was born out of that initial activity of that inflection point of having this new platform, new platform to do this.
But it wasn't just a technical problem. So it needed ongoing management, it needed trust. There needed to be rules of the road, reciprocity, sustainability and governance. And so Crossref was set up as an organization soon after the prototype got out there. So just some of the lessons learned from that time, focusing on a particular problem and using the right technology to solve it, not the other way around.
It was really important. We didn't start out to assign persistent, persistent identifiers or collect of metadata, but that was a way to solve the issue. Collaboration is essential. Developing prototypes and proofs of concept. Building trust by agreeing principles and getting the governance right was critical. Also, a sustainability model and being prepared to change that.
And then being able to compromise within the framework of the solution. The principles that we were trying to achieve. But I do want to note this is interesting to look back and think about that. Another aspect that helps with process founding was fear. Now the fear was prompted by something he had heard Joseph also mentioned in her talk. In 1999, NIH director Harold Varmus released the biomed proposal, and this was a proposal to have a central NIH run, web based electronic archive for full text articles as well as preprints was very, very visionary and it would be freely available online.
There was also in the proposal talks of having editorial boards as the concept of overlay journals, right? That could actually be run on top of this as well. So this, you know, upset some of the big society and commercial publishers, but also researchers had issues with it as well, worrying about government interference and editorial independence and those types of issues.
But in 2000, the project was launched and became PubMed central. We were hearing about that before and it's been very successful 9.5 million, I think getting up to 10 million full text articles and a great discovery system. But it wasn't it didn't turn into what the original proposal was, but that the e biomed proposal sort of pushed some of the publishers to say, we better get we better get working together so we can improve.
Online journals and make them easier to use. And that did help lead to the creation of Crossref. And luckily, Crossref was established as a nonprofit with one member, one vote and with a broad mission. This is from our articles of incorporation. The purpose of the organization here and you can see that it doesn't mention identifiers, it doesn't mention dois, it doesn't mention publishers. So this actually gave a really good foundation for Crossref to evolve and go beyond what it was originally set up to do, because, you know, it's really given us room to expand.
But because at the start, Crossref was entirely closed metadata, the metadata was not openly available. It was only available to members to do their reference linking. Some publishers didn't want to give us all author names. Some publishers didn't give us article titles at the time, so that seems a bit strange now, but that's the way it was. But that was a point of compromise, right?
If we had insisted and mandated a Fuller set of metadata at the time, it would have really harmed uptake. So it it's a way to that was one of the points of compromise. And over the years, we've tried to go beyond that. So another critical juncture was having to change the sustainability model. We had a fee at the time where you would pay $0.10 for each Doi the Crossref returned, send in a list of references, references would match and there was a $0.10 charge.
So it was a charge. And it was making it very expensive to do what we were trying to get everybody to do, which was link their references. And so there was a 8 to 7 vote, the Crossref board to drop the fee. There was one vote in it. And if it had gone the other way, I think I could have really damaged the organization.
But of course it was presented at the time. As you know, we made this enlightened strategic decision. But, you know, it wasn't maybe quite like that behind the scenes, but I did also then just want to touch on ORCID as well. Crossref started leading discussions of author IDs in 2007 February 2007, but it became apparent that Crossref was not the right place to develop this. Different stakeholders need to be involved funders, universities, research institutions.
So the discussions came out of Crossref. Although we continue to be closely, closely involved. Orchid was incorporated in 2010 and then launched in 2012. And at the time when it moved out of crossref, Howard Ratner again and David Calvo played a leading role in getting that going. But when orchid launched at the end of 2012, so you can see that gestation period, you know, 2007. Five years later, and so often a number of years before it got to work on sustainability.
But now it's an essential part of the scholarly infrastructure. And an important thing about orchid was the before doing anything else, almost anything else, the set of principles that are still follows today was established very, very early on. I just want to note on the step to open metadata Crossref finally got to after 14 years had got to an open ended data available via its API in 20 2014.
More recently, a more recent development was roar the organization registry. So taking the lessons from Crossref and orchid, we started off again focusing on the problem to solve, keeping the reef, keeping the use case very, very focused. So content was being identified through crossref, datacite and other registration agencies. Orchid was covering researchers and the missing leg of the stool, as we refer to it at the time was organization identifiers.
But we wanted to keep the use case focused on affiliations and identifying affiliations for citations. And that meant not going down to a fundamental level in a lot of detail. And so there were a lot of discussions around that at the time. And so we started discussions in 2016, 2017, and then roar finally got launched in 2019 and it just had its fifth, fifth anniversary.
And so that's been really great to see how that's been developed as an open and community driven solution. So a key aspect though, of roar was that we decided not to create another new organization. People have got organizational fatigue and it wasn't scalable to create new organizations for every new identifier. So roar is jointly managed by crossref, datacite and the California.
Digital library. And with a wide community though supporting it. And now more and more integrations coming along. But a big turning point for Crossref and I think for me as well in running across breakfast that in November 2020, the Crossref board adopted the principles of open scholarly infrastructure. So this brought together a lot of things that I was talking about lessons learned from orchid development and other initiatives.
But when that happened in November. 20th November 2020, and we did a self-assessment against the principles and the detailing of how we met them, how we did it, and how we would go about meeting them in the future. So the principles were developed by Jennifer Lynn, Cameron neylon and Jeffrey bilder, and it distilled the lessons from these other organizations. And today has been adopted by 15 organizations, including Crossref.
And they do also do self assessments against the principles. And I think it's a really good outline of, of running open scholarly infrastructure. So there are 16 principles for the best practice for running the organization, for running these initiatives and organizations. So it's their principles. It's not really a detailed checklist, but there's not an organization associated with it.
So it's organizations who voluntarily decided to adopt these. And it's a way of building trust with their respective communities, but also a way of being held accountable to following these principles. So so that was really important. And we hope that more organizations adopt these in some practical ways. Crossref has updated its governance.
There's information on our website about that. But also, I think importantly, really inspired by the principles Crossref in 2022, open to all references. That's the last sort of holdout of the metadata and Crossref wasn't fully open. So that's now all fully open. And in 2023 we acquired an open the Retraction Watch metadata. So getting to that stage where more and more open metadata is a really, really positive development.
So the vision that we have. So looking forward a little bit now, we want a rich and reusable open network of relationships, connecting research organizations, people, things and actions, a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever for the benefit of society. So that's the vision we haven't shared with some other organizations. But we also refer to this as the research nexus.
So you can see here the whole sort of scholarly research publishing funding workflow here. And we want to try to bring together the disparate pieces of the scholarly record, have relationships expressed properly and allowing. And this is a real basis for evidence, provenance and persistence. And so at the moment, we think about roughly it's just a guess really.
But about 60% of this is possible. The rest is aspirational and I'll talk about that in a little bit. But this is also important is the integrity of the scholarly record as well. Right? so metadata can provide trust signals. And so we want to keep the barriers low to membership and participation and have an inclusive, scholarly, scholarly record.
So looking forward, we're still working towards the Crossref vision. There are too many gaps. So we need more integrations, we need more collaboration. But we're working on grants, better use of raw ids, abstracts, corrections and retractions, and having a better alerting systems around corrections and retractions. And all of this is we need to make things easier for researchers.
So they don't have to re-enter information in again and again. So I've been I live in Oxford and often I'm know neighbors and people I've run into who are researchers. And I was just talking to a researcher on Friday before coming here and he was complaining about having to enter stuff into research fish, the UK system, and he was having to rekey stuff and all the pieces are there now with, with the orchid and and metadata and things.
I'm just going to talk about all the pieces that are there or that should be largely automated and they should just need to check it off. So still want people to verify things. So, so we still have a ways to go to achieve that. And so just putting out a reminder for any publishers here that this was something in nature when they did an editorial after Crossref opened, the references calling for depositing all relevant metadata in Crossref becoming the norm in scholarly publishing, we have over 150 million content records in crossref, so we've got a lot of content.
We need we need to do more. Key area we want to work on is expanding the scholarly record. So a wider range of research objects and more relationships, more multilingual things that was mentioned earlier today, more global lowering barriers to participation the developed world doesn't have all the answers. We we want to capture better how the scholarly record, how the scholarly record is, is changing. And a big area here is research integrity.
So we have major challenges just listing of a few of them here. Collaborative action is key to solving these. A number of organizations are working on these things. The committee on publication ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals United act recently launched, and that's a group looking at addressing the paper mill problem. We see the niso correction and retraction work pub peer is important as well as last post-publication peer review and researchers actually.
Posts about problems that they see in the literature. And a worry I have is, though, that publishers are having to put huge amounts of additional resources into research integrity. And they should, right? That's their job. But it makes it hard also to say, well, you also need to do integrate with raw. You also need to do all these extra things around what we're asking publishers to do in terms of metadata.
So so there is some contention there in terms of resources because resources are limited. So that's something we'll have to deal with over the next few years. But just to say, the other thing is the rise of science sleuth, I think is something to keep an eye on. So there are a lot of researchers now who are doing investigations, who spend a lot of articles about this, right?
Finding image duplication problems with data. And there's a lot of articles written about this. And I think it's really interesting to keep an eye on this because, you know, hundreds of researchers now doing this. I think it's almost becoming I think it's going to grow into a new discipline, right? A a new self-titled scientific discipline. And there may be some more formality coming around this.
So that's, I think, something to keep an eye on. Just to note, we're hearing a lot about AI, and I do think that provenance and citation are even more important than ever. And we heard that with the excellent talk this morning about OpenAI. And, you know, trust is critical. And I think having a strong scholarly record can really help.
Going forward and open metadata helps because things can be analyzed and assessed in an open way. Just a case recently where there was some steamed references, there was a preprint about this and having the references available through Crossref enabled people to track down that something funny is going on. We'll have more information about that soon. So really just wrapping things up, solving collective problems, collective problems, takes collaboration and diplomacy.
Also a little, little, little bit of luck, principles, patience and focus really help being non-profit, being sustainable. But I think now we're looking more and more towards globalization and diversity and equity and inclusion, both for organizations and the scholarly record scholarly record itself. And I think we can see that change is possible. It takes time.
And sometimes external pressure is good. I mentioned about the biomed proposal, but over the years, thoughts of funders, government agencies, the OSTP memo, things do shift and things do change. And so Thomas this morning left us on an image of the nice blooming flowers. And I thought with AI, this is something I got sent by my brother the other day. This is just almost like maybe the more negative side.
It's like funny, but it's also really scary because we're potentially entering this world where we've got all this stuff where, you know, no connection to reality, total fakery. And how do we deal with this? This is this is amazing that we're facing at the moment. But I think by working together to try to address. The same. Thank you very much.
Segment:0 .
And the last thing for this program is to award the Miles Conrad award. We've already announced Ed Pentz as this 2024 recipient of the Miles Conrad award. I'll give you a little background. Many of you might not be familiar with Miles Conrad, so I'll provide a little bit of context. In the 1950s, Miles Conrad was director of biological abstracts.
Now, biosis reviews part of Clarivate. In 1957, Conrad organized a meeting of the 14 A&E services at the time to discuss the implications of new government investments in science that were resulting from the Soviet launch of the Sputnik spacecraft in the Soviet Union. And this led to the formation of NFAIS in 1958. And unfortunately, Conrad passed away a few years later at the age of 53 in 1964.
Following his death, the NISO and the interface board of directors established an annual lecture series named in his honor, which will be a central feature of the annual conference. And since NISO and interface merged in 2019, we're continuing this tradition. I think it's super important that we recognize leaders in the information space. Some previous recipients over the years have been CEOs of major organizations in our community, leaders of national libraries.
It has been an opportunity for us to recognize true leadership in our space. And so I didn't want to have this up for too long propped up there. This is award reads the NISO Board of directors presents the 2024 Miles Conrad award to Edward Pentz for his lifetime achievements in the information community. And on behalf of the Board of directors, I'm so pleased to present this award to Ed, I wrote in the press release that announced Ed's.
Recognition here that it's difficult to overstate his impact in scholarly communications and infrastructure, not only through his work at crossref, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with, but also his leadership and involvement in so many other initiatives in our community. Ed has been a tremendous supporter and advocator for identifiers, for the quality of metadata in our community, for interoperability generally.
He's been he's served as a leader at organizations as well as getting down deep into the weeds in terms of what a standard should say and how it should be identified and how it should be managed. His collaborative style has grown and shaped a leading infrastructure organization over his the entire existence of Crossref for the past 25 years. So on behalf of the Board of directors, I'm so pleased to congratulate and Thank Ed for all of your service to the information community and to introduce Ed, I'd like to bring to the stage Robin Dunford, who is at advanced wireless solutions to the stage to introduce Ed.
Thanks, Tom. Yeah I'm grateful to NISO for this opportunity to say a few words on behalf of our sponsors of this awards lunch and the Miles Conrad lecture. By way of introduction to a few of us are blessed with the vision and the drive and insight to shape the entire landscape in which we work.
And we've recently lost one of those people in Bruce Rosenblum. I think a lot of you will know Bruce as a colleague and a friend over the years. He was a great supporter of the work of niso and a former niso fellow and a towering influence on the world of scholarly information. I was fortunate to work with Bruce and Ainara for 10 years. And one thing in this, in this world of standards that rubbed off on me from Bruce was the standard where it's high.
So I've done that his honor today. I'm sure Bruce would be delighted to know that this award goes to another of those people who has been instrumental in establishing a world of information infrastructure that we all benefit from today. Bruce, of course, would have had a timely anecdote relating to add, and I was very fortunate this morning that it happened to let slip that he was a little concerned he wouldn't be allowed in today because he forgot to register his resume.
As Todd has said, a roll call of significant infrastructure initiatives over the last 20 years. In many cases, such as crossref, albeit raw, he's been there from the start, as it was as academic press when he launched their first online journal 30 years ago. In each of these roles, as championed the need for openness, interoperability and consensus building considerations that have been fundamental to the success of many of these pillars of today's information infrastructure.
And he has done so by making much more use of the carrot than the stick. So I think it's therefore entirely appropriate that Ed's talk today will chart his journey as a builder of open scholarly infrastructure, and I'm delighted to introduce him to the stage. Thank you.
Well, Thank Thank you very much. That's a great honor. And Thank you to the board for the award and the recognition and Thank you for the great introduction. And yeah, it's looking back at the previous recipients of the award. It is it is really humbling. So I hope I can do it justice today. And just talking back, talking about looking back over my career and how Crossref and some of these other initiatives and developed and yeah, to talk about that journey of collaboration and diplomacy.
So I've spent most of my career working at crossref, but I've also worked on many other collaborative initiatives. And so it is really nice to get this award in the context of NFAIS and NISO and Miles Conrad. Legacy, which was about bringing together different organizations and stakeholders to collaborate. And the founding of NFAIS was, as Todd noted, was around an inflection point.
Right things had changed with the launch of Sputnik and the investment in the US space program, and I'm going to be talking about inflection points today and how collaborative efforts and diplomacy are critical to taking advantage of those inflection points. I've had the privilege of working with and for a great people and everything I've worked on has been collaborative. So and it has involved many people, some of them, many of them in the room today.
But so I'm not claiming individual credit for anything that I'm going to talk about. So talk about today. I did want to note that since the award was started in 1968, I think about 56 people have received it. 44 men, including me and 13 women. So there's a little bit of an imbalance there. In the last 10 years or so, since 2013, it has been a lot better.
Six women and five men. But I do just want to note that the issue of privilege and, you know, as a straight white man, that's a privilege I've had and it has benefited my career. The other thing I wanted to note is just to say Thank you to my wife, who when we had kids, she decided to take a career break and we decided together to do that.
And so that enabled me actually in the early days of crossref, to really focus and to travel a lot. And you know, that that's made a big difference. I just wanted to say Thank you to her. And that was another privilege to be able to be in that position. So just noting that. But you know, another sorry.
So I chose the title for my talk today because I'm most proud of having helped launch, run and build critical, open, scholarly infrastructure. And all of these things have involved extensive collaboration and diplomacy, as well as patience and focus. So my professional journey has been from working at a big commercial subscription based publisher to a nonprofit open organization, and that's sort of a crossroads journey as well, because it started off solving a narrow, narrow problem with limited metadata, and it's grown into providing infrastructure based on open metadata, with over 20,000 members from 160 countries around the globe.
So last year's lecture, the miles Conrad lecture by Dr. noble on decolonizing standards was really inspiring. So a couple of things that resonated with me were her points about rethinking who gets to control knowledge and information, and that during the Cold War and the National Science Foundation's early years, the approach was to keep knowledge away from scientists in nations of color.
So I think we want to keep that in mind. And I think open scholarly infrastructure really has a role to play in addressing some of those issues that she raised. Also in 2021, recipient Heather Joseph highlighted the importance of open knowledge and open access to knowledge, citing article 27 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancements and its benefits.
She also highlighted the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. They're an action plan through 2030 for ensuring a better future for all citizens of the world. And scholarly publishers are signing up to the stem Association's SDG publisher compact this explicitly so they explicitly tie their publishing activities to helping achieve the SDGs. And so I just wanted to note those things because I think that the foundational, open, scholarly infrastructure that I'm going to be talking about that supports open research is vitally important to achieving these larger goals.
So there really are moral imperatives and critical to advancing human knowledge. So and like Heather Joseph noted, I didn't start my career thinking about these larger goals, but I've been on a journey to get to a point where I now see these as really important and really been lucky to be able to contribute to advancing them. So looking back at the organizations and projects I've been involved with, there are some important themes to solve collective problems.
It takes collaboration and diplomacy, bringing together different stakeholders, balancing out different concerns and building trust and reaching consensus. This does take patience and focus. The gestation period can be quite long and it takes lots of discussions and meetings. I think this is true in the standards world as well. The results aren't always perfect, but if you get some things right at the beginning, then things can evolve over time.
I think also being a non-profit has been essential for many of these initiatives and projects. But related to this is sustainability because of course, being able to generate mission appropriate income and having surplus for investing back into new projects and for weathering unexpected events and things like that is also really, really important. So I'm going to be touching on some initiatives and talking about some of these inflection points.
And when things have catalyzed action. So I've been involved in scholarly publishing for about 30, 32 years, and February 1st was my 24th anniversary. And I was lucky at the beginning of my career because I got involved in publishing just around the time of a big inflection point. And that was the arrival of the world wide web and the rapid expansion of electronic publishing, particularly online publishing on the web.
Although I did have a little detour into putting encyclopedias onto cd-roms that didn't last very long. But you can see here, this is the proposal from Tim berners-lee for a distributed hypertext system, which was the world wide web, and that was 1990, got going. And then really took off with the launch of the Mosaic browser and then the Netscape browser.
But I had an editorial role at the time working on some journals at academic press, and we had a project to get the tables of contents listed on bubble, the bulletin board for libraries. It was a gopher service. If anybody here remembers gopher, if you don't look it up on Wikipedia. But this got me interested in online things, and I started to read Wired magazine, which was launched in 1993.
And one day at my desk at lunch, I was reading wired magazine and Chris Gibson, who was the senior person in production at the time, saw me reading it and stopped for a chat. And then not long after that, he offered me a job as an electronic publishing assistant in the brand new electronic publishing department. So that was a chance. The thing that changed my career really, because being involved in electronic publishing in the mid 90s, there was a lot of experiments.
Nobody knew anything. This was this was all new. But one of the key benefits of, well, one of the main first things was getting journals online. And then one of the things that people wanted to do after getting the journals online in HTML was to link the references because that was a huge benefit to the readers and the researchers to be able to follow, follow the references.
So publishers started to do this, but every publisher had their own domain names and URL naming schemes. They changed often, and so it wasn't a scalable solution. But publishers were signing bilateral linking agreements with each other. I mean, these were actual legal agreements. So thinking back on it now, it's kind of crazy. But the it just wasn't scalable.
Obviously, if you have hundreds and thousands of journals and hundreds of thousands of publishers. So this was a problem that could only be solved through collective action and no one publisher could solve it on their own. So working through the Association of American publishers, their enabling technologies committee, there was a small group of publishers who collaborated on the prototype system.
And using digital object identifiers and metadata in XML. And this was originally called the DOI-X. And it created a prototype proof of concept system that was announced at the STM meeting at the 1999 Frankfurt book fair, and it was announced by Howard Ratner, who's here, who's here today and was a previous miles Conrad recipient.
But you can see here, there was an article in d-lib magazine, which is nicely archived but no longer extant. And you can see again, there were many, many people involved. There's also Chris shillam, who's also here today. So so this was born out of that initial activity of that inflection point of having this new platform, new platform to do this.
But it wasn't just a technical problem. So it needed ongoing management, it needed trust. There needed to be rules of the road, reciprocity, sustainability and governance. And so Crossref was set up as an organization soon after the prototype got out there. So just some of the lessons learned from that time, focusing on a particular problem and using the right technology to solve it, not the other way around.
It was really important. We didn't start out to assign persistent, persistent identifiers or collect of metadata, but that was a way to solve the issue. Collaboration is essential. Developing prototypes and proofs of concept. Building trust by agreeing principles and getting the governance right was critical. Also, a sustainability model and being prepared to change that.
And then being able to compromise within the framework of the solution. The principles that we were trying to achieve. But I do want to note this is interesting to look back and think about that. Another aspect that helps with process founding was fear. Now the fear was prompted by something he had heard Joseph also mentioned in her talk. In 1999, NIH director Harold Varmus released the biomed proposal, and this was a proposal to have a central NIH run, web based electronic archive for full text articles as well as preprints was very, very visionary and it would be freely available online.
There was also in the proposal talks of having editorial boards as the concept of overlay journals, right? That could actually be run on top of this as well. So this, you know, upset some of the big society and commercial publishers, but also researchers had issues with it as well, worrying about government interference and editorial independence and those types of issues.
But in 2000, the project was launched and became PubMed central. We were hearing about that before and it's been very successful 9.5 million, I think getting up to 10 million full text articles and a great discovery system. But it wasn't it didn't turn into what the original proposal was, but that the e biomed proposal sort of pushed some of the publishers to say, we better get we better get working together so we can improve.
Online journals and make them easier to use. And that did help lead to the creation of Crossref. And luckily, Crossref was established as a nonprofit with one member, one vote and with a broad mission. This is from our articles of incorporation. The purpose of the organization here and you can see that it doesn't mention identifiers, it doesn't mention dois, it doesn't mention publishers. So this actually gave a really good foundation for Crossref to evolve and go beyond what it was originally set up to do, because, you know, it's really given us room to expand.
But because at the start, Crossref was entirely closed metadata, the metadata was not openly available. It was only available to members to do their reference linking. Some publishers didn't want to give us all author names. Some publishers didn't give us article titles at the time, so that seems a bit strange now, but that's the way it was. But that was a point of compromise, right?
If we had insisted and mandated a Fuller set of metadata at the time, it would have really harmed uptake. So it it's a way to that was one of the points of compromise. And over the years, we've tried to go beyond that. So another critical juncture was having to change the sustainability model. We had a fee at the time where you would pay $0.10 for each Doi the Crossref returned, send in a list of references, references would match and there was a $0.10 charge.
So it was a charge. And it was making it very expensive to do what we were trying to get everybody to do, which was link their references. And so there was a 8 to 7 vote, the Crossref board to drop the fee. There was one vote in it. And if it had gone the other way, I think I could have really damaged the organization.
But of course it was presented at the time. As you know, we made this enlightened strategic decision. But, you know, it wasn't maybe quite like that behind the scenes, but I did also then just want to touch on ORCID as well. Crossref started leading discussions of author IDs in 2007 February 2007, but it became apparent that Crossref was not the right place to develop this. Different stakeholders need to be involved funders, universities, research institutions.
So the discussions came out of Crossref. Although we continue to be closely, closely involved. Orchid was incorporated in 2010 and then launched in 2012. And at the time when it moved out of crossref, Howard Ratner again and David Calvo played a leading role in getting that going. But when orchid launched at the end of 2012, so you can see that gestation period, you know, 2007. Five years later, and so often a number of years before it got to work on sustainability.
But now it's an essential part of the scholarly infrastructure. And an important thing about orchid was the before doing anything else, almost anything else, the set of principles that are still follows today was established very, very early on. I just want to note on the step to open metadata Crossref finally got to after 14 years had got to an open ended data available via its API in 20 2014.
More recently, a more recent development was roar the organization registry. So taking the lessons from Crossref and orchid, we started off again focusing on the problem to solve, keeping the reef, keeping the use case very, very focused. So content was being identified through crossref, datacite and other registration agencies. Orchid was covering researchers and the missing leg of the stool, as we refer to it at the time was organization identifiers.
But we wanted to keep the use case focused on affiliations and identifying affiliations for citations. And that meant not going down to a fundamental level in a lot of detail. And so there were a lot of discussions around that at the time. And so we started discussions in 2016, 2017, and then roar finally got launched in 2019 and it just had its fifth, fifth anniversary.
And so that's been really great to see how that's been developed as an open and community driven solution. So a key aspect though, of roar was that we decided not to create another new organization. People have got organizational fatigue and it wasn't scalable to create new organizations for every new identifier. So roar is jointly managed by crossref, datacite and the California.
Digital library. And with a wide community though supporting it. And now more and more integrations coming along. But a big turning point for Crossref and I think for me as well in running across breakfast that in November 2020, the Crossref board adopted the principles of open scholarly infrastructure. So this brought together a lot of things that I was talking about lessons learned from orchid development and other initiatives.
But when that happened in November. 20th November 2020, and we did a self-assessment against the principles and the detailing of how we met them, how we did it, and how we would go about meeting them in the future. So the principles were developed by Jennifer Lynn, Cameron neylon and Jeffrey bilder, and it distilled the lessons from these other organizations. And today has been adopted by 15 organizations, including Crossref.
And they do also do self assessments against the principles. And I think it's a really good outline of, of running open scholarly infrastructure. So there are 16 principles for the best practice for running the organization, for running these initiatives and organizations. So it's their principles. It's not really a detailed checklist, but there's not an organization associated with it.
So it's organizations who voluntarily decided to adopt these. And it's a way of building trust with their respective communities, but also a way of being held accountable to following these principles. So so that was really important. And we hope that more organizations adopt these in some practical ways. Crossref has updated its governance.
There's information on our website about that. But also, I think importantly, really inspired by the principles Crossref in 2022, open to all references. That's the last sort of holdout of the metadata and Crossref wasn't fully open. So that's now all fully open. And in 2023 we acquired an open the Retraction Watch metadata. So getting to that stage where more and more open metadata is a really, really positive development.
So the vision that we have. So looking forward a little bit now, we want a rich and reusable open network of relationships, connecting research organizations, people, things and actions, a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever for the benefit of society. So that's the vision we haven't shared with some other organizations. But we also refer to this as the research nexus.
So you can see here the whole sort of scholarly research publishing funding workflow here. And we want to try to bring together the disparate pieces of the scholarly record, have relationships expressed properly and allowing. And this is a real basis for evidence, provenance and persistence. And so at the moment, we think about roughly it's just a guess really.
But about 60% of this is possible. The rest is aspirational and I'll talk about that in a little bit. But this is also important is the integrity of the scholarly record as well. Right? so metadata can provide trust signals. And so we want to keep the barriers low to membership and participation and have an inclusive, scholarly, scholarly record.
So looking forward, we're still working towards the Crossref vision. There are too many gaps. So we need more integrations, we need more collaboration. But we're working on grants, better use of raw ids, abstracts, corrections and retractions, and having a better alerting systems around corrections and retractions. And all of this is we need to make things easier for researchers.
So they don't have to re-enter information in again and again. So I've been I live in Oxford and often I'm know neighbors and people I've run into who are researchers. And I was just talking to a researcher on Friday before coming here and he was complaining about having to enter stuff into research fish, the UK system, and he was having to rekey stuff and all the pieces are there now with, with the orchid and and metadata and things.
I'm just going to talk about all the pieces that are there or that should be largely automated and they should just need to check it off. So still want people to verify things. So, so we still have a ways to go to achieve that. And so just putting out a reminder for any publishers here that this was something in nature when they did an editorial after Crossref opened, the references calling for depositing all relevant metadata in Crossref becoming the norm in scholarly publishing, we have over 150 million content records in crossref, so we've got a lot of content.
We need we need to do more. Key area we want to work on is expanding the scholarly record. So a wider range of research objects and more relationships, more multilingual things that was mentioned earlier today, more global lowering barriers to participation the developed world doesn't have all the answers. We we want to capture better how the scholarly record, how the scholarly record is, is changing. And a big area here is research integrity.
So we have major challenges just listing of a few of them here. Collaborative action is key to solving these. A number of organizations are working on these things. The committee on publication ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals United act recently launched, and that's a group looking at addressing the paper mill problem. We see the niso correction and retraction work pub peer is important as well as last post-publication peer review and researchers actually.
Posts about problems that they see in the literature. And a worry I have is, though, that publishers are having to put huge amounts of additional resources into research integrity. And they should, right? That's their job. But it makes it hard also to say, well, you also need to do integrate with raw. You also need to do all these extra things around what we're asking publishers to do in terms of metadata.
So so there is some contention there in terms of resources because resources are limited. So that's something we'll have to deal with over the next few years. But just to say, the other thing is the rise of science sleuth, I think is something to keep an eye on. So there are a lot of researchers now who are doing investigations, who spend a lot of articles about this, right?
Finding image duplication problems with data. And there's a lot of articles written about this. And I think it's really interesting to keep an eye on this because, you know, hundreds of researchers now doing this. I think it's almost becoming I think it's going to grow into a new discipline, right? A a new self-titled scientific discipline. And there may be some more formality coming around this.
So that's, I think, something to keep an eye on. Just to note, we're hearing a lot about AI, and I do think that provenance and citation are even more important than ever. And we heard that with the excellent talk this morning about OpenAI. And, you know, trust is critical. And I think having a strong scholarly record can really help.
Going forward and open metadata helps because things can be analyzed and assessed in an open way. Just a case recently where there was some steamed references, there was a preprint about this and having the references available through Crossref enabled people to track down that something funny is going on. We'll have more information about that soon. So really just wrapping things up, solving collective problems, collective problems, takes collaboration and diplomacy.
Also a little, little, little bit of luck, principles, patience and focus really help being non-profit, being sustainable. But I think now we're looking more and more towards globalization and diversity and equity and inclusion, both for organizations and the scholarly record scholarly record itself. And I think we can see that change is possible. It takes time.
And sometimes external pressure is good. I mentioned about the biomed proposal, but over the years, thoughts of funders, government agencies, the OSTP memo, things do shift and things do change. And so Thomas this morning left us on an image of the nice blooming flowers. And I thought with AI, this is something I got sent by my brother the other day. This is just almost like maybe the more negative side.
It's like funny, but it's also really scary because we're potentially entering this world where we've got all this stuff where, you know, no connection to reality, total fakery. And how do we deal with this? This is this is amazing that we're facing at the moment. But I think by working together to try to address. The same. Thank you very much.
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