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Amy Brand Opening Keynote NISO Plus 2020 - The Other I-Word: Infrastructure and the Future of Knowledge
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Amy Brand Opening Keynote NISO Plus 2020 - The Other I-Word: Infrastructure and the Future of Knowledge
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: I am going to introduce Marian Hollingsworth. Marian Hollingsworth is the Director of Editorial Publisher Relations at Web of Science Group and is our NISO Board Chair '19 to '20. And she is going to introduce our keynote. So thank you. [APPLAUSE]
MARIAN HOLLINGSWORTH: Good afternoon, everyone. It's so great to be here. Amy Brand, PhD, is Director of the MIT Press and co-founder of the MIT Knowledge Futures Group which develops open knowledge infrastructure. She has played a seminal role in transformative scholarly communications initiatives, such as ORCID, CRediT, and peer review transparency. Previously, Amy held positions at Digital Science, Harvard, and Crossref.
MARIAN HOLLINGSWORTH: She currently serves on the boards of Creative Commons, Crossref, the Open Syllabus Project, and the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information, among many other directorships. She studied linguistics and cognitive science and also dabbles in documentary film. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Brand. [APPLAUSE]
AMY BRAND: Wow. It's really wonderful to be here and to be honored by delivering the opening keynote at the very first NISO Plus conference. It's really a luxury, too. I know what Todd said about, this is all conversation and not presentation. But he also told me to talk for 45 minutes. [LAUGHTER] So we'll have some conversation afterwards, but it's been a chance to synthesize many of the things that I've been thinking about over the last few years, and for such a terrific audience of friends and colleagues.
AMY BRAND: That this is the very first NISO Plus conference makes all of us, in a sense, pioneers-- working on the information frontier at a time when trust and facts and evidence are an increasingly precious currency. So NISO is an organization that thrives by bringing together diverse constituencies, as Todd said, in the information sector-- seek common ground, create an ever-stronger union of publishers and libraries and universities, government agencies and associations, along with other content and technology specialists.
AMY BRAND: So I see this conference as a celebration of coexistence and of partnership, including private-public partnerships, and of what we can all accomplish working together. You'll also see in my slides, this opportunity satisfies my collage-making impulses. [LAUGHTER] Healthy, resilient ecosystems require cross-pollination. And today, I'll be talking about the importance of diversified distributed infrastructures and how seemingly divergent stakeholders and models ideally interoperate in our print-optional, post-truth world, because I've received some very real risks from consolidation in the sector, from privatization of community-based solutions, and from, frankly, reductionist approaches to our current challenges and opportunities in research information.
AMY BRAND: To borrow an analogy from my colleague, Travis Rich, how do we avoid creating monocultures within our research and publishing ecosystems? How can we better anticipate the future consequences of the business models and policies that we adopt? So we've made tremendous progress on open access and open data. Obviously, still a ways to go.
AMY BRAND: But open for its own sake is not enough for a thriving knowledge ecosystem. I think we all know that. And I say this as an actively pro-OA publisher. If technology today is power, we have yet to address who controls the systems that host the open content. We have yet to think through the longer-term consequences of an all-open world.
AMY BRAND: How will commercial models and entities evolve around openly-licensed full text and data? What might go wrong? And what infrastructures, models, and licenses might help us avoid possible dystopian scenarios? So when Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, his intention initially was to enable researchers to share their work.
AMY BRAND: But not only have our research communication tools thus far fallen short of leveraging all the linking and access and decentralized authority that the Web makes possible, but the history of the Web itself reminds us that making vast amounts of linked data readily accessible to third parties can trigger a number of unintended consequences. The success of a limited number of social networks, shopping services, and search engines shows us that internet platforms based on data and analytics tend towards monopoly.
AMY BRAND: And to stretch the analogy that I began with, the crop in this particular monoculture is advertising revenues. So for all of us here, whether we work for a commercial or a non-profit entity or an association or a government agency, we do this work because we care deeply about the knowledge enterprise and the imperative to promote trust and transparency in research communication.
AMY BRAND: OK. So where do words that begin with the letter "I" enter into this narrative? When thinking about the title of this talk, the "I-word" that was very much on my mind-- and I know I'm not alone in this-- was "impeachment." [LAUGHTER] What mind-bending journeys it has been through all the alternative fact landscapes around impeachment.
AMY BRAND: But that now seems like a distant memory. It's only been three weeks since the Senate acquittal of Donald Trump, but that was yesterday. With all the other salient news developments-- for example, the coronavirus epidemic. It was fascinating to follow developments recently on social media when bioRxiv posted a preprint connecting coronavirus to HIV. The community rallied quickly.
AMY BRAND: The article was withdrawn and the site now contains a disclaimer to the effect that treating preprints like peer-reviewed articles is not a good idea. bioRxiv, by the way, is also involved in piloting refereeing preprints. So I think they're a good player in all of this. But that begs the question, how are journalists and members of the public to know that preprints aren't typically peer reviewed, let alone fact checked?
AMY BRAND: Which speaks to the need for some form of peer-review badging or tagging on research publications. And I'm going to come back to that later in my talk. Another I-word on my mind, predictably, was information itself-- the lifeblood of this community, of higher learning, and of functioning democracies. The struggle for control over information and knowledge today looms large everywhere that we turn.
AMY BRAND: I don't think the work of information professionals has ever been so critical or fraught at any other point in history. But to keep a light tone with this, what with disinformation, misinformation, and tribal epistemologies in which information is evaluated not on the basis of evidence, but rather on whether or not it is good for our side, or some commercial interest, like a pharmaceutical or fossil fuel company.
AMY BRAND: And tribalism, by the way, also applies to some of the ideology around open access. And that's another point that I'll come back to. I think there's some irony too that in our era of information abundance, ever-increasing, seamless access to scholarship and science, the basic challenges around getting trusted research content to a target readership for its intended purpose and impact are more complex for publishers and information services than ever before in our efforts to accelerate discovery and promote credibility in scientific information.
AMY BRAND: And these are just some of the issues and familiar bits of infrastructure-- metadata, standards, licenses, identifiers, metrics-- that factor into research dissemination today. So it's exciting to be part of a professional community that is always experimenting with new solutions to intelligize published content. And by the way, we all love our print books. They remain the bedrock, at least for me, of university press publishing and certainly of our revenue base.
AMY BRAND: At the same time, we know that e-book platforms and markets have yet to live up to their full potential. And that's why the I-word that I'm actually focusing on today is "infrastructure." Specifically, the technologies that are driving the transformation of knowledge and the tools in our evolving research communication ecosystem. If the truth wars have taught us nothing else, they've shown us how inextricable information is from the systems that deliver it.
AMY BRAND: So let's do a deeper dive now into the concept of infrastructure and why we're all talking about it, because it has become such a buzzword. I'm just going to take a drink. So in first-world countries, infrastructures are the things that we have the luxury to take somewhat for granted, like the roads that we drive on or the grids that deliver our electricity.
AMY BRAND: It says here, "The basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society or an enterprise." A quick little detour-- when I was putting this together, it struck me now that my interest in this is not so very different from my lifelong fascination with how the mind structures information and how language structures meaning.
AMY BRAND: As a middle school kid, my favorite thing, believe it or not, was diagramming sentences with their parts of speech. So there's some continuity, at least in hindsight, in my ending up doing a PhD on the cognitive science of language and that I'm here talking to you about information infrastructures. But back to knowledge.
AMY BRAND: In that domain, "infrastructure" refers to, of course, the underlying systems and standards and practices-- licenses, business models, the internet, even the cloud. It's what connects research labs, data, computers, and people with the goal of creating and sharing knowledge. Of course, systems and networks vary according to how centralized or decentralized they are, both in terms of architecture and in terms of ownership and control.
AMY BRAND: Large-scale, centralized systems can be very efficient, but they also tend to be less transparent. Theyr'e more of a black box. Decentralized or distributed architecture, and blockchain as one example, require data, protocols, governance, standards to enable interoperability. So open standards like those that NISO helps develop rely on a broadly consultative and inclusive process with representation from vendors, academics, and others with a stake in the development of interoperable platforms and solutions.
AMY BRAND: So when I refer to science in this talk, by the way, I really mean science as a public and democratic knowledge-making process. This is a phrase that I'm borrowing from an MIT anthropologist named Susan Silbey. So not excluding other forms of scholarship, like the humanities or the social sciences. The future of science is in many ways already here, and it relies on distributed networks, varied stakeholders, publishers, and vendors.
AMY BRAND: Yes, but also startups and librarians and funders and museums and other organizations that serve the public good. Our infrastructures and how we use them to build knowledge will further shape our futures. So let's take a look now at what makes community-based solutions more feasible today and where that work is happening. And another really weighty question that I'll come back to is, what is the role of universities themselves in all of this?
AMY BRAND: The academy has historically relied on centralized forms of credentialing, certification, and publishing. From the perspective of authors and readers over hundreds of years, the physical act of publishing was really something of a black box-- unedited material one side, peer-reviewed, printed, ideally saleable product of the other.
AMY BRAND: This is a crude oversimplification. But one depiction of academic publishing in the internet age is blowing apart that black box. And the building blocks within-- the things that publishers do, like layout and design, peer review, and copy editing-- can at least be partially unbundled. This is what leads to the expectation of greater transparency-- a greater speed in publishing, a different distribution of costs.
AMY BRAND: For example, authors can do their on page layout, and they do that all the time now. And libraries can host digital copies of researchers' publications locally. And that's happening everywhere. Data and protocols can be broadly disseminated, supporting reproducibility. So there have been tremendous advances in open science as a result. And yet, entrenched academic norms and publishing models remain a countervailing force when it comes to taking full advantage of what's really possible here.
AMY BRAND: So on many campuses, especially in science labs, these building blocks engender homegrown research tools-- solutions like Authorea, which is now part of Wiley, but which was birthed at the Harvard Seamless Astronomy Group-- or all the companies that became part of Digital Science where I used to work-- readcube, Altmetric, Figshare, and Overleaf, and others.
AMY BRAND: Commercial investment and ownership is one way that these innovative solutions become sustainable, and ideally, profitable. But there's also a hell of a lot happening in the nonprofit and open source tool space. Last year, the MIT Press issued a Mellon-funded report for the benefit of the community surveying the literally dozens-- I think it was something like 80 open source publishing tools in existence at that time, and there are even more now.
AMY BRAND: With so much activity in this space, I'll just cover a few examples you've probably heard of. You've no doubt heard of the Center for Open Science which has developed a variety of software tools, workflows, and data storage solutions called the Open Science Framework. They also promote, which is dear to my heart, the use of open science badges, such as for open data materials and protocols.
AMY BRAND: So consider the power in this approach. As an extreme example, would Theranos have been able to attract the same level of trust and investment if the marginal journals in which Elizabeth Holmes and colleagues published various results had been obligated to badge for pre-registered protocols, open data, and peer review? I think that's an interesting question. Another important infrastructure initiative is COAR, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, which is aiming to build a sustainable, inclusive, and trusted global network based on OA repositories.
AMY BRAND: And this strikes me as, in some way, the successor to the original ARL share vision of many years ago, if you remember that. And the share still exists, but in a somewhat different form. There's also a new initiative called Invest in Open Infrastructure, or IOI, to support open source tools. And a good deal of community support around this effort. And in talking with Kristen Ratan and others leading the charge, it sounds like the goal is to become a central clearinghouse or re-granting program for funding and curating open source projects.
AMY BRAND: And then there is significant federal investment in open knowledge infrastructure. In 2018, the NSF launched a generously-funded accelerator track to enable the creation of, quote, "non-proprietary shared knowledge infrastructure available to all stakeholders, including the researchers who will help push this technology further." An OKN requires a non-proprietary public-private development effort that spans the entire data science community and will result in an open and shared infrastructure.
AMY BRAND: There are several projects now competing for the final prize-- I think 10 of them on various campuses around the country. A very different sort of public-private partnership is something called RoRI, Leiden, and Sheffield University's Digital Science and the Wellcome Trust recently launched the Research on Research Institute to organize and support more metascience research across stakeholder groups.
AMY BRAND: And I borrowed this particular slide with permission from Ludo Waltman and James Wilson, who are part of RoRI. Because it's really fascinating to me to see how much the Research on Research in universities is happening within the social sciences and humanities. And that's the concentrated [INAUDIBLE].. And by the way, these are the people who write books, which is very good for my business. And I'll show you some of those later.
AMY BRAND: So meta-research-- metascience deepens our understanding of the incentives and organizational dynamics within the academy. And in work that I'm doing in collaboration with Christine Borgman of UCLA, we are surveying the level of coordination or lack of coordination in distributed university systems. Not only scholarly communications, but also academic appointments, course management, library catalogs, archiving, data warehousing, and so on.
AMY BRAND: And we expect to turn this work into a call for greater university investment and new institutional leadership roles with requisite budgetary control. So libraries and presses are part of this picture to be sure, but they are not the entirety. And after decades of working in different quadrants of the knowledge ecosystem, I personally envision a much larger role for institutional leadership here.
AMY BRAND: Again, I am thirsty. So universities are the locus of empirical research and critical enquiry. They contain libraries, and some have university presses. But they have historically under-invested in capturing and communicating the knowledge being created on their campuses. They've outsourced much of the relevant infrastructure, including the standards upon which academic reputations are judged.
AMY BRAND: Owning technology is a form of control. And I'm not alone in believing that it behooves institutional leaders today to explore the implications of commercial control of research data, analytics, and infrastructure, along with the potential for community-owned alternatives. And a recent SPARC white paper by Claudio Aspesi makes related points.
AMY BRAND: So now that we've set the broader scene and surveyed many of these important developments, I'll drill down into what we're doing at the MIT Press to contribute momentum towards these advances. Yes, it's a bit of a juggling act. So I myself really do two things at MIT. One is running the publishing company that outputs about 300 books a year and 40 journals.
AMY BRAND: And the other is partnering with the academic community to create the knowledge tools and services of the future. And these two things are closely intertwined, because we're a university press with no endowment and we strive daily to balance our mission to produce excellent, impactful content with the imperative to sustain our own operations on the basis of what we know are unsustainable business models. So we have to be thinking about the future.
AMY BRAND: So on the one hand, our work at Knowledge Futures at MIT is about the content we publish in book and journal form. And last week, we proudly launched a new journal called Quantitative Science Studies, which is the OA flip version of a journal that was previously published in Elsevier. It's the official journal of the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics, and it publishes theoretical and empirical research on science and the scientific workforce.
AMY BRAND: And as I mentioned, we also do a lot of book publishing on these topics-- the topics of knowledge, media, and information. And I'm reminded every day of what a tremendous privilege it is to run such an edgy publishing company and how powerfully books continue to rock our world. I feel a profound responsibility to use this perch as publisher at the MIT Press for whatever good that I can. But the business of academic book publishing was once a lot more simple.
AMY BRAND: Our monographs used to sell thousands of copies, because libraries used to buy print books. And speaking of infrastructure, until recently, we were able to afford our own warehouse and distribution services in partnership with two other universities in the Northeast. In a move that has made some waves recently, beginning July 1, the MIT Press will be distributed by Penguin Random House, the largest publisher on the planet.
AMY BRAND: We're doing this because an efficient supply chain in the Amazon era means scale and interoperability at a whole new level. So business models are formative structure too, and we're experimenting there actively-- a lot around open access. We recently received a generous grant from the Arcadia Fund to develop and openly disseminate a durable financial framework for OA monographs.
AMY BRAND: And we also receive direct subsidy from the MIT libraries for OA textbooks and trade books. In order to maximize readership for scholarly monographs which remain a requirement for tenure in many fields, we believe it is more sustainable to publish them OA with subsidy upfront from a university or funder or some yet-to-be-created organization to offset production and marketing costs while continuing to sell print according to whatever the demand may be.
AMY BRAND: Now, our work on new models extends into technology as well with the Knowledge Futures Group that originally formed as a partnership between the MIT Press and the Media Lab. I talked earlier about a range of open infrastructure efforts across the community. But what makes the KFG stand out is our vision of university on infrastructure and cross-institutional consortia.
AMY BRAND: Our twofold goal with the KFG is to incubate homegrown solutions and to spark a movement towards greater institutional investment and knowledge infrastructure. One core service in the KFG today is the PubPub platform. Another is the Underlay open knowledge graph, which I don't have time to go into. PubPub is a turnkey open publishing solution with collaborative editing, rich media, annotation, versioning, and it's intended to support publishing as a community-driven activity.
AMY BRAND: You can host books on it, journals, conference proceedings-- really any type of content. And we use it at the MIT Press in a variety of ways. For example, it runs our new full-featured open journal, The Harvard Data Science Review. HDSR is the OA platform of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, which has a mission to elevate the profile of data science as a scientifically-rigorous field. And I circled here an application of the credit contributor role taxonomy, which I'll talk a little bit more about.
AMY BRAND: And there's a session about credit tomorrow as well. I don't know who clearly you can see the contributor roles in there, but you'll be hearing about them at this conference. HDSR also makes good use of PubPub's capability to embed interactive visualizations and a range of other media. On the book side, we use the platform at the MIT Press to experiment with early community review on books that we eventually publish in print, like this book called Data Feminism.
AMY BRAND: Because it's really early days experimenting with community review, we don't substitute community review from our traditional peer review. But we've found that it's been really interesting to have both of these streams of input, and the authors have really appreciated it. Another application that's related is something that we call Works in Progress, where we don't make a publishing decision at the MIT Press until the work has been out in the wild for community review for some time.
AMY BRAND: And so this work, Open Knowledge Institutions, with multiple authors-- I don't know if people can read that, but you'll recognize names like Cameron Neylon and Cassidy Sugimoto. It has been out in the open for some time. And we are now-- now that it's matured and has gone through lots of commentary and review, we're going to be publishing it as a print book at the MIT Press.
AMY BRAND: So not too surprisingly, we're seeing demand for the platform from other publishers and institutions. The American Psychological Association just launched an OA journal on PubPub called Technology, Mind, and Behavior. The American Astronomical Society launched their new bulletin on the platform recently as well. And several universities have homegrown OA journals on the platform, like the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law & Policy.
AMY BRAND: And I could go on with many such examples, but I'm probably overdoing it already. MIT's own node in the Knowledge Futures network-- just getting off the ground. Because again, this is supposed to be a network where institutions have nodes and participate and contribute resources of various kinds, like people, or code, or potentially even money. But there are a couple of nodes to start, and one is MIT itself.
AMY BRAND: We are establishing the MIT Open Publishing Services, MITOPS. So it's a new operating unit that supports community publishing at MIT and beyond. And it aligns with that vision of unbundled publishing services that I described earlier with those colorful building blocks. The concept isn't new. There are other university presses, for example, who have publishing service units.
AMY BRAND: Michigan does. North Carolina does. But the combination of PubPub with traditional service offerings, like peer review and EDP I think makes the service unique. So Workflow's standards and metadata are infrastructure too. And KFG-affiliated ASAPbio, which was founded by Jessica Polka, is working on a range of innovations in peer review.
AMY BRAND: Reimagine review as a registry of platforms and experiments innovating around peer review of scientific outputs, and through a partnership called the New Commons, is offering peer review on preprints, which I mentioned earlier, prior to journal submission. And you can see the very first case of this now in bioRxiv. In fact, I think that was announced on February 4. A related project is the Peer Review Transparency project that we launched in 2018 with funding from the Open Society Foundations.
AMY BRAND: And the original impetus was to address misconceptions about the rigor of OA journals and presses in the face of predatory publishing. My colleague Mark Edington, who was at Amherst College Press at the time-- he was having a hard time getting an all-OA press off the ground because of the bias against OA publishing. If badging can help separate credibility from publisher and journal brand, it lessens disincentives in the academic community to publish OA.
AMY BRAND: So Mark sketched out some preliminary icons, which you can see here. And what needs to happen now is that-- actually, what NISO does best, a community-driven standards process around a taxonomy of types of peer review. So if there are any takers in the audience, please talk to me afterwards. There's a lot of work yet to be done, although I'm told that MECA-- the manuscript exchange common approach, which is a common way to transfer manuscripts between and among submission systems-- already includes some XML 4 review types, so that's a start.
AMY BRAND: Contributor role tagging, which I pointed to earlier in the context of the Harvard Data Science Review, is another example of taxonomy and standards. And you'll hear more about this in a session tomorrow with my colleague Gabe Hart and others. But I want to tell you briefly about how it came about, because it speaks to this ecosystem perspective.
AMY BRAND: So I was working on tenured promotion at Harvard several years ago, and I was reviewing the tenure case of an outstanding last statistician, someone considered to be the leading methodologist in his field. And I observed that his list of publications had him as middle author consistently on everything he published. And I knew from experience that this did not bode well for his tenure case.
AMY BRAND: And this often happened for methodologists. So wouldn't it be much better, I thought, if his publication record captured that he was consistently lead contributor on statistical methods? That was, after all, his field which he was being evaluated in. So a group of publishers and funders who were collaborating on the launch of "Work It" at the time, including Liz Allen-- a very new comer-- and others, undertook a significant community effort to build a 14-role taxonomy.
AMY BRAND: It was quickly adopted by the PLOS. And now Elsevier-- beginning with Cell Press, but I think there are other parts of Elsevier, and several publishers use it on hundreds of journals. It was endorsed by the president of the National Academy of Sciences last year, and it is included in part in JATS4R, although I think this is just the start of really incorporating that kind of taxonomy into our standards.
AMY BRAND: But this speaks to the power of infrastructure to enrich the research record and fundamentally shift conversations about authorship and attribution. After all, who gets credit for research and discovery that can have a huge impact on people's lives? So this academic life cycle-- the interplay among authorship, diverse measures of impact, and academic career advancement-- are especially fascinating to me and are what have animated my personal creative journey.
AMY BRAND: And it continues to be such a pleasure and privilege to partner with others in this multi-faceted community who are motivated by the same fundamental questions. So we've covered a lot of ground here. I want to acknowledge that. And I'd now like to shift gears and look back to the future, as it were, returning to the issue that I mentioned at the outset-- the unintended consequences of our infrastructure choices.
AMY BRAND: A brief history of the open access movement I think will be instructive. So in 1994, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad posted a subversive proposal to a mailing list, calling on researchers to make copies of all of their published papers freely available on the internet. But the term open access wasn't introduced until 2001 by the drafters of the Budapest open Access Initiative, Peter Suber among them.
AMY BRAND: When it started gaining steam in the early naughts, the open access movement focused on [INAUDIBLE],, self-archiving, which as you all know involves a researcher uploading a version of a paper to a subject or institutional repository archive in physics already existent at that time. Harvard launched the first US self-archiving policy in 2008. I wanted to be part of this new movement towards greater institutional roles and scholarly communication.
AMY BRAND: And so I left Crossref, where I'd been one of the earliest employees, to manage the Harvard Scholar Communications Project. At the time, the agreements that most publishers had their authors sign did not contain barriers to self-archiving, by which I mean the copyright transfer payments. And so this outlook for green or university-owned OA was pretty sunny and optimistic.
AMY BRAND: But institutional repositories have been really slow to realize their full potential and to create robust, academy-owned records of scholarship. We're not there yet. On the one hand, it's really tough to corral faculty. I learned this very early on in the Harvard job, and I'm sure many of you who work in libraries with depositories know that.
AMY BRAND: But on the other hand, universities haven't mustered the requisite level of financial and technical investment or cross-institution collaboration. As well, shifting publisher policies on self-archiving played a big role. Consider that the original 2004 Elsevier policy required no embargoes on self-archiving. In later years, 90% of Elsevier journals would have embargo periods of 12 months or more, and many other publishers and societies followed suit.
AMY BRAND: And I'm sure they had good reasons to do so. But at the same time that new pay-to-publish-- or gold-- journals emerged, larger publishers upped their investments and services to manage research workflows, metadata, and analytics. These developments significantly slowed institutional cooperation on open access and shared infrastructure. And when I'm feeling more cynical, I would go so far as to say it was a very successful divide and conquer strategy in the scholarly communication space.
AMY BRAND: So what do I mean by open is not enough? There are still growing pains in Plan S. There's the developing OSTP policy here in the US-- neither of which I'll go into unless we want to talk about it during the Q & A. Suffice it to say that open is not enough on its own when it comes to truly open knowledge. Libraries and publishers have every reason to be proud of transformative deals with read-and-publish provisions and discounted APCs-- what I gather is now called pure publish.
AMY BRAND: So why do I find myself worrying about the consequences of most-favored-nation deals and their impact on academic freedom when it comes to where authors are incentivized to publish their work? I also find myself wondering whether the mining of open text and data will result in further consolidation by enabling the creation of topic-based silos by bigger publishers at the expense of societies and institutions.
AMY BRAND: So as open gains ground, the research community needs to be alert to potential unintended consequences and to invest in alternative solutions and efforts to avoid future monopolies over research content, infrastructure, and analytics. If you want to read about the pros and cons of open access, there's no better place than SSP's Scholarly Kitchen. And so just for fun and a little self-effacement, I'll confess here that for a whole five minutes, I believed this 2018 April Fool's Scholarly Kitchen posting.
AMY BRAND: And I actually have an email to prove it. I emailed Jess Polka and wrote, WTF-- did you know about this? She was kind enough not to tease me about it. So yes, we want a diverse participatory ecosystem but not that kind of crowdsourcing. Thanks, Phil Davis, I fell for it. It's an interesting question, though-- why was it believable to me in the first place that Amazon would enable crowdsourced peer review of pre-prints?
AMY BRAND: In an upcoming piece in Our Knowledge Futures publication called "The Commonplace," my colleague Sarah Kember, who is a professor of new technologies of communication at Goldsmiths College and director of Goldsmiths Press, refers to this future dystopia in a way that I found really helpful. She writes, "Commercial platforms represent the next phase in the capitalization of knowledge, and tend towards replacing old monopolies for new-- the giants in the commercial journal publishing world, the tech giants such as Amazon and Google." And Sarah, by the way, is one of the smartest people I know thinking about these issues across the Academy, so I strongly suggest that you follow her work.
AMY BRAND: So as we look back to the future, it's fascinating to observe that three world-changing developments in the information sector are celebrating 20th anniversaries-- Crossref, Creative Commons, and Wikipedia. And back in October, I wrote a guest piece for The Scholarly Kitchen about the important role that Crossref plays, both as infrastructure and as convening body for our community.
AMY BRAND: I wrote the Crossref is in a truly unique position to scaffold enriched representations of digital scholarship and to serve in effect as a metadata commons. As Crossref enters a new decade under new leadership, will the community and its elected board allow that to happen? That remains to be seen. Creative Commons, where I am also on the board, is seeking new leadership and reflecting on its legacy and its future after 20 years in operation.
AMY BRAND: CC licenses are fundamental components of our more open infrastructures, and there are significant opportunities for greater interoperability between licensed metadata and other discovery systems. But another reason that I opted to invest some of my personal time in CC is because I see opportunities for the licenses themselves to evolve to better suit the practical needs of creators and publishers.
AMY BRAND: For example, do we need a more robust non-commercial license? I believe publishers should have the option to make content open without relinquishing control over how it is monetized downstream. When I publish an OA digital book, my business model for making it open in the first place includes a component of print or POD sales, as I explained earlier to the academic community. So if other entities or agents can compete with my print revenues-- which the current NC license does not prevent according to recent case law-- which I can go into in Q & A if you're familiar with the Great Minds vs. FedEx case-- it inadvertently hurts the mission by cannibalizing the sustainability of OA publication.
AMY BRAND: So that's a really interesting topic for a longer conversation. Another rule-changing open initiative is Wikipedia itself. What began as an experiment in collaboration became the world's most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of mostly reasoned interaction. So how is Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remain true to its original mission of free access to the sum of all human knowledge when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms?
AMY BRAND: What can we learn from this example, and how will the success story be replicated? And I should say, also stay tuned for a forthcoming MIT Press book on this very topic. And remember to donate to the Wikipedia cause at every opportunity if you care about the future of knowledge. Here's the Wikipedia page. And now for some closing reflections-- I'm in the midst of reading Robert Caro's fabulous biography of mid-century powerbroker and master builder Robert Moses.
AMY BRAND: And I'm finding really interesting analogies to the infrastructure challenges in today's information industry. During his rise to power in the early to mid 20th century, Moses built scores of public works-- expressways, bridges, apartments, parks, garages, playgrounds-- all without ever being elected to public office. So he did lots of good, but today he's blamed for many of the problems that are urban center's face, because his decisions typically favored highways and the wealthier people living in the suburbs over public transit from the inner city.
AMY BRAND: Can public good ever be provided without public voice and regulation? Now today at MIT and other leading research universities, we're in the midst of a pretty painful awakening to the corporatization of the academy and the role of private funding and private sector interests. To quote again from my brilliant friend Sarah Kember, "In the neoliberal context, market values dominate knowledge and culture as well as the economy." And to borrow a phrase from another MIT Press author, Marshall McLuhan, a name you'll recognize, sometimes the medium is the message.
AMY BRAND: So I recognize that we've navigated through clouds and weeds alike here during the last 45 minutes-- or 42 and 1/2-- such is the nature of this topic. But knowledge is, after all, the greatest legacy of human progress and our strongest ammunition in facing the world's urgent challenges. So the question we must all ask ourselves is, are the structures, markets, and incentives for disseminating academic knowledge today impeding or accelerating human flourishing?
AMY BRAND: And my goal today was to help you envision a future where the infrastructure to create, access, curate, and build upon knowledge is controlled by a village rather than a monolith. For myself, there are still many challenges that keep my brain churning at night when I probably should be sleeping. How will high-quality, sustainable, open access publishing ultimately work?
AMY BRAND: What will ultimately incentivize researchers to share their precious data? How should we define excellence and contribution in the production of new knowledge going forward? And is peer review and adequate quality control measure, and how can we make it better? After all, peer review is not really fact-checking. The people in all of our collaborations are especially important, and here is a snapshot of my own village, some of the intellectual partners that keep me away from monocultures and silos, and are a tremendous source of ongoing inspiration.
AMY BRAND: So over the course of the next few days, the various and sundry professionals at this conference will discuss topics such as big data, standards, the role of AI, OA mandates, privacy, digital humanities, preservation, altmetrics. Lost that. And these are some of the most exciting conversations the scholarly information community is grappling with today.
AMY BRAND: I, for one, am confident the best solutions will arrive through multi-stakeholder coordination-- as Todd said at the outset-- shared infrastructure, and open standards. So thank you for listening. It's been a real pleasure to speak with you on this Sunday afternoon in Baltimore. And now for what I hope is a really robust Q&A discussion. And I want to start off with my own question to the audiences-- have I made any enemies today?
AMY BRAND: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: We do have a decent amount of time for Q&A. We have two mics-- one here and one in the center. If you would like to come to a mic, you may do so. And if you would like to raise your hand, I will run the mic to you. Wow.
AMY BRAND: Wow. [INTERPOSING VOICES] OK, good.
SPEAKER 2: [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER 3: I'm just curious about your thoughts on why institutional repositories didn't take off-- as an example, where template panels would work. And what's there to learn from that?
AMY BRAND: Yeah, well, I think there's going to be a bit-- I'm hoping there's going to be a bit of a revival. But so from my experience, we did not expect that, from Harvard and then later at MIT, that when the faculty agreed to and voted to this commitment to make their work OA, they weren't actually going to do the work of putting their articles in the repository or transcribing metadata. And so we scrambled at Harvard.
AMY BRAND: We created a group of about 35 undergraduates, I think, to do all this handholding. But really what had to happen was the creation of a lot of interoperability among different systems that faculty were using to reduce the burden. If a faculty member was entering all this information into their faculty profile and their activity tracking system and God knows where else, it all really had to integrate.
AMY BRAND: And that's what I meant by a lack of university investment. And then, as I said, the other factor now was that the green OA vision was supplanted by a gold OA vision. But I think we lose a lot there. I was having this conversation with a friend recently, and she said, no, no gold OA is so much better, because the agreements that-- it's actually faculty-signed when they put stuff in our repository-- don't allow for all of these CC renews.
AMY BRAND: And that is true, but that could be addressed. Good question.
LISA ANGELO: Amy, thanks so much for getting us started with infrastructure. I think this room is like a geeked-out room about infrastructure. It's kind of exciting, because that's not usually the focus. So I'm Lisa Angelo at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I'm going to bring the Twitter track to this conversation. So there's been a large discussion going on as you've been speaking around-- sort of playing with the notions of what I'm going to summarize as open content and open infrastructure and the degree to which those are tied or separate concepts, because it seems like you can have open content running off certain kinds of closed infrastructure.
LISA ANGELO: Not calling you out, but we definitely can see that even in the projects you've showed us here today in the sense that the manuscript submission for QSS is manuscript central. But we've got open content going on. One can also imagine closed content running on open infrastructure.
AMY BRAND: For sure.
LISA ANGELO: For sure. And so, could you maybe say a little bit more about your vision of-- what I think you're going for in your vision is open content and open infrastructure-- but the degree to which you see those two things sort of obviously having to coexist, but also the choices that are being made for open content, but yet going, say, with closed infrastructure in certain cases.
AMY BRAND: Yeah, I am a pragmatist in all this. I'm not an ideologue. So I think those things can and should be separable. And I think what I'm going for is a vision of diversity in business models and in infrastructure. The reason that I was harping on the importance of-- well two things-- one, open infrastructure is because I'm concerned about the control of infrastructures that limit the innovation and creativity in creating kind of new tools and services to a particular group.
AMY BRAND: And the reason that I was saying that OA, in and of itself, is not enough is that we've seen that how gold OA has developed has not in any way disrupted the-- really, in some senses it's probably been good for some of the larger commercial players. That's not a bad thing. I just think that we have to be realistic about the fact that there may be consequences from how we're accomplishing open via infrastructure and potential downstream unintended consequences.
AMY BRAND: So that was my point. So I don't take issue with any of those Twitter comments. I think yes, you're absolutely right. And I would never-- for example, at the MIT Press say, you know, everything we publish has to be on an open platform. We launched our own e-book platform in partnership with Silverchair, and we're very happy. And some of the content on there is open, and some of it isn't.
AMY BRAND:
JOHN DOWD: Hi, I'm John Dowd. And for a dozen years, I helped the online encyclopedia know as Credo, which was a for-profit company and is actually has been sustainably profitable for about 12 years or something. I have nothing to do with the company anymore, but it's given me a lifelong interest in Wikipedia. And I've always been a big fan of Wikipedia. And I think it's a really interesting example in terms of thinking about NISO and standards and how it's not just what's written down in the standards, but it's the social organization that's around it, because if you look at the rules around wisdom of crowds-- which is that you should have independent units which don't have any biases and they should be summed up in a fair way.
JOHN DOWD: Wikipedia does not measure up very well for that. I mean, last in, first out is not a good summation mechanism. So in fact, what they've done is they managed to surround some of the rules they have-- and it's certainly true they still have biases that-- 80% or 90% of the editors are men and there's a highly euro-centric support to it. But they try to address those biases. And so there's a whole social organization around Wikipedia, which is what has allowed it to continue to grow and thrive.
JOHN DOWD: And there's a basic irony about a paradox about Wikipedia, which is that it has become reliable because it declares itself to be unreliable. And it's only so it doesn't inherit any reliability from itself. So if you wrote an entry that only referred to other Wikipedia entries, it would be dinged by the system itself. So I think there's some really interesting things in that whole arena that could be instructive for all of us.
AMY BRAND: I'm so glad that you made those comments, and I agree entirely. There's this concept that's sort of like public auditability of these-- which is extremely powerful. I often think about it as too-- I have three kids. And my youngest is 16, and she's in the middle of learning to drive. And she's scared, and I said, you know, all these people driving don't want to have an accident.
AMY BRAND: So there's relatively good behavior. I mean, bad things happen. But I see the way in which the community functions in Wikipedia that way too.
SARAH: Hey, Amy. It's Sarah from PLOS.
AMY BRAND: Good to see you.
SARAH: Good to see you. Thank you for a really important kickoff to the conference. Something that you kept coming back to-- but I just wanted you to go into more so I'm raising it now-- you mentioned the words control and systems. And all of this is leading to the question of the unintended consequences of not thinking these things through. And so I was wondering if you could elaborate more on what those are, because I think you hit on some of the ones that are going to help us nerd out in this room, but I think there's some unintended consequences that are much more scary in a deeper sense, particularly given the kind of paradigm we're living in now.
SARAH: Do you want to speak to any of those, or are you not really interested--
AMY BRAND: Sure, [INAUDIBLE] I mentioned Claudio Aspesi, who's a consultant who's been working with SPARC. He and I have written a paper-- we're waiting to hear from Science. We hope it gets in-- about that topic. Basically what we modeled out that was very likely to happen is now that we're sort of at NISO end phase, the vision of ANIs on steroids, that you would have these siloed disciplinary communities based on full text, and all these services built around them that would tend to lock in professional societies, potentially discourage some of this cross-disciplinary stuff that happens in Science because these communities would be so robust.
AMY BRAND: You can build in all kinds of functionality into them on the basis of the full text. I think that is the big computation applied to big data and full text. And what could potentially emerge in terms of siloed services was one of the things that we're worried about. And we wanted to put it out there. You know, and I had to be really careful to say, OK, if somebody goes and does that, more power to them.
AMY BRAND: I think for me, because I was talking about the life cycle and the relationship between academic careers, the thing that I worry about most is how these things impact the evaluation of excellence in the production of new knowledge. And anything that's kind of locking that in is, I think, very problematic to academia. And part of the reason why I love the vision of more of a open metadata commons based on Crossref or perhaps something else-- there's a really interesting initiative out of Australian called lens.org-- is the possibility of allowing universities to devise their own metrics according to the needs of specific fields.
AMY BRAND: Great question. Thank you.
WILLIAM GUNN: Hey, elites-- William Gunn, director of Scholarly Communications at Elsevier. My personal interest in infrastructure and awareness of this dynamic that you were painting between community-owned projects and private for-profit enterprises versus non-profit ones started with Mendeley and working at Mendeley. And around the same time Mendeley started, there was this project in the US called VIVO that also wanted to make this a national network of scholars.
WILLIAM GUNN: And I've always been kind of fascinated, and the question of well--
AMY BRAND: What happened there?
WILLIAM GUNN: What was it-- yeah, what happened there? What was it about?
AMY BRAND: Yeah, I mean, that's a really good example. And that's kind of what I meant by inadequate university investment. One of the things that I tried to do at Digital Science was work on these two open solutions for faculty profiles, one being VIVO, the other being Harvard Catalyst. And we created a service provider thing around that. But there were very few universities-- Duke is one that comes to mind-- where the provost and head of IT and the head of IR and the libraries all said, we're going to work together and try to make this happen.
AMY BRAND: Most universities don't have that kind of coordination and the requisite investment to make something like that work. I mean, that's an oversimplification, because there are other cultural issues around faculties in different fields. But I think we need to give these kinds of, again, homegrown university-initiated initiatives a chance by investing more in them.
WILLIAM GUNN: Can I have just a small follow-up?
AMY BRAND: Yeah.
WILLIAM GUNN: So a lot of what I have seen is that-- it has to do with kind of who is-- where the locus of control is, so to speak. And we have these community-led projects-- like VIVO or like some of the institutional repository projects or even standards-- you have a group of people that are the core people that are really making the decisions, that are making everything work.
WILLIAM GUNN: And it's a community project, and it's open. But there's really a core. And the locus of control-- when you think of a for-profit organization, it's more centralized. The control is-- there's literally a CEO who's literally making all the decisions. When do you think it is that the-- or what are the factors for these more open community-based things to actually take off?
WILLIAM GUNN: What needs to be there?
AMY BRAND: Yeah, so there are two different open things. And the one that I'm more interested in is the one where the control is coming from research institutions themselves in roles with power that probably doesn't exist yet, which is why we're kind of trying to make the case of, you can't put it all on the shoulder of the librarian. I mean, they don't have access to enough budget. And these meetings in which you have the CIO and librarians sort of provosts, no one's making the decision.
AMY BRAND: What does ownership look like there? And I think we have to create that and make a case for that. I think in that community space, that is a good question, and I'll just explain what I think as opposed to what I'm seeing in IOI. So in working with the SPARC folks and folks in IOI, I think they have this vision that we need to create this backbone organization. So it's a very top down model, and it's going to get all the funding.
AMY BRAND: It already has all these great partnerships with funders. And it's going to curate what projects happen, and it's going to distribute money. That terrifies me-- one, because it's so top-heavy administratively. But also, I don't think it's organic to how universities and these projects work. And so what we've been saying in the KFG world has been, we're going to let this develop somewhat organically.
AMY BRAND: We're going to have this kind of loose confederation of organizations and universities that are working on this stuff. And over time, we're going to kind of bootstrap into what can make this work. One of the other things that I'd really like to do-- and Claudio is working on a project for us-- is we want to do this-- basically, let's take stock.
AMY BRAND: Let's look back at all of the examples in the past of multi-institutional collaborations that have worked well and those that have filled dismally, and see what we can learn from them. I mean, we know that libraries combine consortially. We have some success with Duraspace, and there's some other examples too. But I think we have to understand what is it that's going to allow institutions to pool resources and make this happen.
WILLIAM GUNN: Thanks.
AMY BRAND: Thanks.
SPEAKER 1: There's time for one more. If you've got something burning in your brain, now is the time. Ah, there we go. Awesome.
MICHELLE: I thank you for a very nice talk. I'm Michelle from Research Square, which is a relatively new pre-print platform. So my question is around badging and tagging, which you mentioned several times. I agree with your statement that peer review is not fact-checking. And to me it's not adequate anymore, because we're capable of more now. And so I'm just interested to hear what you think.
MICHELLE: What sorts of badges and tags are going to contribute in the most meaningful way now?
AMY BRAND: Yeah, that's a good question. So with a PRT project, what we envisioned was, because of what we learned from the credit taxonomy, it's very-- you know, it's of like the perfect is the enemy of the good. There's only so far we're going to get with describing types of peer review, and there are many different types of peer review. But if we could capture open versus closed, open report versus open identity, the number of people involved, what was peer reviewed and for what purpose, in some machine-readable way, then you're giving the tools to the reader or the integration of the discovery service to make that usable information.
AMY BRAND: That's as far as we got. We did not get to, we're going to make peer review itself better. We want to make it visible to the community so that-- essentially it does two things. It helps authors promote the rigor of their work. And it helps readers and discoverers that-- for a certain level of peer review-- that is of interest to them.
AMY BRAND:
SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Amy. Everybody give her one more round of applause. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: I am going to introduce Marian Hollingsworth. Marian Hollingsworth is the Director of Editorial Publisher Relations at Web of Science Group and is our NISO Board Chair '19 to '20. And she is going to introduce our keynote. So thank you. [APPLAUSE]
MARIAN HOLLINGSWORTH: Good afternoon, everyone. It's so great to be here. Amy Brand, PhD, is Director of the MIT Press and co-founder of the MIT Knowledge Futures Group which develops open knowledge infrastructure. She has played a seminal role in transformative scholarly communications initiatives, such as ORCID, CRediT, and peer review transparency. Previously, Amy held positions at Digital Science, Harvard, and Crossref.
MARIAN HOLLINGSWORTH: She currently serves on the boards of Creative Commons, Crossref, the Open Syllabus Project, and the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information, among many other directorships. She studied linguistics and cognitive science and also dabbles in documentary film. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Brand. [APPLAUSE]
AMY BRAND: Wow. It's really wonderful to be here and to be honored by delivering the opening keynote at the very first NISO Plus conference. It's really a luxury, too. I know what Todd said about, this is all conversation and not presentation. But he also told me to talk for 45 minutes. [LAUGHTER] So we'll have some conversation afterwards, but it's been a chance to synthesize many of the things that I've been thinking about over the last few years, and for such a terrific audience of friends and colleagues.
AMY BRAND: That this is the very first NISO Plus conference makes all of us, in a sense, pioneers-- working on the information frontier at a time when trust and facts and evidence are an increasingly precious currency. So NISO is an organization that thrives by bringing together diverse constituencies, as Todd said, in the information sector-- seek common ground, create an ever-stronger union of publishers and libraries and universities, government agencies and associations, along with other content and technology specialists.
AMY BRAND: So I see this conference as a celebration of coexistence and of partnership, including private-public partnerships, and of what we can all accomplish working together. You'll also see in my slides, this opportunity satisfies my collage-making impulses. [LAUGHTER] Healthy, resilient ecosystems require cross-pollination. And today, I'll be talking about the importance of diversified distributed infrastructures and how seemingly divergent stakeholders and models ideally interoperate in our print-optional, post-truth world, because I've received some very real risks from consolidation in the sector, from privatization of community-based solutions, and from, frankly, reductionist approaches to our current challenges and opportunities in research information.
AMY BRAND: To borrow an analogy from my colleague, Travis Rich, how do we avoid creating monocultures within our research and publishing ecosystems? How can we better anticipate the future consequences of the business models and policies that we adopt? So we've made tremendous progress on open access and open data. Obviously, still a ways to go.
AMY BRAND: But open for its own sake is not enough for a thriving knowledge ecosystem. I think we all know that. And I say this as an actively pro-OA publisher. If technology today is power, we have yet to address who controls the systems that host the open content. We have yet to think through the longer-term consequences of an all-open world.
AMY BRAND: How will commercial models and entities evolve around openly-licensed full text and data? What might go wrong? And what infrastructures, models, and licenses might help us avoid possible dystopian scenarios? So when Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, his intention initially was to enable researchers to share their work.
AMY BRAND: But not only have our research communication tools thus far fallen short of leveraging all the linking and access and decentralized authority that the Web makes possible, but the history of the Web itself reminds us that making vast amounts of linked data readily accessible to third parties can trigger a number of unintended consequences. The success of a limited number of social networks, shopping services, and search engines shows us that internet platforms based on data and analytics tend towards monopoly.
AMY BRAND: And to stretch the analogy that I began with, the crop in this particular monoculture is advertising revenues. So for all of us here, whether we work for a commercial or a non-profit entity or an association or a government agency, we do this work because we care deeply about the knowledge enterprise and the imperative to promote trust and transparency in research communication.
AMY BRAND: OK. So where do words that begin with the letter "I" enter into this narrative? When thinking about the title of this talk, the "I-word" that was very much on my mind-- and I know I'm not alone in this-- was "impeachment." [LAUGHTER] What mind-bending journeys it has been through all the alternative fact landscapes around impeachment.
AMY BRAND: But that now seems like a distant memory. It's only been three weeks since the Senate acquittal of Donald Trump, but that was yesterday. With all the other salient news developments-- for example, the coronavirus epidemic. It was fascinating to follow developments recently on social media when bioRxiv posted a preprint connecting coronavirus to HIV. The community rallied quickly.
AMY BRAND: The article was withdrawn and the site now contains a disclaimer to the effect that treating preprints like peer-reviewed articles is not a good idea. bioRxiv, by the way, is also involved in piloting refereeing preprints. So I think they're a good player in all of this. But that begs the question, how are journalists and members of the public to know that preprints aren't typically peer reviewed, let alone fact checked?
AMY BRAND: Which speaks to the need for some form of peer-review badging or tagging on research publications. And I'm going to come back to that later in my talk. Another I-word on my mind, predictably, was information itself-- the lifeblood of this community, of higher learning, and of functioning democracies. The struggle for control over information and knowledge today looms large everywhere that we turn.
AMY BRAND: I don't think the work of information professionals has ever been so critical or fraught at any other point in history. But to keep a light tone with this, what with disinformation, misinformation, and tribal epistemologies in which information is evaluated not on the basis of evidence, but rather on whether or not it is good for our side, or some commercial interest, like a pharmaceutical or fossil fuel company.
AMY BRAND: And tribalism, by the way, also applies to some of the ideology around open access. And that's another point that I'll come back to. I think there's some irony too that in our era of information abundance, ever-increasing, seamless access to scholarship and science, the basic challenges around getting trusted research content to a target readership for its intended purpose and impact are more complex for publishers and information services than ever before in our efforts to accelerate discovery and promote credibility in scientific information.
AMY BRAND: And these are just some of the issues and familiar bits of infrastructure-- metadata, standards, licenses, identifiers, metrics-- that factor into research dissemination today. So it's exciting to be part of a professional community that is always experimenting with new solutions to intelligize published content. And by the way, we all love our print books. They remain the bedrock, at least for me, of university press publishing and certainly of our revenue base.
AMY BRAND: At the same time, we know that e-book platforms and markets have yet to live up to their full potential. And that's why the I-word that I'm actually focusing on today is "infrastructure." Specifically, the technologies that are driving the transformation of knowledge and the tools in our evolving research communication ecosystem. If the truth wars have taught us nothing else, they've shown us how inextricable information is from the systems that deliver it.
AMY BRAND: So let's do a deeper dive now into the concept of infrastructure and why we're all talking about it, because it has become such a buzzword. I'm just going to take a drink. So in first-world countries, infrastructures are the things that we have the luxury to take somewhat for granted, like the roads that we drive on or the grids that deliver our electricity.
AMY BRAND: It says here, "The basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society or an enterprise." A quick little detour-- when I was putting this together, it struck me now that my interest in this is not so very different from my lifelong fascination with how the mind structures information and how language structures meaning.
AMY BRAND: As a middle school kid, my favorite thing, believe it or not, was diagramming sentences with their parts of speech. So there's some continuity, at least in hindsight, in my ending up doing a PhD on the cognitive science of language and that I'm here talking to you about information infrastructures. But back to knowledge.
AMY BRAND: In that domain, "infrastructure" refers to, of course, the underlying systems and standards and practices-- licenses, business models, the internet, even the cloud. It's what connects research labs, data, computers, and people with the goal of creating and sharing knowledge. Of course, systems and networks vary according to how centralized or decentralized they are, both in terms of architecture and in terms of ownership and control.
AMY BRAND: Large-scale, centralized systems can be very efficient, but they also tend to be less transparent. Theyr'e more of a black box. Decentralized or distributed architecture, and blockchain as one example, require data, protocols, governance, standards to enable interoperability. So open standards like those that NISO helps develop rely on a broadly consultative and inclusive process with representation from vendors, academics, and others with a stake in the development of interoperable platforms and solutions.
AMY BRAND: So when I refer to science in this talk, by the way, I really mean science as a public and democratic knowledge-making process. This is a phrase that I'm borrowing from an MIT anthropologist named Susan Silbey. So not excluding other forms of scholarship, like the humanities or the social sciences. The future of science is in many ways already here, and it relies on distributed networks, varied stakeholders, publishers, and vendors.
AMY BRAND: Yes, but also startups and librarians and funders and museums and other organizations that serve the public good. Our infrastructures and how we use them to build knowledge will further shape our futures. So let's take a look now at what makes community-based solutions more feasible today and where that work is happening. And another really weighty question that I'll come back to is, what is the role of universities themselves in all of this?
AMY BRAND: The academy has historically relied on centralized forms of credentialing, certification, and publishing. From the perspective of authors and readers over hundreds of years, the physical act of publishing was really something of a black box-- unedited material one side, peer-reviewed, printed, ideally saleable product of the other.
AMY BRAND: This is a crude oversimplification. But one depiction of academic publishing in the internet age is blowing apart that black box. And the building blocks within-- the things that publishers do, like layout and design, peer review, and copy editing-- can at least be partially unbundled. This is what leads to the expectation of greater transparency-- a greater speed in publishing, a different distribution of costs.
AMY BRAND: For example, authors can do their on page layout, and they do that all the time now. And libraries can host digital copies of researchers' publications locally. And that's happening everywhere. Data and protocols can be broadly disseminated, supporting reproducibility. So there have been tremendous advances in open science as a result. And yet, entrenched academic norms and publishing models remain a countervailing force when it comes to taking full advantage of what's really possible here.
AMY BRAND: So on many campuses, especially in science labs, these building blocks engender homegrown research tools-- solutions like Authorea, which is now part of Wiley, but which was birthed at the Harvard Seamless Astronomy Group-- or all the companies that became part of Digital Science where I used to work-- readcube, Altmetric, Figshare, and Overleaf, and others.
AMY BRAND: Commercial investment and ownership is one way that these innovative solutions become sustainable, and ideally, profitable. But there's also a hell of a lot happening in the nonprofit and open source tool space. Last year, the MIT Press issued a Mellon-funded report for the benefit of the community surveying the literally dozens-- I think it was something like 80 open source publishing tools in existence at that time, and there are even more now.
AMY BRAND: With so much activity in this space, I'll just cover a few examples you've probably heard of. You've no doubt heard of the Center for Open Science which has developed a variety of software tools, workflows, and data storage solutions called the Open Science Framework. They also promote, which is dear to my heart, the use of open science badges, such as for open data materials and protocols.
AMY BRAND: So consider the power in this approach. As an extreme example, would Theranos have been able to attract the same level of trust and investment if the marginal journals in which Elizabeth Holmes and colleagues published various results had been obligated to badge for pre-registered protocols, open data, and peer review? I think that's an interesting question. Another important infrastructure initiative is COAR, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, which is aiming to build a sustainable, inclusive, and trusted global network based on OA repositories.
AMY BRAND: And this strikes me as, in some way, the successor to the original ARL share vision of many years ago, if you remember that. And the share still exists, but in a somewhat different form. There's also a new initiative called Invest in Open Infrastructure, or IOI, to support open source tools. And a good deal of community support around this effort. And in talking with Kristen Ratan and others leading the charge, it sounds like the goal is to become a central clearinghouse or re-granting program for funding and curating open source projects.
AMY BRAND: And then there is significant federal investment in open knowledge infrastructure. In 2018, the NSF launched a generously-funded accelerator track to enable the creation of, quote, "non-proprietary shared knowledge infrastructure available to all stakeholders, including the researchers who will help push this technology further." An OKN requires a non-proprietary public-private development effort that spans the entire data science community and will result in an open and shared infrastructure.
AMY BRAND: There are several projects now competing for the final prize-- I think 10 of them on various campuses around the country. A very different sort of public-private partnership is something called RoRI, Leiden, and Sheffield University's Digital Science and the Wellcome Trust recently launched the Research on Research Institute to organize and support more metascience research across stakeholder groups.
AMY BRAND: And I borrowed this particular slide with permission from Ludo Waltman and James Wilson, who are part of RoRI. Because it's really fascinating to me to see how much the Research on Research in universities is happening within the social sciences and humanities. And that's the concentrated [INAUDIBLE].. And by the way, these are the people who write books, which is very good for my business. And I'll show you some of those later.
AMY BRAND: So meta-research-- metascience deepens our understanding of the incentives and organizational dynamics within the academy. And in work that I'm doing in collaboration with Christine Borgman of UCLA, we are surveying the level of coordination or lack of coordination in distributed university systems. Not only scholarly communications, but also academic appointments, course management, library catalogs, archiving, data warehousing, and so on.
AMY BRAND: And we expect to turn this work into a call for greater university investment and new institutional leadership roles with requisite budgetary control. So libraries and presses are part of this picture to be sure, but they are not the entirety. And after decades of working in different quadrants of the knowledge ecosystem, I personally envision a much larger role for institutional leadership here.
AMY BRAND: Again, I am thirsty. So universities are the locus of empirical research and critical enquiry. They contain libraries, and some have university presses. But they have historically under-invested in capturing and communicating the knowledge being created on their campuses. They've outsourced much of the relevant infrastructure, including the standards upon which academic reputations are judged.
AMY BRAND: Owning technology is a form of control. And I'm not alone in believing that it behooves institutional leaders today to explore the implications of commercial control of research data, analytics, and infrastructure, along with the potential for community-owned alternatives. And a recent SPARC white paper by Claudio Aspesi makes related points.
AMY BRAND: So now that we've set the broader scene and surveyed many of these important developments, I'll drill down into what we're doing at the MIT Press to contribute momentum towards these advances. Yes, it's a bit of a juggling act. So I myself really do two things at MIT. One is running the publishing company that outputs about 300 books a year and 40 journals.
AMY BRAND: And the other is partnering with the academic community to create the knowledge tools and services of the future. And these two things are closely intertwined, because we're a university press with no endowment and we strive daily to balance our mission to produce excellent, impactful content with the imperative to sustain our own operations on the basis of what we know are unsustainable business models. So we have to be thinking about the future.
AMY BRAND: So on the one hand, our work at Knowledge Futures at MIT is about the content we publish in book and journal form. And last week, we proudly launched a new journal called Quantitative Science Studies, which is the OA flip version of a journal that was previously published in Elsevier. It's the official journal of the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics, and it publishes theoretical and empirical research on science and the scientific workforce.
AMY BRAND: And as I mentioned, we also do a lot of book publishing on these topics-- the topics of knowledge, media, and information. And I'm reminded every day of what a tremendous privilege it is to run such an edgy publishing company and how powerfully books continue to rock our world. I feel a profound responsibility to use this perch as publisher at the MIT Press for whatever good that I can. But the business of academic book publishing was once a lot more simple.
AMY BRAND: Our monographs used to sell thousands of copies, because libraries used to buy print books. And speaking of infrastructure, until recently, we were able to afford our own warehouse and distribution services in partnership with two other universities in the Northeast. In a move that has made some waves recently, beginning July 1, the MIT Press will be distributed by Penguin Random House, the largest publisher on the planet.
AMY BRAND: We're doing this because an efficient supply chain in the Amazon era means scale and interoperability at a whole new level. So business models are formative structure too, and we're experimenting there actively-- a lot around open access. We recently received a generous grant from the Arcadia Fund to develop and openly disseminate a durable financial framework for OA monographs.
AMY BRAND: And we also receive direct subsidy from the MIT libraries for OA textbooks and trade books. In order to maximize readership for scholarly monographs which remain a requirement for tenure in many fields, we believe it is more sustainable to publish them OA with subsidy upfront from a university or funder or some yet-to-be-created organization to offset production and marketing costs while continuing to sell print according to whatever the demand may be.
AMY BRAND: Now, our work on new models extends into technology as well with the Knowledge Futures Group that originally formed as a partnership between the MIT Press and the Media Lab. I talked earlier about a range of open infrastructure efforts across the community. But what makes the KFG stand out is our vision of university on infrastructure and cross-institutional consortia.
AMY BRAND: Our twofold goal with the KFG is to incubate homegrown solutions and to spark a movement towards greater institutional investment and knowledge infrastructure. One core service in the KFG today is the PubPub platform. Another is the Underlay open knowledge graph, which I don't have time to go into. PubPub is a turnkey open publishing solution with collaborative editing, rich media, annotation, versioning, and it's intended to support publishing as a community-driven activity.
AMY BRAND: You can host books on it, journals, conference proceedings-- really any type of content. And we use it at the MIT Press in a variety of ways. For example, it runs our new full-featured open journal, The Harvard Data Science Review. HDSR is the OA platform of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, which has a mission to elevate the profile of data science as a scientifically-rigorous field. And I circled here an application of the credit contributor role taxonomy, which I'll talk a little bit more about.
AMY BRAND: And there's a session about credit tomorrow as well. I don't know who clearly you can see the contributor roles in there, but you'll be hearing about them at this conference. HDSR also makes good use of PubPub's capability to embed interactive visualizations and a range of other media. On the book side, we use the platform at the MIT Press to experiment with early community review on books that we eventually publish in print, like this book called Data Feminism.
AMY BRAND: Because it's really early days experimenting with community review, we don't substitute community review from our traditional peer review. But we've found that it's been really interesting to have both of these streams of input, and the authors have really appreciated it. Another application that's related is something that we call Works in Progress, where we don't make a publishing decision at the MIT Press until the work has been out in the wild for community review for some time.
AMY BRAND: And so this work, Open Knowledge Institutions, with multiple authors-- I don't know if people can read that, but you'll recognize names like Cameron Neylon and Cassidy Sugimoto. It has been out in the open for some time. And we are now-- now that it's matured and has gone through lots of commentary and review, we're going to be publishing it as a print book at the MIT Press.
AMY BRAND: So not too surprisingly, we're seeing demand for the platform from other publishers and institutions. The American Psychological Association just launched an OA journal on PubPub called Technology, Mind, and Behavior. The American Astronomical Society launched their new bulletin on the platform recently as well. And several universities have homegrown OA journals on the platform, like the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law & Policy.
AMY BRAND: And I could go on with many such examples, but I'm probably overdoing it already. MIT's own node in the Knowledge Futures network-- just getting off the ground. Because again, this is supposed to be a network where institutions have nodes and participate and contribute resources of various kinds, like people, or code, or potentially even money. But there are a couple of nodes to start, and one is MIT itself.
AMY BRAND: We are establishing the MIT Open Publishing Services, MITOPS. So it's a new operating unit that supports community publishing at MIT and beyond. And it aligns with that vision of unbundled publishing services that I described earlier with those colorful building blocks. The concept isn't new. There are other university presses, for example, who have publishing service units.
AMY BRAND: Michigan does. North Carolina does. But the combination of PubPub with traditional service offerings, like peer review and EDP I think makes the service unique. So Workflow's standards and metadata are infrastructure too. And KFG-affiliated ASAPbio, which was founded by Jessica Polka, is working on a range of innovations in peer review.
AMY BRAND: Reimagine review as a registry of platforms and experiments innovating around peer review of scientific outputs, and through a partnership called the New Commons, is offering peer review on preprints, which I mentioned earlier, prior to journal submission. And you can see the very first case of this now in bioRxiv. In fact, I think that was announced on February 4. A related project is the Peer Review Transparency project that we launched in 2018 with funding from the Open Society Foundations.
AMY BRAND: And the original impetus was to address misconceptions about the rigor of OA journals and presses in the face of predatory publishing. My colleague Mark Edington, who was at Amherst College Press at the time-- he was having a hard time getting an all-OA press off the ground because of the bias against OA publishing. If badging can help separate credibility from publisher and journal brand, it lessens disincentives in the academic community to publish OA.
AMY BRAND: So Mark sketched out some preliminary icons, which you can see here. And what needs to happen now is that-- actually, what NISO does best, a community-driven standards process around a taxonomy of types of peer review. So if there are any takers in the audience, please talk to me afterwards. There's a lot of work yet to be done, although I'm told that MECA-- the manuscript exchange common approach, which is a common way to transfer manuscripts between and among submission systems-- already includes some XML 4 review types, so that's a start.
AMY BRAND: Contributor role tagging, which I pointed to earlier in the context of the Harvard Data Science Review, is another example of taxonomy and standards. And you'll hear more about this in a session tomorrow with my colleague Gabe Hart and others. But I want to tell you briefly about how it came about, because it speaks to this ecosystem perspective.
AMY BRAND: So I was working on tenured promotion at Harvard several years ago, and I was reviewing the tenure case of an outstanding last statistician, someone considered to be the leading methodologist in his field. And I observed that his list of publications had him as middle author consistently on everything he published. And I knew from experience that this did not bode well for his tenure case.
AMY BRAND: And this often happened for methodologists. So wouldn't it be much better, I thought, if his publication record captured that he was consistently lead contributor on statistical methods? That was, after all, his field which he was being evaluated in. So a group of publishers and funders who were collaborating on the launch of "Work It" at the time, including Liz Allen-- a very new comer-- and others, undertook a significant community effort to build a 14-role taxonomy.
AMY BRAND: It was quickly adopted by the PLOS. And now Elsevier-- beginning with Cell Press, but I think there are other parts of Elsevier, and several publishers use it on hundreds of journals. It was endorsed by the president of the National Academy of Sciences last year, and it is included in part in JATS4R, although I think this is just the start of really incorporating that kind of taxonomy into our standards.
AMY BRAND: But this speaks to the power of infrastructure to enrich the research record and fundamentally shift conversations about authorship and attribution. After all, who gets credit for research and discovery that can have a huge impact on people's lives? So this academic life cycle-- the interplay among authorship, diverse measures of impact, and academic career advancement-- are especially fascinating to me and are what have animated my personal creative journey.
AMY BRAND: And it continues to be such a pleasure and privilege to partner with others in this multi-faceted community who are motivated by the same fundamental questions. So we've covered a lot of ground here. I want to acknowledge that. And I'd now like to shift gears and look back to the future, as it were, returning to the issue that I mentioned at the outset-- the unintended consequences of our infrastructure choices.
AMY BRAND: A brief history of the open access movement I think will be instructive. So in 1994, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad posted a subversive proposal to a mailing list, calling on researchers to make copies of all of their published papers freely available on the internet. But the term open access wasn't introduced until 2001 by the drafters of the Budapest open Access Initiative, Peter Suber among them.
AMY BRAND: When it started gaining steam in the early naughts, the open access movement focused on [INAUDIBLE],, self-archiving, which as you all know involves a researcher uploading a version of a paper to a subject or institutional repository archive in physics already existent at that time. Harvard launched the first US self-archiving policy in 2008. I wanted to be part of this new movement towards greater institutional roles and scholarly communication.
AMY BRAND: And so I left Crossref, where I'd been one of the earliest employees, to manage the Harvard Scholar Communications Project. At the time, the agreements that most publishers had their authors sign did not contain barriers to self-archiving, by which I mean the copyright transfer payments. And so this outlook for green or university-owned OA was pretty sunny and optimistic.
AMY BRAND: But institutional repositories have been really slow to realize their full potential and to create robust, academy-owned records of scholarship. We're not there yet. On the one hand, it's really tough to corral faculty. I learned this very early on in the Harvard job, and I'm sure many of you who work in libraries with depositories know that.
AMY BRAND: But on the other hand, universities haven't mustered the requisite level of financial and technical investment or cross-institution collaboration. As well, shifting publisher policies on self-archiving played a big role. Consider that the original 2004 Elsevier policy required no embargoes on self-archiving. In later years, 90% of Elsevier journals would have embargo periods of 12 months or more, and many other publishers and societies followed suit.
AMY BRAND: And I'm sure they had good reasons to do so. But at the same time that new pay-to-publish-- or gold-- journals emerged, larger publishers upped their investments and services to manage research workflows, metadata, and analytics. These developments significantly slowed institutional cooperation on open access and shared infrastructure. And when I'm feeling more cynical, I would go so far as to say it was a very successful divide and conquer strategy in the scholarly communication space.
AMY BRAND: So what do I mean by open is not enough? There are still growing pains in Plan S. There's the developing OSTP policy here in the US-- neither of which I'll go into unless we want to talk about it during the Q & A. Suffice it to say that open is not enough on its own when it comes to truly open knowledge. Libraries and publishers have every reason to be proud of transformative deals with read-and-publish provisions and discounted APCs-- what I gather is now called pure publish.
AMY BRAND: So why do I find myself worrying about the consequences of most-favored-nation deals and their impact on academic freedom when it comes to where authors are incentivized to publish their work? I also find myself wondering whether the mining of open text and data will result in further consolidation by enabling the creation of topic-based silos by bigger publishers at the expense of societies and institutions.
AMY BRAND: So as open gains ground, the research community needs to be alert to potential unintended consequences and to invest in alternative solutions and efforts to avoid future monopolies over research content, infrastructure, and analytics. If you want to read about the pros and cons of open access, there's no better place than SSP's Scholarly Kitchen. And so just for fun and a little self-effacement, I'll confess here that for a whole five minutes, I believed this 2018 April Fool's Scholarly Kitchen posting.
AMY BRAND: And I actually have an email to prove it. I emailed Jess Polka and wrote, WTF-- did you know about this? She was kind enough not to tease me about it. So yes, we want a diverse participatory ecosystem but not that kind of crowdsourcing. Thanks, Phil Davis, I fell for it. It's an interesting question, though-- why was it believable to me in the first place that Amazon would enable crowdsourced peer review of pre-prints?
AMY BRAND: In an upcoming piece in Our Knowledge Futures publication called "The Commonplace," my colleague Sarah Kember, who is a professor of new technologies of communication at Goldsmiths College and director of Goldsmiths Press, refers to this future dystopia in a way that I found really helpful. She writes, "Commercial platforms represent the next phase in the capitalization of knowledge, and tend towards replacing old monopolies for new-- the giants in the commercial journal publishing world, the tech giants such as Amazon and Google." And Sarah, by the way, is one of the smartest people I know thinking about these issues across the Academy, so I strongly suggest that you follow her work.
AMY BRAND: So as we look back to the future, it's fascinating to observe that three world-changing developments in the information sector are celebrating 20th anniversaries-- Crossref, Creative Commons, and Wikipedia. And back in October, I wrote a guest piece for The Scholarly Kitchen about the important role that Crossref plays, both as infrastructure and as convening body for our community.
AMY BRAND: I wrote the Crossref is in a truly unique position to scaffold enriched representations of digital scholarship and to serve in effect as a metadata commons. As Crossref enters a new decade under new leadership, will the community and its elected board allow that to happen? That remains to be seen. Creative Commons, where I am also on the board, is seeking new leadership and reflecting on its legacy and its future after 20 years in operation.
AMY BRAND: CC licenses are fundamental components of our more open infrastructures, and there are significant opportunities for greater interoperability between licensed metadata and other discovery systems. But another reason that I opted to invest some of my personal time in CC is because I see opportunities for the licenses themselves to evolve to better suit the practical needs of creators and publishers.
AMY BRAND: For example, do we need a more robust non-commercial license? I believe publishers should have the option to make content open without relinquishing control over how it is monetized downstream. When I publish an OA digital book, my business model for making it open in the first place includes a component of print or POD sales, as I explained earlier to the academic community. So if other entities or agents can compete with my print revenues-- which the current NC license does not prevent according to recent case law-- which I can go into in Q & A if you're familiar with the Great Minds vs. FedEx case-- it inadvertently hurts the mission by cannibalizing the sustainability of OA publication.
AMY BRAND: So that's a really interesting topic for a longer conversation. Another rule-changing open initiative is Wikipedia itself. What began as an experiment in collaboration became the world's most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of mostly reasoned interaction. So how is Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remain true to its original mission of free access to the sum of all human knowledge when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms?
AMY BRAND: What can we learn from this example, and how will the success story be replicated? And I should say, also stay tuned for a forthcoming MIT Press book on this very topic. And remember to donate to the Wikipedia cause at every opportunity if you care about the future of knowledge. Here's the Wikipedia page. And now for some closing reflections-- I'm in the midst of reading Robert Caro's fabulous biography of mid-century powerbroker and master builder Robert Moses.
AMY BRAND: And I'm finding really interesting analogies to the infrastructure challenges in today's information industry. During his rise to power in the early to mid 20th century, Moses built scores of public works-- expressways, bridges, apartments, parks, garages, playgrounds-- all without ever being elected to public office. So he did lots of good, but today he's blamed for many of the problems that are urban center's face, because his decisions typically favored highways and the wealthier people living in the suburbs over public transit from the inner city.
AMY BRAND: Can public good ever be provided without public voice and regulation? Now today at MIT and other leading research universities, we're in the midst of a pretty painful awakening to the corporatization of the academy and the role of private funding and private sector interests. To quote again from my brilliant friend Sarah Kember, "In the neoliberal context, market values dominate knowledge and culture as well as the economy." And to borrow a phrase from another MIT Press author, Marshall McLuhan, a name you'll recognize, sometimes the medium is the message.
AMY BRAND: So I recognize that we've navigated through clouds and weeds alike here during the last 45 minutes-- or 42 and 1/2-- such is the nature of this topic. But knowledge is, after all, the greatest legacy of human progress and our strongest ammunition in facing the world's urgent challenges. So the question we must all ask ourselves is, are the structures, markets, and incentives for disseminating academic knowledge today impeding or accelerating human flourishing?
AMY BRAND: And my goal today was to help you envision a future where the infrastructure to create, access, curate, and build upon knowledge is controlled by a village rather than a monolith. For myself, there are still many challenges that keep my brain churning at night when I probably should be sleeping. How will high-quality, sustainable, open access publishing ultimately work?
AMY BRAND: What will ultimately incentivize researchers to share their precious data? How should we define excellence and contribution in the production of new knowledge going forward? And is peer review and adequate quality control measure, and how can we make it better? After all, peer review is not really fact-checking. The people in all of our collaborations are especially important, and here is a snapshot of my own village, some of the intellectual partners that keep me away from monocultures and silos, and are a tremendous source of ongoing inspiration.
AMY BRAND: So over the course of the next few days, the various and sundry professionals at this conference will discuss topics such as big data, standards, the role of AI, OA mandates, privacy, digital humanities, preservation, altmetrics. Lost that. And these are some of the most exciting conversations the scholarly information community is grappling with today.
AMY BRAND: I, for one, am confident the best solutions will arrive through multi-stakeholder coordination-- as Todd said at the outset-- shared infrastructure, and open standards. So thank you for listening. It's been a real pleasure to speak with you on this Sunday afternoon in Baltimore. And now for what I hope is a really robust Q&A discussion. And I want to start off with my own question to the audiences-- have I made any enemies today?
AMY BRAND: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: We do have a decent amount of time for Q&A. We have two mics-- one here and one in the center. If you would like to come to a mic, you may do so. And if you would like to raise your hand, I will run the mic to you. Wow.
AMY BRAND: Wow. [INTERPOSING VOICES] OK, good.
SPEAKER 2: [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER 3: I'm just curious about your thoughts on why institutional repositories didn't take off-- as an example, where template panels would work. And what's there to learn from that?
AMY BRAND: Yeah, well, I think there's going to be a bit-- I'm hoping there's going to be a bit of a revival. But so from my experience, we did not expect that, from Harvard and then later at MIT, that when the faculty agreed to and voted to this commitment to make their work OA, they weren't actually going to do the work of putting their articles in the repository or transcribing metadata. And so we scrambled at Harvard.
AMY BRAND: We created a group of about 35 undergraduates, I think, to do all this handholding. But really what had to happen was the creation of a lot of interoperability among different systems that faculty were using to reduce the burden. If a faculty member was entering all this information into their faculty profile and their activity tracking system and God knows where else, it all really had to integrate.
AMY BRAND: And that's what I meant by a lack of university investment. And then, as I said, the other factor now was that the green OA vision was supplanted by a gold OA vision. But I think we lose a lot there. I was having this conversation with a friend recently, and she said, no, no gold OA is so much better, because the agreements that-- it's actually faculty-signed when they put stuff in our repository-- don't allow for all of these CC renews.
AMY BRAND: And that is true, but that could be addressed. Good question.
LISA ANGELO: Amy, thanks so much for getting us started with infrastructure. I think this room is like a geeked-out room about infrastructure. It's kind of exciting, because that's not usually the focus. So I'm Lisa Angelo at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I'm going to bring the Twitter track to this conversation. So there's been a large discussion going on as you've been speaking around-- sort of playing with the notions of what I'm going to summarize as open content and open infrastructure and the degree to which those are tied or separate concepts, because it seems like you can have open content running off certain kinds of closed infrastructure.
LISA ANGELO: Not calling you out, but we definitely can see that even in the projects you've showed us here today in the sense that the manuscript submission for QSS is manuscript central. But we've got open content going on. One can also imagine closed content running on open infrastructure.
AMY BRAND: For sure.
LISA ANGELO: For sure. And so, could you maybe say a little bit more about your vision of-- what I think you're going for in your vision is open content and open infrastructure-- but the degree to which you see those two things sort of obviously having to coexist, but also the choices that are being made for open content, but yet going, say, with closed infrastructure in certain cases.
AMY BRAND: Yeah, I am a pragmatist in all this. I'm not an ideologue. So I think those things can and should be separable. And I think what I'm going for is a vision of diversity in business models and in infrastructure. The reason that I was harping on the importance of-- well two things-- one, open infrastructure is because I'm concerned about the control of infrastructures that limit the innovation and creativity in creating kind of new tools and services to a particular group.
AMY BRAND: And the reason that I was saying that OA, in and of itself, is not enough is that we've seen that how gold OA has developed has not in any way disrupted the-- really, in some senses it's probably been good for some of the larger commercial players. That's not a bad thing. I just think that we have to be realistic about the fact that there may be consequences from how we're accomplishing open via infrastructure and potential downstream unintended consequences.
AMY BRAND: So that was my point. So I don't take issue with any of those Twitter comments. I think yes, you're absolutely right. And I would never-- for example, at the MIT Press say, you know, everything we publish has to be on an open platform. We launched our own e-book platform in partnership with Silverchair, and we're very happy. And some of the content on there is open, and some of it isn't.
AMY BRAND:
JOHN DOWD: Hi, I'm John Dowd. And for a dozen years, I helped the online encyclopedia know as Credo, which was a for-profit company and is actually has been sustainably profitable for about 12 years or something. I have nothing to do with the company anymore, but it's given me a lifelong interest in Wikipedia. And I've always been a big fan of Wikipedia. And I think it's a really interesting example in terms of thinking about NISO and standards and how it's not just what's written down in the standards, but it's the social organization that's around it, because if you look at the rules around wisdom of crowds-- which is that you should have independent units which don't have any biases and they should be summed up in a fair way.
JOHN DOWD: Wikipedia does not measure up very well for that. I mean, last in, first out is not a good summation mechanism. So in fact, what they've done is they managed to surround some of the rules they have-- and it's certainly true they still have biases that-- 80% or 90% of the editors are men and there's a highly euro-centric support to it. But they try to address those biases. And so there's a whole social organization around Wikipedia, which is what has allowed it to continue to grow and thrive.
JOHN DOWD: And there's a basic irony about a paradox about Wikipedia, which is that it has become reliable because it declares itself to be unreliable. And it's only so it doesn't inherit any reliability from itself. So if you wrote an entry that only referred to other Wikipedia entries, it would be dinged by the system itself. So I think there's some really interesting things in that whole arena that could be instructive for all of us.
AMY BRAND: I'm so glad that you made those comments, and I agree entirely. There's this concept that's sort of like public auditability of these-- which is extremely powerful. I often think about it as too-- I have three kids. And my youngest is 16, and she's in the middle of learning to drive. And she's scared, and I said, you know, all these people driving don't want to have an accident.
AMY BRAND: So there's relatively good behavior. I mean, bad things happen. But I see the way in which the community functions in Wikipedia that way too.
SARAH: Hey, Amy. It's Sarah from PLOS.
AMY BRAND: Good to see you.
SARAH: Good to see you. Thank you for a really important kickoff to the conference. Something that you kept coming back to-- but I just wanted you to go into more so I'm raising it now-- you mentioned the words control and systems. And all of this is leading to the question of the unintended consequences of not thinking these things through. And so I was wondering if you could elaborate more on what those are, because I think you hit on some of the ones that are going to help us nerd out in this room, but I think there's some unintended consequences that are much more scary in a deeper sense, particularly given the kind of paradigm we're living in now.
SARAH: Do you want to speak to any of those, or are you not really interested--
AMY BRAND: Sure, [INAUDIBLE] I mentioned Claudio Aspesi, who's a consultant who's been working with SPARC. He and I have written a paper-- we're waiting to hear from Science. We hope it gets in-- about that topic. Basically what we modeled out that was very likely to happen is now that we're sort of at NISO end phase, the vision of ANIs on steroids, that you would have these siloed disciplinary communities based on full text, and all these services built around them that would tend to lock in professional societies, potentially discourage some of this cross-disciplinary stuff that happens in Science because these communities would be so robust.
AMY BRAND: You can build in all kinds of functionality into them on the basis of the full text. I think that is the big computation applied to big data and full text. And what could potentially emerge in terms of siloed services was one of the things that we're worried about. And we wanted to put it out there. You know, and I had to be really careful to say, OK, if somebody goes and does that, more power to them.
AMY BRAND: I think for me, because I was talking about the life cycle and the relationship between academic careers, the thing that I worry about most is how these things impact the evaluation of excellence in the production of new knowledge. And anything that's kind of locking that in is, I think, very problematic to academia. And part of the reason why I love the vision of more of a open metadata commons based on Crossref or perhaps something else-- there's a really interesting initiative out of Australian called lens.org-- is the possibility of allowing universities to devise their own metrics according to the needs of specific fields.
AMY BRAND: Great question. Thank you.
WILLIAM GUNN: Hey, elites-- William Gunn, director of Scholarly Communications at Elsevier. My personal interest in infrastructure and awareness of this dynamic that you were painting between community-owned projects and private for-profit enterprises versus non-profit ones started with Mendeley and working at Mendeley. And around the same time Mendeley started, there was this project in the US called VIVO that also wanted to make this a national network of scholars.
WILLIAM GUNN: And I've always been kind of fascinated, and the question of well--
AMY BRAND: What happened there?
WILLIAM GUNN: What was it-- yeah, what happened there? What was it about?
AMY BRAND: Yeah, I mean, that's a really good example. And that's kind of what I meant by inadequate university investment. One of the things that I tried to do at Digital Science was work on these two open solutions for faculty profiles, one being VIVO, the other being Harvard Catalyst. And we created a service provider thing around that. But there were very few universities-- Duke is one that comes to mind-- where the provost and head of IT and the head of IR and the libraries all said, we're going to work together and try to make this happen.
AMY BRAND: Most universities don't have that kind of coordination and the requisite investment to make something like that work. I mean, that's an oversimplification, because there are other cultural issues around faculties in different fields. But I think we need to give these kinds of, again, homegrown university-initiated initiatives a chance by investing more in them.
WILLIAM GUNN: Can I have just a small follow-up?
AMY BRAND: Yeah.
WILLIAM GUNN: So a lot of what I have seen is that-- it has to do with kind of who is-- where the locus of control is, so to speak. And we have these community-led projects-- like VIVO or like some of the institutional repository projects or even standards-- you have a group of people that are the core people that are really making the decisions, that are making everything work.
WILLIAM GUNN: And it's a community project, and it's open. But there's really a core. And the locus of control-- when you think of a for-profit organization, it's more centralized. The control is-- there's literally a CEO who's literally making all the decisions. When do you think it is that the-- or what are the factors for these more open community-based things to actually take off?
WILLIAM GUNN: What needs to be there?
AMY BRAND: Yeah, so there are two different open things. And the one that I'm more interested in is the one where the control is coming from research institutions themselves in roles with power that probably doesn't exist yet, which is why we're kind of trying to make the case of, you can't put it all on the shoulder of the librarian. I mean, they don't have access to enough budget. And these meetings in which you have the CIO and librarians sort of provosts, no one's making the decision.
AMY BRAND: What does ownership look like there? And I think we have to create that and make a case for that. I think in that community space, that is a good question, and I'll just explain what I think as opposed to what I'm seeing in IOI. So in working with the SPARC folks and folks in IOI, I think they have this vision that we need to create this backbone organization. So it's a very top down model, and it's going to get all the funding.
AMY BRAND: It already has all these great partnerships with funders. And it's going to curate what projects happen, and it's going to distribute money. That terrifies me-- one, because it's so top-heavy administratively. But also, I don't think it's organic to how universities and these projects work. And so what we've been saying in the KFG world has been, we're going to let this develop somewhat organically.
AMY BRAND: We're going to have this kind of loose confederation of organizations and universities that are working on this stuff. And over time, we're going to kind of bootstrap into what can make this work. One of the other things that I'd really like to do-- and Claudio is working on a project for us-- is we want to do this-- basically, let's take stock.
AMY BRAND: Let's look back at all of the examples in the past of multi-institutional collaborations that have worked well and those that have filled dismally, and see what we can learn from them. I mean, we know that libraries combine consortially. We have some success with Duraspace, and there's some other examples too. But I think we have to understand what is it that's going to allow institutions to pool resources and make this happen.
WILLIAM GUNN: Thanks.
AMY BRAND: Thanks.
SPEAKER 1: There's time for one more. If you've got something burning in your brain, now is the time. Ah, there we go. Awesome.
MICHELLE: I thank you for a very nice talk. I'm Michelle from Research Square, which is a relatively new pre-print platform. So my question is around badging and tagging, which you mentioned several times. I agree with your statement that peer review is not fact-checking. And to me it's not adequate anymore, because we're capable of more now. And so I'm just interested to hear what you think.
MICHELLE: What sorts of badges and tags are going to contribute in the most meaningful way now?
AMY BRAND: Yeah, that's a good question. So with a PRT project, what we envisioned was, because of what we learned from the credit taxonomy, it's very-- you know, it's of like the perfect is the enemy of the good. There's only so far we're going to get with describing types of peer review, and there are many different types of peer review. But if we could capture open versus closed, open report versus open identity, the number of people involved, what was peer reviewed and for what purpose, in some machine-readable way, then you're giving the tools to the reader or the integration of the discovery service to make that usable information.
AMY BRAND: That's as far as we got. We did not get to, we're going to make peer review itself better. We want to make it visible to the community so that-- essentially it does two things. It helps authors promote the rigor of their work. And it helps readers and discoverers that-- for a certain level of peer review-- that is of interest to them.
AMY BRAND:
SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Amy. Everybody give her one more round of applause. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING]
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