“Re-engineering the scientific journal” Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing UHMLG Spring Forum: March 1st, 2009

1. Committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource “Re-engineering the scientific journal” Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing UHMLG Spring Forum: March 1st, 2009

2. The functions of journals • Registration • Who’s done what and when? • Certification • Is the work sound? How important is it? • Awareness • The right information to the people who need it • Archiving • Preservation for future generations Roosendaal and Geurts

3. The life cycle of a research article Research Submission 2-3 Experts Is it rigorous? Good enough? Right audience? Takes months/years Rejects Peer review Journal name is key Publication

4. Journals are a giant sorting mechanism www.flickr.com/photos/sewpixie/2374778051/

5. How can the functions of a journal be re-engineered online? • Awareness • Open access • Discoverability • Certification • What questions need to be asked before publication? • What is best left until after publication? • Registration • Promoting the rapid sharing of information

6. AwarenessPart 1Open Access

7. PLoS Founding Board of Directors Harold Varmus PLoS Co-founder and Chairman of the Board President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Patrick O. Brown PLoS Co-founder and Board Member Howard Hughes Medical Institute & Stanford University School of Medicine Michael B. Eisen PLoS Co-founder and Board Member Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory & University of California at Berkeley

8. PLoS publishing strategy • Establish high quality journals • put PLoS and open access on the map • Build a more extensive OA publishing operation • an open access home for every paper • achieve sustainability • Make the literature more useful • to scientists and the public

9. PLoS BiologyOctober, 2003 PLoS MedicineOctober, 2004 PLoS Community JournalsJune-September, 2005 October, 2007 PLoS ONE December, 2006

10. Growth in submissions and publications

11. Financial growth% Operating expense covered by operating revenue

12. www.oaspa.org

13. AwarenessPart 2Discoverability

14. What is open access? • Free, immediate access online • Unrestricted use

15. What is open access? • Free, immediate access online • Unrestricted use

16. What is open access? • Free, immediate access online • Unrestricted use

17. What is open access? • Free, immediate access online • Unrestricted use

18. Document A network of literature

19. Document Database A network of literature and data

20. Open access • Free, immediate access • Unrestricted reuse www.flickr.com/photos/chris_short/79656776/

21. CertificationPart 1What to do before publication

23. PLoS ONE’s Key Innovation – The editorial process • Editorial criteria • Scientifically rigorous • Ethical • Properly reported • Conclusions supported by the data • Editors and reviewers do not ask • How important is the work? • Which is the relevant audience? • Use online tools to sort and filter scholarly content after publication, not before

24. What else is different? • Inclusive scope • all science and medicine • Encouraging discussion and debate • at PLoS ONE: commenting, rating and annotation • elsewhere: Editorial Board discussion forum; EveryONE blog; Twitter; FriendFeed; Facebook • Streamlined production • publication on every weekday

25. PLoS ONE – statistics • * Started publishing Dec 20th, 2006 • Community acceptance • third largest peer-reviewed journal • 50,000 authors • 1000 Academic Editors

27. CertificationPart 2Adding value after publication

28. Researchers (authors and readers) Institutions Funders Librarians The public Publishers Who cares about measuring researchimpact?

29. How do we measure ‘impact’? The worth of a paper tends to be judged on the basis of the impact factor of the journal in which it was published. Recommended reading: Adler, R., Ewing, J. Taylor, P. Citation statistics. A report from the International Mathematical Union. http://www.mathunion.org/publications/report/citationstatistics/

30. How could we measure ‘impact’? At the ARTICLE LEVEL, we could track: • Citations • Web usage • Expert Ratings • Social bookmarking • Community rating • Media/blog coverage • Commenting activity • and more… • Current technology now makes it possible to add these metrics automatically

31. Article-Level Metrics at PLoS • A range of additional measures which provide insight into ‘impact’ - not just citations and usage • Metrics/indicators at the article-level, for all journals • Not just for scholarly evaluation – also a way to filter and discover content • The idea is not new, but PLoS is the first publisher to provide this range of data • Michael Jensen, The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15, 2007

32. (http://tiny.cc/ALM1)

36. CrossRef Landing Page

40. citeulike Landing Page

42. Postgenomic Landing Page

44. Downloading the data http://www.plosone.org/static/plos-alm.zip

46. Evaluating the (usage) data

47. Evaluating the (usage) data

48. Evaluating the (usage) data

49. Next steps for article-level metrics • More sources for each data type • Citations, blog coverage • New data sources • F1000, Mendeley • Expert analysis and tools • Broader adoption • By publishers • By tenure committees, funders etc • Develop and adhere to standards

50. RegistrationRapid communication of new findings and ideasPLoS Currents