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Jan Velterop – 20 June 2014. Publishing in the future: is the Global South leapfrogging?. A UK-based publishing services company:.
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Jan Velterop – 20 June 2014 Publishing in the future: is the Global South leapfrogging?
A UK-based publishing services company: “It is possible to find good typesetting suppliers in many countries, and locations such as India, Malaysia, Hong Kong and the Philippines also host high-quality suppliers. And offshore suppliers now offer a wide range of services, not just page layout. Many UK typesetters have gone out of business as a result. We, too, lost work to typesetting companies overseas who charged lower rates than us (and which we couldn’t match), but outsourcing has never threatened our core business, namely project management and editing.” • Dream on
Outsourcing Where would we be without quasi slave labour?
By the way… Most of what science publishers do is done in emerging economies
made in China • made and branded in China
Beall-effect? • beallious – bealligerent – beallicose • Publishers with foreign* names being seen as “predatory” • *non-English, non-European
arXiv:1406.4331 • [which are practically invisible in Google]
Research is spreading to the global South… …and so is publishing • Western countries allocate more resources to biomedicine; Russia and former Soviet countries excel in physics, mathematics and engineering; and a third group of countries strongly focus on agriculture and fisheries science. • http://www.agenciasinc.es/Noticias/El-mapa-de-la-investigacion-mundial-mas-completo-divide-el-planeta-en-tres-grandes-bloques
Two examples • Hindawi • SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) • Publisher • Publishing ‘approach’
In September 2012, Ahmed Hindawi revealed: “Our results for the first half of 2012 show revenues of $6.3m with a net profit of $3.3m.”
of Collections of Journals* Not so much a ‘publisher’ as a ‘publishing approach’ Deposit Hosting/Delivery Preservation • * SciELO Brasil also books
Journals in SciELO are not ‘published by’ SciELO, • but are independent entities • (Chile) • Cost of publications: Authors are encouraged to submit color illustrations when the color conveys essential scientific information. Color reproduction will be subsidized by the publisher, reducing author costs to US$300 per page. (Articles in black and white = US$250). All articles including the translation of the summary to Spanish will be reviewed at a rate of US $50- per article.
http://figshare.com/articles/Culture_change_in_academia_Making_sharing_the_new_norm_/1053008http://figshare.com/articles/Culture_change_in_academia_Making_sharing_the_new_norm_/1053008
http://figshare.com/articles/Culture_change_in_academia_Making_sharing_the_new_norm_/1053008http://figshare.com/articles/Culture_change_in_academia_Making_sharing_the_new_norm_/1053008
http://figshare.com/articles/Culture_change_in_academia_Making_sharing_the_new_norm_/1053008http://figshare.com/articles/Culture_change_in_academia_Making_sharing_the_new_norm_/1053008
Even just reading everything that’s relevant has become humanly impossible • Embarras du choix
What do we do? What do we need?
First • Overview
Then • Detail
Predicate • Object • Subject • An approach: • extract significant assertions/statements
Lazarus: • identifying assertions of ‘scientific significance’…
… semantically normalising them • and finding them in other articles
What if we had vast numbers of those assertions/statements, “semantically normalised”, available and suitable for machine-reading?
They could be ‘harvested’ from open access literature And ‘crowdsourced’ – via researchers and students – from paywalled literature
Getting the picture from a large number of data points • ‘Whole-o-gram’
Homing in • on detail
My expectation It will be outfits from the Global South that… • substantially grow open access publishing • comprehensively aggregate knowledge in the form of machine-readable assertions • fundamentally change peer-review practices Why? They are not impeded by legacy issues the way publishers in the US and Europe are!