User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/Open Access in Poland 2012/Abstract

Abstract

Research is a process, built around generating, validating and modifying pieces of information within the wider context of existing knowledge. Current scientific practice does not adequately reflect this dynamic aspect, with a line of research typically culminating in an attempt at formal publication of a static document, though ironically often in several iterations. The delays incurred on the way and all the effort that goes into repackaging and reformatting existing knowledge in order to convey a nugget of new information beg the question whether this time-honoured habit is still appropriate in the digital age.

It is not difficult to identify conditions under which this appropriateness vanishes. In alternative scenarios for communicating research, research documentation thus grows in public and with a public version history by default, so as to make the research process transparent and to invite feedback and collaboration right from the start.

Such an open approach to research has obvious advantages: it speeds up the research process by avoiding unnecessary delays and by allowing for collaboration on a far broader scale than what is typical today, while at the same time raising the usefulness of research materials in educational contexts and serving a steady stream of seeds for public engagement with the matter at hand. The major drawback is that none of the relevant groups of actors - authors, reviewers, editors, publishers, librarians, research funders and administrators - have so far shown signs of coherent collective movement in this direction. Although no platforms exist that would allow seamless integration of scholarly workflows with the Web across a wide range of disciplines, some research groups and small fields already achieve this integration for most of their respective research cycles. In parallel, initially independent experiments of this kind are increasingly being interconnected through the Web and the ever richer ecosystem of ways in which it is used by researchers, by tools they operate, by citizen scientists they collaborate with, and by the public at large.

One hotspot in this experimental ecosystem is the set of collaborative platforms operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, which include Wikipedias and their sister projects in multiple languages as well as a shared repository of reusably licensed image and multimedia files. Though not designed for research, together they cover all steps of the research cycle. They interface well with steps that have been taken elsewhere on the public Web, thereby highlighting the process by which encyclopaedic and related projects are being built by a global community of humans and their machines.

To further stress the notion of process, this talk is being developed in public at the URL from which it will be delivered: http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Talks/Open_Access_in_Poland_2012/Opening_up_the_research_process .

Background

To date, most of the published scientific literature and of its context is hidden from the public, yet the percentage that is not hidden is on the rise: a total of about 20% of the research literature published in 2009 were available through Open Access publishing or self-archiving or both, as long as copyright - and copyright transfer agreements in particular - allowed for that.

The initial purpose of Open Access is to provide researchers with the information necessary to perform their research, but once the information is public, it can of course circulate more widely and contribute to society more broadly. One way to encourage such re-use is to release the works under open licenses, such as the Creative Commons Attribution License that is compatible with the stipulations of the Budapest Open Access Initiative and used by many Open Access journals. It allows for any form of sharing of the materials (including modifications), provided that the original source and the licensing terms are shared alongside. This opens the door for the incorporation of materials from Open Access sources into a multitude of contexts outside traditional academic publishing, including blogs or collaborative platforms like the Wikipedias.

While the content in the Wikipedias and their sister projects - Wikiversities, Wikibooks, Wiktionaries, Wikispecies, Wikiquotes, Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons - is dominated by popular culture, a sizeable amount of information relevant to scholarly research is present as well, and a number of initiatives by scholarly societies, academic journals and the Wikimedia community aim at improving the quality and quantity of materials in those areas.

Perhaps even more interesting than the content on display at these platforms, however, are the processes by which the content is generated, referenced, contextualized and modified. These processes shall be in the focus of this talk and highlighted from an Open Research perspective.

Dynamic publishing as a discovery tool

Suppose you are interested in animal body plans and would like to know what the lower size limits are for vertebrates from different taxonomic groups. How would you go about finding existing information on the topic? How sure can you be that you have not missed some important examples? How likely is it that you would publish the results of your investigations in the same places?

Now consider the wiki approach. The English Wikipedia has an entry on the smallest organisms, with a section on vertebrates. Until January 11, the smallest vertebrate mentioned there was a cyprinid fish of the species Paedocypris progenetica that had been described in 2005 and whose mature females exhibited a minimal size of 7.9 mm. Then, the frog Paedophryne amauensis was described, whose males can be as small as 7.7 mm, and the smallest organisms entry was updated accordingly (with more details added in subsequent edits), linking to the new entry about the frog species. Also updated were the entry on the genus Paedophryne, which now contained six species, albeit the article describing P. amauensis stated only four. The reason for the difference is that between the final submission and the formal publication of the article describing P. amauensis (and P. swiftorum), an article describing P. dekot and P. verrucosa had been published in December 2011, complementing the earlier description of P. kathismaphlox (type specimen for the genus Paedophryne) and P. oyatabu, all in Open-Access articles.

The description of P. amauensis and P. swiftorum was accompanied by a map detailing the locations of the species known when the article went to press, and thus did not include P. dekot and P. verrucosa. Till date, no formal publication covering all six species has been published, but the information - including the updated map - is readily available on Wikipedias, in multiple languages.