Presentation at the National Federation of Advanced Information Services Workshop: Open Access to Published Research: Current Status and Future Directions, Philadelphia, PA USA November 22, 2013

1. Future of Research Communications and E-Scholarship
Open Access and Research Communication: The
Perspective of Force11
Maryann E. Martone, Ph. D.
Executive Director
Professor of Neuroscience, University of California, San Diego

2. What is FORCE11?
Future of Research Communications and EScholarship:
A grass roots effort to accelerate the pace and nature
of scholarly communications and e-scholarship through
technology, education and community
Why 11? We were born in 2011 in
Dagstuhl, Germany
Principles laid out in the FORCE11 Manifesto
FORCE11 launched in July 2012

3. Who is FORCE11?
Scholars
Tool builders
Publishers
Science
Social
Sciences
Library and
Information
scientists
Humanities
Funders
Policy makers
Anyone who has a stake in moving scholarly communication into the 21st century

4. FORCE11 Vision
•
Modern technologies enable vastly improve knowledge transfer and far wider
impact; freed from the restrictions of paper, numerous advantages appear
•
We see a future in which scientific information and scholarly communication more
generally become part of a global, universal and explicit network of knowledge
•
To enable this vision, we need to create and use new forms of scholarly
publication that work with reusable scholarly artifacts
•
To obtain the benefits that networked knowledge promises, we have to put in
place reward systems that encourage scholars and researchers to participate and
contribute
•
To ensure that this exciting future can develop and be sustained, we have to
support the rich, variegated, integrated and disparate knowledge offerings
that new technologies enable
Beyond the PDF Visual Notes by De Jongens van de Tekeningen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

5. Old Model: Single type of content;
single mode of distribution
Library
Scholar
Scholar
Publisher

6. The future is now...
Peer Reviewers
Narrative
Workflows
Data
Scholar
Blogs/Wikis
Nanopublications
Consumer
OA
Multimedia
Data Repositories
Code
Curators
Code Repositories
Community databases/platforms
Social
Social Social
Networks
Networks
Networks
Libraries

7. The duality of modern scholarship
Observation: Those who build information systems from the
machine side don’t understand the requirements of the
human very well
Those who build information systems from the human
side, don’t understand requirements of machines very well
Scholarship requires the ability to cite and track usage of
scholarly artifacts. In our current mode of working, there is no
way to easily track artifacts as they move through the
ecosystem; no way to incrementally add human expertise.

8. Digital objects are a new beast
Trust: Not just
who produced it
but what
produced it
Can’t just view them as digital versions of
physical objects

9. Whole-sale text-mining is required for
synthesis and discovery
Search Pub Med: Spinal
Muscular Atrophy

10. The scientific corpus is fragmented
• ~25 million articles
total, each covering a
fragment of the
biomedical space
• Each publisher owns a
fragment of a particular
field
• The current process is
inefficient and slow
Spinal Muscular Atrophy
Wiley
Elsevier
Oxford
MacMillian

11. A new platform for scholarly
communications
Components
•
Authoring tools
– Optimized for mark up and linked content
•
Containers
– Expand the objects that are considered “publications”
– Optimize the container for the content
•
Processes
– Scholarship is code
•
Mark up
– Data, claims, content suitable for the web
– Suitable identifier systems
•
Reward systems
– Incentives to change
– Reward for new objects
Scholarship must move from a “single currency system”;
platforms must recognize diversity of output and representation

12. Impetus for change: Is our current
method serving science?
47/50 major preclinical
published cancer studies
could not be replicated
 “The scientific community
assumes that the claims in a
preclinical study can be taken at
face value-that although there
might be some errors in
detail, the main message of the
paper can be relied on and the
data will, for the most
part, stand the test of time.
Unfortunately, this is not always
the case.”
Begley and Ellis, 29 MARCH 2012 | VOL 483 | NATURE | 531

13. FORCE11.org
500 members from diverse stakeholder groups
• Community platform
–
–
–
–
–
–
Meetings
Discussions
Tools and resources
Blogs
Event calendar
Community projects
• Promote
interoperability
– Data Citation
– Resource identification
initiative

14. Beyond the PDF
• Conference/unconferen
ce where all
stakeholders come
together as equals to
discuss issues
–
–
–
–
Publishers
Technologists
Scholars
Library scientists
• Incubator for change
• What would you do to
change scholarly
communication?
San Diego, Jan 2011 ...... Amsterdam, March 2013........?2015
http://www.force11.org/beyondthepdf2

15. Promote community, crossfertilization and interoperability
• FORCE11 helps facilitate
communications across
disciplines and
communities
• Issues are not identical but
we can learn from each
other
– Enhanced publications
• Digital humanities +
– Dealing with data
• Science +
– Open Access
• Science +
“What is an ORCID id?”-computer scientist

16. Resource for scholarly communications:
People, organizations, publications, tools

17. Scholarly communication landscape:
Looking at the big picture
Workflows 4Ever
Data Verse
ORCID
PeerJ, eLife
Research Data Alliance
Scalar
Impact Story, Rubriq
Data journals
Sadie
Are we really suffering
from a lack of tools?
• or is it usable tools?
• or is it tools that are
used?
• or is it awareness that
there are tools?
• or are these even the
right tools?

18. Born digital: working with research
objects in scholarly publications
• Authoring tools: make
it easier for
researchers to work
with other researchers
and research objects
• Make citations to
these objects
machine-actionable
• If we are short on time
and money, then
perhaps we should
spend our time and
money more
effectively

19. A place to come together: Data
citation principles
•FORCE11 provides a neutral
space for bringing groups
together
•35 individuals
representing > 20
organizations concerned
with data citation
•Conducted a review of
current data citation
recommendations from 4
different organizations
•Arrived at a sense of
consensus principles
Data citation synthesis group:
http://www.force11.org/node/4
381

20. Data Citation Principles
• Draft of
Consensus Data
Citation
principles ready
for comment
• Designed to be
high level and
easy to
understand
1. Importance
2. Credit and
Attribution
3. Evidence
4. Unique
identifiers
5. Access
6. Persistence
7. Versioning
8. Interoperability
and flexibility
http://www.force11.org/datacitation

21. Connecting ORCID and
DataCite
http://datacite.labs.orcid-eu.org
5 December 2013
orcid.org
21

22. Unique ID’s for all! Resource
Identification Initiative
• It is currently impossible
to query the biomedical
literature to find out
what research resources
have been used to
produce the results of a
study
• Impossible to find all
studies that used a
resource
• Critical for
reproducibility and data
mining
• Critical for troubleshooting
Faulty Antibodies Continue to Enter US and
European Markets, Warns Top Clinical
Chemistry Researcher-Genome Web
Daily, October 11, 2013
http://www.force11.org/resource_identification_initiative

23. Resource Identification Initiative
• Have authors supply
appropriate identifiers for
key resources used within
a study such that they
are:
– Machine processible
(i.e., unique identifier that
resolves to a single
resource)
– Outside of the paywall
– Uniform across journals
and publishers
Launching February 2014: Change the way
authors think about writing papers

24. FORCE11 Vision
•
Modern technologies enable vastly improve knowledge transfer and far wider
impact; freed from the restrictions of paper, numerous advantages appear
•
We see a future in which scientific information and scholarly communication more
generally become part of a global, universal and explicit network of knowledge
•
To enable this vision, we need to create and use new forms of scholarly
publication that work with reusable scholarly artifacts
•
To obtain the benefits that networked knowledge promises, we have to put in
place reward systems that encourage scholars and researchers to participate and
contribute
•
To ensure that this exciting future can develop and be sustained, we have to
support the rich, variegated, integrated and disparate knowledge offerings
that new technologies enable
What is the 21st century equivalent of the library?