Beyond the PDF: New modes of dissemination

1. Beyond the PDF: New modes of dissemination Experiments from PLOS Theo Bloom, Editorial Director for Biology, PLOS Amsterdam, March 2013

2. Take-home / talking points / provocation • Trying to fix a big interconnected system - it’s not easy or fast • One change at a time brings people along • Steps are good if they’re in the right direction • Partner with others wherever it makes sense • Experiments are good: adapt to the results

3. Theidealised cycle of research communication Do some science Discuss ideas Write a description Read/use other people’s work Share it with the world

4. The real-life cycle is more complicated Do some science Discuss ideas Write a description Read / use other people’s work Rejection. Tryanother journal Submit it to a journal Get promoted Do more work as requested Get grants Resubmit Be judged bypublications Publication

5. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5885/36.1.full.pdf

6. The real-life cycle has some big problems Problem 4: poor links from underlying data and methods to write-up Problem 1: Access to what you want to read and (re) use Do some science Discuss ideas Write a description Read / use other people’s work Rejection. Tryanother journal Submit it to a journal Problem 5: Get promoted Do more work as requested Problem 3: because of problem 2, repeat cycles at different journals; publication is delayed Get grants Problem 2: publication venue as a measure of publication quality and/or impact Resubmit Be judged bypublications Publication

7. The real-life cycle has some big problems Problem 4: poor links from underlying data and methods to write-up Problem 1: Access to what you want to read and (re) use Do some science Discuss ideas Write a description Read / use other people’s work Rejection. Tryanother journal Submit it to a journal Problem 5: Get promoted Do more work as requested Problem 3: because of problem 2, repeat cycles at different journals; publication is delayed Get grants Problem 2: publication venue as a measure of publication quality and/or impact Resubmit Be judged bypublications Publication All subject areas; not assessing ‘impact’

8. We haven’t ‘solved’ problems 1-3 • Beyond CC-BY: explore better ways to do openness (metadata, data, reusability); and accessibility • Beyond ALMs: make altmetrics optimally useful and encourage wider adoption • Beyond PLOS ONE: more formal experiments with peer review this year – increase openness; structure reviewer information; portable reviews? … We have made some progress in these areas

9. Problem 4: poor links from underlying data and methods to write-up Do some science Write a description

10. Do some science Write a description Store some of the data somewhere…

11. Do some science Integrated collection of methods, results, data, metadata Write a narrative description that is inextricably linked to the data and methods Store all of the data somewhere useful and link to publication

12. Steps towards better data handling What to do with ‘homeless’ data? • Partnership with Dryad (www.datadryad.org) • Unstructured data ‘packages’ associated with published articles • Freely available - CC0 • A unique identifier (DOI) for each package • Statistics for access • Seamless tying together of article and data • Partnership with figshare (www.figshare.org) • figsharewidget displays Supporting Information files directly in the article • search, magnify, download singly or as a package • Planning in hand for ‘data papers’ (www.ploscompbiol.org) • Describes reusable dataset to support reuse • Publishes associated metadata • Ensures valuable data is actionable for reuse • Data accessible in a recognized, stable repository

13. Can we revolutionize speed? PLOS Currents: Influenza - Inspiration Seeking Lessons in Swine Flu Fight “Another problem is communication. Officials and experts say they have learned a lot about human swine influenza. But relatively little of that information...has been reported and published. Some experts said researchers were waiting to publish in journals, which can take months or longer.” New York Times, August 10th, 2009 Lawrence K. Altman, M.D. Problem 5:

14. A single, integrated direct-authoring and publishing platform

15. Rapid technical and scope review Authors may revise but can be published almost immediately post-review Content is peer-reviewed, citable, publicly archived, and included in PubMed

16. What comes out: flexible (familiar) format

17. PLOS Currents as an experiment • Swine flu epidemic faded away - then a new one started • We said “submissions do not have to be full-length articles” – but what did we get? • What use-cases make most sense for Currents? • Can we try harder with non-traditional article formats? • Single findings • Negative results • Replications • Methods and protocols • Publish all results with as little delay as possible

18. Back to issue 1: Access vs. accessibility • Readable by machines as well as people • Intelligible

19. Where do people go for information? • open review via wiki • PLoS ComputBiolarticle “version of record” • A high-quality Wikipedia article that can be edited and updated

20. Take-home / talking points • Trying to fix a big interconnected system - it’s not easy or fast • One change at a time brings people along • Steps are good if they’re in the right direction • Partner with others wherever it makes sense • Experiments are good: adapt to the results • We need to work with real people – authors, readers – as well as with machines

21. Open Access tbloom@plos.org

22. What do we mean by “associated with the article”? • Layer 1: essential: the data needed to replicate the major findings. Must be available to reviewers, readers, etc. • Layer 2: all the data that went into the pot: raw, unprocessed, replicated, etc • Layer 3: from beginning to end, everything collected by the lab, recorded, time-stamped and linked-out to the narrative article

23. Where should it go? • Curated, subject-specific, open access, long-term databases (GenBank, ArrayExpress) • General non-specific repositories: Dryad, FigShare, Institutional (bigger is better? Can we have a ‘kite-marked’ list?) • Supplementary files with the article (heterogeneous, poorly formatted, hard to collate/mine) • NOT: the author’s website or file drawer