Is sustainability really what we're after - Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka

Kevin Guthrie starts with a metaphor about pilot fish.

Q: If you're a pilot fish how fast must you swim?
A: Faster than a shark.

Q: How fast must you swim to find your next meal?
A: Faster than other pilot fish

Academic publishing is the shark apparently. We are the pilot fish.

Kevin highlights that digitisation changes and increases the symbiosis between "shark" and "pilot fish". Growth online is imense and speed of growth is staggering. YouTube was founded, grown and sold on within 2 years and users from none to 48 million in that time. This is a huge seachange.

The life cycle hasn't just shortened. Innovation adds layers - today's "value added" is tomorrows commodity. Things evolve so quickly and you must always be better than you were before (giving the example of evolution of videos through to online rental to video on demand in 10-2o years).

Kevin was previously with JSTOR at their birth and now works for a private organisation called Ithaka. JSTOR found it difficult to digitise at first but now publishers are fully onboard and involved.

Newspapers as Example
Traditionally there was protection for newspapers - geographical, advertising, media-specific view (not competing with other mediums). They relied on subscriptions and advertising (classified - thus local - advertising was key income). Even as challenges and benefits of digital production and distribution came through in the 1990's (and profits went up) the digital business started to become a threat to traditional print business.

What's been happening now is that profit margins decline. Stock prices falling 42% in 2007. Worst decline in 50 years. Even online advertising showing signs of slow down. Market place is shrinking, fewer titles, shrinking of journalist jobs (some moving online, some just ditched). Examples from multiple papers shrinking staff. The Guardian, as a contrasting example, offer multimedia training to journalists and will not cut staff who will transition to digital.

What happened?
Competition for audience - global market and competition from ALL news media. Indeed the Virginia Tech incident was actually reported best by Wikipedia - they absorbed new information most quickly. Enormous competition for advertising budgets and classified ads killed by eBay, CraigsList etc. Many papers (e.g. New York Times) are now going free rather than subscription online services (though others retain subscription is market can support - e.g. Wall Street Journal). Some serious lack of sustainability here though as all start ups seek advertising revenues. Resources of national papers stressed. By contrast small community papers are doing better as they have local information and news more relavent to their readers than cash-strapped national wire stories.

Kevin suggests a similar thing is going on in scholarly communication. Preprints and websites compete with journals. Open Access crosses territory with sustainable economic models. Consolidation is becoming key in newspaper world as it will in other digital areas. Libraries have one serious strategic advantage in their local knowledge. Niche targetted areas of knowledge also have advantages - in newspaper and libary worlds.

Kevin recommends a presentation on the similarities between newspapers and libraries:
http://www.slideshare.net/naypinya/what-rupert-would-tell-the-dlf/

Crisis of Wake-up Call?
Strategic change is required. It is very hard to implement though and academic areas are notoriously resistent to strategic change and reallocation of resources.

Scholarly Publishers
Historically they were insulated, walled search areas etc. Google is changing things substantially and it is now a very different commercial environment. Dissemination and intermediaries were important. Discoverability was by A&I databases and publisher marketing.

It is now the case that faculty do much of the selection more directly. Distribution quite different and threatened by the web. "Credentialing" is really the only competitive advantage of traditional serials brands - publishing in key journals still influences tenureship etc. This has not really changed.

Scholarly publishing must identify it's core values and explore new ways that the internet can enhance them.

What is needed so that new technologies can help to strengthen the core, not weaken it?

• Outsourcing - where some functionality is best taken outside organisations core work.
• Willingness to experiment and invest, not retrench and protect.
• Letting go of long-held attitudes and beliefs in what the situation was, in favour of moving to what it will be.
  
• Mindset shift to an ongoing focus on users and their needs and their preferences (not research project/funding drivers of content) - this will help make a much more sustainable model.
  
• Compromise
• Unprecedented industry-wide collaboration

Deficiency of Peer Review - Muir Gray, NHS National Knowledge Service

"The future is here; it is just not generally distributed - William Gibson"

Muir is talking about the issue of sharing data usefully - data may be known but for reasons of privacy and trust it may not always readily available at your fingertips. Thus he will be talking about the quality of knowledge (from a medical perspective).

"most articles in clinical journals are not appropriatte for direct application by individual clinicians" - various refs etc. will be available later.

"Most reviews published in peer reviewed journals or funded by industry have serious methodological flaws that limit their alue to guide decisions" - A.R. Jaded et al (2004)

Muir notes that most journals answer questions raised by researchers, not always the useful date or areas that you would wish.

The way evidence is presented can have a huge impact on the apparent effectiveness of a given drug/technique etc. Researchers often duplicate trials and like positive research - this can lead to misleading results and medical efficacy.

Peer reviewing is the target here *but* it is not the only problem. Planning, funding, research topic selection, positive bias etc. cause issues at all stages. Huge positive publication bias as many drug companies, researchers etc don't want to publish negative results - "we need a journal of negative results!"

People frequently do not report their findings and what they were funded for. They do not report all hypotheses, generally it is the negative findings that are not reported. Industry follow this trend perhaps even more enthusiastically. Publishing constraints also support the bias with 91% of 1994/5 contrained from publication: only 9% of protocols reported.

NB: this presentation is heavy on quotes which are flashing by quickly so I would recommend seeing the slides directly if/when they are made available.

Solutions:

1. Good Systematic Reviews
   
2. Better peer reviewing and editing - what do we mean by peer review? It has many meanings and so how do we define and work out what we want it to achieve.
   
3. Improve standards of reporting and include caveats to make clear that the reader must beware.
   

Equator Network aims to train researchers and set standards. CONSORT (Consolidating Standards of Reporting Trials) is a standard to help with this. It should make journals more readable and reporting more accurate/unbiased.

The same principles are being applied to other types of research - a key issue is the perception of absolute vs. relative risk which researchers are not well aware of at present and publishers must therefore have a role in addressing this.

Finally we plan to reduce the carbon footprint of the NHS and that means reducing the carbon footprint of its supply chain ("campaign for greener healthcare"). Hopefully entirely digital publication usage by 2011 - digital has its own carbon footprint but it is better. Muir's organisation is knowledgeintoaction.org. This is a little off-topic but a personal concern of Muir's own charity. He would like us all to walk everywhere please (great for 1-to-1 meetings apparently). Also he wants to set up a knowledge service using internet radio. And logical (online) bookshops for healthcare professionals.

[NB: Q&A for this and other sessions to come later. ]