Prepared for
57th Annual Meeting of National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS)
Washington, D.C.
February 2015
“Information wants someone else to pay for it : as science and scholarship evolve,
who consumes and who pays?”Dr. Micah Altman
Director of Research, MIT Libraries
DISCLAIMERThese opinions are my own, they are not the opinions of MIT, Brookings, any of the project funders, nor (with the exception of co-authored previously published work) my collaborators
Secondary disclaimer:
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future!”
-- Attributed to Woody Allen, Yogi Berra, Niels Bohr, Vint Cerf, Winston Churchill, Confucius, Disreali [sic], Freeman Dyson, Cecil B. Demille, Albert Einstein, Enrico
Fermi, Edgar R. Fiedler, Bob Fourer, Sam Goldwyn, Allan Lamport, Groucho Marx, Dan Quayle, George Bernard Shaw, Casey Stengel, Will Rogers, M. Taub, Mark Twain, Kerr
L. White, etc.
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Collaborators & Co-Conspirators
• Margy Avery, Program on Information Science• Project CREDIT Working Group• OCLC Task Group on Researcher Identifiers• NDSA Coordination Committee
Research Support Thanks to the Digital Science, Sloan
Foundation
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Related Work• Liz Allen, Jo Scott, Amy Brand, Marjorie M.K. Hlava, Micah Altman (2014),
Beyond authorship: recognising the contributions to research; Nature. • Altman M, Crosas M., 2014.The Evolution of Data Citation: From Principles to
Implementation. IASSIST Quarterly.• Smith-Yoshimura, Karen; Micah Altman; Michael Conlon; Ana Lupe Cristán;
Laura Dawson; Joanne Dunham; Thom Hickey; Daniel Hook; Wolfram Horstmann; Andrew MacEwan; Philip Schreur; Laura Smart; Melanie Wacker; and Saskia Woutersen. 2014. Registering Researchers in Authority Files. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research.
• Amy Brand, Liz Allen, Micah Altman, Marjorike Hlava, Jo Scott, (2015) “Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration, and credit”, Learned Publishing. Forthcoming.
• Altman M, Bailey J, Cariani K, Corridan J, Crabtree J, Gallinger M, Goethals A, Grotke A, Hartman C, Lazorshak B, et al. 2015 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship. National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA); 2014.
Reprints available from:informatics.mit.edu
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Roadmap for this Talk
* Some Trends in Information Creation and Use in Scholarship and Science *
* Why the market alone cannot sort it out--Information is not a Pure Public Good *
* Implications for Change Among Consumers, Producers, Publishers, and Funders *
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Information wants someone else to pay for it
Some Trends in
Authorship
Then
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Clarke, Beverly L. "Multiple authorship trends in scientific papers." Science 143.3608 (1964): 822-824.
Later
• By 1980, average number of authors in high-ranked medical journals was 4.5
• By 2000, average number of authors was 6.9
[Weeks et al. 2004]
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Now
Information wants someone else to pay for it
Now is More
Information wants someone else to pay for it
Information wants someone else to pay for it
Some Trends
More…… Forms of Evidence
… Collaborators
… Data
… Publishing, and Filtering
… Learners
… Access
… Evaluation
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Increasingly Complex Information Flow
Information wants someone else to pay for it
idea
People
Team
Collaborations
Trainees
Affiliations
Employer
Professional Associations
Education
Funding
Grants
Contracts
Seed Funding
Coop Agreements
Publications
Journal Articles
Books
Patents
Legal Briefs
Algorithms
Software Code
Datasets
Physical Objects
Electronic Files
Protein Structures
Genetic
Sequences
Impacts
Policy
Legal
Health
Environment
Education
Product Development
Spin Off
Workforce
Service Activities
Peer Review
Working Groups
Leadership Positions
Training and Mentoring
More Contribution Types
Information wants someone else to pay for it
More more…
•Rapid Fabrication•Social Media•Mobile Devices •Learning Analytics
•Discovery•Models of education
•Inter-institutional collaboration
•Adaptive learning•Linked data•Identifiers•Sensors•Multidisciplinary work
•Data Science
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Information wants someone else to pay for it
Why the Market
Alone Can’t Sort
it Out
Practical Economics Principle #1:Keynesian Long-Run Equilibrium Theory
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“But this long run is a misleading
guide to current affairs.
In the long run we are all dead”
- Keynes, 1923, A Tract on Monetary Reform
Practical Economics Principle #2:Bator’s Theory of Market Failure
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Many things in the real world violate
[market assumptions] –
Bator, 1958, The Anatomy of Market Failure
Some Conditions for Market Function
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• Condition on Markets
–No political/legal distortions
Common knowledge
–No barriers to entry
• Conditions on agents
–Perfect rationality
–Self-interested
–Infinitely many agents
–Stable preferences
• Conditions on goods
–Consumptive goods
–Excludable goods
–Decreasing returns to scale
–Transferability
–No externalities
• Conditions on exchange
–No transaction costs
–No information asymmetries
• Conditions on equilibrium
valuation
–Pareto optimality vs. economic
surplus
–Ignorability of distributional
concern
Practical Economics Principle #3:Kranzberg’s Theory of Technological
Change
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Technology is neither good nor bad;
nor is it neutral.
Kranzberg, (1986) Technology and History:
"Kranzberg's Laws", Technology and Culture
Practical Economics Principle #4:Ostrom’s Principle of Commons Goods
Ideal market goods are
excludable and consumable --
otherwise, watch out.
[Not a quote!]
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Managing a Commons is Different from Managing
a Market
• Clearly defined boundaries should be in place.
• Rules in use are well matched to local needs and conditions.
• Individuals affected by these rules can usually participate in
modifying the rules.
• The right of community members to devise their own rules is
respected by external authorities.
• A system for self-monitoring members’ behavior has been
established.
• A graduated system of sanctions is available.
• Community members have access to low-cost conflict-resolution
mechanisms.
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Ostrom & Hess 2007
Softwar
e
Best
Practice
Preserve
d Digital
Content
Storage
Provisionin
g
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Excludable
Rivalrous
Willing
Researc
h
Subject
s
Public, Private, Toll, and Commons Goods
McCleod’s Corollary of Information Purchasing
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Source: © Hugh Macleod,
Gapingvoid Art
gapingvoid.com
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Changing
Information,
Changing
Relationships
Scholarly Publication Unpacked?
• Digital information Allows us to “Unpack”
• Traditional Scholarly Publication Bundles
–durability & fixity
–identification
–discovery
–content indexing and previewing, interaction
–business broker
–selection
–production workflow
–distribution channels
–market - consumers & Channels
–market -producers
–Content - format, organization and boundaries
• As we unpack, and rebundle – how do we manage stakeholders &
frameworks Information wants someone else to pay for it
Creation/Collection
Storage/Ingest
Processing
Internal Sharing
Analysis
External dissemination/publica
tion
Re-use
• Scientific
• Educational
• Scientometric
• Institutional
Long-term access
Information Lifecycle
Information wants someone else to pay for it
Creation/Collection
Storage/Ingest
Processing
Internal Sharing
Analysis
External dissemination/
publication
Re-use
Long-term
access
Many Stakeholders
Scholarly
Publishers
Researche
rs
Data
Archives
/Publish
er
Researc
h
Sponsor
s
Data
Sources/S
ubjects
Consumers
Service/Infra
structure
Providers
Research
Organization
s
Information wants someone else
to pay for it
Digital Stuff is Different
•Accessible
•Replicable
•Computable
•Changeable
•…
Information wants someone else to pay for it
Some Questions Raised by Changes in Information Flow
•How to design systems to carry provenance?•How to communicate “trustworthiness” of the information displayed, especially when you have similar information from multiple sources?
•How to enable corrections and annotations from information consumers?
•Are all entities identified?•How does all information integrate into lifecycle workflows?
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Questions Raised for AnalyticsHow to…
• Reduce error in standard analytics-- impact factors, citation indices
• Which new measures become feasible-- collaboration analysis
• Include new research objects-- grants, datasets, software
• Include new populations-- graduate students, postdocs, citizen scientists
• Include new connections-- new maps of science, revealing “dark matter”
• Improve predictive and causal validity
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Some Questions Raised from Changes in Production
Trend Potential Authorship Issues Questions
Increase in number of coauthors
- ‘honorary’ authorship- ‘ghost’ authorship- disputes
- How to disambiguate author names?
- How to communicate attribution in citation?
- How to describe contributions to work?
- How to evaluate and predict impact?
- Who is responsible?
Shift from academic publishing in books to journals
- loss of sole-author-book as a evaluation measure
- How to integrate name authority and researcher identifier systems?
Decreasing granularity of publications
- persistence of “nano” publication vs. authorship
- How to document authorship over substructure of work?
Dynamic documents - version misattribution - How to document authorship over time?
Increasing diversity in citable scholarly outputs
- citation cannibalization, overrcounting
- How to cite data, software, protocols …. presentations, blogs, tweets
Information wants someone else to pay for it
No Single Organization can Preserve all the
Information upon which it Relies
• More production of digital content
• More publishing, filtering and access
• More learners and collaborators
• More attention to public information
• More embedding of information you
want, in a larger context required to
understand it
Single Institutions Cannot Counter all Risks
– Digital Offers Opportunity to Diversify
•Distribute to mitigate external risks–Third party attacks
–Institutional funding
–Change in legal regimes
•Distribute to mitigate internal risks(“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)
–Unintentional curatorial modification
–Loss of institutional knowledge & skills
–Intentional curatorial de-accessioning
–Change in institutional mission
• Distribute Management of Information
Information wants someone else to pay for it
References• Clarke, Beverly L. "Multiple authorship trends in scientific papers." Science 143.3608 (1964): 822-824.
• Weeks, William B., Amy E. Wallace, and B. C. Kimberly. "Changes in authorship patterns in prestigious US medical journals." Social science & medicine 59.9 (2004): 1949-1954.
• Liz Allen, Jo Scott, Amy Brand, Marjorie M.K. Hlava, Micah Altman (2014), Beyond authorship: recognising the contributions to research; Nature.
• Altman M, Crosas M., 2014.The Evolution of Data Citation: From Principles to Implementation. IASSIST Quarterly.
• Smith-Yoshimura, Karen; Micah Altman; Michael Conlon; Ana Lupe Cristán; Laura Dawson; Joanne Dunham; Thom Hickey; Daniel Hook; Wolfram Horstmann; Andrew MacEwan; Philip Schreur; Laura Smart; Melanie Wacker; and Saskia Woutersen. 2014. Registering Researchers in Authority Files. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research.
• Amy Brand, Liz Allen, Micah Altman, Marjorike Hlava, Jo Scott, (2015) “Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration, and credit”, Learned Publishing. Forthcoming.
• Altman M, Bailey J, Cariani K, Corridan J, Crabtree J, Gallinger M, Goethals A, Grotke A, Hartman C, Lazorshak B, et al. 2015 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship. National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA); 2014.
• Bator, Francis M. "The anatomy of market failure." The Quarterly Journal of Economics (1958): 351-379.
• Keynes, John Maynard. A tract on monetary reform. Ed. Elizabeth Johnson. Vol. 4. London: Macmillan, 1923.
• Hess, Charlotte. "Elinor Ostrom, eds. 2007." Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice.
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Questions?
E-mail: [email protected]: informatics.mit.edu
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