Carl Malamud's Text Mining Project

For many years now it has been obvious that humans can no longer effectively process the enormous volume of academic publishing. The entire system is overloaded, and its signal-to-noise ratio is degrading. Journals are no longer effective gatekeepers, indeed many are simply fraudulent. Peer review is incapable of preventing fraud, gross errors, false authorship, and duplicative papers; reviewers cannot be expected to have read all the relevant literature.

On the other hand, there is now much research showing that computers can be effective at processing this flood of information. Below the fold I look at a couple of recent developments.

Sustaining Open Resources

Cambridge University Office of Scholarly Communication's Unlocking Research blog has an interesting trilogy of posts looking at the issue of how open access research resources can be sustained for the long term:

• Dr. Lauren Cadwallader's Open Resources, who should pay
• David Carr's  Sustaining open research resources – a funder perspective
• Dave Gerrard's Sustaining long-term access to open research resources – a university library perspective

Below the fold I summarize each of their arguments and make some overall observations.

The Vienna Principles

This is an excellent piece of work, well worth reading and thinking about:

Between April 2015 and June 2016, members of the Open Access Network Austria (OANA) working group “Open Access and Scholarly Communication” met in Vienna to discuss [Open Science]. The main outcome of our considerations is a set of twelve principles that represent the cornerstones of the future scholarly communication system. They are designed to provide a coherent frame of reference for the debate on how to improve the current system. With this document, we are hoping to inspire a widespread discussion towards a shared vision for scholarly communication in the 21st century. 

Their twelve principles are:

• 1 Accessibility
• 2 Discoverability
• 3 Reusability
• 4 Reproducibility
• 5 Transparency
• 6 Understandability
• 7 Collaboration
• 8 Quality Assurance
• 9 Evaluation
• 10 Validated Progress
• 11 Innovation
• 12 Public Good

IDCC15

I wasn't able to attend IDCC2015 two weeks ago in London, but I've been catching up with the presentations on the Web. Below the fold, my thoughts on a few of them.