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Cameron Neylon
science21: Cameron Neylon
Timo Hannay - The future is a foreign country: Science publishing in the 21st century
September 9, 2008 - Comment - Share
An englishman with a polish father a scottish mother, a japanese wife and a finnish first name - Cameron Neylon
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." - LP Hartley - Michael Nielsen
William Gibson's great quote: "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." - Michael Nielsen
A personal anecdote coming up - a journey to japan - Cameron Neylon
Talking about change, and how people respond to change. - Michael Nielsen
He's a "digital migrant" - Michael Nielsen
just as he is a 'digital migrant' not brought up in the digital world he was a geographical migrant - Cameron Neylon
japan was an alien place - completely different - Cameron Neylon
amazing juxtapositions of western/eastern familiar/unfamiliar old/new - Cameron Neylon
Constant shocks... microshocks, through to really big shocks; then occasionally the shock of the familiar. - Michael Nielsen
"Think twice before you go to a country where the concept of death through overwork is so common that they have reduced it to a three-syllable word." - Chad Orzel
Early visitors to China apparently thought the language was a pretense, meant to intimidate them. - Michael Nielsen
Switching topics: the internet. - Michael Nielsen
The internet is a foreign land to publishers. - Michael Nielsen
Gives the example of an essay submitted by a 13 year old girl in England; written in text messagese. - Michael Nielsen
"My smmr hols we CWOT... 0 bt baas & ^^^^... IDTS!! I wntd 2 go gm ASAP, 2C my M*s again... Now its BAU" - Michael Nielsen
strange languages (text spealk and others), new currencies, new cultural currencies, gift culture - Cameron Neylon
New cultural currencies. - Michael Nielsen
Email as mass copyright infringement. - Chad Orzel
Wonderful photo from Joi Ito: younger person reading on their phone, older person reading a book. Something unfamiliar for everyone. - Michael Nielsen
the idea that emails include the previous text when you hit reply would have been totally repugnant to lawyers - paraphrase from Cory Doctorow - Cameron Neylon
(Though, really, the copyright problem would be moot if people would learn to use a goddamn text editor...) - Chad Orzel
"How can you imagine somebody reading their phone... it's like reading your ironing board... convergence." - Michael Nielsen
'reading on a phone..you may as well tell the recording industry that people will be listening to their ironing board' - Cameron Neylon
this is just a typing race isn't it? :-) - Cameron Neylon
How should publishers respond? - Michael Nielsen
Publishers react - PRISM as an example - Cameron Neylon
PRISM! Astroturfing... - Michael Nielsen
reflected badly on publishers in a predictable manner and was very counter productive - Cameron Neylon
publishing is not a monolithic industry - Nature, Cell, and Science are really very different - Cameron Neylon
Talks about the fact that people regard publishers in a monolithic way, but they're not actually monolithic. Gives example of Science, Nature, Cell - people think about them in a similar way, but they actually behave very, very differently, and think in incredibly different ways. - Michael Nielsen
Industry is starting to embrace change - perhaps not enough but things are changing - Cameron Neylon
all industries have progressive and reactionary peeople - Cameron Neylon
While scientists have gloried in the disruptive effect that the Web is having on publishers and libraries, with many fields strongly pushing open publication models, we are much more resistant to letting it be a disruptive force in the practice of our disciplines. (Jim Hendler quote) - Jen Dodd
... including both science and publishing (following Cameron). - Michael Nielsen
NIH request manuscript deposition in PubMED: 4% compliance. - Michael Nielsen
Nature offers to do it: 30% compliance. 70% can't be bothered to say yes. - Michael Nielsen
NIH mandate: has gone up, but still not near 100%. - Michael Nielsen
Scientists can't be bothered to change. Indeed. - carolh
I think Wellcome is finding compliance around 70% level - but don't have a source for that number to hand - Cameron Neylon
New topic: What being progressive involves - Michael Nielsen
Nature mission statement: from second issue of Nature, 1869: "First, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery; and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life;" - Michael Nielsen
Mission doesn't say anything anywhere about being a journal publisher. I skipped part 2 of the mission - about disseminating science. - Michael Nielsen
First - communicate to public, _then_ aid communication between scientists - Nature mission statement - Cameron Neylon
Mission continues: And secondly, to aid Scientific men [sic] themselves.... - Jen Dodd
Showing NPG services - staritng with connotea http://www.connotea.org - Cameron Neylon
Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/ -- Del.icio.us for academics. - Chad Orzel
going on the Nature podcasts http://www.nature.com/nature... - Cameron Neylon
podcasts very successful - above Madonna on iTunes - Cameron Neylon
"Listening to an author talk about their work is very different than reading a paper..." - Michael Nielsen
ABout 1/3 of podcast listeners not scientists at all. - Michael Nielsen
the idea of podcasts was very alien a few years back NPG is now a broadcaster as well as a publisher - Cameron Neylon
My question: does Nature make or lose money off this? (I wonder if NPG is publicly traded?) - Michael Nielsen
Its all a loss leader - NPG is part of a privately held company - Cameron Neylon
Pretty happy with the meeting structure in Second Life now. First meeting "a debacle"... - Michael Nielsen
Cameron: How do you know they're losing money on all these things? - Michael Nielsen
Should say I don't know what the numbers are for nature.com itself as opposed to all of these additional services - Cameron Neylon
Precedings: http://precedings.nature.com/ (Nature version of the arxiv) - Chad Orzel
journal submisssion system is hooked to precedings - option to directly puit submitted documents into precedings on journal submission - Cameron Neylon
Wonder how precedings traffic scaling compares to the scaling in the early days of the arxiv? - Michael Nielsen
example of the wikified supplementary information for the Stein article - Cameron Neylon
Most scientific publishers have ignored databases. - Michael Nielsen
growing role of scientific databases - nature.com inforamtion gateways, working with partners with NIH funding to provide data access - Cameron Neylon
Wiki with supplementary info: http://nrgwiki.nature.com/cyberin... - Jen Dodd
Gateways and databases: http://www.nature.com/databas... - Chad Orzel
SciFoo! - Cameron Neylon
Science publisging is changing - obvious change is that it has moved online' - Cameron Neylon
but also critically about functionality - Cameron Neylon
Adding functionality, not just serving content-- becoming software companies. - Chad Orzel
"we're more and more turning into a software company" (rough) - Michael Nielsen
Not "If we build it they will come"... "Unless we build it we won't know" - Michael Nielsen
"the product is the market research" in some cases - Michael Nielsen
"If we don't ever fail, we're not trying hard enough." - Chad Orzel
"If we don't ever fail we're not trying hard enough" - Bonnie Swoger
An "experimental publisher," as opposed to a theoretical publisher. I wonder what that would be... - Chad Orzel
Hard to escape the feeling that while a lot of science publishers might die in the coming years, Nature isn't going to be one of them. - Michael Nielsen
An algorithm to determine peer reviewers: http://arxiv.org/abs... - Chad Orzel
Back to Joi Ito's photo: publishers forced to re-evaluate: what do we do? - Michael Nielsen
last year, 5 of top 10 novels in Japan were keitai novels (on mobile phones) - Chad Orzel
Back to the analogy with migrants. Emphasizes not having a sense of entitlement on the part of publishers. Humble posture. - Michael Nielsen
@eva just a small interruption in the flow, here in the government we get periodic presentations from people who have email servers that purport to control messages entirely. There's a thing called Rights Management Services for Windows that, as long as everyone uses totally controlled systems, prevents people from forwarding emails and other such ridiculous limitations. I don't know if any big organisations have actually tried to use this kind of DRM for email, but the tech is there. - Richard Akerman
"We're not in Kansas any more, but that's good, because it was a pretty boring place before." - Chad Orzel
About 30 people in web publishing; gradually becoming more integrated with the rest of the company. - Michael Nielsen
We're into questions. - Michael Nielsen
30 people in Nature web publishing; 750 in NPG, MacMillan 10 times larger. - Michael Nielsen
Classified ads very online-centric, display ads largely print-centric - Chad Orzel
This was a great talk! Definitely recommend watching. - Jen Dodd
Looking at nature.com, most of the adds are for other NPG publications or products. - Bonnie Swoger
Recording (video and slides) is at http://pirsa.org/08090030/ - Jen Dodd