Interview with Michael Nielsen

No, not me interviewing Michael Nielsen (although I'll probably get around to it one of these days).

It's my older son Sam who is in grade 10. It's for a Career Studies assignment because he's thinking that theoretical physicist is a possible career path. Check out the interview here.

Recently, I had to do an interview of someone who was on, or had been on, a similar career path to the one we want to pursue (being in grade 10, there's some growing up left to do, but it doesn't feel right to say 'when we grow up'). I've been thinking theoretical physicist as of late (have I mentioned that before?) and I was hoping to interview someone who's... in theoretical physics. At first, it seemed like a hopeless journey; how could I reach someone who's in physics and actually convince them to do an interview? I didn't even know where to start to find a physicist, unless one counts asking my dad. Of course, he said something along the lines of 'Michael Nielsen! He was a physicist and is now writing on the future of science as a whole. He's famous and his career path is extremely relevant.' My curiosity was piqued.

Interview with Dorothea Salo of Caveat Lector

Welcome to the latest installment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the library, publishing and scitech worlds. This time around the subject is Dorothea Salo, Digital Repository Librarian at University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the blog Caveat Lector. Dorothea is well known for her role in the institutional repository and scholarly communications communities; she's the author of the widely read eprint on IRs "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel," forthcoming in the Fall 2008 Library Trends.

Thanks to Dorothea for her provocative and thoughtful responses. Enjoy!


Q0. Hi Dorothea, would you mind telling us a little about yourself and how you ended up as Digital Repository Librarian at University of Wisconsin-Madison?

After burning out of Ph.D candidacy in Spanish a decade ago, I landed a job doing SGML work and typesetting for a publishing-services bureau serving scholarly publishers and university presses. I also took part in the ebook boomlet of the early 2000s, working on the content specification put out by the (then-)Open eBook Forum. In so doing, I met Allen Renear (then at Brown, now at Illinois/Urbana-Champaign), who has been a mentor and friend ever since.

When the ebook market decayed like the rest of the dot-com boom, I looked around to see who else was doing digitization in a halfway-responsible fashion, and where I could apply such skills as I had usefully. That led me to the UW-Madison's library school. I owe immense gratitude to the UW Survey Center, which turned my full-time job into a half-time project assistantship that paid all but the last semester of my tuition.

On graduating in 2005, I hunted several different sorts of jobs, the entry-level library job market being what it is. The job I landed was the inauguration of the institutional repository at George Mason University in Fairfax VA just outside DC.

Now, Mason is a wonderful place with fantastic colleagues and I loved working there. Unfortunately, DC can be a soul-sucking place to live in; it and I just weren't a good fit for each other. So when the repository-manager position opened at the University of Wisconsin, I searched my soul, consulted with my husband, and applied. I'm so happy to be home in Madison again!


Q1. Recently on FriendFeed Steve Lawson asked people what they would like to be interviewed on. Here's your chance. So, what do you think about "libraries' feasible and proper roles in scholarly communication?"

I think a lot of things. I think the institutional repository was a noble and worthwhile experiment, but as a tool for redressing the imbalances in the scholarly-communication system, it is a failure. It may be reborn if the Harvard experiment succeeds, but that very much remains to be seen. This doesn't mean that I think IRs are useless; they don't have to be, though they often are. It does mean that we're going to have to go after the serials crisis in other ways.

I think we libraries have a lot of market power that we are not using properly. I've heard publishers talk about their industry, and what they invariably say is "we will follow the money." That means libraries; as individual subscriptions dwindle, WE are the ones with the money. They'll follow us -- but we aren't leading them toward open access. We're squealing like stuck pigs about the stalemate, yes, but we're not reallocating any of our serials funds to support gold open access. I think this is a serious mistake.

I think I know why we're doing it; it's the same old story about serving our patrons as best we can with the resources we have. (Librarians have a bit of a martyr complex sometimes.) There is also a serious and ugly undercurrent of anti-OA backlash among faculty; maybe Alma Swan hasn't seen it, but I sure have. Librarians trifle with that at our peril, and we know it. So we sigh, and put every cent we have toward subscriptions, and feel backed against the wall.

Even so -- we HAVE stood our ground once or twice, and the publishers blinked. I am thinking of the stand against the Big Deal of three or four years back. We came out of that well, as hard as it must have been to contemplate at the time. We could have and should have built on that -- but we didn't. I want to see us cancelling overpriced journals, regardless of their impact factors or usage statistics, and standing up to faculty when they ask why. We need to say "no" loudly and clearly more often, and we need to divert some of the serials money we save thereby to gold open access. (Some should go back to monographs, of course.)

As a matter of strategy, then, the open-access movement needs to target serials and e-resources librarians with requests for support of gold OA. SPARC needs to take a hard look at propagandizing (for example) NASIG and the Charleston Conference. CNI isn't anywhere near enough, and ALA conferences revolve around the status quo.

I think some of us have futures as publishing support specialists. Open
Journal Systems isn't going away. I don't know how big this will become,
truthfully, but I do know that I trust librarians a lot more than I trust
other potential and actual players in this space. Big-pig publishers lost
credibility as scholarship's dutiful handmaidens long ago, and I'm nearly
as cynical about scholarly societies, which had their chance to stand with
us but stuck by the big pigs instead. A pox on both their houses; if the
scholarly societies are right and open access sinks some of them, I'm
perfectly baffled as to why I as a librarian should care.

I think all of this boils down to one theme, which I have seen expressed in several distinct contexts: librarians cannot remain the warehouse at the end of the train tracks, as we historically have been. We have to become part of the whole process. We're not used to that, but there's tremendous potential in it for us.


Q2. How did get started blogging and what keeps you going?

Ah, yes. I started blogging in 2002, after a nasty contretemps with my then-employer. The said employer hired me because I was a notable voice in the field at the time. Good public relations, don't you know. During the negotiation process, the employer assured me that they had no interest in stifling my editorial voice; being associated with me was enough of a marketing tool.

Yes, I was stupid to believe it. What can I say? I'd been out of the fishbowl of graduate school barely two scant years, and (believe it or not) I tend to believe the best of people until I have my nose rubbed in how wrong I am. The inevitable happened, of course; I wrote and published something that outraged them, they nearly fired me over it, and it scared me badly enough to find another job.

And start blogging. I hadn't run out of things to say, some of them controversial or even damaging, and I understood finally that I needed a place to say them that was clearly and unequivocally mine, firewalled off from employers. The firewall is, shall we say, somewhat permeable and not always as effective as I'd like, but it's worked well enough for the purpose. And I've learned some things too about where the appropriate boundaries are -- which isn't to say I don't still cross them now and again!

What keeps me going? Well, to be stone-cold selfish about it, blogging is the most productive professional activity I engage in, even though I don't actually do it at work! Directly or indirectly, it's sent me abroad twice, gotten me several "wanna write a book?" invitations, several article gigs, and similar opportunities. It's not all gravy; it may have cost me a job once, and I've also noticed that some people are cautious about approaching me professionally because of my pugnacious blog demeanor. (To them I say: yes, I can occasionally be difficult, but far from always, and I try to be worth the trouble!) Roach Motel may actually manage to eclipse CavLec as the first thing librarians know about me as a professional librarian, but we'll see.

Truthfully, the professional notoriety is a pleasant side-effect, but it's not why I blog. I still have things to say, things I can't say at work or in the professional literature. The blog reaches far more people, and a far greater variety of people, than balkanized and toll-access-firewalled professional publication can. I find the blogging form useful for thinking through systems and phenomena I don't fully understand. And I can also express my joy in great blue herons and art festivals and music.


Q3. I find it interesting that you don't allow comments on your blog but at the same time there's often a quite lively conversation on FriendFeed? What's your rationale for not allowing comments on the blog itself?

I've addressed this on CavLec many a time; I think I need to put permalinks for those posts in the sidebar. For all my pugnacity, I am easily frightened and stressed by open conflict, especially in some of the horrendously nasty and frankly evil forms the Internet tends to foster (notably against technical-minded women). I don't want to deal with that in my space. I don't want to become the next Kathy Sierra. I don't want to go through the angst some of my fellow librarian bloggers have with out-of-control comment threads, trolls, and threats.

There's a counterargument, and a good one: my public blog-face is a good deal meaner and wronger than it would be if I had commenters to call me in public on my garbage. Unfortunately, if I threw open comments to all, I shortly wouldn't have ANY public face, because it isn't just the wise and sensible commenters calling me on my garbage who would show up.

There are also bad counterarguments concerning the effect of comments on a blog's popularity. Sure, I coulda been a contenda in the blogosphere if I'd enabled comments. I don't care about being a contenda, and never have. People come to me now and then asking how to write a popular blog; one or two have even asked me how to make money with a blog, though I've never knowingly allowed so much as the teensiest text-ad on mine. (CavLec did get hacked by linkspammers once, but I cleaned that up as soon as I found out about it.) I never answer such people. I don't know and I don't care. That isn't why I blog.


Q4. And why do you think FriendFeed tends to foster more and better commentary that the comments section for most blogs?

Partly because communities self-select. Partly because the FF signup barrier, minor though it is, is sufficient deterrence to eliminate random trolls as well as pack-mobbing. Partly because feed owners can fence their feeds off by making them semi-private (as I have done with my FF) and by hiding or blocking people who get out of line. Partly because FF threads are ephemeral enough not to attract attention whores the way popular comment-enabled blogs do.

I caution adopters that a "private" FF should not be considered private, even if you strictly control whom you permit to see your feed (and I don't). You never know who's going to squeal on you (I learned that one in grad school), so behave yourself. Still, by and large FF is an immense improvement over blog comments.


Q5. Once upon a time, faculty used to come to the library every week or so to check new journals. You could ask them questions, get their input, etc. How do you think libraries and libraries can still reach out to such an important constituency in the age of Google and ejournals?

Get out of the library! QED. Mohammed and the mountain. The health-sciences library director at MPOW has made a career of this to fantastic effect, and I respect him a great deal for it. He doesn't wait to be invited to faculty meetings; he invites himself. By the third meeting, they expect him to be there and value his input -- which is only natural, because he's incredibly sharp and knowledgeable.

What's holding us back from that? Two things, honestly. One is the reference desk, which is an incredible timesink. (Resolved: Librarians can no longer afford to provide synchronous in-person assistance; the ROI is insufficient. Discuss. Now discuss it in the context of other professions, such as law and medicine.) The other barrier is libraries' unbelievably bad habit of holding too many library-internal meetings. Get librarians OUT of those and INTO faculty meetings, and watch faculty learn to value us again.

There's lots of other stuff floating about with regard to embedding librarians in the research process, as we're doing with information literacy and teaching, and I'm all for that and hope to become an embedded librarian someday myself. None of that changes the fundamental proposition: since they won't come to us, we have to go to them. Not hat in hand, not begging -- we walk in as professionals with plenty of value to offer.

And if we can't think of any value we offer, we've got way worse problems than faculty not coming into the library!


Q6. I guess I have to ask a question about IRs: if you could get one message across to faculty at your institution about Institutional Repositories, what would it be?

Asking questions about IRs is such a drag. ;)

Faculty specifically? "Let me help you."

Frankly, though, a more productive message would be directed at my fellow librarians, and would read "I can't do this without you. Help me."


Q7. In terms of the future of IRs over the next, say, five years, what would the best and worst case scenarios be?

Worst case is easy: they are defunded and die. Harvard delayed that, but I don't think they have prevented it. If the software remains obtuse and difficult, if the goals remain socio-culturally impractical, if the services remain under-resourced and poorly understood, IRs are doomed. At a good many institutions, I believe this is inevitable, still; it's just going to take a little longer than I initially thought. The five-year time horizon you specify should suffice.

Best case: IRs shift from "warehouse at the end of the digital train tracks" to a set of services and systems that manage, safeguard, and shepherd the digital products of the research process all the way through, soup to nuts. We have successful examples of this already, particularly in Australia, and Europe is starting to build them as well. In this country, I suspect they aren't going to grow out of IRs -- they'll be part of the funder-initiated and IT-spearheaded movement to cope with research data locally. This is my warning call to libraries: if we're not in on these discussions, we'll be shut out of the resulting services, and that's bad for all concerned. I have heard some stunningly ignorant statements about data curation from IT people at MPOW -- but on the plus side, at least I'm in on those conversations!


Q8. The scholarly publishing landscape is changing pretty quickly these days. What major changes do you see happening in the next few years in terms of some of the major issues such as journal publishing, publishers' business models, the role of scholarly societies, and the open access movement?

You don't ask small questions, do you? (Yeah, well, they're the only ones really worth asking. -John)

I honestly have no idea what the major changes will be, because so far, major changes in this realm have been discontinuous and out-of-the-blue. I didn't predict the Big Deal backlash. I didn't dare predict the trajectory of the NIH public-access policy, and I'd be stupid to predict who might or might not follow their example. I didn't predict Harvard, and I frankly can't so much as guess who will follow Harvard, or even if anyone will. California's experience is the stern warning here, and extrapolating a guess from MPOW, while it could be interesting, doesn't pass my internal sniff test for reliability.

Part of the reason I can't predict these things is that I'm not invited into the right smoke-filled rooms; players in this game tend to play their cards close to their chests, so I have no way of finding out what they're thinking. Part of the reason is that the outcome of any given individual process, as the NIH policy trajectory demonstrates, is fairly random!

All that leaves me with is the obvious. The publishing lobby will continue its stunning mendacity, largely though not entirely unopposed by rank-and-file publishers. There will be more open-access journals. It is likely to become harder to assert that open-access journals are unsustainable, but that won't stop the publishing lobby from trying -- and it won't stop a few gold journals from folding, either. We will continue to argue about citation advantages, and just what a citation is worth. Faculty will continue to feel whipsawed by all this.


Q9. What role so you think social software/web 2.0 will play in all this?

In "The Social Journal," a presentation I gave for publishers in 2006, I argued that in becoming disciplinary markers and quality arbiters, journals gave up the power and usefulness of unmediated, un-gatekept communication, and that is what researchers are now finding on the Web. The long and short of it is that I still think this.

What's happening now is that some of this communication, since it isn't ephemeral the way a hallway chat at a conference is, is being recognized as holding some sort of scholarly value. Young-turk tenure-trackers want their blogs to be included in their tenure-and-promotion packages. Digital humanists of varying stripes are clamoring for their rightful place. Scientists are asking themselves about communicating with the public as a service obligation. Pieces of the scholarly-valuation process, such as
publication lists and citation tracking, are moving into machine-readable forms on the Web.

The sticky wicket is that none of this directly assails the journal or the monograph yet. (This enabled me to make my 2006 presentation utterly non-threatening to my audience, which both they and I appreciated.) Cultural norms and standards in academia are what they are, and it will be a long time -- probably my lifetime -- before they shift appreciably. I do think some of the smaller problems, such as citation and credit for datasets, will be solved relatively quickly. The larger problems, such as the fragmentation and mutability of online conversations and the difficulty of persisting them, are here to stay.

In the main, then, promotion and tenure will happen as they pretty much have for the last century or so, and the outside conversation will happen outside that process, as it generally has. That conversation is becoming more visible and more persistent, and that makes me happy because I don't approve of the way the toll-access world shuts out the public from the research conversation. Call me a curmudgeon if you will, though, but I don't believe the visibility and persistence of that conversation is game-changing.

Though I could be wrong...

Interview with Eugene Wallingford of Knowing and Doing

Welcome to the latest installment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Eugene Wallingford, Head of the Computer Science Department at University of Northern Iowa and author of the blog Knowing and Doing. I've been following Knowing and Doing for most of the four years it's been running (Happy Blogiversary, Eugene!) and I've always been impressed by Eugene's insights into the world of computer science, especially from the educational viewpoint. Since it's been quite a while since I interviewed a CS faculty member, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to see what Eugene thinks about some of the important issues in the field today. I think there's some food for thought in the interview for librarians supporting CS programs and students.

Thanks to Eugene for his thoughtful responses. Enjoy!


Q0. Hi, Eugene, please tell us about yourself, your career path and how you got to be the Head of the Computer Science Department at University of Northern Iowa.

Thanks, John, for asking me for an interview. I am honored to share a few thoughts with your readers.

From the time I was seven or eight, I wanted to be an architect. All of my career planning in school aimed that direction. Academically, I liked everything and so had a full load of math, science, literature, history, and social science.

I started college as an architecture major. While I liked it just fine, something was missing. Somehow, I was drawn toward computer science. I ended up double majoring in CS and accounting, but CS was my passion, especially artificial intelligence. I went on to grad school, specializing in knowledge-based systems. My dissertation focused on the interaction between memory and domain knowledge.

A little over three years ago, we were nearing the end of an interim department head's term. I'd never given much thought to being an administrator, but I saw many ways in which we could improve and thought for a moment that I might be the right person to help us get there. I am now ending my first 3-year term and have agreed to continue on for three more years. Looking back, I see some improvements but, frankly, had hoped to have accomplished more. This is a tough job. It lets me be a computer scientist in some ways but takes time away from doing all of the CS I love. I'm committed to helping us move forward for another term, and then we'll see.


Q1. Do you have a theory of blogging? What got you started blogging and what do you get out of it and what keeps you going? I'm sure all your faithful readers are hoping you can add comments to your blog at some point.

I don't think I have a theory of blogging. I first started because I had things I wanted to say. Every computer I had ever owned was littered with little essays, reviews, and conference notes that no one had ever seen. I'd been reading several blogs for several years and thought that starting a blog was a way to make some of my writing more permanent. If others found it worth reading, all the better.

My blog consists mostly of short pieces connected to my professional life as a computer scientist and faculty member. I make connections among things I read, write, see, and do. My one personal indulgence in writing is running, and I've written quite a bit about my experiences training for marathons. Some of my more interesting pieces in this category have made connections from training and running to software development.

Occasionally, I write something that is purely personal, or something that made me smile and laugh. I don't think anyone really wants to hear about what I eat for meals or who I am voting for in elections, so my blog has never veered in that direction. But readers get to know me as a professional person, and I do think that knowing something about the person on the fringes adds depth to how they read my other pieces.

Comments... Yes, I understand. When I first started blogging -- four years ago today (July 9)! -- I planned to add comments. The tool I use to blog is very simple and didn't make that easy. I've just never gotten around to it.

I read many blogs in which comments make a valuable contribution to the message. In others, they add little. There are many ways in which I would relish an ongoing conversation with readers. Adding comments is still on my wish list.


Q2. You blog a lot about teaching computer science. Do you have a teaching philosophy? How do you think teaching computer science differs from teaching other disciplines?

There was a thread recently on the SIGCSE mailing list about teaching philosophies. Many schools ask job applicants for a statement of teaching philosophy, and some folks think that's silly. How could new Ph.D.s have teaching philosophies when they have spent little or no time in a classroom?

I've been on the CS faculty for sixteen years now, and I can't say that I have a coherent, pat teaching philosophy even now. Were I to apply for a new job, I would have to do what those new Ph.D.s have to do: scour my mind for bits of truth that reflect how I teach and how I think about learning, and then mold them into an essay that captures something coherent about me on this day.

My blog exposes some of these bits of truth as I write about my experiences in the classroom. It will be a wonderful resource the next time I have to write a statement of philosophy.

Thinking back to all I've written in the last few years, I can see some themes. Learning is more important than teaching. Students learn when they do. Students learn when they want to do. What I can do as a teacher is to create an environment where students come into contact with cool and powerful ideas. I can organize ideas, skills, and tools so that students encounter them in a way that might spur their desire. Ask students to write programs and solve problems. Ask them to think about how and why. Ask them to go deep in an area so that they learn its richness and not its surface chemistry. Oh, and show as often as I can and in as many ways as I can how much I love computer science. Show what I learn.

That paragraph would get me started on a philosophy statement.

Computer science is an interesting mix of mathematics and programs. Most people don't realize that it is a creative discipline -- a discipline in which making things is paramount. In that sense, we can learn a lot from how writers and artists (and architects!) learn their craft.


Q3. Another of your favourite themes is how computing is infiltrating all the other sciences -- in other words we're getting to the point where it's computational everything. What got you interested in that trend and where do you see it going?

This is not as new as it might seem. Computer science has always been about applications: creating solutions to real problems in the world. The discipline goes through spurts in which it looks inward, but the focus always turns back out. When I was in college in the first half of the 1980s, there was a lot of talk about end-user programming, and even then that wasn't new. Alan Kay has been talking for forty years about computing as a new medium for expressing ideas, a medium for every person. Before that, pioneers such as Marvin Minsky said similar things.

What's happening now is a confluence of several developments. Computing power has continued to grow at a remarkable pace. Our ability to gather and store data has, too. We realize that there will probably never be enough "computer scientists" to solve all of these problems ourselves, and how could we anyway? Biologists know more biology than I ever will; likewise for economics and astronomy and geography and most other disciplines. We are reaching a point where the time is right to fulfill the vision of computing as medium for expressing and testing ideas, and that will require we help everyone use the medium effectively.


Q4. Enrollment has been an issue in the CS community for a while now. Are you happy with the current levels of enrollment? What do you think are some of the ways to get enough students of all kinds interested in CS and willing to consider it as a major? How can we improve the diversity of the students willing to give CS a shot?

We've started to see a small bounce in our enrollments, and I think this trend will continue for a while. I'm not sure that we will ever see the large growth we saw in the 1980s and 1990s, but that's okay -- as long as we recognize our need to broaden the base of people who can use computing in their own disciplines.

Figuring out how to get more students to major in CS or to learn how to use computing in their own disciplines is not easy. If I knew the answer, my school would have a lot more majors and students! There are a lot of things we can do: tell our story better; help more people to understand what computing is and what we do; introduce our ideas to more students earlier in school. One thing a lot of us have noticed over the years is that most people learn about CS as something "hard", a discipline that requires special wiring in the brain. While it's probably true that not everyone is suited to do academic research in CS, I think that everyone can learn to use computing as a medium for expressing ideas. If we can find good ways to introduce computing in that way across the population, the number of majors and the number of interested non-majors will take care of themselves.


Q5. Could you tell us a little about your research interests?

As I mentioned in my history earlier, I started in the area of artificial intelligence, a field in which computer scientists work with many others in an effort to make computers do ever more impressive tasks. Most of my work was in Knowledge-based systems, a sub-area that focused on how systems with deep knowledge of a class of problems can organize, access, and use the knowledge to solve those problems. In the mid-1990s, I began to move in the direction of intelligent tutoring systems, which are programs that help people to learn. This was probably a natural evolution for me, given my interest in how my students and I learn new areas of expertise.

In the late 1990s, I found myself drifting toward work in the area of software design and development, which led me more toward programming languages. Notions of design and language were central to my interest in AI, but I found the concreteness of supporting software developers attractive.

As a department head, I don't have much time for research. When I do have time, I work on how to provide support to programmers as they write, modify, and manipulate code. Of particular interest is how to support refactoring (changes to programs that preserve their intended behavior but modify their structure) in dynamic languages, which do not provide all of the cues we need to ensure that a modification preserves behavior.


Q6. Being a librarian, you know I have to ask what journals, conferences, etc., you find most helpful. I'm also curious about any search engines you might use, be they commercial ones like INSPEC, Web of Science, Scopus or "free" ones like CiteSeer, Google, or Google Scholar? Or anything I haven't even mentioned.

Google. That's the answer for so many things! It's my primary tool for search to find new articles. It links me to more focused technical tools like CiteSeer and the ACM Digital Library, as needed. But so many articles are now available directly on the web from their authors that the journals themselves become more like convenient packaging devices than essential units themselves. It's akin to the change in the music industry from the album to the single. Singles fell out of favor for a while, but the advent of iTunes and other music services have really changed how most people come into contact with their music today.

I don't read many journals cover to cover anymore. I do subscribe to the Communications of the ACM and am looking forward to its new format. I also follow the bulletins of several ACM special interest groups (programming languages, AI, and education).


Q7. Again, being a librarian, I'm also curious about any CS-related books you've read that you've found useful or inspiring, either recently or in your formative years.

A few years back, before I had a blog, I created a webpage for sharing books with colleagues and students:

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/miscellaneous/recommended-reading.html


I haven't added to that list lately, but it lists most of the CS books I'd recommend yet today, including Abelson and Sussman's The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, and the Gang of Four's Design Patterns. It also lists books that are not technically about CS but which might change how someone thinks about computing and software, such as Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn -- a marvelous book!

One glaring omission from this page are the works of Christopher Alexander, the inspiration for the idea of software patterns. Most everyone recommends The Timeless Way of Buiding and A Pattern Language, and I concur. But I also strongly recommend The Oregon Experiment, which describes Alexander's experience implementing his ideas on a college campus. This is a thin little volume that I found rewarding.

Most of my CS-specific reading lately has been on Ruby.


Q8. I find it interesting that computer science students still seem to be relatively high users of print books and I was wondering about your take on that phenomenon. Is it still the same or is it changing?

Philip Greenspun has described CS as pre-paradigmatic in Thomas Kuhn's sense, which means that books play an important role in how new ideas are shared and disseminated. Computing has always been rich in print books, from timeless works down to skills books with a shelf life limited by the rapid change in technology. I know many publishers are thinking about ways the market might shift into electronic versions, and more and more books are available on-line now, sometimes in their first run.

A lot of my students are reading books on-line more now than in print. A recent favorite is Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, available at http://poignantguide.net/ruby/. To my knowledge, this book is available only on the web and not in print. I'm curious to see how this trend develops. My guess is that individual authors will create most of the ideas that change how we read their works, which will cascade down to how we publish.

This comes back in to some ways to blogs, which seems like a good way to close the circle on this interview. One thing I love about my blog in comparison to the essays and comments I used to write in regular text files is the ability to link directly to other works. When I drop a short piece onto my blog, it often takes its place within a web of related writings and software pages. The connections among these works adds value to what I write by giving my readers a way to find and explore related work. That is so much more convenient than a list of references at the end, even if it is also a whole lot messier.

Thanks again for asking me to contribute to your interview series.

Interview with Bora Zivkovic, Crazy Uncle of the Science Blogging Community

Welcome to the latest installment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Bora Zivkovic, Online Community Manager for the open access journal PLoS ONE. Bora is also well know as a prolific science blogger at his blog A Blog Around the Clock. In yet another persona, Bora has organized two science blogging conferences and edited two anthologies of the best of the science blogs.

One of the great things Bora did in association with the most recent North Carolina Science Blogging Conference was host a series of interviews with various attendees on his blog (myself included), all of which are well worth reading. So, I thought I'd turn the tables a little bit and get Bora to answer many of the same questions he posed to his various subjects.

I'd like to thank Bora for his enthusiastic, insightful and fun responses. Enjoy!


Welcome to the Confessions of a Science Librarian. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background?

I grew up in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), reading books and riding horses since an early age. I majored in biochemistry and molecular biology in high school, then went to vet school with the intent to specialize in equine medicine. In 1991, I sold my horse and saddle and bought a ticket -- train to London, then plane to JFK. The war started a week later, breaking the country into several smaller pieces.

After a summer in Hendersonville, NC, working in a summer camp, and about a month in Boston and New Hampshire, I came back to North Carolina, to Raleigh, to work in a horse barn while dealing with the Immigration bureaucracy. On my first day in Raleigh I met Catharine who, a year later, became my wife. We have two kids -- a son and a daughter -- as well as a dog and three cats. We moved to Chapel Hill five years ago and love it here.

My transcripts from the vet school in Belgrade did not count for anything here, so instead of just finishing up in a year or so I would have had to start all over again. Instead, and after talking to horse vets at the barn for a couple of years, I decided that the situation here is quite different than in Yugoslavia. On one hand, the equine veterinary field is quite competitive, leaving little choice as to the location where one has to move to. On the other hand, one can actually do top science in the USA and biology was always my first love.

My interest was always in evolutionary biology, but I was often dismayed with some of the theoretical stuff that seemed to ignore the way the organisms actually work. My vet-school background, heavy on physiology, made it pretty easy for me to get into the NCSU Zoology program where I could integrate physiology, behavioral biology and evolutionary thinking into a single project. I did my MS on the physiology of circadian rhythms and photoperiodism in Japanese quail with Dr. Herbert Underwood, one of the pioneers of chronobiology, and continued with my PhD work in the same lab expanding both down to the level of the molecules and up to the evolutionary context. As you know, I have not defended my Dissertation or published any of that work yet...

After almost ten years in grad school (and after three deaths in the family in succession) I became depressed. The political situation in the USA was depressing as well. I spent more and more time online, reading and commenting on political blogs (including on the Edwards campaign blog), and less and less time writing my thesis. After the 2004 election, I got tired of political blogging and started blogging about science on a new blog instead, with immediate success (my very first post on the science blog got many thousands of hits from BoingBoing and others within the first day of the blog's existence!). In 2006, I got invited to move my blog to Seed ScienceBlogs.com. The rest is history.


What do you want to do/be when you grow up?

When I was a kid I had this great idea to be the first person to win both an Olympic medal and a Nobel prize. I am older and wiser now. Four years out of the lab, and fifteen years off the horse, the childhood dreams are over. And last time I checked, dealing with comment trolls does not qualify for the Peace prize. Jobs come and go. Passions come and go. But passion for making the world a better place for our children never goes away. I want to do whatever I can toward that goal. And, of course, be happy with my family and have lots of friends.

If Janet Stemwedel is the Cool Aunt of the science blogging community, you have to be the Crazy Uncle (only in the best way, of course). No one is a bigger supporter and cheerleader for the science blogging community. Can you explain a little the inspiration that's led you to edit an anthology series and organize a couple of conferences around this community? And what's next!?

I guess I am a gregarious type. Also, while blogging for a few years I have looked at the ways by which blogs get recognized and become popular, how top groups get entrenched and how much more difficult it is to make a break now than it was just a couple of years ago. So I feel an obligation to find and promote good new blogs as much as I can.

I have also quickly realized that I have made many good friends online and in many cases their own writing resulted in me knowing them better than many people I know in the meatspace. Meeting an online friend in person is like meeting an old childhood friend after a long break. No need to go through the rituals of "getting to know each other", you just hug and continue -- off line -- the conversation that started online. And having met in the real world, we understand each other better online afterwards (and are likely to be nicer to each other). One reinforces the other. There is something particularly strong about friendships that happen both online and off line. And this is something that Anton Zuiker has recognized a long time ago and showed us all, through meet-ups and conferences, how cool and powerful this idea is.

Thus, wanting to get my online friends, the science bloggers, together was a natural next step. And the way to do it was to organize a conference. And then another one. And we are working on the next one already. The idea is not just to have a giant meet-up where science bloggers get to share a beer, but to do something productive at the time as well -- put together people who probably would never meet otherwise: scientists, students, science bloggers, web developers, science journalists, science writers, science librarians, publishers, teachers and let the cross-fertilization of ideas produce magic!

There are still many people, scientists included, who are not very Internet savvy. Blogs have received quite a lot of bad press from threatened op-ed writers over the years as well, making people even more reluctant to check blogs out. We thought that one way to break this vicious cycle would be to present the best writing on science blogs in a medium that such people are comfortable with -- a book. The first anthology was a big hit and we hope that the second one will get even broader coverage and readership. And of course, we are already planning the third one.



Your real life job is Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE. Could you tell my readers the amazing story of how you go that job and what it consists of? Is herding cats a too gentle phrase to describe it?

My cats are marching in a perfect formation! Scientists....not yet... ;-)

When PLoS ONE was launched a year ago, on the new TOPAZ platform that incorporates readers' commentary, PLoS decided to hire a manager for the online community. Liz Allen was doing the search and, among other things, she sent e-mails to people who could potentially help identifying the right person, i.e., someone with both a scientific background and an experience online. One of the recipients of her e-mail was Anton Zuiker, my friend and co-conspirator in various local blogging activities, including the Science Blogging Conference and the anthology. Anton immediately forwarded the e-mail to me insisting I apply right then and there. Well, it was Friday night, so I thought I'd spend a weekend thinking about it, talking to my wife, fixing my CV, then applying on Monday morning. But, being a blogger, I could not resist posting the job description on the blog and asking my readers to let me know if this job was right for me or if I was just fooling myself. The readers started piling up in the comments, urging me to apply and urging PLoS to hire me. One of the comments, on Saturday morning, was from Chris Surridge, the Managing Editor of PLoS ONE, who wrote: "So should we take this blog post as a formal application?" The rest, as they say is history. So yes, I got the job in the comment thread of my own blog. Who said blogging is bad for your career?

So, my job is primarily to try to get people to post comments, notes and ratings on PLoS ONE articles. This means I have to keep making friends -- online and offline -- in the scientific community, to educate about Open Access, about PLoS, about TOPAZ, etc. I also manage the PLoS Blog, use my own blog to inform my readers about news from PLoS, and I sometimes evangelize OA at meetings.


When, how and why did you become a believer in Open Access publishing? In discussions of Open Access on science blogs, at meetings, between scientists and publishers, most people talk about Gold, while sometimes we librarians seem to prefer the Green approach to Open Access. Given the recent Harvard announcements about the Green approach, what's your current feeling about the balance between Green and Gold?

Back in grad school I was a fanatical downloader and reader of scientific papers. I read papers old and new in my field, in several related fields, and in some unrelated but interesting fields. I read, carefully, several papers per day. Then, a few months after I left grad school and started science blogging, my password expired for the school library and suddenly I realized what I never thought of before -- papers are actually NOT free and available for everyone to read. And I needed my daily dose of papers, both for blogging and for my, at the time, illusion of writing a Dissertation. I had to resort to begging friends for PDFs. When I look back, even to the early days of my science blogging, more and more of my blog posts were about papers in OA journals, mainly PLoS Biology (to which e-mail I was subscribed from the very beginning of the journal's existence).

I have mixed feelings about Green approach to Open Access. On one hand, it is a Good Thing -- papers previously unavailable become available for everyone to read. This is definitely an improvement over Toll Access. On the other hand, I have two main problems with it. First one is technical/practical: papers deposited in many places are more difficult to find and papers deposited with different formats are hard to machine-mine for data. I think all the papers should be in the same format, searchable from a single place and interconnected. Second problem I have is tactical/psychological. Settling for a semi-Good solution will slow down the movement towards the Good solution. Many people will be smugly satisfied with Green and will be hard to recruit to fight for Gold.


How do science blogs fit in the entire ecosystem of scientific publishing, communication and education?

Ah, we had two conferences on this question and we are not sure we have the answer yet! Every now and then, the science bloggers do a round of navel-gazing: what is science blogging (see the discussions from 2006 and the 2008). I could probably make this interview really long by writing a treatise on this, but let me try to point just at a couple of main functions, keeping in mind that every blogger has somewhat different motivations, methods and goals for blogging.

Science blogs are an educational resource. Some are actually used as teaching tools in the classrooms, while others are open to everyone (see, for instance, the series of Basic Concepts). Google loves blogs and many science blogs have high traffic and high ranking in search engines. This brings students (and teachers and other interested people) to science blogs when they search for scientific terms and concepts. My posts with the greatest longevity (and total traffic over time) are my educational posts, e.g., my BIO101 lecture notes.

Science blogs remove filters. A scientific paper is usually dry, dense and difficult to read. Most people outside of the particular field need some level of translation from Scientese into English (or whichever other language). Traditionally, this is the job of the Press Officer at the researchers' institution, often a person who does not have the requisite background in that scientific discipline and may thus make mistakes. The press releases are then picked up by journalists who write their articles based on these. They also usually do not have scientific background and find it difficult to read and understand the actual scientific papers. Thus, they add another step in translation which may, and often does, distort the meaning of the published research. Science bloggers are scientists and they tend to write about the research in their area of expertise (as I would write about chronobiology papers and leave physics to others). They read the actual papers. They tend not to make mistakes. And, as only a small proportion of scientists write blogs, the science bloggers are self-selected for love of writing -- so, at least after a few months of doing it, they become very, very good writers, often as good (or better) as the professional science journalists. And, as they tend to point out the mistakes in press releases and media articles, they keep the journalists' feet to the fire, making journalists better at their job in the process.

Science blogs protect science. Most working scientists do not have the time, energy and inclination to actively fight against various pseudoscience and anti-science movements. Many science bloggers do. And, as blogs tend to have high search-engine rankings, their responses to such attacks on science usually show up higher than the original attacks. Every time someone says something stupid or pernicious (for personal, financial, religious or political reasons), a chorus of science blogs dissects the quasi-argument and replaces it with correct information. This is what people will find if they search the relevant terms.

Science blogs are starting to change the way science is done. The examples are few for now, but Open Notebook Science, i.e., the publication of daily lab notes on a blog or a wiki (the way, for instance, Jean-Claude Bradley does it), is slowly gaining adherents. Sooner or later, hypotheses and data published on blogs will routinely get cited -- I have published both hypotheses and data on my blog before, and I had a blog post cited as a reference in a paper. In the other direction, scientific papers (like those published in PLoS journals) enable bloggers to leave trackbacks. This will become more and more frequent in the future.


How is a scientific paper going to look in 20 years from now? How is that going to affect the way scientific research (and teaching) is done?

It is hard to make predictions (although I did before), especially with such temporal precision -- things may happen much faster or slower than I think. It depends on the state of science in 20 years -- its global size and power, its global distribution (will the US science, with its US-specific culture, still be dominant in 20 years?), the technological breakthroughs and societal/political environment.

Most scientific disciplines go through cycles. A new technology (microscope, telescope, computer, gene-sequencing machines) suddenly allows people to gather previously intractable data. A whole industry develops around this new technology and over some years or decades, mountains of data are produced, yet the analysis and understanding of data is still quite superficial and preliminary. So the field swings to the other part of the cycle -- data analysis and interpretation and construction of new theoretical scaffolds, also a time for bitter theoretical battles within the discipline...until it is settled, by which time usually there is a new technological invention that allows for collection of new kinds of data and the cycle moves on again.

Right now, some fields, e.g., astronomy and genomics, are in the data-producing phase. Much money and manpower is dedicated to the production of enormous amounts of new data, with little time to stop and think about them. So, it is in the interest of researchers to make the data available to others for analysis. Thus, they are dumped online (where else? reams of printer paper?). Is publication of a new genome a scientific paper? It is just a lot of raw data, after all, with minimal and highly formalized Introduction, Methods and Discussion sections.

My prediction, probably false, but I'll go out on the limb here, is that a scientific paper of the future will be a work in progress -- with different people with different skills and talents contributing to a body of work sequentially: one has the idea, another turns it into a hypothesis, another designs the experiments, another runs them, another analyzes the data, another visualizes them, another interprets them, another places several such pieces of work together into a historical and philosophical context and finishes writing the "paper". The bits and pieces of it are independently searchable and citable and they are all interconnected by links until the final version is put all together in one place. After all, science as the work of a lonely genius is pretty much a myth -- it has been, for the most part, a very collective endeavor. The readers of the paper then keep adding their commentary, links to subsequent "papers," etc. The unity of the paper -- a single date, journal, volume, issue, page -- will be gone. All of science will become interdisciplinary and interconnected.


Bora -- the question that everyone wants to know the answer to: how do you manage to be such a prolific blogger and still hold down a job, edit anthologies, organize conference and maintain a life outside all that stuff.

It helps that most of it is a part of my job. I love my job, I love blogging, I love learning, and I love making friends -- and all of it is interconnected in my life right now. I do not sleep enough (but I do, every night, despite rumors to the contrary), I do not go out to commune with nature enough, and, unfortunately (and that HAS to change), I do not find enough time any more to read books as much as I used to.


When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?

Since I started as a political blogger, it is no surprise that the first blog I encountered was The Intersection, at the time when Chris Mooney was starting to write his material for The Republican War On Science. His blogroll then led me to Pharyngula, Deltoid and a few other science blogs. After that, by jumping from blogroll to blogroll, as well as through blog carnivals, I discovered hundreds of others.

It is impossible any more (for at least a year now) to keep up with all of them, so I tend to rotate them -- some I check daily for a few months, then move to others, while checking the others only sporadically. I'd love to have a thousand Favourites (just check my blogroll!), but it is just physically impossible. I read all of my SciBlings pretty regularly (it is easy by checking The Last 24 Hours page), visit my old friend Archy just to say Hello every morning, check Peter Suber for professional reasons, and enjoy the fresh new young voices, e.g,. that of Pondering Pikaia or Laelaps. Like most of my interviewees, I encountered the delightful Inverse Square Blog at the Conference, as well as The INFO Project blog, the OpenHelix blog and will keep an eye to see how Space Cadet develops over time.


Is there anything that happened at this Conference -- a session, something someone said or did or wrote -- that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

It's hard, when you are the organizer, to quit worrying about the organization, choose a session and settle down with a full focus on the conversation. I actually had to watch the videos and read the blog posts afterwards for most of the sessions. In my mind, the most important development is the realization, reached by both sides I think, that former adversaries, the professional science journalists on one side and the science bloggers on the other, are really on the same side and need to find ways to collaborate.

Another focus for me, during the entire year of organization as well as during the meeting, was finding the ways to fully include people who traditionally were not invited to the table when scientists talk -- not only concerning gender and race, which are important, but also age and formal qualifications, e.g., undergraduate and high school students, writers, journalists, amateur naturalists, middle school teachers, elected officials and parents. I think that the Conference was quite successful in those goals, but I am already concocting plans for making the ScienceOnline09 even more inclusive if I can.


It was so nice to finally meet you and thank you for the interview.

It was great meeting you, too. It was a pleasure. See you next year at the conference.

Interview at A Blog Around the Clock

Bora turns the tables and interviews me as part of his continuing series of interviews with people who were at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference.

It was a lot of fun and a really great experience to be on the other side of the online "microphone." The one thing that has me a little conflicted is that he's interviewing so many people that I would like to interview for my series too ;-) Oh well, I'll probably wait a while before re-interviewing any of Bora's victims, which is probably good incentive to interview a few more people on the computer science side of things rather than concentrating on blogging/publishing.

In any case, check out the whole series of interviews, if you haven't seen them yet. They're all great and a fantastic source of new blogs to check out.

Interview with Christopher Leonard, Associate Publisher of PhysMath Central

Welcome to the latest installment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Christopher Leonard, Associate Publisher of PhysMath Central. While I've never met Chris in person, we first became acqainted in the online world when he was doing his Computing Chris blog while at Elsevier, a lively and insightful view into the world of publishing and computer science. His new position at PhysMath Central seemed like a good opportunity to elicit some of those same lively and insightful peeks into the world of open access publishing. Thanks to Chris for his thoughtful responses. Enjoy!


Q0. Hi Chris, tell us a little about yourself and how you ended up as Associate Publisher of PhysMath Central?

It is a strangely circular story. I'm a scientist with an undergraduate degree in colour Chemistry from the University of Leeds. I wanted to do something a bit different to 'plain' chemistry and this was ideal for me. Upon completion of that I did a PhD in photo- and thermo-sensitive coatings, for which I was mainly based in Oxford at the commercial R&D centre of my sponsor. Nearly 7 years of lab work had convinced me that my future lied outside of the lab, but I was still interested in what was happening in research -- which was when I heard of new company starting up which sounded perfect to me.

It was 1997 and the new company was called ChemWeb.com, which was an online community for research chemists and offered a great number of innovative services - such as access to online journals, job listings, free online conferences with simultaneous video, audio and chat, its own webzine, The Alchemist, and even its own preprint server for chemists. Now, more than 10 years later with RSS, blogs, and social networking, much of this sounds mundane, but at the time it was definitely cutting edge stuff.

As part of the Current Science Group, we were based in the (externally) beautiful offices of Middlesex House on Cleveland Street in London. I was there for 2 years until ownership changed and ChemWeb.com and its sister company BioMedNet were sold to Elsevier. Now I had the opportunity to work in the Elsevier headquarters in Amsterdam and jumped at the chance! Initially I was Publishing Technology Manager - maximizing the opportunities of the web and the content of Elsevier journals to create new products, but after a few years I decided I needed to experience life at the coal-face, as it were, in 'real' publishing.

As a publisher in Elsevier I certainly got a feel of the issues facing researchers and librarians very quickly. I was in charge of various portfolios of journals in mathematics, physics and computer science and all of these disciplines had the same concerns - namely the prices of subscription journals, 'big deal' packages for online access and the questioning of the value-add by the publisher -- this by people fully au fait with TeX and the issue of hosting articles for retrieval in a large database.

It didn't take me long to see that Open Access was the future. I was aware that the biosciences were well served by PLoS and BioMed Central, but there were few options for chemists, physicists, computer scientists etc, to get research published in peer-reviewed, open access journals. Then I heard that BioMed Central were looking to expand into exactly these areas. My former colleague at ChemWeb, Bryan Vickery, explained what they wanted to do with PhysMath Central and I was sold. So here I am, back in Middlesex House again, sat next to Bryan again!


Q1. Please tell us a little about PhysMath Central and how it works? What is your vision of a sustainable publishing business model, if I may use that term.

PhysMath Central is based on the same model as BioMed Central - namely that the costs of publishing are covered before publication. This way we can make the article available, permanently, for free. The articles are published under a Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to sue the article freely, so long as the original authors, citation details and publisher are identified. This means that an individual could, in theory, have a copy of all articles published by BMC or PMC, in full, on his hard disk, or even website. It also opens up a host of possibilities with data mining since all our articles are available in full text as XML/MathML.

We also make sure all of our articles are deposited and permanently archived in a number of national archives. For PhysMath Central, this includes arXiv.org, whom we work closely with (indeed authors can submit to us using just their arXiv IDs).

These 3 elements are what I call the ABC's of true open access publishing: Access (immediate and free), Back-ups (permanently archived by third parties) and Creative Commons (copyright model).

As to what makes a sustainable model, that answer will vary slightly from discipline to discipline. BioMed Central are just about to break even after 7 years of publishing with a model which combines institutional prepay subscriptions, payment from author research grants, sponsorship from funding bodies, and many other smaller sources. We also offer waivers automatically to all authors from countries with low-income economies (as defined by the World Bank).

In addition, in physics we are witnessing the birth of an exciting project called SCOAP3, which intends to centralize library budgets in high-energy physics to pay for open access to every paper in this field.

In other areas, research grants are typically either non-existent or very small. Here it is unreasonable to assume a grant-paying model will work, and as such we will investigate other options for covering open access charges. A central fund for an institute, or a whole field (as with SCOAP3), or even sponsorship would be a more likely way to achieve sustainable open access for these disciplines.

Open access publishing doesn't cost more than traditional publishing (indeed, it is much less), but we need to be able to redirect the available resources to make sure that money spent today is freeing research to the whole world - rather than it funding barriers to its access.


Q2. How's the new PhysMath Central blog going? What do you think the importance of blogging is for a publisher?

The PhysMath blog is something I was very keen on starting when I started here. It is a way to keep people informed, a little more informally, about what is happening with various projects behind the sciences, and also allows me to chip in with my 2 cents on major topics in physics or open access in general. As a new publisher with no published articles until around a year after we started the company, it was essential that people could see we were busy behind the scenes and getting things ready for launch with mock-ups, editorial appointments and various other mini-projects.

For a more established publisher, I still think blogs are an invaluable 'other' way of keeping in touch with your readers/authors/librarians etc. I'm well aware that only a small fraction of the online public regularly read blogs though, and so we also spend a lot of time with traditional outreach methods such as advertising, conferences, email promotions etc.


Q3. And by the way, I sorely miss your old Computing Chris blog...Any chance of reviving something along those lines?

I started that blog whilst at Elsevier after having being inspired by Robert Scoble, then of Microsoft. He wrote an entertaining, authoritative and personalized view of things happening behind the scenes at Microsoft and had transformed the company's image amongst developers. It had a history of monopolistic bullying, but Scoble had made it appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world. I thought, if it can do that for Microsoft -- what can it do for Elsevier? We could do with a humanizing face to our authors and readers, so I started the blog off. It became quite popular in a very short time frame, but I had a feeling that others in the company didn't appreciate this direct line with the outside world, and indeed when I left it was closed down.

The style of writing was very conversational, and subject matter sometimes completely unrelated. I haven't adopted that style fully with the new blog as it feels wrong to have a publisher blog, closely related to and accessible from the site, report on what I had for lunch or a funny sign I saw on holiday. However, that may change. I am currently spending most of my time on getting new journals up and running and reporting on that rather than being entertaining. Besides, with a young baby at home, my extra-curricular activities would quickly become boring to readers not interested in diapers or wine!


Q4. You have user comments on papers -- any other web 2.0 functionality coming in the future?

I am hesitant to push all things web 2.0 as it seems that uptake from authors is inversely proportional to how difficult something is to set-up. Commenting on a paper is a relatively simple way to get a 2-way conversation going on the site, which could have scientific merit and is reasonably well-used. We have also recently implemented the facility to save an article to the social bookmarking site of your choice, including Facebook, where we are also examining what we can do with Groups.

We are experimenting more with the concept of a journal than with the bells and whistles around it. For instance we have recently launched BMC Research Notes, which aims to provide a home for short publications, case series, incremental updates to previous work, results of individual experiments and similar material that currently lack a suitable outlet. The intention is to reduce the loss suffered by the research community when such results remain unpublished. We also have the Journal of Medical Case Reports, which publishes open access case reports across all medical disciplines, which will be aggregated into an online, fully searchable database, creating a valuable resource for clinicians and researchers.


Q5. First it was BioMed Central, then Chemistry and PhysMath Central, what's next? Is computer science going to be included in PhysMath Central? It seems that the engineering disciplines are particularly poorly served by Open Access.

We certainly plan to launch our first computer science journals in 2008, so yes, computer science journals will be included in PhysMath Central, but given the name of that platform, it may make sense to have a dedicated computer science platform instead. Expect to hear some news on this before the summer.

You are right in saying that Engineering is not well served by Open Access - although Hindawi have some titles in this area. However once central funds for open access are in place, you will see an expansion of journals in all areas, including engineering and the humanities.


Q6. What do you see as the future of scientific publishing? Will we even be able to recognize something called a journal (or even a journal article) in 5 or 10 years?

Personally, I think at some point in the future, journals will cease to exist as we know them, but will still exist as a 'brand'. The holy grail for scientific publishing, at least as far as users are concerned, would be an open access database containing all scientific articles ever published (including grey literature and preprints), all cross-linked and cross-referenced. All the usual metadata would be interoperable, searching would cover everything, raw data would be just a click away. However, in order to sort the wheat from the chaff, peer-reviewed articles would be identified as being peer-reviewed. Which editorial board approved the peer-review for a certain article would also be shown. This means that a journal 'brand' could live on as the editorial board reviewing and approving certain articles in the database.

Technically, I think we could do this now. Whether the political and economic conditions for it to happen within 10 years will occur, I doubt. But it will happen eventually.

It is tempting to think of journal articles evolving over time too, but the versioning of each new amendment or addition would need to be peer-reviewed too, to keep up editorial standards. For instance it is easy to think of a wiki-type journal where the authors (or any authorized person) can all amend the document over time. But if an original version had passed a rigourous peer review process and it had then been rewritten in part or in whole, are those amendments correct and of a standard of the original text?

I think that comments and notes on the original text, but which preserve the original text, are therefore more likely to be the future -- and indeed this is exactly what we have with PhysMath Central.

There is also the issue of how articles are authored. Authors in our field are still very wedded to the idea of authoring documents for print presentation in TeX, no doubt due to the influence of arXiv. I would hope that the benefits of online publishing become apparent to authors within the next few years. Documents which combine text with interactive formulae, video, audio, raw data sets should become the norm.


Q7. Is there an Open Access tipping point in the near future, where suddenly all sane scientists will suddenly think to themselves, "Of course! It all makes sense now! Why would I ever publish in a journal that wasn't Open Access?"

There was an excellent 'guerilla' project in some major US university libraries recently where students placed stickers on journals informing the reader of the price of a subscription to that journal. When you're suddenly confronted with the fact that your Nuclear Physics A subscription costs the library $25000, that's a shock the system.

I think every researcher who has ever published has tried to access an article from a subscription journal and been thwarted at some point. That is annoying for them, but for people in developing countries, it is an everyday occurrence seriously hampering the rate of development of research.

I think the big tipping point, however, may be a financial one. As library budgets plateau or decrease, the 'big deal' packages simply become unaffordable. Having access to 1000s of journals switched off overnight may jolt people into realizing that open access isn't an option anymore, it's the only way which makes sense.


Q8. Who do you see as your main competition? Or is it even meaningful to talk about competition for an OA publisher?

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about 'the competition'. In one sense we are in competition with commercial publishers, but since we offer very different services, maybe not really. We are more obviously in competition with other OA publishers, but there are still a lot of articles published in the world and only a small, though increasing, proportion are published in open access journals. Until everyone is publishing in OA journals as a matter of course, we are all happily coexisting for now!


Q9. How about the recent push back from some of the commercial publishers, like the all the fuss about the PRISM Coalition?

I view a lot of this 'push back' with nagging sense of unease and disappointment. Of course directors of multi-million pound companies are going to defend their positions, but to do so with a disinformation campaign with the aim of spreading Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, leaves a sour taste in one's mouth. I think the number of publishers who have publicly dissociated themselves from PRISM is a sign that they seriously misjudged the mood of most of their members -- and the majority of scientists, if number of blog postings is anything to go by.

Thankfully with people like Peter Suber on our side, the open access movement is always ready to strike back with some facts. As each day passes it seems to me that open access for all areas of research is inevitable and unstoppable. My favourite quote on open access actually predates the movement and is from Albert Einstein: "The free, unhampered exchange of ideas and scientific conclusions is necessary for the sound development of science, as it is in all spheres of cultural life". Open access publishing is huge step forward to make this happen sooner, rather than later.

Interview with Sasha Gurke, Sr. Vice President and Co-Founder, Knovel.

Welcome to the latest installment of my occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around I'm interviewing Sasha Gurke, Sr. Vice President and Co-Founder, Knovel Corp. I've long been an fan of Knovel's products and appreciated their business model. When I met Rick Spiegel at the ASEE St. Lawrence Chapter conference a few weeks ago while he was demoing some Knovel products, I asked him if there was anyone in Knovel on the product development side that I could interview. Rick put me in touch with Sasha, for which I am grateful. Thanks to Rick for getting us in touch and thanks to Sasha for such a stimulating interview.



Q0. Sasha, please tell us a little about yourself and your career path to this point.

I am a chemist by training but spent last 27 years of my career in technical information, first at Chemical Abstracts Service and then at Knovel and a predecessor company. After helping to found Knovel in 1999, I, as a VP of Product Development, was responsible for creation of Knovel's award-winning product, including the website and the content. Since late 2006, my primary responsibilities shifted to Marketing and Editorial areas. I travel and present a lot now, bringing back feedback from the customers and keeping a hand on the pulse of the industry.


Q1. Could you tell about the Knovel ebook products (present and in the pipeline) and your business model. And what exactly do you guys mean by "Knovelization?"

Knovel is an aggregator of STM reference works, including handbooks and databases, in 19 subject areas ranging from aerospace to oil and gas engineering and from chemistry to food science. We just added a new subject area, Earth Science, covering such topics as Geology, Geotechnical Engineering, Oceanography, and Petrology. Most of our content comes from well-known publishers such as Wiley and Elsevier, although some is developed internally and available exclusively on Knovel. We have an annual subscription model with concurrent user license. Customers can subscribe to the entire Knovel Library or special collections, including premium products and subject areas. We have 3 types of products: full text searchable e-books, databases and interactive e-books with live tables, graphs and equations. Databases and interactive e-books are field searchable and are very popular with our customers because they increase their productivity. They are our main differentiator in the marketplace. The process of making an ordinary e-book interactive and resulting product are unique to Knovel and we called it "Knovelization".


Q2. I'm sure you get this a lot, but what is the delay between a new edition of a print reference being released and its Knovelization?

It depends on the editorial priority and on our publishing partners. Some publishers wait up to 6 months before they make a title available to aggregators. It takes Knovel production folks about a month to load a title with high priority, e.g., those requested by our customers. Knovelized titles require 2-4 months to load because of the work involved.


Q3. Do you have a lot of content that is you have created rather than licensed? Is this an area that's going to grow?

We have 18 titles that we either created ourselves or took a copyright-free publication (often old and out of print) and gave it a second life. Many of these titles are large databases and interactive. Some, such as Unit Converter, are free tools. Currently, we are significantly expanding Knovel Critical Tables. Content creation is going to be a growth area for Knovel in the future.


Q4. Can you foresee a day when the print versions of the books you Knovelize will disappear completely and they will only exist in electronic format? And what will the next generation of Knovel products be like?

It is hard to imagine not having print versions, although, certainly, the trend is toward more content available either in both formats or in electronic format only. The latter is especially true for journals and databases. The next generation of Knovel products will have a more user-friendly interface and more robust search capabilities. We will continue to add value to our content knovelizing it and integrating it with 3rd party software tools and platforms. And, of course, we hope to enable our users to add their own content to Knovel, creating their own e-books from that content and selected content available on Knovel.


Q5. I think that librarians probably see the value in these products fairly quickly. But faculty and corporate scientists and engineers can be difficult to reach sometime so has it been difficult to get uptake on that side of the equation? How do you market to those groups and convince them of the value of your product?

You are right, it has been a challenge getting to the end user and we are not alone in the industry with this experience. Our answer is increasing awareness and explaining the benefits of Knovel to end users via frequent training webinars, interactive demos, a newsletter, and viral marketing, e.g., social networks. We exhibit at many trade shows and work with professional societies such as ASME and AIChE to reach their membership by providing access to some content. An important part of it is integrating Knovel into the work flow. In academia, this is being accomplished by offering Knovel-based course exercises to faculty. In the corporate world, we have an individual user registration program that allows us to "touch" the end users, learn more about their needs and be more responsive and proactive. Excellent customer support also plays an important role.


Q6. What have been some of the challenges so far?

The main challenges have been acquisition of certain high-value content, automation of content management for interactive products, search engine optimization, and uneven usage.


Q7. What do you see as your main competition? Wikipedia and other free stuff on the Web or something else entirely?

Wikipedia is a great general reference source that lacks the depth required in the STM field. Our main competition are publishers themselves. Most STM publishers have e-book sites with full back list and they are becoming more aggressive in pricing and marketing. With federated search becoming more widely adopted and expanding Google Book Search, it will be easier to search across different publishers bypassing aggregators.


Q8. Where do you see the broad field of scientific and technical publishing going in the next 5 to 10 years?

The amount of STM literature will continue to grow unabated, especially in the electronic format. We will see more of it being published in the languages of developing countries such as China. More e-content will be available free, especially in the journal arena, via social networks and Wikipedia-type sites. DRM will become a non-issue. There will be more advertisement driven business models. Librarians will demand perpetual licenses to e-content. Work flow integration of STM content and software tools will become a reality. This is what my crystal ball is saying but it has a crack :)

Interview with Richard Akerman, Technology Architect at CISTI

Welcome to the latest installment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Richard Akerman, Technology Architect at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI). While I've never met Richard in person, I've long followed the provocative and insightful commentary on his blog, Science Library Pad. Provocative and insightful are certainly words I would use to describe his responses in this interview. Enjoy!


Q0. Richard, please tell us a little about your background and career path to this point and how you ended up at CISTI.

I didn't start out with any particular plan, at university in the late 80s I found I had an aptitude for computer science, and science in general. From there I spent a while building expertise in computer networking and system administration. I worked for six years at a company called AMIRIX Systems, initially as a network admin, and later as a software designer. From there I ended up at CISTI in 2002, again initially as a network admin, and now as a technology architect.

If I look at the threads that run through, the main aspects are working with and understanding computers and networks at a very technical level, and the analytical aspects that computer programming, network troubleshooting, and science all share. What I guess isn't obvious is that software engineering and technology architecture are also highly social activities, that require a high degree of communication skills to gather information and requirements from a wide variety of people, translate those into technical details, and then explain the technical details in an understandable way back to a variety of audiences.

There is another thread which is that from the time of High School on I have been required to do presentations for school or for work, and I've always been comfortable and enjoyed doing so.


Q1. Why did you start blogging and what keeps you going?

For my personal blog, I started in 2001 when there weren't really any good bookmarking management tools. From the early days of the MOSAIC browser, when you had to hand-edit the MOSAIC.INI file to arrange bookmarks, I have always had an interest in being able to re-locate useful information I've found on the net. (Perhaps there is some librarian in me after all.) In 2001 del.icio.us unfortunately hadn't been invented yet, but Google and other search engines had, so the easiest way for me to maintain bookmarks with a rich enough set of metadata that was meaningful to me was to blog them.

When I went to my first library technology conference, Internet Librarian in 2004, I started taking conference notes (mostly since I have a terrible memory when it comes to things people have said). But I shortly decided it didn't make much sense to have my work-related notes mixed in with pictures of my cat, so I launched Science Library Pad (SLP) as a more "professional" location for that sort of information.

And somehow I managed to get noticed in the library blogosphere.

I think in a way I was just lucky to hit a moment when library conferences were just starting to get connected out to the web, it would be very different if I started now, when library conference blogging and wikis are common.

From there I started to use SLP as a venue for work-related bookmarks or items of interest, and also to work out some of my thinking about libraries and technology. Working in a public sector science library was a very different experience both in terms of technology and culture from my previous employment at a very technical private sector firm, and I used the blog to sort out some of my thoughts about both the pure computer systems aspect of libraries, as well as my perceptions of how librarians thought about those systems.

From those not particularly auspicious beginnings, I have found my blog has led to incredible and entirely unexpected connections and opportunities.


Q2. Tell us a little about CISTI and it's current and future roles in the library and scientific worlds? If we can imagine a world where everything is open access, what's the role for an institution like CISTI?

CISTI is Canada's national science library and provides science publishing services as well, both of these roles are derived from sections of the National Research Council (NRC) Act, CISTI is an institute of the NRC. We're in a challenging position as we're not an academic library in the university sense - we do serve a campus, but it's a campus of research institutes. Our publishing role is carried out through the peer-reviewed journals of the NRC Research Press. Our library role includes services by reference librarians to every NRC institute, as well as document delivery.

In my personal opinion, three forces have radically reshaped the scientific information provision landscape: the Internet, plus digital content, plus "good enough" search capabilities. I think all academic libraries are reeling from the implications of content directly available from publisher sites to students and researchers. I don't have the answers to what the future holds, but I think it's clear that the library role has to involve an understanding of network computing, and that academic libraries have to examine issues related to scientific data and digital preservation.

As well, there has to be a rethinking of reference services to ensure that librarians are positioned to provide a large degree of added analysis - the simple queries are gone, what's left is much more intensive partnerships and collaborations between librarians and their patrons to take the best advantage of their abilities.

On the publishing side, again as a personal opinion, I think the business models will sort themselves out. The scientific community sees substantial value in peer review and readable papers, and both of those cost money. I think we will see "papers" become much richer online objects, and alternative types of publishing (e.g. video), but the fundamentals of the system remain.


Q3. SciFoo must have been cool beyond belief. What are some highlights and insights you could share with the scitech library community? What were people's reactions when they found out that you work at a library?

SciFoo was a very interesting event. For those who haven't heard of it, it's an invitation-only scientific "unconference" organised by Nature Publishing and O'Reilly, and hosted by Google. The schedule is self-organised at the conference itself, there is no programme published or arranged in advance. The method in their madness is to try to maximise the amount of discussion between participants, to make it a much more interactive event.

So there were a lot of very smart people, of varying degrees of famousness, with lots of interesting ideas. Interesting, but not necessarily convergent ideas. There were a lot of different opinions, perceptions and solutions for the scholarly communications system.

And unfortunately, I have to say for the most case people indicated they didn't seem to see their libraries stepping up to participate in the conversation. They welcomed such participation, they just didn't see it.


Q4. Can academic/research libraries change fast enough to stay relevant? Similarly, can libraries rush to transform themselves into the wrong things, and just a different path to irrelevance?

I think there was a big, big intermediation role that libraries just have to let go of. It isn't coming back. And there's also a big, big technology investment, in catalogues and ILS systems that worked in ways that librarians understoood, that were basically library operations, turned into computer programs and databases. As the library operations radically transform, there is a huge challenge in transforming the supporting technology systems.

For public libraries, I think the library as both place and service has an enduring role. For academic libraries, I think the library as place role continues, but the library service role is going to be a big challenge. For libraries whose role was almost entirely in providing access to information, such as CISTI, the challenge is tremendous when digital files over the Internet, obtained directly by researchers, becomes an easier pathway for access.

I don't think libraries should worry about transforming too quickly. I do think however it is important to separate technological change from organisational change. Libraries made that mistake before. An entire organisation built around serving up Web 2.0 pages is going to be just as brittle as the one that is breaking because it is built around serving up WebOPAC pages. "You are not the technology you use." To some extent, don't worry about the technology, it's not the important part. We have computers and networks that are fast enough that we no longer need to be constrained by technology. Decided what you want to do FIRST, and then implement flexible technology solutions SECOND.

I see far too often a tendency for people to say "we need federated search solution XYZ", when they really should be saying "I think we could serve our patrons better by making it easier for them to find relevant materials, how can we solve that problem?" and then putting in place the organisational structures, processes, and technology to meet your needs.

Technology should never be the driver. As long as libraries remember that, I don't think they will fall into a "change trap".


Q5. What's it like to be a techie working with a bunch of librarians? Don't worry, they won't read this, so you can be honest.

We come from very different backgrounds in terms of training, approach to problem solving, and analogies that we use to understand the world. It is a huge challenge. People from a techical background think of computers, web sites, networking and information quite differently from librarians. But I think the surprising aspect may be that often people with a technical background are less concerned about the details of the particular technology of the moment, than with the problems to be solved.

I think the best hope for a common meeting ground is mutual respect. In a pre-searchable-digital-Internet world, librarians were the Masters of All Information. They have to cede many of the technical aspects of that to the people who are trained in technology. That's hard to do, it's just human nature. I would say that's the biggest single source of friction, on one side of the table you have technical people who have years and years of training in their fields, basically pleading to have their expertise recognized by the librarians. On the flip side, the technology people have to appreciate that librarians draw upon a rich tradition of information management and document preservation, and that the solution to everything isn't necessarily to hand all information over to Google and close up shop.


Q6. And the other side of the coin: What kind of insights on the way science is done, science is published and the way to serve a science community do you think you, as a technology person, have brought to a library organization. (ie. Have you been a disruptive influence...evolutionary or revolutionary?)

Although I do have a background being a physics and computer science grad student, I don't think that experience brought insights into the organisation in any specific way. Academic librarians have a good general sense for the way science is conducted, particularly as many of them have degrees in the sciences themselves.

I think the technology background, the analytical approach to troubleshooting and problemsolving, the understanding of what is possible with networking and computers, these are much more disruptive, revolutionary elements for the library.


Q7. You post a lot on e-science. How do you thing computing will affect the way science is practised (and communicated) in the future?

I think computing has already started to transform some of the sciences, and this trend will only continue and grow over the next decades. Get used to seeing -informatics attached to all scientific areas. Bio-informatics is already a huge area, but chemo-informatics and others are following quickly behind.

It is inevitable that much of scientific communication will move into one continuous workflow, a scientific discussion, with links, data, computation, and visualisation all seamless elements. Just as today we don't give a second thought to moving between a phone call, an email, an IM window and a browser window, the future of science will be that computers and networking will be used whenever appropriate, without a second thought. Scientific discussions will move naturally from virtual environments, to a written page, to an interactive graph, depending on the message, the audience, and the research.

It is a huge challenge for libraries to think about how in the world we ever preserve an understandable scientific record for the future in this kind of dynamic, "participative science web" environment.


Q8. Peer review and other scholarly publishing issues are also among your favourites: Can you envision a day when journals as we know them no longer exist? What do you think will replace them? The recent experiments in alternate forms of peer review: no big deal or long-awaited revolution?

I think in the short term, journals become much more semantically-rich online documents, with linkages out to data and analysis tools, as well as to other articles and relevant content. In the long term, they turn into the sort of continuous scientific discussion I described above.

One of the big things I heard at SciFoo was time-to-publication. I think that is going to drive radically improved ways to do timely peer review. But I don't think the underlying concept of peer review is going away. It is imperfect, but better than anything else anyone has been able to come up with.

Q9. What are your current obsessions and preoccupations? What do you think the Next Big Thing will be?

Impact factor, specifically evaluation of scientists based on impact factor, is driving people up the wall. This was a big theme both at the ICSTI conference and at SciFoo. I think the feeling in the community against the misuse of impact factor is actually much stronger than other issues that may get more press, for example, I think fixing the IF issue is of more interest to the broad science community than sorting out Open Access.

I think we are going to see a lot more screeds against impact factor, and a lot more experiments in terms of both technological approaches (new computable metrics) as well as processes.

I think in order to imagine the Next Big Thing, the easiest approach is to just imagine the Current Big Expensive Unattainable Things become small, cheap, and ubiquitous. So e-Science, the stuff of multi-million-dollar computing and networking, is going to become me-Science, with vast computer power and storage available to everyone, as well as the opportunity for huge "citizen science" networks gathering data and contributing valuable insights.

Things like the Great World Wide Star Count will be a common part of the school and citizen experience in the future. Basically anyone with an interest in science will have opportunities to contribute and participate throughout their lives.

One of my particular interests is what it means to have ubiquitous access to geographic information. What does it mean if everyone has Google Earth in their cellphone? And they can share their position with anyone in the world? Considering that Nokia just bought mapmaker Navteq, this direction seems inevitable.

So I think the future in the near term is something about more e-science, and more participative web. I've actually got an upcoming blog post on the trends that I see, based on an internal presentation I did at CISTI recently. I'm also excited to have been invited to blog the OECD Participative Web Forum this Wednesday, October 3, 2007.

Which I guess in a way shows the limits of my foresight, as I never imagined that when I was sitting in Ottawa making a web storage place for some conference notes that it would lead me to be contacted by an international organisation based in Paris.