April 3, 2013 – By R. P. Bauchwitz, SSP Communications Committee
As part of SSP’s commitment to provide the scholarly community with the newest and most up-to-date information in the publishing field, it recently sponsored a webinar about how organizations are addressing the rapid changes occurring in academic review and publication.
Featured speakers from the Genetics Society of America (GSA) and Hypothes.is discussed a range of publishing interests during last month’s webinar, “The New Publishing Normal: Managing Rapid Data Dissemination, Open Research, and Organizational Growth.” Among the topics discussed were the principles and practical experiences of a scientific society starting its own open access journal, and a not-for-profit start-up’s ambitious goal to implement a system by which digital information, in particular everything published on the Internet, can be reviewed by annotation.
Tracey DePellegrin Connelly, Executive Editor of Journals at GSA, spoke about GSA’s self-published open access journal, G3, which first appeared in June 2011. One of the underlying precepts of the journal is that, as long as the science was good, authors could present a puzzling finding or other results without having to convince anyone they had a potentially high-impact finding.
In addition, she noted that G3 insists on access to raw data before review, and that the journal is committed to open access publication of raw data and datasets.
Along with the open data principles, GSA members want G3 editors to be able to help improve their papers, as well as to make decisions quickly (within 30 days). All this had to be accomplished at low cost, supported by author charges. G3 is managed by two full-time staff (soon to be three), assisted by interns.
More information about GSA and G3 can be found on its website, http://g3journal.org/site/misc/about.xhtml
Peter Brantley, Director of Scholarly Communication at Hypothes.is, discussed how the not-for-profit start-up is trying “to enable community-moderated annotation of the world’s knowledge.” In contrast to the typical comment boxes that currently follow online blog pieces or new articles, web annotation aims to allow a sentence-level discussion. The moderation of annotated comments will be based on a reputation scheme.
Hypothes.is will allow an “overlay” of accessible digital content – from blogs, research articles, and books, to terms of service, software code, and even legislation or regulations. Most importantly, annotations will be made without participation by the underlying website.
One concern was whether there would be legal ramifications for seemingly imposing annotation on sites, to which Mr. Brantley responded that the issues were “legion” and that Hypothes.is intended to use an algorithm to assess potentially defamatory content and to counter “trolls” and spam.
The standards needed to support the universal annotation of digital documents are being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, National Information Standards Organization, O’Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.
With respect to scholarly publishing, Mr. Brantley stated that Hypothes.is believes that annotation review can be used not only for open post-publication review, but also for pre-publication peer review.
“For newer or ‘lightweight’ journals that do not have comprehensive workflow solutions, but instead rely on piece-work style management of peer review, an annotation framework can automate the handling of discussion and rating,” he said.
Using the Hypothes.is for automating peer review also has secondary benefits otherwise unavailable in a more traditional scholarly publishing setting. Mr. Brantley noted that more annotations are able to be input into the peer review system and that a database of reviewers, rated by the quality and utility of their comments and subject areas reviewed, can grow with every use.
As to why Hypothes.is may fare differently from many prior attempts at web annotation, which the company notes is a frequently asked question, the response was, “No one has yet made an effective attempt …”
More information about Hypothes.is can be found on its website, http://hypothes.is/what-is-it.
SSP offers regular webinars on a variety of scholarly publishing topics. For a list of upcoming webinars, please visit https://www.sspnet.org/events/webinars/.
Robert Bauchwitz is a behavioral neuroscientist and a past member of the Genetics Society of America.
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