 Great. Okay. Good afternoon everybody. Thanks. Okay, so the title for this afternoon's session I think we'll maybe pick up on some themes that were discussed earlier today in various different ways. And then also maybe focus I suppose on the issue of publishing and how we think about publishing in this new digital era that we're in, although we've probably been saying that for the last 25 years. So maybe take the opportunity to think about what exactly we mean by that. So I mean you'll see from the abstract I wrote that there's so many different dimensions to this actually when Eamon contacted me to do a talk on this theme. I was like oh my god that's a vast theme, digital publishing or academic publishing in a digital era. So I kind of tried to focus on three or four different ideas and you'll see them there in orange. You don't have to read all of what's on the slide. But the writing process itself, no matter whether we're writing with or without digital tools, we're still writing and digital tools will change it. So it's interesting to think about the writing process in a digital context. Idea generation, sharing and access, they're not new, they've been around for hundreds of years. But what does it look like today in terms of consumption of the academy's goods? And how has that shaped the dissemination of academics' writing within and outside the academy? I think there are complex tasks. I think being an academic 20 years ago is a little different to being an academic nowadays in terms of academic writing. And it's certainly different than it was 100 years ago. There's a real political economy around publishing and even preparing for the today's session. I got captivated by looking at the quite tense debates between universities and publishing houses that have been very lively in the last three or four years for a whole variety of factors. And then in a way I'm coming back to where it started with writing but this time thinking of it in terms of there's a life cycle to papers, there's a life cycle to people. Even writing as a new academic is maybe a little different than writing as a seasoned academic and in between. So there's many different dimensions to this. So in summary then it's kind of thinking about writing, learning and the tools that go with that including digital ones, the idea generation. And an idea generation to me is really a central part of thinking about academic work. You know what are the good ideas and one or two examples in terms of ways of thinking about that. And then people and papers over time, how they've changed, how we think about that has changed especially in this contemporary era and then a short conclusion. So I mean in a way thinking about this presentation I kind of was drawn back to core issues about the extent to how in terms of how we value the purpose and function of academic research. You know what actually is the value and purpose of academic research? I mean that's the fundamental question prior to any notion of publishing. And then how do new forms of publishing in the digital era count if at all in academia, in the public sphere, in promoting citizenship, in making a better world? I mean these are the fundamental questions that academics answer in various different ways or the public expects them to answer and address. And then what counts in academia? I was on a promotions panel last week in UL and it was interesting to me in the context of preparing for today's session. There was no talk about alt metrics, there was no talk about Twitter, there was no talk about blog spheres. And yet they're probably the bread and butter of the digital era. So is it the case that in academia maybe we're quite conventional and we have a rather stratified understanding of what counts as quality academic outputs from lectures etc. So at one level we talk about digital revolutions but there's not necessarily the same revolution in terms of understanding of academic outputs I think within academia more generally. Now listening to Deirdre Butler's fabulous presentation this morning, here's a set of metrics on the mind rising project. It just struck me, you know, we moved the students who were maybe 9, 10, 11 who were doing these projects, some of them will be working in academia in 30 or 40 years. But will they be presenting metrics like this of their academic outputs that'll have, look at all the various pieces that are there, you know, the impressions, the number of hits in various different ways. You know, there's five or six different numbers there. Nowadays we tend to rely on a relatively small set of numbers to think about what it means to do academic research given we're in this age where everything is counted. And that wouldn't have been the case to the same extent at all 20 years ago. So if we think about academic writing now very quickly following on from that is the notion of how do we count the impact of that same writing. But it was the slide that Deirdre shared earlier today that made me think about this. This was published this morning. It's coming back to the idea of a good idea. It's a colleague at the University of Limerick somebody mentioned this article was coming out. And it's an article. It's a surgeon at the University of Limerick Graduate Entry Medical School. And he's making a very new argument in medicine. And if somebody hears a biologist and somebody said how many organs in the body maybe there's an answer to that, I don't know, I'm not a scientist. But he's identifying in this article a new organ. He's making a case for a new organ in the human body. It's a powerful idea. Now people will buy that or they won't. But if they do agree that it's a new organ then there's a whole new field of medical research that will open up following that. Funding will flow from it. People will do their PhDs on it. People will publish in that area. So there's something powerful about not just an idea but a good idea. So there's the press release. Again just thinking about publishing. So you have the Lancet article, you have the press release. Altimetric score. I picked this up. They must have put up the abstract a few days ago. So there's already an altimetric score for that publication. And it's interesting. One of the arguments that's made, and I'll come back to this in a few minutes around open access journals, is that look with the current higher education if you will corrald access to journals that people who need to read journals namely academics, can read the journals. We don't need open access. But the next slide you'll see if you look in the bottom right-hand corner half of the people who've looked at this journal article already are the public. To me that's quite telling. And there's a study there recently looking at access to university research. Look all of us probably have access to university published academic research but it's not available to the wider citizenry. And this is one of the arguments, I think, that's becoming even more relevant now as we think of Horizon 2020 and global challenges or global challenges in an international worldwide context. That the world is the aesthetic climate change. That the challenges are so great that we can't wait for journal ideas, good ideas and journals to become available five and ten years down the road. We need as many people on the planet to be aware of and have access to the best ideas as quickly as possible. But the current system within academic publishing, digital era it may be, it's still quite corrald, it's still a very protected space. There are all sorts of reasons for that but that's the way it is. So some of the ideas that I've been thinking about and preparing for today's session were the interface between ideas and writing, publishing, the digital dynamics of that and then what it means for readers. And the reader's piece is important. Do we really think of readers only as academics or are we writing at some level for the wider citizenry? So I've structured the rest of the talk in terms of three ideas. One is writing and then the ideas and the political economy and then coming back to issues of writing and people and papers. So this first section then, I'm not sure you can see it from a distance but it was basically the idea that writing is a process that has a history and I've used that title in a number of different ways. Up to maybe about the 1970s, there was very little research on the actual nature of writing. It was only with the cognitive revolution. Let's see if you take the cognitive revolution, really kicked off in the late 50s, early 60s. It took about 10 or 15 years, 20 years of research in the cognitive tradition for a focus to get very, very clear on the nature of writing, which is a highly complex cognitive task. A lot of the early work was on more simple tasks. In that process emerged a sense of how writing demands very sophisticated set of strategic decisions by writers akin to a problem-solving approach. We tend to think of problem-solving in maths and science but writing is a problem-solving task in itself. If we think about writing, we tend to think of it in quite static terms nowadays. We type most of the time, we don't use pens as much as we used to. Going to primary school and secondary school in the late 70s and 80s, I remember having to use a pen and ink. I don't think that's probably part of the development of writing nowadays in schools. Even though at one level we have lots of new shiny tools for writing, we don't have to go too far back to think about what tools were like in bygone days. Even if you look at the top left there, the idea of a hammer and a chisel, that was one of the early writing tools. I can't even read it out myself. The screen is in a small here because it shows the next slide as well. I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realise that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas of pure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and intelligible thought. I want to see my book report. The Dynamics of Interbeing and Modelogical Imperfectures in Dick and Jane, a study of psychic transformation of gender norms. Academia here I come. You can always rely on Calvin for the insight. When we think about the writing process, the cognitive tradition drew our attention to the cognitive thinking, the knowledge associated with writing, but it's also an emotional process as this slide, I think, captures. Whether we're writing with digital tools or without digital tools, there's no escaping that kind of interplay between affect and cognition in the course of writing. I mean, one of the questions in that context will be thinking about what's that interplay between affect and cognition when we're writing full blown journal articles, we're tweeting, we're engaging in the blog sphere, there's sort of different dynamics of play here in each of these in terms of cognition and affect. I'll just go back there. I mentioned the cognitive approach to writing, and I think it's no less relevant today with all our digital tools. We still end up coming back to some of the core processes in writing around drafting, planning, revising, editing and invention, that all of those are still very much to the heart of writing. That's that kind of classic article, if you Google it, you'll see it's got about 3,500 or 4,000 citations. It ended up kind of launching 25 years of research on self-regulated writing. But the core of it comes down to what's on the right there, it's this idea of composition monitoring and composition fostering. So what do we do ourselves or with our students to help them be aware of the process, the monitoring piece to be aware of their own processes. So self-awareness is kind of the first phase of self-regulated learning. So how do we become aware of our processes of writing? What do we do to in a sense pause, because the temptation of course is just to barrel on and write without doing much planning. But there are very teachable strategies in writing. So this kind of cognitive approach captures that very, very well. So for ourselves and for the students we work with then, it's how do we foster a monitoring approach or self-awareness and then simultaneously a composition fostering approach. And there's a parallel process in reading actually. So lots of people have done work in this tradition in higher education and I think the ideas are no less relevant in a digital era. So thinking about writing as a thinking tool as opposed to just a mode of expression and just an important difference there that we actually learned to think by writing as opposed to expressing our ideas in writing. And I think a lot of the time, even as preparing for this session, I didn't quite know what I was going to do until I started writing and using the tool whether it's scribbling on paper first and then I started using the laptop and then an iPad. But it's that actual process of engaging in the writing that we understand our thinking as opposed to figuring it out in our head and then doing the writing. But even helping learners to understand the use of tools is vital in fostering their own learning. My own background is in primary teaching so I've always had a long-term interest in individual development in terms of writing. And I'm not sure if you can read. If you want to start on the right there, there's a nice reflection there on the process of learning to write over time. Somebody at five years of age, 14, and now. The brown dog was friendly. That's writing at five. My writing when I was 14, the chestnut-colored Labrador with streaks of gold and his soft thick fur was amenable to the concept of doling out affection to his human counterparts. And my writing now, well, I think it speaks for itself. So when we speak of progress in the digital era, what do we mean? What is that progress? It's interesting. Is that progress in writing? Or is it regression? When we actually... What rubric would we use to assess the change in writing over time there? Because a lot of the time, I think, we tend to assume there's progress. So what's the point I'm making and spending quite a bit of time speaking about writing? Writing as a process is core to all of our work. Now, we have new tools, digital tools for that process. But despite that... In that context, it's helpful to think of the tools as a way for advancing our thinking, not merely expressing our thinking. And digital tools offer us a wider array than tools in the past. So again, the point I made about writing as a process. And this may seem really obvious, but sometimes stating the obvious is really important that writing is a learned process. It's very teachable and very learnable. And in that context, it can be seen and helpfully seen as a self-regulated learning process. I mean, it's a very interesting line of literature to read, actually, is the history of research on writing over the last 30 or 40 years. It mirrors quite a bit of the research in reading, but it takes some interesting side paths from that as well. There's a lot of overlap, but there's some interesting deviations as well. Writing is an emotional process. I remember when I was at Michigan State, the head of department gave me some very valuable advice. He said, anytime you're sending off a journal article for submission, two envelopes, he said. One for the journal you're sending it to. And the second one, when it comes back to reject it, and you're in bits, you just throw it into the second one, send it off, and then go and sort yourself out. But it's very good advice. It's almost to kind of not get buffered by the emotional impact of a particular rejection. I just keep going. I've used that story for myself and talking to others about the writing since, and it's usually helpful both to myself and others. Brian McCrath, this morning, quoted Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft was here in DCU recently, and reminded us, and reminded himself, that she had said that every organisation is a digital organisation, and if not, there should be, etc. But to paraphrase that, every scholar is a digital scholar, and if not, what? We could break out into groups and we could do the... sharing the padlet again. We could talk about that, I think. It would be worth talking about that. If we're all digital scholars, what does that mean these days? So, part two. Ideas matter. When I was talking about ideas, I focus on the digital context for those as well. In terms of thinking about digitally republishing. Ideas matter, of course, in general in academia, but also specifically in thinking about this topic, in terms of the generation of ideas, the sharing, and then there's the political economy of access to ideas, which I spoke about a few minutes ago. If any of you, which I'm sure many of you are, are futurists when it comes to technology, always asking what's coming over the horizon with regard to technology. Nicholas Negroponte has been, I suppose, plowing that for over... I think he did one of the first TED talks in 1984. So, what's that? It's a long time ago. It's 30 years ago, right? The best vision to use to see the future is peripheral vision. Now, the next slide, it'll take a bit to swallow, but anyway, I'll put it up. My prediction is that we're going to ingest information. We're going to swallow uphill and know English and swallow uphill and know Shakespeare. It will go through the bloodstream and it will know when it's in the brain and in the right places it deposits the information. Nice. I don't know. Is this the future of academic writing? It'll all be an uphill. Now, if you think that's incredible, in 1984 he predicted we'd move from the computer mouse to using our fingers to control interfaces. He also predicted in 1995 that we'd sewn by books and newspapers straight over the internet. So, how many believe the ingestion of information? Show of hands? One, two, a handful? Okay, one or two. Okay, back to more mainstream ideas. Peer review. In a way, the peer review process and the history of the peer review process is a really fascinating dimension of the work of academia because in a way it reminds us sometimes very clearly and sometimes very opacly, how the academy meets the market. Because it's been a central part of the academy for 350 years. We all write for no charge, believe it or not. Now they're going to make us pay for open access for all sorts of interesting reasons in itself. So we publish in peer reviewed outlets to share and that's what we do. We share our ideas with the sense that it advances our field or it contributes to the common good, the public good. So, for instance, and this is really what's fascinating in preparing for this talk is today at university libraries have paid high subscriptions to academic publishing companies for journal access, but there are almost I think about the stage where they're saying stop, there's been a rethink of this relationship. And now, so one of the predictions is I think that by 2021 over 50% of academic publications, 51% will be open access. So that means in the next five years there's going to be a very big change pushed on in large part by the digital era we live in and the digital tools available for sharing work be it academic or otherwise. It was changing our access, the public's access to knowledge. And so there are all sorts of very good reasons why that should be so and maybe why it shouldn't. And lest we not want to take that seriously if you look at the 80 billion invested by the European Union in horizon 2020 there's a mandatory clause in that there's a mandatory clause in the H2020 about open access publishing which I'll come back to in a minute or two. Now, so I'm kind of moving towards the idea of open access publishing. I can't go there without first thinking and talking about what this is a fascinating study and nobody will beat this in terms of the number of data points in a study. This is a study just published in plus one journal, an open access journal. And there were 45 million publications in the web of science were analysed recently. And basically one of the findings this shows how we live in a kind of stratified world of academic publishing. More than 70% of the social science publications are put out by five publishing houses. Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Taylor and Francis there's a fifth one missing there anyway. So there's a real control of that space and that's changed over time as well. It's 50% outside of the social sciences but social sciences in particular are very much controlled by a small number of publishers and in their analysis they showed how that's impacting and changing citation patterns. And there's that kind of screenshot of that publication. Actually you can even look at the metrics there that's been downloaded 90,000 times or 90,000 views since it was published last year. So at one level open access seems to kind of throw and give unfettered access to the goods of academia. But that's not to kind of leave behind the idea or not to confuse open access with free because somebody is paying. Nice. Somebody is paying but the open access just changes who pays or the timing of the payment. So the academics or their institutions end up paying for the biarticle as opposed to for the journals. So the payment is just moving around the money but the appeal of open access I think is quite powerful nonetheless. How many of you are just curious how many of you publish kind of in terms of green access where you publish on a local archive? It's a relatively small number. It's interesting. Five minutes, thanks. That works. So that's how many of gold have published an article with gold? So you pay the publisher one and one, okay. Nice. So I think in the next five or ten years that would change if we were in ten years time there would be a lot more hands going up. But I think there is something happening in academic publishing at the moment and we are just right at the cost of that. And the age of 2020 policy I think is a good pointer to that. So why does all this matter? Ten years ago Willinsky who is really one of the earlier speakers discussing this spoke about the commitment in academia to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible. Our job is not done when we publish it wherever we do but even to go a step further and I think that's the academy is moving into that space now with policies around open access. So the quality Willinsky gave a lovely example of a library in Kenya which had only access to six journals in the late 90s six medical journals and then the World Health Organization in 2001 negotiated access to the electronic archives of hundreds of medical journals for 101 developing countries. And again that imperative around making the world a better place becomes more clear when we look at access to particular areas maybe health maybe education or others. So 2001 was a turning point but this open access idea is not new it's been around for about 40 or 50 years but it's only I think I think it's getting to a tipping point at this stage and it will change all of our publishing habits in the next five or ten years. So the access principle left there is Willinsky's book and then there's another more recent one this book has become widely discussed in the open access movement by Subur published by MIT Press and so there are a few different sources of evidence to look at this turning point so in 2003 for example nature placed open access movement right up there with all the biggest stories of the year so 15 years ago open access was out there as a big story but we're still only getting to grips with it you know the academic publishing houses have been trying to grapple with this for quite a long time so you know how we got to the point where the open access is the royal road for the future well Horizon 2020 is one example where I think it's going to be much more on our desk and there would have been in the past there's a pilot study on open access now with the EU there's a European commission interesting green and gold access the next slide you'll see a recent report just out in the last six months or about nine months on this very issue and what why has it been driven in the European context one of the arguments across Europe is that there's an underlying need for more flexible and seamless access to ideas across cultures and countries in Europe because even looking within the European Union there's differential access to academic publishing quite stark differences across Europe so that's that report if you're interested again it can make the slides available after so what's the argument in the European context at least I'm not going to go through this in detail but you have the serious crisis which I mentioned the universities and publishers the administrative burden, the publisher perish, collaboration or competition there's the questioning of traditional publishers the oligopoly and there's also pressure from policy makers in Horizon 2020 is a great example of that so that the global challenges that Horizon 2020 is putting out there the European Union doesn't want to fund put 80 billion in research funding and then have all of that corralled behind paid subscription journals in with only academics the only ones who can have access to that publicly funded research so there are powerful arguments in favour of open access now this is not without its problems but I think Connor was alluding to this point this morning in his response in one of the panels but the world is a very different place and you have big mammoths out there who are taking over large tracts of academic publishing so publishing is now also Pearson Higher Education so that's oligopoly 2.0 it's a whole new level where you have Pearson Higher Education offering learning solutions who doesn't want a learning solution that's marked simply on this paper and it's a study of academics knowledge of open access and the basic finding from it is that the academics have limited enough knowledge of open access its dynamics, its origin its implications for their work so I think partly because it's driven on by the digital era but I think it's a real challenge for all of us so now the last bit in about two minutes so I'll fly through this so where were we, where did we start and where were we now so we talked about writing as a process how the digital tools have only changed our experience of writing at an individual level a collective level but then there's this wider politics of writing and the political economy of writing which has made our job more complex, more interesting and the decisions we have to make as authors is different now than it would have been 30 or 40 years ago when we were there for doctoral students writing in 1916 we all have to do 1916 to 2016 this year and 1996 and today you know what would we speak about so we might talk in 1916 it might have been writing typing and rhetoric in 1916 it might have been about the writing process word processing we don't use that term now journal impact factor, maybe web publishing open access paradigms today we have writing process again paradigms impact, not impact factor maybe impact journal quartiles impact factor is going to pass there now journal quartiles citations, open access, much larger social media more complex landscape way more decisions so despite all that there's lots of you might call old practices like hunting words or sitting with the book and pen I will just go back there's a famous there's a famous poem written in the 7th century there's the original old Irish version the new Irish version the old Irish version it's been translated into English by five or six different and the meanings have shifted across all the translations which in itself is interesting in terms of intertextuality and what it means to publish but the point is that in that okay one of the phrases that that monk who wrote that was he said his job was hunting words and we're not far from that no matter who we're writing we're tweeting or we're doing blog or it's an article we're still hunting words and we still have to sit with the book and pen or phablet or iPhone whatever it happens to be still core challenges haven't changed now that said the meaning of the text and the stability of the text has changed I think that's one of the arguments that people are saying in terms of contemporary writing is that the stability of the text is different than it would have been a hundred years ago there's the greater movement because of all the different ways of representing ideas and knowledge so that Mishog is Pangorbon which changed meaning which you could say the meaning is over the various different versions that's not a whole lot different to the way our ideas may shift in the current kind of digital era as we represent them in different formats and infographics and text so what I might do is just to conclude I liked to and I was only doing a conclusion slide when I heard Grania's comment from Castells about informed bewildermint so where are we with digital the digital era and writing in a way it's maybe informed bewildermint so Castells may not have been far off there so what do we have we have greater access now potentially to people and ideas we have new ways to gather and represent data new ways to share new measures of impact look at the metrics tied report published last year documenting the powerful ways in which the work of academics has been measured and is impacting all sorts of practices inside and outside academia and funding agencies etc I think there will soon be a measure for not just the person who's read your paper but the person who's thinking of reading your paper the old and new practices writing and just looking down through the latter part of that slide so the final point is the dynamics of publishing are more complex and they're more complex for all of us, for novice and experienced authors so I will leave it there since I got my final the final whistle there about a minute ago so thank you very much and thanks to the organisers for the invite