 Welcome to the fourth in our spring public scholarship professional development series. This one is on crowd sourcing Leveraging networks for cradle to grade grave project engagement Your presenters today are all experts in various aspects of crowd sourcing for research endeavors Christina Tron is the community specialist at experiment comm which is a crowdfunding platform for scientific research She's a form of biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Did I get that right and then H and Caltech she now helps research researchers communicate work to the public and raise funds on experiment Which has been profiled positively in the Economist the Wall Street Journal and various other publications Next up will be Rick Curtis who is a professor of anthropology here at John Jay. He's chaired both the anthro and social departments He's pioneered the crowd sourcing of data collection As a research methodology and a methodology of pedagogy alike with his strength and numbers project That involves hundreds of students across the CUNY system and in surveying New York City neighborhoods And finally Bilal Khan is a professor in the Department of math and computer science here at John Jay He develops new analytic techniques and data-driven mathematical models To describe the emergence and propagation of behaviors influence capital and pathogens over time and dynamic social and interaction networks Bilal is going to speak on the breadth and depth of his open-access publishing experience Thanks. Well, hi everybody. I'm Christina as so well introduced by Dan over here And we're here from experiment from San Francisco So experiment is a crowdfunding platform for science. You can find us at experiment.com So to get started, this is what a typical project page looks like on the site So we have a vast majority of the users on this site do come from academia So, you know professors postdocs graduate students This is an example of a professor and graduate student at University of Connecticut And they were looking at these particular bacteria in these glowing squids So kind of an obscure topic, but they managed to find 187 people who seem to think that you know This project was really worth supporting both and you know going online and sharing it but also donating So they were managed to fund their project and actually went a little bit past it, too And so that's kind of the idea of what we were doing at experiment. So we have these Projects on the site And our mission is enable anyone to push the boundaries of knowledge So it's kind of on both sides both as a researcher Being able to put their project out there on the internet and share it with you know the general public and Also on the on the side of the general public being able to go to this site and directly fund researchers as opposed to you know donating to An organization where they may not know where the money goes or you know You know paying taxes that goes into like NSF grants and those sorts of things being able to directly give A voice with their with their funds to researchers So our experiment started with Denny who's actually here in Cindy our co-founders There were undergraduates at the University of Washington And they were in biology research and ran into this this problem of where they had a question that they you know They they were had a pretty good idea that was going to work out But they didn't have any funding to test it. So they're actually working working on anthrax therapeutics at the time And so that's where the idea for experiment was born So the idea is that there's a long tail of research that doesn't get funded and these are usually small projects below like $50,000 or so So not the ones that get funded by larger grants and there's quite a few of these small projects So in order to address those Crowdfunding kind of fits into that niche. So not so much for the larger projects. We do have a few Larger products on the site and hopefully we'll get more but at the time at this time It's more of around five to ten thousand is the average for projects on the site And the idea is that there's a fast turnaround So you put the you know You put the project up on the site and you get possibly funded in 30 to 60 days And then you know the money comes in and you're able to start the research right away without having to wait For the grant to come in and get process and those sorts of things And so Bill Gates noted on his blog that the solution helps close the gap for potentially promising but unfunded projects So we do have some some people believing in us So we do have some stats if you want to go to experiment comm slash stats We do try to keep everything as open and transparent as possible So right now we have over 1.7 million dollars pledged through the site for scientific research We have 300 funded projects. I think we just hit our three hundreds recently 40% success rate and about 7% of our backers are repeat backers So this is kind of the people who come they back, you know a project that they may find through their friends or family And they come back to the site to fund you know another project on the site because the idea of Supporting science directly resonates with them. So hopefully that's kind of a pool that we can grow Over time. So we've been around for about three years now. And so this is kind of where we are now hoping to grow more too So the idea I guess I'm not really sure what exactly the audience is we can do here today But in speaking to researchers, I do an emphasize that experiment is not for everybody So it does work for some particular types of projects maybe not so well for others, but It really depends on how much time and an openness and effort you're going to put into it So there is an upfront time investment We estimate usually takes around 15 to 30 days to go through the review process on our site So we vet every single project that comes through submit a short proposal. It does it's not like a grant at all You just sort of you know answer a few questions about the research And we look through it and work with every researcher one-on-one We call them you know have Skype calls and talk to them and make sure that everyone is you know on board with what it takes to run a crowdfunding campaign So this usually takes you know a couple weeks just to get everyone up and running the you make a video Plan out marketing strategies those sort of things and then it's around another 30 to 60 days to run the actual campaign So it is an upfront time investment and that's something to keep in mind And there's also the commitment to science communication. So this is something we really emphasize as sharing the science so we really are strong supporters of open access Sharing results openly on the site whichever way that may be it could be you know sharing the paper with the backers It could be sending, you know email updates just explaining, you know, I went to the field today This is what we found. This is what we didn't found of fine because the idea is these people are personally supporting the research by donating and giving their contributions And so the return that they get is not any, you know tangible reward But the idea that they had to come along for the science and we really found that backers love that a lot They love being able to you know get a little window into what it's like to do research And sort of you know come along see pictures of You know the data or life in the field those sorts of things They really appreciate that and they that's the feedback we get is that they really love seeing that So here's some examples we do have like comments on the site So we had one backer who actually you know one and got scuba scuba diving certified and Kara is one of our researchers And her project is actually Deals with she goes scuba diving out in Massachusetts So she got to connect through with with one of her backers on the platform And that was just that really rewarding, you know cycle that we really encourage and being able to talk about the actual science And share it with people in a way that they can understand So yeah, so to start with usually when a crowdfunding campaign goes live a large amount of the first First support comes from first three networks. So friends family and colleagues And it's kind of that social proof in a way that you know you're doing this research But it's not very often that you get to share it with your friends and family So I think a lot of researchers to find that it's kind of great in a way That their friends and family get to finally get a little window into what they do I was a lot of times it's could be like very obscure or you know very abstracted type of thing But that's why we we have all sorts of resources too. So once You've spread it amongst your friends and family then they we move on to you know trying to reach out to other avenues such as press Social media those sorts of things so we do have a lot of resources along the way and we support every researcher as they go Through with their campaigns. So this is just our dashboard right now It's kind of what it looks like and you can kind of see you know We really encourage you to look at the metrics and those sort of things to think about you know how to improve your voice And we also have lab notes on the site. So this is one of our biggest features And they're just like little bits of science. So some some researchers think of it as like a blog Some think of it, you know as a way to teach so they they say you know write a few paragraphs of just like a very interesting topic And they get shared through social media or through the press And so these are just a few examples like teaching lab notes educational lab notes And then Chicks in space had an early prototype So these are actually three high schoolers who ran a project on our site And they were sending this little hydroponic garden up the International Space Station and they got funded and it was really great They post awesome lab notes where they kind of bring people in and show them how they're they're building the garden It's really fun. They use a lot of gifts, which we love So you can see we have about 3,200 lab notes on the site right now and about 11,700 comments So these are people coming back, you know asking questions Seeing like oh, you know, that's really interesting what you said about sponges and here's another question ahead And so this is kind of that science communication thing we're talking about trying to open up What is actually happening inside the lab venture out in the field? And so at that point, it's a little bit easier to go out to other Press and things like that So these are just like a few places that researchers have been have been featured with our projects But at the end of the day the most valuable part is that you get to build a community around your research So these are the 196 backers I think and one of our projects and at the bottom of every project page You can see like all the icons and you can see how many people backed It's kind of amazing to think this researcher can come back here and see, you know All these faces some of them is like face of her grandmother or her mother But there's also a lot of strangers in there, too And that's kind of one of the the greatest things I hear from researchers is at the end of the campaign They're like I really you know I wasn't expecting that many people I didn't know to back and ask questions And that I think is one of the most valuable parts of running a campaign experiment So that's it a quick introduction. Yes, you can leave on that Unless questions or yep Yeah, so we So we are an all-or-nothing funding model So you set a goal as you're developing a project and we talk with every researcher about their goal So usually recommend going for the minimum needed to accomplish something So, you know if you want ten thousand dollars to do like a three part project Maybe you can cut it down to three thousand dollars for the first part and just start there And I showed at the beginning one example where we do have a stretch goal So if you do reach your first goal, you can go on to keep fundraising and set like a stretch goal And then you know try to go for more But that's kind of what we focus on just the the smallest amount needed to get off the ground So it's kind of like a lot of proof of concept Experiments work really well, you know If you just want to do a short experiment and then prove it and then you can go for a larger grant Experiments really great for things like that So it's out of the number of projects launched how many reached their goal, so it's 40% right now, right? Sorry 44 apparently it's 44 now, okay Yes We do have a few more advanced commercial like some organizations that down the line They do hope to you know make money off of what they find, but we're really more for like the early stage You know just experimental type of testing So as long as the person or the organization is very clear and transparent with what they hope to do So like as long as they're you know make it very clear that somewhere down the line We hope to someday monetize this and just the backers are aware that that's something Yeah basically Yes I mean so the idea is that it's a it's a trade of knowledge So the donors get to directly you know They can message and comment on projects and we really encourage researchers to reply You know an answer because that's the idea that we want to foster is that openness to being able to you know access The science directly and then ask questions and you know Wonder why you know they do things a certain way Mm-hmm. It depends on the project So some if if you do want to run a project you can have we can set up to have tax-adeptable status Through a foundation arm that we use Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we actually do have social science projects on the site right now It is you know It doesn't make sense that a lot of the projects are biology ecology medicine But we do have a large amount of like anthropology. We have some archaeology archaeology projects We do we have a few social science projects hoping to get more so I think that's kind of why we're here My question was what happens when a funded research project Might not meet all of its research objectives Right, so normally in the traditional funding model The funder gets you know has some kind of review process at the end of the funding cycle And over here I'm wondering whether there's some kind of Reputation-based thing that's in effect or what's the feedback so the idea is that we do want researchers to write Lab notes as a result so even if the results aren't what they find as long as they share that I think that the The act of sharing it and being open about it is the most appreciative part So we've had had some researchers who came up with you know results that weren't what they expected or what they laid out in their Project but actually was just as interesting because you know a lot of times not getting the result You want in science actually is a result so but that and that sharing that with the backers I think that was the most valuable part and also the project pages are up for the public like they're there so You know they're always there Another question, which is for the projects which were funded by you? Which were led by university faculty what has been the relationship with the administration of these universities? I mean do they do they charge administration fees on top of that on top of the budgets? Yeah, it really depends on the university So we work with every university for each researcher and some are more difficult than others We definitely we work our first priority is the researcher always though So we try as hard as possible to avoid overhead, but I mean sometimes you just can't which is very unfortunate Yeah, so we've actually had researchers run multiple projects So it's kind of we actually have one that just finished I think today even he ran a first project I think last fall To sort of to test that he could test what he wanted to test And so that project was funded and then he tested what he wanted to test. This is a very big way of saying it But yeah, so you can run a series of projects But once the funding period ends for a particular project you can't keep fundraising on that project. You have to open a new one There's no other questions. I think you move on well good afternoon. I Didn't prepare any visuals So you'll have to suffer through me talking I guess But the wall will pit make up for that. I'm sure he's got a couple of things to show you There we go So I know most of you but for those of you that I don't I'm Rick Curtis and I'm a professor of anthropology here at John Jay and You know crowdsourcing You know, I'm sort of a Johnny come lately to this You know in a certain way certainly in the in the ways in which the folks here are going to talk about it But it's an idea. I think that some of us have had for quite a while Not crowdsourcing in terms of getting money per se to fund the projects, but crowdsourcing in terms of You know, we as college professors have crowds that we command, you know so to speak semester after semester after semester this large number of students that come through here and you know the idea that we had is to chain them together to form a big crowd who that could potentially collect a a lot of data for us and This is what we've been doing for a number of years now, but it's get it's gotten larger and You know, but you know, it's only until I met Bilal that I discovered how small thinking I actually was so he'll You know, he's he's got a lot more ideas about how to expand what we've been doing But essentially the idea is that we've got free labor at our disposal that we really don't make very good use of and That with a minimum of training and supervision and oversight We think that it's possible for students at Just about any level to collect useful data that you could that could have policy implications could have Practice implication could have lots of implications but you know, we we spend much of our time making them do useless papers and you know Mindless kinds of exercises, but why not marshal them to do something that's useful and we found over the years that in fact When students think that they are doing something that's real and that's useful. They'll do a much better job on it a much better job an astoundingly better job, so This is the idea that we have and You know in the last 20-some years we we've daisy-chained a bunch of classes at John Jay together to get a Mass of students that can go out and collect data for us in the in New York City neighborhoods on crime and drug problems Primarily, but it's the kind of data that doesn't exist otherwise and could not probably be collected otherwise so The idea of crowdsourcing your your data collection is something which you know in some many ways predates the Computer techniques that we have today, but it all makes it so much easier to do today and so this year we've Begun to expand in the last couple of years we've expanded to include the community college students as well into our portfolio of crowdsourced slaves if you will and But it's kind of important to us that I think that we get students at a very early stage Dipping down at the freshman and community college level to sort of develop a research sensibility in them You know, we don't want to wait till they're seniors You know, I mean it's sort of as they're going out the door or say oh by the way, you know Let me show you how to do this research Because they can do it as freshmen and they have done it and so the idea that we have also of You know better articulation between the community colleges something which fits this rather nicely as well so I'm sort of enthusiastic about the idea of combining the very CUNY the various CUNY colleges together to Apply large number of students to collect data on social problems that exist so to date we've done mostly crime and Drug problems was interesting as I was just looking at the data that the students collected this semester on crime and as you might imagine We one of the questions that students asked in doing their surveys tell me about your last encounter with the police This being a sort of a hot topic in the in the newspapers these days and as you might imagine African-American folk Had the worst things to say in terms of their last encounter more of them said it was negative as compared with any other group Not a surprising finding and white folk on the other hand were the opposite of that They were the most happy about their last encounter with police So those are not surprising findings. They certainly Match I think what what else is out there, but but what we did find was that? You know when we asked did you see drug dealing in your neighborhood whites came out number one for yes You know whites came out number one for yes I see drug use in my neighborhood and yet all the police action aren't any of the neighborhoods So, you know, it's these these kinds of data, which I think Are useful for us to collect and challenge some of the things that are out there That are you know put out by police and other people with agendas So I think it's going to be very useful. We've we've sort of begun to explore funding options we've thought about certainly the kinds of things that you talked about and We've we've called the folks at at NIH also and they seem quite interested though We have some a little bit of work to do to To make it something that they would fund You know, this is a little bit different maybe from some of the projects you described earlier in the sense that you know if I those projects many of them seemed like they had a An ending to them, you know, whereas this one doesn't so I Yeah, they're experiments mostly or they had you know some you know, I'm going to do this and I'm going to find out something Whereas this one is it needs perpetual funding. So It's doable. Okay Well in any event, it's most of them don't seem like they're that way, you know, but You know, the other thing is that I think that you know, even though we've we've focused on Crime and drugs given that this is John Jay College of criminal justice seems sort of appropriate There's so many other topics which could be investigated using this kind of method as well and you know, I've been sort of very interested in issues of gender and You know how things are changing in terms of sex and sexuality There's the the big editorial today in the New York Times on transgender Issues and that's the second of a huge series on the editorial page in their time so it strikes me that it's a Really sort of interesting time to collect data about changes in sex and sexuality, you know, given the changes in in That we've seen in the law vis-a-vis gay marriage I mean, it's just a you know, it'd be an opportunity missed if we didn't collect data right now during this sort of transition period That on you know, later down the road would be very important to have had that and collected it So and there's a bunch of other issues as well You know, it strikes me that I just finished reviewing a Book called Dreamland, which is about the heroin epidemic in rural America And one of the points that it was making in the book is how all of a sudden now that it's white kids doing the drugs The powers that be the Republicans that control, you know, the levers of power in Congress want to be Not tough on crime anymore They want to be smart on crime because it's their kids that are getting locked up, you know But what we've not really thought about of the long-term implications of criminalizing this next generation of of kids and white kids primarily so This is gonna, you know, a long-term kind of view is going to be needed for this and it's something that is I think could benefit from from crowd The crowd gathering the information if you will so You know how this happens is You know, thank God we do have the internet now and I think the law is gonna talk a little bit about maybe some of the mechanics of how we can Produce some of the things that we need but this is sort of the way we're thinking now and You know, the other thing is that I have to say that the traditional research Not just at John Jay, but elsewhere has never really been terribly collaborative, you know People tend to work in silos Largely, I don't know Many people talk about well, you need single author publications to get tenure for example but you know the model that we're trying to Build is one that is the opposite of that if you will is seeking the most partners that you could possibly find and There's something that's sort of liberating about that as well. I think so anyway Let me stop talking and and and let go all over and take questions, I guess and then let ball come up and See what you gotta say I Don't think it's a big stretch People Get to the result that differentiates Not just Absolutely right, so Maybe that's the next stage Well, you're right it's making it available to people to people that want to do something with it, you know I Should actually go up and show some of the social science parties we have but a lot of it is very similar So it is using the data set and trying to find a way to answer it You know, and you can use the money that you raised for stipends or going out to travel collect the data all those things It doesn't need to be limited to buying pipettes and testing Couple thousand I guess they don't really market themselves as class projects. I don't really know And usually we have like the one or two people leading the project and then they can have But I think at the most you've had me run four or five collaborators So if the project is is vetted beforehand as tax-adoptable then all donations to we tax-adoptable But it just needs to go through our system before the launch Yeah, very That part of Well, we had you know sex work research on the beaches of Rio, you think they'd find that Okay Yes Now that's tough now, isn't it you can't could because you can't accompany 30 students Into the field however, I would say that a couple of things number one you the data collection part You can set it up in such a way that it's very hard to Fraudantly put it in for example, we do surveys right student has to go out and do a number of surveys And they have to enter it in right now. They have to enter it on Survey Monkey We have a set where you can only do it one entry per device So they could go out and borrow ten devices To put it enter it ten times, but it's easier just to go get the ten people and put it in on their device You understand I'm saying so and when they do interviews in depth interviews and they have to write it up if they If they've invented it, you know of the night before they tend to be really wouldn't and They're not very you know, there's a real contrast between the real ones and the fake ones. Let's put it that way So we're able to weed those out pretty easily It's not hard to find those. Yeah, we have not run into IRB issues. We do have IRB approval and Of course the data that we collect is you know confidential and Anonymous to everybody, but the part of the student that collects the data So that hasn't been a problem and you know in all the years of doing it. We've never had a problem Yes, I think you should say the students are not reporting on themselves, right? That's right The students are not well actually They do for the first because this semester they did They were they acted as the seed to the RDS process You know, so they didn't have to fill it out the first one as a seed They could have just you know gotten the next two but pretty much what we're not asking students to report about themselves at all and Even when they go and do the interviews with the people that they're interviewing the people are not reporting so much about their Own behaviors, but other people's behaviors, you know, I mean It's a little worrisome if you're sending freshmen out into you know out into the communities to ask tough questions You have to sort of be careful about that because you know, even though they're very capable in some ways. They're not all going to be Equally capable, so we have to sort of set the bar low Until we know what we're working well, you know Well below unless I've got any more questions. Oh You're gonna look at some of the examples Every semester, yeah If they want to they can I mean they can because they get all the data I make all the data available to them at the end of the semester and they can download it and take it with them And they can have all the data from the previous semesters to if they want And some of them do come back later to work on it. I have some master's students working on it. I don't know this Not all of them, but Fair number of them do So these are the projects here that you're I mean, I'm just showing some examples of social science projects on the site right now So at your time you can go look at them. It's not just to prove the point. It's not just, you know hard lab science There's a lot of interviews a lot of data collection like working with data You know asking questions about data sets. So I think pretty Relatable for many things here. I would just encourage you to look on your own time. Yeah No, so it's really just when you go to submit a project you just lay out What is you know the project? What are the goals? What do you hope to do? What's the significance and then we hop on the phone with you and talk about like how can we you know Get that get the word out when you go live. You don't have to have that as you come in So it's really a case-by-case basis. So what works best for one project doesn't always work best for another and it really depends on the Subject matter, you know the people's personal networks You know what sort of press they hope to get out if you know Sometimes they manage to get an article and then gets picked up by other articles in that case It might just be luck or more timing. So it really depends for each person So that's why we work with each researcher and and kind of talk about what can be best And we have a lot of ideas I think just from doing it so many times and you could try all of it and see what sticks So I just want to say a few things that are on the tail end of Rick Curtis's topic And then I'll talk about open access, which is what I was asked to talk about So so Rick and I have worked on many projects and as well as Kirk Dumbbrowski who used to be at John Jay and Typically in these projects There's a lot of data collection and some of that data that comes back is coded and turns into numbers and then is Analyzed and then there's usually a vast amount of qualitative stuff not typically Audio recordings of intake interviews and stuff like that Which is actually a wealth of data that ends up being lost because the next grant comes along and and the time runs out so and Rick's project that he spoke about is a Similar example where when he first started it, I don't know in the late 80s or early 90s All the essays that he was asking the students to write for this class were hand written Typically or at best typed So there were cabinets and cabinets full of you know these essays over the years and they had to be passed through OCR technology in order to digitize it and that is Error-prone at best so there's this huge volume of Work to generate and clean the data and go back through all data and make it usable And so one of the technologies that Rick and I have been working with is the whole crowd sourcing of labor and not data collection, but actually data cleaning and What we did recently was we took and used something called Amazon Mechanical Turk Which is a crowd sourcing? Marketplace And you can post what are referred to as hits on Amazon Mechanical Turk hit is a human intelligence task and you post this in our case It was small Clips of audio of an interview and we needed them to be transcribed and then when that data came in we took the transcriptions and we posted hits of random subs of Verification tasks basically so you would take your original audio recording chop it up into small segments post hits for Transcriptions and then get the transcriptions back and then a randomly Sub-sample and post hits of verification to see whether the people that did the transcription were reliable transcribers or not and whether they should be paid or not So that kind of thing is going on and it's a labor source and it's a marketplace And it should be something that you consider as well. So but that's not what I'm supposed to talk about So I'm gonna stop there on that. So I was asked to talk about open access See how this works Yes, good. Okay, so I was asked to talk about open access and Anyone who can identify the image on the left at the end. I don't know get surprised Okay, so open access. You'd like to know the definition. Here's two definitions of it Free unrestricted access to primary research materials articles for everyone in Immediate permanent online access to full text of peer-reviewed research journal articles free for all users web-wide This is you know part of this whole trend that you're that you're seeing and in companies like experiment and In the strategies that people like Rick are using is to go directly to the to the public So a little bit of history the first part of my talk is all going to be Attempted to be objective and then there will be a couple of slides in there Which will be subjective and I will try and be very clear when I'm giving you my opinion So in the beginning it starts in 1665. That's the first Instance of a journal publication sponsored by the Royal Society of London and Over the years there have been two main problems. There's the librarians problem, which is how do we get access to these? growing numbers of journals in an affordable way and there's the researchers problem, which is How do we get access to the information and make sure that what we're doing has the greatest? Availability to other researchers so that we can generate synergy in our scientific work now in the physical world these two objectives are coupled because there's a physical space called a library and It's simultaneously is supposed to embody those two problems not so much anymore So here's the follow the money and follow the knowledge graph which everyone knows but probably you never bothered to write it down So here it is The public the public is paying taxes to the government the government has got a set of funding agencies underneath it It also that box on the top is John Jay College The funders end up competitively assigning money to researchers and the researchers pay overhead into the administration The administration goes and gives a certain amount of budget to the librarians and the librarians pay the publishers and the publishers pay their printing costs In the reverse direction You have the researchers producing results the red arrow Sending that result to publishers to be published and publishers are bundling them up and selling them back to the librarians The librarians are making it available to the researchers And the researchers give sort of Thinned out PR versions of their results to funders who then release it to the press and the public gets to hear about it that's the Flow So 300 years after 1665 we have roughly 50 million papers And one paper being generated roughly a minute doesn't seem very high actually, but it's it's growing And Anyone here from the library? Good so I can say whatever I want. No one will challenge me. No This is a topic that's really interested me And I think that people in the library sciences probably know it much better than I do and it's a fascinating historical thing Sequence of events and I feel like most academics don't know about it So there's the serial crisis which arises and it's the collision course of three things This is the birth of open access. I'm trying to motivate it. It's not just a bunch of entrepreneurs In a vacuum So the cereals cry the cereals crisis arises because you have an exponential growth in research output post World War two You have continuous journal price increases and you have static or falling library budgets and those three things collide to generate a market opportunity Here's the exponential growth in research output as measured in citations as opposed to papers that are never cited So you might think of this as a Better representation of knowledge the the y-axis is log of the number of references so it's So we have you know 10 to the 16 right now in 2000 and something Now this is from nature May 2014 and You know, we won't get into whether this means that knowledge is increasing or researchers are getting better at slicing Their results into finer and finer pieces, but that's the journal citation count Unduplicated. Yes. Yes Continuous journal price increases. This is from EBSCO and Here you can see college and university subscription fees Are growing roughly 25 percent every five years six percent per annum and that's pretty much been constant and So in the face of this The publishers come up with a genius solution The genius solution is referred to as the big deal Anybody here know about the big deal? I didn't know about the big deal. I heard about the you know Okay, so the big deal of 1996 roughly was a discount bundle of all offerings So all the publishers decided that rather than paying by the journal you can pay and get a hundred journal Of which you probably only care about 10, but you get it you get the discount bundle And the net impact of this was that it basically Created a consolidation of publishers because journals wanted to enter into the bundle and it created a barrier to entry for small publishers and new journals and As far as budget library budgets go it became an all-or-nothing kind of proposition for them Either you go with the vendor or you don't and it ended up eating a large portion of their budget for cereals and that Basically made the affordability problem worse Now So the next slide is some information about About the Elsevier publisher So so in the face of that you have the following kind of data about the publisher Elsevier From 2000 in 2002 they had 429 million pounds profit out of their 12 95 million pounds of revenue so 33 percent of their revenue was profit and and Down in 2011 they had 37 percent of their revenue being profit. This is one of the best businesses to be in Yes, that's right. That's right. Thank you Thank you So this is how it translates when you pay 37 95 because you don't belong to a top tier institution in the United States to download a PDF from an Elsevier journal 13 dollars of that goes into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders when you pay $3,000 because Elsevier has decided to support open access $1,000 goes into the pockets of the shareholders and when your library CUNY for example pays $1.7 million for a bundle of Elsevier journal subscriptions $600,000 of that goes into the pockets of Elsevier Shareholders that's just how the numbers work out Well, it depends I'm not sure what exactly the terms of this $1.7 million bundle is but I suspect some of them are physical and The majority are electronic Okay, so coincident with all of this you have the the technology boom and you have the web in 1991 roughly you have the Los Alamos archive of preprints happening in 1991 as well This is basically academics attempting to circumvent some of these Access problems by setting up their own preprint archives NIH funds PubMed in 2000 the public library of science gets launched in 2000 and In 2002 Soros funds something called the the Budapest open access initiative And this is typically considered the birth of the open access movement so So this is what the picture used to look like and then as things got worse This is what happened So the the budgets of libraries got thinner That's the thin green arrow over there between administration and librarians and the bottom you have a giant plethora of educational institutions with lots of money and Producing research which I like to refer to as the education bubble economy, but other people think of it differently and the publishers costs went Basically to zero because posting an article the marginal cost of posting an article on the web and putting up a paywall is zero So the affordability problem is still unsolved and The access problem is still unsolved because the public is still feeding off of that small channel and Researchers can't get their stuff out globally because in most places the prices that are being charged by the publishers are are not Can't be sustained by the international educational institutions So in this you have the birth of open access publishing open access publishing is a change in the way that money flows Right, so in open access publishing the researcher is paying for the publication of their results and Once that payment has happened then the open access publisher doesn't charge a subscription to the librarians It simply makes the makes the results available directly to the public over the web and also to researchers over the web And this the first instance of this was Biomed Central in 1999 which has some ridiculous number of Articles at this point so Of course this started to you know bleed the existing publishing traditional publishers, and so they came along and mimicked the business model And they now have Most traditional publishers I think 92% of them support open access as well Although very few researchers take them up on it and that involves the researchers paying a Publication fee which ranges typically from 700 to $3,000 a paper and after that the open access The article becomes declared open access and it's made available also The traditional publishers are supporting Researchers hosting their papers on local archives without violating the copyright agreement that the researcher has with the press So this is sort of the menu that traditional publishers who embrace open access provide you quote-unquote gold means that You paid money to the publisher and therefore the article is going to be available at the publisher's site Blue means that you can post the article after it's been accepted on your own site Yellow means that you can post the article on your own site before it's accepted and green means you can do both Although typically these green blue and yellow open access agreements have an embargo period which means that basically the press has Exclusive rights to the distribution for roughly two years after your paper comes out So for two years the press will be the sole access point and then two years after that You can make it available on your website and not face copyright infringement on your own work Okay, so So this is just some Some news from 2012 to give you to give you a sense of the fact that the writing is on the wall and This isn't just a problem for universities like CUNY which are facing budget Shortfalls this is an article in The Guardian about Harvard And I'll just read the first part Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research Available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls a Memo from Harvard Library to the University's 2,100 teaching and research staff called for action after warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by large Journal publishers which build a library around three point five million dollars a year Okay, so this is There are many institutions that are moving in this direction, and I think that that's going to continue This is an article from the Economist titled of goats and headaches which basically Traces out the fact that Elsevier, which is the biggest publisher of journals has 2,000 titles and Has cruised through the recession in flying colors So this is so far just the history points to ponder for you are can one lobby to raise Library budgets when you have a public relations environment in which publishers are being openly shown to have huge profit margins Can one lobby to increase research agency budgets without promising transparency of the results and the funding process And the third question is is the copyright intended for the creator or the publisher? Now if that last question, you know might have different answers It certainly has different answers in the music industry than it does in the academic industry In the academic industry, we actually don't want to keep our research to ourselves When you see the J store screen come up and ask you for a $39 to read the article because you happen to be not on the John Jay network You're not getting a dime from the $39 fee That you pay to get that access So I would say that Copyright is quite different for certain industries, and we're in a different industry than it was originally intended for Okay, so enough history on to pragmatic considerations How to find open access journals there's roughly well, there's probably many more now But 63,000 journals total of them 73,000 are open access so roughly 10% There's a directory of open access journals do a j.org Yeah Well some of them have but a lot of them who happen to be on the editorial boards of those journals have not because Those journals that are currently housed at traditional publishers do represent Consolidation of political power in those disciplines and it would be Quite unreasonable for the editor to just simply step down and you're asking them to you mean you're asking them to resign from editorial boards So though I don't think there's been much movement in that but I think that there has been some movement in submitting articles to open access journals and I think that that kind of a statement by the administration is really Targeted to words junior faculty who might face penalties by not targeting Traditional journals to say that it's okay to Publish in open access. I don't think anybody at Harvard resigned from any editorial board. I Just want to show you do AJ because it's kind of impressive the scale of it So let's just search for journals So there are 71 open access journals with the word drug in it, of course You know many of them will be science biology related and not social science related but this is sort of a starting point and And there are other journals which obviously haven't made it to this list. There is a vetting process which goes into a Appearing at DOA J. So it's not 100% guaranteed because it's not really clear what the admission criteria should be but This is a good resource for you to come to find open access journals in your discipline Okay, so this is the question which I'm often asked and which I've struggled with which is how to know if an open access journal is quote reputable and There are several here's a list of positive indicators the scope of the journal is well defined and clearly stated I mean something that says that the journal is covers any area of computer science in my world is is a negative indicator The journals primary audiences researchers and practitioners the editor and editorial board are recognized by experts in the field I will say something about how it's possible to spoof all these things in a second Journal is affiliated or sponsored with an established scholarly society Articles are within the scope of the journal fees and charges are easily found on the website articles have DOIs The journal clearly indicates what the rights of use and reuse are it has an ISSN number and Is registered in various directories and is included in subject databases or indexes in terms of negative indicators, I would say If it doesn't have a website if you heard about it through an email the publishers Information is absent the journals website is absent Or the instructions to submit are not available Information on the peer review is hard to find the scope statement is is very broad and vague These are all things that Should be questioned. Also, if you have repeat authors in the same issue That is something to watch out for and then different professional organizations have maintained lists of of journals that are known to be Known to be not reputable journals Okay, so this is my list There are there are other ways to go about it. Oh, yeah, yeah There is a list which is referred to as Beals list now Beals list is maintained by someone named Beal and It is a list of predatory Publishers now I have an issue with this list mainly because it is a list of Publishers and not a list of journals and some of these open access publishers have hundreds of Journals that they are hosting in their in the open access paradigm In fact, you could as a practitioner in your field write to an open access publisher and say I would like to start a journal and this will be its scope and this will be its editorial board and so on and They would review it and they would send it out through their process And then you would get either accepted or not and then you would be in charge of the quality control as the editor in chief of that journal and And so I've found that within any one of these open access publishers. There's actually a pretty wide range of Of quality control within the journal so for someone to be comfortable saying that this is a predatory publisher Just doesn't strike me as being an honest kind of granularity of assessment So but if you're pre-tenure and you think your department chair is just going to go to that website and say where the publisher is and Ding you on it. You might want to consider it, but I don't I don't personally Think it's worth much If you believe the impact factor is meaningful or your personnel and budget committee thinks it's meaningful Then there is there is a catalog of open impact open access impact factors What I've found is the best way to assess a journal is to read some papers in the journal And I think that that gives you a very good idea of whether this thing is is real or whether it's a vanity press Which is basically what people are afraid of right? so And then I would say that for the P process The best thing is to get an expert to read the paper that you want evaluated rather than Looking to see what the number of citations is or looking to see what the impact factor of the journal is that the paper was published in So here are some journals in the social sciences. I know you can't see it because it's really tiny but You know right up there at the top Oh is Ernie isn't here, but Ernie I think is the harm reduction journal Which has an impact factor of 1.48 and these are some pretty decent impact factors up here if you're into that sort of thing Down here is discrete dynamics in nature and society with 0.97. I've published in that journal It's mentioned. It's under the hindawi press which is on Beale's list of predatory journals and Then here's my discipline is Computer science and over here. We have a list of journals I've truncated them, you know, so a journal of artificial societies and social simulation 1.73 is its impact factor. It's also on Beale's list I've published in that Okay, so Until now I've tried to be very objective. I've given you the websites I've given you graphs and charts and whatever and now I'm going to tell you about my own personal story and I'm in the math and computer science department, which is not ranked nationwide at CUNY in any in any capacity It's not on any list of rankings and you might be in a department that is your dynamics in the department might be different than mine So please take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt. Are we out of town? Okay So so and this is very subjective. I graduated in 2003 with my PhD I've been here for 10 years a little bit over 10 years and Shortly after I arrived here. I learned the basic ground rules of academic life, which for me were That there is a club and you're not in it And And this I learned by submitting to the top journals and getting bounced around from one journal to the next and and So it pretty early on I realized that there was some sort of strategic choice that I had to make and For me it looked like this. I could I could be working to get a paper What happened? Yes, I could be working to get a paper published So there are two assumptions typically the Academy makes that getting a paper published is a competitive process in which the quality of Piece of work and its potential is evaluated So obviously if you go to some very selective journal, then you know the quality of your work must be really good on the other hand you say that getting jobs and grants and tenure is a competitive process and In that process quality of individuals previous work and future plans are evaluated and the assent and and not surprisingly these two these two Phenomenon are highly correlated and the general unspoken assumption is that this correlation is a causal connection that goes from left to right Right that if you get these papers published in high-end journals Then you will get grants and jobs and tenure that this is a correlation It's not a causation actually and that was what my experience was So I I tended to focus on getting papers published quickly Here's here's the choices The choices that I had were on the one hand. I could make 100% sure that I look impactful and I'm fine-facing delays bouncing around club journals and waiting for the star chamber to approve me or I could say that I want to be impactful in the field and to do so quickly and to trust the value of my ideas Intrinsically and I want researchers to be able to access them for free that's my choice that I faced and I went on that side on the right side and because of that I was able to get a lot of grants and tenure and And and and so I really in my experience. I can't say that that top pairing is A causal connection. I see it as a mere correlation But as I said, this is life for me in my discipline in this department and it's a subjective reality Okay now caveat emptor literally Until about two months ago I was single-mindedly for open access and then I had an interesting thing happen to me, which is that Well, I'm still for open access. Okay, but it's complicated So I work in computer security and one of my students wrote to me who had graduated with a PhD And he said really upset the paper that you and I wrote seems to have been plagiarized and it's available on this website so Yes, so anyway, the paper was published by a professional organization the IEEE and then it appeared at the international journal of Computer technologies and applications comm in volume 3 issue 6 page 2 it was the exact same paper except the author's names were changed and The algorithms a name was changed and otherwise the figures and the theorems and the graphs and everything was exactly the same and This this journal is an open access journal and charges $3,000 So I looked at it and I thought The editorial board didn't catch this plagiarism And I looked on the editorial board and I found low and behold that one of the signatories on my PhD thesis Was on the editorial board. So I wrote to them for it because I was going to blast them out of the water I was like, okay, let's do the politically right thing and right to the editorial board. I Wrote to the editorial board and I said, hey, you know, there's these two papers. Here's my paper It's preceded that paper by three years. It's the exact same copy And my ex, you know Committee member wrote back to me and said blah It's really unfortunate. I'm very sad to hear this on by the way I have no idea what you're talking about because I'm not on the editorial board and And so actually that entire editorial board and the reviewers list everything about that journal was fake Including several of the papers which were author which were placed there as plagiarized papers just to make the journal look like it was a real journal and Had contributing papers can papers being contributed to it so this is an example of what I call a fishing market and and you know, I In this case had some collateral damage from this because well my work appeared over there And even though people say, oh, well, you should be really flattered. Your work is so great that it's been plagiarized It feels it feels weird Okay, so the institutional implications for this I think are pretty profound I think there is a stigma attached to us open access publications because they are considered a vanity press Especially and that is especially a kind of viewpoint that is pushed by people who are on the editorial boards of Traditional publications because this is a kind of shift in power and currency So I think a lot of thought needs to be given to that and then in college budgets Currently, there's a huge amount of money being spent funding the big deal and it's unclear whether a portion of that would be better spent Supporting faculty being able to afford publication fees and Specifically the office for the advanced advancement of research who's supporting this presentation should consider supporting These sorts of open access publication fees, especially for bootstrapping research Which which you do thank you very much, and that's that's that's it for me And we should thank everybody who proceeded Yes That situation is unresolved and unresolvable That website is run and owned by somebody who lives in well the best of my knowledge lives in Tamil Nadu Province, India and Does not respond to any emails and is outside of the scope of law So unless the IEEE decides to mount a legal case against them I don't think that there's anything to do Yeah, that That's right. That's right and and you know so so That's that's basically what's happening. It's efficient You mean the article that doesn't have my authorship on it Or do you mean well my authorship? Here's the deal my IEEE article an average person Cannot see because they would have to be a member of the IEEE to get it Or they would have to have access to a university library that has a subscription to someone of these bundles That has access to that right the fake one. I'm sure lots of people have downloaded I don't know if we haven't looked at the download count, but that doesn't come back to me They didn't bother to put me in the acknowledgments. It was a very superficial hack of the PDF Even the pagination is the same it does it cost the researcher that but you know You know if you're planned for it in your research budgets Then that can be part of the publication fee in the same way that Conference travel used to be or conference registrations used to be and that's what I do at this point when I apply for grants But to get boots bootstrapped into that You need to have you know, you need to have support Yeah, that money is going to an open access publisher's bottom line Yes, yes, it is although people have done interesting analyses on the not-for-profit versions of this and of course their fees and Are much lower there are not not for profit versions of this that are typically run by Professional organizations Societies right but for that for that three thousand dollars that you're spending anyone can get what you what you put up. Yeah Yes, I don't know for sure actually I think that's right You know if it's been published at another in another press You can't just take it and put it and make it available. You will receive a nasty email from them Yes Yes Posted they wait for the publisher to take action and thus far Right because the market share is too small that they've captured right but when you start when you start getting Harvard Canceling its bundles because they can get everything they want from from such sites. I'm pretty sure they're going to see something That's my feeling Absolutely, this is all about justice this college. So let's do it. Oh Yeah Cornell is right there and I forget who else but the top tier is pulling out. I Mean pulling out of the subscriptions not the editorial boards. Yeah I Don't I don't know it's it's a very vibrant topic and unfortunately Or fortunately, I mean academics tend to not Get a lot of information about the huge machinery that they're feeding their results into And so, you know, there's a lot written online. I'm sure someone's keeping track of the conversions as they happen