[sc-announce] Voices from the future of science: Matthew Cockerill of BioMd Central -- Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Thu Sep 18 06:56:49 EDT 2008


Voices from the future of science: Matthew Cockerill of BioMed Central

September 18th,
2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/09/18/voices-from-the-future-of-science-matthew-cockerill-of-biomed-central/>by
dwentworth

**Perhaps the best description of what scientific publishing can achieve in
the digital age comes from Richard Poynder<http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk/>,
the UK journalist who's been interviewing leaders in the open
access<http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm>(OA)
movement. In his
interview<http://poynder.blogspot.com/2008/02/open-access-interviews-john-wilbanks.html>with
our own John
Wilbanks <http://creativecommons.org/about/people/#34>, Poynder articulates
the vision of a scholarly paper that is "no longer simply an article to be
viewed by as many eyeballs as possible, but also the raw material for
multiple machines and software agents to data mine, a front-end to hundreds
of databases, and the launch pad for an ecommerce system designed to speed
up the process of research."

In this light, Poynder writes, OA is not an end in itself, but "the
necessary precondition for a complete revolution in the way that science is
done."

BioMed Central (BMC) is a publisher that has taken bold steps to help
realize this vision. A trailblazer in OA since the company's inception, BMC
recently launched the innovative *BMC Research
Notes<http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcresnotes/>
*, which aims explicitly to "complete the scientific record" by
providing a venue
for dark data<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/09/18/weblog/archives/2008/03/13/biomed-centrals-smart-push-to-publish-negative-data/>and
other kinds of useful information, and to make sure that the data are
"published in standard, reusable formats and are exposed to ensure that they
are searchable and easily harvested for reuse." It is also investigating
novel approaches for enriching the literature, exploring such areas as data
mining and semantic technology. Under the leadership of Matthew Cockerill,
who started off at BMC as its Technical Director, the company has seen
remarkable growth, introducing new journals in cutting-edge fields, gaining
impressive impact factors and surging in readership, submissions and
revenue.

"I came into this from my own perspective as a biologist, trying to deal
with a flood of data and results," said Cockerill in an
interview<http://www.itweek.co.uk/information-world-review/features/2189448/eye-oa-storm>last
year with
*Information World Review*. "One of the founding reasons for BioMed Central
was the idea that if you want to encourage the development of tools to
analyze research results, as a basic starting point you need to ensure all
the research is openly accessible. By opening up access to the original
research, we're helping the community develop better tools to work with that
research."

I talked with Cockerill about the progress we're making in the OA movement,
the factors behind BMC's success and what he envisions for making OA
research even more useful to scientists.
.
*BMC has been a pioneer in road-testing
models<http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ala07/matrixhtml.shtml>for
making OA publishing sustainable, including introducing an
institutional
membership program <http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/instmembership>.
Can you tell us about some of the milestones you've reached? W**hat's
driving your growth?
*
We're super happy with how things are going right now — both submissions and
access rates are on the rise. We're now seeing 4 million article downloads
per month, and it will be more than 50 million for the year. That's a lot of
access to research. Submissions are currently at about 1,800 per month, up
from 1,500 at the same time last year. And it's worth noting that in terms
of submission rates, we expect the next year to be an even bigger growth
period. The reason is simple: last year, we had one journal that got its
first impact factor. This year, we have 13 journals in the same position!
These include prominent titles such as *Retrovirology*, *Journal of
Translational Medicine*, *Biology Direct* and *BMC Biology*. In our
experience, the release of an official impact factor can triple submissions
to a journal.

We now have a sustainable business model. Revenue has roughly doubled in the
last 12 months — in part because we're publishing more articles, and in part
because we've structured our institutional membership fees so they're
proportionate to the value of the articles published, as well as realistic
for covering the costs of publishing on a large scale. Our fees are still
among the lowest for an open access option, and we've been able to maintain
growth in terms of the absolute number of submissions.

Another important trend that's going to drive submissions growth over the
next year is existing journals switching across to open access with BioMed
Central. Quite a few have done so already, coming from Taylor & Francis and
other traditional publishers. And the pipeline for such transfers is growing
rapidly, now that OA has proven itself as a viable model with many benefits
for society publishers.

*What's behind the trend?*

There are three factors driving it:

(1) Not all society journals are big money spinners — a large number only
just break even, and this can be an unstable situation. With the majority of
library serials budgets swallowed up by "big deals," subscription
cancellations are an ongoing worry for society journals. OA provides
security and stability — since the publication costs for each article are
covered, the society can be sure that the journal will not drain its
resources.

(2) OA gives society journals the visibility that many don't currently have,
especially with a dwindling pool of subscribers. OA increases visibility and
enhances dissemination, which fits well with the mission of scientific
societies to advance communication within their field.

(3) Societies have, quite reasonably, taken a "wait and see" approach to
open access. But now that OA journals are doing well, and some societies
have led the way, the rest, I think, are seeing it as a much more viable
option — just as authors no longer see choosing an OA journal as such a big
risk.

*So part of why we're seeing the migration to OA is that even well-endowed
libraries can no longer afford to keep the traditional publishing model
afloat. And at the same time, OA is attractive to publishers because it
promises to leverage the Web better for visibility and reputation building?*

Yes. If you're a publisher starting a new journal, or seeking to
reinvigorate an existing journal and gain mindshare, how do you do it? Open
access is the natural way to go.

All of this makes OA a much more dynamic, interesting and responsive
publishing environment. It keeps us on our toes in terms of the competition,
as well.*

Looking ahead, do you think the Harvard faculty
mandate<http://hul.harvard.edu/osc/overview.html>can help change the
culture and attitudes toward making OA happen — not just
with words but also actions and investment?*

Absolutely — the mandate at Harvard has already changed perceptions, but I
think that the next steps from Harvard, in terms of practical actions, such
as providing sustainable central funding for open access publication, will
be even more profoundly influential.

It's been encouraging to see the shift over the past few years in the way
people think about funding OA. With OA taking off, initially there was a
certain amount of concern from libraries and institutions — OA seemed to be
turning from this small thing to a more substantial cost, which could be
expected to grow from year to year. But now more institutions are
recognizing that this is an important transition in scientific publishing.
They're working with us to bring about the changes necessary to move
smoothly and progressively from a model of funding subscriptions that keep
the results of research locked up, to funding the cost of publishing openly.

Foundations like HHMI <http://www.hhmi.org/> and the Wellcome
Trust<http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/>led the way on this, explicitly
setting aside and providing institutions
with the extra funds to support OA costs. Now, other funders are following
suit — the Research Information Network <http://www.rin.ac.uk/> in the UK,
for instance, has set up a working group that brings together publishers,
university representatives and research councils to develop guidelines and
best practices for efficiently channeling funds to OA. Individual
institutions are also working on plans for central OA funds, along the lines
of the funds at Imperial College, Nottingham and Amsterdam.

In the US, Harvard's Stuart Shieber<http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/%7Eshieber/>has
signaled <http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6565148.html?nid=2673#news1>his
commitment to putting OA journals on "equal footing" with subscription
journals, calling attention to the need for institutional funding. And we
also have the Berkeley Research Impact
Initiative<http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii/>,
which is funding OA and looking at the best way to make it work at the
University of California.

Of course, each country has its own complications, and research and
university funding in the US is very different from in the UK. So the change
isn't going to be easy, but it's happening.

*You've described<http://www.itweek.co.uk/information-world-review/features/2189448/eye-oa-storm>opening
access to research as laying the foundation for innovation in
analyzing and working with the results. **What are the next steps for
enhancing the usefulness of published research? *

Publication shouldn't just be about putting words on paper, but about
contributing to a structure of knowledge — more like contributing to an open
source software project. We launched BMC Research
Notes<http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcresnotes/>with a view to trying
to catalyze some of the standards required for that.
One of the things we want to do is enable people to share data sets — not
only if they happen to fit into the narrative of a traditional paper, but
just if they encapsulate useful knowledge.

To some extent, what we need to do next is connect basic scientific concepts
with the kind of meaningful interconnections that exist on social network
sites between people and their stuff. That isn't easy stuff to do, in
practice, but some of the underlying technologies (e.g. semantic
representations like RDF) are increasingly getting towards the point of
being practically useful — not least because of the massive enthusiasm for
social networks, which has seen the world start looking at graph and network
analysis algorithms as hot topics.

*Can you elaborate on the connection you're making between semantic
technology and social networks?*

The best way to explain what I mean is probably to refer you to a paper
published in *Genome Biology: **Calling on a million minds for community
annotation in WikiProteins <http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/5/R89>*. It's
about a project — WikiProteins — that implements some of these ideas in
terms of mining the literature for conceptual relationships. The project is
currently being developed to also use these conceptual relationships to
connect researchers to one another. BioMed Central has worked extensively
with the folks responsible for Wikiproteins, and I'm a co-author on the
paper (as is Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia!).

For another perspective, Toby Segaran <http://kiwitobes.com/>'s excellent
book, *Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0
Applications <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/>*, explores
techniques to make use of information that can be mined from the pattern of
connections in a network, social or otherwise. Perhaps the best known
examples of this type of network mining in action are recommendation systems
like Amazon's "Recommended for You" feature, or Apple's "Genius Playlists."

Toby is now at Metaweb
<http://www.metaweb.com/>/Freebase<http://www.freebase.com/>,
Danny Hillis <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Hillis>'s consumer-focused
semantic web project. Although the extraction of semantic structure from
scientific data is conceptually similar to this work in the consumer space,
it doesn't always get quite the same resources thrown at it — just as
scientific computing does not get the same resources as Nintendo or Xbox.
One recent case in point: Microsoft's announcement that it is abandoning
Live Academic Search, its never-quite-successful attempt at a Google
Scholar-type service, because it wants to focus on consumer markets where it
feels it is easier for the company to add value.

However, that said, scientific computing can and does benefit from the
Nintendo/Xbox innovations, and I think the same can be said about the
ingenuity being poured into developing social networks — ironically, some of
the commercially-driven innovation in the consumer space gradually finds its
way back to the scientific information space.

*BMC is one of most prominent OA publishers using Creative Commons licenses.
Do you have thoughts to share about your experience?*

Returning to the theme of progress in OA, I'm happy that more people
(including publishers) are starting to understand that open access doesn't
just mean not hitting a pay-wall at the publisher's site. It's about
enabling people to get full use and value from the research that's being
conducted.

Creative Commons has it absolutely right with the idea of "some rights
reserved" — providing a way for authors and publishers to allow a wide range
of uses, while reserving the author's right of attribution. There are an
increasing number of scholarly publishers who embrace this principle of
licensing open access content to encourage reuse. BMC is now involved in an
initiative to to set up an association with these other OA publishers,
analogous to associations which exist in the world of open source software.
The development of such an open access publisher organization reflects the
increasing importance of OA publishing, which goes beyond the activities of
any one publisher.

#

Previous posts in this series:

   - Voices from the future of science: Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge
   Foundation<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/08/18/voices-from-the-future-of-science-rufus-pollock-of-the-open-knowledge-foundation/>
   - Voices from the future of science: Lorrie LeJeune from
OpenWetWare<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/09/18/weblog/archives/2008/06/03/voices-from-the-future-of-science-lorrie-lejeune-from-openwetware/>
   - A Wellcome future for
science<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/09/18/weblog/archives/2008/04/28/a-wellcome-future-for-science/>
   - Voices from the future of
science<http://www.sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/04/02/voices-from-the-future-of-science/>
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