This paper examines how two contrasting scholarly publishers are responding to the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 to innovate their services. Our findings highlight the need to take seriously the role of publishers in the move towards a vision of more rapid and open scholarly communication and to understand the factors that shape their role as intermediaries in the innovation pathways that may be needed to achieve it.

2. Making Web2.0 for science
James Stewart,
JRC-IPTS, European Commission, Sevilla
ISSTI, University of Edinburgh
James Stewart1,3, Rob Procter2, Meik Poschen2, Robin Williams (Forthcoming)
The role of academic publishers in shaping the development of
Web 2.0 services for scholarly communications, New Media and Society

3. What is Web 2.0?
1. “Web 2.0 encompasses a variety of different
meanings that include
a) an increased emphasis on user-generated content,
b) data and content sharing and collaborative effort,
together with the use of various kinds of social software,
c) new ways of interacting with web-based applications,
and
d) the use of the web as a platform for generating, re-
purposing and consuming content.”
(Franklin and van Harmelen, 2007)
2. Web 2.0 is a set of concrete examples and categories
3. Ways of developing: experimental, perpetual-beta
4. New media, information and knowledge forms

4. Web 2.0 is not a given: it is a work in progress
‘Web2.0’ in scholarship is emerging though socio-
technical change processes in which the value, form
and use of scholarly knowledge is being negotiated and
changed, and the roles of key intermediaries tested
– Explored with multi-method study of producers, users and
intermediaries
‘Web2.0’ created by people investing, experimenting and
creating ideas: a finite number of small teams lead this
work, influenced by access to resources and a host of
other constraints, and driven by visions of the
potential of the technology.
– Explored by examining the work of 2 teams, based in two
conventional intermediaries of scholarly communication:
academic publishing houses, PLOS and NPG (Macmillan)

5. Empirical insights
• Publishers are playing a role as user, developer, and
intermediary in creating Web2.0 for scholars - but the story
has only begun.
The Story
• Publishers driven by vision – better science though Web2.0
• User rejection of closed thin experimental reproductions of
exemplar ‘social’ consumer Web2.0. led to
• Deeper exploration of potential to integrate data-mining
with human interpretative activities (writing searching,
reading, annotation)
• Knitting the ‘article’ closer into a broader network of new
objects of scholarly communication
• Revaluing the publisher role in a re-framed but
conservative scholarly communication processes- the
business of discovery

6. Approach
• A social shaping approach
– Social technical change through interactions of multiple
stakeholder
(MacKenzie and Wajcman; Williams and Edge; Bijker;)
• Social learning approach
– Long process of experimentation, learning, failure and
reinvention of common socio-technical frames, where tentative
technical configurations and user and stakeholder
representations are tested and ‘solidified’ through cycles of
development and domestication of technology
(Sørensen; Williams, Stewart, Slack.; Hyysalo )
• Innovation Intermediary approach
– Beyond users and producers: Hybrids that stimulate, facilitate, configure
and broker the social shaping and social learning processes
(Howells, Stewart and Hyysalo )

7. Questions
• How are scholarly publishers contributing to
the development of Web2.0?
– How are they doing this, within the context of
broader dynamics in scholarly communication?
– What are the results of this work?
• What can we learn more generally about how
we are inventing “Web2.0”

8. Study context
• “Adoption and Use of Web 2.0 in Scholarly
Communications” funded by RIN 2009
• Representative survey of UK scholarly community to
discover basic use and awareness.
• 50+ in-depth interviews on scholarly communications
and Web 2.0.
• Case studies of promoters, developers and users of
specific Web 2.0 services
• Exploring adoption and non-adoption,
domestication, adoption features (barriers,
drivers etc) and impact on behaviour of broad
range of ‘ Web2.0’ services

9. Survey results
• Web2.0 just beginning; 10% active users
• Enthusiasm for change and tools to support
interdisciplinary work
• Conservatism related to use of articles, status of
articles and understanding of new tools
• Discovery though search most popular
• Only use new tools when it is put in front of their
noses
• Failure of adhoc new systems dependent on other
people’s use, and with any sort of learning curve.
• Deep disciplinary differences

10. Publisher cases
• Documentary and technological evidence (papers, blogs, websites
webtools, journals etc)
• 1 hr semi structured interviews with members of teams exploring
– Motivations
– the organisational interests and constraints,
– 'practice-bound' visions (Hyysalo, 2006)
– Activities in technological, business, publishing and political arenas
– representations of potential users and themselves
– interactions with stakeholders and end-users.
• Follow up interviews with directors, and review of literature and
documentary evidence; discussion of research findings
• Draw on broader results of Web2.0 survey
• NPG (Publishing director, 4 members of development team, editor of
Nature Chemistry)
• PLOS (publishing, technology and marketing managers)

11. What is Scholarly Communications?
A range of formal and informal communications:
• In developing ideas, preparing, shaping and disseminating formal
results
– Usually conceived of as roughly linear process
• Pursuing personal careers, managing research teams and research
programmes;
• In teaching and communicating scholarly ideas to broader
communities.
Special techniques and tools for the advancement of scholarship- e.g.
scientific method, peer-review
“journal publication dominates our definition of a unit of
communication” Sompel 2004
Privileged role given to the academic article, which becomes a tool in
scholarly careers advancement and research business

12. Dynamic Structural Context
• ‘Crisis’ in Publishing – publishers, peer review etc
• ‘Hot’ Open Science Movement
• Fight over the governance and business of scholarship
(Elsevier Boycott, Green v. Gold)
• Scholarly communication moves online:
• Globalisation of Research
• Emphasis on interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research
• Increasing metrification of publication
• Opening of Industry research (Pharma, IT)
• Mass market adoption of ‘Web2.0’ including by scholars
• “New units of scholarly communication” Sompel et al 2004
• Massive diversity in scholarly practice across disciplines,
countries, institutions etc. diversity in embracing new
forms of communication e.g.
• physics – arXiv; bio-informaticians - friendfeed

13. Web2.0: The ‘Radical’ Open Research
position
• Web 2.0 provides the technical platform essential
to the ‘re-evolution’ of Science
– it allows the scholarly community to return to it roots
of open scholarship and trustworthy peer-review.
• The ossified institutions of scholarly research:
universities, libraries, academic publishers,
venerable scholarly societies etc have lost their
purpose and benefits in the world of global
electronically mediated, cross-disciplinary
research.
• Challenge gatekeeper role of journals
• “What are academic publishers for” (JSC 2012) – they
neither prepare manuscripts or manage review.

15. Examples(provocation!)
• Visiting Google replaces visiting Libraries
• Open-reviewed blogs replacing peer-reviewed paper
journal
• Data and methods shared on open websites
• Journal articles judged on own value, rather than on
ranking of journal
• Articles published online with free access
• Research teams distributed and electronically mediated.
• Global online communities replacing old ‘disciplinary
scholarly societies
• Hyperlinked discovery replaces journal and library
organised discovery.

16. The Cases

18. NPG:The innovative establishment
• Successful Medium publisher,. • Leadership in cross industry
Top brand “Nature“ standardisation and dialogue
• Professionally Edited journals.
Branded and White label • Split off the data mining
publishing for scholarly department to form a
societies separate company “ Digital
• Switch to internet early 2000s Science”
– built a publishing ‘platform’
• “Scientific communication
facilitator ”
• Open access-resistant
• ‘Leading promoter of Web2’ –
Timo Hannay
• Recruited developer team
from new media, science
blogs, chemistry

19. PLOS: The radical newcomer.
• Set up by leading scientists • PLOS One ,radical, open
• Goal of improving quality of ended, open access journal.
science though OPEN • PLOS Currents
ACCESS • Article Level Metrics
• Pay to publish
• 7 conventional open access
journals
• “crowd sourcing peer
review”
• Use OTS platform
• Initial political lobbying
stage
• Small team of developers

20. Academic publishers
• Suppliers are the customers
• Users are both readers and authors and
effectively members of staff (reviewing,
editing)
• Deeply dependent on the the ‘academic
community’.
• Diversity of publishers –
– University presses; multinationals
– Small innovative; obstructive giants

21. Stage 1: “Mode of massive
experimentation”
• 2007-2009 NPG and PLOS copied consumer Web2.0
“social tools”
– Article Comments and rating
– Wiki editing
– Social network
– Social bookmarking
– Blogs (‘whitelist’)
– Multimedia
– Little ‘new’ technology or ideas
"If we’re going to fail hopefully we can fail quickly and
cheaply but try different things and see what works
and see what will be useful and also see what we can
make money out of and what we can't." (NPG)

22. “Failure”
• Most Users rejected most things
– Structural value of peer-review, publications in career progress,
etc
– Tensions within organisations
– Antisocial academics!
• Publishers and the web journals behaving as Innovation
intermediaries:
• facilitating social learning by interactions between
developers, active users, the scientific community, journal
editors etc
"Innovation comes from having 2 way communication
channels to allow them [the users] to shape what we do.”
(PLOS)
• publishers gain privileged information and data unavailable
to others

23. Stage 2: A New Media strategy
• Web2.0 activity taking place outside their platforms
– Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, Blogs
• Media strategy: Promote to external media, link back
to article using human and automatic linking
– Techniques to drive scholars and public to the articles
(promotion, multimedia)
– Raises value of journal to scholars to publish (impact
factor)
– Enhances discovery
– Requires data-mining of unstructured data + emotion
driven hype.
• New metrics : Article level Metrics. …

24. Stage 3: Raising value for scholar:
discoverability and “linked data”
• Discovering knowledge
– Old discovery: the Journal, the society, the discipline,
citations, reviewing, discipline conference
– New discovery: Search, interdisciplinary, new published
objects, new metrics of use, New Social Media mentions
and reviews, adhoc conferences
• New Discoverability pathways and networks
– New ways to link into and out of contents of articles
• Requires Annotations in the article, link-backs,
– New published elements: data and methods
– New indexes: libraries e.g. classifications of chemicals
– Open and extended Metadata

25. Messy linking
• Journal articles are not well suited to machine
annotation
• Linking citations to authors and other papers
hard (for legacy)
• Some disciplines have object that can be
automatically linked (chemicals), most do not.
• Need Human annotation.

26. New publisher role: insertion into the
network:
• Who can do the new media promotion?
• Who can do the annotations?
– Difficult, time consuming, specialist knowledge
• Authors? Limited skill and time
• The ‘crowd’ of readers? They don’t, and there isn’t a crowd
• Librarians…?
• Datamining machine? Yes, but only some.
• Lazy/Pragmatic answer: Let the publishers
(editors) run the prepublication and post
publication !

27. Limits of the publishers
• Limited resources
• Publishing businesses first,
– technology users, developers, lobbyists secondary roles
• The journal ‘overflowing’: data, methods, Web etc
• Metadata generated inside and outside publisher
control
• Technical systems better developed outside?
– NPG -> web2.0 team split off to form ‘Digital Science’,
division of Macmillan
– PLOS limit their development

28. "What are academic publishers for?”
• Publishing articles – but new roles added to old ones –
preparing manuscript, managing review
• Focused role and responsibilities allows them to focus
on deep, and multilevel innovation.
• A key innovation intermediary: their place in network,
control over ‘the article’ and publishing platform give
them privileged position
– Put the inventions related to articles in front of users at
the point of use
• BUT others could do this too if the data were released?
• Pre-publication; Peer review – for another study

29. Reflections on methods
• Tools of STS allow us to describe more the
emergence of ‘Web2.0”
• Need to explore in detail how decisions are
made on forms, user interactions, affordances
of information/data and systems, and usage
by producers and users.

30. Further Research Needed
1. On innovations in quality control, including both
conventional and novel scholarly outputs.
2. On how new types of metrics are being appropriated
and how they are shaping practices at the level of
individual scholars and institutions of scholarship.
3. On how (if at all) new socio-technical configurations
support new discovery practices and improved
scholarship.
4. On how these are being shaped by major trends such
as the shift to open access and globalisation of
scholarship.

31. Extra Slides

32. What is a publishers role in
Web2.0
• User: adopting and configuring off the shelf
systems; responding to external
developments by copying “active users”
• Developer: creation of new technologies, and
especially new services and models
• Intermediaries: configuring technology,
brokering in the network, facilitating
experimentation by others

33. Static/Service Innovation Activities Innovation Intermediary
intermediary role
Scholarly Societies Focus, shape and Innovate to serve their Put pressure on publishers
legitimise research community, and further and funders to change
communities. Publish core ideas and interests of regime
journals, run conference members. Encourage discussion and
innovation within
community
Create and configure new
tools
Academic publishers Facilitate the production Innovation to maintain Encourage discussion and
and distribution of peer- market position: build the innovation within market
reviewed journals and reputation of their journals Create and configure new
books and sell them tools with existing products
Contribute to standards
High risk
University Structure careers, Provide training, Provide training to
activities, IT and physical Provide tools for SC researchers, students,
facilities etc Promote research, librarians and IT
Give researchers access Set rules of local Encourage discussion in
to journals – behaviour management and research
Test , buy, implement
services, and provide
support
occasionally create original
services and tools
Conference Organisers Provide face to face Encourage attendance, Provide tools to enhance
meetings and publish gain contracts to run other conference experience
proceedings conferences, gain Provide demonstrations to
sponsorship conference community.

34. Intermediary role