ABSTRACT

Research libraries see themselves as being in the forefront of moves to extend, exploit and promote new forms of scholarly communication. The advent of the digital environment has created new opportunities for librarians to act as protagonists, advocates and innovators. The role of research librarians now extends beyond being facilitators, brokers and guardians, to working as champions of change for the benefit of the whole research community. Nationally and internationally, libraries are engaged in collaborative initiatives to find the best ways to support the research process and extend affordable access to the rapidly growing volume of resources that is now available. This chapter reviews the role of research libraries in responding to an increasingly complex research environment, and the response of libraries to the acceleration of digital publishing, escalating costs and the long-term preservation needs of research outputs, as well as their positioning in the debates on Open Access and research data management. Research libraries are bringing knowledge and professional expertise to the task of enhancing the effectiveness of the research environment, which is placing them in the role of advocates and service integrators. The success of this activity has been underpinned by a strengthening of the natural tendency of research libraries to form strong collaborative networks that can share knowledge, pursue joint initiatives and work co-operatively.

Introduction

Research libraries see themselves as being in the forefront of moves to extend, exploit and promote new forms of scholarly communication. This is not surprising, since their position as guardians of the scholarly record stretches back centuries, and libraries have often combined long-term perspectives with a commitment to innovation. The advent of the digital environment has created new opportunities for librarians to act as protagonists, advocates and innovators. The role of research librarians now extends beyond being facilitators, brokers and guardians, to working with other stakeholders as champions of change for the benefit of the whole research community.

The pace of change in the landscape of scholarly communication has created both significant opportunities and interesting challenges. The adoption of whole new areas of activity has transformed the way that research libraries position themselves.

Scholarly communication is in ferment. The Future of Scholarly Communication aims to provide an overview of this huge and complex topic, and to identify and evaluate current and future trends.

The process of generating, publishing and disseminating academic research is (maybe needlessly?) complex, so in selecting our contributors we have sought to include players from as broad a spectrum as possible. Of course the different players reflect different interests: some seek to protect the status quo; others are determined to disrupt it. In any case, the stakes are high.

This debate plays out on a global stage, and no country can manage its scholarly communication in isolation. So, while the contributors to this volume are mostly from the UK, we charged them with taking the broad view. We are grateful to them all for their wide-ranging and thoughtful contributions.

Only the foolish would dare to predict exactly what the future holds for scholarly communication. But one thing is certain: it is far too important to leave to chance.

ABSTRACT

Scholarly communication is not just about communication. It is not the final stage of the publication process, solely a means of providing the ‘minutes of science’. Rather, it is a vital part of the research process itself, inspiring researchers along new avenues of discovery and enabling the creation of connections between concepts and people. The ways in which researchers disseminate their research have changed and developed over the four centuries since the launch of the first scientific journals. But it can be argued that scholarly communication has in turn affected the way in which researchers behave. This chapter explores some of the interaction and interdependencies between researchers and scholarly communication. It also describes how the move to online, electronic publishing might further influence the research process.

Introduction

We tend to think of the history of scholarly journal publishing as an unbroken thread of consistent activity since the founding of the first journals. In reality, journals have changed in many ways over the past 350 odd years, and so has the research environment. It may be obvious that publishing activity will alter in order to reflect changes in the research process, but it may also be argued that the research process itself has changed, at least in part, as a result of developments in scholarly communication. This chapter will investigate the two-way flow of influence between research and publishing, in terms both of a 400-year history and of looking forward to new developments.

The rise of journals

The birth of the modern system of scholarly communications is generally taken to be the launching of the first two scientific journals, the Journal des Sçavans in 1665 and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1666. These journals reflected the growing interest in natural philosophy at the time, but also, through their very existence, began to initiate changes in scholarly practice. Before the mid-seventeenth century it was not the norm for ‘scientists’ (to use an anachronism: they would not have recognized the term) to share their findings. While they were as concerned with issues of priority as are modern researchers – witness the famously bitter battle between Newton and Liebnitz regarding the invention of calculus – they were hoarders of knowledge, reluctant to give what we would describe as a competitive advantage to their rivals.

ABSTRACT

The impact of the data deluge is affecting all disciplines – from the humanities to largescale science. Making data openly available allows us to approach global challenges holistically. In many cases we need to assess human factors alongside the legal, medical and technology issues: for example, in the field of world energy demand. So there is a need for common standards for preservation and access in order to ensure interoperability. Yet the field is developing very fast, with many funders arguing that publicly funded research must be made publicly available. This does not simply mean that the data is dumped somewhere: it must be accessible to other researchers in an intelligible manner. Some large international projects are trying to solve these issues, and there is increasing evidence that governments have woken up to the issues. A key challenge will be for the researchers themselves. Projects in biodiversity, for example, require individual researchers to come together – physicists, space scientists and computer scientists working alongside biologists and environmental scientists. The management of such projects requires skills that few possess at present. Hence the need is urgent to look at how researchers are trained, how they manage such projects and the role of the data specialist. How will democracy work if data is publicly available in the future? This chapter seeks to open up these and many other issues that will affect society in fundamental ways. Informed debate is needed in order to ensure that the immense opportunities offered by the data deluge are not lost for future generations.

Introduction

We hear continuously the slogan ‘data deluge’; but what does it mean, why has it suddenly become important and is it really going to affect the way in which research will be done and communicated to others in the future? Concerns about being overwhelmed by a flood of data have focused both on the impact of so-called e-science and its implications, and on the scale and complexity of many of the ‘grand challenges’ facing the research community and society at large.

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ten years’ experience as a journal editor, the author of this chapter looks at the key drivers for change in the journal market-place: the drive for profit by the large commercials and the impact of rapidly developing technology which is enabling different access and publishing models to be explored. These drivers are leading to changes in the editorial function, in particular the role of peer reviewing moving from pre- to postpublication review. The exaggeration of the added value contributed by publishers may be a matter of debate. The very significant impact of Open Access (OA) is assessed and some predictions are made, including the likely demise of the Big Deal, at least in its present form, because of the impact of OA. The chapter concludes by arguing that publishers have contributed greatly to increasing access to the academic literature but are now acting as a brake on further developments through their exploitation of copyright law and digital rights management constraints. All these factors will see the role of the journal editor change dramatically in the next five to ten years, more quickly in the fields of science, technology and medicine, and more slowly in the humanities and social sciences.

Introduction

‘As long as the journal remains important for the achievement of research funding and tenure, it will endure as a key component of scholarly communication’; and, as David Worlock notes on his blog: ‘the science knowledge market is in a ferment’. Changes taking place today are subverting the business models of journals and threatening the stability of the tenure system; the role of the journal editor is bound up with these changes.

The journals industry is very large; globally, there are about 225,000 active journals, of which 63,000 are academic journals, with 25,000 seen as core titles; these estimates are discussed by Tenopir and King. Changing the course of an industry of this size, rather like turning an oil tanker round, is a slow and complex process, which makes prediction difficult. However, some emerging trends will dramatically affect the roles of both journals and their editors. Traditionally, the key functions of a journal editor are to provide the publisher with a regular supply of articles, usually in a particular discipline, and of a satisfactory quality.

A Short Answer

It does not.

A Long Answer

Power-law distribution and scale-free networks

Sure, the Internet has many security loopholes, from cyber-attack vulnerability to privacy-intrusion threats. But it does not have a few highly-connected routers in the center of the Internet that an attacker can destroy to disconnect the Internet, which would have fit the description of an “Achilles' heel”. So why would there be rumors that the Internet has an Achilles' heel?

The story started in the late 1990s with an inference result: the Internet topology exhibits a power-law distribution of node degrees. Here, the “topology” of the Internet may mean any of the following:

• the graph of webpages connected by hyperlinks (like the one we mentioned in Chapter 3),

• the graph of Autonomous Systems (ASs) connected by the physical and business relationships of peering (we will talk more about that in Chapter 13), and

• the graph of routers connected by physical links (the focus of this chapter).

For the AS graph and the router graph, the actual distribution of the node degrees (think of the histogram of the degrees of all the nodes) is not clear due to measurement noise. For example, the AS graph data behind the power-law distribution had more than 50% of links missing. Internet exchange points further lead to many peering links among ASs.

You pick up your iPhone while waiting in line at a coffee shop. You Google a not-so-famous actor and get linked to a Wikipedia entry listing his recent movies and popular YouTube clips. You check out user reviews on IMDb and pick one, download that movie on BitTorrent or stream it in Netflix. But for some reason the WiFi logo on your phone is gone and you're on 3G. Video quality starts to degrade a little, but you don't know whether it's the video server getting crowded in the cloud or the Internet is congested somewhere. In any case, it costs you $10 per gigabyte, and you decide to stop watching the movie, and instead multitask between sending tweets and calling your friend on Skype, while songs stream from iCloud to your phone. You're happy with the call quality, but get a little irritated when you see that you have no new followers on Twitter.

You've got a typical networked life, an online networked life.

And you might wonder how all these technologies “kind of” work, and why sometimes they don't. Just flip through the table of contents of this book. It's a mixture: some of these questions have well-defined formulations and clear answers while for others there is still a significant gap between the theoretical models and actual practice; a few don't even have widely accepted problem statements. This book is about formulating and answering these 20 questions.

By the end of this chapter, you will count yourself lucky to get as much as a few percent of the advertised speed. Where did the rest go?

A Short Answer

First of all, the terms 3G and 4G can be confusing. There is one track following the standardization body 3GPP called UMTS or WCDMA, and another track in 3GPP2 called CDMA2000. Each also has several versions inbetween 2G and 3G, often called 2.5G, such as EDGE, EVDO, etc. For 4G, the main track is called Long Term Evolution (LTE), with variants such as LTE light and LTE advanced. Another competing track is called WiMAX. Some refer to evolved versions of 3G, such as HSPA+, as 4G too. All these have created quite a bit of confusion in a consumer's mind as to what really is a 3G technology and what really is a 4G technology.

You might have read that the 3G downlink speed for stationary users should be 7.2 Mbps. But when you try to download an email attachment of 3 MB, it often takes as long as one and half minutes. You get around 267 kbps, 3.7% of what you might expect. Who took away the 96%?

Many countries are moving towards LTE. They use a range of techniques to increase the spectral efficiency, defined as the number of bits per second that each Hz of bandwidth can support. These include methods like OFDM and MIMO mentioned at the end of the last chapter and splitting a large cell into smaller ones.

A Short Answer

Almost all of our utility bills are based on the amount we consume: water, electricity, gas, etc. But even though wireless cellular capacity is expensive to provide and difficult to crank up, consumers in some countries like the USA have been enjoying flat-rate buffets for mobile Internet access for many years. Can a restaurant keep offering buffets with the same price if its customers keep doubling their appetites every year? Or will it have to stop at some point?

In April 2010, AT&T announced its usage-based pricing for 3G data users. This was followed in March 2011 by Verizon Wireless for its iPhone and iPad users, and in June 2011 for all of its 3G data users. In July 2011, AT&T started charging fixed broadband users on U-Verse services on the basis of usage too. In March 2012, AT&T announced that those existing customers on unlimited cellular data plans will see their connection speeds throttled significantly once the usage exceeds 5 GB, effectively ending the unlimited data plan. The LTE data plans from both AT&T and Verizon Wireless for the “new iPad” launched soon after no longer offered any type of unlimited data options. In June 2012, Verizon Wireless updated their cellular pricing plans. A customer could have unlimited voice and text in exchange for turning an unlimited data plan to usage-based. AT&T followed with a similar move one month later. What a reversal going from limited voice and unlimited data to unlimited voice and limited data. Similar measures have been pursued, or are being considered, in many other countries around the world for 3G, 4G, and even wired broadband networks.

We saw in Chapter 13 that the Internet provides a “best effort,” i.e., “no effort” service. So, how can it support video distribution that often imposes stringent demands on throughput and delay?

A Short Answer

Viewing models

Watching video is a significant part of many people's daily life, and it is increasingly dependent on the Internet and wireless networks. Movies, TV shows, and home videos flow from the cloud through the IP network to mobile devices. This trend is changing both the networking and the entertainment industries. As of 2011, there were more than 100 million IPTV users in the USA, and Youtube and Netflix together take up about half of the Internet capacity usage. As the trend of decoupling among contents, content delivery channels, and content-consuming devices intensifies, IP has become the basis of almost all the content distribution systems.

This trend is bringing about a revolution in our viewing habits.

1. • Content type: Both user-generated and licensed content have become prevalent. Clearly, more user-generated content implies an increasing need for upload capacity, which is traditionally designed to be much smaller than download capacity.

2. • When: For many types of video content, we can watch them anytime we want, with the help of devices like a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) on IPTV or services like HBO Go.

3. • Where: We can watch video content almost anywhere, at least anywhere with a sufficiently fast Internet connection.

4. […]

We just went through some of the key concepts behind the TCP/IP thin waist of the Internet protocol stack. We will now go through five more chapters on technology networks, focusing on two major trends: massive amounts of content distribution and the prevalent adoption of mobile wireless technologies.

Scaling up the distribution of content, including video content, can be carried out either through the help of peers or by using large data centers. These two approaches, P2P and cloud, are described in this chapter and the next, respectively. In particular, P2P illustrates a key principle behind the success of the Internet: under-specify protocols governing the operation of a network so that an overlay network can be readily built on top of it for future applications unforeseen by today's experts. It also illustrates the importance of backward compatibility, incremental deployability, and incentive alignment in the evolution of the Internet.

A Short Answer

Skype allows phone calls between IP-based devices (like laptops, tablets, and smartphones) or between IP devices and normal phones. It is free for IP-to-IP calls. How could that be? Part of the answer is that it uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol riding on top of IP networks.

P2P started becoming popular around 1999. For example, Kazaa and Gnutella were widely used P2P file- and music-sharing systems back then. However, incentives were not properly designed in those first-generation P2P systems; there were a lot of free riders who did not contribute nearly as much as they consumed.

A Short Answer

Take a look at your iPhone, Android phone, or a smartphone running on some other operating system. It embodies a remarkable story of technology innovations. The rise of wireless networks, the Internet, and the web over the last five decades, coupled with advances in chip design, touchscreen material, battery packaging, software systems, business models… led to this amazing device you are holding in your hand. It symbolizes our age of networked life.

These phones have become the mobile, lightweight, smart centers of focus in our lives. They are used not just for voice calls, but also for data applications: texting, emailing, browsing the web, streaming videos, downloading books, uploading photos, playing games, or video-conferencing friends. The throughputs of these applications are measured in bits per second (bps). These data fly through a cellular network and the Internet. The cellular network in turn consists of the radio air-interface and the core network. We focus on the air-interface part in this chapter, and turn to the cellular core network in Chapter 19.

Terrestrial wireless communication started back in the 1940s, and cellular networks have gone through generations of evolution since the 1970s, moving into what we hear as 4G these days. Back in the 1980s, some estimated that there would be 1 million cellular users in the USA by 2000. That turned out to be one of those way-off under-estimates that did not even get close to the actual impact of networking technologies.

We have come to the last chapter, on a sensitive subject that we touched upon many times in the previous chapters and forms an essential part of both social choice theory and technology network design: quantifying fairness of resource allocation. This may sound obvious, but it does not hurt to highlight: the scope of our discussion will be only on performance metrics, not on liberty and rights.

A Short Answer

Thinking about fairness

The naive view of “equality is fairness” is problematic in examining performance metrics of a group of users stemming from some allocation of resources. If you have to choose from an allocation of (1, 1) Mbps between two iPad users, and an allocation of (100, 101) Mbps, many people would choose (100, 101) Mbps even though it deviates from an equal allocation. Magnitude matters. Part of Rawls' theory of justice is the difference principle that we will discuss in the Advanced Material, which prefers a less equal allocation if that means everyone gets more. Of course, a more challenging choice would have been between (1, 1) Mbps and (1, 2) Mbps.

Another objection to marking equal allocations as the most fair stems from the differences in the contributions by, and the needs of, different users. If a user in a social network glues the entire network together, her contribution is higher than that of a “leaf node” user. If one works twice as hard or twice as effectively as another, these two people should not receive identical salaries.