Björn Brembs

As a regular user of the scholarly literature since before the internet
(I started reading primary scientific literature for a [high-school
project](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/?wpdmdl=687) around 1989), I have
closely followed its digitization. I find it rather frustrating that
some of the most basic functionalities we have come to expect from
virtually every digital object are still excluded from scholarly
articles, making the literature much less useful than it could be. Some
of these functionalities are more than 20 years old.

Nobody told Zuckerberg that they wanted Facebook. One would think that
with profit margins sometimes exceeding 40% on billions in revenue,
academic publishers would use some of that cash to provide their readers
with at least a modicum of modern functionalities, without constant
prodding. Alas, it appears as if these publishers have different
priorities. They sue Sci-Hub, send take-down notices to Academia.edu for
some papers, or they buy start-ups for reference management, preprint
servers, laboratory notebook providers or companies providing
altmetrics. It seems they don't really know what to do with all this
cash burning holes in their pockets! I have some long overdue features
publishers could instead invest the money they stole from us in (no
particular order):

1\. Accessibility

Today, [most human readers with an internet
connection](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/sci-hub-s-cache-pirated-papers-so-big-subscription-journals-are-doomed-data-analyst)
can, after an often [awkward and cumbersome
process](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/12/so-your-institute-went-cold-turkey-on-publisher-x-what-now/)
that sometimes involves several search engines and a variety of other
tools read every digital scholarly article. However, in the age of Big
Data, mining the scholarly literature for content is something so
fundamental that it boggles the mind how publishers can get away with
simply blocking this kind of research arbitrarily.

2\. Smooth peer-review

Peer-review, as any similar social endeavor, involves humans with
differing opinions, approaches and social skills. Today's version of
formal peer-review of the scholarly literature has been around since
around the 1950s. Given the time elapsed, one would think that the
realization ought to have set in, that one shouldn't needlessly compound
a process already fraught with trials and tribulations with cumbersome
and clunky technical procedures.  Today's common procedures run the risk
of amplifying the chances of misunderstandings and simultaneously
exacerbating anxiety and misbehavior of the people involved.

Those of us old enough to be able to read and write at this time, have
enjoyed web-based message boards (or online forums) since [at least
1994](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum). Online commenting
and annotation on web-based word processors such as, e.g. Google
Documents have been around since [about
2005](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets_and_Slides).
Compared to the current practice of a single text review and single text
replies by the authors, these ancient, in web terms, technologies appear
almost like magic. How can publishers in 2017 get away with service from
before 1994?

3\. Social components

Social media technology started around 1999 with the development of the
"web 2.0". However, our scholarly literature is still firmly stuck in
web 1.0, despite the commendable efforts of some lone publishers to
implement one of the earliest social functionalities, commenting.
However, commenting is only one of many social technologies and one that
may even better be implemented in a formal peer-review process at that.
There is little reason we shouldn't be able to form scholarly online
communities which share common interests -- after all, scholarly
societies have been around for centuries. These communities could use
social functionalities to share articles, but also to track
recommendations, citations, downloads, etc. as we do with any other
digital object. Obviously, such a functionality only makes sense as a
built-in property of the literature and not of some duplicated space
where some users share some of the literature, à la RG *et al*. Such
basic functionality would let the reader know who in their communities
are reading which articles and which colleagues are publishing which of
their results.

Remember the "customers who have bought this book also bought this one"
recommendation from Amazon? That was around 1994, 23 years ago -- and
still no sign of our scholarly literature implementing this ancient
feature as a native component.

4\. Web-based data visualizations

These days, in our private lives, we routinely zoom through all kinds of
map-like data, either with pinching fingers or the scroll-wheel. We
rotate all kinds of 3D objects or dynamically adjust the graphs
displaying the usage statistics of our personal sites. However, for the
scholarly literature, almost exclusively, the one visualization that
counts is the pixel-based, flat image that only displays what the
authors want their readers to see. While some journals are demanding
their authors deposit their data with the publication of their article,
this is not to ensure proper visualization of said data. Instead, it
becomes a tedious, manual process by which authors may pay lip-service
to data accessibility in principle, without any added benefit to
scholarship other than the theoretical ability of a select few experts
to potentially have a second look at the data (also that second look
being cumbersome and manual). As if to add insult to injury, nobody
seems to care about the software we write to transform the bits and
bytes of the raw data into the flat, pixel-based images.

5\. Hyperlinks

The first public demonstration of hyperlinks was also the first time a
computer mouse was demonstrated. It was in 1968, in what is today called
"[the mother of all
demos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)". In the almost 50
years since then, we haven't managed even to properly implement
hyperlinks into the scholarly literature. For example, try and click on
a very common sentence, e.g. "the experiments were performed as
previously described". In essentially every single case today, nothing
happens, while in the demo in 1968, it would have taken the reader to a
document describing the experiments.

If today's reader is lucky, there is a reference behind the sentence
that is clickable. However, in the majority of cases, it will just lead
the reader to the place in the reference list where the full reference
is listed. Whether this reference is clickable remains a hit or miss. In
the affirmative case, however, the click will still not lead to a
description of the experiments, but to a paper (or a paywall). If that
paper is accessible, today's reader may again be lucky and find the
particular experiment buried somewhere in the Materials and Methods
section, or, if less lucky, only some components with further
references.

Imagine what would happen to an online store that would treat customers
like that if they wanted more detailed descriptions of the merchandise.
As if it wasn't already
[clear](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/08/what-interacting-with-publishers-felt-like-for-this-open-access-proponent/)
before, this comparison should make it quite obvious what academic
publishers think of their readers.

6\. Semantic web technology

Coincidentally, proper hyperlinking of our literature with standard
technology from about a decade ago, would also provide every article
with an automatic list of citing articles (i.e., pingbacks/trackbacks)
and allow deep citations (aka. anchors) to text, data and code. This
would simultaneously allow us to implement a citation ontology to
specify what kind of citation we are using, with myriads potential use
cases, all benefiting scholarship.

Speaking of ontologies: semantic mark-up of all our scholarly articles
would greatly benefit all kinds of scholarship, be it systematic
reviews, content mining or simple literature searches, etc.

7\. Single click submission

Once I click "publish" on this blog post, it is made public, without any
further ado. Yet, despite institutional logins, ORCID, etc. the vast
majority of publishers still require us to fill in forms about each
author, copy-and-paste titles, abstracts and other information as if we
just put a stack of paper sheets into an envelope, rather than a
document which already contained all this information.

I'm sure there are more candidates for obvious functionalities every
user of the scholarly literature would like to have, but I'll leave it
at that for now. At least no academic publisher can claim any more, they
didn't know what their users wanted.


As a regular user of the scholarly literature since before the internet (I started reading primary scientific literature for a high-school project around 1989), I have closely followed its digitization.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

7 functionalities the scholarly literature should have