Since 2008 Scholarly Kitchen's team of bloggers has served up informative and insightful essays on the changing, mostly digital, world of academic publishing. Last week's post by Joseph Esposito especially caught my eye. Under the title "The elephant in the room is a phone," Esposito argues that the power of mobile phones to disrupt academic publishing is both real and unexploited—or even unrecognized—by publishers. I agree.
Granted, if you or your institution subscribes to, say, Applied Physics Letters or Medical Physics, you can read any paper from those journals on your mobile phone. Some journal websites even practice responsive design, which dynamically reformats content depending on screen size. But, as Esposito points out, in providing those features, publishers are merely repackaging content that they already produce. The features are not revolutionary nor do they make use of the characteristics that make mobile phones so useful, such as their portability.
Esposito doesn't offer any ideas for what new products publishers might provide to their readers on mobile phones. Devising truly new products is challenging. But as a physicist and a fan of cryptic crosswords, I like problems. Could I come up with any ideas myself?
Before considering what a new mobile product might do, it's worth asking when anyone would want to use one. When I'm in my office or at home, I have access to a desktop, a laptop, and a tablet—all of which I prefer to use over my iPhone. But when I'm out and about on Washington's Metro system or between sessions at a meeting, I'll take out my phone to consume small, easy-to-read chunks of content and perform small tasks. I imagine your habits might be similar.
Could any of those chunks and tasks come from an academic publisher? Possibly.
One idea is actually an old one. Starting in 1990, Phil Schewe of the American Institute of Physics began writing short summaries of newsworthy papers for science journalists. Those summaries formed the basis of Physics Today's Physics Update department, which made its debut in February 1995.
Physics Update is still going strong. Its popularity derives in part from the papers themselves. The magazine's editorial staff strives to pick interesting papers to write about. But Physics Update items are also brief and written with readability in mind. My most recent Physics Update item concerned a hypothesized pentagonal form of graphene. In 235 words, I tried to provide context and background while also describing the paper itself.
But I'm paid to write and edit. Scaling up Physics Update to cover even one journal's entire output of papers would likely be too expensive, even if the writers are freelances who are paid at the prevailing low rate of roughly $1 a word.
Alternatively, journals could follow the example Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and require authors to submit a short statement "about the significance of their research paper written at a level understandable to an undergraduate-educated scientist outside their field of specialty," as the PNAS author guidelines put it. Here's the significance statement that the author of the pentagonal graphene paper, Qian Wang of Peking University, submitted:
Carbon has many faces—from diamond and graphite to graphene, nanotube, and fullerenes. Whereas hexagons are the primary building blocks of many of these materials, except for C20 fullerene, carbon structures made exclusively of pentagons are not known. Because many of the exotic properties of carbon are associated with their unique structures, some fundamental questions arise: Is it possible to have materials made exclusively of carbon pentagons and if so will they be stable and have unusual properties? Based on extensive analyses and simulations we show that penta-graphene, composed of only carbon pentagons and resembling Cairo pentagonal tiling, is dynamically, thermally, and mechanically stable. It exhibits negative Poisson's ratio, a large band gap, and an ultrahigh mechanical strength.
My hunch is that an app that served such statements based on user-selected criteria might catch on. The principal challenge for publishers is that scientists place far more importance on the relevance and importance of a paper than they do on its provenance. An app that drew on papers from only one publisher's journals would not be compelling.
Beep! Your paper has just been cited
Mobile phones are great for delivering alerts and notifications. Elsevier already has an app, Research Highlights, that will notify the user when papers are published that meet criteria—keyword, journal, and author—supplied by the user. The app isn't limited to Elsevier's journals. When I tested the app this week, I was able to specify the Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy and Astrophysics, neither of which is published by Elsevier. But the app has one key limitation: By the time a paper is published in its final form, it's old. I'd love to see an app that works like Research Highlights but on the preprints in arXiv, wouldn't you?
A mobile app that might prove popular is one that notifies users whenever their papers are cited—and links to the citing papers. To work, the app would need access to a central database of journals and papers, such as Scopus, but that's not a problem. Elsevier's Research Highlights app already does just that.
My final app idea is more general. Publishers have access to vast amounts of bibliographical data, such as download rates, citation rates, keyword frequency, and so on. As a science journalist, the app I’d really like to see is one that draws on all those data to monitor trends in research. For example, users could receive an alert when the number of papers about a new material, say germanane, surpasses a threshold, when a physics paper hits 100 citations, or when the user’s own h-index increases.
Besides portability, another characteristic of mobile phones is that they are more personal to their users than desktops, laptops, and tablets are. Whereas a single, well-funded publisher like Elsevier could develop new notification apps along the lines I’ve sketched out, innovation is perhaps more likely to come from a startup whose focus is primarily on what individual scientists want.
