The Future of Peer Revi...

This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu — a site that serves as a platform for academics to share their research papers and to interact with each other. Instant distribution Many academics are excited about the future of instant distribution of research. Right now the time lag between finishing a paper, and the relevant worldwide research community seeing it, is between 6 months and 2 years. This is because during that time, the paper is being peer reviewed, and peer review takes an incredibly long time. 2 years is roughly how long it used to take to send a letter abroad 300 years ago. Many platforms are springing up which enable research distribution to be instant, so that the time lag between finishing a paper, and everyone in the relevant research community worldwide seeing it, is measured in hours and days, rather than months and years. Some of the strong platforms are Academia.edu , arXiv , Mendeley , ResearchGate and SSRN . What about peer review? One question many academics have is: in a future where research is distributed instantly, what happens to peer review? Will this be a world where junk gets out, and there is no way to distinguish between good and bad research? Content discovery on the web Instant distribution is a characteristic of web content, and the web has thrived without a system of formal peer review in place. No-one thinks that the web would be enhanced by a panel of formal peer reviewers who verify each piece of content before it was allowed to be posted on the web. The web has thrived because powerful discovery systems have sprung up that separate the wheat from the chaff for users. The main two systems that people use to discover content on the web are: Search engines (Google, Bing) Social platforms (mainly sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also generic communication platforms like email, IM etc) Both search engines and social platforms are peer review systems in different ways. One can think of these two systems as “Crowd Review” and “Social Review” respectively: Crowd Review: Google’s PageRank algorithm looks at the link structure of the entire web, and extracts a number (PageRank) that represents how positively the web thinks about a particular website. Social Review : Twitter and Facebook show you links that have been shared explicitly by your friends, and people you follow. One can think of the peer review system in the journal industry as “two person review”: Two Person review: Two people are selected to review the paper on behalf of the entire possible audience for that paper. The drawbacks of the Two Person review process are that it is: expensive: $8 billion a year is spent on subscriptions to journals, which is money that could be spent on more research. slow: the Two Person review process takes about 6 months to 2 years to complete, sometimes more.  of questionable quality : the two people who are selected as peer reviewers may be biased against the paper, or unqualified, or just in a bad mood, when reviewing it.   unchanging : the judgement is fixed, and doesn’t change as the impact of the paper changes  a lot of work for the reviewers : it takes a lot of time to review a paper, and the review is not published, so reviewer doesn’t receive credit for their work. More and more, academics are discovering research papers nowadays via the web, and in particular, via search engines and social platforms: Search engines: Google, Google Scholar, Pubmed Social platforms : Academia.edu, arXiv, Mendeley, ResearchGate, blogs, conversations with colleagues over email or IM, Facebook and Twitter. As research distribution has moved to the web mostly, so the discovery engines for research content are the same as those for general web content. The peer review mechanism is evolving from The Two Person review process to the Crowd Review process, and the Social Review process. But has the research been done to a high standard? People often say that the formal peer review process helps ensure that all the accessible research is above a certain minimum quality. The fear is that if this quality floor was removed, things would start falling apart: an academic would be reading a paper, and would have no idea whether to trust it or not. The experience of the web is that this fear is over-blown. There is no quality floor for content on the web. There is bad content on the web, and there is great content. The job of search engines and social platforms is to ensure that the content that you discover, either via Google or Facebook, is of the good kind. The success of the web shows that the discovery engines do a good job generally. Discovery and credit systems are powered by the same metrics Peer review in the journal industry has historically played another interesting role, other than powering research discovery. It has helped an academic build up academic credit, which is required to get grants, and get jobs. People on hiring and grant committees have historically focused on how many peer reviewed publications an academic has in order to get a sense of the academic’s level of achievement, and in order to see how deserving the academic is of the grant or job in question. The peer review system has historically played this dual role, in powering both the discovery system and the credit system, because ultimately research discovery and research credit are about the same issue: which is the good research? Whichever systems are good at answering that question will drive both the discovery system and the credit system. One new metric of academic credit that has emerged over the last few years is the citation count. Google Scholar makes citation counts public for papers, and so now everyone can see them easily. Citations between papers are like links between websites, and citation counts are an instance of the Crowd Review process. Legend has it that Larry Page came up with the idea of PageRank after reflecting on the analogy between citations and links. Citation counts nowadays play the dual role of driving discovery on Google Scholar, as they determine the ordering of the search results, and help to determine academic credit. Academic credit from social platforms In the case of social platforms, the metric that drives discovery is how much interaction there is with your content on the social platform in question. Examples of such interaction include: numbers of followers you have the number of times your content is shared, liked, commented on, viewed. These metrics show how much interest there is in your papers, and how widely they are read right now, and thus provide a sense of their level of impact. One drawback of citation counts as a metric of academic credit is that they are a lagging indicator, in that they take a while to build up. If you publish a paper now, it is going to take several years for a body of papers to emerge that cite your paper. This leads to academics experiencing a credit gap, where papers they have published in the last 3-4 years hardly impact their academic credit. The advantage of the kinds of metrics that social platforms like Academia.edu, Mendeley, and SSRN provide is that they are real time, and they fill this credit gap. Academics are increasingly including these real time metrics in their applications for jobs and for grants. The competition for jobs, and grants is intense, and having more data that speaks to the impact of your work helps. Funding bodies are also eager to see more data about the impact of research, as it helps them make better decisions. Instant Distribution and Peer Review The prospect of instant distribution of research is tremendously exciting. If you can tap the global brain of your research community in effectively close to real time, as opposed to waiting 6 months to 24 months to distribute your ideas, there could be a wonderful acceleration in the rate of idea generation. The web has shown that you can take out this 6 month to 24 month distribution delay, which occurs when research is undergoing the Two Person peer review process, and see high quality filtering of content done by new peer review mechanisms, Crowd Review and Social Review, which are faster, cheaper, and more personalized. The web is also an incredible place for new ideas to be invented and to take hold. No doubt new peer review mechanisms will emerge in the future that will advance beyond Crowd Review and Social Review.

Email Marketing Tips: T...

In email marketing, like all messaging, the content needs to be as relevant as possible to ensure effectiveness and a solid ROI.  In a recent article on PracticaleCommerce.com, the author details three simple tips marketers can use to improve communication relevancy. The three main elements discussed are advanced personalization, enlisting dynamic content and using “date-triggered campaigns.”  These tips and more echo what we’ve been telling our clients for years in terms of improving everything from delivery, unsubscription rates, and of course, relevancy. The full article is available here .

Jason Kilar: Hulu’s 201...

Last year, Hulu brought in $420 million in revenues , with was 60 percent above the year before. The news, however, was seen as a miss because Hulu earlier in the year suggested that it would make $500 million. Today at the D: Dive Into Media conference, CEO Jason Kilar defended his record, revealing that “our board plan was $408 million.” So Hulu came in above the internal goal it had set for its board. So why the discrepancy? “Earlier in the year we were pacing higher than that,” says Kilar. Then in the third quarter the ad market softened and the “pacing changed.” But he insists that there was a rebound in the fourth quarter and so far in 2012. Nevertheless, Hulu’s subscription business, Hulu Plus, “is our fastest growing business,” says Kilar. He ended last year with 1.5 million subscribers and expects subscription revenue to become the majority of revenues this year. Those subscription dollars “allows us to pay the content business more than anyone else,” he says. He plans on spending $500 million this year on licensing more content and creating original shows . He thinks it will be important to have a mix of exclusive shows on Hulu and a broad library in order to create some differentiation from other online video services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. Asked specifically about the auction last year for Hulu and why they didn’t sell, Kilar quipped: “Things changed.” In retrospect, he now says, “The strategic value of something like Hulu you can see dwarfing some very considerable economic considerations.” That sounds like a post-facto justification for why Hulu didn’t attract higher bids, but Kilar is philosophical about what he is doing with Hulu and the dance he must do with the traditional media companies, some of whom are his biggest investors. “In the late 1940s,” he notes, “everyone in California thought the television was the devil incarnate. It had to be destroyed. Walt Disney was one of the first to go to New York to find out what was this devil incarnate.” As everybody knows, TV “was one of the best things to happen to the content industry.” Online video, he argues, will have a similar effect. “It is not different than the introduction of television when there were movie houses everywhere and people used to go to them three times a week. That is how they used to get premium content.” Now with online video, you are going from video in one room of the house to “getting premium content 24/7 wherever you may be.” Photo via AllThingsD

Technicolor TV: Persona...

Check out the latest innovation in home theater technology that could put you right inside the Super Bowl without leaving the comfort of your couch. That’s because the folks at Technicolor’s research lab are working to recreate the experience of being at the big game – without actually being at the big game. Their new Related Digital Buzz Posts: Google Launches Fast Flip Content App Adobe CS5: New Content Aware Fill Tool YouTube Content Mixer Comments

The 5 Reasons Why Faceb...

How did Facebook become worth so much money that it could  file for the biggest IPO in tech history ? By building a highly defensible product, platform, and advertising business on top of brilliant talent and valuable data. It now has several competitive advantages that protect it from disruption and could give it a long life as the primary online identity provider. Here are the 5 components that make Facebook a smart long-term bet for investors, regardless of its exact IPO pricing. Network Effect Displacing Facebook as the mainstream online social network would be next to impossible. It brought authenticated identity to the internet –a crucial utility that compelled users to join. No other service may be able to add on top of Facebook something as valuable as what Facebook added to Myspace, friendster, and other services where you didn’t have to be yourself. Facebook’s ingenius distribution strategy, detailed in The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick , allowed the service to capitalize on this value-add and spread to the farthest reaches of the globe . Eventually the network effect took hold, with Facebook’s ever-growing user base making it ever-more valuable and attractive to new users. And now inertia has set in. Users have invested considerable time into Facebook building their profiles, walls, interest graphs, and most importantly, their social graphs. As Facebook handles a wide range of use cases and a critical mass of any person’s friends already using it, a competing social network can’t just be as good or better, it would need to be massive improvement to lead users astray. The insulation to competition provided by the network effect makes it a safe long-term bet for investors. The News Feed’s EdgeRank Algorithm For five years, Facebook has been collecting data and refining its EdgeRank algorithm , which determines what of all the content your friends share ends up in your news feed, and how prominently. By using Likes, comments, and shares to determine what’s most relevant, Facebook had developed arguably the best automated content curation engine in the world. The news feed also gets to draw on the web’s largest database of photos , and the friend tags they feature which helped Facebook go viral. For new users without tons of data points, Facebook can still predict what they might be interested in seeing. For existing users, especially veterans of the site that actively use its feedback mechanisms, the news feed consistently surfaces relevant content. EdgeRank creates that the highly addicting experience that drives Facebook’s enormous time on site, return visit rate, and engagement. Even if Twitter or Google+ had all the content of Facebook, it could take them years to develop an algorithm that produces such a relevant feed. Talent Mark Zuckerberg sees the future. His product vision allows Facebook to release features that users grow into rather than out of. Zuckerberg has integrated progressive home brewed ideas as well as those that  couldn’t reach their full potential when launched elsewhere. He has pushed the service to constantly reinvent itself, allowing it to stay cool and relevant 8 years after launch. Zuck’s dedication to making the world a better place through interconnection and openness has also attracted other visionaries. COO Sheryl Sandberg ‘s efficiency has made the company very profitable, and her willingness to experiment means Facebook will continue to revolutionize advertising through behavioral targeting and social content-infused ads. VP of Product Chris Cox has led Facebook’s social design movement, where 1st and 3rd party products are made to leverage Facebook’s data and community from the start, rather than bolting them on. With the promise of changing the world and a lean, fun-loving company culture, Facebook has been pulling top engineering, product, and business talent away from larger companies like Google that are saddled with product bloat and bureaucracy. It’s also been aggressively acquiring disruptive startups such as Paul Bucheit and Brett Taylor’s FriendFeed , Blake Ross’ Parakey , Sam Lessin’s Drop.io , and Josh Williams’ Gowalla . The rockstar product designers and executives ensures innovation will continue to flow from within Facebook. The IPO will provide Facebook more cash for acquisitions and give its talent the liquidity they deserve . Though there’s always the chance they could cash out and leave, the ability to sell a little stock and upgrade their lifestyle might keep employees happy enough to stick around. The Apps and Games Platform Facebook has created a gaming platform proven to offer viral growth. While the service has curtailed some of loudest viral channels, organic growth opportunities remain and on-site advertising for games has produced high returns on investment for companies like Zynga. Facebook has fostered an enormous community of developers that pay while populating the site with engaging apps and content, and that won’t ever disappear overnight. Facebook games are often infinite building simulations or twitch puzzlers, have long session lengths, and let users make vanity purchases so they can show off while simultaneously hooking them deeper into a game. They readily produce “whales”, or people who spend orders of magnitude more than the average player. Mobile is emerging as a lucrative platform for Apple and Google, and Facebook is just getting started there, but it does have an enormous install base to work from . By attracting developers early with free growth , clamping down once they had invested, and then taxing them 30% through its virtual currency Credits, Facebook has turned its games platform into a consistent money maker . Now some developers are experimenting with digital media sales and rentals , pay-per-view , as well as offering virtual currency microincentives , showing potential for platform monetization beyond games. Ad Targeting Age, gender, current city, hometown, employers, education, friends, interests, and now in-app activity and ecommerce habits. When users share this data with friends, they’re also sharing with Facebook. This gives Facebook possibly the most accurate and robust set of ad targeting data in the world. With both an self-serve tool and ad reps handling premium accounts, Facebook can provide effective advertising solutions to both local business and international brands. Facebook has developed eye-catching ads by combining this targeting with  social-content infused ad creative . Viewers see the names and faces of friends who Like an advertised brand. Interactions between their friends and brands, such as Likes, app usage, and checkins, can become the ads themselves through Sponsored Stories. These trump, and are increasingly pulling spend away from more cookie-cutter display and search ads targeted through cookies and keywords. Facebook has only begun to monetize through ads. The sidebars where ads primarily appear have been kept small and unobtrusive. Facebook is now mixing ads back into the web version of the news feed , where they’re sure to be seen between organic social content. Facebook has yet to show ads to its hundreds of millions of daily mobile users, but Sponsored Stories could show up there soon too. Finally, it could one day create an ad network that allows other sites to pay to show logged-in Facebook users the same highly targeted social ads they see on Facebook.com.