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.

Labor Efficiency: The N...

Editor’s note: Nick Cronin is a former corporate attorney and now the President and Founder of ExpertBids.com , which is based in Chicago. For more than a decade now, the Internet has done a great job of making things in our day-to-day lives more efficient by easily connecting parties who can have a mutually beneficial personal or business relationship. This same idea is now on the verge of disrupting labor and changing the definition of employment as we know it. The Rise of the Independent Worker. Over the past couple of years, there has been a huge increase in the number of workers who operate as some sort of independent, free-agent contractor or consultant. Though the numbers vary greatly, the consensus seems to be around 20 percent of the U.S. workforce , and growing (with some estimates up to 50 percent by 2020). Think about that, one in every five workers are currently unattached to any one company! Expert explanations for this rise vary as much as the number itself, but I believe the two most important factors, by far, are: Technology. Never before has a physical space represented less. An office building, in and of itself, often holds no more tools necessary to perform a job than someone can carry with them. Computers, phones, the cloud, and an overall connectedness has produced an environment where location is becoming less and less relevant. Not having to rely on someone else for the tools of productivity has given substantially more people than ever before the ability to be an independent worker. (No doubt there remain exceptions). The economy. The recent recession has resulted in layoffs and very high unemployment numbers. Further, there is a whole new generation coming of age believing that long-term employment at one company is a remnant of the past. Whether this is because they have read about layoffs, experienced it with their family or friends, or any other reason — many people, regardless of age, no longer feel comfortable or stable at a traditional job. So the economic conditions have forced some into an independent role by necessity, and it has motivated a countless number of others to explore work options outside of the traditional job. Armed with the technology and connectedness, people are setting out on their own in record numbers. But where are they finding work? Changes in How Companies ‘Hire’ Labor. Labor efficiency is about having the right workers for the tasks which need to be accomplished. This includes tasks of all types and in all areas. More than ever, this is being accomplished by having lean, flexible workforces which come and go as projects demand. Increasingly, employers are parsing up tasks and having temporary, project-basis workers complete the tasks. Take one gigantic U.S. company, Caterpillar Inc., who recently reported that they hired almost 30,000 flexible, contingent workers in the last quarter of 2011. By almost every study, companies of all sizes are emphasizing a lean workforce, and hiring on project-basis engagements more and more (though not all are as drastic as Caterpillar). This trend is not limited to factory workers or computer programmers or any one group — workers in every industry and profession are seeing this increase. For a company to hire someone, there are many costs beyond a salary and benefits (which in and of themselves are substantial!). There are recruitment efforts, on-boarding costs such as supplies and training, and finally costs when the employee leaves, such as unemployment premiums, severance packages, and HR costs. Now, instead of choosing to go the route of employing someone, companies have the option of hiring some of the millions of independent workers out there for substantially less. Instead of paying all the associated costs, businesses can parse tasks up into projects and find experts to do them very efficiently – only having to pay for the work completed, not the secondary costs discussed above. Additionally, they can more easily expand and contract their workforce as supply and demand dictate. Not only are the large businesses hiring more independents, this trend is trickling all the way down to the millions of bootstrapped startups who hire (outside of the founders) only independents for projects as they grow their company. The era of the lean, flexible workforce is here and guess where both companies and independents are increasingly locating each other. Yep: The Internet. Time for Disruption. There are already plenty of companies out there connecting one party who needs a service with another who can provide it. TaskRabbit and Zaarly specifically are two startups that have grown very quickly. But we are just beginning to scratch the surface of how the Internet is going to disrupt labor. The real change will come as more and more of the traditional job creators, small businesses all the way up to the Fortune 500s, realize the benefits of flexible workforces and more and more individuals take the plunge into independent, free-agent land — whether by necessity or choice. There are many companies working to facilitate the connection between project-basis workers and companies. Marketplaces like ODesk and Elance provide a worldwide platform of freelancers in a variety of different fields. Some of these marketplaces are aimed more towards commoditized services, but increasingly they encompass services of all types. OnForce allows companies to retain the services of IT professionals for projects. WorkMarket is a labor resource platform. Crowdspring and 99Designs are creative services marketplaces. And finally (though there are countless others that could be included here), my company ExpertBids.com is a professional services marketplace for consultants, lawyers, and accountants. Every day it seems a new vertical labor marketplace launches. There are many obstacles these companies must overcome still, but change is coming. Some have criticized this shift , saying this type of labor and employment is only increasing inequality and the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. We need to begin looking deeply into this trend and how it is affecting people, but an efficient labor system can have major advantages to both parties. A marketplace where tasks are accomplished by the right people, at the right time, and at the right price (not lowest price, the right price) may seem to favor the employer. But think about an independent who has very little overhead, can work from anywhere, at anytime, and for anyone and whose income potential is no longer limited by a single salary. Removing wasted time and expenses is something both parties, and the economy as a whole, can gain tremendously from. That is where all of the online labor marketplaces, ExpertBids included, need to assist. We must create efficient platforms that remove the barriers for these two parties to connect in a mutually beneficial relationship.

U.S. Government & M...

The amount of stuff we trust to fly in and out of our smartphones is astounding . Just look at what happened when a couple of reporters got access to an unwitting (and rather unlucky) Apple employee’s iMessages alone — within days, they learned more about him than most people know about their closest friends. Now, imagine all the stuff that could fly in and out of a government official’s phone, or that of a highly-ranked member of the military. Forget saucy texts and booty pictures — we’re talking about state secrets, here. Looking to keep their secrets underwraps while on the go, the U.S government is working on a build of Android custom-tailored to meet their security requirements. Word of the project comes from CNN , who notes that U.S. officials/soldiers aren’t currently allowed to send any classified data over their smartphones. If they need to transmit anything that might sink ships (so to speak), they currently need to find a secured (generally meaning hardwired) line hooked to an approved device. Here’s the gist of the project: A limited number of soldiers will get the phones first, then federal agencies, then possibly contractors The U.S. won’t be building their own hardware — that’d be too expensive. Instead, they’ll be buying commercially available devices and reflashing them. They hoped to be able to offer iOS devices, but it’s not going to happen. CNN notes that federal officials met with Apple to request that they share their source — as you’d probably guess, Apple wasn’t too cool with that idea. Surprisingly, users of the handsets will be able to install new applications, though the handsets will put a specific emphasis on exactly what information the application can access and what it’s currently sending. Seems unlikely that they’d give these things full Android Market access, though — that’d be rather silly. The project is being funded by DARPA, with the NSA evaluating it as they go (while working on a version of their own, curiously.) Most of the project’s details are still underwraps, but this is all still rather interesting. What hardware might they use? If DARPA makes any substantial security improvements to Android’s kernel, might that work make it back to the official branch? Might this work eventually be monetized (remember, Siri was born as a DARPA project) and offered to enterprises looking for a locked-down version of Android — and what does that mean for RIM/BlackBerry?

Back To Basics: Sony Ap...

If there’s been one complaint my contacts inside large CE companies have had, career-wise, it’s been the inability to rise far in the hierarchy. While there are clear exceptions to this rule, the complaint has always been that succeeding in Asian companies has been contingent on (literally) speaking the language and knowing the rules of the road, as it were, culturally. When Sir Howard Stringer took the reins at Sony, it looked like this tendency had been bucked. However, with the appointment of Kazuo Hirai, it looks like Sony is going back to the old ways – but why? First, Stringer’s note “passing the brandy snifter,” as it were: “Three years ago, I started to work with the Board on succession plans, and in February, 2009 we named a new generation of leaders to be my management team. Among them was Kaz Hirai, who had distinguished himself through his work in the PlayStation and networked entertainment businesses. Kaz is a globally focused executive for whom technology and the cloud are familiar territory, content is highly valued, and digital transformation is second nature. I believe his tough-mindedness and leadership skills will be of great benefit to the company and its customers in the months and years ahead. I look forward to helping Kaz in every way I can so that succession leads inevitably to success. It was my honor to recommend him to the Board for the positions of President and CEO, because he is ready to lead, and the time to make this change is now.” Sony is no longer in the position they were in when Stringer became CEO. In June 2005, when he was appointed after a long career in Sony’s media divisions, Stringer looked like they guy to lead Sony through the rocky shoals of media distribution. You’ll remember that the iTunes store started selling music two years earlier and streaming video was still a few years off. The way ahead was clear – Blu Ray would carry HD content into homes and streaming would always be the second best solution. HD piracy was difficult because of the huge file sizes and the best solution for digital distribution was to include a nice DRM-ed video file in with the DVD, complete with a with a special Sony player. It was a simpler time and it looked like Stringer could make content work while Japanese engineers could make the TVs and Walkmen work. Today Howard’s world is completely changed. Sony is no longer the darling of the computing world (Apple owns that limelight) nor is it good at CE (Samsung and Vizio have shown that cheap TVs don’t have to suck) nor can it make phones. Blu Ray is fast becoming irrelevant and distribution channels have curved around Sony like light around a dying star. Stringer’s Sony is a shambles. So Sony went back to a Japanese CEO who ran the company’s most prosperous product, Playstation. It makes perfect sense: the next decade isn’t solely about hardware or content or mobile – it’s about all of those and more. Gaming consoles take the best of those three worlds and actually sell products to people who want to pay for them. Gaming is a huge business and it’s the one place that Sony can excel in this century. In the end, Stringer was a CEO for a Sony that wanted to appear more plugged into Hollywood, media, and content. Now Sony needs to look like it cares about gaming and the capital of Sony’s gaming empire is Japan. It was fun to try new things, Sony is saying, but when it comes to turnaround they’ve come back to basics.

3 Must-Take Steps to Br...

Long passed the days when we had to wonder why we should care about search results for our (brand) names. Google reputation management is a well-known phrase to anyone making a living online. Hence, you are most likely to know that in order to maintain stable presence in branded search results, one should be working continuously. If you are blogging a lot and care about your brand name and what people see when they are searching Google for your name, here are exactly three things you need to do once to improve your Google search results branding: 1. Verify the Authorship of Your Articles A few months ago Google got really serious about giving more credit to great content authors. As a result, you can see the author’s headshot right within relevant search results. Since then, claiming your content authorship has been step #1 in branding your search results. Luckily, following the community feedback, Google has made that a fairly simple task: 1. "Reciprocal" Links Method This method is about interlinking your Google Plus profile with your articles: Your articles & Your author page both link to your Google Plus profile Your Google Profile Links back to your Author page. Step 1 : Link your author page to your Google Plus profile. This tool will help you generate a pretty button for that. Alternatively, you can text-link using rel=author added right to end of the profile URL address: Google Step 2: Link your Google Plus Profile back to your Author’s pages from within "Contributing to" section. This tool will help identify if you have done everything right. This is what you should see after step 1 and step 2 are both passed: Hard to remember? Here’s an easy checklist for you: Link to: From Rel= Your Google Plus Profile Each of your articles + your author page "author" Link generator Your Author Page Your Google Plus profile "contributor-to" Verification 2. eMail-Based Method If you contribute in many places and don’t feel like linking to your Google Plus profile, consider an email verification process. Step 1: Create a separate email account to feature on all your guest posts (this can be name@yourdomain.com or anything. Mind that there is likely to be much junk mail after you publicize your address on your articles) Step 2: Add your email address to your Google Plus profile Step 3: Link to that email address whenever you guest post. Step 4: Link to all domains you are contributing to in "Contributing to" section of your Google Plus Profile (same section as in the first method) How to add a new email address to your Google Plus profile? It’s very easy: in "editing" mode scroll down a bit and click on a "Work" section. Select "email" from the drop-down and add your email address you want to verify (note that you’ll need to click a link inside the email sent to that email address for verification purposes): 2. Create a Master Feed of Your Contributions If you have built some popularity, you are most likely to be frequently invited to guest post . Or you contribute to a few blogs, or you maintain a (paid) columns in a number of online publications… In all the above cases, it’s a very wise idea to aggregate all your content in one RSS feed to promote all your contributions on auto-pilot and to showcase your work around the web. I have done a very detailed post on creating your master RSS feed for all your contributor accounts . In short, here’s a quick to-do list on creating the feed as well as sharing it on the web: STEPS HOW Step 1: Identify your author RSS feeds In many cases, you can find your author RSS feed here: http://www.blogdomain.com/author/ author-name /feed/ Yahoo! Pipes "Fetch Feed" tool Step 2: Create Feeds where you don’t have one Identify repetitive HTML mark-up of your author pages to extract links to your individual posts and to create an RSS feed of your author page Feed43 (optionally, premium) Step 3: Combine all your RSS feeds in one Create one master feed of all your author RSS feeds by uniting them in one Yahoo! Pipes ("Fetch feed", "Truncate", "Union" & "Sort by" modules). Here’s my pipe, feel free to clone it! RSSMix (easier but less customized) Step 4: Publicize your master RSS feed on your blog (blogs) You can share your master feed in a WordPress widget (WordPress has a default widget for that) or embed in a page. RSS include (paid) RSS Just Better WordPress plugin (free) You are done! Now, your guest posts and contributions are shared on an autopilot (which means more social shares, exposure, links and consequently better rankings for all your articles around the web!). Here’s my master feed embed in a page that serves as my guest post portfolio (as an example): 3. Claim Your Brand Name in Major Social Networks While this one is absolutely obvious, plenty of people are really too late to claim their brand names across social networks. While Google Plus is attempting to kill nicknames , we still have other huge players we can’t ignore. Here’s another quick to-do for you (together with important notes to remember): Social Network What to Claim What to Remember Twitter Username (the one you specify when registering an account or logging in) Twitter TOS don’t allow users to hold usernames just in order to claim them. You may want to keep it (at least somewhat active) and update it now and then Facebook Username (in the URL path): There can be a lot of Ann Smarties on Facebook but only one is able to have facebook.com/annsmarty profile address. Google loves short URLs with keywords, so if you want *your* profile to be #1 for your name search, claim it now! It can’t be later changed Fan page username (URL path) The page should have at least 25 fans; it cannot be changed as well. Gmail Username (username@gmail.com) You are most likely to be already too late to this party LinkedIn Username (Public profile URL path) Do not use spaces, symbols, or special characters The best thing about all the above exercises is that you need to only do them once – so they are really worth a one-time effort! Post image: If you don’t remember me The views and opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of Marketing Pilgrim. About the author Ann Smarty is a professional blogger and guest blogger. She owns My Blog Guest , the free community that connects bloggers to guest authors. She also maintains a few other smaller start-ups (including the most recent tool for guest post and link tracking). Ann is also an SEO ninja at Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Ninjas . Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community