Transcriber: Hajar Ben Tahaikt Reviewer: Jeong-Lan Kinser
(Applause)
Is technology going to change the way we do science?
Is the communication technology
going to change the way we are doing communication of science?
And when I'm asking myself such questions,
first thing is, I always want to go back
and ask myself the basic questions.
So, the basic question here is:
"Why are we doing science?
What are we trying to find?
Or what are we trying to understand?"
Basically, the universe, as you know,
from the very big to the very small.
This is something which is absolutely universal.
But to do that, we have to base our work on a chain of transmission.
That is like building a wall: when you're building a wall,
you're putting up bricks on top of each other
and of course,
the one who finishes the wall, is not the one who started it.
And so you're building on somebody else's construction.
And so this is really what is fundamental in science.
You're working on work that has been done by others.
Basically, as Newton liked to say:
"Standing on the shoulders of giants."
In fact, not necessarily giants,
but certainly standing on the shoulders of other people who worked before you.
Or who worked at the same time as you do.
And there was also, 500 years before Newton,
somebody who said that, John of Salisbury said exactly the same thing.
When we perform science, we do it on top of what others have been doing.
So basically, progress and science is based on communication.
And nowadays,
there is a revolution in communication.
So, is the revolution of communication going to impact
on the communication of science?
The answer is, of course, yes.
We have been working with print works,
with print communication for several centuries.
And we haven't changed a thing.
We're still writing papers the way papers were written a long time ago.
So there is no basic change in the way we are communicating.
However,
the real revolution in communication is the new tools that we are using nowadays.
And are we using these tools?
Yes, a little bit.
But when you think of it, the way we do it
is, we take papers and
instead of printing them, put them on the web in printing form.
So we don't change the way we do science.
We don't change the way we communicate science.
This is really the first observation that we can make.
In fact, we have transposed an old system
in new tools but with the same system.
And so, at this point,
it's time to go from the 17th century --
we are still writing in the same way --
to nowadays, with the new tools.
And we should, of course, use what is existing
but we should also think of how we could
possibly invent tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, whatever.
We should use tools like those to transmit information of science.
And it's maybe not necessary
to write our scientific papers the way we have done it for three centuries.
We could propably make use of the tools
to write it differently, communicate differently,
shorten the ideas, shorten what we want to say.
It's like making a conference in 18 minutes maximum.
It's exactly the same concept.
Now, how do we communicate?
We communicate orally in academies, meetings.
And we communicate in written form,
through papers, books, chapters.
But there has always been a scholarly circle
which looks like this.
There is a scientist up there doing the experiments,
and then he or she sits down here
and writes what will be a paper, what we call a 'manuscript'.
And then this manuscript is being read by somebody else,
who is also a scientist
and who is trying to find out whether it's okay or not okay,
and there are maybe several turns.
And when the paper is ready, it's being published.
And when it's published, it's being read by another scientist.
So, all these people,
all these blond people here are all scientists.
And they write the papers,
they review the papers,
they read the papers,
and where the hell will they have to pay for all of this?
So, there are intermediaries who are really sort of a problem.
There are not a problem as long as they are practicing really fair fees,
but when the price is growing up, then it's no longer fair.
So, how can we, in fact, publish material
without having to pay enormous amounts of money
either to publish or to read?
This is the big challenge now
with what we call "open access" to scientific publications.
And so the classic model here,
is -- okay, maybe you can't see very well -- yellow and green,
but the yellow arrows are where the money flows
and the green arrows are where the scientific material flows.
And so the public funds are funding the researcher.
He becomes an author when he finishes his experiments
and he publishes.
Then it's being reviewed by the reviewer,
it comes back to the publisher
and the publisher provides the material to the reader and the reader pays to read.
That's the old classical system.
But, of course, it has evolved a little bit.
And now, we are going to a new situation
where the public funds go to the researcher,
the researcher becomes an author,
he sends his paper to a publisher.
The publisher takes care of organizing the reviewing
and then presents the material to the reader, even online.
And with this system, the author pays.
This is what we call
"the open access autopays open access."
It's fine, it's fair, it's normal,
as long as the publisher doesn't want to make the same amount of money
from this system as he did with the previous one.
So it means for the author
it's going to cost an arm, and a leg and even more.
So the system is certainly not the best one.
So we are looking for a fair,
what we call "gold open access model"
where the funds, the public funds,
are being given to the scientist for his research and
to the publisher for the publication.
Unfortunately, the arrow on the right
is going to increase in terms of amounts
and nobody will be able to pay for this service.
So the "green open access route" has been invented.
When you have a mix of both systems
and the researcher, in fact, as an author is publishing, the publisher,
who still publishes a review with a lot of value added material
and the reader may still want to buy this review.
But he can also, without paying for it,
find it directly on the web
and the little dotted arrow shows that.
The author puts his material up for consultation by the reader.
Of course the publisher finds that this is going to take him to bankruptcy.
But in fact not, because he is adding value
and this value added can be valorized
through the fact that the reader will still pay for having the review.
But of course, this little yellow arrow here
will be less money than the publisher wants.
So, we are still at war with the publishers,
with this consideration.
So, the dream system is simply
that the public funds fund research,
the researcher puts his results openly in communication.
Everybody can read it.
There is no publisher and the whole system works by itself.
The only problem is,
how do we have a good, serious professional review,
an organized peer review, organized in the system.
And so the difficulty is there
and we are still working on it.
But, of course,
we're going to a new paradigm
where the researcher does exactly that.
He puts his material openly on the web for the reader
and the reader does the open reviewing,
which is a new concept,
where, when you have published your material,
people can look at it,
make comments,
put stars -- one, two, three, four stars --
and, in fact, come back with a discussion
and review - peer review or public review --
your material after it has been published.
So, this is really what is in our view,
but it needs a lot of precautions.
Nevertheless, nowadays,
we can see that there is a new birth of publication.
A system where, in fact, we have
publicly funded research which is available for the public for free
and new knowledge is immediately available,
which is great speed,
and the knowledge, which is shared by everybody,
is progressing without barriers.
This is an ideal system and we should work on it.
If we work on it, we should develop the tools for it.
There are already many things that are in the pipe.
First of all, the Open Data system which has been approved
by the Obama Administration less than a week ago
and which is in a prototype with Horizon 2020
of the European Commission for the next framework program for research.
Open Data is a system where you put up your data,
your raw data, available for everybody,
to look at,
everybody to verify,
to use and to reuse.
It's a completely new way of sharing scientific material
and it's a very difficult system to put up, of course,
because you don't want your material to be stolen
but you want it to be used by others,
so that the wall can be built.
Interactivity means that you can interact with other people
and then your science is evolving in interactivity.
Open reviewing, I just mentioned what it meant.
Liquid publication is the fact that you can publish a paper
and then come back to it and change it,
and say, "I've done another experiment
and so I've chosen this and that",
and so you have a basic paper
and you may have layers of different versions behind it,
with dates, of course,
with an identifier as a digital object.
And then you can make all these digital objects one after the other,
and you can go and look through the whole series
which is also a very interesting way of sharing science.
Then you have a transparency index,
because you have to be completely transparent
and your data can be demonstrated to be true.
And then the reproducibility initiative is a big new initiative
based on the fact that your material should be reproducible
and your data should be reproducible.
So, as a whole,
we are really in the field of a new birth of science
where the new and innovative approach
which is based on emerging technologies, evolving technologies,
that need improvement, even now.
But there are fully mastered by the young generation
which is, of course, a very important point.
They permit immediate exchange of material
and they create living
and evolving scholarly communication
and no longer working on a fixed text that remains like it is forever.
So, in fact, this text can be changed
and you don't have to rewrite the whole thing.
You may identify with an identifier
your methods, your references
and all this can remain a fixed frame
to which you can go with a link from your paper
and your paper actually is no paper anymore.
It's a text or it's a film or it's a video
or it's an interactive dicussion, whatever material
and it can be exchanged very easily
and refer to the basics, which should be
very strictly controlled as a scientific matter.
So, the whole way that we are, in fact,
not so much doing the experiments,
but writing our data, writing down the data
and then, communicating the data must be completely changed
from the old classical way of transmitting science slowly.
So, this is what I wanted to tell you this afternoon.
Thank you.
(Applause)