Publishing with and OpenSky

Carl Drews NCAR Earth System Laboratory

American Geophysical Union – San Francisco, California December 16, 2010

NCAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation

NESL Presentation Format April 2010 Copyright 2010 by Carl Drews. distributed under Attribution License 3.0 1 Master’s Thesis: Parting the Red Sea

Figure 8 of Carl Drews and Weiqing Han, 2010 Dynamics of Wind Setdown at Suez and the Eastern Nile Delta. PLoS ONE 5(8): e12481. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012481 2 Where can I publish my thesis research?

•Not a funded project; no money for page charges.

•Is this: oceanography, meteorology, archaeology, history, coastal oceanography, biblical studies, numerical modeling, geology, or what?

•I expect that there will be popular interest.

3 Great Popular Interest?

Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956). Wikimedia Commons.

A classic Hollywood movie, Bible stories, etc. 4 Frustrations with traditional publishing

•Too slow.

•Limited access. My friends can’t read my paper.

•Out of scope for this journal.

•Color and print charges (I want electronic-only).

5 Open Access Day – October 22, 2009

John Wilbanks: •Executive Director of Science Commons •Visionary

Wikimedia Commons

John Wilbanks and George Strawn said some crazy things that day, but I wrote them all down and thought about them for months afterwards . . .

6 . . . and concluded:

•Open Access is perfect for this paper! •Inter-disciplinary research. •Popular interest.

•I see the future, and it is Open Access.

•The Open Access train has already left, and I’m not on it. •Somebody has already solved these problems. •I have to change my thinking!

7 PLoS ONE

Aha!

John Wilbanks had mentioned the science journal PLoS ONE in his talk.

There are many other Open Access journals.

http://www.plosone.org/ 8 About PLoS ONE

•Impact factor: 4.351 for 2009. •Open Access, electronic only. Open Access? •Any topic within science or medicine. •No test for “Significance”; just good science. •Quick publication cycle. •Peer reviewed. •I thought was open, but it is not. •Published by Public Library of Science since 2006. •Very strict about declaring your Competing Interests. •Cost: $1,350 regardless of article length, figures, color. •Published 4,406 articles in 2009 (17.6 per working day). •About 1,000 academic editors. •Several article metrics provided. •Creative Commons Attribution License.

“Peer review requires organization, and organization costs money.” – John Wilbanks. PLoS ONE follows the “Author Pays” model. Discounts available.

9 Chalcolithic Footwear

10 Remains of St. Birgitta

11 Horned Dinosaurs

12 Peer Review and Manuscript Acceptance

•Academic editor and two anonymous referees.

•Knowledgeable and insightful comments.

•Helpful and constructive suggestions.

•Editor had extensive comments regarding formatting and scientific presentation.

•Appropriate questions about uncertainty.

•Focused on the scientific content of the manuscript.

In short, the PLoS ONE review was everything a scientific peer review is supposed to be. Everything an NCAR internal review is.

13 Publication time: 5 months

April 5, 2010: Submitted manuscript to PLoS ONE. April 9, 2010: PLoS ONE says to remove funding information and refer to Supplementary information in the text. April 12, 2010: I made the requested corrections and approved the revised manuscript file. June 17, 2010: PLoS ONE editor sends back requests for revisions. They look manageable. I have 60 days to respond. July 21, 2010: I submitted the revised manuscript, addressing the editor and reviewers' comments. August 3, 2010: The academic editor informs me that "your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLoS ONE." The files need to be checked by PLoS ONE production staff before formal acceptance. August 5, 2010: PLoS ONE requests minor changes to document formatting. August 6, 2010: I corrected the manuscript format and approved the merged PDF. There were other minor corrections over the following few days. August 11, 2010: Manuscript is "accepted for production"! August 23, 2010: PLoS ONE tells me that the publication date will be August 30, 2010. August 30, 2010: Paper is published.

Basically: 2 months for peer review, 1 month for my revisions. Less than 1 month from acceptance to publication.

14 Publication! August 30, 2010

15 Daily Article Views

Same readership pattern as the other articles: initial burst of excitement, then view count trails off.

The initial burst is 5 days. Robots and web crawlers?

Will my article make 1,000 views by the end of September 2010?

16 UCAR Media Relations Group

David Hosansky Rachael Drummond

Image: UCAR

•Press release: September 21, 2010 •Illustration of the parting the sea. •Videos of the model results, and Carl explaining them. •Training for media interviews, guidance, handling inquiries.

17 NCAR Visualization & Enabling Technologies Section (VETS) Image: UCAR Don Middleton Tim Scheitlin

Ryan McVeigh

Image: UCAR and Nicolle Rager Fuller 18 OpenSky – NCAR Library

19 Press Release: September 21, 2010

Laura Snider is a reporter for the Boulder Daily Camera. Laura covered the publication of the Red Sea research. http://www.laurasnider.com/

This is still my favorite news story!

20 Media Frenzy!

•A media frenzy erupted over September 21-23! (Tuesday-Thursday) •Web sites, TV camera crews, dozens of phone interviews, radio stations, TV stations… •5 phone interviews with the BBC in one night. •I missed some e-mail requests because I could not keep up. •International: Italy, Columbia, United Kingdom, Iran, Canada.

•The story kept popping up on more web sites, hour by hour!

•David Hosansky and Rachael Drummond scheduled interviews, filtered out some requests, advised me on tough questions, kept me calm and enthusiastic through those 3 days. Focus on the science.

21 ABC News

22 Fox 31 News

23 National Public Radio

24 International Coverage

25 Daily Article Views

Same pattern of readership: Initial burst, then trails off.

13,678 views on September 23, 2010!

The spike is only 4 days long.

The pre-press release numbers are not even visible on these plots. Try a log scale . . .

26 Daily Article Views – log scale

The UCAR press release occurred on day 22 after publication in PLoS ONE.

Note the impact of the press release and media coverage on the article views.

Suggest: Hard to get these numbers with limited access.

27 Impact of the UCAR Media Relations Group and VETS

•Total views of the scientific article increased from 500 to over 35,000 in two weeks; a multiplicative factor of 70. •(Reached 32,000 by the end of September.)

•Non-burst daily views increased from 10 per day to 30 per day; a factor of 3 increase over the longer term.

28 YouTube – NCAR/UCAR Channel

Tim Scheitlin’s animation was a sensation!

534,793 views

Video explanation: 57,249 views 29 Scholarly Attention

Popular media coverage led to scholarly attention:

•Invited speaker for Exodus conference in Italy. •Rotary Club of Pinerolo, province of Turin.

•James Hoffmeier commented on my research. •Professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School •Respected biblical scholar and Egyptologist.

•NCAR colleague Heba Marey is modeling air pollution in the Cairo basin, and heard about my project. •I gave her a terrain grid at 86-meter resolution.

30 Impact of Open Access

Harder to quantify, but:

•I would not expect 38,000 article views with limited access.

•Blogs and comment boards reveal non-experts reading the original article and posting comments on it.

•Easy to supply a URL to anyone, or a search phrase to find the article and read it!

•Deposit final published version in OpenSky without restrictions or embargo.

31 Creative Commons Attribution License

Includes commercial usage.

32 Re-post article with different styling

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2932978/ 33 Quote long sections and figures without my “permission”

John Wilbanks says this is a good thing!

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/parting_red_sea_could_it_have_happened_wind_setdown_model_says_yes 34 News Article Comments

•Over 1,500 comments at CNN.com.

•A lot of remarks by non-experts.

•A few scholars in the bunch! •They try to educate the rest.

•Some people have read the original paper. •Correct mistaken impressions.

35 Encouraging

Stan Strickland Great! Send in the Archeologists! September 22, 2010 at 6:37 pm | Report abuse | Reply

36 Genuine Interest

Bob On the other hand, during the 19th Century, before the Suez Canal was built, an Englishman discovered that there were parts of the Red Sea where you can ride across on horseback at low tide. So it could have been something like that, as well. And did the study account for changes to the hydrology of the Red Sea area caused by the construction of the Suez Canal? September 22, 2010 at 6:53 pm | Report abuse | Reply

37 Helpful

stan turecki huxley – the wind doesnt have to HOLD UP the water – all it has to do is push it out of the way. it's the exact same principle as a storm surge associated with a hurricane. a 6ft storm surge from a cat 1 hurricane isnt unreasonable. September 22, 2010 at 11:56 am | Report abuse | Reply

38 Skeptical

shawn Computer models don't mean squat, trash trash out, if they attempt this on a real scale modle it will FAIL September 22, 2010 at 7:58 pm | Report abuse | Reply

39 Irrelevant but amusing

jersey born tom cruise did it September 22, 2010 at 8:15 am | Report abuse | Reply

40 Look up the original article!

Thomas says: October 19, 2010 at 11:56 am Found this link – it gives greater detail about everythign Bill has already posted – maybe you wanna take a look into it and give some feedback? http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0012481

DagoodS says: October 19, 2010 at 3:15 pm Thomas, Thank you VERY much for the link. It was informative to read the article itself. …

As suspected, the ground cover exposed by this simulation was mud. The example giving the impetus for the study notes (on a similar event) Major-General Tulloch, saying “…natives were walking about on the mud…” And the article continues with the claim, “…make their way across the exposed mud flats.”

More importantly (thanks to looking at the maps), it was impressed upon me how much wind resistance we are talking about. I was wrong above, the simulation has the wind coming from the east. In other words, they were walking into the wind.

The simulation indicated the waters would recede for 4 hours if the wind blew at 28 m/s (62 mph). To have the water recede for 7.5 hours the winds would be at 33 m/s (74 mph). But the researchers determined it extremely unlikely the Hebrews could walk into a 74 mph wind; instead relying upon a 62 mph wind. 41 Who’s driving what?

Media coverage drives people to my research; Open Access lets them in the front door.

Open Access works together with media publicity to increase drastically the societal impact of our research.

42 Conclusions

•Research was fascinating, exhilarating, and stressful.

•Open Access was perfect for this paper!

•UCAR Media Relations Group and VETS had a huge impact on the publication of this research.

43 Test

How can you get this presentation after the conference?

OpenSky

Search for: NCAR OpenSky Carl Drews AGU 2010

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