Author: Jason

total-impact at SPARC OA

I (Jason) presented TI at the SPARC Open Access Meeting in Kansas City last week. It was an interesting event, with a mix of in-the-trenches librarians, publishers, institutional repository folk, and business people representing the growing range of  products and services springing up around Open Science. I found the engagement and growth of this latter group encouraging, since it’s where we see TI ending up.

There was ample skepticism about TI: bit publisher reps were very interested, but non-committal, giving the sense that they want to see a more stable legal/org entity before they take the SaaS plunge. Many librarians had initial “it’s a toy, my faculty care only for IF” reactions, although these tended to thaw after more explanation. Both reactions underscore for me the importance of 1) establishing a trustworthy legal identity for TI and 2) continuing to do outreach and research around the idea of altmetrics in general.

There was a lot of encouraging enthusiasm, as well. The TI poster was mobbed. Several repositories expressed heavy interest in embedding TI stats, and some libraries were interested in contributing plugins. Was great to hear folks say “someone isfinallydoing this…it’s just what we’ve been wanting!”

Another highlight was a great chat with John Wilbanks; the more I hear him talk, the more his open-sci insight and knowledge impresses me. Turns out he’s been keeping well abreast of TI and altmetrics, and has good things to say about total-impact’s future prospects, which was great to hear. I also got a chance to talk with smart folks from the Kauffman Foundation at a dinner they set up; they had thoughtful things to say about the Value Of Entrepreneurship, and why a for-profit startup could be the best structure for even a mission-driven project like us.

So, overall an educational and useful event. Thanks to SPARC for putting it on!

What’s the market for total-impact?

We’ve been thinking a lot lately about how TI can make money to support infrastructure and future development. We’re still unsure what kind of organisational structure will best serve the goals we’ve got for TI (a conventional startup, a B Corp, a non-profit foundation, or something else?). But we’re increasingly sure that there’s a clear business model to support whatever we come up with, built around selling high-volume access to the data we collect.

In the short term, TI is nicely positioned  at the intersection of social-media analytics (Gnip, Radian6, etc) and scholarly impact (ISI, Scopus, etc). The great things about this confluence from a market perspective are:

  • There are a bunch of special academic-specific sources (insulating us from competition from Gnip et al).
  • The institutional inertia of big players like the ISI and Scopus makes them unlikely competitors in the short- to medium-term. They see this stuff as toys. Once they don’t, it’ll take time to develop relationships with many providers, relationships we’ve been building for the last year.
  • As budgets tighten, there’s a growing clamor for more and better metrics to support  funding applications.  There’s growing dissatisfaction with the IF, but still a culture comfortable with (addicted to?) making decisions based on popularity in social sharing networks (which the literature, at its core, is).

Of course there are challenges here; the IF is a very well-established brand, and citations are the coin of the realm. But there’s also a growing sense that the Web opens exciting possibilities for scholcomm that we scholars are letting slip away.

The scholarly impact market—which ultimately drives the whole scholarly enterprise—is based on 1960s data sources and 1960s technology. It’s ripe for disruption. And selling this new data with a low-risk SaaS model is the perfect way to get that disruption started.

Over the long term, sources like TI can be the infrastructure upon which all of science is built.  Future researchers won’t read journals, but rather customised feeds, filtered using data gleaned from their social networks. As a provider of that data, total-impact sits atop a powerful revenue stream, as well helping to push science into the future.

total-impact gets £17,000 support from OSF

total-impact has come full circle: we were born out of a hackathon thrown by the Beyond Impact project, funded by the Open Society Foundations. Now we’re being generously supported from that same Beyond Impact grant, helping us move from prototype to a reliable, scaleable service.

The budget on the grant is pretty simple: £16k goes to open-source devs Cottage Labs to help build out Jean-Claude, our next release. The other £1k flew me here to Edinburgh to work with CL for a week. There are more details in our grant application; in keeping with our radical transparency philosophy, we are posting that as a gDoc here, so you can see more specifics.

It probably goes without saying that we’re really excited about this grant…it’s a great chance to work with Cottage Labs, a great vote of confidence from Beyond Impact, and a great push toward our goal of revolutionizing the dissemination and evaluation of scholarship.

Special thanks to Cameron Neylon for his vision and leadership in setting up the original workshop, for suggesting we apply for funding, and for helping us along when we did.

Jean-Claude tools

Here are the main libraries and other tools we’re using for Jean-Claude. Some are new for TI (Flask) some are old (Couch) and all are awesome:

  • Python 2.7
  • jQuery on the UI
  • CouchDB with the Python couchdb lib.
  • Flask as the lightweight web framework
  • BibJSON to describe bibliographic information
  • Supervisor to run and manage server processes
  • Beautiful (Stone) Soup for parsing xml and html
  • The Negotiator for content negotiation in the API
  • Memecached or maybe Redis for caching
  • JSONP? for serving API data

#thistlesprint

This week Jason is Edinburgh working with the crackerjack devs of Cottage Labs. I’m still getting clearance to announce the details, but TI has gotten a tidy grant and Cottage Labs are getting most of it.

It’s awesome working with Cottage on this stuff. They are super skilled, great to work with, and have built their whole shop around open-source approaches to solving problems in academia. CL were the natural choice to work with, and I’ve not been disappointed.

The goal of this week-long sprint is to get get the main pieces in place for Jean-Claude, our next release (scheduled for mid-May). We’ve been at it three days now, and I’m finally getting settled in enough to start posting about it (will do better next time). Today I’ll be posting some of the stuff we’ve been whiteboarding. If you want to look at code, though, check out our new repo at https://github.com/total-impact/total-impact .

feedback wanted: updated api spec

We’ve been working on an updated api spec.  It is quite similar to our initial api but contains a few refinements to help us scale up.

For example, we’ll make namespaces explicit rather than implicit, so a PubMed identifier will always be referred to with a PMID prefix.  

We’ve also introduced the idea of total-impact identifiers — we affectionately call them tiids.

Javascript snippets will make embedding total-impact data into webpages as easy as pie.

Have a look at the new api spec and see what you think?  You can add thoughts, questions, and suggestions right on the google doc as comments.

Sloan Foundation grant submitted

We’ve just submitted a proposal for a $125,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We’re really excited to work with Sloan, who have a great record of funding important projects in the advancement of knowledge and scholarship.

In keeping with our commitment to radical transparency and openness, we’re making this available via our GitHub repo.

By opening these kinds of documents, we reveal our inevitable failures and lose some strategic control over how we unveil our plans. But we gain accountability, transparency, and engagement with our community. We’re pretty excited about that.

Keep in mind that this is a living document that will likely go through some revisions before it’s (hopefully) accepted. And feel free to post any feedback to the mailing list.

(Update: we received the grant! Read all about it here.)

sprint report: planning the rewrite

This is the first of what will be many sprint-report blog posts. Heather and I (Jason) have drunk deeply of the agile kool-aid, and we’re excited about working in two-week sprints; we’re also excited about documenting the results of each sprint on this blog. There’s a 15-minute cap on writing these posts, though, so…don’t expect Shakespeare (that’s like a 20-minute job for sure).

The theme of this sprint was getting TI ready for a pretty major rewrite aimed at improving the documentation, API and making it easier for open-source contributors to, well, contribute. This’ll b a pretty big deal; we’re going to be working with some external devs (more on that when we’ve got official news, but it looks like there will be some funding) and it’s important to have TI in a place where it’s easy for them to contribute.

With Jason travelling most of the time and fighting food poisoning the rest of the time, Heather had to come up big. Luckily that’s the only way to come up that Heather knows. She wrote some great spec and user stories, and moved issues from the GitHub tracker into our new backlog spreadsheet. We both worked on submitting a grant application (more on that later).

Overall, we’re both pretty happy with how the sprint system is working, although it’s going to be nicer when we’re actually shipping code at the end instead of spec.

This next sprint is built around more preparation for an epic one after that, where we hope to actually get much of the rewrite done. For now, Heather will be doing more documentation, particularly of the all-important plugins that get external data into the system, while I’ll be working on my Python skills as well as getting comfortable with libraries we’ll be using.