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A lifecycle model
of the scientific
I
ntroduction
The speed of progress in science has
always been strongly dependent on how
efficiently scientists can communicate
their results to their peers and to lay-persons
willing to implement these results in new
communication
technologies and practices. For centuries the
communication chain was very slow, relying,
for instance, on tedious copying of scientific process
texts by hand. Communication was to a
large extent local, taking place orally in
the few universities then existing. The Bo-Christer Björk
invention of the printed press was a major Swedish school of Economics and Business
step forward and enabled the cost-effective Administration, Helsinki
reproduction of monographs, as well as © Bo-Christer Björk 2005
the establishment of more systematic
forms of communication, in the form of ABSTRACT: A formal model of the scientific
regularly appearing scholarly journals. communication process is presented using the
During the 20th century science became IDEF0 notation. The model provides a roadmap
recognized as the major driver for economic for policy discussions and further research. In
development and the number of scientists comparison to earlier models it is more detailed
increased dramatically. In addition to jour- and hierarchical, and includes more modelling
nals and monographs, conferences became constructs. It includes the whole communication
an important form of communication, due value chain, from initial research to the
to the increased possibilities for travel. assimilation of research results to everyday
During the latter half of the 20th century practice. Although the model treats both informal
information technology (IT) has had a and formal communication, as well as the
profound impact on the scientific publishing publishing of data, its focus is on modelling the
process. First it enabled the setting up of publishing and indexing of traditional
electronic databases of bibliographic data, peer-reviewed journal articles, and finding and
which greatly facilitated the search for relev- retrieving them. New developments enabled by the
ant publications. Secondly word processing Internet, such as open access journals and e-print
has meant increased efficiency in both the repositories, are also included.
writing of manuscripts and in the handling
of them during the printing process.
But the most dramatic effects on the
overall process have occurred during the
last 15 years or so through the Internet
and the World Wide Web in particular. It
is perhaps no coincidence that scientists
have been among the pioneers in taking
these technologies into use. Science is by
its nature both global and collaborative
and the sorts of networking capabilities
now offered are perfectly aligned with the Bo-Christer Björk
Context diagram
Do research
Perform the research
Communicate the knowledge
Communicate results informally
Publish results
Publish textual account of results
Write manuscript
Publish the results
Publish as book
Publish as monograph
Publish as conference paper
Publish as scholarly journal article
Do general publisher’s activities
Do general journal activities
Process article
Review the manuscript
Copyedit manuscript
Queue for publishing
Negotiate copyright and/or author charges
Publish article
Publish data and models
Facilitate dissemination and archiving
Facilitate retrieval of publication
Make manuscript or copy of publication available openly on the web
Bundle publications from different sources into electronic services
Integrate metadata into search services
Facilitate retrieval inside reader’s organization
Preserve publication
Study the results
Find out about publication
Search for publication
Be alerted to publication
Retrieve publication
Read publication
Apply the knowledge
Evaluate the research or researcher
the quality, the libraries that help archiving in the form of publications that in the end
and in providing access to the publications, can be printed out and studied on paper
the bibliographic services that facilitate the (irrespective of whether the publications are
identification and retrieval of publications, distributed on paper or electronically). Thus
and the readers who search for and retrieve forms of communication such as oral com-
the publications. munication, unstructured use of email and
The current version of the model has multimedia, which all are essential parts of
some limitations, which should be kept in the scientific knowledge management process,
mind. Its main emphasis is on the public- as well as publishing of data and models, are
ation and dissemination of research results only shown on a high level of abstraction in
the model. Details could be added at a later hierarchy up to seven levels deep. There are
stage, but would also add to the complexity typically three or four activity boxes on each
of the model. diagram, although there are a couple of
In the model the central unit of obser- diagrams with more activities and some with
vation is the single publication, how it is only two. Altogether, there are 80 activity
written, edited, printed, distributed, archived, boxes and around 250 labelled arrows. The
retrieved and read, and how eventually it overall hierarchical breakdown of the model
may affect practice. The scope is thus the is shown in Table 1.
full lifecycle of the publication and the Only the separate diagrams are shown in
activities of reading it, which also is reflected Table 1. Some diagrams are further broken
in the name chosen for the model. This down into separate activities, but this is not
means in practice that most of the activities shown. Note that this version of the model
take place 5–10 years after the initial writing is the third draft and that the model is
of the manuscript, but in some cases there continuously evolving based on the feedback
will be a demand to access the results even received. Due to the enlarged scope, the
decades later. model has been renamed the Scientific
The model depicts publishing and value- Communication Life Cycle Model. The earlier
added services using both paper and elec- published version was called the Scientific
tronic formats in an integrated way. Pure Publishing Life Cycle Model. A working
electronic or pure paper-based publishing report describing the earlier model has been
could be described by subsets of the model. posted on the website of the SciX project.10
The same goes for free publishing on In addition, a conference paper11 and a
the web (‘open access’), which resembles journal article12 discussing parts of it have
traditional publishing, but where certain been published.
activities such as negotiating, keeping track
of and invoicing subscriptions can be almost
entirely left out. Model walk-through
The model includes some activities that Due to the space restrictions of this article
would be typical for a scientific publisher only some central parts of the model can be
publishing several journals, allowing for explained here and the diagrams shown.
economies of scale. The activities of single- Interested readers are strongly adviced to in the long run
journal publishers could be described by a
subset. The reason for including activities
download the full model description (a the customers
35-page PDF file) from the OACS project will decide on
such as the general activities of a publisher website.13
is that these significantly influence the cost In the following the diagrams that are which business
of running individual journals in the form of shown will be identified by their hierarchical models prevail
the general overhead costs that publishers codes according to the IDEF0 standard
add to the subscription prices. notation, rather than consecutive figure
Analysing the whole process in this way numbers. The diagram A0, Do research, com-
should help in highlighting how different municate, study and implement the results, is
actors provide added value to the end cus- crucial for understanding the lifecycle view
tomers at each stage. It is therefore close in adopted in this modelling effort (Figure 1).
spirit to the concept of value-chain analysis The whole life-cycle is seen as consisting of
as defined by Porter.9 In the long run the four separate stages. The Perform the research
customers (authors and readers) will decide stage is probably the most expensive part,
on which business models prevail based on usually consisting of several hundred hours
how much added value different inter- of work effort per resulting publication, but
mediaries, such as OA journals, provide them. the one least directly affected by the effects
of the Internet (at least directly; indirectly
the effect can be substantial in terms of
Overall organization of the model
better quality of the research due to better
The current version of the SCLC-model access to existing knowledge). The Com-
includes 26 separate diagrams, arranged in a municate the knowledge activity has been
profoundly affected by the Internet and is describes activities carried out by a large
the main subject of this modelling effort. number of organizations, IT tools, etc., that
The downstream activity Apply the know- help readers find out about and retrieve
ledge is important in order to achieve the publications of interest. This is in contrast
goal of improved quality of life, but is here to the earlier informal communication
mainly included for illustrative purposes. where the author usually is directly com-
One major change compared to earlier municating with the recipients of the
versions of the model is that a separate information.
activity, Evaluate the research or researcher, The last part of the communication chain
a decision has been included. This is because the is carried out by the recipients of the
support system system fulfils two functions; one is to information. In any lifecycle studies this part
for university communicate the knowledge as efficiently as is extremely important, and has also been
possible. The other is to act as a decision profoundly affected by the Internet.
administrations, support system for university adminis- Publishing consists of two separate activ-
granting trations, granting agencies, etc. This latter ities, the writing of the manuscript, which
agencies, etc function has important repercussions on the researcher carries out alone or in a small
how researchers communicate, in particular group, usually taking into account feedback
in which journals they publish. from colleagues, and the more formal pub-
The Communicate the knowledge activity, lishing process, in which outside persons,
diagram A2, is split up into an informal and such as conference organizers, journal editors
a formal process. Informal communication is and staff, etc., participate.
carried out in the form of oral presentations The sub-process Publish the results is split
of all sorts (person-to-person meetings, into four parallel tracks which all take
conference presentations) as well as email the generic ‘Manuscript’ as input: books,
messages, whereas formal communication monographs, conference papers and peer-
(Publish results) relies on written texts and reviewed journal articles. Of these four only
on quality control by peers (Figure 2). The the part publish as scholarly journal article has
Facilitate dissemination and archiving activity at this stage been further detailed in the
model. This is because of its relative enters the activity Process article (see Figure
importance in scientific publishing. The 3).
main pipeline of this part of the model is the The Process article diagram (A221243)
input arrow Manuscript, which directly starts out with the review activities carried
out as a co-operation between the editor, motivator for the founding of both e-print
the researcher and anonymous peer aca- archives and electronic open access journals.
demics. This activity demands resources but The part of the model dealing with how
is usually not a cost item of significance for intermediaries facilitate finding out about
the publishers since reviewers usually work and retrieving material includes a distinc-
hundreds or for free (from society’s viewpoint this is, tion between open access material, which
even thousands however, a significant cost item). A new can be either in the form of manuscripts or
item compared to the earlier version of the copies of formally published papers posted in
of libraries model is the Negotiate copyright and author e-print archives, and in ‘toll-gated’ material
from all over charge activity. The rest of this diagram is a (Figure 4). The process has been split into
the world straightforward workflow of a typical article. two sub-activities in which the first models
Note in particular the value-decreasing activities carried out by different inter-
have been activity of queue for publishing, where fully mediaries, typically only once for the whole
performing the processed articles have to wait for several world market (Facilitate retrieval of public-
same archiving months due to the issue scheduling of the ation, A231), and the second the activities
function journal. Waiting does not imply a direct carried out in the local organizations of the
cost, but there may be an important oppor- readers (Facilitate retrieval inside reader’s
tunity cost involved from the viewpoint of organization, A232), thus typically thousands
the researcher and society, since the results of times for each article. From a cost view-
are poorly spread before the actual pub- point, hundreds or even thousands of
lishing. This opportunity cost is different libraries from all over the world have been
for different domains of science. It might be performing the same archiving function for
low for the humanities but is usually higher each paper version of an article.
in the STM (science, technology and For subscribed material a further split is
medicine) domain. In particular this is the made into secondary publishers who bundle
case for IT research, where developments full-text material from several different
are extremely fast. This has been a strong sources (an example is EBSCO) and sell it to
libraries, and indexing services, which help traditionally dominated the Integrate metadata
in the retrieval function only. into search services (A2313) function (see
Subscription-based indexing services have Figure 5). Over the past years researchers
have increasingly started to use general web dramatic reduction in the activities to make
search engines to try to identify interesting paper publications available inside the
publications. An effort to overcome the organizations.
quality problems related to using general The Study the results (A24) diagram struc-
search engines is the definition of the Open tures the activities of the readers of scientific
researchers Archives Initiative standard for tagging sci- publications. Note that from a cost per pub-
entific content material on the web, which lication viewpoint the activities of individual
often readers all over the world and in different
will enable dedicated harvesting search
self-archive engines to maintain a much more focused time periods should be summed up. The
interesting database of links to relevant publications. Find out about publication activity results in
the output metadata of interesting publication
publications A by-product of the heavy use of IT for
(including the location from which a paper
these purposes is the possibility that readers
they have read can subscribe to services that, based on the or electronic version can be retrieved). This
interest profiles they define, can send them output is used as the control of the retrieve
alerting email messages when something publication activity. Finally the publication
is read and the scientific information in
they might be interested in is published.
question disseminated (Figure 7). Note that
The Facilitate retrieval inside reader’s
researchers often self-archive interesting
organization (A232) sub-process shows the
publications they have read either as paper
activities carried out by the organization in copies, or today increasingly as bookmarks
which the reader works to facilitate access, or in a database.
e.g. the university library of the reader
(Figure 6). Note the inclusion of a separate
activity for the negotiations that the library Earlier models of the scientific
carries out in order to obtain the necessary communication process
licenses (the activities by library consortia Some earlier models or studies of the
could be included here as well as a sort of scientific communication process have been
overhead cost). One of the biggest changes presented in the scientific literature. Garvey
that electronic publishing has brought is the and his colleagues at the Johns Hopkins
University presented a model in the early 앫 More modelling constructs, i.e. controls
1970s, based to some part on empirical and mechanisms.
observation of scientists in the domain of 앫 Much more detailed modelling of many of
psychology.14 The Garvey–Griffith model the functions.
was a good description of how the commun- 앫 Disaggregation of inputs and outputs on
ication process functioned at a time when IT more detailed levels.
support was still lacking. The modelling 앫 Modelling of many of the new system
consisted of verbal descriptions supple- functions that have emerged as a result of
mented by graphical diagrams. A central the Internet (OA repositories, harvesters).
aspect was the integration of both formal
and informal communication of research It is hoped that the model could prove
results and also the inclusion of the research useful in providing a roadmap showing the
into the body of scientific knowledge in its place of a number of different initiatives for
domain through citations in other public- increasing access to scientific publications,
ations, inclusion in review articles, etc. within the overall system of scholarly com-
In the mid 1990s Julie Hurd re-examined munication. It could also be used a basis for
the status of the scientific communication empirical cost studies (e.g. Morris18) and a
process and took explicit account of the framework for integrating the results from a
emerging effects of the Internet (i.e. email wide variety of different studies, focusing on
and listservers and electronic publications).15 specific parts of the overall process.
She has recently written on the subject,
taking into account recent developments References
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