{"id":643,"date":"2017-12-12T11:23:07","date_gmt":"2017-12-12T11:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/how-journals-make-assertions-an-insight-into-the-publishing-industry\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T06:38:39","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T06:38:39","slug":"how-journals-make-assertions-an-insight-into-the-publishing-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/how-journals-make-assertions-an-insight-into-the-publishing-industry","title":{"rendered":"How journals make assertions: An insight into the publishing industry"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was 19, I took a trip to the United States. I travelled across country by bus, and was able to do a lot of reading as I moved from state to state. One of the books I read was The Effective Executive<\/em> by Peter Drucker. A key message within the book is to: \u201cknow your business.\u201d For example, if you think you\u2019re in the oil business, you\u2019re wrong. You\u2019re actually in the energy business. If you\u2019re in the postal business, you\u2019re really in communications, and you\u2019d better understand the impact of e-mail!<\/p>\n

Assertions journals make about their content<\/strong><\/p>\n

What \u201cbusiness\u201d is the scholarly publishing industry in? The content business? No. What business are journals in? I would say that journals are in the \u201cassertions\u201d business. Here are some of the assertions that journals make: This content is worth reading because it is novel and because it is original; These are the authors; These are the institutions; The content has been through peer review; The statistics support the conclusions<\/em>, etc. If you think about the work that a journal does, it\u2019s really collecting a group of assertions about the content. It\u2019s the assertions that make the content valuable.<\/p>\n

Historically, assertions have been implied by journal format. A journal didn\u2019t need to explicitly say \u201cthis is the title,\u201d \u201cthese are the authors,\u201d \u201cthis is the abstract.\u201d Instead, all of this was woven in to the format that a journal used. It was a good way of communicating assertions for the past 350 years. This dates all the way back to Henry Oldenburg\u2019s Philosophical Transactions<\/em><\/a>: using format to communicate assertions.<\/p>\n

The need to validate assertions<\/strong><\/p>\n

But the assertion business is changing, and fast! To begin with, it\u2019s increasingly easy to make false or inaccurate assertions. If format is all a journal is using to communicate assertions, anyone else can replicate that format. Clearly that isn\u2019t the case. What about the quality of assertions made? If you happen to make an unsubstantiated assertion these days, there\u2019s a whole industry, including outlets like Retraction Watch<\/a>, outing these kinds of failures. Format is no longer a guarantee of assertion quality.<\/p>\n

Research funders are spending $1.6 trillion a year<\/a>— $50,000 a second\u2014so understandably they want better tools to evaluate research output. They want higher quality, accurate, granular assertions. Those assertions must be machine readable, not just human readable. Return on research investment can be proven if assertions are more reliable.<\/p>\n

From a journal perspective, is this an opportunity or a threat?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s not think about content workflow. Rather let\u2019s think about an assertion workflow. An author makes a number of assertions about what they submit to a journal: I\u2019m an author. These are my co-authors. Here\u2019s who funded the paper. Here are the methods I used. The data supports the results, etc.<\/em> One of the things that the journal does is evaluate those assertions for accuracy. Then, the journal makes its own assertions: This work has been through peer review. This is original. <\/em>Next, the journal boils the assertions down to published content. This is where it\u2019s important to understand that the process of creating assertions is not the same as the process of creating format.<\/p>\n

Tools journals use to validate\u00a0assertions<\/strong><\/p>\n

Semantic tagging:<\/strong> This means taking a look at the process or, from a technical perspective, at the workflow infrastructure. How<\/em> assertions are tagged can be critical to their usefulness in workflow. Take the word Brown, for example. Is this word a university? A name? A color? A street address? Let\u2019s use simple tagging. For example, <b> Brown <\/b>, tells software applications that Brown should be bolded: Brown<\/strong>. Still, that is format, which is not a reliable way to communicate assertions, because it doesn\u2019t say anything about what Brown is.<\/p>\n

Using semantic tagging, such as <author> Brown <\/author>, it is now clear what Brown is: an Author. However, because different publications might use different semantic tags to describe an author (e.g. Contributor, Author, or Article Author) there is still some ambiguity. What\u2019s needed is an agreed way of tagging the author<\/em>. This is where Document Type Definitions (DTDs) come in.<\/p>\n

Formatting:<\/strong> The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is one way<\/em> (DTD) of agreeing to tag scholarly journal data. The software here knows that Brown is an author from reading the tags around the name. A style sheet can then be used to apply formatting \u2018rules\u2019 that anything tagged as an author should be represented in bold. Thus the word ‘author’\u00a0is bolded and positioned in the correct area of the manuscript.<\/p>\n

Formatting is nothing but presentation. And when there\u2019s talk of formatting, XML cannot be far behind. It may be tempting to think of XML as just a \u2018fancy\u2019 and convenient way to do formatting. But it\u2019s more than that. Journals can change the styling ruleset to say, for example, all author names should be shown in blue, and from that point on, that will happen.<\/p>\n

Persistent identifiers:<\/strong> Still, in order to get the maximum value out of XML, persistent identifiers<\/em> need to be used. Let\u2019s take ORCID for the case of the author named Brown. In this case, ORCID will reliably tell the software which specific Brown the journal is referring to. Using API integrations, a journal can validate that it\u2019s not just anyone<\/em> asserting which Brown we\u2019re talking about, that there is an authoritative<\/em> source (i.e. ORCID) doing that. If an unsophisticated user decides to manually enter ORCID iDs to manuscript XML, that does not achieve anything other than adding a bit of text to the XML output. The problem is that the text-entered ORCID hasn\u2019t been validated anywhere. The \u2018right\u2019 way to add an ORCID iD to XML is through an API call to the ORCID database. This empowers users themselves to validate their ORCID iD. Outputting a validated iD in XML is a reliable assertion<\/em> that flows through the workflow.<\/p>\n

This same approach can be taken to add more reliable assertions to workflow. For example, by identifying an institution to whom an author has an association. This is possible, for example, if the author and\/or the institution has validated their institutional affiliation to \u201cNortheastern University\u201d in China. This validation is possible through Ringgold institutional identifiers<\/a>. Now the assertion that author Brown belongs to Northeastern University in China is validated and can persist in workflow. This type of assertion is valuable to funders since it helps them track their investment. But we can go further. Now we know who <\/em>did the research and which institution(s)<\/em> they belong to but we do not know what<\/em> they did. Here CRediT roles<\/a> can assert the contribution, and degree of contribution in workflow. Open Funder Registry<\/a> identifiers can confirm who funded the research, citations can be asserted using DOI linking, and so on. This logic of interconnected assertions can be applied to many aspects of journal workflow.<\/p>\n

Tools to aid\u00a0peer review:<\/strong> Speaking of journal workflow, let\u2019s look at peer review. In peer review systems such as Editorial Manager, there are tools to support making and validating additional journal assertions: Has this content been plagiarized? Is this content novel? <\/em>(Similarity Check<\/a>, Meta<\/a>) Are the citations accurate? <\/em>(Reference linking<\/a>) Have conflicts of interest been disclosed? Are the statistics accurate? <\/em>(StatReviewer<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Once created, these assertions can be passed to other tools for other purposes such as searching for reviewers, acknowledging reviewer activity, and estimating and processing APCs. In other words, once you have valuable assertions, your content can \u201ctalk\u201d!<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a world where \u201ccontent wants to be free,\u201d assertions represent an opportunity for publishers to add value and generate revenue.\u00a0 The growth of Open Access and Open Science underscores this point and accelerates the need for journals to think beyond \u201cselling content.\u201d This requires transitioning from content-based workflows to assertion-based workflows. The journal\u2019s peer review system is an assertion management system that helps publishers grow and manage assertions via integration with persistent identifiers and taxonomies. Publisher marketing departments will need to focus their messages not just on offering \u201cthe best content\u201d but on having \u201cthe best assertions.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is more important than ever for publishers to understand the beating heart of their business. The lessons from Peter Drucker\u2019s book that I read while on the road in 1981 are more relevant than ever!<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Recommended reading:<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n