Maurice Vanderfeesten, MSc.

Age: 33
Interview: 21.11.2012

Profile

Maurice Vanderfeesten studied information science and is currently project coordinator at the department ICT & Research at SURF . He plays a key role in defining and implementing the Dutch Scholarly Communication Infrastructure. He participated in studies on enhanced publications and related technical trends, interoperability and open standards, and development of demonstrators for depositing, archiving, and harvesting of complex objects in repositories. In the field of knowledge infrastructure Maurice has been actively involved in coordinating activities related to persistent identifiers and usage statistics exchange.

View on enhanced publications

With regard to the ratio digital/printed publications Maurice uses roughly 80% in the digital format, which is particularly adroit for finding and quick reading, and 20% in a printed version, the latter mostly large texts, which can be more easily marked up and annotated on paper .

He makes a distinction between two kinds of enhanced publications: (1) publications linked through persistent identifiers with other information (i.e. a set of information hold together by a persistent pointer infrastructure), and (2) publications with a rich user interface, which contains visualizations, interactive graphs etc. The first is a prerequisite to implement the latter.

As an author in the field of knowledge infrastructure he observes a lack of adequate tools to obtain, verify and insert identifiers with a persistency policy. These are essential to guarantee a durable access to published content, because URLs are vulnerable in this respect and may easily get broken without clear organisational policies concerning persistent identification and resolution. Persistent identifiers should be based on Open Standards and independent of the underlying technology (e.g. hyperlinking ) and the commercial services that happen to exist in the rapidly evolving future of this young digital era.

Built-in visualizations like molecule models such as the Utopia reader allows, are attractive but probably not a ‘must’ for researchers, because they have already access to it. Sidebar links to additional background information, for example to databases such as Wolfram Alpha, are ‘nice to have’. A pivot table is useful for data exploration and what-if questions. Most interesting would be a service that uses data feeds and offer facilities to explore and to analyze the data set. This should be based on international standards like GData (Google Data Protocol) or the OData (Open Data protocol).

Top three

With regard to features of enhanced publications, Maurice’s top three comprises:

1. Mechanisms that prevent information overload and that provide additional details just-in-time. This will help the user to concentrate on the current task of reading without being distracted.

2. Information filtering is needed in bibliographic expIoration. This should immediately make clear what the problem and conclusions are. Many abstracts tend to be incomplete and are rather an introduction than a concise outline of the article. A quick overview of images is helpful to form a further impression of the publication’s content.

3. An additional feature that is welcome in the explorative stage, is a clear indication of the relevance of the publication as assessed by the group of the peers as expressed through ranking, download frequency, a citation index and comments by other experts (impact measurement as available through services such as ImpactStory, Altmetric and Plum Analytics). If this goes together with a persistent pointer infrastructure it will be possible to backtrack our knowledge, and indicate where some theory in the chain of publications started to be invalid. The same applies to scholarly discussions on the web: if persistent identifiers are used, the authors of blogs can easily refer to content elsewhere. In that case annotations and comments don’t need necessarily to be on the same web page as the article.

Audio fragments

· Persistent identifiers  (types, usage and relevance; 5:57)

· Top three (7:35)

· Data exploration service on basis of data feeds (0:38)