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Introduction by Alexander Refsum Jensenius (video)

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Introduction by Alexander Refsum Jensenius (video)

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In this short video, Alexander Refsum Jensenius talks about the motivation for the workshop. He is the current chair of the NIME steering committee.

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Introduction to NIME Publication Ecosystem Workshop

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Following the successful NIMEHub workshop at NIME 2016 and Open NIME workshop at NIME 2019, as well as discussions in a workgroup on developing a new template for the NIME conference, we propose a workshop to push the discussions about publication strategies in the NIME community forwards. Publication should here be understood in a broad sense, meaning different types of output of the community, including but not limited to textual outputs.

One reason this discussion is relevant now is the rapid and radical changes in people’s working environments due to the coronavirus crisis. But this is also linked to the more long term changes that will be necessary due to the need to reduce travel because of climate change. In addition comes the general accessibility concerns, making it possible for everyone to contribute to the NIME community, independent of whether they are able to attend a physical conference once a year or not. All of these factors may push more NIME activities toward virtual or physical-virtual communication.

Another reason for a needed change is the increasing focus on more openness in research, which has recently received a lot of political attention through the Plan S initiative, The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), EU’s Horizon Europe, funder’s requirements of FAIR data principles, and so on. Another important reason for a needed change of practice, is the recent covid-19 lock-down, general need to reduce travel due to climate change issues, as well as accessibility concerns.

The NIME community has embraced openness principles since the beginning, but has not yet fully exploited this in a systematic manner. Recent attempts in developing a new paper template for the NIME conference have been unsuccessful due to technical limitations, problems of long-term preservation, usability, and so on. It has proven similarly difficult to come up with common solutions for data/media sharing. People in the community have different interests and skills, so it is important to find solutions that are both innovative and user-friendly at the same time. The longevity of chosen solutions is also important, since NIME is central to an increasing number of people’s careers. Hence we need to balance exploration of new solutions with the need for preservation and stability.

In addition to finding solutions for the NIME conference itself, the establishment of a NIME journal has been discussed for several years. This discussion has surfaced again during the testing of a new paper template for the conference. But rather than thinking about the conference proceedings and a journal as two separate projects, one could imagine a larger NIME publication ecosystem which could cover everything from draft manuscripts, complete papers, peer-reviewed proceedings papers, and peer-reviewed journal papers. This could fit into a more “Science 2.0”-like system in which the entire research process is open from the beginning. This is an approach that is similar to how the Research Catalogue is a first step on the way to publishing in JAR, and the way that systems like Open Science Framework,  Authorea and PubPub in various ways support early publication, open/iterative peer review, and so on. One could here also think about the way Registered Reports are used in some experimental fields. The idea with this publication format is to write up the study design, hypothesis and methodology, which is peer reviewed and accepted before the study is carried out. This has been an important step in supporting the publication also of “negative” and non-spectacular results, as long as the study is well done. A similar format could be useful also in a NIME setting, particularly when it comes to evaluation studies and other empirical studies.

The recent coronavirus crisis, and the changing of NIME 2020 into an online event, will most likely continue to blur the boundaries between what happens at the conference, and what goes on in the community during the rest of the year. All in all, we see a number of exciting possibilities for the community to explore. There is also a growing number of technical solutions being developed that may support such a shift. The aim of the workshop is therefore to:

1. Discuss how a larger publication eco-system built around (but not limited to) the annual conference could work

2. Brainstorm and sketch concrete (technical) solutions to support such an idea

3. Agree on some concrete steps on how to proceed with the development of such ideas the coming year

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Reflections on online publication ecosystems by Anna Xambó (video)

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Reflections on online publication ecosystems by Anna Xambó (video)

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Anna Xambó was paper co-chair for NIME 2019. Links to material discussed in her video:

WAC online proceedings

WAC YouTube channel

WAC website repo

WAC Pre-submission draft feedback

WoNoMute website & blog

ICLI 2020 website

ICLI > Meta.Morf

ICLI online proceedings

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Reflections on Online Publication Ecosystems: Three Case Studies

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Summary of the pre-workshop survey (padlet)

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Summary of the pre-workshop survey (padlet)

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A survey was sent out on nime.org in June 2020. Below is a padlet summarizing the feedback that we received.

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A few points about nime.org by Charles Martin (video)

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A few points about nime.org by Charles Martin (video)

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Charles Martin is the current webmaster for nime.org.

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Reflections on Publication formats and the arts by Luiz Naveda (video)

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Reflections on Publication formats and the arts by Luiz Naveda (video)

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As a challenging interaction between two different epistemologies, the representation of music and arts in the academic discourse is always problematic. The network of established submission formats, institutions, ranks and the need for proper evaluation processes contribute to the tough environment for arts. In this presentation, we will show the first results of an ongoing project that maps how publications support artistic creativity and innovation in the field of arts. In this first phase, we analysed 200 high ranked journals from a dataset of 800 journals present in the Brazilian rank of publication in arts (Qualis). By looking at how art journals manage submission formats, media and other elements of scientific reporting we try to understand how we develop better formats for the field of arts.  These preliminary results show that the environment for arts is strongly oriented by textual reporting and traditional methods, mostly inherited from other disciplines.  We also discuss how actual publishing strategies available elsewhere could help to improve the dissemination in arts, its interfaces and concepts, including the specific challenges we observe in the NIME conferences.

Luiz Naveda (Professor of musicology- UEMG)

Gerson de Melo (Master in Arts - UEMG)

Rômulo Rodrigues (Undergraduate student in Visual Arts - UEMG)

Igor Tolentino (Undergraduate student Music- UEMG)

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Publication formats and the arts: a preliminary report

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Reflections on previous discussions about a NIME journal by Michael Gurevich

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Reflections on previous discussions about a NIME journal by Michael Gurevich

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I'd like to start by thanking the organizers of the workshop for advancing this much needed discussion! I wanted to contribute by providing a tiny bit of history and context for the present discussion, but mostly to share some nuts and bolts information I learned about launching a journal a few years ago. I would welcome if there are people among the workshop participants who have more experience with running a journal who can add more up-to-date information, refute everything I say, or otherwise advance the conversation. But here's what I know, in case it's helpful.

Background
In 2014 there was some momentum and discussion among some longtime NIME community members toward creating a "NIME Journal." As I recall, there were a few in-person conversations at NIME 2014, which themselves were preceded by conversations among the steering committee. What a NIME Journal would be was somewhat ill-defined, but I think we all had a shared general understanding of what an academic journal is and its role in professional academic life as distinct from conference proceedings. (But what a NIME Journal will be is still very much an important topic of discussion!)

After consulting with Alexander and Michael Lyons, I approached Michigan Publishing, the umbrella organizing that includes the University of Michigan Press and Michigan Journals to learn more about their journal publishing division, to understand what would be involved in creating a journal with them, and to assess whether they would be a suitable platform for a NIME journal. Michigan Journals has about 30 online, peer reviewed titles, mostly open access. Among academic journal publishers they have sort of carved out their brand as being low-cost, open-access, encouraging and supportive of creative commons licensing, and providing a la carte options to journal editors.

Bearing in mind that this was now 6 years ago, so it's possible that much has changed, I revisited my notes and thought I'd share what I learned in that conversation. I should clarify that I'm not offering this information to advocate for Michigan Journals if there is consensus to go in the direction of an online journal, but really just to pass along the information, which I think includes useful considerations regardless of the platform. Michigan Journals staff shared the attached "Orientation" document, which I think helps spell out the steps and realities involved in launching a journal. I revisited my notes from our meeting and will recount those here:

Journal Organization
The first step in launching a journal would be to establish an editorial board and managing editors, and determining an institutional or organizational home for the journal (if any). Note that the institutional/organizational home is not necessarily the same as the publishing platform or host. The institutional home has to do with who funds the journal rather than who hosts it. So although I refer to "Michigan Journals" as a 'publisher', in reality they are the publishing platform  or host. So, for example, the journal could be hosted by Michigan Journals, but it could be "The Journal of the Society for New Interfaces for Musical Expression" (if such an org existed) or it could be "Published by Queen Ramonda University through a grant from the Wakanda Arts and Humanities Council." There can also be no formal entity behind it—it could just be an independent editorial board—although there would need to be a clear and compelling ongoing funding plan. Regardless of the organization, I'd recommend creating some kind of foundational document that establishes how the board is composed, succession, dispute resolution, ethics & code of conduct, and many etceteras.

Platform
A basic question is whether to self-publish a journal or to work with a publishing platform. There are obviously pros and cons that I won't spell out here, except to say that a platform should at minimum be able to offer their expertise and experience (if not explicitly their services) in dealing with many of the basics such as hosting, indexing, article/issue registration, etc. Then there are questions of design/layout, review platforms,copy-editing, typesetting, promotion, publicity, etc. Cumulatively, this is A LOT OF WORK, and anyone launching a journal needs to be realistic about how much of it they are realistically able to take on, especially given that this will almost certainly be unpaid labor which, at least for faculty in the U.S., counts as "service" (i.e., nominally 10% of your job and relatively unimportant when it comes to career advancement). My assumption is that you'll get what you pay for, i.e., a platform with high fees/costs will do more of that for you and vice versa.

Fit
If there were desire to go with an established publishing platform, then there is a basic division between academic presses and commercial publishers, and within those categories there would be a question of the alignment of priorities between the publisher and the journal's governing body. My sense is that a commercial publisher is not likely to be aligned with the values and priorities of much of the NIME community. At the time, as I understood the priorities (which had admittedly been discussed among a very limited segment of the NIME community), it seemed that the priorities of the NIME community and of Michigan Journals were very much in sync. They encouraged open access, creative commons licensing, minimal costs, and in general a DIY approach. They were interested in developing and experimenting with embedded media and embedded interactive content. Although we didn't look in depth at how much their platform would actually support they were open to exploring possibilities and being experimental—the possibility of having artistic work as well as more traditional written articles.

Costs
Launching a journal will have costs. At the time, the basic bare minimum costs with Michigan Journals were ~$2000 to start up, $200 per year for hosting and $20 per article. But this did NOT include: design services (creating a custom look/layout), typesetting (if we wanted to produce pdf articles), copy editing, a custom domain and landing page, a submission management system, or any editorial assistance. None of these is strictly necessary, though some may be useful. All would add to the cost. Some were available through Michigan Journals for extra fees. Most journals also have a (paid) part-time editorial assistant at minimum, which would certainly add to the costs.

Funding
Although the costs for a DIY operation can be relatively low, they are real, and one of the places we got stuck in 2014 was the question of who would bear the costs. I was told that many journals are funded initially (for the first 2-5 years) by a grant from someone on the editorial team's home institution. Most others have a professional society that provides some or all of their funding through annual dues or remittances from conference registrations. Some charge a small author's fee to generate some revenue, or a nominal submission fee (on the order of $25/article). One would of course need to be realistic regarding how much revenue can be raised through different means.

Submission/Review
I assume this landscape may have changed significantly in the last 6 years. At the time, a submission/review system wasn't something that was available directly through Michigan Journals. Some titles used Open Journal Systems, but most found the software too buggy/undocumented/difficult to use. The bottom line was that with them, peer review needed to be managed by the editors and there was no great free system available. There is also significant room for innovation here. Open peer review?

Copyright
The journal needs to have a copyright policy. Michigan Journals preferred creative commons. One intriguing consideration is to allow individual authors to specify the CC 'level' rather than enforcing it on the scale of the whole journal. Copyright is a serious consideration for media, software, or other non-'article' content that may be part of the journal. E.g., there may be performance rights issues for media content where the performers aren't the copyright owners. For media embedding they used youtube/vimeo for the live version but retained archival versions on the U-M library servers.

There are certainly many other considerations, but these are at least the ones that were foremost on our minds a few years ago when the subject of a NIME Journal was explored in at least some depth. I hope you found this information useful. I will only be able to attend the second hour of the workshop so would be happy to discuss any of this in person at that time.

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Ten questions from Michael Lyons (video)

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Ten questions from Michael Lyons (video)

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Michael Lyons was one of the co-founders of NIME.

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Ten Questions Concerning the NIME Publication Ecosystem

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Just wanted to highlight that the NIME Website is an open GitHub repository. Feel free to leave issues if you find something broken or having ideas and fork/hack on it if you want :-D

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Questions about development documentation and replicability of existing NIMEs by Filipe Calegario

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Questions about development documentation and replicability of existing NIMEs by Filipe Calegario

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How could we make more people to experiment the different NIMEs created in our community?
How could we foster replicability as a pedagogical tool for new comers?
How could we combine or allow combination of NIME ideas by proper documenting for replicability?
How to document not only the resulting performance but also the development process to allow interested people to reproduce, replicate, remake an existing NIME?

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Reflections on practice-based research by Jack Atherton

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Reflections on practice-based research by Jack Atherton

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I think that one of the major obstacles to NIME researchers codifying knowledge into journal articles (or even the conference as it stands now) in a rigorous way is that people who follow practice-based or research through design methods are often not very explicit about what knowledge they are contributing through their writing. This is how we end up with papers that are either just descriptions of performances or engineering diagrams. I recently came across this heavily-cited paper from CHI that outlines how researchers practicing Research Through Design might contribute to the HCI discipline. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1240624.1240704

The paper lays out the necessary components of a research paper in a way that seems to be highly aligned with how many people practice NIME research:

The background is a synthesis of "true knowledge" (from the sciences and humanities), "how knowledge" (from engineering), and "real knowledge" (from anthropology and prior design research, understanding humans and what has worked well in the past or what is valued by the community).

The contributed research outcomes are twofold: (1) a discussion of what "question" the artifact is trying to answer, how that question has evolved over the work, and an articulation of a preferred state of the world; (2) artifacts, including models, prototypes, products, and most importantly, documentation of process, so that others can understand deeply what you did and how you did it, possibly replicating the process for themselves.

The paper articulates that research knowledge is embedded in created artifacts, but only if they are created with specific intentions in mind to find research knowledge and to work toward creating the right thing (as opposed to a commercially viable thing or other aims).

The paper articulates that two design researchers approaching the same problem with the same values will invariably come up with completely different results, which nevertheless are both valid research outcomes, resulting in:

The paper recommends that evaluation of this kind of research be based on (1) documentation of and justification of process, (2) articulation of invention -- why is your integration of true, how, and real knowledge novel?, (3) relevance: framing the work in the real world, and articulating why working toward the preferred state is necessary given our current context, and (4) extensibility: presenting knowledge in a way that others can learn from it and apply it in the future.

I think that if more people work in this way, it could advance our understanding of how to create and interpret knowledge in our field. A renewed focus on extensibility would help NIME research build on itself over time rather than being a repository of siloed projects. In regards to evaluation, right now, there is also a heavy focus on pilot user studies that attempt to prove the usability or some other aspect of a project in a quantitative way; these studies, having at most dozens of users, are usually not rigorous enough to prove anything beyond a question of a doubt unless follow-up research is performed (and it is often not). In many cases, this kind of evaluation is not well-aligned with the work: the pursuit of much of NIME research is not to build something with a performance increase (engineering, e.g. much of the work at ISMIR) or to prove something is true (science, e.g. much of the work at SMPC), but to build the right thing (design) and to articulate why a particular preferred state of the world is something that we all must collectively strive for.