Comment: on Open Access

I know that what I will say is going against the main stream, but alternative points of view are important as well. As we can all see by the incredible number of new Open Access journals flourishing daily and harassing scientists and other scholars via filling email boxes with invitation to submit a paper there, Open Access it now very fashionable. And as we can read in Nature, there is a global movement even in funding agencies to promote Open Access, as a wider way to spread scientific results.

Of course, nothing can be said against the fact that, once published, we all would want our results to be accessible as largely as possible.

However, there are some risks as well.

With the former publishing model, in which Authors submit an article to a peer-reviewed journal, the Authors who do the experiments and write the paper do not have to pay more. If accepted, the paper gets published in the journal, and it is readers who will pay via (individual or institutional) subscription, or with a pay-per-view system. I don't want to discuss here the question of the pricing of the subscriptions, which can reach extremely high levels for universities which often have to maintain active tremendously large collections. Money is sparse, so often universities unfortunately have to make choice. But in this "classical" model, the interest of the journal is to only accept the best papers, so the reputation of the journal will stay high, and consumers will be willing to pay to keep their subscription.

With the Open Access model, it is a bit different. Authors submit an article to peer-reviewed journal. But, if the paper is accepted, the Authors have to PAY to make sure that the paper will be in Open Access, meaning freely accessible by anyone anytime. Great, but nothing is free, it is in fact the Authors who pay for that. Meaning, not only the Authors have to do the experiments, to write the paper, and to finally pay to have it published. Given that Reviewers work for free, the money goes all in the journal. I am not saying that the journal does not have fees and people to pay. Nor I am saying that it is a bad system. There are some excellent peer-reviewed Open Access journals, the first names coming in mind being PLoS ONE (which initiated the movement) and the Frontiers series. But still, in such a model, the interest of the journal is not necessary anymore to insure the highest level of publication, but to get the most papers published, since the money is not coming from the copies of the journal purchased (linked to the intrinsic quality of the papers inside the journal and to the overall reputation of the journal), but from the number of papers published. And hence, here is the danger to go for quantity over quality.

Having said that, I myself publish a lot of papers in Open Access journals, so I am not fundamentally against this idea (not at all). Just, I believe we still need to find the optimal way to articulate the Open Access model of publishing with the more traditional systems, in order to keep the quality of published science: only keeping the highest quality for publishing research (whatever the field, whatever the Impact Factor) can pave the way to human progress.

Lab Update

Very long time I did not post something, sorry ... A lot of interesting projects going on, which kept me busy from updating. But now, it is really time for a small update !

A lot of good things happened in the lab in the last few months, here is a short summary.

First and foremost, our approach of virtual anthropology to study cyberbehavior and virtual worlds is so far extremely rewarding. We are advancing really well on different directions, and have enough data to launch a few long-term projects (some of them having keep me away from posting and tweeting recently). As a general update, I got elected as a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute a few month ago and got promoted Associate Editor for Computers in Human Behavior (going to be official in the coming days or weeks). I can not stress enough how much I consider that this journal has an amazing potential. It is one of the oldest and clearly most prestigious academic journals on human behavior in virtual spaces, and, in contrast to most of the other journals of the field, it is trully inter-disciplinary. I was already part of the Editorial Board, and I am glad that I will be able to work more to do my best to push the journal forward.

Enough about me, now regarding the lab people ! Dr Anna Lomanowska is going to become Assistant Professor at the School of Psychology June 1st. But nonetheless, her postdoctoral grant to work in my lab got renewed one more year. And Catherine Lortie got the extremely prestigious Alexander Graham Bell grant from the three Research Council of Canada for outstanding students and research projects, which is given only to the 100 best canadian students. Of course, I am lucky to have such good people in my lab. But that also reinforces me in the idea that we should probably be doing good research, and that our working hypothesis go in the good direction.

And indeed, it shows with the publications. Since the last post (wow, was it really in January ? Shame on me !), we got a few more papers published :

Achim A, Guitton M, Jackson P, Boutin A, Monetta L (2013) On what ground do we mentalize? Characteristics of current tasks and sources of information that contribute to mentalizing judgments. Psychological Assessment, 25:117-126.

In fact, this paper was Epub ahead of Print since a good 6 months. But now at least, it is fully published. Worthy of note, it already elicited some comments and debates, which is always a good sign ...

Lortie CL, Guitton MJ (2013) Internet addiction assessment tools: dimensional structure and methodological status. Addiction, [7 May 2013, Epub ahead of print].

This paper is going to be a "must-quote", honestly. We performed a in-depth review of the different questionnaires and assessment tools developed so far to evidence Internet addiction, and we attempted to extract from the meta-analysis the general trends of how people in the field actually do perceive Internet addiction. So far, we already got some pretty good feedback. Catherine presented it in Nice at the 21st European Congress of Psychiatry (EPA) and is currently at Toronto presenting it at the Canadian Association for Neuroscience annual meeting.

Guitton MJ (2013) Telemedicine in Tinnitus: Feasibility, Advantages, Limitations and Perspectives. ISRN Otolaryngology, 2013 (2013), Article ID 218265.

With this paper, I am pretty happy. We are now succeeding to apply a bit of what we studied on human behavior in virtual spaces to medical problematics, and particularly to some which are close to my heart. More on this subject is coming soon (we are working on a few projects on tele-medicine in otolaryngology, going to be really interesting !).

And the work I presented at the PCA/ACA meeting a few months ago on the morphological conservation in human-animal hybrids in science fiction and fantasy settings (is our imagination as free as we think it is?) is now accepted for publication in Advances in Anthropology.

On the "molecular" side of our research, we have not been inactive either, with two papers published or accepted since January, both in the extremely prestigious Journal of Neuroscience :

Bories C, Husson Z, Guitton MJ, De Koninck Y (2013) Differential balance of prefrontal synaptic activity in successful versus unsuccessful cognitive aging. Journal of Neuroscience, 33:1344-1356.

and the coming accepted paper :

Arsenault D*, Dal-Pan A*, Tremblay C, Bennett DA, Guitton MJ, De Koninck Y, Tonegawa S, Calon F (Accepted) PAK inactivation impairs social recognition in 3xTg-AD mice without increasing brain deposition of tau and Abeta. Journal of Neuroscience, Accepted.

And, as a final note for this long update post, we are always looking for amazing PhD students and striking post-doctoral fellows to work on our research thematics. I have a lot of idea to explore both virtual worlds and human behavior in these virtual spaces, so do not hesitate to contact me if that sounds appealing to you !

Future of Virtual Worlds

This post is an answer, or a complement to a few other posts. The excellent post of Botgirl Questi ("Virtual worlds is dream over") which summarizes things very well, the also excellent post of Tateru Nino ("That's just plain embarrassing") which launched in the last few days a debate on the "game" aspect of Second Life, and how to classify it, and my own post ("Shrinking of communities in Second Life"), which was intended to be polemical (or at least not fully "politically correct" by being the "Devil's attorney" and mentioning that users too may be somehow guilty of the shrinking of communities in Second Life).

As Botgirl described it extremely well in her post, there is a serious loss of hope in people who were dreaming of a "Metaverse". This came due to two main phenomenon : 1) The numerous issues with Second Life, and 2) the fact that none of the other alternative Second Life-derived grids got enough power to attract a critical mass of users which would be enough to launch a real global movement.

As I wrote in the previous post, it is more than just an issue on platform, it is a way deeper issue, which is: how do we want the Metaverse to be shaped?

What made the success of Second Life was the fact that nobody needed to be a programmer to enter the virtual world, and to become part of it. Sure, some communities of builders emerged, and some individuals did truly amazing work as “builders”, “fashion designers”, “SL photographers” ... but the vast majority of users did not. They simply “lived” their Second Life, rather fully (which explains also the extremely high number of “Adult” oriented SIMs). And what was amazing in Second Life is that NUMEROUS independent communities were co-existing in relative harmony. I believe there is nothing like a “SLebrity”, but there were a lot of “community SLebrities”. Some people in Second Life got famous among some circles (sometimes hundreds, or even thousands, of people) for “blogging” about SL and the Metaverse, but were vastly ignored by a majority of users. Some people from some very strong communities, let's say for instance, the Gorean community, reached a similar status of “Legend”, and were known or heard of by any people in SL Gor, but there name was never mentioned in other communities. In Star Wars Role-Play, some people were known by all (for instance the former leader of the Hutt Council, Darmutta the Hutt), and their words were extremely respected ... but if a Hutt comes into a non-Star Wars SIM, people would probably laugh at him a lot.

This superimposition of various communities was I think a key in Second Life's success. Second Life reached a lot of people. It was revolutionary because it succeeded to reach a lot of people.

The new platforms are not succeeding that so far. One issue I think is that they are mostly doing the same thing than Second Life. Less expensive, more open ... anything goes ... but it is still very similar in a lot of aspects. And, some are less “user-friendly” that Second Life used to be. Without any experience of virtual spaces, you could navigate your way in Second Life almost intuitively. Without previous experience of Second Life, it is in some platform rather complicated to build something …

But the Metaverse is not linked to a single platform. We already had such a discussion few months ago on this blog ("Metaverse, Hyperverse, Cyberverse"). New tools, such as augmented reality, human-machine interfaces ... the possibilities are endless.

An issue still is the “democratic” aspects of virtual worlds. A problem I see in the current avatars of the “Metaverse” is the existence of an “elite” of people travelling from one platform to another (in “platform”, I include blogs and twitter too), very active and very involved. But I fail to see a democratisation of the Metaverse currently. A true Metaverse will emerge and exist only when (much) more users will come and join. A lot of attempts to use the Metaverse for something else than just being there often failed (I think particularly about education ... a lot of places tried to have courses or lectures in Second Life, to conclude that it was easier to do it in normal class or in tele-conference). That does not mean that virtual worlds can not be used for educational purposes. Just, we need to think to that differently (I say that, but I am not claiming to be better than the others nor to have the magical answer on that). Virtual worlds have potential for education, but we did not sized it fully yet. Same goes for a lot of other applications.

So, if the virtual world of Second Life may be not giving us too much hope, in no way would I say that the Metaverse is over. Virtual worlds are the future, I am rather sure of that !

Lab Update: Media Coverage

Some excellent Media Coverage for this New Year !

As expected, the "Virtually Naked: Virtual environment reveals sex-dependent nature of skin disclosure" paper published in PLoS ONE got a lot of media coverage. Some comments were really nice, some less ... but that is due I think to the provocative subject of the paper. However, if people actually READ the paper itself (and not just the press resume), they can see that we were extremely cautious with what we said. Still, a question coming often is : And ? What does that mean ? Well, two answers to that I guess : 1) virtual spaces allowed us to study human behavior without the external (environmental) constraints (and the "social" constraints, even if arguable, but in the paper you can see we did an experiment on this aspect); and 2) it does have important practical implications too. When we will want to design efficient medical virtual spaces, we will need to control for all the parameters of the avatars. Including, how they are named (Guitton MJ (2010) Cross-modal compensation between name and visual aspect in socially active avatars. Computers in Human Behavior, 26:1772-1776), how they look like (Giard F, Guitton MJ (2010) Beauty or realism: The dimensions of skin from cognitive sciences to computer graphics. Computers in Human Behavior, 26:1748-1752), how they create group according to their appearance (Lortie CL, Guitton MJ (2011) Social organization in virtual settings depends on proximity to human visual aspect. Computers in Human Behavior, 27:1258-1261 or Lortie CL, MJ Guitton (2012) Looking similar promotes group stability in a game-based virtual community. Games for Health Journal, 1:274-278), how they relate to a community (Guitton MJ (2012) The immersive impact of meta-media in a virtual world. Computers in Human Behavior, 28 : 450-455 or Guitton MJ (2012) Living in the Hutt Space: Immersive Process in the Star Wars Role-Play community of Second Life. Computers in Human Behavior, 28:1681-1691), or how they dress (this new paper in PLoS ONE). Yes, taken individually, those papers may seems strange, but we need to get the "bigger picture", which is, understanding the multimodal reality of an avatar.

Second nice point : the Encyclopedia of Cyber Behavior (edited by Prof. Zheng Yan, in which I wrote the Chapter on Cyber Behaviors in Canada) got nominated for the Outstanding Reference Sources Award by the American Library Association ! This award recognizes  and recommends "the most outstanding reference publications of the year for small and medium-sized libraries". Well, the Outstanding Reference Sources Committee still has to do the final review of each title nominated, but still, it is a very positive outcome for this fascinating project. This Encyclopedia also got a really nice review published in Choice Magazine (from the Association for College and Research Libraries, which is a division of the American Library Association).

Comment: Shrinking of Communities in Second Life

Second Life is shrinking. It is a fact, no need to be a big expert of the Metaverse to see it.

The number of SIMs is decreasing everyday a bit more (most would say due to the extremely high fees). For instance, we have now about 44 SIMs popping when doing a search with SWRP while they were around 78 a year ago. But more important, the SL communities are shrinking too.

Now, a question could be : who is guilty?

And all blogs so far point to Linden Lab. It is true, the strategy of our beloved LL regarding the management of the Second Life communities if far to be optimal. Well, let's be fully honest: if they would want to kill Second Life they would not do it in another way. But still, I think the Lindens are not the only one to blame.

I think that part of the problem is us, the "old timers".

Some times ago, I was reading an interesting blog post. In substance, it was saying: "Do you know any "Resident" who achieved anything?" (for those non familiar with SL, people there used to have a first and a family name, but then few years ago, the family name was abolished and every new avatar is named "Resident"). The author of the blog was mentioning that during her three first months of existence in SL, she was doing a lot of amazing things (which by the way was true), and even more by six month of her second life. And that, yet any Resident would have reached an even slight level of SL celebrity due to their SL achievements.

Maybe. But something has to be said: when the old timers rezzed the first time, all doors were open. Anything was possible, Second Life was a new world, the (virtual) sky was the limit. Is it still the case ? I honestly doubt it.

Let me explain my mind a bit. SL communities were already quite difficult to penetrate. I am well placed to know it, since I explored a few of them from a (virtual) anthropological point of view (and I am still doing it, as my interest for Second Life as a premise of the Metaverse is not dead yet). 

But since some time (let's say, a year or so), things are getting more and more complicated. It now gets simply impossible to reach the community for new comers without previous experience (at least impossible without putting really disproportionate efforts in the process). If we take back the example of Star Wars Role-Play SIMs. I wrote above that the number of SIMs appearing under SWRP keyword. But if the number of SIMs decreased, the traffic did not. Of course, mathematically, the TOTAL traffic decreased, but the individual traffic of individual SIMs (let's say, Little Mos Esley, Dantooine Jedi Enclave, or Nar Shaddaa) is stable. People are still here. The same people. We observe more endogamy. And that is not specific of Star Wars Role-Play, I am observing a few other communities of SL (role-play communities, or not role-play community). Endogamy is growing. As a correlate, new comers are having more and more difficulties to enter into the community. Another phenomenon I observed since some time: even in role-play SIMs, most of the conversations are now strictly carried on in IM (instant message function of Second Life), while before, most of the role-play was done in public chat. That too does not help new comers to integrate easily. Of course, it is not an absolute rule, some people are still incredibly nice to newbies as it used to be the case few years ago. But, more and more people are "newbie-unfriendly". Maybe not newbie-unfriendly, but "neutral" (in the sense of ignoring). And in a supposedly social environment, "neutral" equals "unfriendly" (does not however equal aggressive). As a result, communities in Second Life are shrinking. Even worse, I see more and more the very same persons in SIMs with somehow related thematic. Well, of course, it was always the case. But what I mean is that we see more and more ONLY those very same persons, once again, attesting the shrinking of the communities ... and logically reinforcing the bounds between the already present members, but making new players difficult to enter the game.

So, we all complain about the Lindens. But we should ask ourselves what changed in us. Because we are here since longer than others, we "saw all, did all, know all" of Second Life, and took all what it had to offer. We lost this amazed eyes that we had when we went out of Help Island the first time. And all of us, happily rich of the knowledge we got from our experience in Second Life, we take one of these three directions: 1) we leave it at all ... it was a good time but it is over now, 2) we stay there, but become cynical to newcomers, 3) we move to OpenSim or other platforms. None of these solutions is satisfactory. The third one particularly looks like a kind of a trap: OpenSim and other "Metaverse" platforms are kind of based on Second Life, or derived from it at least. Meaning, they mostly attract former users of Second Life. They are so far lacking the "democratical" dimension that Second Life had at a time. We again stay "between us", between "old timers", within a "Metaverse elite".

Now the real question is, do we want the Metaverse to really emerge ? If so, how could it really emerges if only kept by a restricted number of people ? To make it work, it should be open to the largest number of people, nope ?

Lab Update

Some time I did not wrote ... so, like always, a lot of things happened. But for now, one news is really important : after two years of postdoc in the lab, Anna Lomanowska got a position of Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology of our glorious Laval University, beginning June 2013 ! Congratulations, Anna !

Well, her research program does include some projects on virtual spaces, so we will have one more excellent researcher working on this field at Laval University ! Looking toward some really good collaborations and interactions between our groups !

And by the way, I am extremely glad that my 400th Tweet was to announce such a great news !

Lab Update

September ... new academic year is beginning, and with that, some changes in the lab. First, we lost our extremely good undergraduate summer students Charlotte and Marie-Ève ... Summer is finished, that's life. But we gained a new lab member, Maxime, who is beginning is Master degree and who will be working on knowledge sharing in virtual spaces (among other things).

I finally officially joined the Editorial Board of "Computers in Human Behavior", one of the best (if not the best) peer-reviewed journal in the field of human-machine interactions, of cyberpsychology and of computer-mediated communication, as member of the Scientific Board. With the explosion of virtual spaces, this 18 years old journal is having its impact growing (and is Impact Factor growing too !), and I am very happy and honored to join the Board !

New year coming, new projects, and particularly new research projects ! Still exploring cyberbehavior, but we need more people for that, so amazing graduate students or fascinating post-doctoral fellows are always strongly encouraged to come and join us in the funny (virtual) world of cyberscientists !