Open Access Archivangelism

Eight new Green OA mandates bring ROARMAP's total institutional/departmental/funder mandates to 182 -- for a grand total of 252 if we include the 70 thesis mandates. (More are coming soon, especially from Portugal.)

Here are the November 2010 mandates:

Institutional Mandates:

PORTUGAL: Universidade de Lisboa
SPAIN: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
USA: United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)

Departmental/Faculty/School Mandates:

USA: Harvard Divinity School
USA: Arizona State University Libraries

Thesis Mandates:

ITALY: Università degli Studi di Salerno
USA: Virginia Tech
USA: San Jose State University

For universities, research institutions, research funders, libraries and governments worldwide, the principal site for Open Access policy-making guidance is now:

1. EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS)

Other valuable sites for guidance on OA policy-making include:

2. Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS)

3. SPARC Campus Open Access Policies

4. EPrints Open Access

5. ROARMAP Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies

6. American Scientist Open Access Forum (AmSciForum)

7. Open Access Archivangelism

8. OSI Self-Archiving FAQ

The Value of Shared Access and Reuse of Publicly Funded Scientific Data
A Public Symposium

Board on Research Data and Information
National Academy of Sciences

20 F Street Conference Center
Conference Room B, 20 F Street NW
Washington, DC
December 1, 2010, 2:00-4:15 p.m.
"The scientific community generates increasingly vast amounts of publicly funded digital data and information, and disseminates much of it online. The public investment in the production and management of such data resources in the United States alone is estimated to be several billions of dollars. Research communities within the United States and throughout the world have adopted different policies regarding whether or not to require publication of publicly funded data, how the research data and information created by individuals and projects are to be made available, and the terms under which that material may be reused by other parties. At the same time, there appears to be a broad recognition in both the public and private sectors of the importance of broad access to and reuse of publicly funded scientific data, not only for other researchers, but for the economy and society at large. The intangible social benefits of different types of scientific data are harder to measure, but they also can be very significant. They include educational, research, good-governance, and various other benefits that contribute directly and indirectly to improvement of the public welfare.

"At the same time, there are many legitimate reasons for not disclosing scientific data publicly – among them, the need to protect national security and law enforcement, personal privacy, proprietary interests, and confidentiality. Furthermore, many data sets are not sufficiently documented or organized, or of good enough quality, to make them useful to others. Questions about how to properly balance these competing interests and deficiencies in the preparation, access, and reuse of datasets remain unresolved, but will be addressed in the future work of the Board and elsewhere.

"Despite the huge public investments in generating and managing publicly funded data, and the even larger estimated downstream spillover effects of making it available, surprisingly little is known about the costs and benefits of open access and reuse on downstream research for our information society, and the knowledge economy. Many government agencies, academic organizations, and the research community generally are beginning to look into these issues in more depth.

"This public symposium will look at some of the research, economic, and social benefits that can be derived from providing online access to publicly-funded scientific data, as well as how such benefits can be evaluated, with a view to adding to that inquiry. The event will include presentations on the scientific data sharing and reuse policies of the federal government; compelling examples of the value of free online access and unfettered reuse of data; methods of assessing the value and effects of research, the economy, and society; and comments by Board members. The symposium is open to the public, but advance registration is requested (contact: Cheryl Levey, clevey@nas.edu or call 202-334-1531)."

Symposium Program

2:00 p.m.        Opening remarks by the Board Chair
                         Michael Lesk
                         Rutgers University
 
2:10                Overview of scientific data sharing and reuse policies of the Federal government      
                        [TBD], Interagency Working Group on Digital Data, OSTP*
* Not yet confirmed

2:30                Benefits of data sharing and reuse in policyr esearch: case studies in environmental sciences        
                        Rod Atkinson and Jan Johansson, Congressional Research Service
 
2:50                Benefits of data sharing and reuse in biomedical research: the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
                        Neil S. Buckholtz
                        National Institute on Aging, NIH
 
3:10                Evaluating the effects of federal data programs       
                        Carl Shapiro
                        U.S. Geological Survey
 
3:30                 Evaluating the effects of open access to scientific data and literature
                         Heather Joseph
                         SPARC
 
Comments
 
3:50                 Michael Carroll
                         Washington School of Law, American University
 
4:00                 Paul David
                         Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford University
 
4:10                 Stevan Harnad
                         Université du Québec à Montreal & University of Southampton
 
4:15                 Concluding observations by Symposium Chair, Michael Lesk   
 
4:20                 End of Symposium

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Some supplementary remarks on Open Access and Open Data (part of a brief pre-recorded video to be delivered at the above NAS symposium):

Open Access to Refereed Research Publications and Open Access to Research Data: A Crucial Strategic Distinction

Stevan Harnad
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences
Université du Québec à Montreal
&
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton

(1) On the Open Access Impact Advantage for Refereed Research Reports

It has now been repeatedly demonstrated that refereed research articles that are made Open Access (OA) are used and cited significantly more in every scientific and scholarly field tested than those that are not made OA. It has now also been shown that this OA advantage is just as great for mandated OA as it is for self-selected OA. This means that the OA Advantage is not (as some have suggested) simply an artifact of selectively making higher-impact research open access: OA is the cause of the increased research impact. This finding greatly increases the importance and urgency of mandating OA for the sake of increasing and accelerating research uptake and progress.

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5(10): e13636.   

(2) On the Importance and Potential of Open Access Data-Archiving

Although there is not yet enough OA data to be able to demonstrate that the same kind of impact benefits will be generated by OA to research data as those that have been demonstrated for OA to research articles, it is highly probable that that will prove to be the outcome. Moreover, the impact benefits of making research articles OA, and the rich new means of measuring research usage and impact that OA is generating will also serve as incentives to encourage researchers to provide OA to both their articles and their data.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web:  Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly, 3 (3). 

(3) On the Crucial Differences Between Research Archiving and Data-Archiving -- And Why Immediate Data-Archiving Cannot be Mandated

There is, however, a crucial difference between providing OA to research articles and providing OA to data: Scientists and scholars are not primarily data-gatherers. They gather data in order to data-mine, analyze, interpret and build further findings, theories and applications on it. Hence (except in the rare cases where the data speak for themselves), researchers cannot be expected (or mandated) to make their data OA immediately upon having collected or generated it, for all other researchers to data-mine and analyze. Researchers must be given sufficient time to data-mine their data, having invested the time and effort into collecting or generating it. And the length of the fair embargo interval on Open Access to data will vary depending on the nature of the data and the time, effort and ingenuity required to collect or generate it. This is fundamentally different from the case of refereed research reports, for which there is no justification whatsoever for embargoing Open Access once the paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication.

Hence providing OA to refereed research reports can and should be mandated by researchers' institutions and funders, immediately upon acceptance for publication. Such immediate OA mandates cannot, however, be simplistically extended to research data (nor to unrefereed preprints of research reports) without generating the risk of needless and counterproductive conflicts of interest with the researchers that gathered the data. OA data-archiving, as soon as possible, should be strongly encouraged; in some cases embargo length limits can be set. But it cannot and should not be mandated (except in very special cases where the data-gathering itself is the research that is being funded.)

OA, OA self-archiving, OA publishing, and data archiving

Open Access and Open Data

On Not Conflating Open Data (OD) With Open Access (OA)

More on Potential Conflict of Interest with Open Data (OD) Mandates

Don't Risk Getting Less By Needlessly Demanding More

How Green Open Access Supports Text- and Data-Mining

On Patience, and Letting (Human) Nature Take Its Course

Open Access: What Comes With the Territory

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

One can sympathize with Larry Lessig's frustration in "An Obvious Distinction":

LL:
"In 2010, [for David Wallace-Wells] to suggest [in a 6000-word review in The Nation] that [the Creative Commons movement] 'exhort[s]… piracy and the plundering of culture'... betrays not just sloppy thinking [but] extraordinary ignorance… [and lack of] respect for what has been written… This terrain has been plowed a hundred times in the past decade… Reading is the first step to… respect for what has been written... Reading is what Wallace-Wells has not done well."

Larry tries to correct Wallace-Wells's 6000 sloppy words with 878 carefully chosen ones of his own. Let me try to atone for my own frequent long-windedness by trying to put it even more succinctly (20 words):

Creative Commons' goal
is to protect
creators' give-away rights --
not consumers'
(or 2nd-party copyright-holders')
rip-off rights.

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Harnad, Stevan (2000/2001/2003/2004) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Published as: (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. [Shorter version: Harnad S. (2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342.] and in: (2004) Historical Social Research (HSR) 29:1. [French version: Harnad, S. (2003) Cielographie et cielolexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment la resoudre. In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte a l'heure de l'Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou: 77-103.

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The persistent "piracy" canard calls to mind others like it, foremost among them being:
"OA ≡ Gold OA (publishing)"...

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Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus

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Despite its protests that "more than 20 hours of video [are] uploaded every minute worldwide," google and youtube are definitely guilty already of gross neglect and irresponsibility. Instead of sloughing off responsibility by offloading it onto "community vigilance," google should use its enormous multilingual mechanical and computational resources to flag automatically all posted youtube content that contains a growing list of code words (known names and terms, in all languages) and immediately divert all suspect postings to a human inspection buffer before allowing them to be publicly viewable.

Everyone is making monumental worldwide efforts in screening at airports, and now in cargo transport, with real human time and energy and money involved, yet one enormous company, with the means to do automated computational screening of unprecedented power and pinpoint specificity -- look how much ingenuity is put into screening shoppers' predilections -- is not exercising its latent capacity on content with equally unprecedented damage potential vastly exceeding any airport's. Instead, google/youtube is waiting passively for the damage that it hosts and amplifies to be dutifully detected by the worldwide user community (good supplement to -- but no substitute for -- automatic screening).

As newspapers have lately reported, a simple search on a prominent terrorist's name retrieves over 5000 videos. The postings from accredited news organizations could be hand-cleared easily. But there are plenty up there from the sage himself, advocating jihads and fatwas and god (sic) knows what else, with thousands of user views and no user alert flags (or none that have been acted upon).

Text can of course be almost as menacing as videos, but the penetration and band-width of videos in today's media-shaped brain-space is much greater, so computational pre-emption there should have an even higher priority.

And before the reflexive, unreflective laissez-faire fatalists begin to whine about censorship and freedom of expression, recall that this is not about the right to speak or publish but about the privilege of using one private company's global megaphone.

Entrust porno-flagging to the global usership, but not terror-flagging. Otherwise we are playing global gaussian roulette.