Saturday, December 25. 2010On Grasping First What Is Already Within ReachSUMMARY: Free online access to refereed research ("Gratis OA") is already within the global research community's immediate reach, because it can be mandated by research institutions and funders. "Libre OA" (Gratis OA plus various further re-use rights) is not within reach because not all researchers want to allow it, hence it cannot be mandated without allowing author opt-out. Yet global Gratis OA is very likely to encourage authors to go on to provide Libre OA too. The worldwide research community should accordingly grasp what is already within its reach, by mandating Gratis OA, rather than over-reaching for what is not yet within its grasp, delaying the immediate benefits of Gratis OA for research uptake, impact and progress.Peter Murray-Rust and I are — and have always been — on the same team. Our disagreements have not been about the ultimate goals, but about the immediate means of reaching those goals. "Gratis OA" is free online access; "Libre OA" is free online access plus various re-use rights. So Gratis OA is a necessary condition for Libre OA: Libre OA is more than Gratis OA, but you cannot have Libre OA without Gratis OA. But we do not yet have Gratis OA! Less than 20% of yearly refereed research output is OA at all. So the strategic difference between Peter and me is very easy to state and to understand: It is easier to ask researchers, institutions and funders for less than it is to ask them for more, especially when most are not yet providing the less, let alone the more. How can researchers be induced to provide at least Gratis OA? Their institutions and funders can mandate that they self-archive their refereed final drafts in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication. That is Green, Gratis OA. Making journals OA (Gold OA) is in the hands of the publishing community, not the researcher community, hence Gold OA — whether Gratis or Libre — cannot be mandated; only Green OA can be mandated. Moreover, Green, Gratis OA mandates are in far less conflict with either the policies of most publishers or the desires of most authors. Hence (by my lights) the overwhelming priority today for those who seek OA worldwide should be to see to it that Green, Gratis OA mandates are adopted by institutions and funders worldwide. The rest — Libre OA and Gold OA — will eventually come, once we have mandated universal Green, Gratis OA. But not even Green, Gratis OA will come if we needlessly over-reach now, and insist on more, when we do not even have less. As we approach universal Green, Gratis OA mandates worldwide, search and harvesting will become incomparably more powerful than it is now. (It is already very powerful now, with Google Scholar, Citeseerx and other new search engines, despite the sparseness of the OA content base (<20%). As OA content becomes less sparse, harvesting and search will become all the more sophisticated and powerful, and the "global bibliography" Peter recommends will assemble across the global network of distributed in institutional OA repositories of its own accord, part of the repository deposit procedure and tagging. The problem today is content, not search.) As to Peter's concern about the right to re-use figures in Gratis OA articles: It is already possible (and easy) to write a java or perl script today that will call up a figure embedded in a Gratis OA document. Instead of literally reproducing the figure in another work, as in the Gutenberg era (which required permission), the online era allows us to embed a pointer URL that has virtually the same effect -- mediated by one click by the user, to get to the locus of the figure in the Gratis OA article. As to other Libre OA uses (e.g., data-mining): Those researchers today who (for some reason I find rather difficult to fathom) feel they need advance statements, formal and explicit, of their "harvesting rights" (when everyone else today is happily crawling and harvesting the entirety of web gratis content with impunity) will have to wait patiently until we have Gratis OA; once we have mandated it, Gratis OA's own benefits and potential will induce more and more researchers to seek and provide Libre OA, formally. Over-reaching by asking for more today, when most researchers are not yet even providing Gratis OA, nor being mandated to provide Gratis OA, will not motivate them to provide Libre OA. In closing, I would like to remind everyone that we are just beginning to think of freeing research from the constraints of the Gutenberg era of Closed Access; throughout the Gutenberg era 100% of research was (and 80% of it still is) neither Gratis nor Libre. In print days, you could not even access a paper if your institution did not have a subscription to the journal in which it was published (and if you did access it, all you could do was read it, and use the information -- not re-use, re-mix, or re-publish the text or figures). The online era made it possible for researchers to make their papers accessible to all potential users, not just those whose institutions subscribed to the journal in which it was published. The further idea of various re-use rights — (and note that there are a number of different levels or degrees of potential re-use rights, all the way to making the document public-domain) — was not even thinkable prior to the online era, when we did not even have Gratis OA — because of the inescapable economic constraints of the Gutenberg medium. So if Libre OA feels urgent now, it is only because the online era has made Gratis OA possible. But before we try to reach the farther possibility, surely we should first seize the benefits of the nearer possibility that the online era has already opened up for us (free online access), for that is a proximal goal that we already have within our grasp the tried, tested and effective practical means of reaching (Green Gratis OA mandates by research institutions and funders), rather than continuing to ask for more — without any tried, tested and effective means of getting it. Peter could perhaps cite the possibility of adopting stronger Green OA mandates — copyright reservation mandates like Harvard's (about which I am sceptical, because of their opt-out clauses) — but Peter is sceptical about mandates in general (whereas I am only sceptical about mandates that needlessly raise the goal-posts while mandates themselves are still sparse worldwide and successful consensus on adopting them is still slow to reach). The practical question to be asked of anyone who is desirous of immediate Libre OA rather than Gratis OA is hence this: How do you propose to persuade researchers to provide it? Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Tuesday, November 30. 2010November 2010: Eight More Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates Registered in ROARMAP
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 LisboaDepartmental/Faculty/School Mandates: USA: Harvard Divinity SchoolThesis Mandates: ITALY: Università degli Studi di Salerno Sunday, November 21. 2010Global Open Access Policy-Making Guidance Sites for Universities, Funders and Governments
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) Monday, November 15. 2010Shared Access and Reuse of Publicly Funded Scientific Data
"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 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 ReportsIt 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-ArchivingAlthough 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 MandatedThere 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 Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, November 14. 2010The First and Foremost PostGutenberg Distinction
One can sympathize with Larry Lessig's frustration in "An Obvious Distinction":
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):LL: The persistent "piracy" canard calls to mind others like it, foremost among them being:Creative Commons' goal "OA ≡ Gold OA (publishing)"...
Thursday, November 4. 2010Google needs to flag up terror video screening on its global megaphone
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. Sunday, October 31. 2010OA, OA self-archiving, OA publishing, and data archiving
Expert Conference on Open Access and Open Data, German National Library of Medicine, Cologne, December 13-14 2010
Stevan Harnad Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences Université du Québec à Montréal CANADA & School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton UNITED KINGDOM OVERVIEW: Open Access (OA) means free online access to the 2.5 million articles published every year in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research journals. OA can be provided in two ways: To provide "Green OA," authors self-archive the final refereed drafts of their articles in their institutional OA repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication (by conventional, non-OA journals). To provide "Gold OA," authors publish their articles in OA journals that make all their articles free online immediately upon publication. (Sometimes a fee is charged to the author's institution for Gold OA.) Because of the benefits of OA (in terms of maximized visibility, accessibility, uptake, usage and impact) to research, researchers, their institutions and the taxpayers that fund them, institutions and funders worldwide are increasingly mandating (i.e. requiring) Green OA self-archiving. Gold OA publishing cannot be mandated by authors' institutions and funders, but universal Green OA self-archiving mandates may eventually lead to a global transition to Gold OA publishing; it depends on whether and how long subscriptions remain sustainable as the means of covering the costs of print and online publication; if subscriptions become unsustainable, authors' institutions will pay journal publishers for peer review out of a portion of their annual windfall subscription cancellation savings. Data-archiving cannot be mandated, because researchers must be allowed the exclusive right to mine the data they have collected if they wish; but as Green OA self-archiving grows, data-archiving too will grow, because of their natural complementarity and the power of global collaboration to accelerate and enhance research progress.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). The Open Access Paradigm: What? Where? When? Why? How?
UNESCO Conference on Open Access - Global and Danish Challenges. Ministry of Education, Copenhagen, Denmark, 6 December 2010
Stevan Harnad Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences Université du Québec à Montréal CANADA & School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton UNITED KINGDOM OVERVIEW: With the adoption of Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates worldwide so near, this is the opportune time to think of optimizing how they are formulated. Seemingly small parametric or verbal variants can make a vast difference to their success, speed, and completeness of coverage: Scholarly/Scientific Impact Metrics in the Open Access Era
Workshop on Open Archives and their Significance in the Communication of Science, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden, 16-17 November 2010
Saturday, October 30. 2010The One Sure Way To OA
Keynote Address: 19th Hellenic Conference of Academic Libraries," Scientific communities and libraries in a world of social networking and synergies," Panteion University, Athens, Greece, November 4 2010
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