A week after #scio12, #rwa and reinventing discovery

This week has seen a convergence of three topics.  First, I got back from the Science Online 2012 unconference a little over a week ago (1/22).  I had been meaning to write a post to wrap up the sessions I attended, but then I started to see a lot of news concerning the Research Works Act.  I have also been reading Michael Nielsen's Reinventing Discovery, and there has been a good deal of discussion about that book on the net as well, including from the famous #scio12 @BoraZ.  So, with all this open access and open science discussion swirling in my head, I figured it was a good time to put the electrons down on the blog.

1. Science Online 2012.  I tweeted a bunch of the sessions already (and blogged about one), and most of the sessions have some form of online abstract, so I don't need to go into the details.  What struck me most about the conference was the discussion between the science journalists and the scientists themselves.  Scientists are stuck in a hard place because many academic departments and/or institutions frown on bloggers/tweets and people who try communicate their research to a general audience.  Journalists have a hard time working with scientists who do not understand their craft.  These two sessions particularly caught my attention.
2. Research Works Act (RWA). While I had known about the RWA since well before the unconference (January 5th), the topic didn't catch fire with scientists until a post from Fields Medalist, Dr. Gowers wrote "Elsevier — my part in its downfall".  That sparked a huge amount of discussion and other blog posts from a variety of scientists.  Many of those posts are cataloged at Michael Nielsen's Polymath Wiki page on journal publishing reform. (I see some posts that are missing on the wiki, so I will add those later.)
3. This brings me to Michael Nielsen's book Reinventing Discovery.  I have been slowly reading the book (a library copy), and I was reading it on the way to and from the Science Online Conference.  Two copies were being given away at the conference, but alas, I didn't win a copy.  In any case, here are some good reviews of the book by Bora, John Dupuis and Martin Fenner.  Michael also talked about his book on Science Friday.  Here is the podcast last Friday, January 27th, bit.ly/wFibOk.

Levels of copyright and some questions

Amy, Jenica and Andy brought up some good questions concerning copyright, and the copying of music and audio files from library materials, and should librarians talk to (confront?) a patron concerning actions that could be deemed to be illegal. But, there are a whole range of actions that patrons could do with library materials (either in the library or with the materials checked out).  At what point should I mention something about copyright to the patron?

1. Patron checks out a CD from the library.
2. Patron checks out a music CD, and tells the circulation person that the CD will be returned tomorrow because the person is going to rip the music to their iTunes library.
3. Patron checks out 20 music CDs, and tells the circulation person that the CDs will be returned tomorrow because the person is going to rip the music to their iTunes library.
4. Patron checks out 20 audio CDs (audio book) and listens to them in a CD player.
5. Patron copies 20 checked out music CDs to a computer at home.
6. Patron starts copying those 20 checked out audio CDs to a laptop in the library.
7. Patron copies the 20 audio CDs at home and then deletes the files after three weeks once the book is due back to the library.
8. Patron copies the 20 audio CDs at home and then deletes the files after six months once the person is done listening to the book.
9. Patron copies the 20 audio CDs at home, listens to the book, and forgets to delete the files from the iPod.
10. Patron purchased a Beatles album in 1964, now copies the same CD to their iPod.
11. Patron purchased a Journey tape in 1983, now copies the same CD to their iPod.
12. Patron purchased a Rush CD in 1996, lost the CD, and copies the same library CD to their iPod.
13. Patron starts copying lots of CDs from the library collection within the library without checking the materials out.

I am sure there are plenty of other scenarios, but I am not sure at which point I should approach the patron.  Even with the egregious case where the person is copying 20 CDs to a laptop within the library, the person could only be intending to load the music or audio book for the next 2-3 weeks for the checkout period.  I have no idea how long the person plans on keeping that information.  [I know that I could ask.] When should I warn the patron about copyright law?  

My reply to the "Public Access to Digital Data" RFI

Here it is.  I wish I had more time to be comprehensive, but this is what I had time to write.  Better this than nothing.

Hello Ted Wackler,

I am writing to the OSTP office concerning the “Request for Information: Public Access to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research” that is available at http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/11/04/2011-28621/request-for-information-public-access-to-digital-data-resulting-from-federally-funded-scientific.

I will put in my comments after the numbered sections below. 

Preservation, Discoverability, and Access 

(1) What specific Federal policies would encourage public access to and the preservation of broadly valuable digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research, to grow the U.S. economy and improve the productivity of the American scientific enterprise?

I would like to see PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) include more data as well as journal articles.  With the new NSF data management plan requirements, research done with NSF funds could copy the data to an NSF repository.  I would also like to see expanded roles for NTIS and the DOE Information Bridge in holding more data from research.  I know that NTIS often sells their reports, but it would be better if the reports and data were freely available to the general public. Astronomical data could be held at the NASA ADS with greater Federal support, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/index.html

(2) What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders, with respect to any existing or proposed policies for encouraging public access to and preservation of digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research?

Where applicable, I would recommend that Federally funded research license their material with a CC by license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) or CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).  This will provide the widest reach to readers throughout the whole world.  This will also have the most benefit for scientists, federal agencies, the readers and the citizens of the United States.  It may not be as beneficial for commercial publishers, but they have plenty of other non-government sponsored material they can publish. 

(3) How could Federal agencies take into account inherent differences between scientific disciplines and different types of digital data when developing policies on the management of data?

There are many different data types.  The Global Change Master Directory provides recommendations to scientists who deposit data to the directory.  They provide guides to their metadata writers (Directory Interchange Format (DIF) Writer's Guide). See http://gcmd.nasa.gov/User/difguide/WRITEADIF.pdf and http://gcmd.nasa.gov/User/difguide/difman.html.  This guide could be used as a template to help data management writers describe datasets in other disciplines.

The Digital Curation Centre is another good resource to consult, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/data-management-plans. This is another good resource, “National initiatives for promoting data management strategies: an overview,” http://sonexworkgroup.blogspot.com/2011/04/national-initiatives-for-promoting-data.html

(4) How could agency policies consider differences in the relative costs and benefits of long-term stewardship and dissemination of different types of data resulting from federally funded research?

It depends on who needs to use that data, and the intended audience of the research.

(5) How can stakeholders (e.g., research communities, universities, research institutions, libraries, scientific publishers) best contribute to the implementation of data management plans?

There are many librarians who are getting to be a lot more familiar with data management plans and e-science.  I would recommend that the government work with university programs such as those listed at http://www.arl.org/rtl/eresearch/escien/nsf/nsfresources.shtml.

(6) How could funding mechanisms be improved to better address the real costs of preserving and making digital data accessible?

I am not sure.

(7) What approaches could agencies take to measure, verify, and improve compliance with Federal data stewardship and access policies for scientific research? How can the burden of compliance and verification be minimized?

Scientists need positive reinforcement for depositing and describing their data.  If they received more grant funding for cooperating in projects, or if they received greater recognition by university administrators, then that would be some positive rewards for compliance.

(8) What additional steps could agencies take to stimulate innovative use of publicly accessible research data in new and existing markets and industries to create jobs and grow the economy?

There are always more mashups that could be done with GIS data and social science data.

(9) What mechanisms could be developed to assure that those who produced the data are given appropriate attribution and credit when secondary results are reported?

Data sets could be given a permanent citation link, such as a DOI. http://www.doi.org/ I would recommend that you read some of the papers presented at this conference, http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/brdi/PGA_064019 “Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards: An International Symposium and Workshop”

Standards for Interoperability, Re-Use and Re-Purposing

(10) What digital data standards would enable interoperability, reuse, and repurposing of digital scientific data? For example, MIAME (minimum information about a microarray experiment; see Brazma et al., 2001, Nature Genetics 29, 371) is an example of a community-driven data standards effort.

This chapter might be of use to you. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK45678/ “The Current State of Data Integration in Science” found in the book, Steps Toward Large-Scale Data Integration in the Sciences: Summary of a Workshop. National Research Council (US) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12916

(11) What are other examples of standards development processes that were successful in producing effective standards and what characteristics of the process made these efforts successful?

I can’t find any right now.

(12) How could Federal agencies promote effective coordination on digital data standards with other nations and international communities?

Start with one country, and then start working with other countries.  I’d recommend that you take a look at the policies of the United Kingdom. Consider looking at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/policy-and-legal/policy-tools-and-guidance and http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/crossmedia/advice/establishing-a-digital-preservation-policy/.

(13) What policies, practices, and standards are needed to support linking between publications and associated data?

I would recommend that you take a look at this article, http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0021101 for some practices that are used.

Library thoughts derived from the book, Where good Ideas Come From

A couple of years ago, I was able to go to a presentation by Steven Berlin Johnson. (I remember the Berlin part of his middle name, because there are A LOT of Steve Johnsons out there.)  Anyway, he was at DU talking about his 2006 book, Everything Bad is good for You. That was way back on March 31, 2009 for a Bridges to the Future (video) event.  (He was also selling his 2009 book, The Invention of Air.) Just this year, he wrote Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.  This book also looked interesting, so I checked it out from Penrose.  In short, I was able to glean lots of great perspectives and insights that could be applicable to the library world.  Here are some:

Concerning open systems - "When one looks at innovation in nature and culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders." Page 22.

"Innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts--mechanical or conceptual--and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those combinations--by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges--will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration." Page 41.

"The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table." Page 42.

Concerning the supposed wisdom of the crowd vs. herd mentality - "This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they are connected to the network." Page 58.

Concerning browsing and serendipity - "But serendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you've made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked." Page 108-109.

Bill Gates from Microsoft used to take annual reading vacations.  He (and his successor Ray Ozzie) would "cultivate a stack of reading material--much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft--and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they've stockpiled." Page 112-113.

More on browsing and serendipity - "But it [browsing on the web] is much more of a mainstream pursuit than randomly exploring the library stacks, pulling down books because you like the binding, ever was.  This is the irony of the serendipity debate: the thing that is being mourned has actually gone from a fringe experience to the mainstream of the culture." Page 118.  I am not sure that I agree with this.  There is a bit of research that shows that browsing and serendipity was important in the print world of the library, too.  Here is one good article, final version is behind a paywall...

Concerning the market of ideas and intellectual property - "All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters--liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity, noise exaptation, emergent platforms--do best in open environments where ideas flow in unregulated channels.  In more controlled environments, where the natural movement of ideas is tightly restrained, they suffocate." Page 232. Yes, yes, yes.  Let's get scholarly research out from behind paywalls.

"Most academic research today is fourth-quadrant in its approach: new ideas are published with the deliberate goal of allowing other participants rerefine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond proper acknowledgement of their origin." Page 233.

Concerning walled information gardens - "Participants in the fourth-quadrant don't have those costs; they can concentrate on coming up with new ideas, not building fortresses around the old ones." Page 235.

"Whatever its politics, the fourth quadrant has been an extraordinary space of human creativity and insight.  Even without the economic rewards of artificial scarcity, fourth-quadrant environments have played an immensely important role in the nurturing and circulation of good ideas--now more than ever." Page 239.

Thomas Jefferson noted: "That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition...."  Johnson noted: "Ideas, Jefferson argues, have an almost gravitational attraction toward the fourth quadrant.  The natural state of ideas is flow and spillover and connection.  It is society that keeps them in chains." page 241.

Another good line concerning the Internet - "There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas." Page 243.

Overall, I liked the book.  I highly recommend it.

Went to the NCAR Library yesterday, and it was good

Some of the members of the DU Student Chapter of SLA went to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Library yesterday.  We had a good time meeting with two of the Archives staff, Matthew Ramey and Kate Legg. I learned about a bunch of things that they are doing, some of which are:

• Making a mobile page using Boopsie.  They will roll that out some time in January 2012
• Recording oral histories
• Creating videos from their collection of films, and loading up some of them to the NCAR Archives YouTube site, such as this one
• They are continuing to add lots to their Digital Collections and process material for other collections 

We had good discussions ranging from policies and procedures, to the art of negotiation and advocacy, to new systems such as Chronopolis and OpenSky, to copyright and other legal ramifications of digitization, to how to balance the needs of administration (looking for institutional metrics) with the needs of the average patron.  I wish I had time to go into more detail, but check out their websites and pages, and give them a call/email if you have any questions about their services and collections.

What should OA publishers work on next?

An OA publisher representative asked me. "What would you like to see ... publishers doing that they aren’t now to help promote growth of OA? Outside of supporting it more, obviously ;). Any specific steps you’d like to see us make?"

I responded with:

----------------------------------------------------------
Hi XXX,

Sorry it took me a while to respond… I’ve been thinking about how and what to write back.

1) I would like to see some more experiments in different peer-review systems. Other scientists have argued for reviews to take place after the article is published, similar to the Faculty of 1000. (But that system is extra review after the pre-publication peer reviewing is already done.) Why not make the post publication review the peer review? This way, the publications can make it out to the public faster.

Here are some good posts and reports concerning the convoluted peer review system we have now.

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/three-myths-about-scientific-peer-review/
Michael Nielsen has a great new book out. (Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science) Have you read this yet? It should be required reading at [Publisher name redacted]. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691148902

http://jasonpriem.org/2011/01/has-journal-article-commenting-failed/
Jason Priem does good work on alt.metrics for journals. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

http://futureofscipub.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/open-post-publication-peer-review-full-argument/
http://futureofscipub.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/open-post-publication-peer-review/
I am not sure who does this blog, but it seems very well thought out.

http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=379
PEER REVIEW IN ACADEMIC PROMOTION AND PUBLISHING: ITS MEANING, LOCUS, AND FUTURE.by Dr. Diane Harley and Sophia Krzys Acord. We had Diane Harley come to our campus last year, and here is her presentation. See the third video down, http://library.du.edu/penrosepen/videos-from-the-provost-conference

There are lots of other good writers and scientists who would like to see faster publication through different arrangements of peer review.

2) Could you get my faculty to understand all of the different models and systems of scholarly communication out there? Get the university’s administrators to modify the tenure and promotion system to encourage more openness? (Yeah, this is a tough one.)

Joe

Good little TEDx video on the history of the web

That is all.

Does it pay to beat your head against the traditional publishing wall?

I just submitted this title to the Science Online 2012 conference.  What do you think of it?  If it gets approved, who would like to see speak at this session?

Does it pay to beat your head against the traditional publishing wall?

Most academic scientists are still concerned with publishing in "traditional" journals because they are rewarded the most for publishing articles in those outlets. However, many scientists are beginning to see the advantages of publishing in new venues and Open Access journals. Should one argue with traditional publishers and their backers concerning the unsustainable scholarly communications model we are currently in, or will that exercise be futile? John Wilbanks noted: "So don’t waste breath fighting with people on the internet. Keep driving train tracks into the ground, relentlessly. Never stop building infrastructure, never stop using existing standards, never stop creating new businesses and projects that recognize open as infrastructure. That’s how we win."

Suggested by Joe Kraus (@jokrausdu)

"We are people of the screen."

This is from "TOC 2011: Kevin Kelly, 'Better than Free: How Value Is Generated in a Free Copy World'".  Found this via Patricia Anderson and this blog post.

This Internet thing is just a fad...

Maybe someday people will put music and their home movies on the net.  Nah.

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the link.