Monthly Archives: September 2011

Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2011

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Friends and implementers of open access around the world: we have outdone ourselves (again!). This quarter a number of initiatives have met or exceeded some interesting milestones. DOAJ is now over 7,000 journals, and still adding more than 4 titles per day. The Electronic Journals Library now lists more than 30,000 titles that are freely available. OpenDOAR now lists more than 2,000 repositories, and the BASE search engine searches more than 31 million documents in repositories. ROARMAP now lists a total of 300 open access mandate policies. Kudos to PMC for clearly posting pertinent data right on their website, and for growing the number of journals making all articles available OA by 19 to a new total of 635 – and for growing free fulltext at the rate of one per minute! Following are links to quick reference and full data versions, rationale and method, items of interest from this quarter, and noteworthy data from this quarter.

Quick Reference (for viewing)
Quick Reference and Full Data (this quarter only) for downloading
Dataverse – Full data (for downloading)
Rationale and method
Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series

Items of interest since June 30, 2011

The data
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)  http://www.doaj.org/

  • # journals 7,070
  • growth this quarter: 376 titles
  • # journals searchable at article level:  3,253
  • growth this quarter: 293
  • # articles searchable at article level:  637,427
  • growth this quarter: 51,900

Electronic Journals Library

  • # of journals that can be read free of charge:  30, 963
  • growth this quarter:  1,767

Highwire Press Freehttp://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl&

  • # free articles 2,117,523
  • growth this quarter 964

OpenDOAR http://www.opendoar.org/

  • # repositories 2,085
  • growth this quarter 105

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) http://www.base-search.net/

  •  # documents 31,044,880
  • growth this quarter 2,133,615
  • # content providers 2,027
  • growth this quarter 137

PubMedCentral  http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ 

  • # articles archived in PMC (from PMC website) 2,200,000
  • # journals that deposit all articles (from PMC website) 893
  • # journals that deposit NIH-funded articles (from PMC website) 296
  • # journals that deposit selected articles (from PMC website) 1,517
  • # journals actively participating in PMC (total minus predecessor minus no new content) 1,214
  • growth this quarter 38
  • # journals in PMC with immediate free access 746
  • growth this quarter 25
  • # journals in PMC with all articles open access 635
  • growth this quarter 19

arXiv http://arxiv.org/

  • # documents 704,659
  • growth this quarter 19,007

RePEC http://repec.org/ 

  • # of documents 1,085,000 25,000
  • growth this quarter 130,000
  • RePEC online (fulltext) 955,000
  • growth this quarter 30,000

E-LIS http://eprints.rclis.org/

  • # documents 12,319
  • growth this quarter 307

Open Access Mandate Policies based on ROARMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

  • Sub-Institutional (was Departmental) 33
  • growth this quarter 0
  • Funder 52
  • growth this quarter 4
  • Institutional 132
  • growth this quarter 5
  • Multi-institutional 1
  • growth this quarter 0
  • Thesis 82
  • growth this quarter 2
  • Total 300
  • growth this quarter 11
  • Proposed Mandates 20

Access to scientific publications should be a fundamental right

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In my last post I reviewed a paper in Nature and gave a précis for the “scholarly poor” the internet citizens who are not employed by rich universities. (Universities have an arrogant attitude that access to the literature only matters for them, and they spend billions of taxpayers’ money in their libraries just for themselves). One of my commenters and ex-colleague (@walter blackstock) commented that it would cost 32 USD to read the Nature article (2 pages, rented for 1 day). He’s a scientist – he just doesn’t happen to work in universities – so no access to the scientific literature.

The lack of access to scientific literature is now a global shame.

Think of all the people (in all countries, not just the rich west) who cannot read the literature:

  • Patients and patient groups
  • Government and policy makers (e.g. in NGOs)
  • Environmental groups
  • Many practitioners of medicine who do not have access to (say) a national service (e.g. NHSNet)
  • Retired people (many of whom are actively involved in changing the world)
  • Schoolchildren (yes, much of the literature is – or should be – understandable by them)
  • Interested citizens who want to understand the world we live in

And, starkly, people die because of lack of access to scientific information. That sounds sensationalist, but it’s self-evidently true. If a patient group cannot read the medical literature they cannot make informed decisions. The conventional wisdom that patients are incapable of understanding their literature is no longer true in this century. The Open Source Drug Discovery project in India is more concerned with stopping people dying than their precious h-index from closed access journals. The countries which see sea levels increasing and changing weather patterns have a right to know what the scientific world is doing and saying – and indeed to be a full part of it.

I have blogged at length on this http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/07/09/what-is-wrong-with-scientific-publishing-and-can-we-put-it-right-before-it-is-too-late/ and subsequent. I have been catalysed to continue by

So I am arguing that Access to scientific publications should be a fundamental right

 

That may sound dramatic so I will put it in context. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights lists substantive human rights to include:

Note that this not mean they are free-of-cost, free-as-in-beer. Water costs money. But it is a fundamental right:

In November 2002, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights issued a non-binding comment affirming that access to water was a human right:

the human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.

—United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

This principle was reaffirmed at the 3rd and 4th World Water Councils in 2003 and 2006. This marks a departure from the conclusions of the 2nd World Water Forum in The Hague in 2000, which stated that water was a commodity to be bought and sold, not a right.[99] There are calls from many NGOs and politicians to enshrine access to water as a binding human right, and not as a commodity.[100][101] According to the United Nations, nearly 900 million people lack access to clean water and more than 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. On July 28, 2010, the UN declared water and sanitation as human rights. By declaring safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right, the U.N. General Assembly made a step towards the Millennium Development Goal to ensure environmental sustainability, which in part aims to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation”.

Note “access to water as a binding human right, and not as a commodity“. We pay for our water in the UK, and I am (generally) happy to do this. The condition is that we must be free of monopolists, or cartels, of indiscriminate and arbitrary sanctions. In the UK water is managed in a capitalist manner and it’s therefore regulated politically and there is a water regulator (Ofwat). There are flaws in this but the system at least removes the appalling monopoly control imposed by capitalist publishers. Making water a right commits the world to finding a solution, not building individual riches.

Then there is the Internet.

The United Nations has proposed to make Internet access a human right. This push was made when it called for universal access to basic communication and information services at the UN Administrative Committee on Coordination. In 2003, during the World Summit on the Information Society, another claim for this was made.[1][2]

In some countries such as Estonia,[3]
France,[4]
Finland,[5]
Greece[6] and Spain,[7] Internet access has already been made a human right. This is accomplished by authorizing universal service-contracted providers with the duty to extend a mandatory minimum connection capability to all remaining desiring home users in the country.

This does not mean that access to the internet is free of cost. I pay my broadband willingly enough. But it means that in countries more enlightened than Britain I cannot be cut off by publishers.

Publishers could cut off my broadband??

Three strikes

Main article: Graduated response

In response to copyright infringement using peer-to-peer software, the creative industries, reliant on copyright, advocate what is known as a “graduated response” which sees consumers disconnected after a number of notification letters warning that they are infringing copyright. The content industry has sought to gain the co-operation of internet service providers (ISPs), asking them to provide subscriber information for IP addresses identified by the content industry as engaged in copyright infringement.[9] The proposal for internet service providers to cut off Internet access to a subscriber who had received three warning letters of alleged copyright infringement was initially known as “three strikes”, based on the baseball rule of “three strikes and you’re out“. Because “three strikes” was understood to refer to physical assault,[citation needed] the approach was later termed “graduated response”. Media attention has focused on attempts to implement such an approach in France (see the HADOPI law) and the UK (see the Digital Economy Act 2010), though the approach, or variations of it, has been implemented in a number of other countries, or attempts are made to do so.[10]

Yes – if they think that I have been violating “their” copyright they can – without judicial process get me cut off. It is they, not a court, who decide on whether it’s a violation. Wiley pursued Shelley Batts with legal threats for posting one graph from a scientific article. (Yes Wiley, until you change the rights of access to your material I shall keep dragging up this appalling violation of scientific rights). If she had done it three times they could have had her cut off .

So I am proposing that we should press for

Access to scientific publications should be a fundamental right

 

This makes simple sense. If justification were needed:

  • Scientific publication is a vital tool in improving the quality of (or even saving) humankind.
  • Scientific publication is largely funded by the public purse and non-profit institutions. These institutions wish the widest possible dissemination of their research.
  • Scientific publications are created by scientists and others with no intention of monetary reward. Scientists also wish the widest possible dissemination of their research.
  • The culture of this century expects information to be freely available.

If we are able to adopt this simple principle, then much else follows. It follows that cost of access should be regulated, or subsidised wholly or partly. It follows that there should be no restrictions on the flow or re-use of scientific information (the dissemination cost is near zero).

We have – through decades of academic indifference – landed ourselves with a band of publisher robber-barons and it will be a struggle to escape. But there is much experience of how to do this. There is – in many countries – strong political will. It can and must happen.

 

Revamping the funding system (Ioannidis)

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In this week’s Nature (not sure whether the scholarly poor have to pay for this so I précis a bit) there’s a useful review More time for research: Fund people not projects
John P. A. Ioannidis Nature 477, 529–531 (29 September 2011) doi:10.1038/477529a. It highlights the failures of the current system – huge amounts of effort expended by applicants and reviewers and there is great dissatisfaction. The current trajectory may make things consistently worse. So Ioannidis gives a table of possibilities. I reproduce bits of it here without permission (I am visiting NPG on Monday so they can throw me in their dungeon if they want):

Option ++ Pros –- Cons xx Example ?? Who would be funded

Egalitarian (fund everybody) ++ Avoids peer-review biases Gives sufficient amounts to scientists doing low-cost research Small administrative burden — Does not support large research efforts Does not recognize exceptional scientists xx Some universities fund the salaries of all their faculty?? All.

PMR: This is how I started (1967). It was called the dual-support system. You could rely on normal lab equipment, consumables, travel, and access to technical support. We were very well supported. It was actually so lavish that you were never brought to account – you could do what you wanted. I did a lot of stupid and pointless stuff. But I was also able to build the core of the chemical informatics program that I am still pursuing.

Aleatoric (fund at random) ++ Avoids peer-review biases Small administrative burden — Will not capture all deserving scientists xx Foundational Questions Institute ?? Flexible

PMR: For small amounts of funding with a large number of applicants this may be useful. For example if I have a 15% chance of getting a summer student funded I’d be happy to go into a lottery. But it doesn’t scale.

Assessment of career ++ Captures career trajectory Has gold-standard status — Is vulnerable to favouritism Inappropriate for young researchers Is labour-intensive xx MacArthur Fellows Program ?? Few elite scientists (or else administratively burdensome)

PMR: I was awarded a CIBA-GEIGY fellowship for a sabbatical year with Jack Dunitz when I had little formal track record (DPhil + 6 years in post). It changed my life. It wasn’t really assessment of career as much as assessment of promise. I hope I have fulfilled some of that.

Automated impact
indices ++ Eliminates favouritism Evaluates many applicants with ease Approaches objectivity — There are many indices, all with flaws; no consensus about best one to use Indices can be gamed Databases have shortcomings (such as imperfect citation coverage, entry errors, name disambiguation problems) xx UK Research Excellence Framework ?? Flexible

PMR: The only attraction of complete automation is efficient bureaucracy (and we know how often automation fails). It has the same objectivity as an income tax form. Formally correct but utterly depressing. It favours regression to the mean. There is no creativity in funding.

Scientific citizenship ++ May improve science, if good practices are rewarded and bad ones penalized — Automation is not yet possible for data gathering, and is difficult for some citizenship practices
Has peer-review biases xx Financial incentives to peer reviewers ?? Could be extended to many scientists only for aspects that can be automated

PMR: quoting without permission:

Funding systems could reward good scientific citizenship practices, such as data sharing4, high-quality methods, careful study design and meticulous reporting of scientific work5. Openness to collaboration, non-selective publication of ‘negative’ findings, balanced discussion of limitations in articles and high-quality contributions to peer-review, mentoring, blogging or database curation could also be encouraged. Researchers might be rewarded for publishing reproducible data, protocols and algorithms. However, some citizenship practices are difficult to capture in automated databases, so would be subject to the disadvantages of peer assessment.

I am not sure “Scientific citizenship” is the best term – this is as much about multivariate indicators of value and esteem (i.e. going beyond the mindless “how many papers and how often cited”). It can be gamed (probably easier than citations). However it’s obviously something that must be pursued and rapidly but overlaps with several other approaches.

Projects with broad goals ++ Proposals are easy to write and review Formulating work can be flexible Permits targeted innovation — Does not eliminate project proposals Is vulnerable to favouritism Holds potential for exaggerated promises and claims xx NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards Howard Hughes Medical Institute ?? Few elite scientists

PMR: I think there are two axes here – breadth / freedom, and patronage. I’ve had patronage and it can be extremely valuable (though often not meritocratic). Patronage often devolves to selected institutions, e.g. in the eScience program Cambridge was awarded a Centre. This allowed people in Cambridge to apply selectively for funds and I happened to be in a position to get 6 PDRA years fairly easily. Similarly there are often targeted programs designed around a group of institutions – if you happen to be in them it’s much easier to get funding. Perhaps the most specific was the Cambridge-MIT Institute (http://www.cmi.cam.ac.uk ) which “helped develop DSpace – a groundbreaking future-proof digital archive” (their words, not mine). I didn’t directly get funding but it helped to get JISC funding. And in eScience there were several projects where I could become a Co-I – eMinerals, materialsGrid.

 

But my biggest patron was Unilever and to them I am very grateful. They provide(d) infrastructure, project funding and a lot of freedom. Patronage is not egalitarian, can be abused, and can be misdirected. Similarly I regard Microsoft as a having elements of a patron. The long association through eScience makes it much easier to agree new mutually beneficial projects.

 

There are other models. I think cooperatives/collaborations (e.g. Mat Todd’s Open Drug Discovery and Open Source Drug Discovery in India) are valuable new models and can mix public and private funding. And while not everyone can receive money, there is greater opportunity for spreading the net and reaching out to citizen science. Similarly some of the funding that the OKF receives allows for considerable freedom and I applaud this – even more because this clearly supports a common good rather than fostering a single person’s career. It’s probably peripheral to mainstream research but it’s often still research.

 


 

Comments on the Bourne plot and other EPSRC matters

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For whatever reason I get very few comments on this blog (note: I try to be courteous to posters). Comments normally come when I upset people and overstep a line (“turning up the outrage knob”). I don’t generally do this consciously. Anyway I have got two useful comments on my criticism of the EPSRC Bourne plot (http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/09/28/epsrc-will-eventually-have-to-disclose-where-the-bourne-incredulity-comes-from-so-please-do-it-now/ ).

I’ll post the comments and reply:

? Jeremy Bentham says: September 28, 2011 at 9:17 am 

We need to raise the quality of this debate – I’m not saying EPSRC is right but it doesn’t help by distorting what they are actually saying. Let’s make a bit more effort to understand what EPSRC have done, why they have done it, and start arguing on a basis of accurate information. EPSRC have actually been very open about why they are doing this, what the process has been, and what inputs they used to make strategic decisions.

Bourne’s team have actually published quite a detailed explanation on how they made *informed judgements* about the physical sciences portfolio which is represented by the QI plot (just because a diagram isn’t quantifiable doesn’t mean it isn’t representative of something)

Read this and please blog again http://tiny.cc/f66xw

PMR: Thanks Jeremy. I agree that my challenge included discourse that I would not use in a measured response. It may trivialize some issues but it also emphasizes the real sense of injustice and arbitrariness felt by many (not just me). It’s a political, not an analytical, post and perhaps more suited to Prime Minister’s Question Time. I have read many of the chemistry documents you list and will comment. I cannot presently see how those documents translate into the Bourne diagram.

? Walter Blackstock says: September 28, 2011 at 12:44 pm 

You may be interested in Prof Timothy Gowers’s deconstruction of the EPSRC announcement. http://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/a-message-from-our-sponsors/

PMR: This is an exceptionally powerful piece. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers is not only a mathematics superstar but also a star of the blogosphere. He created and catalysed the Polymath project, where a virtual group of mathematicians proved an extremely challenging unsolved conjecture. He is rightly hailed as a prophet of new web-based scholarship and I try to emulate the approach in activities such as Quixote. The piece is deliberately underspoken and he uses the EPSRC language itself as as a weapon against their mathematics policy. (In simple terms this is that only certain areas of maths are worth funding. )

PMR Comments on JB and EPSRC chemistry.

I will reread the documents and see what I may have missed. If there is a clear explanation of how Bourne came to create the diagram then I (and many others) have missed it and would welcome it. Let me take:

http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Publications/reports/ChemistryIR2009.pdf

in which an invited group of top international chemists analysed the state of UK chemistry. I’m going to take two areas that I know a bit about, chemoinformatics and polymers (specifically polymer informatics as we were sponsored by Unilever for a 4-year project). Both of these are represented by Bourne as the lowest quality of chemistry (presumably in UK?). I am naturally upset at being repsented as working in areas of very low quality – I believe it is the scientist and the actual science performed that should be judged – not the discipline. (There are limits to this, such as homeopathy, and creationism, but all the sciences in Bourne are mainstream hypothesis- or data-driven science). Let’s remember that Einstein worked in a patent office and van’t Hoff in a vetinary school (for which he was lambasted by Wislicenus).

There is no mention of chemoinformatics in R2009. If Bourne took that as an indication of quality that’s completely unjustified. Here’s polymers (my emphasis):

P 17: There are examples of excellence

that can be readily identified in synthesis, catalysis

including biocatalysis, biological chemistry (specifically

bioanalytical), supramolecular chemistry, polymers and

colloids and gas-phase spectroscopy and dynamics.

P21: Polymer Science and Engineering

Following world-wide trends, the UK polymer chemistry

community has made some important and

excellent choices. In a coordinated action a few

universities have set-up excellent programmes

covering the entire chain-of-knowledge in polymer

science and engineering. In this way, the UK is

ensured a leading position in this important field for

both scientific and industrial needs. There is strong

evidence of growth and impact in polymer synthesis in

the UK Chemistry community. There are several

centres that have been created and whose members

have established international reputations. The

polymer synthesis community has placed the field on

the map in the UK. There is interest in controlled

polymer synthesis, water-processible and functional

polymers. A very strong activity that has international

recognition is the synthesis and processing of organic

electronic materials where the UK is pre-eminent.

Applications include polymer LEDs field effect

transistors, organic photovoltaics and sensors.

This bears no relation to the low quality for “Structural Polymers and technology”.

Bourne labels chemoinformatics as the lowest quality of all: “Refocus – funding targeted towards identified priorities”. A simple reading of this is “you (==me) have been doing rubbish work and we are going to reform you”. Like a failing school.

So if this is going to happen, at least I need to know the reason for it. Who made the decision, on what evidence. If the evidence is there (even that a group of the great-and-the-good made the plot), I’ll comment objectively. Scientists are used to being told their work is poor or misguided – it one of the strengths of science.

But so far the community as a whole seems to be finding it hard to get hard evidence.

About Open Educational Resources (OER)

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To celebrate the appointment of Dr. Rory McGreal as the UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning Chair in Open Educational Resources (OER), Athabasca University is presenting a series of five noon hour webcasts exploring major issues and opportunities presented by OER. Each session will feature an internationally known promoter and developer of open educational resources, research, or ideas.

Events

Monday, October 24 – Fun and Fear in Open Spaces

This presentation presents  the theory and practice of Open Learning as implemented in Athabasca University’s Beyond the LMS social networking system. The presentation discusses the motivation , design and challenges encountered in the first two years of Athabasca Landing (an elgg-based social networking environment). Reference will be made to the disruptive nature of the technology in regard to  the limits of openness, resistance to sharing, context-sensitivity, controllability, ownership, responsibility, soft security, distributed design, managing complexity and  crossing the formal/informal divide etc.

Prof. Terry Anderson  overviews open scholarship and his work as author and editor of open books and the International Review of Research on Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL).

Dr. Jon Dron researches ways to enable crowds to become teachers, using shared content, behaviour and connections. He has been providing and using open educational content on the Web since 1993 and has authored several open source tools and systems.

Noon to 1 p.m., Mountain Time (Canada)
Launch Webcast

 

Tuesday, October 25 – Post Secondary Leadership and the OER Movement

“OER provide both opportunity and anxiety to University Administrators.  While they see possible savings, at the same time they see new expenditures without accompanying revenues.  Little understanding exists by either University administrators or by OER specialists on new economic models.  While some studies have been done, there has been little in depth research as to what these new models might be and then how the post secondary system has to restructure itself to create a sustainable OER eco system.  This within a post secondary system that has an inflation rate of 6% in a funding model that has allowed approximately 2 to 4% or even negative increases.  This discussion will attempt to provide the OER movement with some insights as to alternatives.”

Dr. Frits Pannekoek is the President of Athabasca University and President of the International Council on Open and Distance Education. He is an advocate for the open distribution of scholarly works and has been the driving force behind Athabasca University Press- Canada’s first Open Access Press.

Noon to 1 p.m., Mountain Time (Canada)
Launch Webcast

 

Wednesday, October 26 – Making Sense of Complexity in Open Information Environments

In the pursuit of openness, the cognitive experience of the learners and educators are often overlooked. Open educational resources present fragmented views of topics: a TedTalk video here, an Open Yale lecture there, an OCW lesson plan here, and an open online course there. This fragmentary experience can be taxing for individual learners as they try to make sense of various concepts in order to form a reasonably coherent view of the topic. This presentation will present new research on the sensemaking and wayfinding activities of learners in complex online information environments. Needed skills and strategies of learners will be reviewed. Implications for educational design will also be explored, particularly in the formation of participatory pedagogical models in course development.

George Siemens, with Athabasca University’s Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI), is best known for his development of the pedagogical model of networked learning known as Connectivism. He and Steven Downes have pioneered the development of massive open courses, in which many hundreds of students study and learn in open and networked contexts.

Noon to 1 p.m., Mountain Time (Canada)
Launch Webcast

 

Thursday, October 27 – Panel on Moving to Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University

Dr. Cindy Ives, Director of the Centre for Learning Design and Development (CLDD) at Athabasca University, discusses recent projects in the CLDD that have focused on open educational resources including initiatives to produce and share open educational resources, to use open resources in course materials, and to find and aggregate open materials for adaptation and inclusion in program development. Design principles underpinning the OER projects will be discussed and examples will be demonstrated.

Dr. Lisa Carter, Interim Director of the Athabasca River Basin Research Institute, Tony Tin, Head of Digital Initiatives and Electronic Resources, and Colin Elliott, Digitization Co-ordinator discuss the Bibliography of the Athabasca River Basin (BARB), which is being developed as an open educational resource to aid in the study and dissemination of research done within the basin. This presentation will focus on the ways in which open educational resources will benefit the BARB project.

Noon to 1 p.m., Mountain Time (Canada)
Launch Webcast

 

Friday, October 28 – OER’s and Sustainable Innovation: Low Cost, Low Risk but High Impact. 

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This session will include a description of the UNESCO Chair in OER network including an update on the mandate of the Chair and the  developments so far. These include agreement on support for a network of UNESCO Chairs in OER with Chairs on each continent; an international PhD for scholars studying OER and a Knowledge Cloud for OER research resources including a mapping of OER organizations. The OER University initiative will also be described. This is a project to create/assemble/develop pathways for informal learners using OER for assessment and official accreditation of the knowledge they have gained. This includes investigations into Prior Learning and Assessment as well as challenge examinations and other non-traditional forms of evaluating learner achievement.

 

Prof Rory McGreal is the UNESCO/COL Chair in Open Educational Resources (OER). He is also the Assoc. Vice President of Research at Athabasca University. He is a researcher in OERs and their application. He is also the editor of a bestselling book on educational learning objects and has research interests in mobile learning.
Dr. Wayne Mackintosh is the Director of the Open Education Foundation based at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand, a member of the Board of Directors, and founder of the WikiEducator project. He is an internationally acclaimed advocate and organizer of systems and communities to collaboratively build quality course materials

Noon to 1 p.m., Mountain Time (Canada)
Launch Webcast

 

Prizes!

A draw for AU ball caps, T-shirts and USB hubs will follow the conclusion of each presentation. Everyone from Athabasca University and beyond is invited to participate.

EPSRC will eventually have to disclose where the Bourne Incredulity comes from, so please do it now

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I blogged yesterday (http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/09/27/the-clarke-bourne-discontinuity/ ) about Paul Clarke’s exposure (http://shear-lunacy.blogspot.com/2011/09/bourne-incredulity.html ) of the EPSRC “decision making” process which appears to use a 2-plot of “quality” vs “importance”. It has now seriously upset me. It needs the spotlight of Openness turned upon it.

Why is it so upsetting?

  • It appears to be used as an automatic method of assessing the fundability of research proposals. This in itself is highly worrying. Everyone agrees that assessing research is hard and inexact. Great scientists and scientific ideas are often missed, especially when they challenge orthodoxy. Bad or (more commonly) mediocre science is funded because it’s in fashion. “Safe” is often more attractive than “exciting”. The only acceptable way is to ask other scientists (“peers”) to assess scientific proposals, which we do without payment as we know it is the bedrock of acceptable practice. There is not, and never will be (until humans are displaced by machines) an automatic way of assessing science. Indeed when a publisher rejects or accepts papers without putting them out to peer review most scientists are seriously aggrieved. For a Research Council (which allocates public money) it is completely unacceptable to (not) allocate resources without peer review.

     

    And “peer-review” means by practising scientists, not office apparatchiks.

  • It appears to be completely unscientific. The use of unmeasurable terms such as “importance” and “quality” is unacceptable for a scientific organization. We live with the use of “healthy”, “radiant”, “volume” (of hair), as marketing terms – at best an expression of product satisfaction – at worst dangerously misleading. But “quality”?

     

    It might be possible to use “quality” as a shorthand for some metric. Perhaps the average impact factor (arggh!) of a paper in that discipline. Or the average score given by reviewers in previous grant proposals (urrgh!). Those would indicate the current metric madness, but at least they can be made Open and reproducible. “Importance”? The gross product of industries using the discipline? The number of times the term occurs in popular science magazines? Awful, but at least reproducible.

     

    But this graph, which has no metric axes and no zero point (this is the ENGINEERING and SCIENCE Research Council) breaks high school criteria of acceptability. Suppose the scales run from 99-100? All subjects are ultra important, and all subjects are top quality? Any reviewer would trash this immediately.

I intend to pursue this – in concert with Paul and Prof. Tony Barrett from Imperial College. We have to expose the pseudoscience behind this. (Actually it would make an excellent article for ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” column in the Guardian). We first have to know the facts.

Paul and Tony have used FOI to get information from the EPSRC. They haven’t yet got any. I have suggested they should use http://whatdotheyknow.com as it records all requests and correspondence.

The EPSRC cannot hide. They are a government body and required to give information. It they try a Sir-Humphrey approach (“muddle and fluff”) we go back with specific questions. And if they fluff those then it can be taken to the Information Commissioner.

The information will definitely come out.

So when it does, what are the bets?

  • 1-2: they can’t trace the origin, mumble and fluff
  • 1-1: created by someone in the EPSRC office (“from all relevant data”)
  • 2-1: copied from some commissioned report (probably private) from “consultants”
  • 2-1: a selected panel of experts
  • 3-1: created from figures dredged up on industry performance and reviewers (see above)
  • 3-1: copied from some other funding body (e.g. NSF)
  • 3-1: the field (i.e. some other origin – a dream, throwing darts )

EPSRC: the origins of this monstrosity will be revealed anyway, so it will be best that you make a clean break of it now. You are not the most popular research council – RSC, Royal Society and several others have written to ask you to think again about arbitrary and harmful funding decisions. The longer this goes on the less will be your credibility.

 

 

 

 

    

Europe says (scientific) data should be Open. Neelie gets it! Do publishers?

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Even in the burgeoning era of Openness it’s great to see the strong stance from many political leaders. Here’s European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes Brussels, 22 September 2011 (by Ton Zijlstra) http://epsiplatform.eu/news/news/ec_vp_kroes_on_standardization_and_open_data (I have edited savagely)

Speaking at the Open Forum Europe Summit 2011 yesterday in Brussels European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes has delivered a speech titled “From Common Standards to Open Data“.

In her speech she presented the progress made towards a new legal framework for European Standardisation, and interoperability. Saying that “standards are indispensable for openness, freedom and choice“, she said that in the coming years the focus of work will be to make the proposed legal framework become law as soon as possible. Furthermore also the new European Interoperability Framework has been created that will help create more and better interoperability, such as for cross-border public services in Europe.

“We are going to take action: we are going to open up Europe’s public sector”

“I am convinced that the potential to re-use public data is significantly untapped. Such data is a resource, a new and valuable raw material. If we became able to mine it, that would be an investment which would pay off with benefits for all of us. (PMR emphasis) …

Third, benefits for science. Because research in genomics, pharmacology or the fight against cancer increasingly depends on the availability and sophisticated analysis of large data sets. Sharing such data means researchers can collaborate, compare, and creatively explore whole new realms. We cannot afford for access to scientific knowledge to become a luxury, and the results of publicly funded research in particular should be spread as widely as possible.

PMR: to hear a politician urging this is enormously encouraging

And, perhaps most importantly, benefits for democracy because it enhances transparency, accessibility and accountability. After all, what could be more natural than public authorities who have collected information on behalf of citizens using their tax money giving it back to those same citizens. New professionals such as data journalists are our allies in explaining what we do.”

PMR: lots of exciting stuff on Open Data omitted…

We’ll also be looking at charging regimes because expensive data isn’t “open data”. In short,getting out the data under reasonable conditions should be a routine part of the business of public administrations.”

We are planning two data portals to give simple and systematic access to public data at European level. First we should have, bynext spring, a portal to the Commission’s own data resources. And second, for 2013, I am working on a wider, pan-European data portal, eventually giving access to re-usable public sector information from across the EU, federating and developing existing national and regional data portals.”

PMR: I’ve missed a good deal out. Read it. The message is:

  • Politicians care about open data
  • Politicians care about open science data
  • Politicians aren’t likely to be very happy with people who try to keep scientific data closed

So things are looking up. Open Data has arrived. I’m hoping that scientific publishers will realise that the future has arrived. Because if not, they will find their don’t have many allies.

Meet Google at Stockholm University

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Stockholm University proudly presents a great program for the Open Access week. Speakers from Google and PEER project (earlier representing Max Planck-society Digital Library) will discuss copyright issues, digital innovations in scholarly communication and much more!

 

No fee – Open Access of course!

 

Stockholm University Open Access Week

 

Thomas Neidenmark, Research Coordinator

Open Access Symbol or Character needed! (no image)

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Urgently needed! A symbol or character version of the Open Acces logo to be used in Word!!!! So no icon or image but a character like the Copyright character © that we all know!  

We are creating lists op Top 25% Journals within relevant Journal Citation report (JCR) catagories for our organisation (University Medical Center Groningen) and we want to emphasize the OA Journals in there!

The CMS of the University of Groningen does not allow to add images next to these texts, and we think it would be nice to have that character anyway!

The Clarke-Bourne discontinuity

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I have (regrettably) only just discovered Paul Clarke’s blog http://shear-lunacy.blogspot.com/2011/09/bourne-incredulity.html . Paul is a synthetic chemist and over this year has challenged science policy funding, especially by the UK’s EPSRC. He has mobilised opinion by collecting signatories to letters to EPSRC and getting the Royal Society of Chemistry to take this seriously (which they now do). It’s a great example of the power of the blogosphere. Continual, concerted action by individuals has a massive effect.

Read Paul’s posts this year (rather than a summary from me). Essentially the EPSRC has abandoned traditional methods of funding (PhD studentships and responsive mode (funding excellent ideas from anyone)) in favour of a metric mumbo-jumbo. EPSRC has decided that it will fund high quality, high importance subjects in “sponsorship” mode. This means, effectively, that they have set themselves up as kingmakers and supporters of the Holy Roman Empire of the chosen, rather than understanding that science comes from everywhere and leads anywhere and the skill is in letting this happen. In times of reduced funding everyone will suffer, but this model selects a few privileged groups and showers the limited wealth on them. The model is defensible within a commercial company aiming for particular markets – it does not work for public science.

Unfortunately it leads to the rule of numbers, and here is the EPSRC graph (“Bourne graph”) of desirability (copied from Paul’s blog). (Since it appears to be a work of fiction it is formally copyrightable but I’ll take that risk).

 

It has two axes and until the algorithm for coordinates is revealed they remain completely subjective. (There can be valid reasons for using bibliometry to XY-plot disciplines and these include interdisciplinary links as in the MESUR and Eigenfactor projects. But these are descriptive of information flow, not value). Apparently FOI has been invoked to try to get clarity without success. I am not sure it’s on WhatDoTheyKnow and I’ll suggest that.

To play the game, my own discipline of chemoinformatics scores high on importance and ultra-low on quality. OK, I have been critical of chemoinformatics but I doubt that EPSRC is listening to me. Who decided this? And how? There is no evidence that these indicators have any basis. Are they UK or worldwide?

And polymers – another area we have worked in. Low quality (what an arrogant statement to make without justification) and low importance (why did Unilever fund us strategically?).

And although synthetic organic chemistry is of high importance it is being systematically underfunded by EPSRC. The discipline that allows people to create and modify molecules addressing disease, materials, agrochemistry…

The subject which in Dial-A-Molecule EPSRC itself selected as a Grand Challenge.

I have no objection to graphs of this sort being dreamed up in awayday workshops. The problem is that they become hardcoded into policy tools. That certain keywords guarantee that you won’t get funded.

Anyway great kudos to Paul for leading this activity. If I had known I would have signed his letters. He is in a “typical” chemistry post in that extradisciplinary work such as blogging is usually a negative factor. Campaigning takes away time from writing grants and doing research. Challenging the CEO of EPSRC probably doesn’t do you any good in getting funding.

Am. Chem. Soc. Skolnik Award 2012 (Henry Rzepa + PMR) and some future thoughts

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Henry Rzepa and I have been honoured by the Herman Skolnik award of the Chemical Information Division (CINF) of the American Chemical Society. Details (from Phil McHale) can be found here:

http://www.ccl.net/cgi-bin/ccl/message-new?2011+09+26+014

Other than – naturally – feeling pleased for ourselves there are a number of points:

  • It is the first joint award that has been made in the history of the award. Our mutual support has been essential and kept us going – I have often referred to us as a “symbiote”. Joint awards are common in many disciplines and represent the need for cooperation and collaboration. Chemical informatics must, we believe, be a cooperative approach and there are signs that this is starting to happen.
  • It gives formal legitimacy to our drive for an Open semantic interoperable chemical information infrastructure. While we have never doubted that what we have designed and created is part of the present and future of chemical (and other scientific) information it is often a lonely journey. Sometimes it is possible to think that the time has passed and “it will never happen”. This award gives us great confidence to take ideas forward (and these are ideas shared by many others). It also – possibly – gives us greater believability when promoting particular actions or designs.
  • It pays tribute to the many others who have helped the ideas flourish. This is not a ritual Hollywood acceptance speech – Henry and I have been privileged to be part of a much wider community (Blue Obelisk, Quixote) which has been essential in allowing the ideas (not “our” ideas) to flourish, and even more importantly be implemented. CML owes a considerable amount of its credibility to the code written in Blue Obelisk and Quixote, and this has been done by scientists with free will (i.e. they have bought into the ideas and given their time). So I see Henry and myself as catalysts – we have helped to coordinate and focus the latent potential of the last two decades. Because we are catalysts we do not rely on the need for massive resources, and when people respond it is their work, not ours.
  • I am also very conscious of my very strong support from a number of people/organizations, especially in the Unilever Centre, Churchill College, Unilever and Microsoft Research. These have given me the resources to develop the tools and designs over the last 5 years, and without them it would have been very difficult to keep going and creating tangible information components. This means that our current trajectory is strong. I am continually picking up indications of the work being adopted by scientists and within organisations.

Last month I celebrated my 70th birthday. Unfortunately birthdays are part of the pseudo-scientific numerical metrics – anyone over 67 in this country finds it very difficult to get grants (and I am grateful to some funders, including JISC, for finding age irrelevant). It means (not necessarily a bad thing) that I can generally not act as a Principal Investigator. But, since our last 20 years have been involved in persuasion rather than coercion nothing really changes. So many of my current efforts will continue, but perhaps in a different management setting, and perhaps less obviously coordinated.

My role now is a scientist working in joint opportunities, perhaps even patronage (a common enough method two centuries ago). I have several ongoing activities and opportunities.

  • I will continue to have a place in the Unilever Centre (including writing up more work, and collaborating on computational metabolism)
  • I have a visiting position at the European Bioinformatics Inst. with Christoph Steinbeck working in his group (ChEBI) – and extensions to metabolism and NMR spectra.
  • I am continuing to take the Quixote idea forward and visiting Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNNL) next month to collaborate on semantics and glossary for their Open Source NWChem program.
  • We will continue to support OSCAR4 and OPSIN – and now is the time to broaden the community. Both programs are now cutting edge and competitive with closed source offerings. But we need your involvement
  • I hope to spend several months next year in Australia (more later, hopefully) – developing ontologies and semantics with Nico Adams.
  • And we have just submitted a proposal to JISC for Open Bibliography 2 and should hear in a few days.
  • And a whole host of new things in the Open Knowledge Foundation.

I personally believe that awards should look to the future as well as the past and I hope this gives some indication that the Skolnik award gives new impetus and hopefully new collaborators.

There are some special facets relating to the American Chemical Society who have honoured us. Readers of this blog may get the impression that I am “anti-ACS”. I am not (or I would not be a member and not be accepting this award). I owe my involvement in chemical informatics to superb workshops and publications run by the ACS in the 1970′s. They convinced me to go into informatics in the pharma industry. Their consistent support of informatics over at least 4 decades (and much longer if we count Chemical Abstracts) has been outstanding in science. But change is needed.

I believe that much of the future depends on “trusted” organizations and among these are universities, government and their organs, museums, libraries, scholarly societies/ scientific unions. None are perfect, but they are the best we have (“Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill). So with the learned societies. They are democratic in structure and they are the best we have (unfettered capitalism, as practised by some scholarly publishers, is not an attractive self-regulating alternative). Part of my role, I believe, is to help show ways forward for some aspects of learned societies. I believe that some of the opinions in this blog have influenced scholarly organizations.

The problem with large learned societies is that they can become corporate-like where decisions are taken for purely market reasons rather than the good of the society and its role. The ACS is not unique in this – it seems to happen in many disciplines (including bibliography). There is a size beyond which an organization is in danger of losing its roots and values. And the larger an organization the slower it is to react to anything. We thus have tensions along several axes:

  • Size.
  • Publishing and competition. As I have blogged, I think scholarly publishing is broken. It fosters local undemocratic monopolies. It is one of the weirdest markets there is – there are no conventional market forces and no elasticity. The customers have agreed to work in a system that severely disadvantages them. The problem is that modern scholarly publishing tends to corrupt including corrupting scholarly organizations.
  • Commercial interests. I am not an anti-capitalist, but capitalism per se does not promote the ethics that I would like to see in scholarship. Chemistry has a very large commercial base, and this cannot overrule scholarly interests.
  • Web democracy. The web has opened new ideas of democracy and participation. These will not disappear. Yes, I am a web-idealist and I have seen ideals slip away over two decades but we are currently fighting for our democratic information future. The scholarly societies must recognize and build on this or they will continue to be riven by this tension.

Things are happening in at least the last 3 that offer hope. We are seeing pharma companies raising the pre-competitive level. The ideas of Open Source Drug Discovery in a commercial setting. Could we hope for “Open Source” scholarly publishing?

Henry and I have the opportunity to run the Skolnik symposium on Aug 21st 2012 in Philadelphia. We want the form and content of this to reflect the work that we and others have done. It’s also a chance to get new ideas displayed and promoted. This is not a travelling award with a lecture but if people are interested in my visiting them I have a somewhat flexible diary.

@mire presents: Request your free Open Access week doorhangers (SOLD OUT)

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Currently, all available doorhangers have been requested and are prepared for shipment.

 

Open Access Week is approaching! I am proud to announce that @mire has committed to an official sponsorship of this initiative. As part of our involvement, we have produced Open Access Week doorhangers that we intend to send out to institutions worldwide.

It was our impression that some researchers, enthusiastic about Open Access, are not willing to walk around in an OA Week t-shirt for the whole duration of the week.
That is why we created these “Ask me about Open Access” doorhangers that they can use as a tool to demonstrate their support for open access and invite their colleagues for a chat.

If you want to give these doorhangers to your researchers, you can use the link below to request up to 100 pieces and I will ship them to you for free in the next weeks.

http://bit.ly/oa-week-doorhangers

 

Open Access Week doorhanger: front design

 

Open Access Week doorhanger: back design

First Open Access Week at the University Campus in Rijeka, Croatia

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SHOW (Share/OpenAccess/Worldwide) will be the first-of-its-kind event to celebrate Open Access Week in Croatia, held through October, 26 to October 27th 2011 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences within the University Campus in Rijeka, Croatia.

The idea is to raise awareness among Croatian students about the importance of free flow of information and open access to research literature, which is not a familiar term, by raising questions about what students are already well familiar with, i.e., intellectual property.

The students will be introduced to Copyleft movement, Creative Commons licensing, Open Projects, Open Content movement, Open Access movement and the Right to Research Coalition action and they will be invited to join the debate about the chances for the world of open values.

 

More information about the SHOW and the landing page will be presented soon!

 

Some of the activities (with possible alterations) are listed below and more are to be announced. Hopefully, you will join our effort to push the OA movement forward!

 

Wednesday, October 26

1. Tomislav Medak: Creative Commons Licensing/ iCommons

Tomislav Medak is a philosopher with interests in constellations, contemporary political philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He is co-ordinating theory program and publishing activities of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA (Zagreb, Croatia). He’s a free software and free culture advocate. He’s project lead of Croatian Creative Commons team and board member of international commons organization iCommons. He’s member of urban activist initiative Right to the City. He is a member of the Zagreb based theatre company BADco.

2. Round Table: Intellectual Property in a Digital Age

Tomislav Medak, Philosophy professors, Law professors, Science, Medicine, Technology professors, students

3. Aleksandar Blagojevic – Leader and Founder of Pirate Party Serbia: Digital Freedom and Open Projects

4. Right to Research Coalition Webcast:
Goldis Chami: Students at the University of British Columbia

Goldis Chami is a medical student at the University of British Columbia and a member of the Right to Research Coalition Steering Committee. She has led the charge for her institution to adopt an openaccess policy and serves on its Scholarly Communications Steering Committee.  She is also actively working to get more Canadian students involved in promoting Open Access and to support local advocacy efforts through her work on a forthcoming on-campus advocacy guide.  She writes regularly for The Global and Mail about medical training and healthcare.

5. Movie: Rip Remix! Manifesto

Thursday, October 27

Publishing Open Access:

1. Sara Uhac and the Publishing Academy Rijeka: Publish Open Access
Special Focus on PhD Students

 

Sara Uhac is a PhD Researcher in Communication Sciences, enrolled in a PhD course at the University of Lugano specializing in Publishing Studies. Together with her higher studies, she currently holds the position of Head of Journal Publishing at InTech – Open Access Publisher, and she is responsible for determining, implementing and managing the publishing strategy for 50+ OA STM journals.

 

2. Bernard Koludrovic: “Drugost”
open access journal presentation

3. Free Energy: Introduction to Free Energy: Project Presentation
Professors and students @ Faculty of Technology and Engineering, Rijeka, Croatia

4. Debate: A Remix Manifesto: Digital Music and Piracy

 

5. Movie: Steal This Film

6. Ducks Records: Musical plus Visual Performance
a collective of artists and non-artists/free music and video online
 

 

All Day Activities: Wednesday, Thursday:

  • Art Academy Students: “Free Information” Exhibition and Voting
  • Animations
  • Interactive Book Download
  • Peek and Poke Booth
  • Pirate Booth
  • Student Union Booths
  • Creating an Open Access Comic
  • Right to Research Petition Booth

Stay tuned!

Advice to junior faculty who want to do get promoted doing Open Science

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I recently sent some advice to a colleague who is coming up for tenure at another university.  He’s quite well known in the Open Science community and is trying to figure out how best to make the case to his tenure committee that the open science contributions he has made in addition to his traditional journal publications are important.  We’re talking some major contributions here — lab protocols on OpenWetWare, open lecture materials on slideshare, data files released with CC0, videos of lab protocols on Benchfly, and he’s a regular contributor to science discussions on FriendFeed.

The advice I gave him was basically to make the committee’s job of measuring these contributions easier.  Here’s the advice (in a slightly edited form):

The audience for most tenure documents (and particularly the external letters) is a committee of non-specialists that advises the provost or other high-ranking administrator.  These committees are often somewhat skeptical of departments and candidates and are looking for external validation of what they are reading in the tenure dossier and the packet prepared by the departments.  They are swayed by real experts in the field (named chairs at other institutions, national academy members, people at top 10 institutions) and by things they can measure (publications, h-indices, grant money, citation counts). If you want to add a non-traditional contribution to a tenure dossier, you should also include a way of measuring the importance of that contribution.

First, if the rules of your institution allow it, make sure there is a strong defense of open ways of doing science in your dossier (1-2 paragraphs or so).  Make the case that it is important to consider non-standard contributions even though previous tenure committees did not.

Use as many metrics to back up your contributions as you can. Make a case that each of your software releases counts as much as a full publication, and use download statistics as if they were directly comparable to academic citations.  List external users of your software as if they were research collaborators, because they are!  If you can collect them, include download statistics on open contributions to sites like OpenWetware and Wikipedia.

If your institution’s rules allow it, make sections directly under your publications for  ”Published Datasets”, “Contributed Software”, “Published Protocols & Notebooks”, “Scientific Videos”.  In each section, list authors, a title, description, and URL of the resource you have contributed along with a count of downloads or views, and a list of other groups using your data. Make this look as much like your publication section as possible, as you can then make the argument that these things should be treated with a similar weight to traditional academic publication.   Provide the metrics in the document so that your committees aren’t guessing about how important something is.  I can’t emphasize this enough – citation counts are easy for a committee to dig up – download stats are harder.  Do the measurement work for your committee and they’ll make the assumption that your metrics are important.

So that’s the advice.  I’ve been involved in a few internal tenure discussions, and the metrics are always important.  If there isn’t an easy analogy to something in my own experience, I look to the candidate’s documents and the external letters to tell me why something matters.