Over the past several months, a remarkable series of events have conspired to bring the issue of access to publicly funded research squarely to the forefront of the public consciousness.

This blog has been tackling the problem of Open Access, what it’s vision is and how to get a coherent movement. I’ve been excited to get a comment from Eric Raymond (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond ). Eric (whom I shared a platform with in ca 1996) is one of the pioneers of the F/OSS movement :

Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998, taking on the self-appointed role of ambassador of open source to the press, business and public.

Here’s his comment in full – I then comment. http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/12/20/the-openaccess-movement-is-disorganized-this-must-not-continue/#comment-102743

Eric S. Raymond says:

February 3, 2012 at 12:06 am  (Edit)

I was one of the Open Source Initiative’s co-founders and its first president. The confusion you guys are experiencing and the issues you’re debating are startlingly reminiscent of where we were in late 1997, early 1998. As the original poster noted, we got our act together. You can too.

I endorse P-MR’s analysis and his conclusions. You need a parallel to our Open Source Definition – an Open Access Definition. And, yes, it cannot allow no-commercial-use restrictions.

The reason for the this stance in the OSD wasn’t actually philosophical, it was brutally practical. The problem is that there is no bright-line definition of “commercial use”. Licenses with a no-commercial-use provision make it too difficult to reason about your rights are. Such uncertainty exerts a chilling effect on reuses which must be permitted if “openness” is to have any meaning.

Some of you in this discussion seem ready to constitute yourselves as an Open Access Initiative and write an Open Access Definition. To which I say; do it! Audacity is required in these situations.

I’m willing to assist; I can help with drafting the definition, and I can explain lessons of experience from our community that I think will apply directly to the problems you face.

I’m delighted to get this additional confirmation we are on the right track. We are audacious, we have our own definition (http://opendefinition.org/ ). We are also brutally practical – if people are paying 5000 USD for “Open Access” then they should get a much better deal than what most publishers offer. So we have much of this.

What we need is a revitalised Open Access Initiative. One that insists on BOAI-compliant, OKD-compliant. If Eric can bring new insights from the F/OSS experience, great.

Discussion and creativity continues on http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openaccess . If you share the view that we need clear adherence to the BOAI principles and practice join the list.

I’ve been off air for a bit as

• my hard disk crashed – it emitted messages (“Your disk is about to crash”, then “Ctrl-Alt-Del to access dying disk”, then – the “rest is silence”). Since I live my life in the open I can access most of what I need – about the only thing lost was the originals of the videos .
• the UCC server (wwmm) has been down for 2 days
• #animalgarden were going to make a video about bibliography but they got distracted (see below)

1. Charlotte Bolton and I have been pulling together the outputs of the #semphyssci meeting. We have planned that about 13-17 articles will come out of it and be published in J.Cheminform. Open Access costs money and we’re grateful to EPSRC/PathwaysToImpact for funding. Unlike last year (http://www.jcheminf.com/series/semantic_mol_future) more of the articles come from outside our group so it won’t be as hairy. We’ve posted all the videos and I will start blogging the content soon.

1. Open bibliography has been zooming ahead. We have an increasing number of pots of BibSoup. Every week Adrian Pohl tells us of libraries who have released Open bibliographic data. The Bibserver software is becoming very easy to deploy and very useful. The animals were hoping to make a video but they got distracted telling Gulliver about snow:

1. Open Access. There’s a critical mass of people who care about BOAI-compliant access and making that formal – and exciting. Doing rather than talking. See http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openaccess . We’ve come up with a clear and exciting position. If you want to return to the roots of BOAI this is the pace. Everyone is, of course, welcome

More detailed stuff in separate posts

At a recent meeting of the American Economic Association, the AEA began tackling some important ethical issues, according to this article in The Economist.

Excerpts:
Economics has internalised the views of rich patrons, according to Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago. His scathing analysis of journal publications revealed that papers providing justification for high executive pay were 55% more likely to be published than those opposed, and were more heavily cited by others.

A paper presented by Atif Mian of the University of California, Berkeley, Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago and Francesco Trebbi of the University of British Columbia, laid out why good policy is often most difficult to implement in the wake of a financial crisis…a redistribution of wealth from creditors to debtors could potentially benefit both groups by averting a deep downturn. Yet even though debtors are many, such redistributions are few. Effective lobbying by a few, concentrated creditors helps hold back a populist tide: a few powerful banks, for instance, may be better able to influence legislators than millions of homeowners.

Comment: this is very interesting, and lends support to something I am thinking about but have not yet written about, which is that the current situation of extreme and growing inequity is not good for anyone, not even the 1%. For example, what good will extreme wealth do for the 1% when everyone’s favorite island nation getaways are under water due to global warming? If we continue on our current path of destroying our precious water supplies through using increasingly dangerous methods of obtaining oil and gas such as hydraulic fracturing or putting pipelines to carry oil sands oil – with leaking inevitable – right through key watersheds as per the first Keystone Pipeline proposal – it is only a matter of time before all of us are drinking poisoned water and eating food supplied by poisoned water – including the 1% and their loved ones*. The only sane way forward, from my perspective, is to remove the divide between the 99% and the 1% and become one, or the 100%, living and working in harmony with each other, and with our environment.

* perhaps the 1% is thinking no problem, they will just buy what little clean water and food there is left and to heck with the rest of us. My response: from whom will you buy this? A company that puts profit before everything, and is subject to no government regulation? (postscript Feb 4 2012).

Thanks to Kyle Thompson for the pointer to the Economist article.

While the worldwide researcher community is again busy working itself up into an indignant lather with yet another publisher boycott threat, I am still haunted by a “keystroke koan“:

“Why did 34,000 researchers sign a threat in 2000 to boycott their journals unless those journals agreed to provide open access to their articles – when the researchers themselves could provide open access (OA) to their own articles by self-archiving them on their own institutional websites?“

Not only has 100% OA been reachable through author self-archiving as of at least 1994, but over 90% of all refereed journals (published by 65% of all refereed journal publishers) have already given their explicit green light to some form of author self-archiving — with over 60% of all journals, including Elsevier’s — giving their authors the green light to self-archive their refereed final drafts (“postprint“) immediately upon acceptance for publication…

So why are researchers yet again boycotting instead of keystroking, with yet another dozen years of needlessly lost research access and impact already behind us?

We have met the enemy, Pogo, and it’s not Elsevier.

(And this is why keystroke mandates are necessary; just keying out boycott threats to publishers is not enough.)

Data mining is a growing trend, and we can soon expect to see demand for data mining more personal information than we have seen before, such as our personal health information. My question is, should we all collectively copyleft all of our personal information, including our bodies (DNA), so that anyone who finds a way to make useful services from our information, has an obligation to provide these services in a way that benefits us?

For example, I submit that if a government or health organization authorizes the use of personal health data for research purposes leading to a commercial product, then the producer of that product has an obligation to make it available to those who provided the health information. This would not necessarily mean for free; it could mean reasonably affordable.

Could an approach like this strengthen the position of social goods such as health care?

This post is part of the Articulating the Commons series.

For further related reading, see this article in The Scientist which inspired this post:
http://the-scientist.com/2012/01/24/opinion-occupy-science/#disqus_thread

Unfortunately, we have had to withdraw this service temporily, because the Google CSE has been producing erratic search results.

We are in contact with Google to try and fix this technical difficulty.

We apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience. 2012-01-25

Wiley Open Access is pleased to publish our first EarlyView papers for MicrobiologyOpen, available here. These papers demonstrate the broad scope of the journal and illustrate the high scientific standard we will maintain going forward.

Nakamura et al.’s paper presents their research on a new species of Saccharophagus (Myt-1, found in Toyama Bay, Japan) that produces enzymes capable of effectively decomposing different kinds of seaweed and their component polysaccharides, while Yikmis and Steinbüchel present a system optimized for the expression of recombinant Lcp / active Lcp in the supernatant and the microbial degradation of rubber by different Streptomyces strains. Last, but by no means least, MicrobiologyOpen’s Editor-in-Chief, Pierre Cornelis, contributes an exciting paper which illustrates that a cosmid clone containing both an alcohol dehydrogenase and an aldehyde dehydrogenase from Acetobacter pasteurianus conferred an important production of acetic acid in E. coli, leading to the degradation of casein.

We are receiving a steady stream of submissions and look forward to receiving more. If you would like more information about submitting to MicrobiologyOpen, please visit our author guidelines and, if you decide you would like to submit, please visit our submission site here.