Following our determination to create new ways of scholarship for the benefit of the world (http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2013/03/21/scholrev-why-are-we-doing-this-and-immediate-thoughts-on-how-to-proceed/ ) let’s explore possible approaches. I stress that this is NOT PMR directing where to go, but giving a possible lead.

This sort of desire to change or widen scholarship is happening in many places, not just #scholrev. Today I learnt of a French group (https://hackyourphd.wordpress.com/about-2/comment-page-1/ ) “Hack Your PhD”. They have tapped into the same spring of discontent and opportunity:

The HackYourPhD community was born out of an acknowledgement that current ways of performing research frequently generate frustration, conflits, and isolation. The crisis in research is sometimes covered in the media: job insecurity, rush to publication creating pressure and dishonest practices, privatization of knowledge through the grip of scientific publishing houses. This is a vision from the inside – that of research practitioners. This lack of trust is amplified by the numerous scandals that have occurred in the world of research, for instance through connections with private corporations whose goal is to generate profit, creating conflicts of interest.

…

HackYourPhD brings together students, young researchers, engaged citizens, hacktivists, tinkerers from all horizons, entrepreneurs, and everyone who is interested in the production and the sharing of knowledge in the wider sense. This collective aims to bring concrete solutions to complex issues and to build much-needed collaborative relationships between those involved in knowledge production. This is required for collective intelligence to come into existence and bring answers to urgent issues of society.

…

We believe that in an era of democratization of the tools of research, whether it be technical instruments for the natural sciences, or the exponential simplification of data access, research must be accessible to everyone.

We believe it is important to show that new ways of doing reseasrch exist, and can only benefit research itself as well as the relationship between science and society. We do not seek to revolutionize research, but rather question how it works and add complementary bricks so that it may adapt better to today’s world and respond in a well-adapted fashion to the scientific and human issues of tomorrow.

This is wonderfully compelling and echoes my own thoughts and I am sure those who gathered in Amsterdam 2 days ago. We are also getting mails and tweets of other groups – it’s almost overwhelming.

A natural reaction would be to try to integrate all these efforts. I think that would be wrong because each has its own freedom of action and directions of exploration. And in any case w don’t know precisely where we are going or who will join us or what barriers will be erected.

What I think we need is a communal meeting place to build the future. I think we need to look to successful communities over the centuries. Yesterday I learned a new work: “tietotalkoot” (http://p2pfoundation.net/Rural_Cooperation_and_the_Online_Swarm ) – which I think is a volunteer self-help community which builds things for the good of the community (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkoot ). I like the “Online Swarm” metaphor. I also like concepts such as “Commons”, “Marketplace”, “Bazaar”, “Cooperative”.

“Decentralisation with communication” also encapsulates it. We already have suggested subgroups and subtasks. They should just go ahead and create their artefacts – hacking – but make sure we know what’s happening so we won’t duplicate unnecessarily and so we’ll build on each other. And identify critical areas where we need something. Decentralisation means there is no limit to the number involved and no loss of identity.

In the internet era these things are excitingly possible. I’ll post later about my own experiences but I’m also very happy to learn of others.

We have all been delighted with the immediate reaction and offers of help for the Scholarly Revolution http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2013/03/20/btpdf2-scholrev-planning-the-scholarly-revolution/ . We chose the word “revolution” in a neutral sense – this can be the Digital Scholarship revolution in the same sense of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution. On the other hand determined efforts to main the status quo as the best of all possible ways of research and communication will almost certainly lead to elements of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution .

We are in the middle of the struggle for our digitally enlightened or digitally darkened future. You, reader, must realise the seriousness of the present and fight for Openness or you will awake and find yourself trapped with no means to free yourself. Scholarship is but one axis, but it’s a critical one since knowledge and communication break down ignorance and oppression.

At #btpdf2 Eve Gray reiterated the simple fact that Closed knowledge leads to deaths. She speaks with the passion of living in South Africa where values are necessarily very different.

Consider:

Every time you publish in a closed access manner or fail to publish data, the lack of knowledge kills people. Tweaking the system won’t help. I’ve spent three years trying to get permissions out of Elsevier and been met with prevarication. In Europe Ross Mounce has represented us in demanding that content-mining be available to anyone who has a document. “The right to read is the right to mine”. And we are met with opulent publisher lobbies convincing Europe that it should remark a dark continent for digital knowledge.

Accept as fact that closing knowledge is as harmful as chopping down the rain forest or running gas-guzzlers.

I asked again yesterday – would Elsevier sue us if we created an Open Scholarly Search Engine. We have no assurance. Search and distribution is in the hands of rich unaccountable monopolists. They create wealth and they create anti-wealth.

So we need to be radically different. I’m suggesting we start from some principles and evolve over the next 2-3 days or however long it takes. No idea is out of court, but we favour constructive action, often through creating tools, communities and resources. I’ll start by suggesting a mantra:

OPEN SCHOLARSHIP OF THE WORLD FOR THE WORLD

Mantras are valuable as they help to refocus when we go astray. In the Blue Obelisk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Obelisk ) we set up a collaborative community to create and promote Open computing and information in chemistry. It has had zero funding, no business meetings, but is inexorably growing and slowly (because change in chemistry is very slow) slowly replacing traditional closed source and closed information. Not because it’s cheaper (though that helps). But because it’s better, and better suited to the modern informatics world. I’ll blog later, but it’s one model for how we might take #scholrev forward.

The mantra says a great deal.

• OPEN as in http://opendefinition.org/ . “A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.”. Most scholarship is NOT Open. That must be changed.
• SCHOLARSHIP. The practice and output of scholars. And EVERYONE can be a scholar.
• OF THE WORLD. We can all create it and it’s about anything.
• FOR THE WORLD. The world needs scholarship or it will die physically, biologically, culturally.

More later.

Exciting comment on this blog: I’ve copied it whole as I want to keep discussion very active. I’ll read in detail in the morning. In #scholrev there is no centre, certainly *I* am not running things. We couldn’t possibly get all ideas collected in a 40-minute session and it’s great to have contributions by blog.

I strongly support the metaphor of a commons for #scholrev. I don’t see it as a cathedral, but a bazaar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar ). I’ll blog later about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Obelisk model which has a very bazaar-like structure. I’ll only add that #scholrev is absolutely not limited to science but that may not be relevant to this offer.

This comment has been cowritten from an IRC chat in the wake of #scholrev. We are part of the collective who tweet @openscience and admin web infrastructure for OSF and related groups, such as OKFN and PLOS, but neither we nor these suggestions represent anyone officially.

We would like to see #scholrev start by using Commons In A Box @CBOX — @kfitz had discussed CBOX at #btpdf2 — with which we also have experience. We have contributed to BuddyPress and WordPress for science since 2008 and for example, Mark’s Science 3.0, from which grew @figshare, used a precursor of CBOX https://plus.google.com/117417705451874519785/posts/EyxbLSe8uhD Together, we have built a few dozen networks like these, extending them with federation, integrating science relevant bits such as Zotero for reference management, and such.

PMR would be familiar with the OKFN network, a WordPress implementation with 95 sites, including e.g. that for Panton Principles. A couple of us are admins there. From a quick look, it is probably not CBOX compatible in terms of some of the live sites, while it could be eventually. Federating with the network is doable but probably on the scale of “in 2013.” Otherwise, we should suggest starting #scholrev within OKFN’s network; federating with OKFN in the longer term is regardless a generally desirable technical and organizational goal.

For @openscience the organization, we run a couple federations, comprised of similar networks — one for student scientists and the other for everyone else (per privacy, safety, school policies, etc.). For example, see http://futurescienceleaders.org/ which is federated with networks including http://studentbioexpo.org/ and http://u20science.org/ Not entirely different to the purpose of OKFN’s open science training in early career or for grad students, except for an even younger set who are also mentored, in those examples.

Our role is sometimes design, development, tech support; in all cases we are hosting and maintaining the stack below WordPress and its scripts, and most often we are also maintaining at the WP level. In the examples listed so far, our work and the hosting are volunteered and donated. Unless Sloan or some other angel wants to swoop in, or an existing org had room to foot the hosting bill, we would assume our services and work for #scholrev to also be pro bono and donated. We are not averse to being compensated individually but are not for profit in our work.

Federation in these cases means shared web services, codebase, and also shared users and authentication. It can mean more integration, at the option of participating blogs, sites, networks, or the fact of federation can be invisible. About our code: it is in the WordPress or otherwise appropriate repositories, but making federation work is rather involved and onerous to document properly. A better, still longer term goal both for us and CBOX itself is fully decentralized, distributed social networking and publishing, such that we could easily federate with implementations like OKFN’s and without wizardry by the network admin. Federation should eventually be managed through the CBOX code and with a UI. We have also contributed to attempts such as Social River to do this including but not requiring WordPress; those are longer roads. We can at least do something open and federated for #scholrev now, if not yet decentralized.

If #scholrev is to grow from a commons: ScholarlyCommons.org, .com, and kin are available. If it is not too domain specific to science, ScienceCommons.org is unused — archived content, redirected URLs aside — as is @sciencecommons on Twitter since 2010. We believe this is the proper brand to represent the intent and to pin the online hub of #scholrev. Creative Commons have a new science advisory, which includes Peter. We are glad to see it! but short of Science Commons being resurrected as it was, let it spring again from the grassroots. Let’s renew ScienceCommons.org and @sciencecommons as a functioning commons for science.

At Beyond the PDF2 www.force11.org/beyondthepdf2 a number of us felt that we needed a radical approach to scholarship and its communication. This wasn’t planned, but 25 of us met at lunch and decide we wanted to DO something different. There are very few ground rules but the basics include:

• It must be Open (source, data, content, processes, mentality)
• It must be universal and inclusive
• It must address problems of the human race
• It must be part of modern culture and practice
• It must be protected from going down the stale processes of the last umpteen years

And more – this post must be short

So we grabbed our lunch and moved the chairs and tried to get everyone a chance to contribute but also with the real promise of getting something done by the end of 40 minutes. So far we have:

• A hashtag “#scholrev” (this seems to be fairly free) under which we can group.
• About 6 concrete realisable subprojects. Ranges from an collection of Open metadata (2 variants) to platforms, to textbooks.
• A commons.
• A communications platform, offered by @onelaboratory.com. Thanks. But you must remain open.
• A list of initial members.
• Ideas for how to spend 1K from #btpdf
• Plans to meet AND HACK at #eswc European Semantic Web Conference at Montpelier this summer.
• Invite people that we know would be interested.

I know how hard it is to keep this excitement going. But it’s critically important. So at the very least I am going to blog under this hashtag.

The challenge is to build something as world-changing as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. It can be done. And it involves everyone.

I’m at “Beyond the PDF2″ http://www.force11.org/beyondthepdf2 – which is meant to redesign scholarly publication. I am getting increasingly restless. (I am a “retired” academic – working as hard as ever – but I have an increasingly unhappy view of academia). I compare these two days with #okfest last year and the contrast is immense. Then we had people from all sectors – cities, banks, health, makers, creative … and a real sense we could change the world. At #btdpf2 we have mainly heard minor tweaks to the current system.

The current academic system is broken.

It’s out of touch with the world and the C21. It promotes inequality and injustice.

Whenever an innovative venture occurs then it’s in great danger of being stifled. Or worse being bought and controlled by commercial interests. And used to control us further. The metric tools and repositories and authoring and reading tools will end up in non-transparent and non-accountable publishing houses.

We must have an OPEN alternative.

And Wikipedia and Open Streetmap have shown that it can be done outside academia. And it doesn’t take huge resources to start.

Last Saturday the OKF crowdcrafting hackfest was sparked by two young people from Paris. They didn’t know how to start. They didn’t have tools. But they had a great idea – to use flickr to investigate the role of women in science.

Within SIX hours we – as a community had the start of a vibrant, meaningful research project.

Almost zero funding. (The free lunch was VERY GOOD).

So if #BTPDF has any meaning for me in the future it must run OPEN HACKATHONS.

And build and Openly control scholarship for the WORLD, not “just academia”

I am at the potentially exciting Beyond the PDF2 in Amsterdam. Because the Wifi is intermittent (at best) I’ll blog – not linearly or systematically.

Because I spend much of my time with the Open Knowledge Foundation #okfn I see an exciting creative bottom-up justice-driven meritocratic maker do-er open vision for the 21^st century. Coming to #btpdf2 I find almost none of this. The immediate impression is academics talking to academics with almost no recognition of the world outside. We see countless diagrams of the “data management cycle”, “academic cycle” etc. where the players are academics, publishers, funders. The primary purpose of academia seems to be to create publications. The primary motivation for articles is to promote individuals and institutions. On none of these diagrams were citizens mentioned. Occasionally “consumers”, as if academic output could “trickle down ” to the unwashed masses.

No realisation that many of the people outside academia are doing a far more better job than academics. Those people who are using data to manage their cities. That’s science, scholarship and relevant. That writing and criticism can be done by everyone. That high schools can be research laboratories. It’s just not in the ivory towers.

People are dying because scholarly information is behind firewalls. That should make us angry. I’d like to meet with people who want to create an OPEN alternative to scholarship. Maybe at lunch.

Taylor & Francis have just released early results of a survey of 14,700 of their authors on opinions relating to open access.

Kudos to Taylor & Francis for releasing early results before they complete analysis. Following are some preliminary thoughts on the first few pages of the survey.

First, while this survey is somewhat useful, this kind of research should be led by academics, not publishers. It is unfortunate that the survey questions were developed by the publishing companies’ staff, who despite what might be the best of intentions bring a certain perspective and bias to this research.

For example, the following 3 questions reflect a strong bias against open access (p. 6 of the survey).  T&F questions are bolded.

“Open access journals are lower quality than subscription journals“.

This is a leading question; it’s inviting the respondent to think of open access journals as lower quality. Consider for example other possible questions, such as:

“Open access journals and subscription journals are about the same quality”.

or

“Open access journals are the same or better quality than subscription journals”.

The same can be said about the next two questions:

Open access journals have lower Production standards (copyediting and typesetting) than subscription journals.

Consider this possible alternative:

“Open access journals have the same or better Production standards (copyediting and typesetting) than subscription journals”.

and

“There are no fundamental benefits to open access publication“.

Possible alternative:

“There are fundamental benefits to open access publication”. 

Comment: if you’re going to ask tens of thousands of scholars to respond to a survey, you should take the time to get the questions right. It would have been appropriate to have the questions developed, or at least reviewed, by academics trained in social bias analysis, and preferably without an attachment either to toll access publishing or to Taylor & Francis per se.

Update March 18 – further comments in response to a comment by Thomas Pfeiffer on Richard Poynder’s Google G+ post which alerted me to this study.

Thomas Pfeiffer:

Even though I do still agree that such politically sensitive surveys should be conducted by neutral organizations, I don’t really agree with your analysis of the survey. To me, the questions on page 6 of the survey merely reflect common prejudices about OA, both positive and negative, and checks how widespread they are. It is usual in social science surveys to use questions framed both positively and negatively for the same construct, which is what they are doing here.
If they reframed the negative items, they’d also have to reframe the positive ones like “Open access offers higher visibility than publication in a
subscription journal” and “Open access journals are cited more heavily than subscription journals”. In fact, question 1 has six “pro OA” items and only three “anti-OA” items. I don’t see how that is supposed to set an anti-OA frame.

[Disclosure: I am a scholar as well and doing this kind of research has been central to my undergrad studies as well as my current career]?

My comments

In one sense I agree, Thomas. This is 9 misleading or biased questions, with more biased in favour of open access than against. This is actually useful evidence – moreso, to me, in the sense that “a large publisher is choosing to including more questions in their survey biased towards open access than against it” than in terms of making the results meaningful.

If the aim is to get at researcher’s attitudes, then this is the set of questions to ask with respect to quality – strongly agree to disagree:

Open access journals are lower quality than subscription journals.
Open access journals are the same quality as subscription journals
Open access journals are higher quality than subscription journals.

Even here, there is a strong probability of order bias in the questions. If you’re doing a survey that based on a 19% response rate must have been sent to a hundred thousand researchers, you should control for this (for example, by changing the order of the responses on different survey forms).

Thanks for raising this, though, I’ll add this to my post.