Blind People Won the Right to Break Ebook DRM. In 3 Years, They’ll Have to Do It Again | WIRED

“IT’S A CLICHÉ of digital life that “information wants to be free.” The internet was supposed to make the dream a reality, breaking down barriers and connecting anyone to any bit of data, anywhere. But 32 years after the invention of the World Wide Web, people with print disabilities—the inability to read printed text due to blindness or other impairments—are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.

Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don’t cater to their needs. For the past year, they’ve once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks.

Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill.

 

On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility—by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example—that it’s even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice….”

 

Meta Transition. Meta.org will sunset March 31, 2022 | by Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative | Oct, 2021 | Medium

“With Meta, our goal was to give researchers, patient communities, science societies, and research organizations more ways to discover the research they need. We did this by mapping biomedical knowledge to help researchers learn a new area or keep up-to-date in a field through precise and flexible feed design, personalized ranking, and surfacing the broadest array of research outputs.

We recognize that Meta is one of many discovery tools available to the research community operating in a complex ecosystem. Since its transition from beta to a public release in fall 2019, more organizations and communities have entered the research discovery space, and they are already exploring and experimenting with new technologies to enhance discovery and keep current with research….”

Not All Flexibility P-Hacking Is, Young Padawan

During a recent workshop on Sample Size Justification an early career researcher asked me: “You recommend sequential analysis in your paperfor when effect sizes are uncertain, where researchers collect data, analyze the data, stop when a test is significant, or continue data collection when a test is not significant, and, I don’t want to be rude, but isn’t this p-hacking?”

In linguistics there is a term for when children apply a rule they have learned to instances where it does not apply: Overregularization. They learn ‘one cow, two cows’, and use the +s rule for plural where it is not appropriate, such as ‘one mouse, two mouses’ (instead of ‘two mice’). The early career researcher who asked me if sequential analysis was a form of p-hacking was also overregularizing. We teach young researchers that flexibly analyzing data inflates error rates, is called p-hacking, and is a very bad thing that was one of the causes of the replication crisis. So, they apply the rule ‘flexibility in the data analysis is a bad thing’ to cases where it does not apply, such as in the case of sequential analyses. Yes, sequential analyses give a lot of flexibility to stop data collection, but it does so while carefully controlling error rates, with the added bonus that it can increase the efficiency of data collection. This makes it a good thing, not p-hacking.

 

Children increasingly use correct language the longer they are immersed in it. Many researchers are not yet immersed in an academic environment where they see flexibility in the data analysis applied correctly. Many are scared to do things wrong, which risks becoming overly conservative, as the pendulum from ‘we are all p-hacking without realizing the consequences’ swings back to far to ‘all flexibility is p-hacking’. Therefore, I patiently explain during workshops that flexibility is not bad per se, but that making claims without controlling your error rate is problematic.

In a recent podcast episode of ‘Quantitude’ one of the hosts shared a similar experience 5 minutes into the episode. A young student remarked that flexibility during the data analysis was ‘unethical’. The remainder of the podcast episode on ‘researcher degrees of freedom’ discussed how flexibility is part of data analysis. They clearly state that p-hacking is problematic, and opportunistic motivations to perform analyses that give you what you want to find should be constrained. But they then criticized preregistration in ways many people on Twitter disagreed with. They talk about ‘high priests’ who want to ‘stop bad people from doing bad things’ which they find uncomfortable, and say ‘you can not preregister every contingency’. They remark they would be surprised if data could be analyzed without requiring any on the fly judgment.

Although the examples they gave were not very good1 it is of course true that researchers sometimes need to deviate from an analysis plan. Deviating from an analysis plan is not p-hacking. But when people talk about preregistration, we often see overregularization: “Preregistration requires specifying your analysis plan to prevent inflation of the Type 1 error rate, so deviating from a preregistration is not allowed.” The whole point of preregistration is to transparently allow other researchers to evaluate the severity of a test, both when you stick to the preregistered statistical analysis plan, as when you deviate from it. Some researchers have sufficient experience with the research they do that they can preregister an analysis that does not require any deviations2, and then readers can see that the Type 1 error rate for the study is at the level specified before data collection. Other researchers will need to deviate from their analysis plan because they encounter unexpected data. Some deviations reduce the severity of the test by inflating the Type 1 error rate. But other deviations actually get you closer to the truth. We can not know which is which. A reader needs to form their own judgment about this.

A final example of overregularization comes from a person who discussed a new study that they were preregistering with a junior colleague. They mentioned the possibility of including a covariate in an analysis but thought that was too exploratory to be included in the preregistration. The junior colleague remarked: “But now that we have thought about the analysis, we need to preregister it”. Again, we see an example of overregularization. If you want to control the Type 1 error rate in a test, preregister it, and follow the preregistered statistical analysis plan. But researchers can, and should, explore data to generate hypotheses about things that are going on in their data. You can preregister these, but you do not have to. Not exploring data could even be seen as research waste, as you are missing out on the opportunity to generate hypotheses that are informed by data. A case can be made that researchers should regularly include variables to explore (e.g., measures that are of general interest to peers in their field), as long as these do not interfere with the primary hypothesis test (and as long as these explorations are presented as such).

In the book “Reporting quantitative research in psychology: How to meet APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards” by Cooper and colleagues from 2020 a very useful distinction is made between primary hypotheses, secondary hypotheses, and exploratory hypotheses. The first consist of the main tests you are designing the study for. The secondary hypotheses are also of interest when you design the study – but you might not have sufficient power to detect them. You did not design the study to test these hypotheses, and because the power for these tests might be low, you did not control the Type 2 error rate for secondary hypotheses. You canpreregister secondary hypotheses to control the Type 1 error rate, as you know you will perform them, and if there are multiple secondary hypotheses, as Cooper et al (2020) remark, readers will expect “adjusted levels of statistical significance, or conservative post hoc means tests, when you conducted your secondary analysis”.

If you think of the possibility to analyze a covariate, but decide this is an exploratory analysis, you can decide to neither control the Type 1 error rate nor the Type 2 error rate. These are analyses, but not tests of a hypothesis, as any findings from these analyses have an unknown Type 1 error rate. Of course, that does not mean these analyses can not be correct in what they reveal – we just have no way to know the long run probability that exploratory conclusions are wrong. Future tests of the hypotheses generated in exploratory analyses are needed. But as long as you follow Journal Article Reporting Standards and distinguish exploratory analyses, readers know what the are getting. Exploring is not p-hacking.

People in psychology are re-learning the basic rules of hypothesis testing in the wake of the replication crisis. But because they are not yet immersed in good research practices, the lack of experience means they are overregularizing simplistic rules to situations where they do not apply. Not all flexibility is p-hacking, preregistered studies do not prevent you from deviating from your analysis plan, and you do not need to preregister every possible test that you think of. A good cure for overregularization is reasoning from basic principles. Do not follow simple rules (or what you see in published articles) but make decisions based on an understanding of how to achieve your inferential goal. If the goal is to make claims with controlled error rates, prevent Type 1 error inflation, for example by correcting the alpha level where needed. If your goal is to explore data, feel free to do so, but know these explorations should be reported as such. When you design a study, follow the Journal Article Reporting Standards and distinguish tests with different inferential goals.

 

1 E.g., they discuss having to choose between Student’s t-test and Welch’s t-test, depending on wheter Levene’s test indicates the assumption of homogeneity is violated, which is not best practice – just follow R, and use Welch’s t-test by default.

2 But this is rare – only 2 out of 27 preregistered studies in Psychological Science made no deviations. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.211037We can probably do a bit better if we only preregistered predictions at a time where we really understand our manipulations and measures.

Psychology Intelligence Agency

I always wanted to be James Bond, but being 55 now it is clear that I will never get a license to kill or work for a government intelligence agency. However, the world has changed and there are other ways to spy on dirty secrets of evil villains.

I have started to focus on the world of psychological science, which I know fairly well because I was a psychological scientist for many years. During my time as a psychologist, I learned about many of the dirty tricks that psychologists use to publish articles to further their careers without advancing understanding of human behavior, thoughts, and feelings.

However, so far the general public, government agencies, or government funding agencies that hand out taxpayers’ money to psychological scientists have not bothered to monitor the practices of psychological scientists. They still believe that psychological scientists can control themselves (e.g., peer review). As a result, bad practices persist because the incentives favor behaviors that lead to publication of many articles even if these articles make no real contribution to science. I therefore decided to create my own Psychological Intelligence Agency (PIA). Of course, I cannot give myself a license to kill, and I have no legal authority to enforce laws that do not exist. However, I can gather intelligence (information) and share this information with the general public. This is less James Bond and more CIA that also shares some of its intelligence with the public (CIA factbook), or the website Retraction Watch that keeps track of article retractions.

Some of the projects that I have started are:

Replicability Rankings of Psychology Journals
Keeping track of the power (expected discovery rate, expected replication rate) and the false discovery risk of test results published in over 100 psychology journals from 2010 to 2020.

Personalized Criteria of Statistical Significance
It is problematic to use the standard criterion of significance (alpha = .05) when this criterion leads to few discoveries because researchers test many false hypotheses or test true hypotheses with low power. When discovery rates are low, alpha should be set to a lower value (e.g., .01, .005, .001). Here I used estimates of authors’ discovery rate to recommend an appropriate alpha level to interpret their results.

Quantitative Book Reviews
Popular psychology books written by psychological scientists (e.g., Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman) reach a wide audience and are assumed to be based on solid scientific evidence. Using statistical examinations of the sources cited in these books, I provide information about the robustness of the scientific evidence to the general public. (see also “Before you know it“)

Citation Watch
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. However, psychological scientists often cite outdated references that fit their theory without citing newer evidence that their claims may be false (a practice known as cherry picking citations). Citation watch reveals these bad practice, by linking articles with misleading citations to articles that question the claims supported by cherry picked citations.

Whether all of this intelligence gathering will have a positive effect depends on how many people actually care about the scientific integrity of psychological science and the credibility of empirical claims. Fortunately, some psychologists are willing to learn from past mistakes and are improving their research practices (Bill von Hippel).

You Can Lead a Horse To Water, But... - Meaning, Origin

Perceptions, relationships, expectations, and challenges: Views of communication and research for scientific dissemination in Brazilian Federal Institutes

Abstract:  Communicating Brazilian science still seems to be a challenge for journalists and researchers of public institutions of education and science. In this sense, this research aims to identify and analyze scientists’ perceptions regarding the work of journalists, the relationship between these groups, the expectations, and the challenges of science communication in two Federal Institutes of Education in Brazil. We conducted a mixed study in the qualitative stage with the participation of 30 interviewees, and in the quantitative stage, journalists and researchers answered a questionnaire (n = 242). Our results indicated that the work of science communication is not carried out properly in both Institutes and that there is a lack of articulated work among both journalists, communicators, and researchers. The relationship between these groups needs to be built jointly. In this respect, the biggest challenges are to institutionalize science communication, establish a science communication plan, and overcome internal relationship barriers. Our results may underpin science communication policies and policies for scientific dissemination both institutional or even national levels.

 

 

Enabling smaller independent publishers to participate in Open Access transformative arrangements | Septentrio Conference Series

Independent Society Publishers and Academic Publishers would like to enable Open Access transformative agreements, but find it difficult to do this at scale, especially when each library consortia requires different licence agreements, data and workflows. This project is to create shared principles, a model licence, a data template and minimum workflows, so that small publishers, libraries and library consortia can then use them to more easily conclude Open Access agreements.

Brace for impact

A few milliseconds before a returning space capsule – or any object – falls into water, the water already ‘sees it coming’. The water’s surface takes the shape of the bottom of the falling object as the air layer trapped between the object and the water is squeezed out. UT-researchers from the Physics of Fluids group published two articles on this so-called ‘air-cushioning effect’. By exploiting this effect, engineers can shape the bottom of a spacecraft in such a way it decreases the damage caused by impact on splashdown landing.

If It’s Open, Is It Accessible? – Association of Research Libraries

“The library and open access (OA) publishing communities have made great strides in making more new scholarship openly available. But have we included readers with vision challenges in our OA plans? Only an estimated 7% of all printed works are available in accessible format, and that statistic might not significantly differ for digital scholarship worldwide….

Libraries need to consider accessibility of the document format, as well as accessibility of the tools and platforms they typically use for OA journal and monograph publishing, storage, and access. According to a blog post by the UX designer for the Directory of Open Access Journals last year, testing of a platform’s web interface can be done easily through free tools such as Lighthouse and Accessibility Insights for Web, both available as web browser extensions, which test accessibility against the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA.

Earlier this year, the Open Journal Systems (OJS) team at the Public Knowledge Project noted the strides that their Accessibility Interest Group team has made to improve the accessibility of OJS 3.3. Next up, they will be working on a guide to help journal editors create more accessible content within OJS.

 

This leads to the question of the format of open content. Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), ubiquitous and a de facto standard for digital publishing, is typically not the best format for accessibility. Certainly, PDFs can be made WCAG-compliant, but one must make careful efforts to do so….”

Copyright & Information Policy Specialist

“The Library of the University of California, Berkeley (Library) seeks a creative, collaborative, and diligent individual to join a growing team of public service providers and educators supporting UC Berkeley faculty, researchers, students, and staff with needs related to copyright and research-related information policy matters. Reporting to the Program Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication Services (OSCS), the Copyright & Information Policy Specialist will provide public service, reference, and instruction regarding Library permissions and licensing policies, and help support information policy aspects of Library projects like the Digital Lifecycle Program.  

Responsibilities

PERMISSIONS REQUESTS. This includes managing, processing, & responding to reference and research requests for permission to use, quote from, or reproduce library collections in publications, websites, films, exhibitions, and other public fora. This also includes reviewing, analyzing, and organizing permissions paperwork, collections files, and acquisitions agreements to support permissions and licensing reference/research services. 
LICENSING. This includes creating and administering licensing and invoicing for requests for usage or republication of UC Regents-copyrighted materials. This also includes maintaining master list of collections for which copyright is held by UC Regents. 
REFERENCE & RESEARCH SERVICES. This includes providing e-mail, in-person, online and other user forms of reference and instruction regarding Library permissions policies and copyright issues in special collections. 
POLICY SUPPORT. This includes guiding and helping to create policy for the Library’s Digital Lifecycle Program (DLP) regarding issues of copyright, privacy, indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage, and other information policy matters …”

ATG Interviews Greg Eow, Part 1, President, Center for Research Libraries, Global Resources Network – Charleston Hub

“We’re putting together a webinar to talk about exactly this issue.  How can scholars and publishers and librarians, so sort of this three-legged stool, how can we work together to find new models for creating and disseminating and preserving content that works for all of these communities?  We’re going to have representatives from PLoS come and talk about their new business model exploring Community Action Publishing which is similar in some ways to the MIT Press Direct to Open Model.  And then we’re also going to talk about the Global Press Archive which is a collaboration between CRL and Eastview which is similar to a Direct to Open publishing model but for newspaper content.  So, those are some things that we’re doing later this month but that’s something that we want to build on in the future. ”

ATG Interviews Colleen Campbell, Coordinator of the OA2020 and ESAC Initiatives, Max Planck Digital Library – Charleston Hub

“Rather than framing open access as a movement, I prefer to talk about open access as a logical and necessary evolution in scholarly communication.  Living through the COVID-19 pandemic, I think there is no doubt in anyone’s mind of the value in openly sharing scholarly knowledge nor of the urgency with which authoritative knowledge should be shared.  The process of science hinges upon sharing, discussing, challenging and reproducing the results of research, and for that process to function optimally, research results need to reach the widest audience possible. 

Researchers today heavily rely on journals to provide the scholarly communication services of organized criticism and dissemination of their results, but the subscription business model that underlies the bulk of scholarly journals is actually creating drag on the advancement of science.  What I find compelling is to consider what researchers could accomplish if they were able to finally interact with an open corpus of peer-reviewed research, instead of limiting their interactions to those journals their libraries happen to be able to subscribe to this year. ”

Stop, Look, Listen — New Wilderness in Orderly Markets: Academic Publishing in Times of APCs and Transformative Deals

“Academic publishing is an orderly market — the big players dominate the most profitable markets, while there is still enough room for medium-sized and small providers to make a living.  Many publishers have survived the first two decades of digitization so well, although the need for investment has grown significantly, and the economic reserves have shrunk for many.  The development of business models for the new digital reality, on the other hand, has remained manageable.  In this situation, libraries and publishers are challenged to integrate Open Access (OA) into their work processes — an organizational challenge from various perspectives that is difficult to solve by just a few players.”

IOP Publishing joins open abstract initiative | Research Information

“IOP Publishing (IOPP) has joined the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA), a collaboration between publishers, infrastructure organisations, librarians, and researchers to promote the open availability of abstracts. 

IOPP will deposit abstracts of their scholarly communications with Crossref, the not-for-profit Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration agency bringing together abstracts in a common format in one searchable cross-disciplinary database. 

By joining the initiative, IOPP will make all of its abstracts part of the fundamental metadata of the article so that they will be openly available and accessible to the scientific community for unrestricted machine reading. This expanded availability of article abstracts will boost the discoverability of scholarly research and increase their impact. …”