Tag: European Commission

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A Prison Dilemma

Saint Foucault

I am currently on holiday. You can tell this because I’m writing, reading and otherwise doing things that I regard as fun. In particular I’ve been catching up on some reading. I’ve been meaning to read Danah Boyd‘s It’s Complicated for some time (and you can see some of my first impressions in the previous post) but I had held off because I wanted to buy a copy.

That may seem a strange statement. Danah makes a copy of the book available on her website as a PDF (under a CC BY-NC license) so I could (and in the end did) just grab a copy from there. But when it comes to books like this I prefer to pay for a copy, particularly where the author gains a proportion of their livelihood from publishing. Now I could buy a hardback or paperback edition but we have enough physical books. I can buy a Kindle edition from Amazon.co.uk but I object violently to paying a price similar to the paperback for something I can only read within Amazon software or hardware, and where Amazon can remove my access at any time.

In the end I gave up – I downloaded the PDF and read that. As I read it I found a quote that interested me. The quote was from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, a study of the development of the modern prison system – the quote if anyone is interested was about people’s response to being observed and was interesting in the context of research assessment.

Once I’d embarrassed myself by asking a colleague who knows about this stuff whether Foucault was someone you read, or just skimmed the summary version, I set out again to find myself a copy. Foucault died in 1984 so I’m less concerned about paying for a copy but would have been happy to buy a reasonably priced and well formatted ebook. But again the only source was Amazon. In this case its worse than for Boyd’s book. You can only buy the eBook from the US Amazon store, which requires a US credit card. Even if I was happy with the Amazon DRM and someone was willing to buy the copy for me I would be technically violating territorial rights in obtaining that copy.

It was ironic that all this happened the same week that the European Commission released its report on submissions to the Public Consultation on EU Copyright Rules. The report quickly develops a pattern. Representatives on public groups, users and research users describe a problem with the current way that copyright works. Publishers and media organisations say there is no problem. This goes on and on for virtually every question asked:

In the print sector, book publishers generally consider that territoriality is not a factor in their business, as authors normally provide a worldwide exclusive licence to the publishers for a certain language. Book publishers state that only in the very nascent eBooks markets some licences are being territorially restricted.

As a customer I have to say its a factor for me. I can’t get the content in the form I want. I can’t get it with the rights I want, which means I can’t get the functionality I want. And I often can’t get it in the place I want. Maybe my problem isn’t important enough or there aren’t enough people like me for publishers to care. But with traditional scholarly monograph publishing apparently in a death spiral it seems ironic that these markets aren’t being actively sought out. When books only sell a few hundred copies every additional sale should matter. When books like Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons aren’t easily available then significant revenue opportunities are being lost.

Increasingly it is exactly the relevant specialist works in social sciences and humanities that I’m interested in getting my hands on. I don’t have access to an academic library, the nearest I might get access to is a University focussed on science and technology and in any case the chance of any specific scholarly monograph being in a given academic library is actually quite low. Inter-library loans are brilliant but I can’t wait a week to check something.

I spent nearly half a day trying to find a copy of Foucault’s book that was in the form I wanted with the rights I wanted. I’ve spent hours trying to find a copy of Ostrom’s as well. In both cases it is trivial to find a copy online – took me around 30 seconds. In both cases its relatively easy to find a second hand print copy. I guess for traditional publishers its easy to dismiss me as part of a small market, one that’s hard to reach and not worth the effort. After all, what would I know, I’m just the customer.

 

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First thoughts on the Finch Report: Good steps but missed opportunities

The Finch Report was commissioned by the UK Minister for Universities and Science to investigate possible routes for the UK to adopt Open Access for publicly funded research. The report was released last night and I have had just the chance to skim it over breakfast. These are just some first observations. Overall my impression is that the overall direction of travel is very positive but the detail shows some important missed opportunities.

The Good

The report comes out strongly in favour of Open Access to publicly funded research. Perhaps the core of this is found in the introduction [p5].

The principle that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain is a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable.

What follows this is a clear listing of other potential returns. On the cost side the report makes clear that in achieving open access through journal it is necessary that the first copy costs of publication be paid in some form and that appropriate mechanisms are in place to make that happen. This focus on Gold OA is a result in large part of the terms of reference for the report that placed retention of peer review at its heart. The other excellent aspect of the report is the detailed cost and economic modelling for multiple scenarios of UK Open Access adoption. These will be a valuable basis for discussion of managing the transition and how cost flows will change.

The bad

The report is maddeningly vague on the potential of repositories to play a major role in the transition to full open access. Throughout there is a focus on hybrid journals, a route which – with a few exceptions – appears to me to have failed to deliver any appreciable gains and simply allowed publishers to charge unjustified fee for very limited services. By comparison the repository offers an existing infrastructure that can deliver at relatively low marginal cost and will enable a dispassionate view of the additional value that publishers add. Because the value of peer review was baked into the report as an assumption this important issue gets lost but as I have noted before if publishers are adding value then repositories should pose no threat to them whatsoever.

The second issue I have with the report is that it fails to address the question of what Open Access is. The report does not seek to define open access. This is a difficult issue and I can appreciate a strict definition may be best avoided but the report does not raise the issues that such a definition would require and in this it misses an opportunity to lay out clearly the discussions required to make decisions on the critical issues of what is functionally required to realise the benefits laid out in the introduction. Thus in the end it is a report on increasing access but with no clear statement of what level of access is desirable or what the end target for this might look like.

This is most serious on the issue of licences for open access content which has been seriously fudged. Four key pieces of text from the report:

“…support for open access publication should be accompanied by policies to minimise restrictions on the rights of use and re-use, especially for non-commercial purposes, and on the ability to use the latest tools and services to organise and manipulate text and other content” [recommendations, p7]

“…[in a section on instituional and subject repositories]…But for subscription-based publishers, re-use rights may pose problems. Any requirement for them to use a Creative Commons ‘CC-BY’ licence, for example, would allow users to modify, build upon and distribute the licensed work, for commercial as well as non-commercial purposes, so long as the original authors were credited178. Publishers – and some researchers – are especially concerned about allowing commercial re-use. Medical journal publishers, who derive a considerable part of their revenues from the sale of reprints to pharmaceutical companies, could face significant loss of income. But more generally, commercial re-use would allow third parties to harvest published content from repositories and present them on new platforms that would compete with the original publisher.” [p87]

“…[from the summary on OA journals]…A particular advantage of open access journals is that publishers can afford to be more relaxed about rights of use and re-use.” [p92]

“…[from the summary on repositories]…But publishers have strong concerns about the possibility that funders might introduce further limits on the restrictions on access that they allow in their terms and conditions of grant. They believe that a reduction in the allowable embargo period to six months, especially if it were to be combined with a Creative Commons CC-BY licence that would allow commercial as well as non-commercial re-use, would represent a fundamental threat to the viability of their subscription-based journals.” [p96]

As far as I can tell the comment on page 92 is the only one that even suggests a requirement for CC-BY for open access through journals where the costs are paid. As a critical portion of the whole business model for full OA publishers it worried me that this is given almost a brief throw away line, when it is at the centre of the debate. But more widely a concern over a requirement for liberal licensing in the context of repositories appears to colour the whole discussion of licences in the report. There is, as far as I have been able to tell, no strong statement that where a fee is paid CC-BY should be required – and much that will enable incumbent subscription publishers to continue making claims that they provide “Open Access” under a variety of non-commercial licences satisfying no community definition of either “Open” nor “Open Access”.

But more critically this fudge risks failing to deliver on the minister’s brief, to support innovation and exploitation of UK research. This whole report is embedded in a government innovation strategy that places publicly funded knowledge creation at the heart of an effort to kick start the UK economy. Non-commercial licences can not deliver on this and we should avoid them at all costs. This whole discussion seems to revolve around protecting publishers rights to sell reprints, as though it made sense to legislate to protect candle makers from innovators threatening to put in an electric grid.

Much of this report is positive – and taken in the context of the RCUK draft policy there is a real opportunity to get this right. If we both make a concerted effort to utilise the potential of repositories as a transitional infrastructure, and if we get the licensing right, then the report maps out a credible route with the financial guidelines to make it through a transition. It also sends a strong signal to the White House and the European Commission, both currently considering policy statements on open access, that the UK is ready to move which will strengthen the hands of those arguing for strong policy.

This is a big step – and it heads in the right direction. The devil is in the details of implementation. But then it always is.

More will follow – particularly on the financial modelling – when I have a chance to digest more fully. This is a first pass draft based on a quick skim and I may modify this post if I discover I have made errors in my reading.

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Evidence to the European Commission Hearing on Access to Scientific Information

European Commission
Image by tiseb via Flickr

On Monday 30 May I gave evidence at a European Commission hearing on Access to Scientific Information. This is the text that I spoke from. Just to re-inforce my usual disclaimer I was not speaking on behalf of my employer but as an independent researcher.

We live in a world where there is more information available at the tips of our fingers than even existed 10 or 20 years ago. Much of what we use to evaluate research today was built in a world where the underlying data was difficult and expensive to collect. Companies were built, massive data sets collected and curated and our whole edifice of reputation building and assessment grew up based on what was available. As the systems became more sophisticated new measures became incorporated but the fundamental basis of our systems weren’t questioned. Somewhere along the line we forgot that we had never actually been measuring what mattered, just what we could.

Today we can track, measure, and aggregate much more, and much more detailed information. It’s not just that we can ask how much a dataset is being downloaded but that we can ask who is downloading it, academics or school children, and more, we can ask who was the person who wrote the blog post or posted it to Facebook that led to that spike in downloads.

This is technically feasible today. And make no mistake it will happen. And this provides enormous potential benefits. But in my view it should also give us pause. It gives us a real opportunity to ask why it is that we are measuring these things. The richness of the answers available to us means we should spend some time working out what the right questions are.

There are many reasons for evaluating research and researchers. I want to touch on just three. The first is researchers evaluating themselves against their peers. While this is informed by data it will always be highly subjective and vary discipline by discipline. It is worthy of study but not I think something that is subject to policy interventions.

The second area is in attempting to make objective decisions about the distribution of research resources. This is clearly a contentious issue. Formulaic approaches can be made more transparent and less easy to legal attack but are relatively easy to game. A deeper challenge is that by their nature all metrics are backwards looking. They can only report on things that have happened. Indicators are generally lagging (true of most of the measures in wide current use) but what we need are leading indicators. It is likely that human opinion will continue to beat naive metrics in this area for some time.

Finally there is the question of using evidence to design the optimal architecture for the whole research enterprise. Evidence based policy making in research policy has historically been sadly lacking. We have an opportunity to change that through building a strong, transparent, and useful evidence base but only if we simultaneously work to understand the social context of that evidence. How does collecting information change researcher behavior? How are these measures gamed? What outcomes are important? How does all of this differ cross national and disciplinary boundaries, or amongst age groups?

It is my belief, shared with many that will speak today, that open approaches will lead to faster, more efficient, and more cost effective research. Other groups and organizations have concerns around business models, quality assurance, and sustainability of these newer approaches. We don’t need to argue about this in a vacuum. We can collect evidence, debate what the most important measures are, and come to an informed and nuanced inclusion based on real data and real understanding.

To do this we need to take action in a number areas:

1. We need data on evaluation and we need to able to share it.

Research organizations must be encouraged to maintain records of the downstream usage of their published artifacts. Where there is a mandate for data availability this should include mandated public access to data on usage.

The commission and national funders should clearly articulate that that provision of usage data is a key service for publishers of articles, data, and software to provide, and that where a direct payment is made for publication provision for such data should be included. Such data must be technically and legally reusable.

The commission and national funders should support work towards standardizing vocabularies and formats for this data as well critiquing it’s quality and usefulness. This work will necessarily be diverse with disciplinary, national, and object type differences but there is value in coordinating actions. At a recent workshop where funders, service providers, developers and researchers convened we made significant progress towards agreeing routes towards standardization of the vocabularies to describe research outputs.

2. We need to integrate our systems of recognition and attribution into the way the web works through identifying research objects and linking them together in standard ways.

The effectiveness of the web lies in its framework of addressable items connected by links. Researchers have a strong culture of making links and recognizing contributions through attribution and citation of scholarly articles and books but this has only recently being surfaced in a way that consumer web tools can view and use. And practice is patchy and inconsistent for new forms of scholarly output such as data, software and online writing.

The commission should support efforts to open up scholarly bibliography to the mechanics of the web through policy and technical actions. The recent Hargreaves report explicitly notes limitations on text mining and information retrieval as an area where the EU should act to modernize copyright law.

The commission should act to support efforts to develop and gain wide community support for unique identifiers for research outputs, and for researchers. Again these efforts are diverse and it will be community adoption which determines their usefulness but coordination and communication actions will be useful here. Where there is critical mass, such as may be the case for ORCID and DataCite, this crucial cultural infrastructure should merit direct support.

Similarly the commission should support actions to develop standardized expressions of links, through developing citation and linking standards for scholarly material. Again the work of DataCite, CoData, Dryad and other initiatives as well as technical standards development is crucial here.

3. Finally we must closely study the context in which our data collection and indicator assessment develops. Social systems cannot be measured without perturbing them and we can do no good with data or evidence if we do not understand and respect both the systems being measured and the effects of implementing any policy decision.

We need to understand the measures we might develop, what forms of evaluation they are useful for and how change can be effected where appropriate. This will require significant work as well as an appreciation of the close coupling of the whole system.
We have a generational opportunity to make our research infrastructure better through effective evaluation and evidence based policy making and architecture development. But we will squander this opportunity if we either take a utopian view of what might technically feasible, or fail to act for a fear of a dystopian future. The way to approach this is through a careful, timely, transparent and thoughtful approach to understanding ourselves and the system we work within.

The commission should act to ensure that current nascent efforts work efficiently towards delivering the technical, cultural, and legal infrastructure that will support an informed debate through a combination of communication, coordination, and policy actions.

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