Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety 

ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety January 21, 2010

Posted by Kevin Smith in : Authors' Rights, Copyright in the Classroom, Open Access and Institutional Repositories , trackback

I attended parts of the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, held here in the Research Triangle this weekend.  There was a fascinating array of topics discussed and an interesting crowd of 270+ that included many working scientists, librarians and even journalists.  It was a great opportunity to listen to scientists talk about how they want to communicate with one another and with the general public.

There are some excellent discussions of what went on at this year’s conference, especially here and here on Dorothea Salo’s blog.  Those with a real passion for more information can check out this growing list of blog posts about the conference.  I won’t try to compete with these comprehensive recaps, especially because my selection of events to attend was rather idiosyncratic, and perhaps even ill-advised.  But I do want to make three quick observations about what I personally learned from the conference.

First, I discovered one more argument for open science that had not occurred to me before, but has the potential to be very compelling for scientists on our faculties.  One reason academic research should be online is that “junk” science is already there.  If the general public — including the proportion thereof who vote or require health care — do not make good decisions in regard to matters involving scientific knowledge, we can only blame ourselves when the best research is not available to them, hidden behind pay walls.

Second, I was fascinated to discover that health science bloggers have developed a code of ethics to try and account for the many issues that arise when scientists put important and potentially life-altering information onto the open web.  The benefits of this openness are indisputable, but so are some of the risks.  This code of ethics represents an attempt to address some of those risks and minimize them (there is a somewhat different discussion of a similar issue from the conference here).  The criteria applied to evaluate health care blogs (see the text of the code itself) — clear representation of perspective, confidentiality, commercial disclosure, reliability of information and courtesy — encapsulate standards that all of us who try to share information and opinion online need to be aware of.

Third, I was amazed at how important, and problematic, copyright issues were to this group.  I attended seven sessions at the conference, and five of them dealt with copyright as a major (although often unannounced) topic of discussion.  Even recognizing my tendency to gravitate toward such sessions, this is a high percentage.  I asked a fellow attendee why so many sessions raised copyright and was told, albeit with tongue in cheek, that it is “ruining our lives.”  More seriously, one scientist described trying to put his classroom lecture slides online and being told by his university’s counsel that all material that he did not create had to be removed first.  Apparently there was no discussion of the applicability of fair use and how to decide what was and was not allowable; just a wholesale rule that would discourage most scientists interested in sharing.  This suggested to me that it really is very important to improve the quality of copyright education on campus — for faculty, librarians (who are often the ones asked for advice) and even legal counsel.  We cannot reasonably advocate more online open access unless we also give our scholars the resources to accomplish that goal.  In many ways the technological infrastructure is becoming trivial and it is the policy and legal questions that must be addressed directly if we really want encourage openness.

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

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Open access isn't the same as free access (#scio10)

There is one point from the discussion following our ScienceOnline2010 presentation that I want to elaborate on. This is the way in which credentialism excludes amateurs. This is a problem that I face.

The internet has made accessible vast amounts of literature for much wider audiences than ever before. Many of the original sources that I have been able to use in my research would not have been available to me just ten years ago. Many early journals existed for only a few years, in very small numbers. To read them, I would have had to travel to major libraries in Europe and the Eastern states, which would have been prohibitively expensive. Once at those libraries, I would have needed to get access to their rare book collections, which would have been very difficult since I lack an institutional affiliation. Because of Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and the efforts of many libraries I can now read these works online and, in may cases, view scans of the actual pages without traveling.

My point about lacking an institutional affiliation is very important. Most of the people at ScienceOnline2010 were associated with some kind of university or research institution. It was so taken for granted that they put it on the name tags, as if the affiliation was part of their name. I'm sure that it is standard practice at all professional conferences to assume the attendees are all in that profession. However, this was not a scientists' conference; it was a science communicators conference and communicators were defined as including bloggers who just happen to like science. Many attendees commented that it would have been useful to put peoples' blog aliases or online avatars on their tags along with their names. However, I didn't hear anyone suggest that these identities should have been put on the tags in place of their affiliations. Lacking an institutional affiliation, I put down Clever Wife's soap business, just to have something to fill in the blank.


The wonderful era of online access, which I mentioned above, is already facing counter-pressures to close it back up. The attendees were all familiar with the problems of modern scientific journals. They are ungodly expensive to purchase and many libraries don't have all of the relevant titles to their research. Many journals are beginning to address these problems by putting their content online, allowing institutions to purchase subscriptions that give access to the members of that institution wherever they are. That's great for them, but a barrier to everyone else. As an alumnus of the University of Washington, I'm supposed to have the same access privileges to library resources as do current students. The catch is that those privileges do not extend to internet access. To read journals, I have to go to the library. That's not a problem for people who work at the University, but, to someone who does not work there, it means making a special trip to read any given article. In those who do not work on or near a university library, the internet revolution has changed nothing.

Many of the journals who have put their content online do allow laypersons to access their articles, but we have to pay by the article. The prices range from ten to forty dollars per article with no consideration for length. Scientific research articles are usually quite short; one article I want is three pages long and will cost me forty dollars to view. For current research articles, I need to determine if it is relevant to my work without actually seeing it first.

The pay-per-view firewalls deprive an historical researcher of important context. The Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society are a perfect example of this. A few years ago they began posting online scanned images of the pages of their entire run. These were treasure to me. Whenever I went looking for an article, I browsed the entire issue to get an idea of the intellectual context of that one paper. This was not only useful, it was a lot of fun. In my presentation, I mentioned letters from landowners about natural oddities discovered on their land. As recently as the late 1700s, the Proceedings printed letters as trivial as someone finding a turnip in the shape of the Prime Minister's head. Priceless!

Last spring, with the scanning complete, the Society turned management of the digital archives over to JSTOR, a for-profit institution. Most of the attendees at our presentation were not even aware of the change. Because of their institutional affiliations, nothing had changed for them; they simply go online and read whatever they want. For me and people like me, it costs ten dollars for each article and letter unless we make a special trip to the University library.

As I mentioned in the presentation, the professionalization of the scientific world was a great thing in many ways, but, along with breaking down some barriers to the free exchange of ideas, it created new barriers. It divided the scientific world into two classes, active practitioners and passive spectators. Threats and barriers to the free and open access of ideas are not limited to censorship and social pressures; sometimes they are as simple as cost and distance.

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White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science 

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers Jocelyn Kaiser Should all papers that result from U.S. taxpayerfunded research be made freely available? The White House science office likes the idea and has asked for input on whether many federal agencies should formally adopt it. So-called open access advocates are enthusiastic in comments submitted to a White House forum, but some scientific societies remain wary, fearing that a too-broad public-access policy could kill journal subscriptions. Both sides agree that the White House appears to be moving toward a plan. "They're focusing not on should we do this but how would we do this," says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a librarian group and open-access proponent. The push for mandatory release of research papers started 2 years ago at the National Institutes of Health, which required that grantees send copies of their peer-reviewed, accepted papers to the agency. NIH posts the final manuscripts or published papers in its free PubMedCentral archive; release can be delayed on request up to 12 months after publication. The objective has been to give patients and the public broader access to research results. Despite grumbling from publishers, NIH says the policy is working smoothly. Last month, as part of President Barack Obama's "open government" activities, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched an online discussion about whether the NIH model should be expanded to other agencies. The OSTP forum asks nine questions, including how to ensure that authors comply. About 400 comments have been submitted so far from scores of individual scientists, librarians, publishers, and others. The majority support broadening public access, says OSTP Assistant Director of Life Sciences Diane DiEuliis, a neuroscientist on detail from NIH. "There was a fair consensus on the general issue," she told Science by e-mail, as well as on other questions, such as "embargo times": how long an author and journal can keep a paper under private control. Many suggested using the current NIH embargo12 monthsand preferred central repositories like PubMedCentral rather than university archives. But even a 12-month delay worries some nonprofit scientific publishers. For example, mineralogists and anthropologists argued that their papersunlike those in biomedical researchmay have a very long "half life" and that releasing the full text on the Internet could cause journals to lose subscribers. Katherine McCarter of the Ecological Society of America, which has not yet submitted comments, says that for ecology journals, "even a 1-year delay could be a real disincentive to buy a subscription." The cost of producing a single paper can run significantly higher in social sciences because papers need more space and require a "more robust peer-review process," argues William E. Davis III, executive director of the American Anthropological Association. His letter warns that mandatory release of such papers "could well result in the demise of the very journals that ... advocates seek to make more freely available." Despite such concerns, OSTP seems to be moving inexorably toward a general open-access policy. DiEuliis says OSTP will sort through all comments (the deadline has been extended until 21 January) and send suggestions to an interagency working group. This panel will also consider a report due this week from a group of publishers and other stakeholders that OSTP and the House Science Committee convened last June. One possibility, DiEuliis says, is that OSTP could draft an executive order or memo that would set out "minimum standards" but "give agencies flexibility to create custom plans.

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science