Science in the Open - Latest Comments

Re: Testing…testing…

Martin Fenner — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 03:40:34 -0000

Working…

Re: Testing…testing…

Ross Mounce — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 17:11:50 -0000

yep, it's still working 👍

Re: Against the 2.5% Commitment

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 16:04:32 -0000

Dear David, Lori, Diane, Mike

Thanks so much. I think the important thing is that we debate implementation details and I'm conscious that it is very easy to criticise from an arm-chair. I take your point about the title. My aim was to attract the attention of a specific group, but in that I'm as guilty of a click-bait approach as many of the groups that we often criticise for simplistic headlines on complex subjects.

As you note, what is important is that we tackle the issue of collectively funding infrastructure, platforms and innovation. Targets matter and numbers speak to people in a way that more complex proposals often don't. As you note benchmarks are useful, and it may be that as these efforts evolve we see the number rise. Perhaps a 2.5% Club of institutions will give way to 5% and 10% over time?

What matters in the long term is that we develop systems that can evolve into the future. For that, I thank you for the work you're doing in raising these issues and getting them on the agenda of librarians and university leadership. The implementation details we will no doubt continue to discuss for some time.

Re: Against the 2.5% Commitment

David — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 14:22:30 -0000

As the people trying to turn David W. Lewis’ 2.5% Commitment paper into action, we appreciate this thoughtful critique. The collective action problem is real and overcoming it will be a challenge. The discussions here are useful in assessing the work to be done and how to do it.

This post also points out the apparent contradiction of libraries making a relatively small commitment because they can generally do this on their own while not taking on the more important challenge of creating a commitment from the larger community of scholars. We appreciate this critique, but would argue that libraries can and often have acted collaboratively to solve problems and that doing so now is an important step that should not be delayed. Work on building support in the broader academic community needs to be done in parallel.

The post correctly points out the importance of investment quality. This is a complicated problem that will need to be resolved. We believe the approach presented here is a start in doing so.

We also appreciate the notion that 2.5% is both too ambitious and not ambitious enough. In the end, the particular number is less important than action that leads to more funding for common infrastructure. There will inevitably come a time, and it will probably be sooner rather than later, that we will wish we had picked a different higher number, but for now it seems to us that the specific target is useful at least as a way of bringing attention to the idea.

We believe that independent of the long-term goal of enticing most libraries to invest more in open infrastructure, simply documenting the current set of investment opportunities and the amount of investment being made is useful simply to understand the current state of affairs. There is some urgency to moving quickly to an alternative model as non-Open actors are aggressively trying to create lock-in through creating an integrated walled garden approach to the entire scholarly communication lifecycle.

Our biggest complaint is with the title of the post. We don’t see it as being “against” what we are hoping to accomplish, rather we see it as advancing the conversation in useful ways.

If you want to keep up on the progress of the 2.5% Commitment see our website at http://scholarlycommons.net or follow us on Twitter at @in4open.

David W. Lewis
Lori Goetsch
Diane Graves
Mike Roy

Re: Against the 2.5% Commitment

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 09:38:19 -0000

Yes, absolutely agree with this. That's really what I'm trying to get at with the idea of properly treating them as investments with not just costs, but returns, and differential returns based on the timing and scale of investment.

You wouldn't invest in a building program and then lobby the council to stop any new building (or cut funding for new planning approvals) yet when we treat things as though they are a single bottom line we do this over and over again. And when we only provide a very small number of funding options, and in particular nothing that provides the capital for scaling up and proper usability work we continually lose either the value (because the project fails) or control over the investment (because its bought by outside parties).

Re: Against the 2.5% Commitment

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 09:35:00 -0000

Hi Raym, thanks for the kind comments. My recollection is that meeting in Lieden(?) for the Jisc project on sustainability of OA infrastructures you made it as a straw-person proposal to cut through a somewhat circular discussion we were having about whose problem it was. But my memory may be hazy on that. Definitely someone in that discussion group proposed that as a way forward...

Re: Against the 2.5% Commitment

grahamtriggs — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 18:51:30 -0000

Even with a spending/resource commitment, there is still a question of how that money (/resources) would be used.

When you highlight that the market is good (/better) at providing certain services, there are two, related, elements that go a long way to making that happen - namely, that the market front-loads the costs to recoup them later, and (because of that) there is the incentive to provide solutions, seeking value for a high ROI.

Away from the market, there are problems with the availability of money/resources (hence the 2.5% proposal). But also for what often goes in overhead, and talking about needs to be done, and even encouraging others that they need to be "doing", it's not matched with what actually gets done. The discussions are important, but we end up with lots of initiatives progressing slowly, when we could focus on delivering some before moving on to the next.

There are times when it feels like we've hired 10 architects to design a house, and only one bricklayer to build it.

Re: Against the 2.5% Commitment

Raym Crow — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 10:57:47 -0000

Thanks for this, Cameron. Your summary of the practical difficulties of implementing a collective solution that spans disparate communities is right on-point. I don't recall ever advocating for a 1% solution--and am chagrined if I did--but I've said too many stupid things over the years to disavow it categorically. As you note, coordination mechanisms and participation inducements are critical to successful collective investment, and the practical design of these components merits far closer attention than it generally receives.

Re: 2560 x 1440 (except while traveling)

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 08:06:21 -0000

I'll have to write the post but the core of it is this: if you follow the thread from this post ( http://cameronneylon.net/bl... to this one from Roger Schonfeld ( https://scholarlykitchen.ss... then a very profitable route (particularly for subscription publishers but not exclusively) is to red-flag papers from particular places and people to save money. And all of this can be done silently. At least one publisher used to simply block reject very paper that came from Iran for instance, but you can imagine a prestige journal just dumping anything from unknown authors or developing countries and it never becoming visible.

Re: 2560 x 1440 (except while traveling)

Emanuil Tolev — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 08:01:08 -0000

Well, I'm looking forward to reading pretty much all of these. I'll send any ethnographers I stumble upon your way :).

What angle(s) are you interested in when it comes to the interactions between the structural power of publishers and submission systems?
More specifically (just trying to understand it), is that about assumptions that big rich companies make when designing submission systems and the workflows those systems (implicitly) impose on scholars who use them?

Re: What’s the return? Or…how is it possible that Open Library of Humanities works?

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 07:16:53 -0000

So yes, there are lots of clubs interacting. One challenge is to work out when you have a single club with different kinds of members and when you have different clubs interacting in exchange. TBD on how one does that, tho at some level its a question of how you build your models.

Currently we would tend to see a journal as a single club with different kinds of members. Buchannan's work allows for this (and predicts it). The simplest case is when authors are readers (think traditional society journal) and we need to work out what happens as those two groups drift apart. My (not fully worked out) thinking at the moment is that what tends to happens is that coordination costs move from being off-balance sheet (community managed) to on-balance sheet.

In this sense PLOS ONE and Nature both face the same problem. There is a large divergence between author and reader communities so internal (community based, tacit) knowledge that can efficiently do QA has to be professionalised, which happens in both cases.

In my analysis an OA and a subscription journal don't end up so different, but the models for payment mean that this scaling problem plays out differently for each.

Now, all clubs (by definition) leave some groups out. I think the key club for your relative is not the journal but the institution/community one (which takes you back to the library). There are OA journals that function as a community club where your relative would have OA publishing privileges as a member, but in the subscription case, yes the external author is a free rider. Which is probably why we so fiercely police things around institutional affiliations I guess...

Clear as mud?

Re: What’s the return? Or…how is it possible that Open Library of Humanities works?

crusbrid — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 06:54:56 -0000

OK, I know nothing about this really, so this is just trying to understand a bit. Can we think of a library as a club for its readers, and a journal as the union of two clubs: one for its readers (the majority) and one for its writers. But what if you built the economics of the journal the other way round: the club is for researchers who want their work to be read and judged? Or, possibly, for research institutions (perhaps via their libraries) who want their researchers' work to be read and judged?

Those certainly seem like the criteria for OA journals, whether gold or green. Both seem to leave out some key potential club members: non-affiliated researchers (who are also left out of traditional journal clubs).

I have a young relative, recently completed a clinical doctorate in psychology. A year or so after leaving the university where she completed her training, one of her pieces of work finally gets accepted for publication. Prompted by me, she asks for the Open Access option... but it's £1,800! Too much, and no sponsor, so she has to opt for the traditional TA option... which I suppose makes her a free-rider on the traditional model, after being excluded from the new model!

Re: What’s the return? Or…how is it possible that Open Library of Humanities works?

Brucecaron — Sun, 09 Jul 2017 11:56:44 -0000

Certainly the OLH can point to both an optimal alignment between its goals and those of its members/supporters as well as an economy and efficiency in its practice. The question then becomes: how do for-profit publishers compete with the OLH? The key is to build a package of member benefits that fronts the goal alignment and provides no practical disadvantage (except perhaps impact factor). ESIP does this by creating alternatives for its members to propose online "workshops" that attract a broad variety of expertise, and that are available immediately and at no cost to the member. Instead of needing to propose to the NSF for a workshop in 9 months, ESIP members "workshop" online today and finish their work without any travel, and potentially within weeks. NOTE: the funders love this too!

Re: As a researcher…I’m a bit bloody fed up with Data Management

William Kilbride — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 17:56:04 -0000

This ^

Re: As a researcher…I’m a bit bloody fed up with Data Management

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 03:59:03 -0000

I always liked the line that "any sufficiently large carrot can also be deployed as a stick"...but yes the point is well taken. It's a little worse than that in the sense that all of the various groups view all of the others (admin and library as seen by researchers, admin and researchers as seen by library etc etc) as "donkeys" in the sense of not seeing what they ought to as the really important bit. Its the failure of imagination to realise that we all have different skills and figuring out how to bring them together effectively is the key...

Re: As a researcher…I’m a bit bloody fed up with Data Management

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 03:57:01 -0000

Hi David,

Yes, that kind of practical "just be sensible" advice turned out to be hard to find. For instance that OSF page didn't show up in my results, partly because I thought I was looking for something more specific, and partly because it was buried in pages of results of metadata schema.

The more I've thought about this the more I think its really about discovering and coordinating resources that actually do exist online but are not well connected and don't rise to the top of search results. Again, this is the argument for the professional support person who knows how to find this stuff. The challenge is in guiding the user towards them.

Re: As a researcher…I’m a bit bloody fed up with Data Management

William Kilbride — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 05:56:12 -0000

I have grown used to sitting in sessions where various senior officials refer to 'carrots' and 'sticks' as if it were the only metaphor for how we might encourage researchers to engage in research data management activities. I have an underlying dislike of cliche, but also wonder what it says about us if we casually and routinely cast the brightest and best in the role of the donkey. And in any case it seems to me that this particular highly-skilled and highly-motivated donkey has worked hard to ensure it is already in the right place. Down with cliches: let's look after the donkey where it is.

Re: As a researcher…I’m a bit bloody fed up with Data Management

David Mellor — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 12:57:18 -0000

I love a good rant! To answer one question: "I’m really trying to get advice on a truly basic question: should I organise by interview (audio files and notes together) or by file type (with interviews split up)." how do you organize your data? I suspect that the most effective way to share (and encourage others to share) is to simply use the structure that is most useful for you. If you collect with one structure (e.g. by interview, with audio and notes together) but then analyze after reorganizing into file types, simply share the structure that best represents what you have when you are ready to share. Standards exist after competing strategies are used, their relative merits are evaluated, and a big player or a community agrees on a standard, all of which require experience and trial by error.

As an aside, I am not aware of publicly shared audio transcripts because of privacy issues, but here's simply dataset shared on the OSF of the scored data (https://osf.io/vj3h6/). Obviously the raw data would be more useful, but this is a good example of sharing what you can and maybe sharing more in the future.

Here are some general advice articles on file organizing and creating data codebooks. http://help.osf.io/m/bestpr... I doubt any of it is news to you, but perhaps something there is useful or worth building upon.

Re: As a researcher…I’m a bit bloody fed up with Data Management

Peter Sefton — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 23:58:14 -0000

Hi Cameron,

We hear you!

As it happens we're currently working on data packaging, at UTS we're not done, but I am due to talk about an alpha release of a tool that's designed to make it easy to make a data package based on BagIt (super-simple way of laying out content) with basic re-use and discovery metadata in JSON-LD, as well as HTML. I'd love to try it on your data, and get some requirements from you., you know where to find me if you're interested.

I had a go at this before

Cheers,
pt

Re: As a researcher…I’m a bit bloody fed up with Data Management

terracerulean — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 20:10:47 -0000

Thanks for posting this.
I've worked on EResearch systems and services (and policy) for over a decade, and the issues you raise are endemic.
It will be no comfort, but there is a systemic gap in how these systems are conceived designed an implemented.
Basically it's the result of a conflict in perspective between the customer and users of these projects - where the customer is the person (senior management usually) who pays for the thing to be built and the users are people like yourself to whom these things are delivered.
The thing that always seems to get lost is the simple principle that while the customer transfers value (by paying for the service) it's the users who create value.
Unfortunately the whole conceive, design, build, operate circus is set up to bee more beholden to the customer than the users.
It's changing - slowly - but there it is.
Those of us who do the design work often care a great deal about the users, and we a frustrated that we can't put their interests ahead on the customers'.
I will at least promise to save your post as a "user story" to argue for more attention to user needs in any future work I might do.
Thanks.

Re: As a researcher…I’m a bit bloody fed up with Data Management

Mike Taylor — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 19:48:35 -0000

I absolutely feel your pain. This is a horribly familiar story.

Only one thing ...

> What should I do, right now because the funder is on my back about it!?!

What you should do now is not just package your data in the format that seems best to you, but document that format -- and let that documentation become the zeroth draft of a standard (whether formal or informal) for those who follow. And of course your example will illustrate it.

Tools are good, too, but start with the spec.

Re: Openness in Scholarship: A return to core values?

Cameron Neylon — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 07:25:04 -0000

I do need to more explicitly state what is meant by "evolution" here. I had a go here: http://cameronneylon.net/bl... and there was this chapter that starts to tease it apart in a less abstract way: http://cameronneylon.net/bl...

But yes, evolution is meant as questions of survival of recognizable entities (yes that begs the question...). So Lamarckian (or epigenetic if you prefer) is just fine. The point ultimately is of course that we can choose to guide it, but only if we accept that it is guiding, not controlling, so learning, applying are all important.

I can't recall whether Ostrom uses the word "evolution" precisely at the moment, but I read the main point of Governing the Commons as being that the theoretical institutional provisioning problem that leads to Hardin's tragedy can be overcome in practice by accepting that these institutions build up over time and gradually accrete the capacity to enable a community to address the collective action problem. That to me is a process of evolution.

Re: Openness in Scholarship: A return to core values?

Brucecaron — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 12:47:05 -0000

A great piece. I learned a lot. It is good to remember Boyle's (and the invisible college's) call for "open alchemy."

I do wonder how much evolution is involved in the interplay of demes. There are open contests, there is flowering and fading, collusion, the opportunity for non-zero-sum outcomes; there is learning and path dependence; there are a lot of dynamics (very much like the forces in Foucault's discourses--although demes do not seem to be power-laden), but there probably is not an evolutionary force here. There are unknowns that become new frontiers. But these are occupied strategically perhaps more than by adaptation. I don't (yet) agree that Ostrom "showed that the way to understand institutions that resolve collective action problems is to see them as developing through a process of evolution." Instead I see reflective learning organizations. More Giddens... Perhaps some kind of Lamarkian intellection-based-style evolution? Certainly not Darwinian.

I would also think that Benkler's three tensions might also be of value here [See Rich Bartlett's notes here on these: <https: medium.com="" enspiral-tales="" making-sense-of-the-emerging-economy-with-yochai-benkler-b54f749cee92="">.
Getting back to conservative science, back to Merton or-somthing, could also provide some normative and practical heuristics to avoid these tensions.

Re: What measurement does to us…

Henry Rzepa — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 08:21:54 -0000

Can I add a different dimension. We are used to citing other articles which support (or contradict) the arguments being presented. We are less used to citing data (as a "FAIR" first class object), often relying on data "buried" in an article or the supporting information and hoping the interested reader will find it in much the same manner often as the needle in the haystack.

But what about other objects? What about citing the instrument which might have been used to obtain data, and perhaps associated with a calibration curve or say a probe fitted for the experiment? If the article is about searches of a database, how about citing the version of that database? If software has been used to simulate a model, how about the version of that software? These can be informally cited, perhaps in the "experimental section", but a proper citation should have formal metadata associated with it and this would require a formation citation. We are moving into an era where persistent identifiers (often known as DOIs) can be assigned to all these properties. We should get used to quoting such DOIs for all aspects of the research processes, not just articles describing the research outcomes. Or to put it more generally, metadata really can help to assign a context to the citation.

Re: What measurement does to us…

Mark C. Wilson — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 14:17:22 -0000

If only citations were the gold standard at my institution. Promotions are largely based on number of papers (more = better).