The opening keynote by Tony Hey was both a master-class in how to give a compelling lecture and an impressive demonstration of how much one person can know about his field.  When the video of this talk comes out, watch it!

It was also great to see such a wide variety of topics in the poster sessions: A poster on Data Citation was the award winner (I still can’t believe that the graduate student who did this research had to pay for her own subscription to Web of Science to do this research!). The runner-up award for best paper was about authorship attribution metadata to climate datasets.

Climate data figured quite prominently, including at least three talks : one on implementing an ISO standard MOLES3 (Metadata Objects Linking Environmental Sciences) at the Centre for Environmental Data Archival a second on Twenty years of data management in the British Atmospheric Data Centre and my own on Harmonizing metadata among diverse climate change datasets.

There were 3 parallel sessions on the second day – one just has to be resigned to giving up on two thirds of the interesting talks. I did go to this one one: A system for distributed minting and management of persistent identifiers, which I found especially intriguing. In a sentence, it proposes to do for digital identifiers (e.g. DOI) what Bitcoin does for money. In other word’s it’s a Bitcoin-like, distributed and secure method of generating unique identifiers.  I hope is succeeds.

This talk by the Ph.D. student Tiffany Chao Mapping methods metadata for research data struck me as a perfect application for text mining.  She proposes extracting the Methods and Instrumentation sections from the National Environmental Methods Index to generate metadata descriptors for the corresponding datafiles.  Right now her work is being done by hand to demonstrate its feasibility but a machine could do it too.

I registered for a DataCarpentry workshop to “access life science data available on the web”.  I learned a little R programming, discovered the ROpenSci repository and got my feet wet with the AntWeb and Gender packages. I look forward to graduating to rWBclimate, an R interface to the World Bank climate data in the climate knowledge portal.

One treasure trove led to another. I gate-crashed a small visualization hackathon workshop at which I discovered the British Library’s digital collection and the 1001 things that could be done to it if you had a small army of graduate students in the Digital Humanities at your disposal. Hopefully, that’s exactly what’s going to happen when the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, Warwick and University College London start collaborating at the Alan Turing Institute (to be located in the British Library).

The Data Spring Workshop was exciting in a different way – a lot of presenters gave lightening talks on their practical problems and solutions with managing data.  There was so much, I can hardly remember any of it!  One item stood out for me,  though, because it addresses my pain: a method for re-creating and preserving the environments for computational experiments.  It took me about 1.2 minutes to become an instant convert to Recomputation.org mission.

This only skims the surface, but it will have to do for now.

(1) 1Password : https://agilebits.com/onepassword

This is single-handedly the most useful and valuable piece of software I own.  It’s a password-vault that securely generates and stores passwords for all your logins. Free and Open Source equivalents include Password Safe and KeePass but 1Password has them all beat in their user interface and that’s important when you use something every day. It’s true that Open Source alternatives have the security advantage that anyone can inspect the code for back-doors and security mistakes, but I am willing to trust Agile Bits.  Maybe it’s because they’re Canadian.

(2) BoxCryptor : https://www.boxcryptor.com/

Worry about storing your files in the cloud no more. Boxcryptor provides file-encryption  for cloud storage services, including Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive.  For file encryption or even disk-level encryption I would have recommended TrueCrypt except that it hasn’t been updated in more than a year. For Windows systems, I would suggest Axcrypt.

(3) GPG Mail : https://gpgtools.org/

GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) is a tool for encrypting, decrypting, signing and verifying files or messages. Despite adding my GPG signature on all my e-mails for the past 5 months, no one has yet sent me an encrypted e-mail, but once everyone uses it, I predict it will be the spam-killer app.

(4) Things 2 : http://culturedcode.com/things/

If you’re not the most organized person in the world you’ll be grateful for this tool: it helps remind you of what you need to do, and when you need to do it.

(5) TeXStudio : http://texstudio.sourceforge.net/

TeX is 35 years old and still going strong.  TeXStudio is a pretty good text editor and a pretty interface for this rather complicated typesetting system.  Essential for writing camera-ready copy, particularly if it involves mathematical equations and symbols.

(6) Pixelmator : http://www.pixelmator.com/

If you don’t have the patience to learn Photoshop or even Gimp, Pixelmator likely does most of what you’ll want if you are a casual photo editor.

(7) WhatSize : http://www.whatsizemac.com/

Even a rarely used software item can be quite valuable.  Sometimes you really need to see how your space is allocated on your disk when you see your space disappear from it. WhatSize does only one thing but it does it well.

(8) GoBan : http://www.sente.ch/

I don’t play computer games much, but when I do it’s the game of Go – still by far the most beautiful board game ever invented.  This UI app is very nice for playing others on line or against Go software like GNU Go or Pachi Go.

(9) Stellarium : http://www.stellarium.org/

Starry Night used to be the king of the hill of sky simulators for astronomy – and perhaps it still is – but Stellarium is a quite a fine Open Source alternative that is quite a bit less complicated.

(10) Audacity : http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Audio editing software is probably frustrating no matter how good the user interface. And Audacity’s user interface is frustrating!  But I keep coming back to it because it’s so available and does so much that’s useful (noise reduction, normalization, export to various formats, etc.)

Needless to say, I have no commercial or other interest in any product mentioned above and I have paid for all my personal product licenses for the commercial software listed above: 1Password, Things 2, WhatSize, Pixelmator and GoBan.

Eighteen months ago, Xiaodan Zhu, Peter Turney, Daniel Lemire and I embarked on an experiment to see if we could identify the features in an article that would enable us to identify the critical (vs. incidental) references.  We thought that being able to identify references that are crucial would help us devise a better researcher productivity index – one that was better than the h-index.

I am happy to report that we were successful!  In September I gave an overview presentation to the U. Ottawa School of Information Studies that describes the problem we were trying to solve, our methods and results. Since then our paper has been accepted for publication in JASIST, most likely in a 2014 issue.

To automatically identify the subset of references in a bibliography that have a central academic influence on the citing paper, we examined the effectiveness of a variety of candidate features – positional features, semantic features, context features and citation-frequency features – that might be predictors of the academic influence of a citation. We asked the authors of 100 papers to identify the key references in their own work and created a dataset in which citations were labeled according to their academic influence (note that this dataset is made available under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License). We then used supervised machine learning to perform feature selection and found a model that predicts academic influence effectively using only four features.

The performance of these features inspired us to design an influence-primed h-index (the hip-index). Unlike the conventional h-index, the hip-index weights citations simply by how many times a reference is mentioned. We show that the hip-index has better precision than the conventional h-index at predicting ACL Fellows on a collection of 20,000 articles from the ACL Digital Archive of Research Papers.

P.S. (Nov. 18) Daniel Lemire in his related blog post gives the following credit, which I entirely share: Most of the credit for this work goes to my co-authors. Much of the heavy lifting was done by Xiaodan Zhu.

I once worked for a company that makes the kind of software that the NSA and CSIS appear to be using to monitor email and internet metadata (see the Guardian for a quick survey of the metadata that exists in different digital media).

I might add that I think there is nothing morally wrong with the surveillance technology itself – indeed it can be used to protect privacy and prevent harm. It is more a question of whether our privacy rights are violated when the technology is used and whether those rights should be relinquished to the state for the greater good.

The recent revelation that the presumption of privacy even when engaging in encrypted transactions is erroneous adds fuel to my concern that people don’t make informed decisions about what information they disclose and that they don’t even try to protect their information even when it is quite easy to do. This post highlights some software solutions you can use to reduce the likelihood that your private information is monitored.

Web Browsing

Let’s start with web browsing. The amount of information that a web servers can glean from your web browser’s attempt to connect with it is quite voluminous. To see what a server can find out about your browser and computer, try this link:

http://www.mybrowserinfo.com/detail.asp?bhcp=1

Furthermore, the combination of these browser characteristics, while they may not provide personal identity information can still identify you uniquely.  Try this test from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

When I try it, they assert that my browser information-collection, i.e. my browser “fingerprint” is unique among the 3M or so they have tested.

There is not much you can do to limit the uniqueness of your browser’s fingerprint other than having a generic computer and a generic browser configuration.  Using the TOR browser / network (see below) helps to reduce the uniqueness of your browser-fingerprint, but there are tradeoffs (response speed for one thing).

HTTPS

There was a time when I thought that HTTP-Secure (“https”) was a reliable way of ensuring that information between your browser and the end-point server (e.g. a Bank) could not be intercepted or tampered with. The revelation that the NSA is able to decrypt such communications reduces my confidence that this method is “secure” in any meaningful way, but at least it offers some degree of assurance that not just anybody and either read or tamper with such transactions.

If that level of confidence is sufficient for you, then you might consider adding the HTTPS Everywhere plugin (brought to you by the Electronic Freedom Foundation) to your browser.

TOR

This browser / encrypted network system describes itself as

…free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security

In principle, the Onion Routing technology behind it offers the end-user a high degree of anonymity and untraceability. However, if anyone can break SSL, the next step is to break TOR.

File and file system encryption

If you want to protect computer files, or indeed a whole file system (e.g. in case your laptop is stolen or your USB key is lost) you should try TrueCrypt. It offers operating-system level, on-the fly encryption, file-level encryption and partition encryption.  Best of all, TrueCrypt is open source (so you can check for yourself, if you have the patience and know-how, that there are no backdoors for the NSA or CSIS).

Also, for Windows PCs (or Wine enabled Macs), AxCrypt is a pretty good and easy to use tool for encrypting files.

Email

Securing email is a bit trickier. There is no meaningful way to encrypt e-mail metatdata. The very nature of e-mail addressing and store-and-forward protocols like SMTP require that metadata. Which, of course, is a fundamental design flaw with email.

However, if you want to protect the content of what you say from prying eyes, you can try Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG). Its precursor was PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and Edward Snowden thinks it works.

Conclusion

It appears that most people think that their privacy is worth sacrificing in exchange for safety and protection by government.  This is short-sighted. A benevolent government in whose integrity you trust might do the right thing at any point in time, but the issue is a matter of principle. You should not relinquish your right to privacy to the state.

As Bruce Schneier wrote in The Guardian:

By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract…..

We have a moral duty to [dismantle the surveillance state], and we have no time to lose.

In the meantime we can at least do better to protect ourselves.

First, they have a limited shelf-life. However perennial the issues are (e.g. “What is Justice?”), what makes it a learning experience for the students is the process of investigation and enquiry.  While Sandel’s recordings of his lectures are a master class on how to engage students, how to foster critical thinking and make issues pertinent and alive,  their very nature as recordings ultimately limits them to being historical documents.

For instance, since 2005 – the year in which these lectures were recorded – the richest person in the world (taken as an example of [potential] financial injustice) is no longer Bill Gates (it’s Carlos Slim Helu), significant examples of greed and inequality are better illustrated with the 2007-2008 financial crisis and there have been many changes in U.S. politics since the election of President Obama.

At least as importantly, watching these lectures makes the viewer feel wanting of interactions with the lecturer. Listening to young minds grappling with the issues is pedagogically interesting, but as a student what you really want is to be in the audience asking questions, taking positions and arguing with the lecturer and fellow students.

As a taste of how a student might benefit from a Harvard education, having a course such as this on-line is wonderful. And it is clearly of value to anyone who would be unable to attend or afford such an education.  But it is no substitute for the real experience.

So, for these two reasons alone, I think that MOOCs will, at best, be a complement to a university education, not an alternative to it.

The BC Library Association has condemned it in writing. BC Archivist Myron Groover was polite but firm on “As It Happens”.

Members of Parliament for the Official Opposition Andrew Cash and Pierre Nantel gave the Heritage Minister a piece of their mind about it in the Canadian House of Commons:

Jim Turk, Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) gave a clear explanation of what’s at stake in an interview on Radio Canada International.

My question is – we’ve expressed our collective outrage at this Orwellian nightmare – and now what? Do we decide that Federal archival and library institutions are doomed and take on their role on the remaining islands of democracy or “…take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them”?

At the panel discussion in which I participated, I suggested that to predict the future one need only look at the past. To predict the iPad one needed only look at the Apple Newton (which died in 1998). What was the analog, I wondered, for an information retrieval tool, now dead and buried, that might still evolve into something we all want in the field of information management?

I proposed that the future of information retrieval might be something like an evolved Office Assistant, (affectionately coined “Clippy”) – the infamous, now deceased Microsoft Paperclip that assisted you in understanding and navigating Microsoft products.

My vision for a next generation Clippy was clearly not well articulated since it prompted the following tweet from Stephen Abram:

I think that Siri, (about which I posted a few years ago) belongs to the old Clippy style of annoying and in-the-way-of-what-I-want-to-do applications. I am surprised it has survived so long and was promoted by Apple so strongly. I predict it will join Clippy, Google Wave and Google Glasses on the growing heap of unwanted technologies that were not ready for prime-time.

Watson (who is now going to medical school, and about which I also posted a couple of years ago) is, however, just the sort of Natural Language Understanding component technology that I have in mind for for an interactive, personal information assistant. When a computer that now costs three million dollars with15 terrabytes of RAM can fit in your pocket and cost $500, a Watson-like system that understands natural language queries will be an important component of Clippy++.

What neither Watson nor Siri have – and this is what I foresee in my crystal ball is the most significant attribute about “Clippy++” – is personalization and autonomy. What will make true personalization possible with “Clippy++” is our collective willingness to accept the intrusion of a mechanical supervisor that learns from our behaviour about what we want, need and expect.

This culture-shift is happening right now – we gladly and willingly disclose our information consumption habits to supervisory software and data-analytics engines in exchange for entertainment and social networking. It won’t be long before we’re willing to do that for serious, personalized information management purposes as well.

The key, though, is going to be the interaction – the dialog that we have with Clippy++ – and it will have to have explanations for its actions and recommendations. That’s going to be the hallmark of its evolution to Machina Sapiens.

This is a slightly different prediction than the one made by the Economist in 2005: Death to Folders. Their argument was that folders as a method of organizing files was obsolete and that search, tagging and “smart folders” were going to change everything. My assertion is the very notion of a file – these things that are copied, edited, executed by computers – will eventually disappear (to the end-user, anyway.)

The path to the “end of files” is more than just a question of masking the underlying data-representation to the user. It is true that Apps (as designed for mobile devices) have begun to do that as a convenient way of hiding the details of a file from the user – be it an application file or a document file.  The reason that Apps (generally) contain within them the (references to) data-items (i.e. files) that they need, particularly if the information is stored in the cloud, is to provide a Digital Rights Management scheme. Which no doubt why this App model is slowly creeping its way from mobile devices to mainstream laptops and desktops (viz. Mac OS Mountain Lion and Windows 8).

But this is just the beginning.  There’s going to be a paradigm shift (a perfectly fine phrase, when it’s used correctly!) in our mental representations of computing objects and it is going to be more profound than merely masking the existence of the underlying representation. I think the new paradigm that will replace “file” is going to be: “the set of information items and interfaces that are needed to perform some action the current use-context”.

Consider as an example of this trend towards the new paradigm, Wolfram’s Computable Document Format. In this model, documents are created by dynamically assembling components from different places and performing computations on them.  In this model there are distributed, raw information components – data mostly – that are assembled in the application and don’t correspond to a “file” at all. Or consider information mashups like Google Maps with restaurant reviews and recommendations are generated as a function of search-history, location, and user-identity.  These “content-bundles”, for want of a better phrase, are definitely not files or documents but, from the end-user’s point of view, they are also indistinguishable from them.

Even, MS Word DocX “files” are instances of this new model.  The Open Document XML file format is a standardized data-structure: XML components bound together in a zip file. Imagine de-regimenting this convention a little and what constitutes a “document” could change quite significantly.

Conventional, static files will continue to exist for some time and version control systems will continue to provide change management services to what we now know as “files”. But I predict that my grand children won’t know what a file is – and won’t need to.  The procedural instructions required for assembling information-packages out of components, including the digital rights constraints that govern them, will eventually dominate the world of consumable digital content to the point where the idea of a file will be obsolete.

The inference? Be prepared for Yahoo to read your mind!

I have been a proponent of personalization since 2000, when I worked on developing “Personal Identity Management” services at Nortel. The idea at the time was (for a telecom company) to enable IP devices (routers / gateways) to track / manage / control your on-line identity and provide identity services (single sign-on, personalization of news services, etc.) to the user.

This was conceived at about the time that Microsoft Hailstorm was being launched. The only fundamental difference was – which service provider – “network access” vs. “operating system” vs. “third party service” – would be the trusted source for managing your identity.

From a public relations point of view Hailstorm and its successors Microsoft Passport, and Wallet, were a disaster. Invasion of privacy, identity theft, all the usual public anxiety buttons were pressed and Microsoft dropped a lot of these products – or at least gave them a makeover.

Yet, a few internet generations later, these ideas persist.  Google didn’t make a big PR campaign of it, but everything at Google is about personalization and localization as illustrated most graphically by the (dystopic?) Google Glasses video.

But – fortunately, I might add – I am noticing a (small) swing of the pendulum away from machine-learning, Netflix-style personalization towards a “how do you want it?” style of personalization.

For instance, Google News used to be fully and automatically biased towards your location. Since the summer of 2011, Google has given the end-user a great deal more control.

Marissa Mayer may want to read your mind, but I know that most people don’t want to have their minds read by machines. I think the trend towards great user-control will eventually spread to more personalization and recommender services. I hope so anyway.

My very first thought was “the future of conventional universities is in doubt“. This course alone had 42,000 registrants, 24,000 of which watched at least one video. Only 1,400 of the registrants got a “certificate of achievement” (i.e. completed the course and handed in all the assignments) but in the meantime there were 800,000 video-downloads of the courseware.

Distance-learning or on-line courses have been around for a long time – in the same way that “finger”, “who” and “chat” in Unix had been around a long time before Facebook, Linked-In and Instant Messaging.  The difference now is that major Universities are jumping on the bandwagon and offering them for free.  Why? Perhaps because of decreasing enrolment: free on-line courses are a way to recruit students from everywhere and to show them the best of what universities have to offer.

But also (in the US anyway), education is a business (see the Frontline documentary on the business of higher education: College Inc.)  That universities are feeling the financial pinch and being pressed by their boards to be more agressive in the marketplace was perhaps most visibly illustrated at the University of Virginia (the case against on-line education is elegantly articulated by Mark Edmundson – a professor of English at the University of Virginia – in a New York Times OpEd article).

Making courses on-line available for free will be a moneymaker when they start counting towards a degree, which clearly inevitable in the long run. However, I didn’t expect this development to come so soon after the beginning of the experiment. The Seattle Times reported just yesterday that the University of Washington is going to be offering some of their Coursera courses for credit.

Canada, in the meantime, has its own Canadian Virtual University which lists over 2,000 courses and 300 degrees and diplomas available on-line. The difference with Coursera is that the CVU is not free.

Anyone see any parallels with the publishing industry here?

Since then, there has been a gradual but significant shift in the function of Government research institutions in Canada. For instance, according to a presentation given to “Re$earch Money” by the president of the NRC, its Vision is:

To be the most effective research and technology organization in the world, stimulating sustainable domestic prosperity.

And its Mission is

Working with clients and partners, we provide strategic research, scientific and technical services to develop and deploy solutions to meet Canada’s current and future industrial and societal needs.

The first question that comes up with the Vision is: what is a “research and technology organization”? That phrase – “RTO” for those in the know – means something quite specific. It is a label for the set of things that includes such institutions as the Fraunhofer Institute and Battelle but also Finland’s VTT (“Business from Technology”) and Nato’s RTO.

Organizations like that do interesting things: they are catalysts for exchanging information, they set strategies, give advice, design new products, patent processes and bring mature ideas to commercial reality.  All of this is useful and important but it isn’t “basic research”, at least not in the sense of “advancing knowledge”.

So what is happening to basic research in government?  It is being outsourced to universities. The executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), James Turk, put it this way in an op ed column in the Ottawa Citizen a few months ago:

[Minster Goodyear] claims that [the NRC] no longer needs to [undertake basic research] because universities today play that role.

But, Turk also points out,

Many university-based researchers rely upon the NRC for their scientific work. By gutting the basic research program of the NRC, the government will be weakening university research.

Thus, from the government’s point of view, basic research should be an externality because it incurs long-term costs and no short-term benefits. By outsourcing research to universities long-term costs are downloaded to the provinces.

This was Nortel’s strategy too in it’s later years (~ 1995), and it was RIM’s as well (see also Canada’s Vanishing Tech Sector).

Consider this snapshot of the old UI:

The top third of the screen is reserved for image thumbnails that correspond to offerings in the highlighted service.  The remote’s navigation buttons change only the horizontal and vertical menu choices and the menus correspond to the categories of services available. [The top-level thumbnails are also accessible to get to the item directly.]

Admittedly there are some problems with this way of organizing the user’s entertainment options.  One is that the top level categories are not all the same kind of thing.  “Internet” is a mode of delivery (which, of course, is also the mode of delivery for the rest of AppleTV content), whereas the others are descriptive of the kind of objects that are below the main menu item. What “Internet” means, clearly, is “other, non-apple applications”.  In addition, more recent AppleTV top-level menus also has the “Computer” category, meaning “Content streamed for your local computer running iTunes”, adding a second source-centered category.

However, at least the old interface makes some attempt at grouping content. Furthermore, the interface for the top-level navigation resembles in structure the navigation system implemented for each of the applications.  The interface has the consistency hallmark of Apple interfaces generally: learn the interface for one application and you know (more or less) how all the others behave.

Contrast this with the new interface.  In some respects, it is similar to the old one – thumbnails of content-images appear at the top of the screen, as expected and the content sources are more or less the same.

However, the artificial segregation by source or kind is eliminated altogether: all the applications on the same footing, iPad-App style.

The first serious problem starts manifesting when you scroll just one line down: the 1/2-page sized thumbnails disappear altogether.  Yet the selected applications (I bet) are still generating those thumbnails – you just can’t see them any more.

Right away, this gives screen real estate dominance to the first row of applications – Apple iTunes applications, naturally. Furthermore, you can’t go straight to the items in the thumbnails because you can’t see them any more.

The second major flaw comes from the mixed-mode cognitive models.  The first-level application-selection mode is (vaguely) iPad-like (without the ability to group apps, rearrange them or create screen-pages). However, once you’ve selected an application you’re back to the (more familiar and sensible) menu-navigation system.

What’s worse, though, is that the menu system for each application is now no longer consistent.  “Movies” (short for “iTunes Movie Store”) has a Mac-style top-level menu-bar rather than a right-side menu navigation bar like all the other applications. Gone is the consistent Apple look-and-feel.

If at least the user had the ability to group applications as they see fit and to delete the unwanted ones (why not, the iPod/iPad allows that?).

Theres just no doubt about it.  Steve was right.

However, as Daniel Lemire points out in his latest blog post, the raw data of mere citations is pretty crude.  In any given article, it’s often hard to tell which of the (typically) dozens of references are “en passant” (to fend off the critics who might think you haven’t read the literature) or incidental to the substance of the article. What’s interesting for the authors of the articles being cited is the question “how citical is this citation to the author who cited me”?

One way to find out (and hence, perhaps, to build a better citation measure) is to train a Machine Learning algorithm to extract “key citations” – by analogy with extracting “key phrases” from a text (see Peter Turney’s 2000 article Machine Learning Algorithms for Keyphrase Extraction). As a starting point, we’d like to compile data from researchers which asks the question: “What are the key references of your papers?”

It will take 10 minute: please fill  this Google-documents questionaire. In it we ask you, as the author of an article, to tell us which 1, 2, 3 or 4 references are essential to that article. By an essential reference, we mean a reference that was highly influential or inspirational for the core ideas in your paper; that is, a reference that inspired or strongly influenced your new algorithm, your experimental design, or your choice of a research problem.

When this survey is completed, we will be releasing the resulting data set under the ODC Public Domain Dedication and Licence so that you can use this data in other ways, if you wish.

It is undeniable that there are real and serious problems with academic publishing (as pointed out very cogently by Fields Medalist Tim Gowers here,  John Dupuis (Head of York’s Science’s Library), here and Barbara Fister in the Library Journal here). And the Open Access movement is one I support. The concentration of control over journals by one for-profit publisher is clearly one of the core problems and the questionable practices (e.g. “bundling”) that they can consequently employ is another.

But who (or rather what) exactly is to “blame” (if that’s the right thing to do) for this situation? Elsevier is behaving rationally – from a market-forces point of view anyway. Maximizing profits is what any private enterprise does, particularly one that is publicly traded on stock exchanges. Elsevier (the publisher) is owned by Reed Elsevier which also owns Lexis Nexis (which offers law information and services) and Reed Elsevier Business (which provides data services, information and marketing solutions to businesses). Is this a portfolio mix that should be permitted by law? After all there are anti-trust laws that prohibit monopoly ownership in other domains.

One fundamental problem is that a public good (knowledge) has been comoditized, marketed and sold by a private, for profit enterprise. The officials within Elsevier who are in charge of the company don’t have a lot of room to manoeuvre if they are to comply with the stock-market forces that urge them to forever greater profitability.

Here’s a suggestion to the signatories of the Elsevier boycott: go to your pension-fund manager (university or government) and find out if any of the mutual funds, exchange-traded funds or stock portfolios they own have stock in Elsevier-Reed. I’m willing to bet they do. Preasure them to boycott those investments – I’m willing to bet that will have more influence.

Of course, the academic boycott has been heard, as evidenced by Elsevier’s open-letter reply of February 6th. That is one way to precipitate some kind of change towards greater openness of intellectual output. But lets not delude ourselves into thinking that this is going to address the root problem: the inadequate funding of publicly-owned channels of knowledge dissemination.

Instead, could we harness this desire for change towards lobying governments for more funding for university and independant open-access publishers (and tone down the rhetoric against Elsevier a little)?

P.S. I think it’s pretty important, for this post especially, to make it clear that these are my personal opinions (as are all my blog posts here) and in no way reflect the views of my employer.

From the Executive Summary.

Tuition Fees: they shouldn’t be frozen, but they also shouldn’t increase faster than inflation.  Freezing them would likely result in “further deterioration of the student experience — larger classes and less opportunity to debate and develop critical thinking skills”

Teaching vs. Research: “Increasingly, universities are letting professors sacrifice teaching commitments to conduct more research. There must be a better balance; excellent research should not trump excellent teaching.”

Overall Recommendations:

The current system is unsustainable from both a financial and a quality perspective.

The Commission recommends the following:

1. Contain government funding and institutional expenses;
2. Use differentiation to improve PSE quality and achieve financial sustainability;
3. Encourage and reward quality;
4. Revise research funding structures;
5. Maintain the current overall cap on tuition-fee increases, but simplify the framework;
6. Re-evaluate student financial assistance; and
7. Generate cost efficiencies by, for example, integrating administrative and back-office functions.

Now to expand on a few of these points (items 2 and 3 in particular).

2. Universities and colleges should not overlap in their functions (degree-granting) and programs (i.e. be more differentiated)

The division of roles between the college and university systems should include the following features:

• After two years of study, college students who meet specific academic achievement criteria should be able to transfer into the university system;
• Colleges should not be granted any new degree programs, but existing programs should be grandfathered;
• The government should approve no new PSE programs until existing programs are rationalized and mandate agreements completed;
• No new professional and specialized programs should be approved without a compelling business case; and
• The Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology should work with the College of Trades to optimize the delivery of apprentice training in non-degree programs.

3. Encourage and Reward Quality means, among other things, focusing on more rewards for teaching:

Resources and rewards should be refocused towards teaching: Post-secondary education institutions should devote more resources to experience-based learning such as internships, allow for more independent study, develop problem-based learning and increase study abroad. Universities should be encouraged to include in their collective agreements flexible provisions with faculty regarding teaching and research workloads. Top-performing teachers and researchers should be recognized with the appropriate workloads and rewards. Eleven Ontario universities already have such flexibility; others should follow. Institutions should redesign incentive systems to reward excellent teachers, as they do now for researchers.

Refocus provincial funding to reward teaching excellence: Provincial funding allocations should be linked to quality objectives, and the funding model should reward degrees awarded rather than just enrolment [sic] levels. Government and PSE institutions should work to ensure that the capacity to integrate ideas and create innovative solutions to problems is at the heart of the higher education experience. This will be critical to the economic and social success of Ontario, in an economy where graduates will be working over their career in ways that cannot even be imagined now.