Presentation to Open Scholarship 2006

I am presenting this “talk” from the Web and including parts of my blog. This means I have to decide what I think I am going to say before I do or don’t say it. You know by now what I think of PDF and Powerpoint. This talk is in HTML and can be trivially XMLised robotically. It should be preservable indefinitely.
==== what I intend to cover ====
Data as well as text is now ESSENTIAL – we should stop using “full-text” as it is dangerously destructive in science. “PDF” is an extremely effective way of doing this. We need compound documents (Henry Rzepa and I have coined the term datument).
Need automated, instant, access to and re-use of millions of published digital objects. The Harnad model of self-archiving on individual web pages with copyright retained by publishers is useless for modern robotic science.
Much scientific progress is made from the experiments of others by making connections, simulations, re-interpretation. We need semantic authoring. Librarians must support the complete publication process.
Problems:

  • apathy and lack of vision – scientists (especially chemists) need demonstrators before people take us seriously
  • restrictive or FUDdy IPR. Enormously destructive of time and effort
  • emphasis on visual rendering rather than semantic content. Insidiously dangerous
  • broken economic model (anticommons)

Successes:

Other inititiatives:

  • SPARC – Open Data mailing list

What must be done

  1. DEVELOP TOOLS FOR AUTHORING, VERSIONING AND DISSEMINATING DATUMENTS. THESE MUST BE IN XML.
  2. INSIST THAT ALL AUTHORS’ WORKS ARE THEIR COPYRIGHT AND RE-USABLE UNDER COMMONS-LIKE LICENSE (from menu)
  3. INTRODUCE NEW APPROACHES TO PEER-REVIEW OF COMPLETE WORKS (WITH/WITHOUT “TEXT”). INCLUDE YOUNG PEOPLE AND SOCIAL COMPUTING
  4. DEVELOP AND USE LOOSELY-CONTROLLED DOMAIN-SPECIFIC VOCABULARIES (cf. microformats).
  5. PAY PUBLISHERS FOR WHAT ADDED VALUE THEY PROVIDE, NOT WHAT VALUE THEY CONTROL. CREATE A MARKET WHERE PUBLISHERS HAVE TO COMPETE WITH OTHER WAYS OF SOLVING THE PROBLEM (Google, folksonomies, etc.)

=======Previous posts and related blogs======
Open Data – the time has come
Open Source, Open Data and the Science Commons
Is “peer-review” holding back innovation?
Beginnings
Blogging and the chemical semantic web the blogs

My data or our data?
Science Commons
Science Anticommons
Hamburger House of Horrors Horrible GIFS Hamburgers and Cows – the cognitive style of PDF
Thanks (and XML value chain)
The cost of decaying Scientific data
OSCAR – the chemical data reviewer
Linus’ Law and community peer-review
============= Live demos =========
Taverna
OSCAR1 (applet version)
OSCAR3 (local demo)
Crystallography (not yet released)
MACiE
GoogleInChI
DSpace (individual molecule)
chemstyle (needs MSIE)

===== what I actually said ====
Many thanks to William for recording all the talks and I am delighted to have this record made available. (I have not yet discussed copyright but I hope it can go in our repository 🙂

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2 Responses to Presentation to Open Scholarship 2006

  1. There is no “Harnad model”; but “self-archiving on individual web pages” [preferably OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories] even “with copyright retained by publishers” is perfectly sufficient for the full power of “modern robotic science”. Peter keeps conflating data-archiving with article-archiving. Though it’s always a good idea to retain copyright, there is absolutely no need for authors to re-negotiate copyright for their journal articles in order either (1) to self-archive them or (2) to give users (including robots) full use of those full-texts (harvesting, analyzing, compiling data extracted therefrom — everything but re-publishing them, which is in any case supererogatory, since they are already there, free for all, webwide!). Try the arguments for copyright retention separately for data and articles, and anything any user, human or robot, might conceivably want to do with them, and it will become transparent that those arguments are completely irrelevant to articles (if they are self-archived, free for all). For articles, all the potential uses already come with the (free online) territory, and what’s needed is to get authors to self-archive them. (Only 15% do so spontaneously, even though 94% of journals already endorse author self-archiving.) Hence this is hardly the time to give sluggish authors the wrong impression that they need to successfully retain copyright in order to self-archive. What’s needed is a self-archiving mandate to get them to do the long-overdue keystrokes, so that “modern robotic science” can at last start reaping the benefits.

  2. pm286 says:

    (1) Thanks Stevan – I probably shouldn’t have labelled it with your name. There is still a problem in my mind about what legal rights attain to any given article and whether it can be robotically processed – artic les eitehr need to be labelled as crawlable or be in a repository that guarantees them for all content. I agree this problem is not yet solved.
    P.

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