The Open Rights Group has unearthed an appalling proposed restriction on bloggers like me. In essence regulation of the press will be extended to bloggers. Unless I get a licence I will be closed down. (I know some people would like this). We have till Monday to act. In http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/leveson :

Cameron, stop the Dangerous Blogs Bill

The Leveson regulations are being applied to UK websites – in ways that could catch more or less anyone who publishes a blog. Ordinary bloggers could be threatened with exemplary damages and costs. If this happens, small website publishers will face terrible risks, or burdensome regulation – and many may simply stop publishing.

Lord Leveson’s regulations are being applied to UK websites – in ways that could catch more or less anyone who publishes a blog. Ordinary bloggers could be threatened with exemplary damages and costs. If this happens, small website publishers will face terrible risks, or burdensome regulation – and many may simply stop publishing.

We have until Monday to stop this happening.

Lord Leveson said he wanted to regulate print media. He proposed that judges  be allowed to award exemplary damages and full costs against unregulated publishers. These are stringent and controversial measures, but he only envisaged them applying to large and powerful publishers. Not websites, unless they belonged to print publishers.

Last weekend, the proposals were agreed in a rush, without public consultation, and with no attention to the detail.

Outrageously, they have given the Lords until Monday to fix their mistakes.

The result is that they apply to any size of web publisher – if there’s more than one author, the content is edited and there’s a business involved, then you must join a self regulator.

Most blogs like this aren’t powerful publishing houses. Even ORGZine would need to be regulated, or face punitive measures if it ended up in court.

The threat of websites being regulated like this was never the purpose of Lord Leveson’s recommendations. Websites weren’t involved in phone hacking. There is no evidence that they need to be forced into self-regulation like this.

We need you to email Nick Clegg, Harriet Harman, and David Cameron to ask them to back off and leave the Internet out of Leveson.

A copy will go to your MP so they know how you feel as well.

Following our determination to create new ways of scholarship for the benefit of the world (/pmr/2013/03/21/scholrev-why-are-we-doing-this-and-immediate-thoughts-on-how-to-proceed/ ) let’s explore possible approaches. I stress that this is NOT PMR directing where to go, but giving a possible lead.

This sort of desire to change or widen scholarship is happening in many places, not just #scholrev. Today I learnt of a French group (https://hackyourphd.wordpress.com/about-2/comment-page-1/ ) “Hack Your PhD”. They have tapped into the same spring of discontent and opportunity:

The HackYourPhD community was born out of an acknowledgement that current ways of performing research frequently generate frustration, conflits, and isolation. The crisis in research is sometimes covered in the media: job insecurity, rush to publication creating pressure and dishonest practices, privatization of knowledge through the grip of scientific publishing houses. This is a vision from the inside – that of research practitioners. This lack of trust is amplified by the numerous scandals that have occurred in the world of research, for instance through connections with private corporations whose goal is to generate profit, creating conflicts of interest.

…

HackYourPhD brings together students, young researchers, engaged citizens, hacktivists, tinkerers from all horizons, entrepreneurs, and everyone who is interested in the production and the sharing of knowledge in the wider sense. This collective aims to bring concrete solutions to complex issues and to build much-needed collaborative relationships between those involved in knowledge production. This is required for collective intelligence to come into existence and bring answers to urgent issues of society.

…

We believe that in an era of democratization of the tools of research, whether it be technical instruments for the natural sciences, or the exponential simplification of data access, research must be accessible to everyone.

We believe it is important to show that new ways of doing reseasrch exist, and can only benefit research itself as well as the relationship between science and society. We do not seek to revolutionize research, but rather question how it works and add complementary bricks so that it may adapt better to today’s world and respond in a well-adapted fashion to the scientific and human issues of tomorrow.

This is wonderfully compelling and echoes my own thoughts and I am sure those who gathered in Amsterdam 2 days ago. We are also getting mails and tweets of other groups – it’s almost overwhelming.

A natural reaction would be to try to integrate all these efforts. I think that would be wrong because each has its own freedom of action and directions of exploration. And in any case w don’t know precisely where we are going or who will join us or what barriers will be erected.

What I think we need is a communal meeting place to build the future. I think we need to look to successful communities over the centuries. Yesterday I learned a new work: “tietotalkoot” (http://p2pfoundation.net/Rural_Cooperation_and_the_Online_Swarm ) – which I think is a volunteer self-help community which builds things for the good of the community (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkoot ). I like the “Online Swarm” metaphor. I also like concepts such as “Commons”, “Marketplace”, “Bazaar”, “Cooperative”.

“Decentralisation with communication” also encapsulates it. We already have suggested subgroups and subtasks. They should just go ahead and create their artefacts – hacking – but make sure we know what’s happening so we won’t duplicate unnecessarily and so we’ll build on each other. And identify critical areas where we need something. Decentralisation means there is no limit to the number involved and no loss of identity.

In the internet era these things are excitingly possible. I’ll post later about my own experiences but I’m also very happy to learn of others.

We have all been delighted with the immediate reaction and offers of help for the Scholarly Revolution /pmr/2013/03/20/btpdf2-scholrev-planning-the-scholarly-revolution/ . We chose the word “revolution” in a neutral sense – this can be the Digital Scholarship revolution in the same sense of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution. On the other hand determined efforts to main the status quo as the best of all possible ways of research and communication will almost certainly lead to elements of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution .

We are in the middle of the struggle for our digitally enlightened or digitally darkened future. You, reader, must realise the seriousness of the present and fight for Openness or you will awake and find yourself trapped with no means to free yourself. Scholarship is but one axis, but it’s a critical one since knowledge and communication break down ignorance and oppression.

At #btpdf2 Eve Gray reiterated the simple fact that Closed knowledge leads to deaths. She speaks with the passion of living in South Africa where values are necessarily very different.

Consider:

Every time you publish in a closed access manner or fail to publish data, the lack of knowledge kills people. Tweaking the system won’t help. I’ve spent three years trying to get permissions out of Elsevier and been met with prevarication. In Europe Ross Mounce has represented us in demanding that content-mining be available to anyone who has a document. “The right to read is the right to mine”. And we are met with opulent publisher lobbies convincing Europe that it should remark a dark continent for digital knowledge.

Accept as fact that closing knowledge is as harmful as chopping down the rain forest or running gas-guzzlers.

I asked again yesterday – would Elsevier sue us if we created an Open Scholarly Search Engine. We have no assurance. Search and distribution is in the hands of rich unaccountable monopolists. They create wealth and they create anti-wealth.

So we need to be radically different. I’m suggesting we start from some principles and evolve over the next 2-3 days or however long it takes. No idea is out of court, but we favour constructive action, often through creating tools, communities and resources. I’ll start by suggesting a mantra:

OPEN SCHOLARSHIP OF THE WORLD FOR THE WORLD

Mantras are valuable as they help to refocus when we go astray. In the Blue Obelisk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Obelisk ) we set up a collaborative community to create and promote Open computing and information in chemistry. It has had zero funding, no business meetings, but is inexorably growing and slowly (because change in chemistry is very slow) slowly replacing traditional closed source and closed information. Not because it’s cheaper (though that helps). But because it’s better, and better suited to the modern informatics world. I’ll blog later, but it’s one model for how we might take #scholrev forward.

The mantra says a great deal.

• OPEN as in http://opendefinition.org/ . “A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.”. Most scholarship is NOT Open. That must be changed.
• SCHOLARSHIP. The practice and output of scholars. And EVERYONE can be a scholar.
• OF THE WORLD. We can all create it and it’s about anything.
• FOR THE WORLD. The world needs scholarship or it will die physically, biologically, culturally.

More later.

Exciting comment on this blog: I’ve copied it whole as I want to keep discussion very active. I’ll read in detail in the morning. In #scholrev there is no centre, certainly *I* am not running things. We couldn’t possibly get all ideas collected in a 40-minute session and it’s great to have contributions by blog.

I strongly support the metaphor of a commons for #scholrev. I don’t see it as a cathedral, but a bazaar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar ). I’ll blog later about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Obelisk model which has a very bazaar-like structure. I’ll only add that #scholrev is absolutely not limited to science but that may not be relevant to this offer.

This comment has been cowritten from an IRC chat in the wake of #scholrev. We are part of the collective who tweet @openscience and admin web infrastructure for OSF and related groups, such as OKFN and PLOS, but neither we nor these suggestions represent anyone officially.

We would like to see #scholrev start by using Commons In A Box @CBOX — @kfitz had discussed CBOX at #btpdf2 — with which we also have experience. We have contributed to BuddyPress and WordPress for science since 2008 and for example, Mark’s Science 3.0, from which grew @figshare, used a precursor of CBOX https://plus.google.com/117417705451874519785/posts/EyxbLSe8uhD Together, we have built a few dozen networks like these, extending them with federation, integrating science relevant bits such as Zotero for reference management, and such.

PMR would be familiar with the OKFN network, a WordPress implementation with 95 sites, including e.g. that for Panton Principles. A couple of us are admins there. From a quick look, it is probably not CBOX compatible in terms of some of the live sites, while it could be eventually. Federating with the network is doable but probably on the scale of “in 2013.” Otherwise, we should suggest starting #scholrev within OKFN’s network; federating with OKFN in the longer term is regardless a generally desirable technical and organizational goal.

For @openscience the organization, we run a couple federations, comprised of similar networks — one for student scientists and the other for everyone else (per privacy, safety, school policies, etc.). For example, see http://futurescienceleaders.org/ which is federated with networks including http://studentbioexpo.org/ and http://u20science.org/ Not entirely different to the purpose of OKFN’s open science training in early career or for grad students, except for an even younger set who are also mentored, in those examples.

Our role is sometimes design, development, tech support; in all cases we are hosting and maintaining the stack below WordPress and its scripts, and most often we are also maintaining at the WP level. In the examples listed so far, our work and the hosting are volunteered and donated. Unless Sloan or some other angel wants to swoop in, or an existing org had room to foot the hosting bill, we would assume our services and work for #scholrev to also be pro bono and donated. We are not averse to being compensated individually but are not for profit in our work.

Federation in these cases means shared web services, codebase, and also shared users and authentication. It can mean more integration, at the option of participating blogs, sites, networks, or the fact of federation can be invisible. About our code: it is in the WordPress or otherwise appropriate repositories, but making federation work is rather involved and onerous to document properly. A better, still longer term goal both for us and CBOX itself is fully decentralized, distributed social networking and publishing, such that we could easily federate with implementations like OKFN’s and without wizardry by the network admin. Federation should eventually be managed through the CBOX code and with a UI. We have also contributed to attempts such as Social River to do this including but not requiring WordPress; those are longer roads. We can at least do something open and federated for #scholrev now, if not yet decentralized.

If #scholrev is to grow from a commons: ScholarlyCommons.org, .com, and kin are available. If it is not too domain specific to science, ScienceCommons.org is unused — archived content, redirected URLs aside — as is @sciencecommons on Twitter since 2010. We believe this is the proper brand to represent the intent and to pin the online hub of #scholrev. Creative Commons have a new science advisory, which includes Peter. We are glad to see it! but short of Science Commons being resurrected as it was, let it spring again from the grassroots. Let’s renew ScienceCommons.org and @sciencecommons as a functioning commons for science.

At Beyond the PDF2 www.force11.org/beyondthepdf2 a number of us felt that we needed a radical approach to scholarship and its communication. This wasn’t planned, but 25 of us met at lunch and decide we wanted to DO something different. There are very few ground rules but the basics include:

• It must be Open (source, data, content, processes, mentality)
• It must be universal and inclusive
• It must address problems of the human race
• It must be part of modern culture and practice
• It must be protected from going down the stale processes of the last umpteen years

And more – this post must be short

So we grabbed our lunch and moved the chairs and tried to get everyone a chance to contribute but also with the real promise of getting something done by the end of 40 minutes. So far we have:

• A hashtag “#scholrev” (this seems to be fairly free) under which we can group.
• About 6 concrete realisable subprojects. Ranges from an collection of Open metadata (2 variants) to platforms, to textbooks.
• A commons.
• A communications platform, offered by @onelaboratory.com. Thanks. But you must remain open.
• A list of initial members.
• Ideas for how to spend 1K from #btpdf
• Plans to meet AND HACK at #eswc European Semantic Web Conference at Montpelier this summer.
• Invite people that we know would be interested.

I know how hard it is to keep this excitement going. But it’s critically important. So at the very least I am going to blog under this hashtag.

The challenge is to build something as world-changing as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. It can be done. And it involves everyone.

I’m at “Beyond the PDF2” http://www.force11.org/beyondthepdf2 – which is meant to redesign scholarly publication. I am getting increasingly restless. (I am a “retired” academic – working as hard as ever – but I have an increasingly unhappy view of academia). I compare these two days with #okfest last year and the contrast is immense. Then we had people from all sectors – cities, banks, health, makers, creative … and a real sense we could change the world. At #btdpf2 we have mainly heard minor tweaks to the current system.

The current academic system is broken.

It’s out of touch with the world and the C21. It promotes inequality and injustice.

Whenever an innovative venture occurs then it’s in great danger of being stifled. Or worse being bought and controlled by commercial interests. And used to control us further. The metric tools and repositories and authoring and reading tools will end up in non-transparent and non-accountable publishing houses.

We must have an OPEN alternative.

And Wikipedia and Open Streetmap have shown that it can be done outside academia. And it doesn’t take huge resources to start.

Last Saturday the OKF crowdcrafting hackfest was sparked by two young people from Paris. They didn’t know how to start. They didn’t have tools. But they had a great idea – to use flickr to investigate the role of women in science.

Within SIX hours we – as a community had the start of a vibrant, meaningful research project.

Almost zero funding. (The free lunch was VERY GOOD).

So if #BTPDF has any meaning for me in the future it must run OPEN HACKATHONS.

And build and Openly control scholarship for the WORLD, not “just academia”

I am at the potentially exciting Beyond the PDF2 in Amsterdam. Because the Wifi is intermittent (at best) I’ll blog – not linearly or systematically.

Because I spend much of my time with the Open Knowledge Foundation #okfn I see an exciting creative bottom-up justice-driven meritocratic maker do-er open vision for the 21^st century. Coming to #btpdf2 I find almost none of this. The immediate impression is academics talking to academics with almost no recognition of the world outside. We see countless diagrams of the “data management cycle”, “academic cycle” etc. where the players are academics, publishers, funders. The primary purpose of academia seems to be to create publications. The primary motivation for articles is to promote individuals and institutions. On none of these diagrams were citizens mentioned. Occasionally “consumers”, as if academic output could “trickle down ” to the unwashed masses.

No realisation that many of the people outside academia are doing a far more better job than academics. Those people who are using data to manage their cities. That’s science, scholarship and relevant. That writing and criticism can be done by everyone. That high schools can be research laboratories. It’s just not in the ivory towers.

People are dying because scholarly information is behind firewalls. That should make us angry. I’d like to meet with people who want to create an OPEN alternative to scholarship. Maybe at lunch.

AMI2 and I are going through Biomed Central papers as they are some of the few that carry CC-BY licences. We’ve started at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/11/310 and here’s a picture we’ve found:

What is it? Unfortunately it’s a JPEG and we can’t hack those today (but we will fairly soon). Anyway I went out on the web to find out about Oreina speciosissima troglodytes and the second record was to our old acquaintance SpringerImages. If I want a copy of the picture, I find http://www.springerimages.com/Images/LifeSciences/5-10.1186_1471-2148-11-310-1

License

This image is copyrighted by Borer et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

This image is published with open access under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

If you would like to obtain permissions for the re-use or re-print of this image, please click here.

And when I “click here” I get

So if I want to re-use this image I have to contact Springer even though the Image ought to be re-usable without their permission. (Yes *I* know I have a right to it but with all the muddle about licences I expect there are zillions of readers who don’t think they have any rights).

I hope this is a “glitch” as the last time (/pmr/2012/06/07/springergate-i-try-to-explain-springerimages-and-my-continuing-concern/ ). But it’s a shameful glitch. If an author pays a lot of money to a publisher for Open Access the publisher should recognize that and create a service that makes the author feel pleased and happy, not that they are doing something that the publisher regards as unworthy of treating properly.

Springer is a Closed Access publisher despite its acquisition of BMC. It thinks “closed”, it fails to honour Open Access authors. (So do most of the other Closed Access publishers and I’ll come back to another one soon).

If you pay thousands of pounds to publish an article, the least that a publisher can do it highlight it.

There has been a week or two of discourse about licences for scholarly publications – much of it attempting to show that the widely used CC-BY licence (from Creative Commons) has problems. The standard of discourse (from academics) has been awful – a first year student would fail courses in logic, law, rhetoric, philosophy if they served up this stuff.

The problem is that we are in great danger of using licences which restrict our action and seriously devalue academic output, while granting more rights to publishers. Given that #scholarypub is of the order of 10-15 Billion Dollars (most of which is not paid by academics, but by taxpayers, funders and students) we deserve at least an informed debate. If we don’t we are wasting (probably) > 1 billion dollars per year.

I posted the following to the “GOAL” Open-Access list. It is not easy to have a fruitful discussion on that list but I have had private mail which supports my posting. I do not guarantee the correctness of everything as licences are difficult and I’d be very happy to be corrected:

I am disappointed by the standard of much of the discourse on this list – I had tried to refrain from posting, but the much of the material on licences is absurdly wrong. I am a member of the Science Advisory Board of Creative Commons and have some acquaintance with licences though I am not an expert.

I’d like to make the following points:
* licences are legal documents. They operate within various jurisdictions – and the law is very different in different jurisdictions. There is a great deal of work required to make a CC licence. The wording is very carefully crafted.
* licences allow two parties to agree a contract. If one party feels they have been wronged they may take the other party to court in an appropriate jurisdiction. A licence (paraphrasing Lessig) is the right to defend yourself in court. There are many other laws in force which may have greater power than a licence and which may be used to control parties’ actions and freedoms.
* CC .licences are valuable in considerable part because they are portable over many jurisdictions and fields of endeavour. Many companies create ad-hoc terms and conditions which are (to my eyes) self-contradictory or ambiguous, while CC licences have been written to be clear.
* the combination of material with different CC licences is very difficult. Generally the more restrictive licence “infects” the less. So that if I take CC-BY-NC material and combine it with CC-BY the result must generally be CC-BY-NC, otherwise the terms of the CC-NC licence will be violated. It is not allowed to change a restrictive licence to a less restrictive one (i.e. the licence holder can sue you). Wikipedia (who has a much clearer idea of licences than many people here) went through major restructuring of material when they changed their licence and it required many individuals to change the licence on their contributions.
* many of the possible effects of licences are unclear.One major problem of CC-NC is that it is extremely difficult to define “commercial”. Many (including me) believe – with strong expert opinion – that CC-NC cannot be used for teaching. Students pay money, so universities are running a commercial activity. Motivation – e.g. non-profit – is irrelevant.
* another unresolved problem is the extent of virality.  If I have a CC-BY or CC0 database and include a CC-BY-SA artefact does that require the rest of the items to carry the more restrictive licence? The answer is that no-one *knows*. We have been discussing this on the OKF open-science list [http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2013-February/002242.html and below] and the opinion of Puneet Kishoor (CC) is that it probably depends on whether the item can be withdrawn without changing to nature of the collection. But that is simply one expert’s *opinion* – probably the only way to find out is to sue or be sued

In terms of simplicity of use CC-BY is far simpler than many of the other licences. I know I can retrieve and re-use CC-BY material without asking permission. And so can my robot (#AMI2). Note also that in 10 years of CC-BY BMC, PLoS, etc none of the suggested horror stories of CC-BY-induced plagiarism, libel, patenting, theft of ideas, etc has happened. It’s a non-problem.

I suspect that many publishers are using CC-NC because they still wish to control the scholarly literature. I am particular upset by NPG who will offer CC-NC licences for one APC and charge more for CC-BY. There is no benefit to the reader or author from CC-NC, the only beneficiary is NPG. (And it doesn’t cost more to use CC-NC because it is free and anyway has 3 fewer characters).

Note that simply because an artefact is visible on the web does not confer any rights. This is the problem with many IRs which do not have clear terms and conditions or have a blanket “copyright the university” or “all rights reserved”.

Now I am off to finish our “Liberation Software” (AMI2) which can technically read a scholarly paper and create semantic XML from it.

If I am allowed to. I can only use CC-BY or CC0.

#ami2 has been working on converting PDFs to scientific XML and we have made significant progress. Today we converted a page of PDF to chunks of SVG and then aggregated these to XHTML and non-textual chunks. We’ll show some of the technology below. Ross Mounce @rmounce and I will be demo’ing at Beyond the PDF2 next week at Amsterdam. In brief

AMI2 is an open collaborative platform which can take existing scientific PDFs and turn them into semantic science

Everyone is invited to join in. The abstract infrastructure is well advanced. We’ll soon be re-adding vector-graphics-driven graphs and trees these should be available for demo next week. Possibly some simple tables. Of course there will be a long tail of minor problems but for many papers that won’t matter At this stage, therefore we’d like:

• Anyone who is interested in having PDFs converted to bring some and we’ll see how we get on. The things that cause problem are non-standard Fonts and bitmaps. Probably takes 15-30 secs to convert a paper so bring some on a USB stick. Theses should also work.
• Volunteers to join the effort. You don’t have to be a coder, but you need a hacker mentality. You can help by adding Font info, checking the output visually, creating a corpus, etc.
• Hackers interested in tackling general graphics artefacts. The most common are graphs, barcharts, block diagrams, flowcharts,
• Domain experts (chemistry, phylogenetic trees, species, maps, sequences …)
• Hackers for math equations
• Analysis of bit-mapped graphics (harder, but tractable)

We’re already building up some fantastic Open viewers which we’ll show at Amsterdam. So far we have:

• Visomics (from Kitware) which allows interactive browsing of phylo trees linked to the Open Web (e.g. Wikipedia species)
• JSpecview – an interactive spectrum viewer allowing peak picking comparison, integration, etc.
• JChempaint – 2D molecules display and editing

The great thing is that as a community we can choose those areas which are most important to work on. We then have an area of tools which make the scientific literature more valuable than the dead PDFs.

Here’s an example of a mixed page of text and graphics. From an openly visible artcil;e in the CSIRO Australian J Chem:

SVG2XML has identified the chunks in the page, and their role – in this case text (green) and mixed text and graphics (red). The text is then turned into XHTML and here’s the result. Notice that it’s free flowing and can warp, be scaled, etc. AMI2 manages fonts (and there are some seriously non-standard ones)and sub/superscripts. It can be edited, re-used reformatted, turned back into PDF – whatever you want.

[NOTE. There will be a wail – why don’t you use the publishers’ XML. Simple… It’s behind a paywall and not re-usable legally. But that’s no longer a problem. We can probably omit the publishers’ XML (BTW NEVER let a publisher charge you extra for XML)

So here’s the XHTML. It’s totally readable by machines and humans. And before the type-setters tell us this doesn’t look as good as their creation, this is hot off the press and there are lots of automatic processes we can apply to make it quite acceptable.

TimBL developed HTML for scientists to use. Let’s start using it in earnest.