petermr's blog

This post is primarily for the publicity-seeking animals to get their Serpentine presentation another plug. They have demanded to come, so we have created a big box for them which also doubles as a walled garden – cf Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here’s Sleepless who gets locked out of the garden, Mr Flibble who takes the money, and Prof Felix Q who is the star academic (fresh from his blockbusting series on BBC2 – if only).

Now an amusement (or not)

You have 5 minutes to read today’s article in the Chronicle (of Higher Education – US) http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/pearson-and-google-jump-into-learning-management-systems and subsequent comments

Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System

Here’s an exam paper on the content from the module on “open” and “walled gardens”.

Question 1: Identify all occurrences of the following words (note capitallization)

1. Free
2. free
3. Open (including compound words)
4. open

In each case explain whether the word means:

1. free-as-in-beer
2. free-as-in-speech
3. free-glorious

in the latter case suggest an alternative English word.

Question 2: Compare and contrast the highlighted phrases in:

 a market that has been dominated by costly institution-anchored services like Blackboard, and open-source but labor-intensive systems like Moodle.

What do you understand by “institution-anchored”?

Question 3:

“Openness and social education is a very powerful idea.”

What new insight does this statement bring?

Question 4:

“the ease of use of OpenClass makes it simple for instructors and students to customize it. Plus, Pearson doing the hosting takes much of the headache away from me.”

Analyze whether this is an incipient walled garden. If so, what might be done to highlight the danger?

Question 5:

“OpenClass has a Facebook-like news stream that captures activity and comments for each class, and a page that highlights different people taking a course, along with the questions, troubles, and solutions that they post online. “So it’s easy for you to find someone like you and interact with them, kind of like sitting with your friends in class,” Mr. Kim says. “It provides a comfort zone.”

Differentiate between a walled garden (e.g. Facebook) and a comfort zone.

Question 6:

Commenter Jon K says

Neither of these are using my idea of what openness is, certainly not in the spirit of open source software. Can I install this at my institution? What guarantees of privacy are there when Google’s #1 money maker is that they profile consumers?

Show how Google or Pearson could challenge this statement while retaining the comfort zone.

Oh, and Felix Q attracted a BEE. Now he will definitely get some honey.

I am really impressed and excited by the creation of the Science Code Manifesto under the auspices of the Climate Code Foundation (see http://climatecode.org/blog/2011/10/science-code-manifesto/ ). I’ve had nothing directly to do with the formulation, other than being part of the CCF (advisory board) and having helped to create the Panton Principles which have acted as a guide.

Here’s the key message:

Software is a cornerstone of science. Without software, twenty-first century science would be impossible. Without better software, science cannot progress.

Those of us who hack for science know this, of course. But most scientists and most non-scientists don’t realise that software is part of the language of science. As much as maths. As much as reagents. Or instruments. Or Popperian principles.

Software does so many things.

• Discovers
  
• Informs
  
• Validates
  
• Transforms
  
• Reasons
  
• Simulates
  

And that’s just for starters. It’s encapsulated in The Fourth Paradigm (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/ ) – the inspiration of Jim Gray – that discovery will increasingly come from data-intensive science.

But the culture and institutions of science have not yet adjusted to this reality. We need to reform them to address this challenge, by adopting these five principles:

Code

All source code written specifically to process data for a published paper must be available to the reviewers and readers of the paper.

Copyright

The copyright ownership and license of any released source code must be clearly stated.

Citation

Researchers who use or adapt science source code in their research must credit the code’s creators in resulting publications.

Credit

Software contributions must be included in systems of scientific assessment, credit, and recognition.

Curation

Source code must remain available, linked to related materials, for the useful lifetime of the publication.

Founding Signatories

Nick and David deserve special credit. They’ve seen the vision that science in climate requires validated computation and they’re currently devoting their lives to making this happen. They’ve found time to generalise this to science in general and include an excellent range of other drafters and signatories.

There’s an n-squared or even better effect here. Everytime principles of this sort are created they not only help to confirm and refine the ideas, they spread out to other communities. I’m particularly keen to see the Open Science Allaince involved – that’s where I shall be in ten days time.

Life is so exciting. We are gradually but steadily laying the cornerstones of new ways of thinking and acting.

Join us – and support Nick and David if you can.

Two messages yesterday – both on the harm (intended or unintended) of using the word “open”. It’s one of those cuddly, comfort-making, words like “healthy” or “green”. Unless it’s clear what it means , it means anything-you-like, so I use “glorious” after Humpty-Dumpty in Alice TTLG.

Here’s Ed Chamberlain, library colleague and now formal collaborator in Cambridge (http://edchamberlain.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/fogging-up-in-the-cloud/ ):

Amongst a flood of product updates and familiar faces, the undoubted highlight for myself was a one hour debate on the merits of open source and proprietary software ownership models, with specific reference to library usage.  The formidable but agreeable Carl Grant (EL [Ex Libris, a library software/content company] chief Librarian and former OS guru) and independent library tech consultant   Owen Stephens (the MashFather himself) took the floor.

[…]

It was a fantastic thing for the UK user group and Ex Libris UK to host. Ex Libris have gone to great and commendable efforts to expose functionality in their systems to developers, so it seemed like a natural thing to do.

However, I’ll refrain from referring to their platforms as ‘open’ as they are wont to do. For one thing, their model does not match the definitions of the term espoused by the Open Knowledge Foundation and others.  OKFN advocate Peter Murray-Rust has had a lot to say on this recently.  Ex Libris are a company with great integrity, they don’t need to resort to mis-using words like ‘open’ for marketing purposes.  Public facing works fine for me, and the functionality sells itself.

One way to improve things would be to provide public documentation on the API spec. Right now, its for customers only. Having to pay to get access to documentation on closed source software is hardly open in any sense.

Ed says it all, but here’s my own take. About a year ago EL presented their system. I make no comment on whether it’s good or not as I have no experience. But the salesperson (and it was one of those academic-presentations-where-the-purpose-is-actually-sales – “product placements” – where objectivity is replaced by marketing) said something like (the spirit is correct, but the verbatimness is frayed):

S: “Our system has an Open-API”

PMR: “Can I use it?”

S: “Not if you haven’t purchased it”

PMR: “So how is it Open?”

S: “Customers who have purchased it can use it.”

PMR: “Can I see the documentation?”

S: “Not if you are not a customer. It’s confidential”.

PMR: “Can one of your customers show me the documentation?”

S: “No, that would breach their contract”

So here “glorious” seems to mean: “documented”. EL sell their customers software. In the past it wasn’t documented and may not have had hooks (API). Now it does.

So, EL, please do not use the word “open”. Use “documented”.

Here’s another. From a private correspondent who is upset about “Open” as used by VertNet: http://68.111.46.217/pres/PresentationServlet?action=home (the content is to do with vertebrae, I think)

The project is described as:

VertNet is an open, collaborative network. Data providers interested in joining this effort can find out about software and related information on the VertNet project web site.

Their data policy

Disclaimer and Use of Data retrieved through VertNet

Data records provided through VertNet may be used by individual researchers or research groups, but they may not be repackaged, resold, or redistributed in any form without the express written consent of the original institution where those records are held.

My correspondent objected to “open” being applied to the data. The problem arises in that here it isn’t clear what “open” means. I think it means that anyone can participate, or at least ask to participate. It clearly does not apply to all parts of the project. What would be a good word instead? I can’t immediately think of one – something like “community”? “meritocratic”? I don’t think so – I think it means the project information is exposed as “look-but-don’t-touch”. “weak-gratis” might be a reasonable guess.

“Open-glorious” does more harm than good. Unless you are deliberately deceptive, in which case it’s a great concept. Like “healthy green natural free”.

Do you ever donate to a medical charity? Or help run a charity shop? On the expectation that your funding will go to research aimed at curing or ameliorating disease?If so, much of the output will be primarily in scientific publications. And most of this will be closed.

Are you an amateur palaeontologist? Or a citizen scientist in Galaxy Zoo? An ornithologist? Interested in economics? Or cryptography? Searching the Internet will throw up many references to academic papers. How many can you read? Remember that the authors don’t expect to get paid by you for writing them.

Where will the next earthquake come? Are you worried about floods? Are E-numbers bad for you? Much of this is in publications. Most of those closed.

Do you read Ben Goldacre’s bad science? Much of that talks about scholarly publications. Wouldn’t you like to read them? (30 dollars, please, for one day).

In the information age people expect to find information. Governments insist on it.

Why don’t academics?

NOTE: Sleepless the bear stars next Sunday. This is a trailer.

I am at a 2-day (closed) meeting at EBI on Chemical Registry systems and databases (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/industry/Workshops/workshops.html ). I can’t blog this as it’s a closed meeting. However as always I will try to set my own thoughts out. They are still jumbled (I am talking tomorrow so will be looking for input and inspiration from today’s speakers).

The thing that immediately strikes people in bioinformatics is how far behind in organisation, practice and thinking chemical information systems are. Effectively many are walled gardens where information is controlled by an organisation/authority. In bioscience information is put into national and international databases such as Uniprot, PDB, Genbank and so on. These are Open – people can download the whole lot, annotate it, rework and repurpose it, etc.

In contrast the chemical area consists of:

• Databases of the (papers and reports) in the chemical literature. The best known are Chemical Abstracts and Beilstein (now transmuted through commercialism into Reaxsys (Elsevier)). ChEMBL abstracts the literature for compounds with activity data.
• Databases of chemicals supplied (in bottles) by manufacturers.
• Classifications and collections of information about chemicals (Wikipedia, ChEBI, and several others).
• Collections of compound collections and their measured properties (including biological activity). The best known is NCI’s database of about 250,000 compounds. Many pharma companies have their own privates ones, though parts of these are starting to appear Openly.
• Collections of compounds and measured experimental properties – a few are Open (NMRShiftDB, Crystaleye)
• Hybrid collections (Chemspider includes structures, names, donated experimental data, some Open, some not))
• Theoretical calculations on molecules – few are Open (that’s a reason for Quixote)

This workshop explores how (or whether) these can be brought together.

There are several challenges:

• Socio-political. Some of the largest collectors (ACS, Elsevier) have a history of building closed, walled systems and there is no public hint they intend to change. It is effectively impossible to join together closed and open systems. So the question is whether to compete with them (this would have to be Open). If so it’s a large task. (It would be easier if they allowed textmining)
• Walled gardens and centres-of-the-universe. The great thing about bioinformatics is that the various databases work together to create interoperable identifiers, and more importantly interoperable ontologies. There is a huge and successful biological ontology (Gene Ontology) and effectively little open chemical ontology (ChEBI is the most obvious, but it’s not universal). Most providers of information have their own view of the universe and it’s OK as long as you buy completely into it.
• Molecules and compounds. Chemistry is described at several levels, but most importantly by the macroscopic (substance) and the microscopic (molecular). For many compounds (especially pharmaceutical) there is quite a good correspondence between molecule and compound. But it’s not perfect and it breaks down. The breakdown can only be represented properly by annotation and ontologies (sometimes computable).

I shall talk about all three. The latter is the most technically challenging and – effectively – chemists need to decide that they should adopt and create ontologies.

But this will be bitterly resisted by vested interests.

I don’t have a clear way forward. I’ll wait to see what comes out of the discussions.

Meanwhile here are some questions. My talk is called “Names, structures and compunds”

• What is staurosporine?
• How did you find out?
• Do you believe the result?
• What is glucose?
• What is its NMR spectrum
• Do you believe the result?
• What is Mauveine?
• How did you find out?
• Do you believe the result?

Which is the most important question?

As I have blogged (/pmr/2011/10/04/a-fairy-story-for-the-serpentine-gallery-garden-marathon/ ) I am making a short presentation at the Serpentine Marathon next Sunday. I deliberately kept the details quiet, but now I can reveal that it is part of a session on “Walled Gardens”, run by David Rowan of WIRED. I decided that I would make a photographic story highlighting the problems and emotions of the walled gardens of scholarly publishing.

A walled garden is an increasingly serious feature of the electronic age. It’s typified by social networks and other services where people give their data to central sites which then control it and profit from it. Other WGs include genomic data, personal movements, behaviour, opinions, emails, etc. I’ll write more on this but let me introduce a typical protagonist , Prof Felix Q Potuit:

He publishes papers (allegorised by flowers) and the world knows how important he is. He appears on television and acts on government committees. He is one of the “great and the good”.

But he’s also built a walled garden (you didn’t realise this, did you?)

There’s lot of stuff you can’t see if you are Scholarly Poor. Only FQ and his friends can see this.

Perhaps there’s a way in? Round the back:

Yes – there’s a hole in the wall! But it’s guarded. Who’s guarding it? And why?

To find that you will have to read the whole story. It covers all the emotions, so be prepared. But it’s only 5 minutes long.

To see it download http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/serpentine.pptx (rather large – I’m working on it) and view it full screen in Powerpoint (yes, you heard me) when it will advance every 15 seconds. It will change because am adding intermediate explanations for viewers at the Serpentine who don’t know the full horror of scholarly publishing walled gardens.

NEW: There is a PDF equivalent at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/serpentine.pdf . You will have to change manually between slides.

Those familiar with Open Access publishing may spot a familiar animal and I am told he is going to blog it…

More later.

I’ve tried to access a publication outside the Cambridge university domain (i.e. pretending I am a Scholarly Poor. Here’s the screenshot

In case you can’t read it, the text includes:

Options for accessing this content:

• If you have access to this content through a society membership, please first log in to your society website.
  
• If you would like institutional access to this content, please recommend the title to your librarian.
  
• Login via Athens http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/athens or other institutional login options http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/login-options .
  
• You can purchase online access to this Article for a 24-hour period (price varies by title)
  
  • If you already have a Wiley Online Library or Wiley InterScience user account: login above and proceed to purchase the article.
    
  • New Users: Please register, then proceed to purchase the article.
    

Now there is a little Open padlock at the top right called “Free” and the mouseover says:

“You have Full Text Access to this Online Article”

And yet I don’t.

Do other people get the same?

So Wiley is telling me I have “free” access where “free” seems to indicate I have to pay.

No idea what is going on. My predictions:

• The padlock is a mistake
• The text is actually free but Wiley routes me through a paywall by “mistake”

Let’s see if they even notice this blog. BTW Wiley was the publisher who sent a legal letter to graduate student Shelley Batts for publishing ONE graph without permission.

Today’s focus on the harm done by closed scholarly publications is on patient groups – societies and communities of people affected by disease or working (usually voluntarily) on behalf of those.

First let me dispose of one pernicious opinion which I still hear: “no one outside the medical profession can understand medical literature”.

There is no reason why an intelligent dedicated literate person cannot understand medical literature. Not all of it, but very often enough for purpose. And if they are part of a larger group with varied knowledge and experience it is completely reasonable to expect that there is a high degree of understanding.

Most patient groups do not have free access to the literature. Larry Lessig (Creative Commons) has estimated that to read the most important papers relating to his daughter’s illness would cost over 1000 dollars. Remember also that it is difficult to tell whether papers are relevant just by looking at the “free” titles (and sometimes abstracts).

So closed access publishers effectively deny patient groups knowledge about their disease/s.

Here are two prominent volunteers who spend their spare time on patient groups. That I am working with to try to change access to disease information.

Graham Steel (aka McDawg, aka McBlawg) – a frequent participant at blogging / online / repository / everything meetings in UK and elsewhere and who I have known for some years. Graham is a “Patient Advocate” as that is what, in large part, has driven Graham to demand Open Knowledge. Graham was a co-founder of the CJD Alliance (http://www.cjdalliance.net/ ) and describes himself in “Patients Like Me” (http://www.patientslikeme.com/members/view/1644) :

Graham has several years experience of obtaining and sharing information between researchers and patients – and now Journals. The patient as always, remains at the forefront – always will.

Graham Steel (42) is a native of Glasgow, Scotland, and works as a property claims adjuster/recovery specialist.  Graham’s brother, Richard, was diagnosed with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) in April 1999 and died in November 1999 at the age of 33.

Graham joined the committee of the Human BSE Foundation on a voluntary basis in September 2001 and became a Trustee as of 2003 after the Foundation became a Charity.  Since September 2001, he acted as Vice-Chair.  One of his main initial and continued foci had been to develop and maintain the Foundation’s website. Graham left this organisation in October 2005.

Over the last few years, Graham has devoted much time learning more of the background of TSE’s and so called Prion disease, the current and emerging rationale of treatment issues/early diagnostic methodologies and maintaining/seeking contact with many researchers in several Continents. He has also devoted much time assisting in forging links between a number of CJD related support groups from around the world.

And Gilles Frydman – Founder of the Association of Cancer Online Resources ACOR.org – whom I only met this year. ACOR – creates an information community for cancer patients. Here’s a typical report (http://www.onconurse.com/news/activist_gilles.html ) (10 years old) which captures the practice and spirit. Some excerpts:

During his wife’s treatment, Frydman continued to participate on the list. He was amazed at the quantity, complexity, and accuracy of the information shared. The time and effort donated by the list owners and some members was equally impressive. Frydman found so much valuable information that he wondered why the emails were not stored so that the accumulated wisdom of the group was available for new members.

…

Medical information is now booming on the Internet. Some is provided by organizations with experience and integrity while on other sites snake oil salesmen hawk miracle cures to the unwary. Large numbers of experts–both lay and professional–subscribe to ACOR lists. If a member posts medical information, it is scrutinized closely, and requests for citations to the literature are often made. The quality of the medical information shared is very high. Frydman believes passionately in people’s right to research and make their own medical decisions. He said, “It is your body and your life. You have the right to do the research, talk to others, and make your own decisions.”

Note that ACOR has no special privilege in access to the medical literature – quite the reverse. They are among the scholarly poor – denied access to information freely given by scientists in their publications.

Graham and Gilles will be among those at the December hackathon on Open Research Reports – looking for ways to make more information available to people with diseases.

I am sure we all moan about governments and how difficult it is to find information and how they are filled with Sir Humphreys who want to fudge everything. But there’s a real spirirt of making public government data OPEN. One of the refreshing things about working with the OKF is you see how other sectors behave, and believe me, governments are making scientists and academia look like Luddites. The UK government is up with the best. Read Chris Taggart’s blog post (http://countculture.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/my-response-to-the-uk-open-data-consultation/ ) – he’s worked with government departments and knows the issues, bureaucracy, etc. He finishes:

Open data is no silver bullet, and won’t on its own solve these problems, but it is an essential requirement for a ‘more open, more fair and more prosperous‘ society.

Fortunately the consultation provides such a set in Annex 2 of the consultation (The Public Sector Data Principles). These should be issued to every government department, quango, health authority and public sector body (including the PDC), with the order to follow them in letter and spirit. Backing these up, we also need an independent body needs to be appointed with the power and resources to enforce them. With these two things – good public principles, and an effective enforcer – we have a chance to achieve the innovation and fairer society we need.

Chris Taggart

CEO & Co-Founder OpenCorporates

Founder OpenlyLocal

Member of Local Public Data Panel

Member of Mayor of London’s Digital Advisor

The annex referred to is: http://data.gov.uk/opendataconsultation/annex-2 . When you read it think also of the Panton Principles (http://pantonprinciples.org/ ). Similar! That’s because in all fields the first thing to do is state what you want to happen, and then see how you can make it happen. Same as in the Open Bibliographic Principles (http://openbiblio.net/principles/ ). So what I have done is taken the Open Data principles from government and change “public” to “science” and similar changes. I don’t have a strike through, so I’ve included the original . Wherever it said Public data I changed it to [Science][Public] data or similar.

Writing this made me weep. That I have been urging this for 2 decades. Look at the stuff about W3C standards. Look at the stuff about linked Open Data. About Machine understandable export. About… (but I cannot go on).

That I belong to a community – scientists and academia – who care so little about the culture of the twenty-first century that governments put them to shame.

It is really uncanny how I can change “Public” to “Science” and everything makes sense. Yes, the naysayers will say there is no money and scientists shouldn’t be bothered with this – they should be doing real science and not pratting around with Linked Data.

But unless scientists and academia in general agree that this is a good thing to do, then we shan’t get anywhere. We’ll live with “all your data are belong to us”

http://data.gov.uk/opendataconsWorking definition of “[Science] [Public] Data”

“[Scientific] [Public] Data” is the objective, factual, non-personal data on which [science] [public services] run and are assessed, and on which policy decisions are based, or which is collected or generated in the course of [scientific research] [public service delivery].

Draft [Scientific] [Public] Data Principles

1. [Science] [Public] data policy and practice will be clearly driven by the public and businesses who want and use the data, including what data is released when and in what form – and in addition to the legal Right to Data itself this overriding principle should apply to the implementation of all the other principles.
   
2. [Science] [Public] data will be published in reusable, machine-readable form – publication alone is only part of transparency – the data needs to be reusable, and to make it reusable it needs to be machine-readable. At the moment a lot of science [government] information is locked into PDFs or other unprocessable formats.
   
3. [Science] [Public] data will be released under the same open licence which enables free re-use, including commercial re-use – all data should be under the same easy to understand licence. Data released [as supporting info or embedded in text ] [under the Freedom of Information Act or the new Right to Data] should be automatically released under that licence.
   
4. [Science] [Public] data will be available and easy to find through a single easy to use online access point [???] [(data.gov.uk)] – the [science] [public] sector has a myriad of different websites, and search does not work well across them. It’s important to have a well-known single point where people can find the data.
   
5. [Science] [Public] data will be published using open standards, and following relevant recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium. Open, standardised formats are essential. However to increase reusability and the ability to compare data it also means openness and standardisation of the content as well as the format.
   
6. [Science] [Public] data underlying [scientists] [the Government’s own websites] will be published in reusable form for others to use – anything published on [scientific] [government] websites should be available as data for others to re-use. [Scientific] [Public] bodies should not require people to come to their websites to obtain information.
   
7. [Science] [Public] data will be timely and fine grained – Data will be released as quickly as possible after its collection and in as fine a detail as is possible. Speed may mean that the first release may have inaccuracies; more accurate versions will be released when available.
   
8. Release data quickly, and then re-publish it in linked data form – Linked data standards allow the most powerful and easiest re-use of data. However most existing internal public sector data is not in linked data form. Rather than delay any release of the data, our recommendation is to release it ‘as is’ as soon as possible, and then work to convert it to a better format.
   
9. [Science] [Public] data will be freely available to use in any lawful way – raw [scientific] [public] data should be available without registration, although for API-based services a developer key may be needed. Applications should be able to use the data in any lawful way without having to inform or obtain the permission of the [science] [public] body concerned.
   
10. [Science] [Public] bodies should actively encourage the re-use of their [science] [public] data – in addition to publishing the data itself, [scientific] [public] bodies should provide information and support to enable it to be re-used easily and effectively. [Science] [The Government] should also encourage and assist those using [science] [public] data to share knowledge and applications, and should work with business to help grow new, innovative uses of data and to generate economic benefit.
    
11. [Science] [Public] bodies should maintain and publish inventories of their data holdings – accurate and up-to-date records of data collected and held, including their format, accuracy and availability.
    

Available at [nowhere] [http://data.gov.uk/wiki/Public_Data_Principles]

at the stuff abo

In my (currently daily) review of the scholarly poor I am highlighting groups of people who have an important role in the world who need but do not have access to the scientific technical medical literature (STM). So far I have highlighted dentists and industrialist. Now I highlight a group which is typical of many – people outside academia who spend much or all of their time in studying science but cannot read most of the literature. It’s true of every discipline (ecology, astronomy, number theory, …), but here I am highlighting climate science because I know a little background.

In response to my post /pmr/2011/10/05/pay-per-view-science-for-the-scholarly-poor-is-unacceptable-immoral-unethical-and-encourages-bad-science/

Nick Barnes says: October 5, 2011 at 12:47 pm  

Welcome to my world.

PMR: i.e. the world of the Scholarly Poor.

Now Nick is the co-founder (with David Jones) of the Climate Code Foundation (http://climatecode.org/ ). I am on the Advisory Board:

The Climate Code Foundation is a non-profit organisation founded in August 2010, to promote the public understanding of climate science. We work with climate scientists, science communicators, open knowledge experts, funding bodies, institutions, and governmental and inter-governmental agencies to improve software practices in climate science and to encourage the publication of climate science software.

We want to remove any question that poor or unpublished software in climate science invalidates the results. We also want to use software to make climate science more accessible to the public, for instance through better visualization tools.

Before the creation of the Foundation, the founders had been working for several years on the Clear Climate Code project, improving the clarity of the source code of climate science software. They have also started work on the Open Climate Code project, to encourage the publication of more source code in climate science. The Foundation has been created to build on the success of these projects, and to broaden the range and scope of our activities.

The Foundation has established an independent advisory committee of experts in relevant fields, to guide our work. All the activities of the Foundation–from board meeting minutes to detailed accounts–are open and public. We are seeking corporate sponsors, institutional partners, and other contributions of time, energy, and interest.

Nick and David essentially gave up their day jobs as they care passionately about the objectiveness of climate data and the computer code that creates it [Please think about contributing – http://climatecode.org/contribute/ ]. They’ve taken code which was disputed and rewritten it as Open Source so anyone on the planet can verify for themselves what the answers are.

But they, like 99.99+% of the world, do not have access to the primary scientific literature.

If you think climate matters (and I do) then it matters that we have informed debate. That debate should include everyone – not just privileged academics. It’s narrow-minded (and plain wrong) to think that academics can give us the answer. We need objective analysis of the literature and informed debate.

As an example of the problem the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) publish their influential report, and include references (citations) – several thousand. But can YOU read these – unless you are employed by a university, the answer is NO for most of them.

YOU are capable of understanding the science of climate change. Not necessarily as a single person, but as informed groups of interested citizens. You are also capable of demanding that it’s OPEN.

Otherwise, as the sea levels rise [1] and start to engulf the offices of everyone, including the rich publishers, we shall be able to hear them saying

“Our closed access publishing made record profits last year”

[1] I have no idea whether this will happen this century. Because I can’t get the objective information.