I’ve had two comments / tweets recently that have expanded my horizons:

Todd Vision says: October 6, 2011 at 8:59 am 

I’d be curious to hear from those who have used services like Deep Dyve (http://www.deepdyve.com/) whether their model somewhat address the affordability and accessibility issues raised here.

And Heather Morrison:

it’s important to understand where pay-per leads see also my book chapter re schol comm summit.sfu.ca/item/429

I’ll quote from Heather later. I hadn’t come across DeepDyve before – it’s been going 3+ years and initially appeared to be a deep-web indexer but now is a portal for a variety of publisher articles. In other words it is a single pay-per-view “solution” aggregating over a wide range of publishers (though it is not clear for how many they actually have full text rather than abstracts). Among the FAQ..

We are the largest online rental service, offering full-text access to millions of articles across thousands of journals from the world’s leading publishers, including Springer, Nature Publishing Group, Wiley-Blackwell and more. Our mission is to make authoritative information more affordable and accessible to users who are “unaffiliated” with a large institution and therefore lack easy and affordable access to these vital sources of information.

At least they are honest and use the word RENTAL.

you can “rent” an article which allows you to view-only the full article from the DeepDyve site for 24 hours (or more), but you cannot print or download the document. With DeepDyve, you get reduced access in exchange for a massively reduced price — up to 90% off the cost of purchasing the document.

Apparently they offer much reduced costs (remember the average for publisher-site PPV is ca 30 USD). In other places they say “0.99 USD”. Of course this may not be their average either. (they also offer “free access” to “open Access” papers).

Note that they do not allow saving, printing and I’d guess the product is ultra crippled (no copy-paste, no clicking) with added DRM (Digital Rights Management).

So what’s my take? First, of course the monopoly pricing of the publishers themselves is so horrific, so immoral and so unjustified that there is huge scope for price cutting. This simply emphasizes that we are effectively the victims of a cartel (why do all publishers charge the same and rent for 1 day? Who dreamt that up? Probably a rights collector “dear publisher, you can really fleece these customers – they have no union or cohesion – soak them for whatever you can). Oh, in case you had forgotten, scientists GIVE these people content.

So isn’t 99 cents a paper an equitable solution?

Possibly. I’m not saying that there isn’t a reasonable price for making publications available. But my concern is different. This is a market which looks either like a cartel or a monopoly. And those are intrinsically evil. It’s also something where the product is decide by sheer capitalism, not what is appropriate. *I* write a paper, the cartel decide to dumb it down to a level where my contribution is destroyed. There is no sense of serving the community (which after all provides the whole income) in creating a worthy information product.

I am also worried that this will destroy any role academia has in scientific publishing. We are getting to the stage where commercial companies are starting to run our business. Let’s take the model of Trinity (TX, US) http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=lib_faculty . This recent report shows the costs of traditional subscriptions against pay-per-view. I haven’t read it in detail but the conclusion is:

I approached this study as a strong proponent of pay-per-view journal article access, and my

research reinforces this position. Trinity has saved a significant amount on Elsevier articles

since 2007, far more than anticipated when we deposited what we thought would be our first

annual payment of $50,000 in a pay-per-view account. Moreover, pay-per-view has been a

popular service for those faculty members who have utilized it. We are now ready to increase

our usage and cost by making the process easier for our faculty and students.

Additional savings may result from establishing other pay-per-view arrangements, especially for

the Wiley-Blackwell journals. As a colleague at Colgate noted, “As with anything, there is risk

involved that they will change the model if enough users switch to token access, but compared

to canceling titles and having no access, it seems a reasonable risk” (Poulin). Our cancellation

of all Elsevier journals was certainly a risk, but the results have far outweighed the initial

concerns and the effort it took to start the program. To quote all kinds of people (including one

of my favorite brothers): Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I assume that this is costed on something approaching 30 USD per view and not 1 USD. If, indeed, the negotiable costs of bulk provision can be sharply reduced then PPV becomes attractive to bean-counters.

The logical next step is to develop the PPV market direct to individuals and to cut out the library altogether. It frightens me, because the same approach could also be applied to textbooks. A monopoly publisher who offered solutions for students and researchers. There is obviously so much profit and slack in the system that the publisher complex has great freedom to undercut, lockin, etc.

My concern is academic and scientific freedom. The scientific author is treated like a commodity such as a crop or a mineral – something inanimate without rights. It debases scientific publishing and reduces the debates to numerology. Maybe I am living in a dream world and we are there already – the main role of academia is to provide a market for information monopolists and to deliver managed commodity education.

Heather’s concern is different and complementary – that we are reducing the free use of scholarship by pricing it per view. That we only do as much scholarship as we can afford to pay for, not as much as we want. And that we create a substandard result because we cannot pay to read as much as we should.

And that’s a small step towards academic NewSpeak (Orwell) where the publishers serve up material in a way that is convenient and profitable for them, not as the scholarship demands.

Here’s Heather…

The danger of usage-based pricing

The ready availability of quality, reliable usage-based data raises the possibility of pricing based on usage. At face value, usage-based pricing does seem fair. Those who use a resource heavily pay the most, smaller users pay less. Indeed, there is much to say for considering usage when developing pricing models. Usage data can come in handy, for example, to determine the relative value of a resource for different types or sizes of libraries, and price accordingly. One example, using an FTE-based pricing model, would involve comparing the relative usage of resources at two-year colleges as compared to that at four-year universities. A resource that is used somewhat less at two-year colleges in general could be weighted to 75% FTE for colleges, while a resource that is used a great deal less at two-year colleges could be weighted at 50% FTE for these colleges.

There is much to be said for offering usage-based pricing, or the “pay by the drink” model, on an optional basis, when some libraries are unable to afford needed subscriptions. For obvious reasons. this is much better than no access at all.

However, if a pricing model based on usage were to become prevalent, there are some real dangers, as there are disincentives to use with usage-based pricing.

As Andrew Odlyzkow, Director, Digital Technology Centre, University of Minnesota, referring to internet usage pricing models, characterized it: “Usage-sensitive pricing is effective. The problem is that many of its effects are undesirable. In particular, such pricing lowers demand, often by substantial factors” (Odlyzkow 2001). For example, when AOL switched from usage-based to flat pricing for its users in 1996, usage tripled. This effect has been replicated in other countries and cultures. Research has shown that, with internet usage, even small charges discourage use, even if the charges are small enough that even heavy usage would be less than flat pricing.

While this research is based on Internet, rather than on print information resources and on individuals, rather than libraries, it makes sense that the same principles would apply to libraries and institutions as well. Picture, for example, a cash-strapped university looking for ways to cut the budget. With usage-based pricing, eliminating research papers at the first- or second-year level, eliminating the hands-on or exercise-based portion of an information literacy program, or scrapping an information literacy program altogether, would all be ways to achieve cost savings.

If the cost of use is known, there is a danger that a cash-strapped library will pass the cost along to the user, resulting in the direct disincentives to the user that Odlyzkow describes. This has been the tendency for many libraries with interlibrary loans, an area where libraries themselves have implemented usage-based fees deliberately, in order to limit demand (Budd 1989). Clinton (1999) discusses about how libraries in the United Kingdom have implemented user fees for interlibrary loans, to discourage what they see as indiscriminate use of the service.

With a print-based collection, users are free to browse to their heart’s content. As a researcher, the author has often browsed extensively, often in journals not obviously related to the research topic, looking for new approaches or research methods, or possibly knowledge from one discipline that might have implications in another. If libraries move to electronic-only collections and pay on the basis of usage, this kind of cross-disciplinary research might well be perceived as costly. Readers and researchers might be discouraged from browsing for the sake of curiosity, and be asked to limit their reading to what might be clearly justifiable economically. Learning and certain types of research, such as interdisciplinary research, would suffer.

To conclude, pricing based upon usage appears to not be optimal for scholarly research, due to the likelihood of it discouraging use.

This is the second in a series of posts about the “Scholarly Poor” – people and organizations who need the scientific literature but who are disenfranchised through punitive pricing and grotesque restrictions. In the last post I highlighted that your dentist probably cannot read the medical literature they need to. Now I highlight the industrialist.

But industry has lots of money, right? Not for information. Most industrialist I talk to – except, say large pharma, have great problems about accessing the literature. Critical problems involve:

• Diversity. A modern industry does not know where its future information needs are. A mobile phone company needs to know about the effects of microwave radiation, new materials (the UK is in love with grapheme), algorithms, social networks, economics. It cannot possibly subscribe to all relevant journals in these fields. And if it needs, say, the journal Brain Research – that alone will set it back 24,000 USD per year. That’s an absurd amount to pay if you don’t know whether there will be relavant papers.
  
• Size. The whole pricing strategy of publishers is based on large rich universities. Things like “The Big Deal” – a bundle of lots of journals from a single publisher. Rather like (say) the old books clubs where you bought a series of books each month whether you wanted the actual titles or not. The Big Deal is a clever , if cynical, way of persuading universities to buy from the large publishers who would then offload or create titles of little value or desirability – but librarians would be convinced they were getting a “good deal”. No, they were buying lock-in.
  

  The problem is acute for small businesses – with, say, under 100 employees. There are zillions of these round Cambridge UK, and most of my ex-colleagues have gone into them. They will immediately find that they cannot read anything except Open Access papers, Pubmed abstracts (without fulltext), or stolen (the publishers’ term) copies.
  

I highlighted the case of a (large) industry suffering from information lock-out (/pmr/2011/10/05/pay-per-view-science-for-the-scholarly-poor-is-unacceptable-immoral-unethical-and-encourages-bad-science/ ). Here are two more recent comments on this blog from smaller companies:

Bill Moran says: October 5, 2011 at 4:02 pm 

Peter, I come pre-angered for your convenience.

I belong to a small list-serv group that discusses and experiments with sound frequencies transmitted over a series of plasma tube “antennas” for the purpose of affecting human pathogens without the usual side effects (and dangers) of introducing chemical insults to the body.

We have been so cobbled over the past few years, by the creeping crud of PPV on medical and scientific papers that really serve us only to confirm or deny direction…seldom for anything resembling patentable ideas, that we’ve been reduced to feeling like vultures and “hinting” back and forth to each other, “if somebody could just buy such and such literature” etc., that the group has gotten more and more distant and lost interest because of the rising cost of information. (of all things!)

Who would have thought that the internet would make it MORE expensive to get previously free data??

This is the view from the basement dwelling home experimenter, and if you think that world shaking innovation will ever spring from the data-denied scholarly poor again, I’d love to know how.

PMR: Who indeed would think that the Internet would lock-out information? That’s why Wikipedia is so important – it’s one of the ways in which the Internet culture can spread free/open information. But it’s not taken seriously by arrogant universities and avaricious publishers (who maintain that only closed-access publication of science in any good). Remember how PRISM (Elsevier, Am. Chem Soc and partners in dissing) announced that Open Access was “junk science”. And we pay these people to prosper and build more walled gardens.

The point, which PayPerView destroys, is that most people now surf the literature through Hyperlinks. If I see a paper that looks interesting I click on the link. Within a few seconds I can often tell that it’s irrelevant. Titles are poor measures of full content. Abstracts are often missing. So the buyer (sorry RENTER) has to take a gamble as to whether it’s worth paying for. Imagine that you paid for a video called “Secrets of the night” and when you got it home you found it was about astronomy (when you were expecting the natural history of bats). A video is a few dollars, a paper can be FIFTY dollars (I am working myself into a frenzy of rage).

It makes scientific publishers hated. That’s a fact, not an opinion.

The scholarly poor industrialist has only these options:

• Not to read the scholarly literature (increasingly common).
• Steal copies of the literature from friends in academia. Note that even this, whether or not you call copyright infringement stealing, is also very inefficient. Whereas the scholarly rich can click, click , click in a matter of minutes or seconds, the scholarly poor have to find someone to steal the paper, mail them or a site, wait for the reply (hours, days) and then discover whether it was worth it. At least ten time slower than having access to the rich resources.

And here’s Marcus Hanwell – ace collaborator on Cheminformatics visualisation and semantics. Marcus develops Avogadro , a Free/Open source molecular viewer, analyser, manager, etc. He works for Kitware, a company which builds Open Source software and sells solutions. But if he wishes to read my paper in the ACS journal JCIM he cannot. I am not allowed to send him a copy. I am not allowed to post a copy on my web page. I am not allowed to post my pre-review manuscript on the web. (and yes, I have read the contract).

Marcus D. Hanwell says: October 5, 2011 at 2:02 pm 

I was very surprised when I moved from academia to industry too, I also tend to read far fewer papers due to the excessive fees.

PMR: Some of you should be feeling outraged. Others may be feeling guilty.

I shall post occasionally on the concept of the “Scholarly Poor” – people who need to read the scholarly literature and who can’t. “Can’t” == cannot afford the extortionate PayPerView (PPV) fees demanded by all publishers (all == all I have come across, and that includes a few on the side of the angels). Please let me have your experiences and views and I’ll try to blog them. Not all at once…

So my first category of scholarly poor is dentists.

Dentists? Don’t make me laugh. Dentists aren’t poor!

No, they aren’t. But they are scholarly poor. A scholarly poor person does not read the literature because it costs too much. Remember that reading a paper, even for a few minutes can cost 50 USD. And it’s higher in the medical sciences (so far the record is 61 USD, from Bentham publishers – can you beat that?). So here’s a conversation with my dentist – no names:

• PMR “Do you need to read the dental literature”
  
• “yes” (I would have been worried with any other answer)
  
• PMR “Do you ever find that you can’t get access?”
  
• “all the time. Most of the time I can only read the abstracts. When I was studying/training it was fine – I used to get these requests for copies of papers from practising dentists”. Note, of course, that these are requests to steal material.
  

So, next time you are sitting in the dentist’s chair think about whether s/he has read the latest relevant literature. Note, of course, that editorials are very often hidden behind paywalls. So the Ruritanian J. Dent might have an editorial “100 years of novocaine” (novocaine is a dental local anaesthetic ). It could give pointers to recent information. It might suggest benefits, counterindications, etc. Who knows, because you’ll have to pay 50 USD to read it. It might, of course, say nothing you didn’t already know. So probably not worth forking out 50 dollars for.

I’ve just learnt that cocaine used to be used as a local anaesthetic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procaine ).

[That’s rubbish – you can’t believe anything in Wikipedia. Well you can’t believe anything in Rur. J. Dent either because you can’t read it!]

Dentists, next time you can’t read an article, ask your patient whether they are a scholarly publisher and what their PPV costs. I’ll leave the rest up to you. Or say that you’ve just seen this new treatment and can they pay 50 dollars to find out whether it’s any good.

Is it fair to say that dental treatment is unaffected as a result of not having access to the literature? That the information filters down by word of mouth? That enough papers are stolen and recirculated?

I don’t know. I’d be interested to know whether there has been a study. Dare we ask dentists questions like “how many teeth did you pull out unnecessarily because you hadn’t been able to read the literature? Did you use an anaesthetic that had reported side-effects?” I don’t see why not.

Because lack of access to the literature must ultimately lead to bad practice and patient mis-care.

Maybe Ben Goldacre already knows.

I met a scientist today – I shall not reveal details. S/he was from a company, working abroad but visiting Cambridge. For technical reasons she was not able to access her company scientific information service and so was reliant on some syndicated PayPerView (PPV) system. This is what journals offer to those (most of the world) who don’t have an institutional library subscription (see /pmr/2011/10/04/pay-per-view-pricing-for-oup-journals-and-thoughts-on-foi/ ). It’s indicated on most journals by a shopping basket and a “BUY” button. For most of these you are then given a price and you can buy your papers. I did not realise viscerally till today how awful the system was.

BUY is a marketing lie.

You cannot buy the paper like you buy a book. You RENT the paper. You have this option for ONE day. And once only.

You cannot save the paper to disk. I don’t know how universally true this is but I expect that there are Rights collectors who will provide software to prevent copying.

If you fail to read the paper completely in 1 day (or if your connection crashes or whatever) you have to BUY (sorry, RENT) the paper again.

You ARE allowed to PRINT it. And pay for the paper, and the electricity and the toner… And waste planetary resources.

So what PPV does is force scientists to PRINT papers which are designed for electronic use. Any clickable diagrams, and rotatable molecules are destroyed.

This scientist was spending their valuable time printing about 3 cm thick of paper as that was the only way they could read the papers. S/he told me that s/he now reads many fewer papers because of the hassle. That is encouraging bad science.

Why this absurdity? Mainly because the publisher assumes that the reader is a potential thief (their language – “stealing content”). So we have anti-theft measures for anyone outside the scientific community.

And what about the charges?

I found a journal today which charges 60 USD for 1 paper. How is this justified? I only know about OUP (charges at least 32 USD) who answered an FoI request with:

The pricing has been based  on  market  levels  (which  means,  for  example,  that  our  pricing  for  articles  from 
humanities  journals  is  generally  lower  than  that  for articles  from  scientific or medical 
journals)  and  also  takes  into  account  the  risk  that  too  low  pricing  could  undermine 
subscriptions.

So the pricing is what the market will bear. Chemists can be tapped for more money than historians. OUP is a non-profit and it might be thought that they have an element of public service. Who are the people who have to use PPV? The scholarly poor. Individuals our countries outside rich academia. People who are personally concerned about disease, or climate change, or anything. People like Open Source Drug Discovery in India who worry more about curing TB than their h-index. People like Graham Steel who is a Patient Advocate for CJD in his spare time. You might think that a publisher considered these people. But no, the holy cow of profit runs everything.

(This is not a specific criticism of OUP – other publishers are almost certainly even worse. But they won’t reply to me).

PayPerView is iniquitous. Not because the material isn’t free – though we have to work on that. But because it degrades the reader, regarding them as a thief. Makes no concession to their need to read the literature (and usually assumes by default that anyone outside academia isn’t worth bothering about). And sets a rate of pricing which must be one of the most inexcusable in the whole of materialist capitalism.

And, in case you had forgotten, the publishers DO NOT CREATE THE CONTENT. Scientists GIVE IT TO THE PUBLISHERS FOR FREE.

I’ve got myself quite angry now.

I might even have got some of you angry.

The whole scholarly publishing system is rotten, but PPV is one of its worst aspects.

I got the following today from F1000 – a company that I know reasonably well and get on fine with those people I have met including Vitek Tracz for whom I have a very high regard. But I am not in favour of this…

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 12:06 PM, <Eleanor.Howell@f1000.com> wrote:

Dear Peter,

I’m excited to let you know that we at Faculty of 1000 have launched the beta version of our new F1000 Journal Rankings.

The rankings enable researchers to see where the best research is being published, as judged by the F1000 Faculty. Each month F1000 will publish current rankings based on evaluations of research papers received in the previous 12 months. Each year we will make available historical rankings, based on a calendar year’s worth of articles, for easy comparison with the Journal Impact Factor.

Our press release, including technical details of how the rankings are calculated, can be viewed here:http://f1000.com/resources/Journal_Rankings_PressRelease_Web.pdf

The journal rankings themselves are here: http://f1000.com/rankings/journals/year/current

Please contact me with any queries or comments.

So I wrote:

I think ranking journals is outdated and pernicious. It leads to glory-oriented branding, editorial coziness, arbitrary office-made decisions and distorts scientific publishing.

I approve of per-article metrics done by humans reading the papers. If so, publish the articles.

I would also note that a very high proportion of your journals are closed access – it would be useful to indicate which journals are open, as 99.99+% of the human race can only read

I also commented that publishing rankings to 4 significant figures when the raw data could vary by 20% was ridiculous and unscientific.

I now think conventional journals per se are outdated. There are, perhaps, a few places where journals make sense but most are vehicles for commercial (and commercial-thinking non-profit) companies to promote competition with other commercial companies. The decisions on what a journals is, what’s in it, why it exists, what its policy is, are increasingly undemocratic and distorting. There is also publisher-think where even well-intentioned publishers get sucked into the reader-doesn’t-matter and we-don’t-care-about-the science syndromes.

That’s one reason for wishing to see journal rankings abolished. But while we have journals, there are others. The main is that it trivializes the role of individual articles against the collective standing of the journal. *Where* you publish is more important than *what* you publish. I accept that some of this is probably inevitable while Planck’s Law for editors still operates [1]. However the increasing pressure of commercial greed on scientific publishing distorts editorial judgments or even bypasses them completely. If we want changes in publishing, do we wish to delegate our decisions to the marketing departments of commercial companies? (And I think the F1000 impact factor is a clear indication of marketing triumphing).

Journal impact factors will never be morally or ethically acceptable as long as the primary motivation for journals is commercial. And even without that it’s a seriously flawed concept.

So I am sorry to write this about F1000 as they actually do more than most to try to assess science. But this is retrograde.

[1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck Science progresses one funeral at a time

By a series of happenstances (which I might explain later) I’ve been asked to do a short presentation at a prestigious event – Serpentine Gallery Garden Marathon (http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2011/08/garden_marathon.html )

Garden Marathon
Saturday and Sunday
15-16 October 2011

Saturday 15 October 12noon – 10pm

Sunday 16 October 11am – 7pm

The Serpentine Gallery Garden Marathon is the sixth in the Gallery’s acclaimed Marathon series. This two-day event is an exploration of the concept of the garden. A product of the creative encounter between the man-made and the natural, between order and disorder, the garden can offer productive metaphors for the interactions between human life and time, care, thought or space.

The event is directly inspired by the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011, designed by Peter Zumthor. The encounter of architecture and garden creates a contemplative space that is both set within – and meditatively separated from – the wider surroundings of Kensington Gardens.

Participations will range from the fields of horticulture, design and architecture to explore the creation of gardens and their spatial, urban and scientific importance, through to works by artists and readings by poets and writers exploring the significance of the garden in our experience of the world.

Participants include:
Etel Adnan, Brian Aldiss, Maria Thereza Alves, Rosie Atkins, Yto Barrada and Sean Gullette, Gianfranco Baruchello, Gerry Bibby, Stefano Boeri, Andrea Branzi, John Brockman, Pablo Bronstein, Jake Chapman, Hélène Cixous, Pascal Cribier, Adam Curtis, David Deutsch, Elizabeth Diller, Jimmie Durham, Marcus du Sautoy, Patrick Eyres, Hans-Peter Feldmann, FIELDCLUB, Sophie Fiennes, Adriaan Geuze, Jef Geys, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Fritz Haeg with Denise Withers, Zarina Hashmi, Will Holder, Jennifer Jacquet, Charles Jencks, Koo Jeong-A, Alison Knowles and Meghan DellaCrosse, Pablo León de la Barra, Jonas Mekas and David Ellis, Catherine Mosbach, Christian Philipp Müller, muf architecture/art, Silke Otto-Knapp, Philippe Parreno, Dan Pearson, Giuseppe Penone, Julia Peyton-Jones, Alice Rawsthorn, Carissa Rodriguez and Avena Gallagher, David Rowan, Peter Saville and Anna Blessmann, Rüdiger Schöttle, Richard Sennett, Bas Smets, Paul Smith, Something & Son, Susan Stenger, Corin Sworn, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Günther Vogt, Sophie von Cundale, Alex Waterman, Andrea Zanzotto and Qiu Zhijie.

Why me? I’m not really a gardener and certainly not an artist but it sounds fun. I’m part of a 45-minute session – on a certain type of garden – and I’m kicking off with a 5 minute slot.

Brian Aldiss?? Gulp. And gulp, gulp, gulp

So I thought I would prepare a show and tell a little fairy story using Powerpoint.

Yes, you heard me right – Powerpoint. I’m using it to tell a story with images at 15-second intervals. It’s good at that and wouldn’t event upset Tufte. Here’s a picture that Tom M-R took on Sunday:

It’s a Dendrobium spp. (If you know more, please let me know) I picked up as a £1 remainder as a late Christmas present. I think it lost its label so I don’t know the species. The point here is that it is creating copies of itself. It’s part of the story.

The story has to be told in 5 minutes so I am using the photographic novel technique, with snapshots and speech balloons. Common in some newspapers and magzines. Tom M-R did the first photoshoot and now I am adding speech balloons. A typical picture is:

This is a rather fun medium –

(Yes, I know it’s a cyclamen. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_characters ) explains the importance of a bowl of petunias. Perhaps cyclamens can also think).

So although I will be creating the 5-minute photographic version, I’ll also try to write instalments on a roughly daily basis. Because it’s a first draft I’ll think of things as I go along and there will be little attention to the dramatic unities (or anything else). The draft will explain some of the things in the photographic novel and add some suspense at the beginning. So if you know the ending (I don’t), don’t give it away.

I have recently received two FoI replies, one which I think illustrates the best of the system (Oxford University, my alma mater) and one that doesn’t (University of Cambridge, my current home).

To start with the Cambridge one. I requested information from The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/contracts_for_and_number_of_sour ) because the CCDC was listed as a department of the University. I should point out that I had already asked this of the CCDC and was refused – so I hoped that it might come under the legal constraint of FoI. I sent the request off through WhatDoTheyKnow and waited.

To keep you in suspense I’ll comment that WDTK now has 14% of all FoI requests. I think this is excellent. It’s great to have the answers clearly outlined. Here’s their graph (http://www.mysociety.org/2011/07/01/whatdotheyknow%e2%80%99s-share-of-central-government-foi-requests-%e2%80%93-q2-2011/ ):

Note, in passing, that 7000 requests/quarter = 600 request a week == ca 100 requests per day over the whole country. That seems like a healthy number for a government that is rightly promoting openness. No evidence of serious spamming.

Anyway, back to Cambridge. Here’s their reply, which arrived ONE HOUR before the 20 working data deadline:

Contrary to your assertion that the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CC DC) is ‘one of the listed departments of the University’ the CC DC is a separate legal entity with the status of Non-University Institution solely for the purposes of supervising students on MPhil and PhD research degree programmes. The CCDC operates as a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee under English law and is a registered charity with the Charity Commission. This is set out on the CCDC website at: http://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uklabout ccdc/company information/legal status/ The CCDC is also registered separately from the University with the Information Commissioner (under register entry number Z6351501).

The requested information is therefore not held.

It is always possible that it took 19.75 days to work this out, or that the FoI officer was snowed under with other work. But It’s also possible that there is a policy of delaying answers until just before the deadline. I would suggest that the FoI office knew this information on or shortly after receipt of my request. They could then have informed me.

The WDTK site says:

The Freedom of Information Act says:

A public authority must comply with section 1(1) promptly and in any event not later than the twentieth working day following the date of receipt.

The nerdy detail of exactly how weekends are counted, and what happens if the request arrives out of office hours, is just that – detail. What matters here is that the law says authorities must respond promptly.

The word “promptly” is emphasized for good reason. It’s mean to show that the respondent should try to be helpful, not grudging. I’ll leave you to decide which.

By contrast The OUP response was helpful, though also left until the eleventieth-eleventh hour. (They disagree with WDTK about when the clock starts ticking, but I could wait.) I asked them about pricing of individual journal articles (“Pay Per View”, PPV) and you may find this interesting – I did:

Before you read it, try guessing how many people pay to read a PerPerView article.

 
Thank you for your request. 

Q1 (a) Who sets the pricing policy for online purchases? (b) Has this ever been reviewed 
by advisory or governing bodies? 
A1(a):  What  you  have  called  “online  purchases”,  we  call  “pay  per  view”  (“PPV”).  PPV 
pricing  is  set  by  the  relevant  division  (for  example  Global  Academic  Division,  which 
includes journals), and is reviewed ad hoc at that divisional level. The pricing has been 
based  on  market  levels  (which  means,  for  example,  that  our  pricing  for  articles  from 
humanities  journals  is  generally  lower  than  that  for articles  from  scientific or medical 
journals)  and  also  takes  into  account  the  risk  that  too  low  pricing  could  undermine 
subscriptions. As conditions change, we may change our approach to PPV pricing. This 
can happen at the list or journal level. 
A1 (b): No. Reviews of PPV pricing have not taken place at a higher than divisional level. 

PMR: As I thought – prices are set by the office, not by reviewed by the University
      
Q2(a)  Is  the  policy  uniform  over  all  closed  access  articles,  and  if  not  (b)  what  are  the 
criteria? 
A2(a): No  
A2(b):  The  main  criterion  is  whether  the  article  is  from  a  humanities  or  scientific/ 
medical  journal.  As  mentioned  above,  articles  from  humanities  journals  are  generally 
cheaper than those from scientific or medical journals, though there are exceptions. 

PMR: Useful to know there is a differential

  
Q3 (a) Is any third party (e.g. a rights collection agency) involved? If so, (b) who, and (c) 
what proportion of the revenue do they take? 
A3(a): Yes 
A3(b): There are two types of third party involved in supplying PPV – (i) the third party 
that hosts our journals (HighWire), and (ii) third parties to whom we have licensed the 
right to sell our articles e.g. the British Library, Infotrieve and Reprints Desk. We do not 
offer PPV through any rights collection agencies. 
 

PMR: Good. I do not find rights collection agents to have a sense of anything other than maximising income.
 
A3(c):  For  the  first  type  of  third  party  in  A2(b)  above,  which  represents  around  two-
thirds  of  our PPV  sales, we  will  not  disclose  the  percentage of  the  revenue  from PPV 
taken by HighWire, because we believe that this information is exempt from disclosure 
under  Section  43(2)  of  the  Freedom  of  Information  Act  (FOIA).  

PMR: “FOIA 43(2) Information is exempt information if its disclosure under this Act would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of any person (including the public authority holding it).” High-Wire (from Stanford Univ library) “As the leading ePublishing platform, HighWire Press partners with independent scholarly publishers, societies, associations, and university presses to facilitate the digital dissemination of 1552 journals, reference works, books, and proceedings.” I have no information as to whether it attempts to oversee PPV prices

HighWire  supplies journal  content  from  a  number  of  academic  publishers.  Disclosure  of  the  information 
requested  would  be  likely  to  prejudice  its  commercial  interests  by  weakening  its 
bargaining position in relation to other publishers, who do not have the same terms as 
OUP for PPV. This in turn might cause it to offer a less favourable deal to OUP. 
The  exemption  in  Section  43(2)  is  a  qualified  exemption,  which  requires  the  public 
authority  to  weigh  up  the  public  interest  in  favour  of  disclosure,  which  is  presumed 
from the FOIA, against the public interest in maintaining the exemption.  
The  University  accepts  that  there  is  a  public  interest  in  the  disclosure  of  financial 
information  about  OUP,  given  that  it  is  one  of  the  world’s  leading  publishers  and  a 
department  of  a  public  authority.  This  interest  is  met  through  the  publication  of 
abstracts  of  accounts  in  both  the  University’s  Financial  Statements  and  the  Annual 
Report  of  the  Delegates  of  the  University  Press1.  However,  we  consider  that  there  is 
little, if any, public interest in the disclosure of the percentage of PPV revenue received 
by  HighWire,  given  that  this  represents  an  insignificant  percentage  of  OUP’s  overall 
finances.  Furthermore,  OUP  receives  no  public  money;  it  aims  to  be  a  self-financing 
department of the University.   
The  limited  public  interest  in  disclosure  is  outweighed  by  the  public  interest  in 
maintaining the exemption. As already indicated, OUP is a department of the University 
of  Oxford,  and makes  a  significant  contribution  towards  the  University’s objectives  of 
promoting  excellence  in  teaching  and  research.  Any  harm  caused  to  its  commercial 
interests would undermine its ability to contribute to these goals.  
For  the  second  type  of  third  party  mentioned  in  A2(b)  above,  the  proportion  of  the 
revenue they take depends on what price they sell at, which is information we do not 
hold. We sell to them at a fixed price and they can charge what they like. 

PMR: A comprehensive and useful reply.
 
 Q4.  How  many  online  purchases  were  made  last  year  over  all  OUP  journal  articles? 
Please give both (a) purchase numbers and (b) total number of purchasable articles. 
A4(a): In 2010, 37,157 PPV articles were purchased. 
A4(b): We do not hold this information. 
 Q5.  What  is  the  revenue  from  online  purchases  as  a  fraction  of  subscription  (e.g. 
academic library) income? 
A5. PPV represents around 1.5% of total journal subscription income. 

PMR: Very interesting. I don’t know how many articles OUP publishes a year. About 270 journals, let’s guess ca 150 articles per year average (so journals are large, others small). That’s almost 1 PPV per article. Of course some articles are older. So the average per year per article might be 0.5 PPV per article per year.

This is higher than I would have thought. I remember many years ago the figure that the average paper was read by 1.5 people. If people actually pay 32$ or whatever that is a commitment. Of course it’s a lot less than the pageviews for Open Access journals. (Of course! I forgot that some of the journals are OA – but not many and it doesn’t affect the order of magnitude.

The Green model of Open Access is for authors to publish conventionally (in closed access journals) but to post copies of their articles on the web, freely visible to all. Often it is assumed that this will be in Institutional Repositories. Green Open Access is generally acceptable to most funders and conforming to their requirements that the research outcomes be Openly available. Some institutions (Soton, QUT, Harvard, Princeton …) are now mandating that their faculty publish through open Access and Green is one option.

Here is Ben Goldacre (the scourge of Bad Science) exploring it as a potential way forward (http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/how-pubget-could-be-better-add-free-open-repo ).

How PubGet could be better: add free open repositories. In fact, how about a good repo search site?

Brief thought. PubGet looks fun, an iPad app that lets you read academic papers neatly. None of the logins in our home work on it but it’s a nice idea.

Here’s my suggestion to improve it: journals being free to access is only one model, the other is academics posting copies of their papers in local free access repositories where they’re allowed to is another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

So how about adding free open repositories of closed papers to PubGet? eg the list at the bottom of here:

In fact, has anyone written a brief guide to doing mega search for all open paper repositories? That’d be a powerful thing, tho I admit I’ve never looked as I’ve always had some kind of institutional access myself, which while clunky is still less inconvenient than hunting on the off chance for an open PDF. Maybe googling the title is good enough for that job anyway! If you’ve posted a better workflow, do share it. 

It’s an attractive idea. The vision is something like this:

• All institutions create a repository for this purpose (and this purpose alone – you cannot muddle Open Access with the demands of the REF/RAE)
• All scientists post copies of their papers in their own institutional repository
• There is a giant simple search engine that allows you to find any scientific article in no matter what repository it is in

Result: universal free access to the scientific literature.

I support the validity of this vision, except… and the “except”s are so strong that it won’t happen:

• Scientists will not do this unless they are forced to do it. Any number of studies and mandates have shown that voluntary compliance is a few percent. Until there are mandates with teeth, it doesn’t happen.
• Many scientists will not obey mandates. I believe the current compliance is usually not more than 70%. The only way to increase this is to employ police who monitor compliance and institutions and funders who take absolute action: “you failed to publish Open Access – you are sacked / no more grants / no more licence to practice… “. To which the reply is “I am a star academic, and you are two-bit apparatchik. Get lost. Your institution needs me more that I need you. I don’t care about the greater good of science as long as I get grants and glory”. A slight, but only slight, caricature.
• The infrastructure for doing this is broken. I have blogged at length: (/pmr/2011/08/14/institutional-repositories-are-they-valuable-to-scientists/ ) Instituional Repositories are disorganised, point in different directions, are unsure of their raison d’etre, unsearchable by modern methods. Moreover the access rights are unclear and the re-use rights are missing or restrictive.

I hope I get some updates and possible challenges to these views. If so, people will have to give indication that it’s happening – not just wishful thinking. Among the half-fulfilled promises are ideas are:

• It’s easy to deposit a paper in a repository. It isn’t, unless the institution gives active help. It’s not “one click”. It’s a whole load of reading the publishers deliberately arcane conditions, embargo conditions, etc. How many academics willingly reposit their paper six months after they have published it. It’s a major chore, for no personal benefit. It’s as exciting as writing safety reports.
• The publishers support green open access and are willing partners. They don’t, except in name. They have fought it as hard as possible. The current system is as unfriendly and antagonistic as possible. If they supported it, they’d have a mechanism to post copies of their material in IRs. No, it’s a concession dragged out with blood and they make it as difficult as possible. I have several “negotiations” with publishers where they have simply failed to treat me as a person worthy of discourse – failure to reply, failure to honour agreements, etc. They go along with it at present because they believe it doesn’t work and won’t work.

   

So could it work? Yes, with the following conditions:

• Academia unites with a strategic plan to make it work
• Resource is put into it
• Practice between universities is effectively consistent

Academia should create its own “Ofpub” which tells the publishers what academia requires. The individual publishers either accept it or we don’t publish with them. (Hint: publishers are awful at collaborating as well so it ought to be easy). All major universities sign up to this. Isolated instances such as Soton, QUT, Gent, Princeton, Harvard are uncoordinated and are globally symbolic but not effective outside their own institutions. In fact the very paucity of institutions challenging publishers requires an immediate landslide of others if it is going to achieve anything. Failed revolutions make the next steps harder. I congratulate the institutions and support them, but unless they bring the others along they will be isolated curiosities. I wish I could believe otherwise.

In my last post I reviewed a paper in Nature and gave a précis for the “scholarly poor” the internet citizens who are not employed by rich universities. (Universities have an arrogant attitude that access to the literature only matters for them, and they spend billions of taxpayers’ money in their libraries just for themselves). One of my commenters and ex-colleague (@walter blackstock) commented that it would cost 32 USD to read the Nature article (2 pages, rented for 1 day). He’s a scientist – he just doesn’t happen to work in universities – so no access to the scientific literature.

The lack of access to scientific literature is now a global shame.

Think of all the people (in all countries, not just the rich west) who cannot read the literature:

• Patients and patient groups
• Government and policy makers (e.g. in NGOs)
• Environmental groups
• Many practitioners of medicine who do not have access to (say) a national service (e.g. NHSNet)
• Retired people (many of whom are actively involved in changing the world)
• Schoolchildren (yes, much of the literature is – or should be – understandable by them)
• Interested citizens who want to understand the world we live in

And, starkly, people die because of lack of access to scientific information. That sounds sensationalist, but it’s self-evidently true. If a patient group cannot read the medical literature they cannot make informed decisions. The conventional wisdom that patients are incapable of understanding their literature is no longer true in this century. The Open Source Drug Discovery project in India is more concerned with stopping people dying than their precious h-index from closed access journals. The countries which see sea levels increasing and changing weather patterns have a right to know what the scientific world is doing and saying – and indeed to be a full part of it.

I have blogged at length on this /pmr/2011/07/09/what-is-wrong-with-scientific-publishing-and-can-we-put-it-right-before-it-is-too-late/ and subsequent. I have been catalysed to continue by

• An article by Mike Taylor in Times Higher Ed (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=417576 ) where he argues we should refuse to give reviews for closed access journals (I already refuse – no surprise). Some of the discussion centres round alternative models
• A blog post by Ben Goldacre (http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/how-pubget-could-be-better-add-free-open-repo ) where he suggests we could create a collection of free articles. I’ll blog this later.

So I am arguing that Access to scientific publications should be a fundamental right

That may sound dramatic so I will put it in context. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights lists substantive human rights to include:

• 9.1.1 Environmental rights
• 9.1.2 Future generations
• 9.1.3 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) rights
• 9.1.4 Trade
• 9.1.5 Water
• 9.1.6 Crime and Punishment
• 9.1.7 Fetal rights
• 9.1.8 Reproductive rights
• 9.1.9 Information and communication technologies

Note that this not mean they are free-of-cost, free-as-in-beer. Water costs money. But it is a fundamental right:

In November 2002, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights issued a non-binding comment affirming that access to water was a human right:

the human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.

—United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

This principle was reaffirmed at the 3rd and 4th World Water Councils in 2003 and 2006. This marks a departure from the conclusions of the 2nd World Water Forum in The Hague in 2000, which stated that water was a commodity to be bought and sold, not a right.^[99] There are calls from many NGOs and politicians to enshrine access to water as a binding human right, and not as a commodity.^[100][101] According to the United Nations, nearly 900 million people lack access to clean water and more than 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. On July 28, 2010, the UN declared water and sanitation as human rights. By declaring safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right, the U.N. General Assembly made a step towards the Millennium Development Goal to ensure environmental sustainability, which in part aims to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation”.

Note “access to water as a binding human right, and not as a commodity“. We pay for our water in the UK, and I am (generally) happy to do this. The condition is that we must be free of monopolists, or cartels, of indiscriminate and arbitrary sanctions. In the UK water is managed in a capitalist manner and it’s therefore regulated politically and there is a water regulator (Ofwat). There are flaws in this but the system at least removes the appalling monopoly control imposed by capitalist publishers. Making water a right commits the world to finding a solution, not building individual riches.

Then there is the Internet.

The United Nations has proposed to make Internet access a human right. This push was made when it called for universal access to basic communication and information services at the UN Administrative Committee on Coordination. In 2003, during the World Summit on the Information Society, another claim for this was made.^[1][2]

In some countries such as Estonia,^[3]
France,^[4]
Finland,^[5]
Greece^[6] and Spain,^[7] Internet access has already been made a human right. This is accomplished by authorizing universal service-contracted providers with the duty to extend a mandatory minimum connection capability to all remaining desiring home users in the country.

This does not mean that access to the internet is free of cost. I pay my broadband willingly enough. But it means that in countries more enlightened than Britain I cannot be cut off by publishers.

Publishers could cut off my broadband??

Three strikes

Main article: Graduated response

In response to copyright infringement using peer-to-peer software, the creative industries, reliant on copyright, advocate what is known as a “graduated response” which sees consumers disconnected after a number of notification letters warning that they are infringing copyright. The content industry has sought to gain the co-operation of internet service providers (ISPs), asking them to provide subscriber information for IP addresses identified by the content industry as engaged in copyright infringement.^[9] The proposal for internet service providers to cut off Internet access to a subscriber who had received three warning letters of alleged copyright infringement was initially known as “three strikes”, based on the baseball rule of “three strikes and you’re out“. Because “three strikes” was understood to refer to physical assault,^{[citation needed]} the approach was later termed “graduated response”. Media attention has focused on attempts to implement such an approach in France (see the HADOPI law) and the UK (see the Digital Economy Act 2010), though the approach, or variations of it, has been implemented in a number of other countries, or attempts are made to do so.^[10]

Yes – if they think that I have been violating “their” copyright they can – without judicial process get me cut off. It is they, not a court, who decide on whether it’s a violation. Wiley pursued Shelley Batts with legal threats for posting one graph from a scientific article. (Yes Wiley, until you change the rights of access to your material I shall keep dragging up this appalling violation of scientific rights). If she had done it three times they could have had her cut off .

So I am proposing that we should press for

Access to scientific publications should be a fundamental right

This makes simple sense. If justification were needed:

• Scientific publication is a vital tool in improving the quality of (or even saving) humankind.
• Scientific publication is largely funded by the public purse and non-profit institutions. These institutions wish the widest possible dissemination of their research.
• Scientific publications are created by scientists and others with no intention of monetary reward. Scientists also wish the widest possible dissemination of their research.
• The culture of this century expects information to be freely available.

If we are able to adopt this simple principle, then much else follows. It follows that cost of access should be regulated, or subsidised wholly or partly. It follows that there should be no restrictions on the flow or re-use of scientific information (the dissemination cost is near zero).

We have – through decades of academic indifference – landed ourselves with a band of publisher robber-barons and it will be a struggle to escape. But there is much experience of how to do this. There is – in many countries – strong political will. It can and must happen.

In this week’s Nature (not sure whether the scholarly poor have to pay for this so I précis a bit) there’s a useful review More time for research: Fund people not projects
John P. A. Ioannidis Nature 477, 529–531 (29 September 2011) doi:10.1038/477529a. It highlights the failures of the current system – huge amounts of effort expended by applicants and reviewers and there is great dissatisfaction. The current trajectory may make things consistently worse. So Ioannidis gives a table of possibilities. I reproduce bits of it here without permission (I am visiting NPG on Monday so they can throw me in their dungeon if they want):

Option ++ Pros –- Cons xx Example ?? Who would be funded

Egalitarian (fund everybody) ++ Avoids peer-review biases Gives sufficient amounts to scientists doing low-cost research Small administrative burden — Does not support large research efforts Does not recognize exceptional scientists xx Some universities fund the salaries of all their faculty?? All.

PMR: This is how I started (1967). It was called the dual-support system. You could rely on normal lab equipment, consumables, travel, and access to technical support. We were very well supported. It was actually so lavish that you were never brought to account – you could do what you wanted. I did a lot of stupid and pointless stuff. But I was also able to build the core of the chemical informatics program that I am still pursuing.

Aleatoric (fund at random) ++ Avoids peer-review biases Small administrative burden — Will not capture all deserving scientists xx Foundational Questions Institute ?? Flexible

PMR: For small amounts of funding with a large number of applicants this may be useful. For example if I have a 15% chance of getting a summer student funded I’d be happy to go into a lottery. But it doesn’t scale.

Assessment of career ++ Captures career trajectory Has gold-standard status — Is vulnerable to favouritism Inappropriate for young researchers Is labour-intensive xx MacArthur Fellows Program ?? Few elite scientists (or else administratively burdensome)

PMR: I was awarded a CIBA-GEIGY fellowship for a sabbatical year with Jack Dunitz when I had little formal track record (DPhil + 6 years in post). It changed my life. It wasn’t really assessment of career as much as assessment of promise. I hope I have fulfilled some of that.

Automated impact
indices ++ Eliminates favouritism Evaluates many applicants with ease Approaches objectivity — There are many indices, all with flaws; no consensus about best one to use Indices can be gamed Databases have shortcomings (such as imperfect citation coverage, entry errors, name disambiguation problems) xx UK Research Excellence Framework ?? Flexible

PMR: The only attraction of complete automation is efficient bureaucracy (and we know how often automation fails). It has the same objectivity as an income tax form. Formally correct but utterly depressing. It favours regression to the mean. There is no creativity in funding.

Scientific citizenship ++ May improve science, if good practices are rewarded and bad ones penalized — Automation is not yet possible for data gathering, and is difficult for some citizenship practices
Has peer-review biases xx Financial incentives to peer reviewers ?? Could be extended to many scientists only for aspects that can be automated

PMR: quoting without permission:

Funding systems could reward good scientific citizenship practices, such as data sharing⁴, high-quality methods, careful study design and meticulous reporting of scientific work⁵. Openness to collaboration, non-selective publication of ‘negative’ findings, balanced discussion of limitations in articles and high-quality contributions to peer-review, mentoring, blogging or database curation could also be encouraged. Researchers might be rewarded for publishing reproducible data, protocols and algorithms. However, some citizenship practices are difficult to capture in automated databases, so would be subject to the disadvantages of peer assessment.

I am not sure “Scientific citizenship” is the best term – this is as much about multivariate indicators of value and esteem (i.e. going beyond the mindless “how many papers and how often cited”). It can be gamed (probably easier than citations). However it’s obviously something that must be pursued and rapidly but overlaps with several other approaches.

Projects with broad goals ++ Proposals are easy to write and review Formulating work can be flexible Permits targeted innovation — Does not eliminate project proposals Is vulnerable to favouritism Holds potential for exaggerated promises and claims xx NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards Howard Hughes Medical Institute ?? Few elite scientists

PMR: I think there are two axes here – breadth / freedom, and patronage. I’ve had patronage and it can be extremely valuable (though often not meritocratic). Patronage often devolves to selected institutions, e.g. in the eScience program Cambridge was awarded a Centre. This allowed people in Cambridge to apply selectively for funds and I happened to be in a position to get 6 PDRA years fairly easily. Similarly there are often targeted programs designed around a group of institutions – if you happen to be in them it’s much easier to get funding. Perhaps the most specific was the Cambridge-MIT Institute (http://www.cmi.cam.ac.uk ) which “helped develop DSpace – a groundbreaking future-proof digital archive” (their words, not mine). I didn’t directly get funding but it helped to get JISC funding. And in eScience there were several projects where I could become a Co-I – eMinerals, materialsGrid.

But my biggest patron was Unilever and to them I am very grateful. They provide(d) infrastructure, project funding and a lot of freedom. Patronage is not egalitarian, can be abused, and can be misdirected. Similarly I regard Microsoft as a having elements of a patron. The long association through eScience makes it much easier to agree new mutually beneficial projects.

There are other models. I think cooperatives/collaborations (e.g. Mat Todd’s Open Drug Discovery and Open Source Drug Discovery in India) are valuable new models and can mix public and private funding. And while not everyone can receive money, there is greater opportunity for spreading the net and reaching out to citizen science. Similarly some of the funding that the OKF receives allows for considerable freedom and I applaud this – even more because this clearly supports a common good rather than fostering a single person’s career. It’s probably peripheral to mainstream research but it’s often still research.