#opened14 - second day keynote with Heather Joseph

5 min read

Heather Joseph is the executive director of SPARC. Her background is in publishing, including (only!) 11 months with Elsevier. 

The Open Access movement has been deliberately focused on journal articles as a primary academic output. But they have been very aware that they are not operating in isolation.

This presentation focused on Heather's experiences, and the lessons that have been learned - looking at the parallels between OER and Open Access. It looked to highlight opportunities for collaboration between the two movements.

Technology has been a major driver for changes in scholarly communications. People are sharing academic work via commercial social media. And this is not just sharing work, this is doing work. Ending up with a "whole lot more digital stuff".

Heather gave the example of the human genome as a case study for means of dealing with this data deluge, and the issues that arise. Between 2005 and 2008 the amount of findings taken from the digitised human genome grew exponentially. Submissions to GeneBank also grew exponentially. This put an enormous amount of pressure on the way we share information - there is too much to sit and read articles in a linear fashion.

Enter the concept of the computer as a reader, huge implication for copyright.

A further driver has been the prohibitive cost of journals, similarly to textbooks. Leasing annual access to journals is astonishingly expensive, and a grown by 340% over the last 14 years. An outcomes is that we all run into paywalls when looking for research.

So what do we do, we ask the author for a copy, ask a colleague who can access - or go to #IcanhazPDF on twitter. Or we skip the article and move on. We are operating a system that forces workarounds - we need to optimise the system so it works for scholars.

The Open Access movement is trying to do this. Heather showed the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition (2002). Shortened as "immediate availability plus full reuse".

Enabling strategies have included OA journals and repositories, and policy lobbying.

OA Journals are an alternative to the existing system - offering the same standards as traditional journal, plus free and full access and reuse. Most are available under a CC-BY license.

Repositories are a key component of the infrastructure, allowing authors to make articles accessible and to see them preserved and shared. They are digital collections, that now include things like data, and teaching and learning materials. Interoperability is essential.

Mashing up DOAR and Google Earth shows a healthy infrastructure - though interoperability still needs work. As this infrastructure has grown, so has policy maker interest.

Policy Makers are often focused on maximising social returns on public investment (OECD 2005) by making research findings more widely available. This has enabled an international policy focus based around public entitlement. NIH mandated OA publication in 2008 basted on this pressure, and now all federal agencies are now required to issue similar policies.

After 10 years we have built a lot. Use and trends are increasing. But we are realistic that there is a lot more work to do. Since 2013 only one of the federal agencies has released an OA plan. Only 45 institutions have an OA policy in the US. Less than 20% of articles are deposited in open repositories.

And, as Larry said yesterday: "They're coming for you".

The academic publishing industry is worth $9.4bn, a similar size to the NFL. And they want to preserve this revenue. Publishers like Elsevier are making funding contributions to legislature. The publishing lobby (note there are some commercial publishers that are trying to do the right thing) has a huge "war chest" for influencing policies. Money does buy influence.

The lobby has spent their money on PR (Dezenhall) engaged for a 6 month period in 2007 to run a media messaging campaign against OA. It was noted that the OA message was almost bulletproof - and that the "messages didn't have to be true" to be effective. Ridiculous messages that needed to be rebutted. Money can also buy distraction.

These things will happen, and we will be able to overcome them.

In 2007 SPARC was working with "Students for Free Culture", an organisation inspired by Larry Lessig, They successfully sued Diebold over the the 2000 election. They defended Tom Forsyth against Mattel for using Barbie images - the "Barbie in a blender" day of action.

SPARC and SFC ran a small campaign on the prices of journals. So PR called SPARC "Barbie-Blenders".

But how can we keep winning? We keep winning if we work together, if we build our communities. (wide communities, noting that early-career researchers are key.)

We win when we build better resources for our communities to work with. And these become the preferred resources. The OA campaigns work openly themselves, and this is a strength.

A closing story about Lego demonstrated the benefits of being able to take the pieces apart and put them back together. Lego now looks interoperable with MegaBloks, but they are not. The specs look close, but they are not exact, so structures can collapse. Open campaigns need to adopt the same specifications (technically and legally) to allow bigger structures to be built.

opened14

#opened14 - first day keynote with Larry Lessig

5 min read

The only person that still has the power to get Lessig to talk about copyright issues is David Wiley. He took the chance to think back to the time he worked on this issue - it was the good and the bad together, working with people who want to create things and people who want to stop them.

Aaron Schwartz was a real organiser in the early days, insisted on a focus on "grabbing the theoretical and making it practical".

Around the time of the "Laws that choke creativity" TED talk, he asked "how do you think you are ever going to achieve what you are trying to do whilst government is still corrupt". Lessig said it wasn't his field - but Schwartz suggested it was his field as a citizen.

So the next chunk of his life was devoted to examining this problem. It was like giving up the hopeful part and focusing on the depressing part.

"Tweedism" - a single world to underline the problems with government. "I don't care who does the electing as long as I do the nominating." The question is the whether the filter in between nomination and voting is biased.

Parallel with emancipation - there were all-white primaries before the general election in Texas 100 years ago. So democracy was responsive to whites only.

Again parallels with the Hong Kong umbrella protests. These are protests about tweedism. 0.24% of electorate get to nominate.

We take for granted in the US that campaigns are privately funded. And getting funding is the first stage of the process. Showing the "skinner box" as a metaphor for people knowing how to work the system to get to funding. 30-70% of congress candidates time is spent "calling" for funding,

About 150,000 people in the US (will fall to 35,000) are funders who give important amounts. A tiny fraction of the 1% control the first stage of the system - the "green primary".

Gilens and Page (Princeton) showed that if economic elite or organised interest group preference is high, a policy will pass. But large support from voters has no effect.

Income distribution across cycles is - frankly - terrifying. And the reason for this is changes in government policy. Set by an economic elite.

Lessig was focused on this through the lens of copyright - since the 90s Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Did this advance the public good? Economists overwhelmingly said no (even Milton Friedman). But congress passed it because there was a financial interest and lobbying.

People like Hal Plotkin have won important victories in Open Education advocacy in the Obama administration. But in other ways things have got worse. Some blame the revolving door between civil servants and industry trade groups.

Not all provisions in US law are exported, rights holder provisions are exactly copied across, those for users less so.

From "Free Culture", Lessig argued that the difference between fair use and free uses. Fair uses are uses that would otherwise be regulated, primarily around making copies. But in the digital age everything you do produces a copy, so everything is "presumpted" to be regulated. 

Patterson argued that the insertion of "copy" in 1909 was a mistake. But this "mistake" has led to the extreme regulation of "temporary copies". An absurd position in the digital age. The Obama administration is currently arguing to enshrine this in law.

Hollywood lobbyists have argued that not helping Hollywood (eg SOPA) would lead to Hollywood not helping governments.

Could the department of labour require that new education content commissioned ($100m) be CC-BY? There was a clause (124) that suggested that the government should check that no commercial content should exist in these spaces. Was argued down. But we were "Not important" enough to be defeated.

But this is not just about you. It's pouring honey in swiss watch. It's stopping processes working for the popular good, because blocking is easy for economic elite interests.

Fukyama talks about a "vetocracy" - it is easy to block sane policy because of the way funding works. The democracy part just doesn't matter.

The solution would be to change the way campaigns are funded. To pass 1 statute, to decentralise campaign funding. With public funds. The "obvious and first answer".

But what explains the failure? - pundits say that "people don't care". The Mayday PAC focused on proving this, it wasn't seen to work in the 2014 elections.

The question is not "do they get it?" The question is "will they [WE] do something about it?". It's not because we like it, it is because we are resigned to it. What it means to "grow up", to "accept the reality" of modern life and corruption. How do we resist this?

1. Talk about feasible change. (eg a statute first, not an amendment)

2. Focus on ideals that inspire. 

3. Teach.

To recruit the audience, asking for 10% of our effort to focus on this underlying problem. If you want to make the world better - you need to make it possible to make the world better.

Against all odds, we at opened are fighting against a large producer interest for something that makes sense. What we need to talk about, to rediscover, is a special different sense of the word "Hope".

Vaklav Havel - Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

opened14

Skype is broken (someone should do something)

2 min read

The skype-microsoft links are clearly progressing well as skype now has a habit of occasionally silently crashing and not telling me about it until I try to message or call someone and can't. Skype is the definition of something you want to run in the background and not get in the way but I think that silent crashing is maybe taking things too far.

I'm a heavy user so I have skype on for five long work days each week, and often at weekends too. I have (or had, more on that later in this rant) about 100 contacts. Skype is pretty much mission critical for me - it's how I join conference calls, how I catch up with my team.

So every week or so I get a "crashed skype" moment when I try to send and IM and just get the twisting tiny circle of doom.

The (not always effective) reset process is:

"Quit Skype or use Windows Task Manager to kill any Skype.exe process. Go to Windows Start and in the Search/Run box type %appdata% and then press Enter or click the OK button. The Windows File Explorer will pop up. There locate a folder named “Skype”. Rename this folder to something different, e.g. Skype_old.

If you are on the latest Skype 6.5/6.6/6.7 version, then do also this:

Go to Windows Start and in the Search/Run box type %temp%\skype and then press Enter or click the OK button. Delete the DbTemp folder."

Anyway, what I'm saying is if you can't get through to me on skype, or I don't appear to be a contact any more, it's nothing personal and I still love you :-)  Just add me again and we'll talk.

(and it is also why I am late for the meeting)

Purdah LOLs aplenty #indyref

5 min read

Like most of the fun bits of the way UK is governed, the idea of "purdah" is a convention not a requirement, and is not statutory.

"Purdah" (though the term is deprecated) is what prevents the government of the day spending the period before the election making government decisions (usually, but not always) related to spending that might affect the way that people voted. To give a stupid example, if tomorrow George Osborne promised to buy the entire population of Dundee a beer with treasury funds, this would be seen as a breach of the convention of purdah

It gets complicated because a government minister (though not a government employee - they have purdah too and are restricted from personal political activity at certain times, which it is no fun, I can tell you) will also be a member of a political party or interest groups campaigning in any election or referendum.

As Wragge, Lawrence and Graham note, drawing on previously published Westminster purdah guidance:

"It is customary for Ministers to observe discretion in initiating any new action of a continuing or long-term character. Decisions on matters of policy and other issues such as large and/or contentious procurement contracts on which a new Government might be expected to want the opportunity to take a different view from the present Government should be postponed until after the Election, provided that postponement would not be detrimental to the national interest or wasteful of public money."

So George Osborne could promise that, in the event of a no-vote, a conservative-led government would buy the entire population a beer with treasury funds - and that would be OK.

Confused yet?

The Independence Referendum purdah is slightly more complicated as it is in fact two purdahs in one. The Scottish Government (i.e. the one having a referendum) is in purdah and is not meeting during this period (apart from the first three days, for some unexplored reason), but under the terms of para 29 of the Edinburgh Agreement (which sets out how the referendum works) the UK (Westminster) Government is in purdah even though it is still meeting.

In November last year, SNP Westminster MP Pete Wishart asked David Cameron when he was going to grow a pair and have a debate with Alex Salmond (I paraphrase). Cameron answered correctly (and most likely with one eye on the purdah he would likely be under during the time immediately before the referendum) that it was not a matter for the leader of the UK Government to debate this with the Scottish First Minister. 

[As an aside - this may also be why Cameron, Miliband and Clegg are heading up to Scotland tomorrow. PMQs would surely be a farce if it didn't discuss this #indyref thing that everyone is talking about, and Cameron knows that wily pro-independence questioners could make things very difficult for him due to purdah being observed]

So when the three Westminster parties wanted to say more about the powers Scotland would have within the UK, it was a good choice (in terms of the need to observe purdah, at least) to have someone from the Labour back-benches do so. This looks less like a "government" statement, and more like a "party" statement. Labour are (or were) strong in Scotland and could be seen as the main opposition to the SNP in the Scottish Parliament.

What was odd was having George Osborne pre-announce it. Now George isn't especially popular in Scotland (or anywhere else, other than possibly his bathroom) for a number of reasons, so there was no goodwill reason for him to make the announcement. But he is Chancellor of the Exchequer, which does lend a certain "governmentyness" to an announcement about proposed government legislation and spending that directly effects the area currently having a referendum.

This was a spectacular own goal, as such a statement is very likely to be in breach of the convention of purdah. It could leave the whole referendum (but especially if a "no" is the majority) subject to judicial review or (worse) a direct legal challenge.

The quote from the panicky treasury press officer (sorry, Government Spokesman) does not clarify things at all.

"The purdah is in place to prevent taxpayers' money being spent on referendum campaign material.

"This timetable for new powers would not break purdah as the offer will come from the pro-Union parties, and not the UK government."

The first line is incorrect, purdah refers to anything that could effect the outcome of the referendum, not just spending taxpayers money on campaign material.

The second line is dubious - it is a timetable for government work, not a campaign promise. After any result, the Scottish Parliament and Westminster would speak - formally - about any redivision of powers or responsibilities. The timetable sets out ways in which this would happen, offering specific plans for what needs to be a negotiation between two governments. Those internet bampots at the magnificent Wings over Scotland have already noted that the "news" is not in the the powers offered (these are all from an earlier effort in March) but in the existence of a delivery plan.

And delivery is the business of government, not political parties.

A wee note on nationalism.

2 min read

Brief twitter exchange with that Paul Kingsnorth (who as well as being a good person to follow on twitter and being half of Dark Mountain, has been nominated for some literary award or other...)

His thinking on the rise of Celtic nationalism is that the likely endpoint is a federal structure, with 4 countries, each with their own parliament, under a stripped-down "federal UK" government. Having loads of independent countries under a federal government sounds a bit like the European Union to me, and I think it is interesting that one of the (many) arguments around Scottish Independence is whether or not they would be members of the European Union. 

There's no earthy reason to assume not (despite some very unearthly fearmongering from the Westminster political parties), but it is possible to take this further (and some have done so) and say that an independent Scotland would be more secure in Europe than a UK that has Messrs Cameron, Johnson and Farage in it. Basically, you could be pretty confident that Scotland would be in the EU in 2017 (say), but not as confident that the UK would be.

So a vote for independence is actually - if you think like this - a vote for closer European integration than would otherwise exist.

Amongst my political foibles, I am pretty strongly pro-Europe because I think that the difficulties humankind face are global and needs people working together in as large a number as possible. Stuff like a global minimum wage, or copyright reform, for instance, can't be done nation by nation. But because people tend not to want to be engaged on a level outside of their own country (and because, despite the web, most political press is *very* national in outlook) the transnational bodies that actually exist tend to be a bit rubbish, at best.

If no one is engaged, nothing happens.

So yeah, no idea where I am going with this, but this is my starting point.

Key conference themes so far - #altc 2014

1 min read

Space and permission for staff to reflect and experiment.

Trust and authenticity.

Disconnect between academic university and corporate university.

Any more?

#altc

Packing for #altc

1 min read

"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon."

(as is traditionally posted in response to the numerous "look at all the things I'm taking to this conference" blogs that happen round about this time)

Where's the data on that "Future of England" survey? #indyref

2 min read

The survey was conducted by YouGov and the University of Cardiff on behalf of the ESRC "Future of the UK and Scotland" research programme led by the University of Edinburgh.

The research centre press release is here. (pdf)
The full survey data from YouGov is here. (pdf)

(a note on YouGov - they are actually really good at publishing survey results in their archive, but searching the archive is harder. Basically you need to know the approximate date that the results were published, and look around there. If a survey has just hit the headlines, it's liable to have just been published so it will be at the front, but looking for older survey results can be a pain. And of course, when you do get them they are pdf, so you have to copy them into a spreadsheet manually in order to play with them :-( It's usually abot 2 weeks after the field work that YouTube publish, but for some reason this one was held up till now despite the field work being in April [hmmmm....])

There's no real gold hidden in the data this time, unless you need further evidence that English Conservative and UKIP voters are narrow-minded, vindictive sods. But as a general principle of connected journalism, if you write about a survey you should link to the full data from that survey.

Image: Jabernal at Open Clip Art (no license shown, assumed CC-BY)

#wire106 S01E01 write-up

4 min read

So I'm probably the last person on Earth to watch "The Wire", and I'm starting from the beginning at the urging of Jim Groom and #wire106 . I'm coming to it pretty cold, from an understanding of police/crime drama that extends largely to "The Sweeney" (I usually do this kind of critical review in literature and/or music)

Jim had primed me to see a cop show being subverted, and indeed that is largely what happened. Really it seemed to be more about bureaucracy, and the need for the individual to avoid expressing emotions or instability in order to better play a part in a corporate body. With D'Angelo chastised for losing his cool when attacked in high-rise lobby, and McNulty seeing the piss flow downhill after he subverted reporting lines to press his pet case onto a judge, it was about a man against a machine, and the logic of the machine winning over.

The sense of place and division was heightened by frequent reference to a sub-section of each organisation: Narcotics and Homicide were two almost rival factions within the Baltimore Police Department, both answerable to the whims of the Deputy (who liked dots) and could banish anyone to Marine if he so chose (I liked the use of door signs and office decor in conveying the status of each part of the force). And D'Angelo was demoted from having a tower block as his patch to "the pit", which was clearly of lower status and a "lesser" role after his mistake

And yes, it was, always a man. We counted two fully-drawn female characters - Kima Greggs (a senior detective in narcotics who seemed like she actually knew and cared about what she was doing), and Rhonda Pearlman (an assistant state's attorney who near enough walked out of a fractious meeting/confrontation between Narcotics and Homicide).

Nearly all of the rest of the women we saw worked at "Orlando's" - a strip club "front" for the Barksdale organisation. Yes, a strip club. I'm not sure what we were seeing subverted there, but The Sweeney did a strip club as a criminal signifier in 1974. (in Supersnout, and she was called Brandy DeFrank - two more names than any of the women in Orlando's got).

Now, let's be frank about this: Women have bodies. But unless I am misunderstanding the HBO audience for complex cop show noir drama, people don't need to look at them all the time to remain interested. And maybe drug-dealers do have meetings in strip clubs, I'm not sure. But - as lovely as it always is to hear Bill Withers' "Use Me" - the lengthy establishing shots simply established Women! Getting undressed! To Soul Music! and did nothing to add to the nicely nuanced rebuke that "Stringer Bell" was offering D'Angelo.

So - why? Laura Mulvey's theory of the "male gaze" would be one answer: television and film is often made from the perspective of a heterosexual male viewer and tends to linger on the curves and contours of the female body in the way a heterosexual male would. A friend of mine who lectures in such matters has primed me to always notice that a male character is usually introduced with a straight, still, facial shot (or maybe some purposeful walking), where as the camera will generally move across the body of a female character - especially one presented as "desirable".

A conversation between Kima and her partner nudges episode one past the bechdel test, but it was looking like a close run thing for a long while. So, despite there being a lot to enjoy in The Wire so far, I'll be keeping my eye on the way it portrays women.

Image Lee Nathan at the Noun Project. CC-BY-3.0

MOOCs, and the man leading the UK's rush to charge

2 min read

Someone has written the MOOC article again - this time Peter Wilby in the Guardian presents a gee-whizz gift of an interview to Simon Nelson of FutureLearn.

MOOC "scepticism" (an odd term for "the findings of actual research", but there you are...) merits an entire paragraph. All of which is brushed away, via a series of unchallenged counter-positions from Nelson.

I just want to dwell on "There are huge differences between the providers. Learning is not something you can commodify." for a moment. In my admittedly limited understanding the whole point of online massification is to "commodify" education - the unit cost drops, after all, to the point where you can offer it for free without losing "too much" money, and you do this by substituting an allegedly personalised (algorithmic) student experience for a truly personal (human) one.

All of the major providers (without exception) have done this in the same way, videos, readings, multiple choice quizzes and a few places for students to chat about it. Nelson (who is a nice chap, having met him at a conference in Stockholm) for me overplays the effect of offering a place to comment after the video (youtube style) rather than in a dedicated forum (BlackBoard style). Coursera forums tend to be full of students asking each other for advice, F/L comment streams tend to be "gosh, wow I never knew that" type things.

But the big warning klaxon sounds with the passage on F/L drop out rates. It's the classic pop-sci journalism trope of not properly describing data-sets, and comparing like with like. You can't just "[discount] those who sign up but never start", if you are citing data from other providers which includes all students who sign up. And Simon Nelson definitely cannot go on to say that participation rates are "two to three times better than other providers".

Katy Jordan's canonical dataset puts F/L MOOC completion almost exactly were you would expect it to be given the (smallish) size of the cohort, neatly on the Pareto distribution that appears to be developing when you plot % completion rate against enrolment numbers.

Oh, and Kyloe is not Scottish Gaelic for cow. You are thinking of Bò Ghàidhealach.

source: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/aug/19/moocs-man-leading-uk-foray-simon-nelson-futurelearn
source: http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_cattle