Open Access Juggernaut Hits London

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Stephen

Everyone’s talking about open access (OA). It has been a year of dramatic developments in the drive to liberate access to the research literature and the blogosphere is buzzing with excited chatter.

Well, perhaps not everyone and not even the whole of the blogosphere. It’s important not to get too carried away. I wonder how much in the online discussion has spilled over into common rooms and group meetings around the world? I fret sometimes that the online activity on this topic masks a lack on interest on the ground among researchers too focused on their next grant, next paper, next lecture or next committee meeting to devote time to the issue.

For that reason that I’m grateful to the Science Communication Forum at Imperial for organising, a discussion meeting next Thursday evening on open access, and in particular on the implications of the new RCUK OA policy. Mark Thorley of RCUK will present the new policy and then Richard van Norden will chair a discussion between Mark and myself and the rest of the audience. Also in attendance will be representatives from HEFCE, RLUK, NERC, Wellcome Trust, MRC, NIMR and the Imperial College Library

BOAI Logo

The new RCUK policy is a marked improvement on the current one. But although it surpasses some of the more tepid recommendations of the Finch report, the policy still falls short in some eyes of the ideals and declared goals of the open access movement, recently re-stated by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

If you’re in or near London next week, please come along — it promises to be a good session. As I wrote recently, people who know are asking are some important questions of the RCUK policy and its implications. The event is free to attend but you will have to reserve a place.

To get yourself in the mood, you could do worse than to peruse the BOAI statement, which defines the goals of the OA movement for the next ten years. It reveals a different set of emphases compared to Finch, with greater focus on the role of universities to mandate and facilitate the use of green OA routes.

The document is clearly laid out and easy to read, though it does come across as a little dry. For a more palatable alternative that provides additional context, allow me to point you towards this excellent interview by Richard Poynder with Alma Swan, one of the central architects of the statement and an expert and thoughtful advocate for OA.

 

Posted in Open Access | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

What is it like to be a Scientist?

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Stephen

It is a year to the day since the release of my film, “I’m a Scientist“, in which six different scientists talk openly about their lives in the laboratory and what makes them tick. The aim of the film is very much to cut through the myth that all scientists are heroes and geniuses.

To mark this first anniversary and to make the film more useful in the classroom, I have split it into ten bite-sized chunks. Apart from the introduction and closing credits, there are eight short segments in which the scientists interviewed give their answers to a specific question, such as: How did you get interested in science? Do you have a Nobel Prize? What does it take to make a good scientist? And, is science fun?

 

 

If you haven’t come across the film before, please take a look. If you have friends who are teachers, please send them the link. I know it has already gone down well in schools (much like the “I’m a scientist, get me out of here” competition that inspired it) and would love for “I’m a Scientist” to get more air-time in classrooms around the world.

 

Posted in Science & Media | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Booked

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Stephen

Everyone of a certain pretension likes to think they have a book inside them. I know I do.

But I’ve looked and I can’t find it. Maybe it’s in there somewhere but at too early a stage of germination to be visible. All I know is that I have searched and come up wanting.

The situation is made all the more galling by the fact that everyone I meet these days seems either to have written a book or to be in the midst of producing one. Or if not, they’re working on a bloody book proposal. It’s starting to get on my nerves.

Even several of my co-bloggers here at Occam’s Typewriter are authors of books. You’d think they’d be a bit more sensitive but the talent and productivity of Jennifer Rohn, Steve Caplan and Henry Gee sicken me. Gee I find particularly nauseating: he writes fiction and non-fiction. God Almighty.

That reminds me: Alom Shaha is another of those annoyingly gifted people who has produced a tome.

But today I can cover my inadequacy with a tiny laurel: a book is being published that has my name on the cover. That there are fifty-two other names on the cover is completely irrelevant. Well, almost.

Cover: The Best Science Writing Online 2012

The name of the book is ‘The best science writing online 2012’ and includes 51 of the best science blog posts of last year, selected by a team shepherded by Jennifer Ouellette, the whole process being overseen as ever by Bora Zivkovic. My contribution, ‘Joule’s Jewel‘, is on a paper by the 19th Century physicist recounting his careful measurements to demonstrate the equivalence of work and heat, but you will find plenty of other gems in there too, not the least of which is Richard Wintle’s two-part Shakespearean take on genome sequencing.

Please have a look. Buy a copy for your loved one. It only costs pennies — six hundred and seventy-one of them — and will give you a glimpse of some of the sweetest writing on science that has been scooped from the internet.

The book is available from today at Amazon in the US. Alas, on this side of the pond, you will have to wait until Oct 13.

 

P.S. Thanks to Bora for providing the image of the cover (Courtesy of Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux; design by Jason Heuer).

 

Posted in Book Review | Tagged | 19 Comments

Evaluating scientists: take care

Posted on September 8, 2012 by Stephen

A resonant blogpost is the gift that keeps on giving. One of the latest comments in my Sick of Impact Factors polemic bemoaning the corrosive effects of journal impact factors on scientific lives provided a link to a quite wonderful paper.

I missed Alexis Verger’s comment when it dropped into my blog on August 31st. By the time I had caught up with it, a colleague at work had also emailed me the paper — ‘Evaluating how we evaluate‘ by Ronald Vale (PDF)* — suggesting it might be of interest.

Evaluating how we evaluate

It certainly was.

Vale’s paper provides a lucid and considered examination of the measures that we in the scientific community use to assess one another. He makes it clear that on too many counts we are doing a poor job of evaluation.

The first section, on the pernicious effects of journal impact factors, rang many bells with me of course, but Vale goes beyond this single issue to look at how numbers of publications, lab sizes, scientific collaborations and contributions to training and education are all too often judged numerically, and therefore superficially.

Please read it. Every working scientist should. Vale reaches deep into his subject and touches on problems that many sense but feel unable to resolve, in particular the unbalanced demands of research and teaching and the difficulty of sustaining a scientific career. From my reading it was clear that Vale’s anodyne title and dispassionate style belie strongly held convictions. I can’t do justice to his paper with a summary and in any case prefer not to delay your own reading but, as a taster, here he is on community and education:

“While scholarly achievement and grants sustain the core mission of research institutions, education and community service also are important and creative endeavors; they contribute immensely to the culture of an institution and the future of our profession. These efforts should be respected and deserve more than lip service during a review for academic promotion. Academic evaluation predicated too narrowly on papers and impact factors steers young scientists away from educational/community activities if these activities contribute only minimally to their overall evaluation. This sends the wrong message to young scientists, especially at a stage when many desire both to be altruistic and to advance their careers.”

Vale, finally, is in no doubt where the responsibility lies and I couldn’t agree more.

“As stewards of our profession, academic scientists have a collective responsibility to consider how to disseminate knowledge through publications and how to advance graduate students to postdocs, postdocs to assistant professors, and assistant professors to tenure and beyond. These processes are not out of our hands, predetermined, or immutable.”

 

*Update (9-9-2012): Thanks to Alexis Verger for pointing out (see comment below) the link to the PDF of the paper at Vale’s web-site. You will also find there other examples of his opinion pieces.

Posted in Scientific Life | Tagged , | 15 Comments

Key Questions for Open Access Policy in the UK

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Stephen

It’s not even two months since the tectonic plates shifted underneath academic publishing in the UK. But in the few weeks since the government’s response to the Finch report and the announcement of the new open access (OA) policy of the UK Research Councils (RCUK), the ground has settled. The contours of the new landscape can be more clearly discerned but still lack definition in places. Not everyone is happy with what they see.

From April 2013 RCUK will require all its funded researchers to publish in OA journals. They will be able do this by paying an article processing charge (APC) from funds awarded by the research councils to the their institution so that the publisher makes the paper freely available on publication (gold OA). Alternatively, the researcher can go down the green OA route, in which the author’s unformatted, peer-reviewed manuscript can be posted online, typically in an institutional repository, several months after journal publication. This route is free but permitted under the new policy only if the publisher’s embargo is less than 6 months (12 for papers in the humanities and social sciences).

In principle, both gold and green routes to OA comply with the RCUK new policy, but in practice the emphasis is on gold.

Although I raised questions about the costs and implementation of the new policy, I was generally positive in my initial response to what I saw — and still see — as a bold move. But I have been reassessing in the light of analyses of Finch and the RCUK policy by people who have thought about open access for a lot longer than me: Alma Swan, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad. Between them, these three have written a great deal about the ramifications of policy changes in the UK. Their analyses are well worth reading but they are pretty long, so I thought I would try to distill the key questions as we start to figure how the policy will work in practice, something that RCUK acknowledges still needs to be sorted out.

Is gold OA the best route to worldwide OA? In Going for Gold (PDF), published in June this year, Alma Swan and John Houghton looked at the likely costs of gold OA for a range of APCs and universities with different levels of research output. They concluded that all institutions — even the most research-intensive — would save money from worldwide Gold OA as long as APCs were kept under £2000. Savings would be considerable if the APC were to be held at the current average, which is £571.

But this refers to a post-transition world where there are no journal subscriptions and we are some way from that. The same report finds that use of green OA during the transition would be about 80% cheaper than the cost of gold OA.

RCUK have gone for gold OA because, if I have understood the argument on their blog, they want to insist on a CC-BY licence for papers to maximise their re-use since that “allows others to modify, build upon and/or distribute the licensed work, including for commercial purposes, as long as the original author is credited”. Certainly the licence facilitates exploitation of the research literature but should CC-BY be a priority for the transition?

In the comments on the RCUK blog Peter Murray-Rust has argued that ‘billions’ are wasted because the current literature is not machine accessible (which requires CC-BY), but Harnad sees licensing as a secondary issue and countered that the current restrictions due to expensive subscriptions costs ‘trillions’. For him the absolute priority is to establish free green OA so that the research community (the primary user of the academic literature) can get access. But who is right? Where do these numbers come from? The importance of text-mining has been analysed by JISC: they see clear benefits but don’t attach numbers to them. This is hardly surprising given the forecasting difficulties but clearer acknowledgement of this by opposing sides of the CC-BY argument might lead to more productive discussion.

Can we pave the transition with gold? Swan, Suber and Harnad all have concerns that the emphasis on gold OA for the transition period is too costly. Finch estimated that £50-60m per year would be needed to cover excess costs during the transition (when APCs and subscriptions would both have to be paid), but these figures are very uncertain. In any case, just as important is the need to consider how the RCUK policy is likely to affect the behaviour of publishers.

Harnad and Suber have both expressed the fear that the policy is a gift to publishers because they could simply extend their green OA embargo period to beyond 6 months in order to oblige authors to pay gold OA APCs to comply with the RCUK stipulations. The temptation to adopt this stratagem seems irresistible; it makes good business sense, especially for journals that trade on their impact factors. The policy could therefore simultaneously inhibit the spread of green OA options and lead to hikes in APCs. Suber also points out that journals that currently offer free gold OA publishing will be induced by the new RCUK policy to start charging. These are perverse outcomes for a policy designed to promote open access.

Swan sees a threat to costs from another direction, arguing that RCUK’s preference for gold over green OA favours the status quo by protecting the income streams of publishers and so inhibiting the entry to the market of publishing innovators who are likely to offer better value for money.

We shall have to see how that plays out — much remains frustratingly uncertain — but the development of the market will depend very much on the behaviour of purchaser and under the new policy these will be researchers’ institutions. To fund APCs the research councils will allocate block grants (from existing budgets) to the institutions where their grant-holders work. But how will APC funds be determined by research councils and how will universities allocate them? Given that the over-stretched UK research budget is in decline, it is unlikely that universities will get all the funds they need and I see scope aplenty for administrative headaches. Universities and their researchers will be torn between maximising value for money and — as ever, alas — chasing after expensive high impact factor journals to feed their REF returns and grant applications.

These tensions will be exacerbated if publishers move to eliminate green OA options in the quest for gold OA fees from UK researchers.

Swan, Suber and Harnad all agree that incorporation of a strong mandate for green OA in the RCUK policy would help to remedy many of the problems that have been identified. The lack of emphasis on green OA is seen as the direct result of the influence of publishers on the Finch working group, who were understandably seeking to protect their interests. But the trio of commentators agree that UK policy should first serve the interests of researchers (and the taxpayer) rather than those of publishers. The government is oddly conflicted in its attitude to the policy: although keen on value for money and the winnowing power of market forces, it appears to want protect publishing companies based in the UK from the storms of uncertainty that the push for OA is creating.

The lack of resolution of the gold vs green emphasis is problematic, particularly because no-one, and I really mean no-one, has an idea how long it will take to complete the transition to worldwide OA (when subscription monies can finally be transferred to pay APCs). For how many years is the UK prepared to pay excess transition costs? That question immediately raises another one: why isn’t the RCUK policy aiming to minimise the length and therefore the cost of the transition?

Part of the answer is surely that we cannot calculate how long it will take other countries to make the same commitment to OA as the UK. It is clear that concerted international action will be important, as Science Minister David Willetts has already acknowledged. But if coordination between governments is so crucial, asks Swan, why is the UK pursuing a policy that is out of kilter with the US, the EU, Denmark and Australia where green OA mandates are gaining traction?

I wish I knew the answers to these questions. I remain upbeat about policy developments in the UK: we have made huge strides this year. But in my darker moments I fear that we will still be arguing about these issues in 10 or 20 years time and we cannot afford to do that. I hope that all sides will recognise that the current position cannot be final, that the landscape is still shifting and that it needs to be shaped by us to make sure that worldwide OA works.

 

Posted in Open Access | Tagged , , , , | 14 Comments

Sick of Impact Factors: Coda

Posted on August 19, 2012 by Stephen

My ‘Sick of Impact Factors‘ blog post seems to have struck much more of a chord than I anticipated. At the time of writing it has attracted over 12,900 page views and 460 tweets, far higher than my usual tallies.

The post also generated over 130 comments, which is a daunting number for anyone who now stumbles across the post; but since the comment thread contains several useful ideas and insights from scientists and journal editors, I wanted to highlight them in a summary post.

 

Useful links

Several people flagged up papers and reports that I had not previously spotted. It is just this sort of productive interaction that makes the blog form so wonderful.

Ross Mounce pointed out that he had previously discussed the non-utility of Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) and and linked to a useful opinion piece by Per Seglen.

Tom Webb mentioned a paper by Brian D. Cameron that provides the historical context for the JIF discussion.

Jason Priem, one of the authors of the Altmetrics manifesto pointed to the Total Impact web-site (one attempt to put altmetrics into action) and to a Chronicle of Higher Education article on alt metrics.

But for me, Stephan Schleim provided the most interesting link, to a revealing comparison of means and medians between Nature and two Psychology journals. It provides a great example of the futility of JIFs in their current form and is a must-read#.

There were also interesting commentaries on the post from Telescoper, Bjorn Brembs, DrugMonkey and Tom Webb.

 

Concerns about metrics

Richard van Noorden wondered if it is the fixation on metrics that is the root of the problem and suggests that article-level metrics are not likely solve the problem. This concern was shared by others (Stephen Moss was at particular pains to emphasis the need to actually read papers when assessing them and their authors) and I would agree that the use of any metric runs this risk. However, the particular problem at the moment is the fixation on a single metric that is of no statistical merit.

David Colquhoun cautioned that there is no evidence that the use of metrics of any kind is a reliable way to judge scientific quality; however, as discussed in the comment thread (e.g. by Chris Chambers), there is no easy way to do a proper experiment on this.

It came to light from comments on the post and on Twitter that some funding agencies and university faculties require JIFs to be included in lists of publications applications for funding or promotion. One commenter was explicitly instructed by his HoD to include JIFs to make it easier for the person assessing his application. There was no keener illustration of the idiocy of the processes to which the research community has to endure. I find myself wondering what the general public would make of this.

Some argued that JIF should at least be maintained as a fair measure of journal ranking but this view ignores the gaming and trickery that goes on (see comments by David Howey and Bob O’Hara), the inappropriateness of a mean for such a skewed distribution and the arbitrariness of the two-year time window which seriously undervalues some journals/fields (see especially the link posted by Stephan Schleim).

Steve Caplan suggested that people will always want to aim for ‘high-ranking’ journals, whether or not they are judged by impact factor. I sense this view is widely held but would like to suggest that the rise of PLOS ONE shows that the landscape is changing. Rather than rely on a journal brand (and suffering the delays of working our way down the rankings during manuscript submission), we should be aiming to get good quality work published quickly and after peer review that only focuses on the quality and coherence of the manuscript, rather than on guesses about likely future significance. The community is well-placed to judge significance after publication; the key — and non-trivial — question is how to go about that.

 

What alternative metrics (altmetrics) might we use instead of the JIF?

Setting aside for a moment the concerns listed above, no-one (myself included) seemed to have clear ideas on what metrics to use, though there is plenty of development work going on in this area. Some wondered whether tweets or Facebook likes should be counted as a meaningful statistic but there is little enthusiasm for such measures, in large part because they are effortless to make and so run the risk of representing snap or ill-considered judgements.

I think the key will be to gather information from people that we trust. That trust needs to be established over time (as on Twitter) by a consistent pattern of linking to quality material or making thoughtful comments. Development of unique identifiers (as suggested by Cromercrox) might enable us to build a community like the Faculty of 1000 but much bigger and offering greater coverage.

But the whole business of metrics remains rather foggy.

 

What action should we take?

It was great to have such a vigorous response to my post but I would like all of us who have taken an interest in this issue to make sure that we take action of some sort. Can I suggest that we:

  • Keep banging on about the futility and idiocy of using JIFs
  • Get funders and university administrators to publicly disavow their use and issue clear guidance to panel members and reviewers. The Wellcome Trust has made a start (see last bullet point here).
  • Encourage wider use of open peer-review, where reviewers’ and authors’ comments are published alongside papers; this may foster more online commentary post-publication*.
  • Support the adoption of unique identifiers for authors, to be used when publishing or making any online comment on work — this should help to build reputations and trust among the commenting community*.

If anyone has additional suggestions, please add them to the comments.

#Update (20-8-2012; 21:10): But see comment from Pep Pàmies and ensuing discussion.

*These suggestions prompted by a comment from Cromercrox

Posted in Open Access, Scientific Life | Tagged , , | 47 Comments

Sick of Impact Factors

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Stephen

I am sick of impact factors and so is science.

The impact factor might have started out as a good idea, but its time has come and gone. Conceived by Eugene Garfield in the 1970s as a useful tool for research libraries to judge the relative merits of journals when allocating their subscription budgets, the impact factor is calculated annually as the mean number of citations to articles published in any given journal in the two preceding years.

By the early 1990s it was clear that the use of the arithmetic mean in this calculation is problematic because the pattern of citation distribution is so skewed. Analysis by Per Seglen in 1992 showed that typically only 15% of the papers in a journal account for half the total citations. Therefore only this minority of the articles has more than the average number of citations denoted by the journal impact factor. Take a moment to think about what that means: the vast majority of the journal’s papers — fully 85% — have fewer citations than the average. The impact factor is a statistically indefensible indicator of journal performance; it flatters to deceive, distributing credit that has been earned by only a small fraction of its published papers.

But the real problem started when impact factors began to be applied to papers and to people, a development that Garfield never anticipated. I can’t trace the precise origin of the growth but it has become a cancer that can no longer be ignored. The malady seems to particularly afflict researchers in science, technology and medicine who, astonishingly for a group that prizes its intelligence, have acquired a dependency on a valuation system that is grounded in falsity. We spend our lives fretting about how high an impact factor we can attach to our published research because it has become such an important determinant in the award of the grants and promotions needed to advance a career. We submit to time-wasting and demoralising rounds of manuscript rejection, retarding the progress of science in the chase for a false measure of prestige.

Twenty years on from Seglen’s analysis a new paper by Jerome Vanclay from Southern Cross University in Australia has reiterated the statistical ineptitude of using arithmetic means to rank journals and highlighted other problems with the impact factor calculation. Vanclay points out that it fails to take proper account of data entry errors in the titles or dates of papers, or of the deficient and opaque sampling methods used by Thomson Reuters in its calculation. Nor, he observes, does the two-year time limit placed on the impact factor calculation accommodate variations in the temporal citation patterns between different fields and journals; peak citations to Nature papers occurs 2-3 years following publication whereas citations of papers in Ecology take much more time to accrue and are maximal only after 7-8 years). Whichever way you look, the impact factor is a mis-measure.

Vanclay’s paper is a worthy addition to the critical literature on the impact factor. Its defects and perverse effects are well known and have been dissected by David Colquhoun, Michael Eisen and Peter Lawrence, among others. Even Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, which has one of the highest impact factors in the business, has recognised that we need to escape its dispiriting hold over the lives of researchers.

Writing in 2008, Campbell (albeit somewhat uncertainly) saw a possible solution to the impact factor conundrum in the rise of mega-journals like PLoS ONE, which publish exclusively online and judge papers only on their novelty and technical competence, and in the potential of article-level metrics to assess the scientific worth of papers and their authors. In the end, however, he couldn’t shake the editorial habit of selection, writing of the contents of archives and mega-journals: “nobody wants to have to wade through a morass of papers of hugely mixed quality, so how will the more interesting papers […] get noticed as such?”

Four years later such views are being buffeted by the rising tides of open access and social media. It might sound paradoxical but nobody should have to wade through the entire literature because everybody could be involved in the sifting.

The trick will be to crowd-source the task. Now I am not suggesting we abandon peer-review; I retain my faith in the quality control provided by expert assessment of manuscripts before publication, but this should simply be a technical check on the work, not an arbiter of its value. The long tails of barely referenced papers in the citation distributions of all journals — even those of high rank — are evidence enough that pre-publication peer review is an unreliable determinant of ultimate worth.

Instead we need to find ways to attach to each piece of work the value that the scientific community places on it though use and citation. The rate of accrual of citations remains rather sluggish, even in today’s wired world, so attempts are being made to capture the internet buzz that greets each new publication; there are interesting innovations in this regard from the likes of PLOS, Mendeley and altmetrics.org.

The old guard may be shaking their heads and murmuring darkly about gaming of any system that tries to capture the web-chatter sparked by new research. But they shouldn’t be so concerned. Any working scientist will have experienced the thrill of hearing exciting new findings reported at a conference where results do not need to be wrapped between the covers of a particular journal for their significance to be appreciated. All it takes is for people to gather together in the coffee break and talk. The web allows something akin that process to be energised on a daily basis; if we tap in online as the community of scientists downloads and flags up the papers of greatest interest to them, we could recover a sense of the worth of the scientific literature (and the efforts behind it) that is factual rather than fictional.

These developments go hand in hand with the rise of open access (OA) publishing. Though primarily motivated by the research and societal benefits that will accrue from freeing the dissemination of the research literature, open access is also needed to optimise crowd-sifting of the literature by making it accessible to everyone. But the growth of open access is also being held back by the leaden hand of the impact factor. This year has seen several significant policy developments in the US, EU and UK, but we still have a considerable way to go. In the long term open access can only work by moving to a gold ‘author pays’ model that has to be funded by monies released from subscription cancellations, but while we continue to place false value in impact factors, the publishers of high ranking journals can claim that the cost of sifting and rejecting scores of manuscripts must be borne by the system and therefore warrants exorbitant charges for gold OA.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can avoid high cost gold OA and achieve a system of valuation that works by ridding ourselves of the impact factor.

I don’t wish to under-estimate the difficulties. I am well aware of the risks involved, particularly to young researchers trying to forge a career in a culture that is so inured to the impact factor. It will take a determined and concerted effort from those in a position of influence, not least by senior researchers, funders and university administrators. It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick. Two decades of criticism have done little to break the addiction to a measure of worth that is statistically worthless.

But every little helps, so, taking my cue from society’s assault on another disease-laden dependency, it is time to stigmatise impact factors the way that cigarettes have been. It is time to start a smear campaign so that nobody will look at them without thinking of their ill effects, so that nobody will mention them uncritically without feeling a prick of shame.

So consider all that we know of impact factors and think on this: if you use impact factors you are statistically illiterate.

  • If you include journal impact factors in the list of publications in your cv, you are statistically illiterate.
  • If you are judging grant or promotion applications and find yourself scanning the applicant’s publications, checking off the impact factors, you are statistically illiterate.
  • If you publish a journal that trumpets its impact factor in adverts or emails, you are statistically illiterate. (If you trumpet that impact factor to three decimal places, there is little hope for you.)
  • If you see someone else using impact factors and make no attempt at correction, you connive at statistical illiteracy.

The stupid, it burns. Do you feel the heat?

I need to thank David Colquhoun for inadvertently helping to inspire this post.

Update 20-8-2012: Anyone looking in horror at the long comment thread might be interested to know it has now been summarised in my following post.

Posted in Open Access, Science | Tagged , , | 233 Comments

Here goes something: Occam’s Typewriter cornered

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Stephen

Well this is nice. Today Occam’s Typewriter opens a new cornershop, so to speak, at the Guardian.

For me, this closes a social media circle that started over four years ago because I can trace my entry to the scientific blogosphere to the time I heard someone called Jennifer Rohn talking about ‘Lablit’ – literature threaded with science and scientists – on the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast. After hearing it I summoned up my courage and emailed Jenny, then a stranger, to suggest she include Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels on her lab lit list. Cleverly, Jenny responded by challenging me to make my case and so, for the first time in my life, I published something on the Internet that wasn’t a scientific paper.

That first blooding was enough to tip me into science blogging proper. So it is nice, today, to find myself back at the Guardian.

We hope you’ll enjoy our forays at Occam’s Corner.

 

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Posted in Blogging, Communication, Science & Media | Tagged , | 6 Comments

“You can’t read this book” but you should

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Stephen

Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympic Games spread a warm glow through liberal hearts. His imaginative sweep over British history and culture, which managed to be both reverent and irreverent, was filled with a human chaos that constituted a nicely judged response to the shock and awe of the massed ranks who launched the Beijing games. Better yet, Boyle’s history lesson also pointedly recalled 20th Century protests for women’s and workers rights and had the temerity to remind the incumbent UK government of the value of the National Health Service it has set about dismantling. The ceremony spoke truth to power and pushed at boundaries, apparently being responsible for the first lesbian kiss to be broadcast on Saudi TV.

Alex Wolff, writing for Sports Illustrated in the US, captured the import of Boyle’s audacious vision: “He gave us a chance to celebrate protest and dissent.” Evidently caught in the moment he rounded off his paean to the ceremony with the words, “To speak one’s mind or assert one’s rights is as irrepressible a human instinct as running or jumping. Of that, let us be not afeared.”

Wolff’s piece cropped up time and again on my Twitter feed on Saturday, much liked by the like-minded whom I follow.

You can't read this book

But lest we should be carried away on the liberal currents sweeping out from the ceremony, may I recommend Nick Cohen’s ‘You can’t read this book’ as a stinging slap that will wake you from this pleasant delusion?

Cohen’s book on censorship is a terrific but terrifying read. I was surprised to be so shocked by it. As a paid up member of Amnesty International, a lifelong Guardian reader, and someone who has followed closely the campaign to reform the abysmal libel laws of this country (which features prominently in the book), I had supposed his analysis of the modern ways and means of suppressing freedom of speech would be wholly familiar territory.

Indeed I had already heard of most of the incidents that Cohen assembles to build his case. But it’s one thing to half-remember newspaper reports of censorship and harassment over the course of several years, where the impact is serial and diluted by time; it is quite another to have them assembled into a powerful and far-reaching critique of the watery intellectualism of much of western policy-making in the past couple of decades.

The book pulses with examples and argument. Cohen never lets up as he rips into the corroding censorship reaching into almost every aspect of modern life.

He starts with religion, focusing on the response of Western democracies to the threats of violence from Islamic extremists. Like a tenacious boxer Cohen uses case after case — the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the reaction to Danish cartoons satirising Islam and the persecution of women’s rights activist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, being just a few of the incidents cited — to batter the ‘identity politics’ that have, though self-censorship, ceded ground to religious fundamentalists who are too demanding of respect and too quick to take offence.

But the suppressive power of God on Earth — which remains a fearful concern that takes real courage to resist — is not Cohen’s only concern. The latter half of the book warns of the ease with which governments, corporations and wealthy individual can silence their critics within and without, all to the detriment of society at large. The stifling of insiders by corporate hierarchies that refuse to be questioned, to take just one example, was a significant contributing factor in the banking collapse of 2008. Cohen reminds us that censorship costs us our money, as well our freedoms.

Even the advent of the world-wide web, commonly supposed to have engendered freedom of expression on a global scale, with power sufficient to topple governments in north Africa in the past year, does not escape the lash of Cohen’s critique. I don’t entirely share his pessimism but his points are well made and bear thinking about: publishing for the masses it may be, but the web is also a potent distraction that fragments audiences and provides too many escapes into cliques of the like-minded. Nor, he warns, should we underestimate the ability of the rich and powerful to bend it to their purpose. Reports last night of that a UK journalist has been banned from Twitter* for publishing the corporate email address of the NBC executive so that others might join in his criticism of the company’s Olympic coverage provide an unfortunate but timely reminder of Cohen’s point.

‘You can’t read this book’ is driven by a burning, principled anger. On rare occasions it might spill over into purple prose, but the urgency and immediacy of the issues at stake make that forgivable, especially since Cohen is at sensible pains to remind us that the solutions to these problems were worked out centuries ago.

He calls on Milton (memorably quoted by the judges who found in favour of Simon Singh’s libel battle with the British Chiropractic Association) to reiterate the point that religious ‘truth’ should have no rights above any other kind of truth in a free society. Mills is brought in to explain the value of complete freedom of expression that, while firmly in the grip of the founding fathers who wrote the First Amendment to the US Constitution, has been forgotten in the fearful censoriousness of recent times: “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the key condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”

Amen to that.

 

Update (09:58, 01-08-2012): The reporter, Guy Adams, has now been unbanned and Twitter have acknowledged their mistake.

Posted in Book Review, Libel Reform, Science & Politics | Tagged , , | 22 Comments

Your Invitation to the Open Access Debate

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Stephen

I said the open access debate had been torrid. And it continues apace in the wake of last week’s announcements from the UK government and RCUK, the organisation that represents the common interests of Britain’s Research Councils.

This week at the Guardian, Paul Ayris, the director of library services at University College London, has taken a rather dim view of the UK’s new-found enthusiasm for the gold model of open access (in which the author pays up front for immediate access with minimal restrictions on reuse), whereas I have tried to be more sanguine. Some would say ‘idiotic’ but that’s the Guardian comment thread for you (actually rather tame in this instance).

The key point for the moment is that, despite the announcements, nothing has been fixed in stone, so now is an ideal opportunity to work out how we shape the implementation. Much has been left for research institutions to decide for themselves. There is a fairly robust discussion going on underneath my Guardian piece. I think it’s important that we have these arguments — and that as many stakeholders as possible are involved, if only to prepare themselves for discussion within their own institutions. I don’t claim any special knowledge and have found the debate (over the course of these past few months) very illuminating. I invite you to join in.

And as if that were not enough, have a look also at Cameron Neylon’s thoughtful post on how to resolve the particular challenges of OA to learned societies who rely heavily on subscription income that now appears to be under threat.

Finally, while I’m linking to things, there are fine pieces on open access in the Telegraph (by Mark Henderson) and the Economist; and two divergent opinions in the letters page of last week’s Nature (PDF; paywall).

 

Posted in Open Access | Tagged , | 7 Comments

UK Government Goes For Broke on Open Access

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Stephen

Well that was quick. Less than a month after the Finch working group published its recommendations on the future of open access, UK science minister David Willetts has responded, saying in effect “Let’s go for it.” The government has taken essentially all of the recommendations on board and has committed the country to making all its publicly-funded research available for free online by 2014.

Except that it’s not quite that simple. There are weak points in the government’s response, but in other areas the policy implementation has actually gone beyond what Finch recommended. Let me deal with the weaknesses first.

The point-by-point response (4-page PDF) by David Willetts to the ten recommendations, which cover a range of issues, makes it clear that there will be no new money to lubricate the transition to open access. As a result, the implementation of several of the recommendations remains decidedly aspirational. It is yet to be seen how the health sector or businesses will secure access to the research literature, how university libraries will negotiate with publishers to ensure that subscription prices reflect the increase in open access content, or how scholarly monographs will be paid for (a major concern for he social sciences and humanities). These matters are now left for the relevant institutions and stakeholders to figure out — but with no timescale for resolution imposed.

On the plus side, the proposals that relate most directly to the work of publicly-funded researchers are laid out much more clearly because they have already incorporated into the new open access policy of Research Councils UK (RCUK), which was also timed for release today. The policy appears to have retained all the muscle that was evident in a draft document that was circulated back in March and even shows signs of having worked out. It’s a strong statement that surpasses the Finch recommendations.

For starters, from 1st April 2013:

Peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils:

1. must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access

2. must include details of the funding that supported the research, and a statement on how the underlying research materials – such as data, samples or models – can be accessed.

The document makes it clear that a compliant journal is one that permits either immediate free access to readers on payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC) (gold OA) or, if that option is not made available by the publisher, allows the author to deposit their final peer-reviewed version in a repository (green OA) no more than 6 months after publication (12 months for AHRC and ESRC funded work in the humanities, economics and social sciences).

What is more, if an APC is paid, the article must be accorded a CC-BY Creative Commons licence, which allows extensive rights to copy and distribute the content, even by commercial organisations. If no APC is paid, the deposited copy must still be made available “without restrictions on non-commercial re-use” (I think this may mean CC-BY-NC but would welcome any correction). These are robust conditions.

What is even more is that both routes to open access must allow “unrestricted use of manual and automated text and data mining tools”, a condition that will facilitate deeper and broader analyses of the research literature.

And that’s not all — condition 2 above places an obligation on authors to ensure that the data that their conclusions are based on are also made available and should be clearly sign-posted within the paper. This is an important dimension to open access — it is good for transparency and for research integrity. I half suspect this a response to criticisms of climate scientists who, in the wake of climategate were criticised for not making their data easily accessible; but perhaps it simply reflects a growing trend.

What about the money, and the vexed issue of costs, which has excited much of the negative response to the Finch report? Here again there is bad and good. On the bad side, there is no new money to help the excess costs of transition (when OA and subscription costs have to be borne), but that is hardly a surprise in these austere times and may even help to exert some downward pressure on the level of APCs.

The good thing, however, is that the Research Councils have finally adopted a flexible model for funding of  publications that is similar to the one adopted by the Wellcome Trust. What will now happen is that money for publication costs, rather than being included in time-limited funding awards to individual investigators, will be paid as a block grant to the host institution, which will be required to establish a open access fund. This nicely addresses a criticism I made back in February, but what isn’t yet clear is exactly how these awards will be calculated. I imagine there is some concern among universities as to whether the Research Councils will get their sums right. Nevertheless establishment of such funds (already in existence in some universities, including my own), also creates a possible mechanism for the transfer of journal subscription funds, currently provided via HEFCE, as the publication model shifts from subscriptions to APC-supported open access.

There is still much to be done.  The UK government deserves credit for staking out its position so boldly but this is a risky stratagem and it it to be hoped that its ambition will set an example for other countries to emulate. We can have some reassurance in the fact that that there is already momentum towards open access in the US and the EU.

Moreover, as will be clear from this synopsis, many details of the process remain to be sorted. Some commentators have bemoaned the fact that the government’s endorsement panders too readily to publishers’ interests and current prices (see Stevan Harnad’s comments in the Guardian). However, it is important to see today’s announcement not as an end-point but as a beginning. If we, the community that generates and reviews the research literature, want a publication system that is accessible and effective and that represents good value for money, we have to agitate for it (and the attendant culture change, part of which will involve breaking free from impact factors). We have to get involved in the establishment of the publication funds at our universities and shape the ways that they are run. There is plenty of scope to get this right; the government has made a good start but it is down to us to finish the job.

 

If you would like to hear me being interviewed briefly about today’s announcement on the BBC World Service’s NewsHour, start at 44:00 (not sure how long this link will work).

Posted in Open Access, Science & Politics | Tagged , , | 23 Comments