Access to Science

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1 Panelists
2 Panel Description
3 Speaker Presentation Slides
4 Remote Questions for Panelists
5 Notes
6 Resources and papers

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Panelists

Speakers

Chris Armbruster - Founder and Executive Director, Research Network 1989
Subbiah Arunachalam - Distinguished Fellow, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai, India
Juan Carlos de Martin - Associate Professor, Politecnico di Torino
Larry Peiperl - Senior Editor, PLoS Medicine (Public Library of Science)
Sibusiso Sibisi - President and CEO, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Pretoria, South Africa

Moderator

Dan Burk - Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School

A2K2 Conference Organizer

Chris Riley - Student Fellow, Information Society Project, Yale Law School

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Panel Description

Scientific research in the modern era is often expensive, collaborative, multinational, and data intensive. Disseminating the results of this research often results in widespread social benefits, but it poses significant legal challenges. At a basic level, different countries' domestic legal regimes offer different levels of protection for databases of information. It is unlikely that intellectual property law, by itself, can be helpful here. Database-specific laws vary widely; for example, the European Union offers database protection as a separate system, but the United States does not. But even database-specific protection cannot address the needs of scientific information.

Research is often funded by private industry or through after the fact returns on intellectual property licenses, which may generate additional constraints on the distribution of the results. Much research, not just in the United States (through the NSF and NIH and other agencies) but in the world, is government funded. Does government funding carry with it an obligation to make the results accessible? How are these obligations changed for research which is funded through both public and private sources? Do the domestic norms of open access to government funded research translate to norms of international sharing of knowledge?

Numerous social movements are stepping in to facilitate this process. Some organize funding for research; some work to reduce the costs associated with the publication and dissemination of the research; some produce the tools and the communications networks and the databases to share the final results. Are these movements succeeding because or in spite of the ambiguous legal context for scientific information? What can be done to facilitate their efforts?

Questions to be discussed by the panel include:

What differentiates scientific knowledge from other forms of information?
What constraints exist on the open flow and dissemination of the results of scientific research? [Suggestions: money to fund complex research; incorporation of existing scientific knowledge blocked by domestic and international law]
What affirmative values can we use to structure our discussions and our responses? [Suggestions: free access to results of government funded research]
How can we best structure domestic and international legal systems to promote access to these results?
How does the culture of academic research affect the success of open access?
What successes and what failures have we had in recent years in creating social movements to fund scientific research and to promote the sharing of its results?
What lessons have these experiences taught us for the design of future social movements?

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Speaker Presentation Slides

Chris Armbruster - Image:A2K2-Armbruster.ppt

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Remote Questions for Panelists

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Notes

Professor Dan Burk
Thoughts from last year's Access to Science:

One reason Da Vinci had so little impact on science was the lack of journals; by the time of Galileo, publication and dissemination was more common, increasing his impact on the scientific community.
In the modern world, technology creates possibilities for cheaper production and distribution, but legal concerns (copyright law) constrain publication and dissemination.
Normative considerations in scholarship are transforming as well - the gatekeeper functionality of journals (as peer review for scientific publications) may be diluted through the reduced costs of publication and dissemination
Questions going forward: how can we use technology to increase access to science while retaining some form of the traditional gatekeeper functionality?

Chris Armbruster
Winner of the ISP/IJCLP writing competition - Cyberscience and the knowledge-base economy, available on SSRN

Development of Open Access:

Open access can be achieved by self-regulation alone
3 major steps
- Early stage: Creation of the movement; Mid-late 90s - beginning stages, including an early manifesto
- Next step: Establishment; Berlin Declaration on open access to knowledge (research articles), 2003
- Most recent: Money and Power; Research funders mandate OA2SK (especially in Europe with the European Research Council; the US is slightly behind), mandating open access to articles and even the data collected by the scientists (6-12 months after publication)

Key issues

Rise of e-Science (massive computing, data sharing, and so forth; requires open content, open information exchange, etc.) versus failure of entrepeneurial university (created in Russia among other places; far more closed in operations)
Rise of repositories (run by universities, often freely accessible) versus the failure of scholarly communication (incredible expenses and costs)
De-coupling of dissemination and certification - dissemination costs a nominal amount of money, but journals are expensive, with the rest of the money essentially going to certification. Online repositories and alternative certification methods may be far more efficient.
Nonexclusive licensing - how can a market be created that can serve as an alternative form of certification to traditional scholarly gatekeeping? The current situation is that authors generally sign away their copyrights in order to publish their papers.
Innovations to enhance access, inclusion and impact in scholarly communication - using technology to enhance not just the access but even the use and reading of the scientific knowledge.

Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun)

Developing world view on access to science.
"Knowledge wants to be free!"
Ranganathan - library is a "growing organism".
History of "print-on-paper" over centuries as the single most important means of knowledge exchange and dissemination.
Some commercial publishers have the highest profit margins of all businesses
In the modern world, the OA movement seeks to return science to the scientists. Other declarations on OA to science: Budapest, Berlin, Bethesda, and Bangalore.
Wellcome Trust and 5 of 7 research councils in UK have mandated OA.
Reasons behind OA movement
- Scholars want to share knowledge more than make money
- Technology enables open access
- Journal publishers have raised subscription costs too high
The research community is beginning to realize that sharing knowledge and building partnerships are the best means to advancing science.
Many major established societies are using copyright law, publishing agreements, PR consultants and lobbyists, and other heavy handed techniques to retain control.
It's important for universities and public interest organizations to fight for OA.
Open Course Ware is making great strides in support of the OA movement.
Google, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenburg are making many books available.

India

The Million Books Project
About 100 OA journals
Access to Open Course Ware
Need to improve understanding of copyright laws and limits on OA

Modern issues

Open Access has the potential to help understand and avert major disasters, including national security issues as well as SARS, avian flu, and other diseases.

Concluding

Open Access is not about publishers, it's about increasing access to knowledge.
It is about increasing the exchange of knowledge and about saving the world from poverty and terrorism.
Advances in technology are making it possible, but vested interests are holding it back.
There is surprising indifference from scientist and scholars themselves.

Sibusiso Sibisi

Main distinguishing features of science:
- Cumulative - "stand on shoulders"
- Massively collaborative
- Mix of text, data, visualization tools, and so forth
What must access offer?
- View, visualize, and maybe edit and develop science
- Access to scientific knowledge anywhere, any time, and for all time
'For all time' is not considered enough - formats must be standardized and open
Old spreadsheet product 'Wingz' from 1994 - lost formats, inaccessible now
Case study: UK Atomic Energy Authority - needs to preserve information concerning nuclear bunkers for hundreds or thousands of years, the length of the danger
- UKAEA produced 11,718 pieces of Permanent Paper (acid-free) to document it
Open Document standards are essential
- Historically common in science, e.g. TeX/LaTeX
- Lack of easy to use interface drove customers from LaTeX to proprietary formats
Open Document Format
- Fits the Open Access format
- Implemented within OpenOffice, but not yet very widespread (e.g. not supported by YLS's IT department)
- Some limited international adoption, but still a little behind
- South Africa has no searchable documents in ODF, but lots in DOC and PDF
CSIR has adopted ODF in an attempt to lead South Africa towards OA

Juan Carlos De Martin
Role of Universities in particular on OA to Scientific Knowledge

Much of information is in the heads of professors and is to be transferred to the heads of students
Primary role of universities = education; secondary = research
Objective: maximize contribution of universities in quality and quantity
University has input and output to outside world of information
- Input requires open access (to outside information)
- Output should be directed as much as possible towards the "commons"
Obstacles to Input
- Cost of journals
- Limits of fair use as limit on copyright law
- Privatization
- DRM
- Digital Divide
- Lack of authoritative references (e.g. transience of WWW)
Internal obstacles
- Education: It takes extra work for the professor to make material available on the WWW. It's hard to get non-OA-minded professors to clean up their presentations and lectures and make them available. Part of this is a generic fear of scrutiny from sharing material with more than just the immediate students. Part of it is also a fear of copyright liability, as a lot of tables and other information is taken from copyrighted sources.
- Research: There is a fear of scrutiny here as well, in case the data is incomplete or looks bad to funding agencies. There's also a fear of competition.
- Organizational: No clear information policy at a university, as they're dealing mostly with patents still, and not content
Recommendations
- Encourage open access archives and journals
- Bolster fair use protections
- Shape social norms
  - "Republic of science" based on transparent transfer of knowledge
  - Also a duty to the public, esp for public universities
- Comprehensive information policy
  - Default rules - to place everything in the commons by default - can help a lot
- Copyright aid
  - Explain copyright laws and behaviors
  - Negotiate as an entity with publishers to get better, more open deals
  - Provide funds to encourage OA publication instead of proprietary
- Acquire funding on a more national level (e.g. through EU) to encourage OA

Larry Peiperl

Providing a view of progress and specific problems to OA at the journal level.
A lot of stakeholders are involved in this process.
Quoting Arun: "Copyright, which ought to protect the creator, is actually protecting an intermediary in the production chain." Uses Jack and the Beanstalk as a metaphor.
Lots of problems with publishers holding copyrights, including limitations on technological possibilities of the internet and data mining, and the blocking of public dissemination of publicly funded research.
Life cycle of a Scientists - Funding drives publication which increases status which acquires funding.
How does OA fit into the life cycle? Though many researchers signed a petition to only publish in open access journals, but needed to (and did) publish in high prestige closed-access journals that forbade open access archiving.
PLoS was created to ensure an open-access home for every paper worth publishing.
PLoS includes 3 tiers of publications to fit different levels of prestige and to maintain the gatekeeper functionality of journals.
Requirements of OA publishing as achieved by PLoS:
- Licensed through Creative Commons.
- Deposited on internet repository at NIH (PubMed Central).
Thus far, PLoS is succeeding - plenty of submissions, tight acceptance rate, etc.
PLoS does rigorous peer review within OA mission and business model.
Why not use OA to improve quality, even beyond paper journals?
- Quality control can increase post-publication through modern technology
PLoS ONE - use some objective pre-publication peer review, focused on rigor and ethics, but use collaborative community review (online rating, annotation, comments)
- Has published 400 papers since its launch in late 2006
Questions: Will OA support the typical life cycle? Will it provide prestige?
- The market is starting to change, but slowly.
- After a survey, about half of respondents felt that OA publications lack long term availability, do not have the same impact, and are not as well known.
Common questions from would-be authors:
- "May I have permission to re-use part of my paper?" (If their priority were OA, they would know they don't need this)
- "What's your impact factor?"
Important factors for publication are dissemination first, prestige second.
- OA helps with dissemination above all others, but prestige is not as obvious.
Major hurdle to improve OA: improving perceptions of prestige.
- One way to do this: get funding agencies involved. Wellcome Trust and others are helping with this, mandating the use of OA archives, at least.
  - There are still technical limitations for open access archives, and they cannot replace open access journals.
- Another approach: improve status from within.
  - Try to improve the metrics beyond the formal "#citations/#articles" impact factor.
Closing: Quote from Stephen Berry on the responsibility of government to fund publishing and to make the results available.

Q&A:

Q1. Research results are needed in places where the Internet isn't available. ODF is a great start, but the digital divide is still problematic. The centrality of the English language is a problem as well - meaningful access also needs translation and other accommodations.
Q2. Industries, such as Intel, have a great stake as well in increasing scientific research and development. What can they do to improve OA to scientific knowledge?

A1 (Larry Peiperl). Main goal of HIV information center at UCSF was increasing distribution of information on HIV/AIDS without Internet access; their solution was to distribute CD-ROMs, as the cost of paper distribution is incredibly high and not much more valuable.
A2 (Larry Peiperl). It's tough for places like PLoS to publish work by a proprietary corporation because they can't clear the work for wide distribution. If Intel would be willing to allow the results and data of their scientists to be made widely available, that would be great.

A2 (Juan Carlos de Martin). Corporations like Intel need to think about their objectives in scientific publishing; dissemination is probably even higher for them, and prestige less high, and therefore they may gain great benefits from OA publishing.

A1 (Sibusiso Sibisi). We must appreciate that there are limitations and boundaries to everything. There are always opportunities for additional advancement. But there are great technological opportunities, such as mesh networks and cheap computers, that can perhaps help correct the Digital Divide, rather than working around it.

A1 (Arun). We must provide developing countries with the tools needed to access scientific information. There is a great program called 'Connect Africa' dedicated to correcting these problems.
A2 (Arun). Intel and other companies can create partnerships, providing funds and internet access and other resources, enabling and empowering universities in Africa and elsewhere.

A1 (Chris Armbruster). Once you have open access to scientific knowledge, there are often some places to access the Internet to see what the possibilities are, at least; then local corporate partnerships and more focused access can be acquired.
A2 (Chris Armbruster). Google and Microsoft and other companies are starting to get into Open Content, but they haven't done much in terms of providing overlay services to address digitization and archiving and information preservation. Intel and others could step in here.

Q3. Commentary on Gershner and IBM's transformation towards Open Source, and how it has turned them around. Also default rules and bureaucratic struggles are key here - openness by default is amazing, but a closed default, combined with bureaucracy, will result in closed everything.
A3 (Chris). Signatories to the declarations are looking into these.

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