Making More Scientists
I’ve been working up to a rant on twitter lately about Open Access, as the Access2Research petition’s first week drew to a close (sign it).
The usual suspects are making the usual arguments - OA will dictate where scientists have to publish, OA will kill peer review, and most offensively to me, science is too complex for us unwashed liberal arts heathens to possibly understand, so no good will come of access.
But science is a place where we keep out the unwashed masses. We no longer credential computer scientists (well, universities churn them out, but your credentials on github matter a lot more to savvy programmers than a CS degree from a state university - you’d be better served majoring in something fun and checking in code to open source projects).
Has innovation in computer science been a problem? [crickets chirping]
Basically every knowledge based discipline that runs on digital content has been transformed. Software. Journalism. Music. Video. And you can track the innovation patterns of each one based on the level of control that institutions maintain.
Note: not all innovation is useful - most of it is shit - so part of my argument is that radically increasing the rate of *all* innovation is the best mathematically certain way to increase the rate of *useful* innovation. It’s like art. Most art sucks. But if enough people make art, then even if the rate of awesome artists doesn’t improve, making more people overall be artists means more awesome art.
That’s what’s happened in software. More people make it. That means more shit software. We just don’t use it (ever browse the Android app store’s dregs? Sheesh). It’s happening in journalism, whose business model turned out to be based on classified advertising and got eaten by Craigslist, the ugliest website on earth. It’s happening in music, where Apple ate the music industry’s lunch, where artists can raise a million dollars on Kickstarter just as their old labels go bankrupt.
But science isn’t like that. Science is a lot more like the cable industry. Comcast and a few behemoths control the last mile of the internet to most houses, and so we don’t even realize the world we live in is radically limited. Internet in the US is so bad compared to so much of the world and we don’t even see it. Toll access publishers of science are just like Comcast. They want to control the last mile.
And scientists who buy into the argument that those of us in our houses, lacking credentials to understand their science, are perpetuating a knowledge lockup. They’re on the wrong side of history.
You see, it does not matter if 999 of the 1000 people who read an open access article, who might not otherwise have been allowed to read it without paying $50, fail to understand it, believe they have disproved the second law of thermodynamics, etc. It matters that the one person does read and understand is provided access.
Because then, in that moment, we’ve created a scientist - or at least the makings of one. And the only people that threatens are those counting on their credentials to keep them competitive, or profitable, or employed. Since I’m none of those three it’s pretty easy to support open access.
Time For A Beer
The Access2Research We The People petition has been a far greater success in its first week than I at least dared hope, when we hatched this plan and took this picture:
We’ve crossed 17,000 signatories from late Sunday night to mid-day Friday of the first week, measuring in US Pacific time. Signing is tailing off significantly, as we expected - we’re heading into the weekend, which is a long holiday weekend here in the United States for Memorial Day. I would have been thrilled with 10,000 this week, honestly. So we’re set up well for the next big push to the summit. Everyone who signed, who recruited, who tweeted, who blogged, who shared - thank you. I am going to celebrate with a nice beer tonight and take a break from constant monitoring of the stream for a day or two. There’s a toddler I’d like to spend some time with, and a spouse coming home from a long business trip who I can’t wait to see.
Before that though…some color commentary on the campaign that came out of nowhere.
We have received a plausible batch of criticism, from not going far enough in the petition (asking for liberal copyright licensing on articles, or specifying a maximum embargo) to not having enough detail about the petition on the website. These are good points. We looked at them, and chose not to go after them. Here’s my view on why we chose that - the others may have different views of course.
The petition is simple because of two reasons. One, you only get 800 characters to work with. That’s not something conducive to nuance. Second, it’s simple because we want a positive response from the Administration, and by staying simple we allow a little bit of flexibility to them as they respond. Sometimes detail doesn’t help; we believe this to be one of those cases. That belief may or may not be true, or best, but it’s what we went with, and we did a lot of behind-the-scenes canvassing and draft review of the petition before we posted it.
The website is simple for similar reasons. We’re not creating an effort to educate the public about open access, or public access, or taxpayer access. We’re trying to influence executive policy by getting a certain number of people to sign a short petition. Those people often have to suffer a miserable user experience on the petition website (horror stories of failed registration and browser crashes are commonplace enough to make me think we’d easily have passed 25K if the White House knew about OAuth). They have to fill out email addresses, solve captchas, wait for an email confirmation, and then sign.
Again, our belief was that simplicity makes that action easier than detail. There is an enormous amount of information on the web about OA. We could copy and repost it to teach signers more, or we could be polemic. Polemic was the choice.
None of this matters much in the end. We’ll get our 25,000 by June 19 even if we have to drag the twitterverse screaming across the finish line. Hopefully long before then.
What matters now is what the Administration does in response. The total number of people who care about this issue has radically expanded in the past week. Wikimedia’s endorsement means we’re only starting to see the impact of that expansion.
If the White House wants us to take We the People seriously, this is a great chance to make us believe. This is a proposition we know is under consideration, that is in the power of the executive office to achieve, and that has demonstrated broad public support.
As an #OAMonday wit said early on, Mister President, tear down this paywall.
Access2Research
In my spare time when not working on Portable Legal Consent, I continue to work on Open Access issues.
About ten days ago, I got home from vacation to news that I could go to Washington DC and meet with John Holdren, the Science Advisor to President Obama. He’s a nice guy, and it was a great meeting. He seemed to understand the issues and our points. Like any good political appointee he was non committal of course.
But it was a brutal trip. Redeye on a Tuesday night from the West Coast after a full day of meetings, change into a suit (and shave) in a public bathroom because Dulles Airport has no showers, meeting, back onto the plane home.
And it hit me - us, because I was with Mike Carroll, Mike Rossner, and Heather Joseph - that the redeyes and the meetings and the arguing were not carrying the day. We needed to do something else.
So we started the Access2Research campaign to engage the public in open access. Please go, read the context, and if you agree, sign the petition. The only thing missing from the open access debate is the public. You can remedy that - but you’ve only got 30 days to sign, and we need 25,000 signatures to carry the day.
Oh Please No
I come back from vacation and nearly have an aneurysm.
Seriously, someone thinks we should extend the HIPAA model to consumer privacy.
Because it works so well. Encourages so much innovation. Protects consumers and customers so thoroughly. Let’s use one of the worst-working data systems we have as a model!
It is depressing how often we in the “open” world have to say this, again and again. More control via rights is not the answer to every problem. Not in copyright. Not in patents. And not in privacy for data.
Taxonomy of Privacy
Just a quick hit to link to Daniel Solove’s epic paper “A Taxonomy of Privacy” which has rapidly become a major influence on my work at Consent to Research. It’s a free download.
But the first sentences of the abstract are a great teaser:
Privacy is a concept in disarray. Nobody can articulate what it means. As one commentator has observed, privacy suffers from an embarrassment of meanings. Privacy is far too vague a concept to guide adjudication and lawmaking, as abstract incantations of the importance of privacy do not fare well when pitted against more concretely-stated countervailing interests.
Agreed. I love the taxonomy’s distinction between information collection, processing, and dissemination. I do wish there was a discussion of harm in here because economic harm is a real consequence of information dissemination in health.
