Ah, the Web!

I used to make bread every week. When I went to make it again, I discovered that my old index card for Tassajara bread was illegible with age. Ten second later, I found it on the Web.

The good thing about Tassajara is that it basically never fails. You can vary the ingredients pretty much as you want, throwing in oats, wheat germ, rye flower, iron filings and small pebbles, and the stuff will still rise, cook and be pretty much delicious. And magnetic. (Hint: Add some dental floss and you don’t have to clean your teeth afterwards.)

[Tags: bread recipes ]

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ExpertWitness.com lists experts willing to testify in court for you, for a pretty penny. It’s got over 1,000 categories, including experts in gates, loading docks, and well logging. Click on a category and you go to a page that begins with an explanation. For example, here’s the explanation for the category “exercise equipment”:

Exercise equipment is any object used in exercise. This can include balls, treadmills, weights, bicycles, track shoes, jungle gyms, or protective equipment such as a back brace. An exercise machine is any machine used in exercise. These range from simple spring-like devices to computerized electromechanical rides to recirculating-stream swimming pools

Pretty straightforward. But the rather self-referential category of “Expert Referrals” seems to have snarled the system:

Find referrals Expert Referrals experts and consultants for referrals Expert Referrals litigation support. Available to be referrals Expert Referrals expert witnesses and provide referrals Expert Referrals forensic consulting in referrals Expert Referrals litigation, in addition prepare referrals Expert Referrals expert witness reports for use in deposition and/or in-court trial testimony.

A global search-and-replace or mailmerge on boilerplate gone wrong? (Try replacing “referrals Expert Referrals” with, say, “exercise equipment.”)

[Tags: experts snarls expert_witnesses ]

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Peter Suber, Research Prof. of Philosophy at Earlham College, a visiting fellow at Yale Law’s Information Society Project, and blogger of open access news, is giving a full-house lecture at Harvard, sponsored by the Berkman Center. [Note: I’m live blogging, making mistakes, leaving things out, paraphrasing ineptly, etc. POSTED WITHOUT PROOFING or even with a basic re-reading. Speed over accuracy. Welcome to the Web :(]

 

Peter says he’s going to assume that we know what open access is, etc. But he does want to define Green Open Access (= open access through a repository) and Gold OA (= OA through a journal). There’s also Gratis OA (free of charge but may be licensing restrictions) and Libre OA (free of charge and free of licensing restrictions).

 

Peter says he doesn’t know the future of OA. He likes Alan Kaye’s comment that the future is easier to make than predict. He’s going to talk about 12 cross-over points in OA, in rough order of when they might occur:

 

1. For-pay journals allow green OA. About 63% of these journals already do this.

 

2. OA books:: When there are more gratis OA books online than in the average university library. We crossed this a couple of years ago. “The permission problem is harder than digitization.” The next cross over point here is getting more libre OA books online, which we are quite a distance from.

 

3. Funder policies: “When most publicly-funded research is subject to OA mandates.” This seems to be spreading, Peter says. Today, 32 public funders and more than 3 private funders have OA mandates.

 

4. Green OA deposits: “When most new peer-reviewed manuscripts are self-archived when accepted for publication.” In particle physics, this happens routinely. If 20% of researchers publish 80% of the articles, we could reach cross-over fairly quickly in some fields.

 

5. Author understanding: “When most publishing researchers have an accurate understanding of OA.” This is happening, but notvery quickly.

 

6. University repositories: “When most universities have institutional repositories,” individually or as part of a consortium. This is happening slowly. In the absence of a universal repository, every university ought to have one. Universities will get to this point more slowly than funders because they move more slowly than funders. And we ought to ask why. Aren’t universities interests in line with OA?

 

Libre gold OA: “When most OA journals are libre OA.” Most OA journals are still merely gratis, but curb copying to drive traffic to their site. This crossover could happen overnight if the journals understood the issues. They’d lose a little traffic, but nothing else. There are grounds for optimism: Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association is an assoc of OA journal publishers and it requires libre gold OA. The SPARC Europe program sets standards for what a good OA journal is, and it recommends CreativeCommons attribution licenses. These two orgs are helpful because there’s no topdown org defining OA, so we rely on bottom up orgs like these two to set the standards.

 

8. Journal backfiles: “When most TA journals have OA backfiles.” This is expensive to do. Google will do it, but Google’s terms are difficult: They don’t give the journal a copy of the digital files. (Libraries do get copies of the files of the books they let Google scan.) The OCA focuses on public domain literature. “Once digitized, the benefits of increased visibility and citations should outweigh the trickle of revenue.” Journals make most of their money from new issues, so having greater presence should help. In physics, almost 100% of articles are available OA but the publishers can’t see any dip in subscriptions.

 

9. Author addenda: “When most new research is covered by author addenda” (i.e., additions that grant OA permission, tacked onto standard publisher-author contracts). Now there are few adopters. It’d be good to standardize these. The cross over will come when universities or funders require it. If enough journals allow green OA, that’d make addenda unnecessary.

 

10. University policies: “When most university research is subject to university-level OA mandates.” Today, 27 universities and 4 depts have these mandates. It’d help to have the largest/most productive universities move on this first.

 

11. OA journals: “When most peer-reviewed journals are OA.” “I don’t expect this for a long time.” Now 15% are OA. Progress is slow, but there is progress. High prestige journals are likely to hold out for a long time.

 

Libre green OA: “When most green OA is libre OA.” Today, only a small fraction is libre OA because most OA repositories depend on permission from publishers. UKPMC Funders Group demands green libre. We will reach the cross-over “when it’s safe.” Harvard has taken the lead on this, Peter says, and it will spread as another large university takes this step, then another one … “It becomes self-fulfilling leadership.”

 

Q: Are we stuck with the Sonny Bono copyright extension act?
A: Yes. All copyright reform in the past few decades have been in the wrong direction. And it’s very hard to roll back copyright terms. The only silver lining is that when we have a consenting partner, we can bypass copyright via contract. The problem is that they’re not the default.

 

Q: Under libre OA, how are our scholarly attributions protected?
A: It’s a range. One end is public domain, which does not preserve attribution. But all the CreativeCommons licenses preserve attribution. Most scholars don’t want public domain; they want CC-attribution.”Creative Commons attribution license provides everything a scholar could want.”

 

Q: [me] Conyers!
A: The Conyers bill would tell agencies not to require OA for works they fund. [I’ve put this badly.] The OA advocates are fighting it, but the agencies affected are not yet. I think Conyers is serious about it. I think he introduced it early because we don’t have a Sect’y of Health and Human Services or of NIH. Conyers may be fighting a turf battle. [Paraphrasing!] “He’s motivated primarily to protect the jurisdiction of his committee.” Peter thinks it won’t pass, but it might be introduced into another bill. “We’d like to spread the NIH policy to the rest of the government.”

 

Q: Is the economic downturn accelerating the adoption of OA?
A: The NIH just got $10B in the stimulus, which means there will be more and more OA articles. NSF also, but not as much because NSF requires OA for reports generated by those they fund [may not have gotten this right]. But, Peter thinks the downturn strengthens the case for OA. Libraries are going to be canceling subscriptions. And the Stimulus’ emphasis on green research will be more valuable if it’s OA. Open access to research amplifies its value.

 

Q: [jpalfrey] You’ve noticed there’s no OSF equivalent for OA. But I’d argue that the people in this room — librarians — are your OA OSF. What do you say to these librarians to advance our common cause?
A: Librarians are among the most important allies in the OA movement. But put all the allies together and you still don’t have OSF. Libraries should be sending letters against the Conyers bill. When you negotiate subscriptions you should negotiate the right to pur articles from your authors into an OA repository. Libraries are the only buyers of peer-reviewed journals. When you’re the only buyer, you can dictate your terms, subject to anti-trust. Obama says that we have the right to demand transformation from the banks we’re saving. Librarians can do the same thing for journals. Journals are not serving all of our interests and are acting against other interests. Use your bargaining power. Get the right of self-archive, and, when the time is right, get the right of libre self-archive. Network with one another when you launch repositories. And, btw, every school with an enlightened OA policy had librarians in the head of the charge.

 

Q: Can you give an example of an archive that works?
A: Universities that have mandatory language still have to supplement the language with incentives and education. As you go from unmandated to mandated, it goes from 15% toward 100%. (15% is the average for voluntary, spontaneous archives.) It works best in the Dutch universities that let the “cream” of the article rise to the top. Every week they feature good work in public. This gets academics to archive their work without a mandate.

 

Q: Might universities work with publishers collaboratively to create new business models?
A: Publishers differ in their attitudes toward OA. Some are experimenting in good faith. Some, in bad faith. Some who do OA are actively lobbying for the Conyers bill. Librarians understand the scholarly landscape better than publishers and could educate publishers. Society publishers [i.e., societies that publish] could be told that they’re threatened not by OA but by the “big deal” that brings in academic journals.

 

Q: Is Springer’s taking over of BioMed Central a good thing?
A: Yes. BMC is for-profit. BMC was the world’s largest OA publisher. Now Springer is. Springer says that OA http://arubatourism.com/assets/blog/index.php?=buy-viagra-through-paypal/ is a sustainable part of their bsiness. My reading is that Springer is preparing for an OA future. [Tags: berkman open_access libraries digital_rights education everything_is_miscellaneous publishing scholarship conyers copyright copyleft ]

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Nicole Aylwin at iposgoode suggests that we ought to consider “intellectual property” policy in terms of its effects on culture, rather than sticking solely within the “property” frame. Seems right to me.

[Tags: ip copyright copyleft free_culture ]

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Punya Mishra blogs a “story that connects cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, Oriya writer and poet J. P. Das, and the father of non-violence Mahatma Gandhi.” It contains some of my favorite things: Reflections on the nature of the Web, “serendipitous connectability,” and Scott Kim-style ambigrams.

Ambigrams are words printed in such a way that they can be read in ambiguous ways. Sometimes they can be read backwards and forwards (even though they’re not palindromes), sometimes they can be inverted or flipped, sometimes they contain other words (e.g., “true” written in such a way that you can also read it as “false”). Scott Kim‘s book Inversions has long been a favorite of mine, and the current issues of the relatively obscure journal WordWays has another bunch.

Punya recounts how it came to his attention that none other than Mahatma Gandhi worked on writing his name so that it could be read at one and the same time in English or in Hindi. (He has provided a scan of the pages of the book by an Indian civil servant that discloses this.) The path to this discovery is unlikely, reaching through strangers, hyperlinks and family. And it leads to an ambigram by Gandhi!

(Note that I did indeed find this page by ego-surfing my own name, since Punya cites a book of mine. But, rather than attributing this to my own narcissism, let’s just attribute it to what Punya calls serendipitious connectability.) [Tags: gandhi wordways scott_kim punya_mishra ambigrams wordplay ]

 

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WowTattoos has ambigrams for over 1,000 names, and a generator for words it doesn’t have. They’re not as beautifully clever as Scott Kim’s — they tend to look like gothic text — but it’s still pretty impressive.

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Directors of ten law school libraries, including Harvard’s John Palfrey, have signed an “aspirational” document, called the Durham Statement on Open Access, that “calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.”

This is wonderful.

The statement calls for the end of paper versions of the journals, not merely supplementing them with electronic versions, because printing them costs so much and is bad for the environment. I don’t know if the drafters of the Statement were also thinking that going purely digital would help force a change in mindsets, but I suspect that that would be one of the most important consequences.

[Tags: open_access law_school law_journals publishing media scholarship copyright copyleft everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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In something like 2002, I wrote and posted a kid’s version of my book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. Now Peter Ford has taken it upon himself to create a site with a copy of it with a facility that lets anyone comment on any paragraph. He’s hoping to get the must off of it, stem the link rot, etc.

I totally love this.

[Tags: crowd-sourcing wisdom_of_the_crowd publishing small_pieces books ]

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How about if there were a magical shape we could draw on top of a slide that would magnify what’s under it? So, if you were showing a slide of a screen capture, you could invoke these shapes to come and go, enlarging the elements to which you want to call attention.

kthxbye.*

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Yes, not an entirely appropriate use of the term, but I find it an amusing youthicism. Its marginal appropriateness in this case is that I’m acknowledging that I’m talking into the wind when it comes to making product enhancement suggestions. And, yes, now the footnote is longer than the post. kthxbye.

[Tags: powerpoint keynote ]

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The latest Radio Berkman podcast is with David Hornik of August Capital. David is delightful — not always the term applied to VCs — and finds some reasons for optimism in the current darkling gloom. [Tags: berkman podcasts radio_berkman david_hornik vcs recession innovation ]

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Me, on Twitter:

Challenge: Explain Fourier Transforms, w/o math, to a Humanities major (me), more clearly than http://tinyurl.com/27n3g … in 1 tweet?

Note: I somehow got the TinyURL, which points to the Wikipedia article, wrong. The Wikipedia article begins this way: “In mathematics, the Fourier transform is an operation that transforms one complex-valued function of a real variable into another.” It does not get clearer after that, at least for this Humanities major.

The responses, in the order received:

jonathanweber Looking at a periodic signal in time, the Fourier transform explains it in terms of what mix of frequencies is present. Helps?

DarrylParker the better question is why does a humanities major like you need to understand it? ;)

cparasat It’s just adding waves to other waves.

DarrylParker simpler overview of the Fourier series, but still a bit mathematical – http://tinyurl.com/chw5pp

fantomplanet Fourier Xformations are like ironing your shirt. It smooths things out.

JoeAndrieu FTs take a signal in time and represent it as a series of frequencies. Makes audio signal look like an equalizer graph.v

ts_eliot in 1 tweet?! impossible

fanf the FT splits a signal into separate frequencies, like a prism splits light

fjania – it shows us which, and how much of each, simple sine waves we can add together to reconstruct the signal we’re transforming.

ricklevine Hm. Fourier transforms convert a bunch of sample measurements (audio, seismic data, etc) into frequency info: http://is.gd/iQP3

ricklevine Of course there’s a lot more to it. Try: it’s a way of taking seemingly rndm data and fitting a curve to it, enabling analysis.

fields Things you don’t understand can be expressed in smaller equivalent pieces of things you don’t understand.

IanYorston “Explain Fourier Transforms to a Humanities major”. Smart maths breaks large constructs down into small things loosely joined.

mtobis: your tinyurl fails. Fourier transform an audio signal and get back an amplitude for each pure tone; no information is lost.

vasusrini Sound=Vibrating Air.Bee Buzz & dog bark=diff. frequency signatures. Ear hears all at once & sorts it. FT is the m/c equivalent.

chichiri just say without it you wouldn’t have JPEGs, enough said ;)

artficlinanity Every signal, no matter how complex, is made up of simple sinusoids. Fourier Transformation is how you find those.

vnitin every physical phenomenon can be viewed as existing in space+time or vibrations+energy. FourierTrfm converts view1 -> view2

_eon_ think of waves on the ocean

To follow any of these twitterers, add their name to this url: http://www.twitter.com/

[Tags: fourier twitter ]

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