Randy Scheckman, the new editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — online and free — explains how the a new journal will work: scientists will edit for scientists, there will be rapid turnaround, and the journal’s acceptance rate for submissions will go way up. He positions it as more scientist-friendly than Public Library of Science.

The fact that this interview was (admirably) published in Science magazine has some significance as well.

(By the way, the authors of a report on obstacles to open access have left a hefty and useful comment on my post.)

In my continued pursuit of never getting anything entirely right, here’s a comment from Michael Jensen: “Not quite right — the new editor of what I think is a still-unnamed OA biomedical journal was announced, but Randy Schekman currently edits the PNAS, as I read it.” I have edited the above to get it righter. Thanks, Michael!

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A report on a survey of 350 chemists and 350 economists in UK universities leads to the following conclusion about open access publishing:

…our work with researchers on the ground indicates to us that whatever the enthusiasm and optimism within the OA community, it has not spilled into academia to a large extent and has had only a small effect on the publishing habits and perceptions of ordinary researchers, whatever their seniority and whether in Chemistry or Economics.

The report finds that faculty members want to publish in high “impact factor” journals unless they have some specific reason why they should go the Open Access route, e.g., they need to get something out quickly. The subscriptions their libraries buy mask from them the extent to which their work becomes inaccessible to those who are not a university.

The report ends with some recommendations for trying to move academics towards OA publishing.

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Luca de Biase explains a new power about to be claimed by AGCOM, the Italian telecommunications regulatory agency, that would permit it to “remove content from Italian websites or to block access to foreign websites accused by copyright holders to break their rights.” The proposed powers implement a requirement from the Italian government that the agency take action to prevent piracy. The decision about the proposed AGCOM powers is due on July 6.

The Obama administration is backing the law, and perhaps the specific implementation. Writes Luca:

FIMI (association of music publishers) has circulated a mail about Obama’s administration support to AGCOM, quoting this US document: “The United States encourages Italy to ensure that the AGCOM regulations are swiftly promulgated and implemented, that these regulations create an effective mechanism against copyright piracy over the Internet, and that they address all types of piracy that takes place online.”

The quote comes from an April 2011 global roundup from the U.S. Trade Representative. Here’s the paragraph on Italy:

Italy remains on the Watch List with an Out-of-Cycle review to be conducted this year. Italy continued to make progress in improving its IPR protection and enforcement in 2010, including by increased cooperation among law enforcement officials and improved enforcement actions against certain types of IPR violations. The United States remains concerned that, overall enforcement against copyright piracy continues to be inadequate and that piracy over the Internet continues to grow, severely damaging the legitimate market for distribution of copyrighted works. The United States welcomes recent efforts to address piracy over the Internet, and looks forward to measures to help ameliorate this problem. Specifically, proposed regulations by the Italian Communications Authority (AGCOM) could provide rights holders with an avenue to curb IPR violations online in an effective manner. The United States encourages Italy to ensure that the AGCOM regulations are swiftly promulgated and implemented, that these regulations create an effective mechanism against copyright piracy over the Internet, and that they address all types of piracy that takes place online. The United States also encourages Italy to address other IPR issues, including a troubling Data Protection Agency ruling prohibiting the monitoring of peer-to-peer networks. While rights holders report good efforts by the Finance Police and the Customs Police, few cases reach final sentencing and courts still fail to impose deterrent level sentences. The United States will continue to work with Italy to address these and other matters.

It’s not clear that this an endorsement of what seems like over-reaching by AGCOM, but it ain’t pretty.

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Culture does not exist simply to enlighten us.

Culture’s far more common role is to give us something to talk about.

If we have nothing to talk about, nations divide over unreasonable differences, communities reduce to parking regulations, and marriages end in dinnertime squabbles.

To talk about things in a depth that binds requires freely accessing, citing, quoting, pointing, and linking.

Therefore, for the sake of our nation, communities, and marriages, we need to loosen copyright’s hold.

QED

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Vivek Kundra, of whom I am a fanboy, is leaving his position as our first federal CIO. That’s too bad for America. I think he has done an outstanding job.

But he’s coming to the Berkman Center as well as the Kennedy Center at Harvard as a Fellow, which is great news for us.

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I just wrote up an informal trip report in the form of “take aways” from the LOD-LAM conference I attended a cople of weeks ago. Here is a lightly edited version.

Because it was an unconference, it was too participatory to enable us to take systematic notes. I did, however, interview a number of attendees, and have posted the videos on the Library Innovation Lab blog site. I actually have a few more yet to post. In addition, during the course of one of the sessions (on “Explaining LOD-LAM”), a few of us began constructing a FAQ.

Here’s some of what I took away from the conference.

– There is considerable momentum around linked open data, starting with the sciences where there is particular research value in compiling huge data sets. Many libraries are joining in.

– LOD for libraries will enable a very fluid aggregation of information from multiple types of sources around any particular object. E.g., a page about a Hogarth illustration (or about Hogarth, or about 18th century London, etc.) could quite easily aggregate information from any data set that knows something about that illustration or about topics linked to that illustration. This information could be used to build a page or to do research.

– Making data and metadata available as LOD enables maximal re-use by others.

– Doing so requires expertise, but should be less massively difficult than supporting many other standards.

– For the foreseeable future, this will be something libraries do in addition to supporting more traditional data standards; it will be an additional expense and effort.

– Although there is continuing debate about exactly which license to use when publishing library data sets, it seems that usually putting any form of license on the data other than a public domain waiver of licenses is likely to be (a) futile and (b) so difficult to deal with that it will inhibit re-use of the data, depriving it of value. (See the 4-star license proposal that came out of this conference.)

– The key point of resistance against LOD among libraries, archives and museums is the propecia online justified fear that once the data is released into the world, the curating institutions can no longer ensure that the metadata about an object is correct; the users of LOD might pick up a false attribution, inaccurate description, etc. This is a genuine risk, since LOD permits irresponsible use of data. The risk can be mitigated but not removed.

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MacKenzie Smith of MIT and Creative Commons talks about the new 4-star rating system for open licenses for metadata from cultural institutions:

The draft is up on the LOD-LAM site.

Here are some comments on the system from open access guru Peter Suber.

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One of the outcomes of the the LOD-LAM conference was a draft of an idea for a 4-star classification of openness of metadata from cultural institutions. The classification is nicely counter-intuitive, which is to say that it’s useful.

I asked Peter Suber, the Open Access guru, what he thought of it. He replied in an email:

First, I support the open knowledge definition and I support a star system to make it easy to refer to different degrees of openness.

* I’m not sure where this particular proposal comes from. But I recommend working with the Open Knowledge Foundation, which developed the open knowledge definition. The more key players who accept the resulting star system, the more widely it will be used.

* This draft overlooks some complexity in the 3-star entry and the 2-star entry. Currently it suggests that attribution through linking is always more open than attribution by other means (say, by naming without linking). But this is untrue. Sometimes one is more difficult than the other. In a given case, the easier one is more open by lowering the barrier to distribution.

If you or your software had both names and links for every datasource you wanted to attribute, then attribution by linking and attribution by naming would be about equal in difficulty and openness. But if you had names without links, then obtaining the links would be an extra burden that would delay or impede distribution.

The disparity in openness grows as the number of datasources increases. On this point, see the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data (by John Wilbanks for Science Commons, December 2007).

Relevant excerpt: “[T]here is a problem of cascading attribution if attribution is required as part of a license approach. In a world of database integration and federation, attribution can easily cascade into a burden for scientists….Would a scientist need to attribute 40,000 data depositors in the event of a query across 40,000 data sets?” In the original context, Wilbanks uses this (cogently) as an argument for the public domain, or for shedding an attribution requirement. But in the present context, it complicates the ranking system. If you *did* have to attribute a result to 40,000 data sources, and if you had names but not links for many of those sources, then attribution by naming would be *much* easier than attribution by linking.

Solution? I wouldn’t use stars to distinguish methods of attribution. Make CC-BY (or the equivalent) the first entry after the public domain, and let it cover any and all methods of attribution. But then include an annotation explaining that some methods attribution increase the difficulty of distribution, and that increasing the difficulty will decrease openness. Unfortunately, however, we can’t generalize about which methods of attribution raise and lower this barrier, because it depends on what metadata the attributing scholar may already possess or have ready to hand.

* The overall implication is that anything less open than CC-BY-SA deserves zero stars. On the one hand, I don’t mind that, since I’d like to discourage anything less open than CC-BY-SA. On the other, while CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-ND are less open than CC-BY-SA, they’re more open than all-rights-reserved. If we wanted to recognize that in the star system, we’d need at least one more star to recognize more species.

I responded with a question: “WRT to your naming vs. linking comments: I assumed the idea was that it’s attribution-by-link vs. attribution-by-some-arbitrary-requirement. So, if I require you to attribute by sticking in a particular phrase or mark, I’m making it harder for you to just scoop up and republish my data: Your aggregating sw has to understand my rule, and you have to follow potentially 40,000 different rules if you’re aggregating from 40,000 different databases.

Peter responded:

You’re right that “if I require you to attribute by sticking in a particular phrase or mark, I’m making it harder for you to just scoop up and republish my data.” However, if I already have the phrases or marks, but not the URLs, then requiring me to attribute by linking would be the same sort of barrier. My point is that the easier path depends on which kinds of metadata we already have, or which kinds are easier for us to get. It’s not the case that one path is always easier than another.

But it might be the case that one path (attribution by linking) is *usually* easier than another. That raises a nice question: should that shifting, statistical difference be recognized with an extra star? I wouldn’t mind, provided we acknowledged the exceptions in an annotation.

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I’ve posted the next in my series of library podcasts at the Library Innovation Lab blog. This one is with Peter Suber, the hub of the Open Access movement.

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At the LODLAM conference, Roy Tennant said that OCLC will be releasing the bibliographic info about the top million most popular books. It will be released in a linked data format, under an Open Database license. This is a very useful move, although we need to know what the license is. We can hope that it does not require attribution, and does not come with any further license restrictions. But Roy was talking in the course of a timed two-minute talk, so he didn’t have a lot of time for details.

This is at least a good step and maybe more than that.

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