More on Open Access Week

It has been a busy Open Access Week for me. My last (well almost last!) duty is today at 4:00 pm at the Old Government House at the University of Auckland.

Stratus has organised a panel and invited me to participate, and I have just uploaded my upcoming presentation to Slideshare. If you have a chance, we would love to see you there!

Open access stratus 2012 from Fabiana Kubke

Oh, and thanks to Nat for 4-short-linking my previous post!

Scientific publishing, with a twist

Every now and then something happens that gets me all excited about what comes next.

Today, it is the launch of PeerJ

Image provided by Peter Binfield

Over 10 years ago I was approached by someone at a scientific conference who told me they were launching something that was to be called the Public Library of Science (PLoS), where people could publish their results and make it freely available to anyone, anywhere. The catch: authors paid for the publication cost. I wasn’t sure what to think of it. Yes, I would be totally behind it, and thought the ethos rocked but was not sure how they would get authors to pay for things they would otherwise be able to publish for ‘free’*.

Soon after that I moved to New Zealand and PLoS fell off my radar. Until 2006 when we decided to submit a paper to PLoS Biology. We got a letter back saying that we should instead submit to a new Journal they were launching: PLoS ONE, and that is where the paper got published. I immediately fell in love with PLoS ONE. But I had to wait over 3 years to become an Academic Editor, after meeting I think Steve Koch at Science Online 2010.  Another decision I am proud of.

Image provided by Peter Binfield

In 2009 I was visiting family in Minnesota, and decided to delay my return to New Zealand to attend SciBarCamp in Palo Alto. I had just been to my first unconference (KiwiFoo) and decided to give SciBarCamp a go. Best decision I ever made. It was there I first met Peter Binfield (0f PLoS ONE fame) and Jason Hoyt (who are responsible for PeerJ). There were many things that were said at that un-conference, but I vividly recall Jason’s session on Mendeley and Peter’s session on the future of publishing.

Well, it has been 3 years since then and now is the time for PeerJ.

What is special about it? It does not seem to be ‘another Open Access Journal’ but rather a completely different way of thinking of how authors and journals work together to put scientific results out there. It appears, to me and from what information I have access to, as a partnership. Scientists pay a membership fee and that allows them to publish there. For Free**. In return they commit to providing at least one review a year. Seems like a fair deal. I still find it amazing that at this time and age the majority of published science is ‘read only’. (Shocking, I know!) so I am keen to see how the post-publication interaction with the article (and the pre-publication record) will look like.

It is the sense of ‘partnership’ that I am also attracted to (and got me all excited). I have for some time been thinking whether there should be an ‘Open Science Society’ with its own journals, similar to other societies. A membership fee would subsidise the journal, and everything would be open access. Well, PeerJ is not exactly that, but it comes quite close. I actually like the idea of membership (with its perks) because it makes me the scientist care about that journal in a slightly different way. I am not sure whether Peter and Jason had this ‘partnership’ in mind, but it might just end up becoming that. And that might be a huge game-changer.

Well, we’ve come a long way since the first scientific journal was published back in the 1600’s, and not much had changed since then, other than the font. PLoS changed the game, and they did that so well that they are now one of the biggest scientific publishers. And it is now the turn of PeerJ.

I have a lot of respect for both Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt (since I first met them in 2009). And I also see that they have Tim O’Reilly in their governing board (someone that deserves an un-interrupted series of hat tips as well).

So, paraphrasing a SciBarCamp question…

What would scientific publishing look like if it was invented today?

We might just be about to find out.

*Well, we still pay to see the article. And in many cases we pay costs of publishing like colour figures, etc. But we tend to not think too much about that. Oh, yes, and of course we transfer our copyright – lest Wikipedia make something interesting with them.
**Different membership levels have different publishing privileges. But you can visit the site to get that nitty gritty.

Kiwi foo’s eye view of Open Science

I just came back from another amazing kiwi foo. I have talked about it before, so I will not bore you with the details of what kiwi foo is all about. This time, unlike other years, I went with a very focused view of what I wanted to achieve. And it was as stimulating as ever.

Over the past year, I have gone into a rather quiet reflexion of what ‘open science’ is and how to make it work. I have become increasingly frustrated with a model of science that increasingly rewards self-promotion rather than knowledge sharing. And the emerging theme of my reflexion was ‘context’.

If we want a ‘global’ open science, the formula for adoption needs to be able to adapt to local personal, institutional, social, political, economical and legislative contexts. I may be wrong, but I think many of us who support open science struggle at times with how to make it work in the particular contexts in which we need to operate.

As I was struggling with the frustration of the commodification of science over the past two years, I started thinking about the open source community.  I can’t blame universities for encouraging scientists  to produce revenue at a time when public funding for education are research appear to be in constant decline. So I went to Webstock a year ago to try to learn more about how open source projects generate revenue. After all, their business models are built around giving their ‘product’ away for free, something that is well aligned with the ethos of science. One of my highlights at kiwi foo was a conversation with Don Christie from CatalystIT, a company that produces high quality open source software. I am looking forward to continuing this conversation and exploring how these business models can be adapted to the different demands and constraints for science. I got a lot of insight from him, and am hoping he and people like him can help us move forward.

On the second day (or rather the first long day) there were a few sessions that centered around science. Great things came out of it, and it would be impossible to name everyone that provided insight. Nick Jones, Leonie Hayes, Alex Holcombe , Alison Stringer and I partnered in crime and ran a couple of sessions where we hashed a few issues around. I personally wanted to explore what Open Science meant in the New Zealand / Australia context (I can’t speak for the others’ motivations!).  I think that the local context in NZ/OZ is slightly different than in the Northern hemisphere and there are some things that differentiate this region. Perhaps we can/should capitalise on that.

For example, you will never see a ‘Research Works Act’ bill here, because we don’t seem to have Open Access mandates. Instead, we have NZGOAL and AUSGOAL which are frameworks for data licencing. The Australians have ANDS and NZ has eResearch, all focused on the data. Tim O’Reilly mentioned the PantonPrinciples  in this context – but the Panton Principles (which I have personally endoresed) cannot be exported ‘as is’ to Australia and New Zealand because neither Creative Commons Aotearoa-New Zealand nor CC-Australiahave CC0, for example.  Software hopefully will not be covered by patents is covered by copyright (not patents) in NZ*, so maybe we can capitalise on that to develop tools for open science. New Zealand has a Treaty of Waitangi, and any local open science needs to respect and work constructively to meet our treaty obligations. Lets add to that, that different research groups are going to be subject to obligations related to the international treaties their countries have signed up to. We all have different copyright restrictions and freedoms, we have different systems that determine how to assign funding, and different mandates and guidelines, and are at different points of our careers with different job securities.

So, how do we make open science work within these diverse contexts? We can all agree on the philosophy, but perhaps we need to also agree that the implementation will take different shapes. I think wee need to continue the global conversation and continue to support each other, but we also need to start working locally in smaller groups to ‘make things happen’. And the battles we choose to fight perhaps should be aligned with local contexts so that we can each capitalise on our strengths. I loved having this dialogue at kiwi foo, getting great insights from a diverse group, and mainly feeling that this is something for which we have support.

The rest of the things that happened at kiwi foo will slowly seep into future posts.

I would really like to thank Jenine, Nat Torkington and Russell Brown for putting kiwi foo together (and inviting me!), my partners in crime Alex, Nick, Alison, and Leonie for their hard work on the sessions, all the attendees for their contributions and especially Tim O’Reilly for providing us with valuable insights. You all have complicated my life, but I look forward to a 2012 of hard work and of ‘making things happen’.

 

*Edited on 16/2/2012 to reflect the correction made by @kayakr (thanks for that!). I was thinking of this bill: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2008/0235/latest/DLM1419230.html (which is probably the one that @kayakr refers to as pending legislation)

#SciFund is up at RocketHub!

What if scientists were to crowd-source funding for their research?

Yup, you heard right. Many scientists are asking the question: what would people, rather than established funding agencies, put their pennies on…..

And the answer will be found through the SciFund challenge. 49 projects, 44 days left to raise money on RocketHub.

From athlete’s foot, climate change, crayfish, cancer and … yes … zombies! you can find an array of projects looking for a donation.  So here is an invitation for you to head on to RocketHub and look at what scientists are asking help to fund.

And yes, here is my plug:

All the credit to Daniel Mietchen for putting this together! You can fuel this project here: Beethoven’s open repository of research.

So, come on, start clicking!

Drafting proposals in the open – sketching out project ideas

[also posted in http://www.science3point0.com/evomri/2011/05/03/drafting-proposals-in-the-open-sketching-out-project-ideas/] This post is licenced under a CC0

Recapitulation

“Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.” Vannevar Bush, 1945

As announced last week, we – Fabiana Kubke and Daniel Mietchen – are currently participating in the Getting your CC project funded course at Peer-to-Peer University, and have decided to draft our proposal collaboratively and in the open. Part of our motivation is our (and others’) perceived need for making scientific information more useful by positioning it where it can be easily found, used, linked to, repurposed, and updated.

The introductory meeting of the course took place on April 26 (UTC) via Skype. We have since incorporated some of the feedback we got so far, and in this post – which Claudia Koltzenburg helped us draft – we will outline the next steps in the hope to entice others to get involved as well.

The course is scheduled around a series of workshops, each focusing on a different aspect of the proposal-writing process:

• May 3, Workshop 1: How do we move from having an idea to realizing those ideas in terms of having aims, and goals?
• May 6, Workshop 2: Which funding bodies are there that can give financial support, and how do we find appropriate sponsors for our project?
• May 10, Workshop 3: How can we structure our proposed work in terms of tasks and how do we make a realistic timeline?
• May 17, Workshop 4: Knowing how long time we estimate, and the resources we need, how do we put together a reasonable budget?
• May 24, Workshop 5: What happens after the funding period is over? How do we make the project sustainable?
• May 31, Workshop 6: What would we look at when reviewing another proposal.

The grant proposals are to be drafted in parallel to these workshops until June, when the proposals produced will be peer-reviewed, and professional feedback will be provided to increase the chances of getting funded. In preparation for today’s workshop, we will use this post to explore the aims and goals of our project(s).

The candidate projects in a nutshell

The ideas submitted as part of the application for the course all center around what could be thought of as an Encyclopaedia of original research, which shall therefore be the default focus of the grant proposal (as idea 1). Two smaller projects (ideas 2 and 3) build on idea 1 but are more specific and could thus be integrated into a proposal about idea 1, or developed independently, whereas idea 4 is wider in scope than idea 1. We expect the final scope of our grant proposal to be defined more precisely before attending Workshop 3.

“In the academy [..] we need to recognise an ethical obligation [...] which is at the core of our mission which is universal access to knowledge.” Larry Lessig, in the video embedded below, which is CC-BY-licensed.

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from Lessig on Vimeo.

Idea 1: The primary aim of the Encyclopaedia of original research (henceforth EOR) is to arrange the existing scientific literature in a way that allows it to become dynamic in nature. The primary goal is to develop a platform that is able to capture and archive the open scientific literature such that the original work is being preserved (like at arXive or PubMed Central) but becomes dynamically and collaboratively editable (like at OpenWetWare). By way of such a platform, scientists and others could share their knowledge more effectively than through papers: Work on related matters could be more easily identified and conceptualized, and so could gaps in knowledge. Besides the possibility for direct editing, facilities for annotation, commenting and other ways of interaction with the community of researchers in the field would ensure the widest possible peer review.

The Encyclopaedia of original research combines two of the principles for open science that have been put forward by Science Commons: it takes the “Open Access” literature and recognizes that it too – like data – is a lost opportunity “without structure and annotation”. The characteristics of the platform that would contain the encyclopaedia are complex: it needs to track individual contributions to enable proper attribution, the content needs to be granular enough to be able to be cite individual elements within an entire piece, individual pieces of works or elements within it need to be able to be dynamically linked, indexed and contextualized, and the metadata needs to be structured to enhance discoverability, an attribute that is essential for reuse. The user interface also needs to be suitable for the different technological levels of knowledge or levels of comfort appropriate for individual scientists, so that technology is not a barrier for adoption and/or contribution.

We expect that the encyclopaedia will benefit science by helping to avoid duplication of research efforts (and related funding), providing a faster means of updating information otherwise delayed by prevalent publication cycles or not deemed “worthy” of formal publication (practical example case) and promoting the open discussion of research findings in light of new evidence.

The approach, though initially focused on contemporary literature, could likewise be applied to legacy literature – a start in this direction has already been made, as discussed here.

Idea 2: The aim here is to take advantage of such a repository to facilitate the delivery of scientific and health-related information to remote areas where this information may not be readily available but where access to it is essential for the well-being of those communities. What we imagine is that the above EOR could incorporate (or lead to) lay summaries (similar to AcaWiki of the scientific literature or such as those that already exist in blogs) as part of its knowledge base and both the original research as the lay summaries can be translated to local languages. Specific content that is relevant to specific world regions (e.g., malaria in Africa, Chagas in South America) can be bundled in formats that are compatible with existing local technology. One way to at least partially achieve this goal is to bundle region-relevant information so that it can take advantage of ongoing deployments associated with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and where it can reach the communities that would benefit most from that research.

Idea 3: The aim here is to take advantage of the infrastructure of the EOR (and part of the information contained within it) to complement (or support) digital collections not typically considered part of the scientific “literature”, e.g. from museums or databases. Take, for example this artifact from the Matapihi digital collection. The interaction of the user with the digital object could be enhanced by linking it to different representations of the same specimen (say, an MRI scan), or to relevant scientific information pertaining to similar specimens. It could further be brought back to life by linking it to other cultural artifacts: for instance, ‘Have specific works of poetry or music been inspired by these types of specimens?’, or ‘Are there local traditions or myths that are associated with the artifact?’, or ‘Is there a personal notebook of the individual who brought this specimen to where it is? As an example, this other digital object from the New Zealand National Library presents not just the artifact but the cultural context of what the object represents and how it relates to the local cultural heritage.

The fate of these ideas will depend on how the grant writing develops; the project as a whole could be shrunk to either of these projects (or similar ones), or these projects could be spinned off or retired.

Idea 4: The project could in principle also be expanded in scope, e.g. to test the efficiency of open versus traditional science. However, in order to produce a competitive grant on this big issue, we would require considerable support from beyond our current team of three.

The next steps

By May 10, we will need to identify in a first instance the type (or types) of funding bodies that would be suitable (at least in principle) to fund and/or sponsor the project. We would like to invite feedback and suggestions for that part of the process as well. For that purpose, we have set up a page on Wikiversity were we will be aggregating the relevant feedback we receive, and draft the next blog post in this series.

We would also like to invite feedback on which platform would be most suitable for the drafting of the full proposal. Different wiki spaces seem to be appropriate, as are Google Docs, but the idea of drafting it on GitHub is also on the table.