Month: May 2008

• Stewart Brand interview Freeman Dyson
  • Fantastic interview. 10 years old, but still provocative.
• Nomic – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • “Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move…The primary activity … is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it.”
• Bayesianism and Causality, or, Why I am only a Half-Bayesian (Judea Pearl)
  • “The bulk of human knowledge is organized around causal, not probabilistic relationships, and the grammar of probability calculus is insufficient for capturing those relationships.”
• Marginal Revolution: The Education Transformation of China
  • A more than five-fold increase in freshman numbers between 1996 and 2006.
• Coding Horror: Designing For Evil
  • Websites that fail to design against evil are failing their users.
• Bibwiki – Bibliographic Management – Extend Mediawiki to manage BibTeX bibliographies
  • Useful wiki tool to manage BibTex bibliographies. An example use is at bibwiki.com.
• Half of world’s population has a mobile phone
• Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins
• spreadingscience
  • Blog from a company that helps scientists get into Web 2.0.
• Freeman Dyson: The Question of Global Warming – The New York Review of Books
  • A long and thoughtful piece by Freeman Dyson.
• Genius, Sustained Effort, and Passion « Apperceptual
  • “If you care very deeply about a certain thing … you will be motivated to work hard at it for decades, …I deally, teachers would focus on one single thing: getting their students really, deeply excited about the subject of the course.”

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This is an excellent 1997 paper on the cost of electronic journals versus conventional journals (link to paper). Here’s a few of the takeaway points; italicised portions are direct quotes from the text.

• “Most traditional print publishers still claim, just as they have claimed for years, that switching to an electronic format can save at most 30% of the costs, namely the expenses of printing and mailing. Prices of electronic versions of established print journals are little, if any, lower than those of the basic paper versions.”

  I wonder if this is still true?

• “The direct costs of a journal article are dwarfed by various indirect costs and subsidies.”

  According to Odylyzko’s estimates the direct costs per article are (very roughly) about $4000, out of a total cost of $36,000. Thus, the indirect costs and subsidies are, economically, the main story. An obvious consequence is that making everything open access would do very little to perturb the macroeconomics (to abuse a term) of the whole system.

• “among the mathematics journals considered in [Kirby], the price per page ranged from $0.07 to $1.53, and the price per 10,000 characters, which compensates for different formats, from under $0.30 to over $3.00.”

  I.e., conservatively that’s a ten-fold difference in price.

• “The $4,000 revenue figure was the median of an extremely dispersed sample. Among the journals used in [Odlyzko1] to derive that estimate, the cost per article ranged from under $1,000 for some journals to over $8,000 for others. This disparity in costs brings out another of the most important features of scholarly publishing, namely lack of price competition. Could any airline survive with $8,000 fares if a competitor offered $1,000 fares?”

  Odylyzko goes on to note that such disparities don’t appear to be the consequence of a variation in quality. Many of the best journals are amongst the least expensive, and some of the most expensive journals are distinctly mediocre. It’s pretty obviously a market failure, a point he examines in fascinating detail later in the paper (see below).

• “Many publishers argue that costs cannot be reduced much, even with electronic publishing, since most of the cost is the first-copy cost of preparing the manuscripts for publication. This argument is refuted by the widely differing costs among publishers. The great disparity in costs among journals is a sign of an industry that has not had to worry about efficiency.”
• “Another sign of lack of effective price competition is the existence of large profits. The economic function of high profits is to attract competition and innovation, which then reduce those profits to average levels. However, as an example, Elsevier’s pretax margin exceeds 40% [Hayes], a level that is “phenomenally high, comparable as a fraction of revenues to the profits West Publishing derives from the Westlaw legal information service, and to those of Microsoft” [Odlyzko2].”

  Astounding. Apparently society journals are also often very profitable for the societies that run them.

• Odlyzko does a wonderful calculation of the costs of the arXiv preprint server. After making very generous assumptions about the costs of operation, he comes up with a number: $75 per paper, or nearly two orders of magnitude cost reductions over ordinary journals.
• Odlyzko estimates the cost of running a full-service electronic journal at about $300-$1000 per article, i.e., one order of magnitude cost reduction over ordinary journals.
• Summing up to this point: journal publication is only a tiny part of the whole research economy; the cost of journal publication could be reduced by an order of magnitude or so by going electronic; going to a preprint system buys you another order of magnitude; there are many signs of market failures and inefficiences in the journal publishing industry.

Odlyzko’s analysis of the perverse economic incentives involved and the consequent market failure is excellent. The argument is sufficiently dense and informative that I’ll quote it. Note especially the first sentence:

Journals do not compete on price, since that is not what determines their success[!!]. There are four principal groups of players. The first one consists of scholars as producers of the information that makes journals valuable. The second consists of scholars as users of that information. However, as users, they gain access to journals primarily through the third group, the libraries. Libraries purchase journals from the fourth group, the publishers, usually in response to requests from scholars. These requests are based overwhelmingly on the perceived quality of the journals, and price seldom plays a role (although that is changing under the pressure to control growth of library costs). The budgets for libraries almost always come from different sources than the budgets for academic departments, so that scholars as users do not have to make an explicit tradeoff between graduate assistantships and libraries, for example.

Scholars as writers of papers determine what journals their work will appear in, and thus how much it will cost society to publish their work. However, scholars have no incentive to care about those costs. What matters the most to them is the prestige of the journals they publish in. Often the economic incentives are to publish in high-cost outlets. It has often been argued that page charges are a rational way to allocate costs of publishing, since they make the author (or the author’s institution or research grant) cover some of the costs of the publication, which, after all, is motivated by a desire to further the author’s career. However, page charges are less and less frequent. As an extreme example, in the late 1970s, Nuclear Physics B, published by Elsevier, took over as the “journal of choice” in particle physics and field theory from Physical Review D, even though the latter was much less expensive. This happened because Phys. Rev. D had page charges, and physicists decided they would rather use their grant money for travel, postdocs, and the like. Note that the physicists in this story behaved in a perfectly rational way. They did not have to use their grants to pay for the increase in library costs associated with the shift from an inexpensive journal to a much pricier one. Furthermore, even if they had to pay for that cost, they would have come out ahead; the increase in the costs of just their own library associated with an individual decision to publish in Nucl. Phys. B instead of the less expensive Phys. Rev. D (could such a small change have been quantified) would have been much smaller than the savings on page charges. Most of the extra cost would have been absorbed by other institutions.

Odlyzko continues with more in this vein, before summarizing:

The perverse incentives in scholarly publishing that are illustrated in the examples above have led to the current expensive system. They are also leading to its collapse. The central problem is that scholars have no incentive to maintain it. In book publishing, royalties align the authors’ interests with those of publishers, as both wish to maximize revenues. (This is most applicable in the trade press, or in textbooks. In scholarly monograph publishing, the decreasing sales combined with the typical royalty rate of at most 15% are reducing the financial payoff to authors, and appears to be leading to changes, with monographs becoming available electronically for free.) For the bulk of scholarly publishing, though, the market is too small to make provide a significant financial payoff to the authors.

How can this be changed? From the conclusion:

Although scholars have no incentive to maintain the current journal system, they currently also have no incentive to dismantle it. Even the physicists who rely on the Ginsparg preprint server continue to publish most of their papers in established print journals. The reason is that it costs them nothing to submit papers to such journals, and also costs them nothing to have their library buy the journals.

[…]

Until the academic library system is modified, with the costs and tradeoffs made clear to scholars and administrators, it is unlikely there will be any drastic changes. […] Electronic journals will become almost universal but most of them will be versions of established print journals, and will be equally expensive. Free or inexpensive electronic journals will grow, but probably not too rapidly. However, this situation is not likely to persist for long. I have been predicting [Odlyzko1, Odlyzko2] that change will come when administrators realize just how expensive the library system is, and that scholars can obtain most of the information they need from other sources, primarily preprints. Over the decade from 1982 to 1992, library expenditures have grown by over a third even after adjusting for general inflation [ARL]. However, they have fallen by about 10% as a share of total university spending. Apparently the pressure from scholars to maintain library collection has not been great enough, and other priorities have been winning. At some point in the future more drastic cuts are likely.

Mostly this is spot on, although I think the rate of change has been slower than Odlyzko might have predicted. Odlyzko concludes with:

To maintain their position, publishers will have to move to activities where they provide more value, instead of relying on scholars to do most of the work for them.

You can’t possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It’s a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we’ve been building them for 100 years, it’s very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it’s even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.

That’s from a fantastic interview with Stewart Brand. I’d love to see an interview with the roles turned around. (Incidentally, occasional commenter John Sidles gets a very nice mention by Dyson in the interview. Way to go John!)

Stevan Harnad is one of the pioneers of the Open Access movement, and his Subversive Proposal is a seminal documents in the history of that movement. The following are my very rough notes on the main text of that document.

We have heard many sanguine predictions about the demise of paper publishing, but life is short and the inevitable day still seems a long way off. This is a subversive proposal that could radically hasten that day. It is applicable only to ESOTERIC (non-trade, no-market) scientific and scholarly publication (but that is the lion’s share of the academic corpus anyway), namely, that body of work for which the author does not and never has expected to SELL the words. The scholarly author wants only to PUBLISH them, that is, to reach the eyes and minds of peers, fellow esoteric scientists and scholars the world over, so that they can build on one another’s contributions in that cumulative collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry. For centuries, it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of esoteric publications entered into the Faustian bargain of allowing a price-tag to be erected as a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended readership, for that was the only way they could make their work public at all during the age when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) was their only option.

This all ties into a fascinating set of issues about how human society has collectively chosen to innovate. We’ve essentially decided to split intellectual innovation into two types. One is innovation with a short-term payoff, which is largely done in the commercial realm. The presumption is that that payoff is sufficient incentive for companies to invest in innovation, with the protections of IP law guaranteeing a limited monopoly with which they can recover their investment. The second type is more basic research, which has a longer-term payoff, and is done without relying on the market. Instead, we have a meritocratic welfare system for academics which produces such innovations as output. These go immediately into the information commons.

This is an over-simplification, of course. The real situation is more complex, especially with the passing of the Bayh-Dole Act and similar legislation in other countries, legislation that muddies the distinction between Universities and the market. But it’s a pretty good first approximation.

There’s a lot wrong with this system, but overall it’s a pretty good system for creating a healthy information commons, while also making innovative products available to consumers.

What I think Harnad is pointing out is that journals are an example of a point of contact between the academic welfare system and the commercial world. Inevitably, the two have very different and perhaps sometimes mutually unsatisfactory goals.

But today there is another way, and that is PUBLIC FTP: If every esoteric author in the world this very day established a globally accessible local ftp archive for every piece of esoteric writing from this day forward, the long-heralded transition from paper publication to purely electronic publication (of esoteric research) would follow suit almost immediately. This is already beginning to happen in the physics community, thanks to Paul Ginsparg’s HEP preprint network, with 20,000 users worldwide and 35,000 “hits” per day, and Paul Southworth’s CICnet is ready to help follow suit in other disciplines. The only two factors standing in the way of this outcome at this moment are (1) quality control (i.e., peer review and editing), which today happens to be implemented almost exclusively by paper publishers, and (2) the patina of paper publishing, which results from this monopoly on quality control. If all scholars’ preprints were universally available to all scholars by anonymous ftp (and gopher, and World-Wide Web, and the search/retrieval wonders of the future), NO scholar would ever consent to WITHDRAW any preprint of his from the public eye after the refereed version was accepted for paper “PUBLICation.” Instead, everyone would, quite naturally, substitute the refereed, published reprint for the unrefereed preprint. Paper publishers will then either restructure themselves (with the cooperation of the scholarly community) so as to arrange for the much-reduced electronic-only page costs (which I estimate to be less than 25% of paper-page costs, contrary to the 75% figure that appears in most current publishers’ estimates) to be paid out of advance subsidies (from authors’ page charges, learned society dues, university publication budgets and/or governmental publication subsidies) or they will have to watch as the peer community spawns a brand new generation of electronic-only publishers who will.

There’s not much to add. This is all quite prescient of what’s taken place. There’s an excellent later paper by Andrew Odlyzko on the actual economics of journal publishing that’s well worth looking at.

The subversion will be complete, because the (esoteric — no-market) peer-reviewed literature will have taken to the airwaves, where it always belonged, and those airwaves will be free (to the benefit of us all) because their true minimal expenses will be covered the optimal way for the unimpeded flow of esoteric knowledge to all: In advance.

Stevan Harnad

Cognitive Science Laboratory

Princeton University

Princeton NJ 08542

harnad@princeton.edu

June 27, 1994

The Budapest Open Access Initiative is one of the seminal documents in the history of the Open Access movement. It’s a remarkable and important document. These are my (very) rough notes on it. The notes are mostly critical, which perhaps hides my appreciation for the vision in the document, which is extraordinary. If you find yourself agreeing with much of what’s said, you may wish to sign on to the initiative. The text of the initiative is below, with my notes interspersed:

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge.

The economics is more complex than that. Most scientists make their research available also in part for reputation, which they can convert into material wealth through jobs, promotions, and grants.

The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

For various reasons, this kind of free and unrestricted online availability, which we will call open access, has so far been limited to small portions of the journal literature. But even in these limited collections, many different initiatives have shown that open access is economically feasible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and that it gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact. To secure these benefits for all, we call on all interested institutions and individuals to help open up access to the rest of this literature and remove the barriers, especially the price barriers, that stand in the way. The more who join the effort to advance this cause, the sooner we will all enjoy the benefits of open access.

The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Modern version control systems enable us to go a great deal further, so that multiple authors can work on the same corpus of work, while still enabling people to tease apart who contributed what. If such permissive licensing were allowed – i.e., open source research – then we’d get a good deal more involuntary collaboration. In my opinion, the history of science shows that this would be a good thing.

It would also be nice to have the role of machine-readability more explicitly emphasized. Indeed, one can imagine a notion of “Extreme Open Access”, which not only provides human- and machine-readable versions of material, but also powerful APIs on top of these basic services.

While the peer-reviewed journal literature should be accessible online without cost to readers, it is not costless to produce. However, experiments show that the overall costs of providing open access to this literature are far lower than the costs of traditional forms of dissemination.

Journals traditionally provide (a) printing; (b) distribution; (c) archiving; (d) editorial oversight (including services such as copyediting); and (e) co-ordination of refereeing. (a) and (b) are becoming irrelevant. Points (d) and (e) are becoming increasingly possible to outsource completely. (c) is more problematic, although things like DOIs and archive.org help. As a result the value added by journals is plummeting. Of course, there are potentially many other ways the journals could add value, and some already do – the media services offered by Science and Nature immediately come to mind.

With such an opportunity to save money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time, there is today a strong incentive for professional associations, universities, libraries, foundations, and others to embrace open access as a means of advancing their missions. Achieving open access will require new cost recovery models and financing mechanisms, but the significantly lower overall cost of dissemination is a reason to be confident that the goal is attainable and not merely preferable or utopian.

To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies.

I. Self-Archiving: First, scholars need the tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving. When these archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, then search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one. Users then need not know which archives exist or where they are located in order to find and make use of their contents.

II. Open-access Journals: Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open access, and to help existing journals that elect to make the transition to open access. Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead they will use copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish.

Presumably, through the use of ideas like copyleft.

Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.

This is nicely done. It emphasizes that the old business model is no longer viable, and that the need is to search creatively for new business models, without prescribing what the new business model should be.

Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of open-access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this goal. They are not only direct and effective means to this end, they are within the reach of scholars themselves, immediately, and need not wait on changes brought about by markets or legislation. While we endorse the two strategies just outlined, we also encourage experimentation with further ways to make the transition from the present methods of dissemination to open access. Flexibility, experimentation, and adaptation to local circumstances are the best ways to assure that progress in diverse settings will be rapid, secure, and long-lived.

The Open Society Institute, the foundation network founded by philanthropist George Soros, is committed to providing initial help and funding to realize this goal. It will use its resources and influence to extend and promote institutional self-archiving, to launch new open-access journals, and to help an open-access journal system become economically self-sustaining. While the Open Society Institute’s commitment and resources are substantial, this initiative is very much in need of other organizations to lend their effort and resources.

Apparently, Soros was a student of Karl Popper’s at the London School of Economics – the Popper who wrote “The Open Society and its Enemies”, which is on my to-read shelf.

We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access and building a future in which research and education in every part of the world are that much more free to flourish.

February 14, 2002 Budapest, Hungary

Leslie Chan: Bioline International

Darius Cuplinskas: Director, Information Program, Open Society Institute

Michael Eisen: Public Library of Science

Fred Friend: Director Scholarly Communication, University College London

Yana Genova: Next Page Foundation

Jean-Claude Guédon: University of Montreal

Melissa Hagemann: Program Officer, Information Program, Open Society Institute

Stevan Harnad: Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Southampton, Universite du Quebec a Montreal

Rick Johnson: Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)

Rima Kupryte: Open Society Institute

Manfredi La Manna: Electronic Society for Social Scientists

István Rév: Open Society Institute, Open Society Archives

Monika Segbert: eIFL Project consultant

Sidnei de Souza: Informatics Director at CRIA, Bioline International

Peter Suber: Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College & The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter

Jan Velterop: Publisher, BioMed Central

This is as good a time as any to celebrate my five-year blogiversary. I don’t know the exact date I started blogging, but I believe it was May 2003.

My current blog started in August 2003, but the first few posts were manual imports from my earlier blog. This is post number 373, and the word count is about 150,000. Thankyou to everybody who’s read, and especially to those who’ve commented!

• Confessions of a Science Librarian: Further Thoughts on Abstracting & Indexing Databases
• Microsoft kills Books search engine and Live Search Academic
  • This is too bad. Live Search Academic looked like a pretty good alternative to Google Scholar.
• Kevin Kelly — Technologies that Connect
  • Summary of a talk by Iqbal Qadir, who’s started a compay that loans cellphones to poor Bangladeshis, on the theory that “technologies that connect” are a good way of improving a society’s overall wellbeing.

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I was recently reminded of a beautiful paper by Tony Bracken and Geoff Melloy, Probability Backflow and a New Dimensionless Quantum Number (publisher subscription required, alas). What they describe is a marvellous (and too little known) quantum phenomenon that they dub “probability backflow”.

The basic idea is simple, although counterintuitive. Imagine a quantum particle moving in free space. It’s easiest if you imagine space is one-dimensional, i.e., the particle can only move left or right on a line. The discussion also works in three dimensions, but is a bit trickier to describe.

What Bracken and Melloy show is that it’s possible to prepare the particle in a state such that both the following are true:

(1) If you measure the velocity of the particle, you’re guaranteed to find that the particle is moving rightwards along the line.

(2) Suppose you fix a co-ordinate origin on the line, i.e., a “zero” of position. They prove that if you measure position then the probability of finding the particle to the right of the origin actually decreases in time, not increases, as one might naively expect from point (1).

So far as I know, this has never been experimentally demonstrated.

Bracken and Melloy also give a beautiful explanation of probability backflow in terms of “quasi-probabilities”. It’s been known for a long time, at least since Wigner, that you can reformulate quantum mechanics as something very much like a classical theory, but one with negative probabilities. Using this reformulation, Bracken and Melloy explain the phenomenon: sure, the particle is moving right, but it’s actually negative probability that is flowing to the right of the origin, and so the probability of being to the right of the origin decreases in time.

Inspired by the power of this intuitive explanation, I once worked for a while trying to use quasi-probability formulations to find new algorithms for quantum computers. Despite my lack of success, I still think this is a promising approach, not just to algorithms, but more generally to quantum information.

• Confessions of a Science Librarian: Google Scholar and the future of A&I databases
• Google Code as a science repository : business|bytes|genes|molecules
• Criminal posts 80 videos of himself committing crimes to YouTube
  • People are odd: “Andrew Kellett, 23, was banned from boasting about his criminal activities on the Internet after posting videos of himself and others taking Class A drugs, racing cars at high speeds and trespassing and shouting abuse.”
• Open Library API: Cataloging 13 Million Books
  • Moving towards a webpage for every book every published. How about a wiki for every book every published?
• Bruce Schneier: Our Data, Ourselves
  • “In the information age, we all have a data shadow… Who controls our data controls our lives… We need a comprehensive data privacy law.”
• Secrets to smart decisions when you graduate from college » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk
  • Good post on making big decisions (especially career decisions) in general.
• Find Similar Users on del.icio.us
  • Python script to find similar users on del.icio.us
• InFasta
  • An Open Science Experiment in Bioinformatics

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Anyone from the physical sciences on friendfeed? There are dozens of biologists, but not so many from the physical sciences.