Kylie Pappalardo

Jenine Borowik – Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

What stimulates particular disciplines to adopt OA when others do not?

This question is particularly pertinent to the ABS – ABS has a mission of promoting informed decision making – but there is an increasingly array of “national interests” – as a result, ABS has realised that we cannot continue to be an island of research and information gathering and dissemination, we need to work with other organisations. Due to this, interest in encouraging a community of organisations to build a rich statistical picture of Australia.

In 2005, ABS removed the barrier of price to access for information. So anyone who accessed ABS website could freely download publications etc. Number of downloads has risen from 1 million per year to 5 million per year. Page views from 50 million to 150 million.

Creative Commons (CC) gives a solution to another barrier – the legal barrier. ABS is interested in using CC. Would like to use something that is successful and widely understood rather than something they have developed that is “just theirs”. Also interested in the way the licences are carried with the particular item of data, and the requirement for attribution. Legal aspects not the primary consideration for ABS, so if there is a mechanism that makes it easy to apply the right licences then that is a good thing.

Jeffrey Kingwell – Geosciences Australia (GA)

GA is a national geographic information clearing house. Collects seismic info, operates national mapping agency etc.

Mission = collect geographic stuff to give to other people to do stuff with.

So why is it so difficult to get the stuff out there?

Finding that due to a number of factors, including IP law and IP government policy, that it is important to align OA policy with IP policy. This is an issue where policies developed in different departments (e.g. IP policy by commercialization unit, OA in another area). GA is trying to construct an IP policy that is consistent with their vision and core function.

Creative Commons Pilot Project 2007-08

Summary:

1. Have a simple statement of your objective in sharing
2. align IP policy with that
3. use simple tools (such as CC) to implement

Dr Alexander Cooke – Australian Research Council (ARC)

Broad principles for an Accessibility Framework:

• Publicly funded research outputs and data should be managed in ways that maximise public benefit;
• Institutions or individuals receiving public funding have a responsibility to make the results of that funding publicly available
• ….

What opportunities are there?
The Accessibility Framework offers the ARC and NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council) the possibility of strengthening their funding rules to mandate rather than encourage deposit

Tony Hey – Cloud Computing

Rationale for Cloud computing

• Outsourcing IT infrastructure
• Minimize costs
• Large cloud/utility computing provides can have relativel very small ownership and operation costs due to the huge scale of deployment and automation
• Small business have access to large scale resources

Example – Amazon Web Services
= Simple Storage Service (s3) – storage for the internet; simple web service interface

Example – smugmug.com
= Profitable, debt-free company because it does not have any hardware resources; it only uses Amazon hardware (for free, in the cloud)

Examples from Microsoft:

Live Mesh

• A PC in the cloud
• Can synchronize PC in the cloud with your laptop, your mobile devices such as phones or music players etc

Office Live Workspace

• Can upload documents for other people to work on
• Other people can download and use those documents that you choose to share

The future = software plus services for science

Expect scientific research environments to follow similar trends to the commercial sector

Example – Trident Scientific Workflow Workbench

Toward a Smart Cyberinfrastructure

Collective intelligence

Example – last fm.

A world where all data is linked…
…and stored/processed/analyzed in the cloud

Alma Swan – Open Access: The Next Five Years

Where we are now:

• Focus = research articles
• Latest estimates show level of OA for research article is still <20%
• Expect even more attempts by (some) publishers at obstruction:
• Arguments often fallacious – best way to deal with them is calmly and rational
• Arguments sometimes dishonest
• Argument always wrong to argue that publicly funded research carried out by public researchers should not be made publicly available because it would hurt a private/commercial player
• Weapon: copyright
• Wield it, now, against the interest of academic and the paying public
• Reason for the panic: OA mandates

Open Access policies:

• a lot of almost-there well-meaning policies
• come in various flavours; not all taste good to everyone
• NIH
• But we are on an upward trend
• Mandates work; voluntary policies do not
• Because the outcome makes glorious sense for the research institutions and funders
• Repositories are also management tools
• And marketing tools for a university
• Helps the university make the best use of the web

Repositories: state of play

• growing at a rate of around 1 per day
• Alma cannot believe that within 5 years there will not be a serious university that does not have a repository and does not actively use it

Copyright:

• It is a completely resolvable issues
• Yet it is the major barrier to simple acceptance and practice of OA by researchers
• Copyright futures – actually a tendency towards the legal strengthening of copyright in general
• Research community practice will demonstrate the way copyright is applied to scholarly articles is out of date
• Author agreements that retain copyright (licence to publish)
• New ‘liberal’ practices with respect to publishing findings
• Anyway, OA is completely compatible with copyright

New, ill-defined issue: research data

• increasingly the primary output in some fields
• data have yet to be properly recognised as research output
• increasingly the subject of mandates, too

New research approaches…

• …depend on OA
• e-research (big research) – collaborative research – needs OA to make it work properly
• but so does collaborative ‘small’ research
• interdisciplinary research
• web 2.0 outputs becoming a norm
• early examples of institutional solutions – institutions have to start to help things happen – VIVO: Virtual Life Sciences at Cornell (a system that links up within the uni: the repository, the library, personal websites of academics etc);

Pragmatic Solutions:

• joining articles, data and other related outputs in better ways
• more (and more) work on standards
• ‘surfacing’ web content – i.e. better way to show off OA content
• new services built across repository networks
• clearer vision of how to reach a repository-based scholarly communication system
• new technologies need to show content in a form that researchers (and machines) can exploit (XML) – needs to be semantic/exploitative technologies
• there are already publishers who use a repository as a means of submitting the paper to the publisher for peer review

Wrong solutions: impact and assessment:

• for too long we’ve used a proxy measure to measure impact (journal impact factor), but for years it has been use to advance (or retard) careers
• with an OA corpus, multiple metrics and indicators are possible
• e.g. in the health sciences in the UK, move to measure impact by where it leads in terms of new medicine, new treatment NHS spending etc, not just the journal where the article is published

Mahatma Gandhi:
First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you
Then you win!

Everything “open” started as a big joke. But things are changing….

It’s been too easy to dismiss the issue:

• institutions have been notably disengage
• scholarly communication has been low on the agenda
• yet it is central to the core mission of a university

Questions universities will be addressing:

• Are we happy with current quality and impact measures?
• What do we want?
• What new reward systems can we build?
• How can we use the internet better?

Commentators: Prof Tom Cochrane (QUT) and Derek Whitehead (Swinburne)

Prof Tom Cochrane

Mandates:

Mandates are only likely to succeed if they are clearly purposed in terms of scope – there must be clarity about what outputs the mandates will catch, where the outputs will be and for what purpose, and clarity at a policy level about whether it is in itself sufficient to make a rule (mandate) – at QUT it was thought not to be enough, that it had to be implemented cleverly, which is where the library came in in developing the repository properly

Behaviour:

We need to look at the system of rewards – until we do something about incentives for data curation, then they wont happen or will happen accidentally and haphazardly

Copyright:

A large number of people are rendered more uncertain about copyright than about anything else. Copyright must be dealt with in this space – we need clarity about it as an enabler not an obstacle

Trends:

One trend that is contradicting the nature of research, is that the semantic web tools are forcing questions about how collaboration is to be managed. There rush to develop tools where management is at a machine level rather than a human level. But unless we solve some of the legal and regulatory issues that are thrown up by the use of these tools then we will keep being hindered in our OA efforts.