Disqus - Latest Comments for CameronNeylon

Re: Against the 2.5% Commitment

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 16:04:32 -0000

Dear David, Lori, Diane, Mike

Thanks so much. I think the important thing is that we debate implementation details and I'm conscious that it is very easy to criticise from an arm-chair. I take your point about the title. My aim was to attract the attention of a specific group, but in that I'm as guilty of a click-bait approach as many of the groups that we often criticise for simplistic headlines on complex subjects.

As you note, what is important is that we tackle the issue of collectively funding infrastructure, platforms and innovation. Targets matter and numbers speak to people in a way that more complex proposals often don't. As you note benchmarks are useful, and it may be that as these efforts evolve we see the number rise. Perhaps a 2.5% Club of institutions will give way to 5% and 10% over time?

What matters in the long term is that we develop systems that can evolve into the future. For that, I thank you for the work you're doing in raising these issues and getting them on the agenda of librarians and university leadership. The implementation details we will no doubt continue to discuss for some time.

Re: Against the 2.5% Commitment

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 09:38:19 -0000

Yes, absolutely agree with this. That's really what I'm trying to get at with the idea of properly treating them as investments with not just costs, but returns, and differential returns based on the timing and scale of investment.

You wouldn't invest in a building program and then lobby the council to stop any new building (or cut funding for new planning approvals) yet when we treat things as though they are a single bottom line we do this over and over again. And when we only provide a very small number of funding options, and in particular nothing that provides the capital for scaling up and proper usability work we continually lose either the value (because the project fails) or control over the investment (because its bought by outside parties).

Re: Against the 2.5% Commitment

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 09:35:00 -0000

Hi Raym, thanks for the kind comments. My recollection is that meeting in Lieden(?) for the Jisc project on sustainability of OA infrastructures you made it as a straw-person proposal to cut through a somewhat circular discussion we were having about whose problem it was. But my memory may be hazy on that. Definitely someone in that discussion group proposed that as a way forward...

Re: 2560 x 1440 (except while traveling)

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 08:06:21 -0000

I'll have to write the post but the core of it is this: if you follow the thread from this post ( http://cameronneylon.net/bl... to this one from Roger Schonfeld ( https://scholarlykitchen.ss... then a very profitable route (particularly for subscription publishers but not exclusively) is to red-flag papers from particular places and people to save money. And all of this can be done silently. At least one publisher used to simply block reject very paper that came from Iran for instance, but you can imagine a prestige journal just dumping anything from unknown authors or developing countries and it never becoming visible.

Re: What’s the return? Or…how is it possible that Open Library of Humanities works?

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 07:16:53 -0000

So yes, there are lots of clubs interacting. One challenge is to work out when you have a single club with different kinds of members and when you have different clubs interacting in exchange. TBD on how one does that, tho at some level its a question of how you build your models.

Currently we would tend to see a journal as a single club with different kinds of members. Buchannan's work allows for this (and predicts it). The simplest case is when authors are readers (think traditional society journal) and we need to work out what happens as those two groups drift apart. My (not fully worked out) thinking at the moment is that what tends to happens is that coordination costs move from being off-balance sheet (community managed) to on-balance sheet.

In this sense PLOS ONE and Nature both face the same problem. There is a large divergence between author and reader communities so internal (community based, tacit) knowledge that can efficiently do QA has to be professionalised, which happens in both cases.

In my analysis an OA and a subscription journal don't end up so different, but the models for payment mean that this scaling problem plays out differently for each.

Now, all clubs (by definition) leave some groups out. I think the key club for your relative is not the journal but the institution/community one (which takes you back to the library). There are OA journals that function as a community club where your relative would have OA publishing privileges as a member, but in the subscription case, yes the external author is a free rider. Which is probably why we so fiercely police things around institutional affiliations I guess...

Clear as mud?

Re: As a researcher…I’m a bit bloody fed up with Data Management

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 03:59:03 -0000

I always liked the line that "any sufficiently large carrot can also be deployed as a stick"...but yes the point is well taken. It's a little worse than that in the sense that all of the various groups view all of the others (admin and library as seen by researchers, admin and researchers as seen by library etc etc) as "donkeys" in the sense of not seeing what they ought to as the really important bit. Its the failure of imagination to realise that we all have different skills and figuring out how to bring them together effectively is the key...

Re: As a researcher…I’m a bit bloody fed up with Data Management

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 03:57:01 -0000

Hi David,

Yes, that kind of practical "just be sensible" advice turned out to be hard to find. For instance that OSF page didn't show up in my results, partly because I thought I was looking for something more specific, and partly because it was buried in pages of results of metadata schema.

The more I've thought about this the more I think its really about discovering and coordinating resources that actually do exist online but are not well connected and don't rise to the top of search results. Again, this is the argument for the professional support person who knows how to find this stuff. The challenge is in guiding the user towards them.

Re: Openness in Scholarship: A return to core values?

Cameron Neylon — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 07:25:04 -0000

I do need to more explicitly state what is meant by "evolution" here. I had a go here: http://cameronneylon.net/bl... and there was this chapter that starts to tease it apart in a less abstract way: http://cameronneylon.net/bl...

But yes, evolution is meant as questions of survival of recognizable entities (yes that begs the question...). So Lamarckian (or epigenetic if you prefer) is just fine. The point ultimately is of course that we can choose to guide it, but only if we accept that it is guiding, not controlling, so learning, applying are all important.

I can't recall whether Ostrom uses the word "evolution" precisely at the moment, but I read the main point of Governing the Commons as being that the theoretical institutional provisioning problem that leads to Hardin's tragedy can be overcome in practice by accepting that these institutions build up over time and gradually accrete the capacity to enable a community to address the collective action problem. That to me is a process of evolution.

Re: What measurement does to us…

Cameron Neylon — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 16:48:14 -0000

Potentially. I haven't at all had a chance to chase them down. Either way I find it a fascinating parallel so I wouldn't find it very surprising if someone else has done the analysis properly. I should go looking properly!

[edit] I think I've found it in "Bias in Mental Testing" by Arthur R Jensen. Waiting to try and find the right part of the book. Yup! p172 in a chapter about IQ testing no less!

https://www.google.co.uk/se...

Re: Blacklists are technically infeasible, practically unreliable and unethical. Period.

Cameron Neylon — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 19:22:55 -0000

Hi Marc

Yes, and I had a similar discussion with @gavialib as to the pragmatics in a world of imperfect lists. So my train of thought is that a) they don't work in theory and b) I think black lists are unethical.

Automatic exclusion is always bad in my view. Whereas asking additional questions, requiring more evidence or simply declining to include until further info is available is ok (if not perfect as you note).

This is why I emphasise the *use* of the list. A list might technically be a "blacklist" but if it is used to flag potential issues for further investigation, or to focus QA efforts then I don't really see it as a blacklist, but as part of a QA process for a whitelist.

That may seem like splitting hairs but what is most important from my view is the act of exclusion. Bottom line excluding something permanently on the basis of someone else's assessment, particularly in an automated fashion is to my mind unethical.

Re: FORCE11 Executive Board Statement on Restrictions to Immigration

Cameron Neylon — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 06:21:22 -0000

Hi Ravi

Yes, some good points here. We do need to work on getting good information to those of us who fail to think of these options about places that work, what challenges (if any) there are. I'm hoping we will be able to set up some projects to provide a guide to conference/workshop locations and also to work on technology aspects for multi-site meetings and telepresence as well. This is something FORCE11 is well placed to lead on.

On a personal note, I had to apply for a visa for the first time in years a few months back, and it was a pain. I can only imagine how much of a pain it is when you need to do that for every trip...

Re: FORCE11 Executive Board Statement on Restrictions to Immigration

Cameron Neylon — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 06:18:56 -0000

If anyone is interested in contributing to discussion on this I'd also recommend joining the FORCE11 Discussion Group (if you're already a FORCE11 member you still need to join as we don't like to spam people). You can find the discussion at:
https://groups.google.com/a...

Re: Blacklists are technically infeasible, practically unreliable and unethical. Period.

Cameron Neylon — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 10:02:51 -0000

Hi Marc

Let me try and re-state it because I think I should have defined what I meant more precisely. A list is just a list, something becomes a black list dependent on not just how its put together but how it is used.

So a blacklist is a list of things you shouldn't use or touch. If you use something as a blacklist you are always at risk because something might not (yet) be listed. A blacklist is open conceptually but limited in practice. Imagine you work with an explosive material that combines badly with some other materials. If you rely on the blacklist you are at risk that something has been missed.

A whitelist by contrast is a list of things that are guaranteed to be able to safely use. It is closed conceptually as well as being limited in practice. You can rely on those materials that have been tested to not combine badly with your explosive material. The whitelist is safe in that sense. Of course it may be put together wrong but that's a separate issue.

The ethical problem with whitelists is that they are conservative in practice and tend to become discriminatory against new practice. DOAJ has been criticised for this, for being too strict and excluding valid experimentation for instance. The challenge with whitelists is that they only rarely match the precise thing you want to test for.

So "blacklist" isn't just the list itself but also the way it is relied on. If you are relying on an external agency to tell you what is dangerous you always risk that they've missed something new. If you rely on an external agency to tell you what is safe you will be safe, but possibly overly conservative compared to what you really want.

Does that make more sense?

Re: Licensing, ethics and patient privacy

Cameron Neylon — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 11:02:20 -0000

Well I would say that's an ethical question (and I'm no professional ethicist, and this ain't ethics advice). Ultimately its a consent and commitment question for me. I think you're posing the question the wrong way around (and that's why John had such a strong view on it, he's dug deep into this). I'd also note that the Portable Consent work that John's done addresses a lot of the technical barriers to making access control work in these settings.

And to the scientist's being dismayed I'd say stiff. We seem to be getting a few messages to maybe listen a little harder to the concerns of others at the moment, instead of focussing on our own issues.

In terms of licensing yes, the end point of my view is that we should remove legal barriers and use norms to enforce community requirements on eg attribution (and contracts in the limited cases where limiting specific uses is required). That's why this blog is cc0. Not widely know but PLOS almost went with a public domain dedication at the beginning. But it's not now a viable political argument to make at the moment and we've built a good corpus of CC BY and it has limited (but real) interop and scale problems.

The problem with any variant license is that they just don't work. Using copyright to restrict specified uses just fails in practice. It's not the right legal tool. If you must use a variant license then use one of the existing CC ones (they're tested), I guess NC-ND. But probably All Rights Reserved would be a better fit for the aims you have anyway, as it reduces the liability risk (which is a serious issue here, researchers – and possibly the publisher – would be taking on an ill-defined liability in using a (c) license for this).

The historical evidence I'd give is that all of these issues have come up before with software licensing in various forms. A million and one F/OSS licenses grew up creating massive confusion. Today in practice they're mostly gone and there are three or four, and still massive confusion (and people just ignoring them). Bespoke licenses offer some local comfort but rarely succeed at actually addressing the core problem.

Maybe its time for a new post on what (c) licensing can and can't do and the difference between that and what people want it to do...

Re: Licensing, ethics and patient privacy

Cameron Neylon — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 05:00:15 -0000

Hi Richard

So I'm going to stick with my original point. A copyright license is the wrong tool to use here to give the right kind of (credible) assurances to a participant about use of sensitive data (of any kind). I don't doubt that such restrictions might be comforting, but they're ultimately not really enforceable.

For instance, the authors (as copyright holders) would have to contract with the patient, to pursue the matter in court just as a start. And in many cases there may not be a credible copyright case to make. That combined with the risks of contaminating an open corpus with variant licenses is a slam dunk for me. Even going down this route isn't really ethical because its misrepresenting the situation to participants.

And in the end given that the risks are not clear, even to us who are notionally experts, informed consent is on shakey grounds and safeguarding and precautionary principle would suggest that erring on side of caution and using access controlled data repositories is the way forward. And that's before the additional issue of parents giving consent for children is raised as well.

So in the end, wanting to maximise the chances of consent *is* an ethical issue and one I think we should step away from as it implies guarantees that we can't make.

Re: Scholarly Communications: Less of a market, more like general taxation?

Cameron Neylon — Sat, 21 May 2016 20:36:53 -0000

So two layers of response here. It doesn't matter whether the services are provided by government or third party. It's a question of how the resources are gathered and what decisions are made in the allocation of those resources. Whether or not a road is built by government or contractors, what matters is that its paid for by tax.

The second is to take issue with your second paragraph. There are well defined and well understood situations where testing what individuals want by asking them to allocate resources is the worst possible way to go about it. That's the problem at the heart of public good economics - precisely that rational actors will not apply resources to things that they want in a range of situations.

And my argument will be that what's being created here is a public-like good and therefore understanding its resourcing as tax (and compulsory) will be more useful than pretending its a market. My prediction is that political-economic theories of taxation burden will be more useful in analysing the costs in the system and resource allocation than a market based one (which we know to be largely useless).

Re: RIOXX and metadata only records

Cameron Neylon — Sat, 02 Apr 2016 10:01:09 -0000

So this is the inverse of a question that we debated in the NISO group that proposed the license_ref element, where we asked the question; what happens if the metadata gets separated from the article. If I recall correctly we came to essentially the same conclusion, unless the metadata record points at (or is attached to) something, then it is meaningless so I would concur with your assessment here. That in turn raises a question of authoritativeness of such records but at least in the NISO group we deferred that decision to the user (because the issue of who legitimately gets to assert a license in this context has political ramifications).

Re: The Signal and the Noise: The Problem of Reproducibility

Cameron Neylon — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 10:03:24 -0000

...or indeed to tell a truth. Or to transfer meaning. But yes, the semantics is the route to the semiotics here. Trying to get the easy stuff right before delving into actual meaning and meaningfulness...

Re: The Signal and the Noise: The Problem of Reproducibility

Cameron Neylon — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 10:02:03 -0000

Perhaps, but the source of the problem is certainly not immaterial to the question of how you would try to improve the article or invest resources in improving this article vs another. But I agree much better description of what is being done with respect to a re-test is important. And part of that will be the language.

Re: The Limits on “Open”: Why knowledge is not a public good and what to do about it

Cameron Neylon — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 19:01:14 -0000

Hi Tim

So I probably drew a more explicit link in the talk than in the text. I don’t actually see “creation” and “review” as very different in this model. The knowledge, whether raw or refined, remains a club good. The certification that comes from review and publication are membership benefits. Publication itself is less about dissemination and more the process of creating new (or expanded) clubs. There remains a lot to work through but prestige is definitely a club good (although there’s an argument as to whether it is truly non-rivalrous) and membership benefit.

In terms of the preprint vs publication question it gets more complex and indeed this is at the heart of what I want to tease apart. It could certainly be argued that in principle that actual use value of knowledge (in its most nearly public good form) should be enabled by preprint publication. Now we know that communication is more important than this. Other goods like attention and readership (which are in the opposite quadrant, common pool resources) need to be brought into play and prestige plays a large part in driving these attention markets. A key question is how separated do use value and exchange value get (i.e. what is the quality of information in the prestige markets). Still a great deal to work out here...

Cameron NeylonProfessor of Research Communications

Centre for Culture & Technology, Curtin University cn@cameronneylon.net - http://cameronneylon.net

@cameronneylon - http://orcid.org/0000-0002-...

Re: PolEcon of OA Publishing II: What’s the technical problem with reforming scholarly publishing?

Cameron Neylon — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 08:38:56 -0000

It’s really not a question of number of developers but commitment to community management, and resourcing of community managers. There are more than enough people doing work on OJS worldwide, and more than enough organisations with some actual resource to contribute dev resource either in kind or as money. The challenge is building the community structures that make it work and resourcing those. That’s where many OS projects go wrong in my view - failing to see that its about much more than dev resource.

If you look at something like the Apache foundation then I think there is very little actual dev resource at the centre but lots of infrastructures to support communities (and lots of argument as to whether they are the right shape/form). The dev resource flows from the community to the centre precisely because those infrastructures mean a lot of value is added to any contribution.

Add to that, as Kevin says the technical problem. OJS 2 is not well set up for contributions, but as a result of its structure almost every instance of OJS in the wild is a fork that’s not compatible with 3.0. How to shift is very hard. This is why I think the collaboration with Collaborative Knowledge Foundation is so exciting. It provides some technical space to help bring those forks back to a central plan.

Cameron NeylonProfessor of Research Communications

Centre for Culture & Technology, Curtin University cn@cameronneylon.net - http://cameronneylon.net

@cameronneylon - http://orcid.org/0000-0002-...

Re: PolEcon of OA Publishing II: What’s the technical problem with reforming scholarly publishing?

Cameron Neylon — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 10:23:38 -0000

Good point. That's badly worded and I'll make a correction. PKP is actually a very successful community project and a very successful community. The OJS software is also very successful in terms of reach. What hasn't worked well is OJS as a community open source project, with contributions and community governance.

The 3.0/2.0 split is a good example. This is a classic anti-pattern. The 2.0/3.0 divide happens because architectural change is necessary but because of the way the code modifications have flowed there are thousands of non-compatible 2.0 forks out there in the wild that will be difficult or impossible to reconcile and update.

What is needed IMO is some space for the OJS community to breathe and be able to change some pieces one at a time. I'm excited by the work that Ubiquity and CKF are doing in this sense because they could create an Open Source ecosystem with modular components that give some space for adoption of new pieces while the architectural shifts needed to update OJS can be pursued.

Re: PolEcon of OA Publishing I: What is it publishers do anyway?

Cameron Neylon — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 07:39:03 -0000

Habit? Honestly I don't know. There are some elements of standardisations that help. A quick check on length, number of figures, ease of finding specific things?

But yes there's almost no reason for this and there would be much better ways to handle most of what this is supposed to achieve. I'll be talking a bit about why its harder than you might think to just implement new systems to do that in the next post.

Re: PolEcon of OA Publishing I: What is it publishers do anyway?

Cameron Neylon — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 04:53:02 -0000

Those costs (not a single tool chain) are hard to estimate because they include one-off development costs (but people are working on a lot of that at the moment) costs of running that system, which will be different to current costs in some places (including some new QA steps) and also the savings (which are the easiest to pin down probably, production is ~$200 per article, format mangling probably averages out - pace my comments about this being a long tail problem - at ~$150 over all articles, and then data migrations across systems, probably ~$100)

Re: PolEcon of OA Publishing I: What is it publishers do anyway?

Cameron Neylon — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 04:50:24 -0000

Actually lots do, and essentially no journal from a "big publisher" (i.e. any one that doesn't just slap up a PDF the authors create) does anything except throw out all the formatting that authors do anyway. This is a great segue into the next post which explains why this doesn't solve the problem...or can't yet. Now I just need to finish the post!