#sparc2012 a manifesto in absentia for Open Data

“I am very sorry that I can’t be physically present with you, especially since we are at a critical time for #scholpub... I’ve been asked to talk about Rights and Open Data. The Rights I care about are not academia, nor authors, nor publishers but the 99% of the world who cannot get effective access to scholarship. The #scholarlypoor. So here’s the first principle... [Principle 1] Access to the fruits of publicly funded research is a fundamental human right... We spend about 300 Billion every year on Science Technology Engineering Medicine... That’s about 50 dollars for every inhabitant. And almost no inhabitant (including 99% of those in rich nations) has effective access to this output. Now we have won many human rights and we can win this one. It will cost money to deliver, but then it will be gratis (free to consume) and libre (free to reuse)... [Principle 2] Scientific data should be libre at the point of creation This is why we initiated the Panton Principles. There are many reasons for making scientific data libre: It belongs to all of us... It is required to validate the science... It can be re-used in millions of planned and unexpected ways... Scientists and academia have lost control of the authoring process. They must regain it, and part of this is to regain control of data. So corollary: 2a. Science data should be stamped as Libre (Panton)... Almost all data is now produced either from instruments or from scientific software... All the public fruits of this could be collected and stamped as libre. Similar ideas for images (the microscope software could stamp with ‘Open Data’, the phone app taking gel pictures could do the same). Everything on Figshare or Dryad could be watermarked... Huge amounts of fruitless effort are spent on bad licences. Unfortunately some of these seem deliberate – to confuse rather than help. The latest Wiley paid OA (4000 USD, ‘fully open access’) ‘Chemistry Open’ has so many restrictions that it’s effectively closed. Why does the library community and SPARC not challenge this ? So the way forward has to be clear licences... [Principle 3] Open Access and Data require clear, libre licences The Open Access community has failed to address this for 10 years (since BOAI/BBB). BOAI/BBB were/are great declarations, in the tradition of liberation. But most of the OA community honours then in name only... And for the purposes of data free to “use, re-use, and redistribute” (OKDefinition)... 3a. Libre material should be clearly stamped for human and machine discoverability and reuse... UK/PubMedCentral shows the current problem clearly. It is impossible to search for “Open Access” material and even harder – almost impossible – to search for BOAI-libre material (i.e. minable). Our recent @ccess group is trying to index the malaria literature for BOAI-Openness and it has to be done paper-by-paper – IMO this is unacceptable after 10 years. University IRs are even worse... [Principle 4] Only use CC-BY, CC0 and other BOAI-compliant licences... Abandon NC, Non-commercial. It effectively prevents anything useful. (Maybe Mike Carroll will cover this, but it needs restating again and again)...  4a. Publishers of Open Access (“Gold OA”) should useBOAI-licences... Ross Mounce (a graduate student) has done a tremendous job of collating the hybrid OA licences of major publishers and out of over 100 finds that only 5% are BOAI-compliant. Authors are paying lots of money (1000-5000 USD for this, publishers are restricting re-use to the point of uselessness and academia accepts this without a squeak. Surely this is where SPARC should be labelling offerings as BOAI-acceptable or non-acceptable. But no, we have given in and allowed this mess of “slightly Open Access”. Some of the publisher terms are so badly written, piling restriction on restriction, that they are probably not even executable consistently. And now some more general ideas on “textmining”. Over the last 2 weeks I have blogged about information mining (a better term as we can mine images, speech and video for facts as well)... Here’s what we CAN mine: [1] Patents [2]BMC and PLoS [3] Supplementary info on publisher’s web pages (FWIW we have downloaded 250,000 crystal structures in this way and haven’t crashed any servers)... What we CAN’T mine are: [1] Closed access publications [2] Green OA (can’t find it and anyway no rights) [3] Gold hybrid OA (can’t find it and cannot machine-read the licences to find BOAI) [4] UK/PubMedCentral (impossible to find the BOAI-compliant subset) [5] Institutional Repositories (impossible to navigate and no rights in most cases anyway)... I’ve been asking Elsevier for 2.5 years whether we can text-mine. Have I got “Yes” or have I got “Mumble”. I’ll post today’s mail and let you judge. I’m not the only one. Here’s Max Haussler, writing to publishers for permission to text-mine http://text.soe.ucsc.edu/progress.html . Some have taken two years of negotiations. Half haven’t responded. This is an industry that Eefke Smit says is extremely helpful to requesters. Where the publishers do respond, they want to control what res