Great news for open access research:
A Harvard University Library news story updates the great news of the Harvard research community’s leadership of open access to scholarship through DASH. The release begins:
September 1, 2009—Harvard’s leadership in open access to scholarship took a significant step forward this week with the public launch of DASH—or Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard—a University-wide, open-access repository. More than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have jointly deposited hundreds of scholarly works in DASH.
“DASH is meant to promote openness in general,” stated Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library. “It will make the current scholarship of Harvard’s faculty freely available everywhere in the world, just as the digitization of the books in Harvard’s library will make learning accumulated since 1638 accessible worldwide. Taken together, these and other projects represent a commitment by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth.”
Visitors to DASH (http://dash.harvard.edu) can locate, read, and use some of the most up-to-the minute scholarship that Harvard has to offer. DASH users can read “Anticipating One’s Troubles: The Costs and Benefits of Negative Expectations” by Harvard College Professor Dan Gilbert.
Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Harvard’s DASH for Open Access.
Canada, like many other countries, continues to chip away at privacy protections for online information. Two good articles here:
From Michael Geist:
As expected, the Government has taken another shot at lawful access legislation today, introducing a legislative package called the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century (IP21C) Act that would require mandated surveillance capabilities at Canadian ISPs, force SPs to disclose subscriber information such as name and address, and grant the police broad new powers to obtain transmission data and force ISPs to preserve data.
And, on the same topic by Lawrence Munn, a Canadian lawyer specialising on legislation and policy development:
Section 16 of the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act provides that the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the head of a police service constituted under the laws of a province may designate a limited number of persons who may request particular personal information from a telecommunications service provider. In some respects this power is similar to section 7(3)(c.1) of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), legislation which applies to private organizations in the federal sphere, which permits the disclosure of personal information collected by an organization without an individual’s consent if a “government institution” (which presumably includes police) requests that the information be disclosed. However, under section 7(3)(c.1) of PIPEDA, the government institution must identify its lawful authority to obtain the information, and the request must be made for the purpose of enforcing a law, carrying out an investigation or gathering intelligence. In contrast, section 16 of the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act contains no similar limitation: the designated person need only request the information.
You can’t really critique online privacy protection without knowing something about what privacy involves and how hard it is to maintain. A new book on the topic, just published by the Oxford University Press, is available for download under a Creative Commons license, “On the Identity Trail: Understanding the importance and impact of anonymity and authentication in an networked society”. Sponsored by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and containing chapters from international experts and researchers, it’s a terrific basis for discussion on the issues underlying privacy and anonymity.
For example, the chapter on redeeming privacy for battered women describes ‘the feminist rejection of privacy’ and analyzes the need for privacy (enabling women to hide from their abusive partners) as well as its dangers (enabling domestic abuse to be carried out under the veil of family privacy). The book also has chapters on anonymity and the law in Canada, the US and other countries. And ‘Soul Train: the new surveillance in popular music’ looks at “the close links between surveillance and culture, and control and entertainment”.
Michael Geist, the Canadian law professor and anti-copyright hero, has posted an analysis of how copyright lobbying relies on
a clear strategy of deploying seemingly independent organizations to advance the same goals, claims, arguments, and recommendations. Over the past three years, this strategy has played out with multiple reports, each building on the next with a steady stream of self-citation.
This kind of analysis should be done more often in policy development. The use of self-referential key documents with overlapping contributors is probably pretty common, and not necessarily sinister. It’s a good case study of how advocacy groups can create a sense of momentum with relatively few papers and organizations that look independent but aren’t. However, it can also lead to bad policy based on an insufficient research base, as in the case of the emerging international copyright laws.
Wired has pulled together a set of recommendations for transparency of government data in response to the Obama administration’s policy of open government.
The article includes ‘models for opening and using government data’, including:
Socrata
Socrata is a social data discovery site which hosts lots of government datasets with a simple appealing UI to browse, search and analyze the data.
Infochimps.org
Infochimps is dedicated to finding and hosting free, redistributable datasets. It’s a simple but absolutely enormous mission. So far, they’ve got thousands waiting for you to use.
Sunlight Labs’ Apps for America
Sunlight Labs is an organization dedicated to “turning government data into useful information.” They are currently hosting an Apps for America contest to design web services that promote transparency in Congress.
Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access.
MIT to make all faculty publications open access – Ars Technica.
In a Harvard Business School working paper titled ‘Goals gone wild: The systematic side effects of over-prescribing goal setting’, Ordóñez et al describe the many risks and negative impacts of goal setting in organizations and individuals. One of their strongest points is that:
aggressive goal setting within an organization will foster an organizational climate ripe for unethical behavior. That is, not only does goal setting directly motivate unethical behavior, but its introduction may also motivate unethical behavior indirectly by subtly altering an organization’s culture.
They further state that
the harmful effects of goal setting have received far too little attention in the management literature. Although prior work has acknowledged “pitfalls” of goal setting (Latham & Locke, 2006), we argue that the harmful side effects of goal setting are far more serious and systematic than prior work has acknowledged. First, we begin by describing the systematic and predictable ways in which goal setting harms organizations. We describe how the use of goal setting can degrade employee performance, shift focus away from important but nonspecified goals, harm interpersonal relationships, corrode organizational culture, and motivate risky and unethical behaviors. We argue that, in many situations, the damaging effects of goal setting outweigh its benefits.
All of these damaging effects are operating in the human services, in programs that require the attainment of measurable goals as a condition of funding. Funders need to be attuned to the risks of goal-setting so that they can minimize the very serious social and organizational costs that occur as a result of an over-emphasis on measures.
The paper concludes:
Just as doctors prescribe drugs selectively, mindful of interactions and adverse reactions, so too should managers carefully prescribe goals. To do so, managers must consider—and scholars must study—the complex interplay between goal setting and organizational contexts, as well as the need for safeguards and monitoring.
UPDATE
From an interview with Max Bazerman, one of the authors of the paper, just posted at the Harvard Business School site:
Q: How can goal setting go wrong?
A: When people focus on a specific stretch goal, and fail to perform other valued activities that are needed by the organization, goals are failing. …
When employees care exclusively about reaching a goal, and bad things can happen if they fail, cheating goes up. This is the most important result in the goal setting literature
It seems like such a simple change. Yet asking people to introduce themselves and describe their function in the operating theater before an operation starts turns out to have a significant impact on the operation’s outcome. That is just one of the findings in a recent study by Atul Gawande (the study includes more than a dozen other authors as well), just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that has created quite a buzz in the healthcare community.
That requirement, along with 18 others, forms part of a checklist adopted by surgical teams at eight hospitals. Over the course of the year the teams saw their death rates fall by 40% and their rate of complications by almost a third. The researchers weren’t able to attribute the success to any one of the items on the checklist and concluded that it was the behavioral changes occasioned by the checklist (and the fact that they were part of an experiment) that improved the outcomes of the operations conducted by the team.
Small Changes make Big Differences – HBR Editors’ Blog – HarvardBusiness.org.
“Amazon just launched its Public Data Sets service (home). The project encourages developers, researchers, universities, and businesses to upload large (non-confidential) data sets to Amazon — things like census data, genomes, etc. — and then let others integrate that data into their own AWS applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all of AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they consume with their own applications. Data sets already available include various US Census databases, 3-D chemical structures provided by Indiana University, and an annotated form of the Human Genome from Ensembl.”
Slashdot | Amazon Launches Public Data Sets To Spur Research.
Some new-ish data mining or search services for international indicators:
The United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) has launched a new internet-based data service for the global user community. It brings UN statistical databases within easy reach of users through a single entry point (http://data.un.org/) from which users can now search and download a variety of statistical resources of the UN System.
UNdata | about us. See http://data.un.org/ for the search page.
Also see Gapminder [pointed out by Blogoscoped] which offers visualizations of complex information, including, in the following bubble chart, the relationship between national income and health:
It just got easier to keep track of newly published research in academic journals. Until now, I have mostly subscribed to email updates, which mostly consist of plain text emails containing an inscrutable list of titles (e.g., “Design and development of a concept-based multi-document summarization system for research abstracts”) leading directly to the publisher’s site which may or may not offer a decent abstract. I’ve been waiting impatiently for a good consolidated RSS feed for academic journals, and one has just been launched:
The ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service makes it easy for academics, researchers, students and anyone else to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling them to find, display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers.
ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents Service.
This new service is still pretty clunky to set up, but it works beautifully. I registered and then located relevant journals using keyword searches. ticTOCS currently offers tables of contents from 11,867 scholarly journals and 426 publishers. Below is my initial list of monitored journals:
Then I exported my list into a small OPML file that I imported into my RSS feed (I use
Google Reader). Presto! – I now subscribe to RSS updates for all of those journals. My next step will be to monitor the feeds and remove the ones that aren’t helpful. For example,
Canadian Public Policy and the
International Review of Qualitative Research provide entire abstracts in their feeds (that’s good), whereas
Disability and Rehabilitation just provides titles and author names (that’s not so good).
Hopefully they will continue to add journals. They don’t yet have Harvard Business Review or MIT Sloan Management Review, for example.
Reported on Slashdot today: Exciting news for open access research!
“Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other’s findings.
Slashdot | Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers.
Several of the major academic search engines and standards bodies are working together to improve literature searches and academic repositories. The following quote is not terribly readable unless you already know most of the acronyms:
CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org), the reference-linking network of the Publishers International Linking Association (PILA), has officially launched a free DOI look-up feature called Simple-Text Query (http://www.crossref.org/freeTextQuery). Users can enter whole bibliographies with citations in almost any bibliographic format and receive back the matching Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for these references to insert into their final bibliographies.
…CrossRef actively encourages DSpace repositories to assign DOIs to original, nonduplicative works and register their DOIs with CrossRef, rather than just relying on registration with CNRI….
CrossRef also supports OpenURL links, using the OpenURL syntax in its own system and making all its publishers “OpenURL compliant” for its library participants. It also works with services such as Google Scholar, Microsoft’s Windows Live Academic Search, and Elsevier’s Scirus to connect content to the leading Web search engines.
Linking Up Bibliographies: DOI Harvesting Tool Launched by CrossRef.
The results are coming in about the impact of open access (OA) on research citations.
OA articles are freely available on the web, so that a search on Google Scholar will bring up the full text instead of a publisher’s page that demands payment before you can read it.
A ten-year research study now under way suggests that an OA article may be cited far more often than an article in the same journal that has not been posted on the web by its author.
Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals.
This is such a fundamental issue for policy analysis. I’ve been frustrated yet again this week by trying to track down an article that is not available on the web, nor even in the York University online library. Apparently it’s available in University of Toronto’s online library but I have no access to it. As a result, this article will have no influence on policy. And researchers wonder why no-one listens to them!
Most scholarly journals now permit authors to self-archive their articles on the web either before or after publication. Many funders of research are beginning to demand that their researchers self-archive, or publish in open access journals, as a way to increase the impact of the findings. Given that publication is a small proportion of the cost of doing research, and most of the research is funded by public money, it seems obvious to get the information out to the public.
I like this librarian’s web log focusing on academic search. For example, here’s a comment from July 13:
Gunther Eysenbach's cogent editorial “The Open Access Advantage” over at the open-access Journal of Medical Internet Research hits several points square on the head. The one I find most appealing is that incremental benefits accrue to researchers who publish in open-access journals; the data is clear and unequivocal. Another is the simple truth that open source tools like those developed by UBC's Public Knowledge Project are better alternatives to the commercial OA publishers.
UBC Academic Search – Google Scholar Blog.
John Lavis’s Program in Policy Decision-Making has updated its web site to include new research on knowledge transfer.
A presentation on ‘Assessing provincial or national efforts to link research to action’, dated January 2006, contains many interesting points on promoting evidence-based policy.
Among them is a reference to the reader-friendly writing style of ‘graded entry’, in which there is a 1:3:25 ratio of content. A description is posted on the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation site:
Every report prepared for the foundation has the same guidelines: start with one page of main messages; follow that with a three-page executive summary; present your findings in no more than 25 pages of writing, in language a bright, educated, but not research-trained person would understand.
These are great guidelines, and are aimed at increasing the likelihood that research reports will lead to action.
BBC News reports that public and university libraries are worried that DRM restrictions (Digital Rights Management embedded software that prevents ‘illegitimate use’ of copywritten materials) may be impossible to remove from library collections, even when the copyright expires.
“Libraries have warned that the rise of digital publishing may make it harder or even impossible to access items in their collections in the future. … And there are fears that restricted works may not be safe for future generations if people can no longer unlock them when technology evolves.”
BBC NEWS | Technology | Libraries fear digital lockdown.
The Harvard Family Research Project, in a special issue of its Evaluation newsletter devoted to 'Evaluation Methodology' published a description of eight different outcome models developed by the Rensselaerville Institute’s Center for Outcomes. Logic models are only one type of outcome model that can be used to improve a program or policy.
“The models described in Outcome Frameworks fall into three main categories: program planning and management, program and resource alignment, and program reporting. In addition, most models can be used as an evaluation tool. …
“Model 1: The Logic Model. Logic models, the most widely used of these models, provide a graphic overview of a program, outlining the outcomes to be accomplished along with how they are to be achieved and for what groups.2 A logic model generally includes the target group, the resources to be used, activities, and objectives. Best used for describing a program in the broadest strokes, it can be an extremely useful tool, particularly at the earliest stages of a project. …
“Model 3: Results-Based Accountability (RBA). This model starts with the desired ends and works backward toward the means to achieve them. RBA first describes what a desired result would look like, then defines that result in measurable terms, and, finally, uses those measures to gauge success or failure. RBA asks and answers three basic questions: What do we want? How will we recognize it? What will it take to get there? This model distinguishes between population accountability and program accountability. Its inclusion of the crosswalk, a tool for matching RBA with other outcome models, is a unique and useful aspect of the framework.5
From Eight Outcome Models in the Evaluation Methodology issue of The Evaluation Exchange – at the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP).
Highly recommended article.
“The Campbell Collaboration (C2) is a nonprofit organization that aims to help people make well-informed decisions about the effects of interventions in the social, behavioral, and educational arenas. Using systematic reviews of studies of interventions (programs, practices, and policies), C2 helps policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and the public identify what works.
“Systematic reviews synthesize available high quality evidence on interventions. After a thorough search of the literature to screen available studies for quality, reviewers identify the least equivocal evidence available on an intervention, describe what the evidence says about the intervention's effectiveness, and explore how that effectiveness is influenced by variations in process, implementation, intervention components, participants, and other factors.”
Randomized Trials in the Evaluation Methodology issue of The Evaluation Exchange – at the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP).
Also see the US-based What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), which “collects, screens, and identifies studies of the effectiveness of educational interventions (programs, products, practices, and policies). We review the studies that have the strongest design, and report on the strengths and weaknesses of those studies against the WWC Evidence Standards so that you know what the best scientific evidence has to say.
“The WWC does not endorse any interventions nor does it conduct field studies. The WWC releases study, intervention, and topic reports. A study report rates individual studies and designs to give you a sense of how much you can rely on research findings for that individual study. An intervention report provides all findings that meet WWC Evidence Standards for a particular intervention. Each topic report briefly describes the topic and each intervention that the WWC reviewed.”
The Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia has developed an open source publishing content management system called ‘Open Journal Systems’. It promotes open access to journals by making journal publication as inexpensive and streamlined as possible, supporting every stage of the peer review and publication process. It looks great, and is described here. (They also offer free software, Open Conference Systems, for running conferences, including paper submission, archiving, and an online forum.)
A list of journals using OJS shows some of the pitfalls of open access publishing. Some of the links no longer work, so the content might be lost – there is no sign that the articles, if any, were archived. Other journals are poorly designed, and others charge for content. The journal links (URLs) are made-up domains like www.ecologyandsociety.org or sub-sites like http://calvados.c3sl.ufpr.br/ojs2/index.php/veterinary/index.php, which are unlikely to remain stable for more than a couple of years. Scientific journals must be archived, with stable references, or they are not useful to future researchers. Journal publishers, even if it’s a free journal run by volunteers, need to plan how the content will be archived in the future. All articles should use the Digital Object Identifier System (DOI) or some other persistent identity so that the documents don't vanish every time an agency redesigns its web site.
One possibility is to post journal articles on the Internet Archive, which provides free and ‘permanent’ hosting for any audio, video or text content (assuming the funding continues). OurMedia.org, the free publishing service, is described in this Salon article. I have not tested whether they have permanent URLs.
For information on why open access journals are crucial for social services and nonprofits, see my previous posting here.
