Science Library Pad

Libraries in E-Science - Christine Borgman

A digital video of Christine L. Borgman's "Role of Libraries in E-Science" presentation at EAHIL 2008 is available. Her presentation slides are also available.

Video: Christine Borgman on the Role of Libraries in E-Science - Digital Koans - July 21st, 2008

I reviewed Borgman's book Scholarship in the Digital Age for Nature; she has a comprehensive view of the many different factors that go into scholarly communication online.

implementing SOA at CISTI

My colleague Stephen Anthony has posted his author version of his peer-reviewed article for The Serials Librarian, "Implementing Service Oriented Architecture at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information".  At 14 pages, it's the most comprehensive and detailed look available at the challenges our organisation was facing, the Enterprise Architecture approach we took to help improve our technology planning, and the Service-Oriented Architecture that we are building as a result.

It's from 55 (1/2) which should show up eventually at

http://www.haworthpress.com/store/product.asp?sku=J123&detail=TOCList#TOCList

and, assuming I'm constructing the URL correctly, specifically at

http://www.haworthpress.com/store/Toc_views.asp?TOCName=J123v55n01%5FTOC&desc=Volume%3A%2055%20Issue%3A%201%2F2

Stephen reports the full citation as

Anthony, Stephen K. "Implementing Service Oriented Architecture at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information." The Serials Librarian, 55 (01-02), pp. 235 - 253.
DOI: 10.1080/03615260801970907 (doesn't yet resolve)

Facebook Blog Networks

It's your blog, except in a closed social network, except the blog page itself is public, so you might as well claim the public page, which I am doing (reluctantly)... now

Blog Networks

Knol - Google losing view of web?

I think Google has climbed up so high on their knoll that they have lost perspective on what makes the web work.

Let's see what they have to say about Knol in Blogger Buzz

Blogs are great for quickly and easily getting your latest writing out to your readers, while knols are better for when you want to write an authoritative article on a single topic.  The tone is more formal, and, while it's easy to update the content and keep it fresh, knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content or threading.

Introducing Knol - Blogger Buzz - July 23, 2008 (Emphasis theirs.)

Both the concept and the implementation of this are wrong on so many levels.

1. After we've worked hard to put forth the position that you can present serious science and ideas in a blog, Google says, nah, blogs are just quick and easy jottings.
2. Who is Google to say what the tone of a Knol is?  Is there going to be a Knol Tonemaster?
3. Knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content?  So ideas are all graven in stone?

In addition, Google is hacking away at the web in various ways.

4. The entire Knol is nofollow.  You can't have a web if search crawlers don't follow links.

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />

5. The Knol search engine is utter shite.  It gives different results depending whether you're logged in (i.e. blessed by Google) or surfing anonymously (i.e. unknown by Google, an outcast).

Check this out.

Exhibit A: When logged out.

No results found for digital photo
No results found for geocoding
No results found for akerman

Exhibit B: When logged in.
Results 1-1 of about 1 for digital photo
Results 1-1 of about 1 for geocoding
Results 1-2 of about 2 for akerman

What the heck?  That's not the way people expect a search box on the web to work.

6. In Wikipedia, making a link to a relevant topic is as easy as [[topic]] - the topic doesn't even have to exist yet, someone can come in later and click to create it.  In Knol, making a link to a relevant Knol... doesn't exist in any easy way.  You're supposed to search for URLs and make links.
7. You're supposed to create authoritative articles with references, but many of the examples are just formatted text.  Which is to say, references that don't even link anywhere.  Isn't the whole point of the web supposed to be that you FOLLOW a link to check the referenced source?
8. Given that it has no concept of bibliographic reference metadata, it's no surprise that there are no features to link into the scholarly literature whatsoever - not even a quick way to insert references from Google Scholar, Zotero or RefWorks.  No DOIs, no COINS, no nothing.
9. On Google, PageRank IS AUTHORITY.  Higher in the results, higher (implied) authority.  This may not be right, but it is true.  How do you gain PageRank?  Well, for one, you write a blog (or create a website) which has lots of content.  Lots of good content.  People like that content, people link that content.  PageRank accrues... to your site.  I'll say that again: PageRank accrues to your site.  So instead of blogging, Google thinks you should put your knowledge in a Knol, where PageRank will accrue to... wait for it... knol.google.com
10. Not only are you supposed to give away your PageRank, and your ability to give PageRank to others (through having your links followed), you can't even discover a community of clicks.  What's that?  Well it goes like this.  Joe Biglibrarian's never heard of me.  I link to him and write something reasonable (one hopes).  He sees the incoming clicks from my readers in his web stats.  He reads my thing.  He writes a post.  And so it goes.  Webstats may not be a perfect community discovery mechanism, but it is a part of it particularly in the early days of your blog.  Knol provides no webstats whatsoever.
11. Not only does Knol remove you from your click community, its advertising focus gives you a deliberate disincentive to direct traffic to other sites.  Links to other sites = lost AdSense revenue.  The ideal ad-revenue Knol has no links to outside sites other than the ads themselves.

Google says

Knol will be a great new way for you to share what you know, inform people about an issue that is important to you, raise your profile as an expert in your field, and maybe even make some money from ads.

I'm sorry Google, but that's not only not true, the entire Knol system and "introducing Knol" tone show a total lack of understanding of the current state of scholarly blogging, a total absence of support for scholarly citation and linking, and a surprising disregard for critical existing aspects of the web architecture.

If you want to make Knol a system for presenting authoritative information, you might want to look at how scholars do it in modern web-enabled scientific articles (about which, more to come in a later posting).

the reality miners

Much in the news these days about using sensors in various ways to track and connect people.

Northeastern did a study on the movements of cellphone users.

So Barabási and his colleagues teamed up with a mobile-phone company (unidentified to protect customers' privacy), who provided them with anonymized data on which transmitter towers had handled the calls and texts for 100,000 individuals over the course of 6 months.

Mobile phones demystify commuter rat race - Nature News - 4 June 2008 | doi:10.1038/news.2008.874

The accompanying Nature editorial lauds the possibility for better data for social scientists

The mobile-phone technique is simply the latest example of how modern information technologies are giving social scientists the power to make measurements that are often as precise as those in the 'hard' sciences. By analysing e-mail transmissions, for example, or doing automated searches of publication databases, social scientists can collect detailed information on the network structure of scientific collaborations and other social interactions.

A flood of hard data - Nature 453, 698 (5 June 2008) | doi:10.1038/453698a; Published online 4 June 2008

Wired reports on tracking the interactions of students.

If you have enough data about commonplace conversations, you can even predict when those conversations are going to take place. Working with Pentland, Nathan Eagle tracked the physical interactions of 100 MIT students over an academic year, using their cell phones. After a few months, Eagle could deduce likely future meetings with impressive accuracy. "So if we know that," he says, "why not design our calendars to sync up?"

Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook 'Friends' - Wired Magazine 16.08 (August 2008)

Thompson's article ends on a prescient note:

The scary part of reality mining, as everyone involved readily admits, is that it's a potential privacy nightmare. ...

Eagle is currently analyzing 12 billion anonymized calls placed during one month in the UK.

Prescient because a story popped up in the news in which people were very unhappy to find that, in a different study, movements were being tracked based on Bluetooth signals.

Bluetooth mobile phone technology is being used to monitor the movement of tens of thousands of people, without their consent.

A research project has installed Bluetooth scanners in offices, cafes, shops, and pubs to monitor how people move around cities. But the residents of Bath, who are at the centre of this research, are unaware that their mobile phones and laptops are communicating with the scanners.

The team behind the project, Cityware, stresses that the scanners are not able to personally identify individuals, but privacy groups have expressed concerns about the scheme. The Information Commissioners' Office, which deals with data protection and privacy legislation, said it was "monitoring" the experiment.    

Bluetooth used to track people's movements - Telegraph.co.uk - Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/07/2008

Meanwhile, Boing Boing reports on hackers (of all people) having the opportunity to wear RFID tags to map and discover each other.

This weekend, the Attendee Meta-Data (AMD) project at the Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in NYC will introduce a new location-aware social networking system to track and bring together hackers based on a huge array of matching interests. Conference goers will be given unprecedented ability to connect with new people, find the talks they're most interested in attending, see what's happening and where in real time, and experience and talk about the way RFID technology is changing the world.

RFID badges at HOPE hackercon form automatic social nets and irony - Boing Boing - July 16, 2008

Our ability to gather data on every aspect of everyone's daily life is becoming incredibly powerful.  Powerful technologies require great wisdom to wield for good and not ill.  I am concerned we (and in particular the leadership we chose) lack that wisdom.

David Brin has explored these topics at length.  They are an aspect of his book Earth (1990), and he expanded greatly upon those ideas in The Transparent Society (1998). 

You can read a Discover interview with Brin from last year.

There are many different aspects to this, from illegal monitoring of people's activities in cyberspace, to quasi-legal tracking online, to people simply giving their information up on various social networks.  But the above items are more about reality mining, which is the new ability to track individual movements in great detail in the physical world.  Cellphones are an obvious technology platform for this, as are standalone GPS loggers and RFID.  Individuals now have the capacity to conduct surveillance, sometimes called in this case sousveillance.  Beyond that surveillance possibilities include CCTV cameras, large surveillance drones at various altitudes, and even tiny mobile or flying cameras, reminiscent of the bug in Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy (1974).

One of the unfortunate things about science fiction is that while it raises issues decades in advance of them becoming technologically feasible, it is often little heeded, and when the foreseen changes actually do come, people either don't pay attention to them, or make remarkably bad decisions about how to use and control their new abilities.

Knol - thinking about authority

A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.

http://knol.google.com/

So by its own assertion, right at the top of the Knol page, Knols are about authority.
But they've made an interesting choice, which is to attach authority to authorship.
This is a model that we understand quite well, since it is the classic Britannica model.

So if you want to organise knowledge this way, it's quite easy, you get Learned Persons to write articles in their areas of expertise.  There are, however, multiple problems with this approach:

1. You actually have to get them to write.
2. You get a tremendous management problem as you try to scale out from a handful of articles to millions.
3. Just because someone is very learned in one area (e.g. Ph.D. in Physics with accompanying publications) doesn't necessarily mean that he or she has any expertise whatsoever in another area (e.g. climate change).
4. We only have "authority structures" for a small number of areas (related to issue #2 above).  You can probably find an authority in Evidence-Based Medicine (and indeed the Knol on that topic is quite learned).  But who is the authority on say... Gnolls, obscure mythical creatures?

So Google has created an odd hybrid system.  It's seeded with some articles mostly from medicine, but it's open to anyone.  A system that claims authoritativeness, with no mechanism to verify this, other than a weak name-verification procedure.

Uniquely identifying authors (and producing a global authority file, to use library terminology) would have been an interesting problem to address, but it is not dealt with.

The actual problem they appear to be trying to address is not one of authority, but of certification.  They're focusing on credentials, when the focus should be on proof.  As best I can deduce the argument, it goes something like "on Wikipedia anyone can author, anyone can make changes, and anyone can challenge anything".

Part of this is simply a cultural issue.  There is a culture war in America, and partisans on either side use sophistry to try to prop up their arguments, leading to endless rounds of dispute.  However Wikipedia has at its core the most elegant of mechanisms to address this:

{fact}

This tiny bit of wikicode is so foundational that I think it perhaps gets overlooked.  What it does is put in a link that says "citation needed".  This little piece takes Wikipedia from an open brawl, to one of the most powerful engines promoting scientific thinking in our time.  It says simply: "I don't care who you are, demonstrate with evidence that your statement is true".

To retreat from this is to retreat from reasoned discourse.

Why?  Well, I have to turn to Wikipedia

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Clarke's First Law - Wikipedia: Clarke's three laws

(You can also amuse yourself with Wikiquote: Incorrect predictions.)

To put it another way: authority is a weak predictor of truth.  Only evidence is a strong indication of truth.

This brings me to the another flaw in Knol - the ability to cite evidence is laughably weak.
The Knol idea of a reference is... a URL with a title, that is autonumbered.  That's it.
Let's compare: Wikipedia has an entire page on Citing sources, and an entire page of metadata-rich Citation templates.  Knol has

Search Results:
No results found for citation

or more generously, it has a help page on Adding References with the example

Are you kidding me?  It's 2008 and scientists are enthusiastic about creating a semantically-rich web, and you provide a box to construct a numbered A HREF?  No DOI input?  No bibliographic import or awareness of bibliographic metadata whatsoever?  Where's the authority in that?

Even worse, rather than the single-article Wikipedia model, where everyone must work towards a consensus, Knol encourages a marketplace of competing isolated viewpoints:

What if someone else has already written an article on that subject?

No problem, you can still write your own article. In fact, the Knol project is a forum for encouraging individual voices and perspectives on topics. As mentioned, no one else can edit your knol (unless you permit it) or mandate how you write about a topic. If you do a search on a topic, you may very well see more than one knol in the search results. Of course, people are free to disagree with you, to write their own knols, to post comments and ratings.

http://knol.google.com/k/knol/knol/Help

Great, so all the people with over a century of evidence supporting the benefits of immunization can balkanize off in their own Knol, while the nutjobs who think immunization is some government conspiracy can have their Knol, and each community can rate their respective Knol highly.  How does that help anything?

The problem is that Knol has focused on authorship, and not certification.  What demonstrates the law of gravity is true is a preponderance of evidence, not some sort of individual gravitas.

Now there certainly is something in ranking and commenting that helps us to get at certification, but the mechanism provided is simply too weak.  Certification is some combination of general review, authoritative review, ranking, and ranking of the rankers.  Certification must work on a consensus item.  You may think this is abstract, but for example in astrophysics one camp of researchers put the Hubble Constant at a much higher value than other group, and each research "camp" would consistently release research supporting their number.  I can tell you this in part, not because I have a perfect memory, but because I can extract

The value of the Hubble constant was the topic of a long and rather bitter controversy between Gérard de Vaucouleurs who claimed the value was around 100 and Allan Sandage who claimed the value was near 50.

from the Disputes over Hubble's constant section of the consensus article on Wikipedia about Hubble's Law

Now tell me, what do you think you would get if instead, each of these groups had created its own Knol about the Hubble constant?

SIDEBAR: Problems with Knol

• There is no way to permalink to a comment.  If you have lots of comments, you will have to page through them to find what you want.
• There is no way to see all the comments that a person has posted, that is, to get from their profile to their comments.
• Despite it supposedly being all about you, the author, there is no way to get any page hit stats (which would tell you where you were being linked from, and what search terms were reaching your page, amongst other things).

SIDEBAR 2: Amusing Knol front page

"Who needs a search engine? Ctrl+F" line on main Knol page (i.e. telling you to use your browser's in-page search to find something... which I should mention is actually Splat-F on the Mac)

END SIDEBARS

To wrap up this discussion, let's talk about Gnolls.  (I have to admit, much of this posting was prompted simply because I was amused by the idea of doing a Knol about Gnolls.)

Search Results:
No results found for gnoll

http://knol.google.com/k/knol/system/knol/pages/Search?q=gnoll&restrict=general#

So, who is the authority about Gnolls?  Are we to search the publications of the Academy of Gnoll Studies?  And if you are the authority about Gnolls, what benefit do you get from putting up a Knol, rather than demonstrating your knowledge through blog and forum postings on sites that you control (or that are part of your community of interest), or perhaps writing a book?

Similarly, if you know some tidbit about Gnolls, where are you going to contribute that sentence?  Do you want to put it in front of millions of Wikipedia eyeballs, or do you want to attach it to a Knol that you hope will get rated and linked and searched enough that it will rise above the other Gnoll Knols so that people actually see it?

Whither the Gnoll, that sadly neglected second-tier monster, lost in the shadows of its better known competitors, Goblins and Gnomes.  A pretty obscure topic, one would think.  Yet there is the Wikipedia page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnoll

with paragraph after paragraph of information about Gnolls from the historical to the modern, from Lord Dunsany to World of Warcraft.  (If you want further reading, Dunsany's story is online: How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles.) 

So this is how Wikipedia beats Knols:

• it provides a platform to develop consensus in a single article about a topic, with a focus on citations
• its citations have rich metadata
• it provides a platform to share "microknowledge"
• it provides a big enough Crowd so that you get some Wisdom
• it encourages cross-linking of topics, so you begin to see a web of knowledge

In this case, I think the Wisdom of the Crowd is going to beat the authority of the individual.

I hope that Google will learn from this and refocus to more interesting areas including:

• author identification, impact, reputation, and peer networks - and how to make those all open and portable
• much more powerful systems for ranking, rating, and discussing any web page (including a Knol) - as well as ranking the rankers
• knowledge certification
• creation of semantically-rich knowledge bases

Previously/Related:

July 23, 2008  probably the 1000th Knol post you've seen today

June 22, 2007  Community peer review in Wiki environment - Christine Chichester - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

June 22, 2007  my presentation at ICSTI 2007 Nancy - Web tools for peer reviewers and everyone.  Also see video of this presentation (RealVideo).

In general all of the ICSTI 2007 presentations.

March 02, 2007  soft peer review

June 21, 2006  my article on peer review for Nature

probably the 1000th Knol post you've seen today

Because, as they say, self-plagiarism is style[1], I will quote myself

As for Knols, anyone who thinks Google's initiative is about anything other than the fact that Wikipedia has no Google ads is barking up the wrong tree.

Science Library Pad - Wikipedia death watch? - January 2, 2008

I'm pretty sure I remember Google saying something about "authoritative content blah blah" but the reality is that (like Wikipedia) anyone can create a Knol.  The main difference is you are the page admin, so (if you want) you can decide whether to accept or reject any edits that anyone else makes (or deny non-author edits entirely).

And, oh yeah: AdSense ads.

So you can contribute to Wikipedia, a vast and interlinked set of pages with high traffic.
Or toss your Knol out into the wind and hope it is gently lofted to the top of search results.
They're not very keen on you using a Knol to drive traffic to your site

We don’t allow pages that have the primary purpose of redirecting visitors, acting as a bridge page, or driving traffic to another website.

http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/content-policy/si57lahl1w25/13#

It would seem it does open up yet another front in the spam battle.
In theory with Google Docs you could create docuspam, I guess knolspam is the next frontier.

I don't see any restriction against embedding a web tracking code, however it looks like it removes any JavaScript.  (To be specific, while it remembers JavaScript you enter in the HTML edit view, it strips it out when it actually renders the page.)  The info you can get from just an HTML tracking code is quite limited.  You can also get a small amount of information from your AdSense reports.  But you won't be able to see e.g. what search terms were used to find your page.

You can get way more control and statistics, while still being able to get AdSense revenue, by just setting up your own personal pages on a webserver, or by using other sites that give you more flexibility in content creation (e.g. permitting JavaScript).  They make a big deal about a Knol being attached to an author.  Well for one, my Wikipedia edits are already attached to my user name, and for two, what's more personal than publishing something under my own name in my own web domain instead?

It seems to me this is mostly about ads, and secondarily about drawing you even further into the web tracking dream: you're always logged into Google, they know every search you make, every email and document, and now they will know your particular areas of expertise, and topics of interest.  Seems like lots of benefits for Google...

official press release about NRC repository

<marketing-mode>
CISTI has released its official PR on the upcoming repository.

NRC Publications Archive: Extending the reach and increasing the impact of NRC research

It includes some clarifications about what will be stored and the extent of access that can be provided.</marketing-mode>

Steve has some notes about the underlying technical architecture.

NSERC Michael Smith Awards for Science Promotion

The Michael Smith Awards for Science Promotion focus on people and groups who are inspirational in the way they promote science to the general public.

...

Eligibility

Any individual, organization or company within Canada may be nominated for the award. Nominees will have made a successful and sustained effort to encourage public interest in and an understanding of the natural sciences and engineering (including math and technology) outside the formal education system.

Nomination deadline: September 1, 2008

NSERC - Michael Smith Awards - Call for Nominations

the public library is for: the public

This could very easily descend into an anti-business or urban planning rant, so let's go pointform:

• the city is for its citizens
• the public library is for the public
• public space is essential to a healthy urban environment
• the central public library provides one of the few remaining opportunities to enhance and enlarge public space
• you can't use business terms or voodoo business math to analyze public good

The latest "why a new central Ottawa Public Library" article begins

What's the business case for a $200-million central library? What return will taxpayers get for that investment? How will it result in better service to users of the library? What are the alternatives and why were they ruled out?

Searching in vain for a business case for a $200-million library - Ottawa Citizen - by Mark Sutcliffe - July 19, 2008

Flawed assumptions lead to flawed conclusions.  Our society favours many flawed assumptions and metaphors.  In particular, the idea of the world as an efficient assembly line producing business value.  Government is not a business.  Public good does not have direct monetary ROI.  Cities are not factories that bring components in on assembly lines (i.e. people in on highways) in the morning, get them to do a bunch of work, and then ship them out for storage (i.e. to the suburbs, on the highways again) in the evening.  At least, they shouldn't be.

If you follow these assumptions, what you get is a city with wide highways cutting through all parts of it, as highways always have a "business case", and private space (like say, $300 million convention centres) easily approved, as private space provides an easy "business case", while public concert halls and public libraries languish.  At work you PRODUCE, at home you CONSUME.  People actually love their long solitary private car commutes because it's the only place society permits them to be alone with their thoughts.

So you end up with some Disneyland city full of private space where the idea of return on investment is to provide lots of parking near the wide streets so tourists can zoom around and "contribute to the local economy" by buying a burger at McDonald's.

So let's ditch that nonsense and get back to reality.

The "reality case" for a new central Ottawa Public Library is this:

A vibrant city has people living downtown.  It serves primarily its actual residents.  It provides them with many amenities, not least of which is beautiful places and spaces.  Ottawa, land of the cheap glass tower office building (interspersed, for variety, with the cheap concrete stalinist tower), is starving for public space.  City residents are so used to private space that they don't even use hotel lobbies anymore.  Other than the market, the only place you will see large numbers of people is in the private space of the Rideau Centre mall.  This is not a recipe for a healthy citizenry.

The case for a central Ottawa Public Library is that people need a place to meet and think and be outside in the city.  If it's a signature piece of architecture, so much the better, but be very careful.  Signature architecture leads to regrettable nonsense like Ottawa's brutalist National Arts Centre, an undistinguished pile of concrete where a bunch of lines scraped in raw concrete is the extent of building decoration.  It does at least have usable internal space, whereas much architecture since the 1950s managed to be ugly outside and unusable inside.  God help us if decades from now we're fighting about saving some inverted ziggurat looming over the city.  Quite honestly if they just made a cube that had a giant well-lit room, I'd consider it a step forward.

Wallpaper had a feature "Loan Rangers" in the June 2008 issue, about interesting new public libraries.  Unfortunately it is not available online.

There are those who think [libraries] are an anachronism in the digital age, a sort of urbanised village hall, frequented only by disoriented immigrants doing DIY language courses.  Then there are those who insist they are still vital amenities, 'universities of the street corner', crucial municipal centres at the heart of the community.

(The above image from the opening page of the article is of the spectacular but currently ill-starred José Vasconcelos Library, the Biblioteca Vasconcelos.  I also found a good photo set on Flickr.)

Previously:
December 21, 2007  the central public library is a key civic space
August 25, 2007  America, land of the grand library

NISO Next Gen Discovery presentations up

A question in my FriendFeed prompted me to check if the presentations are up for NISO Discovery Forum 2008 and they are (well, most of them).

http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/discovery08/agenda/

Presentations ranged across the library discovery space including academic bookmarking, federated searching, tagging, web services, and blogging.

You can find supplemental info for Peter Murray's presentation at http://dltj.org/article/niso-discovery-presentation-links/

(Full disclosure: I was also a presenter - I posted a small amount of supplemental info for my presentation.)

STM publishers imprisoned in their own walled gardens?

The latest Outsell Insight (about OA issues but itself, very much for-pay), by Daniel Pollock, has some rather controversial things to say about scientific communications.  He starts by discussing the controversy over Declan Butler's article "PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing", highlighting Timo Hannay's posting about the controversy.

The gist of Pollock's piece in my reading is that publishers may have to consider becoming (at most) solely peer-review services, with the resulting articles being in repositories, the benefit being that the articles can be discovered and mined openly.  A few snippets:

Much scholarly communication takes place outside the STM publishers' domain, via conferences, proceedings, data sets and so forth, none of which fit the process of the peer reviewed research article. Scientists have long (always?) been collaborative creatures - and the digital age means that scientists, and science itself, no longer need publishers to handle the distribution and sharing of information.

...

Perhaps funders are not advocating the open repository as part of some grievance towards STM publishers, but in order to create new ecosystem in which the next generation of R&D productivity tools can evolve.

...

Automated knowledge discovery processes require unfettered access to content.... And - to anticipate the common objection - don't think that harboring "the definitive version of the article" is necessary either! Text mining tools are increasingly capable of disambiguating multiple sources...

...

we issue a warning to the proponents of the peer-reviewed journal article: beware of overstating your value to the process of science! The longer its focus on its narrow part of the scholarly communications process continues, the more the STM publishing community will seem out of touch, and the more likely that - whether it charges for access or not - it will become a prisoner in its own walled garden.

Nature Publishing Group Sets the Cat Amongst the Pigeons of Open Access, But Maybe We're All Missing the Point - by Daniel Pollock, Vice President & Lead Analyst - London, UK - July 18, 2008

 

I'm afraid the above bits don't really give the full shape of his argument.  I think he makes some compelling points, but is I think overly optimistic on the attention and technology side of things.  Journals aggregate interesting science - many scientists still very much like a group of qualified editors and peer reviewers providing a filter on the deluge.   Secondly, while knowledge discovery requires unfettered access for machines to content, I don't see why that necessarily implies unfettered access for humans.  You can perfectly well have an API that lets machines mine full-text, while still putting up a paywall for humans.  As well, I think the versions issue is very challenging, and we are a long way from reliable automatic disambiguation and identification of authoritative copies.  Finally, many conference proceedings already are peer-reviewed, and we can certainly imagine peer review extending to other areas, such as data sets.

I do think that the idea of the imprimateur of peer review existing outside the journal package is an interesting one, it's one of the concepts I covered in my article "Technical solutions: Evolving peer review for the internet"

An article or blog entry submitted to, and passed by, a stand-alone peer review service might be recorded in a public registry, or be digitally signed as part of the certification process.

As well, I do think the point that publishers have to think more about (and provide services for) the overall system of scholarly communication is well-taken, and I think we already seen both Nature Publishing Group and Elsevier (amongst others) taking many strides in this area.

Mandatory IR deposit as of 2009 for National Research Council Canada

From an internal email (with permission)

[The NRC Senior Executive Committee] SEC has established a policy making it mandatory, starting in January 2009, for NRC institutes to deposit copies of all peer-reviewed publications (articles, proceedings, books, book chapters) and technical reports in [the forthcoming NRC Institutional Repository, to be called] NPArC. The SEC has also approved an update to NRC Form 22 Licence to Publish (Crown Copyright) that will explicitly state NRC’s intention to deposit these publications in NPArC.

As this blog is by no means an official source of information about my organisation, if you have any questions I ask that you go through regular NRC or CISTI communications channels.

http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/newsroom/index_e.html

http://cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/media/newsroom_e.html

UPDATE 2008-07-23: There is now an official press release from CISTI.

South Park on Internet monetization

I forgot to include this with my recent monetization post

while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn’t matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that one should trade real and immediate opportunities for income for the promise of future online revenue.

South Park - Canada on Strike - via Will Video for Food

I would link to the clip, but thanks to geofencing, I can't actually see the clip in Canada, I can only watch full episodes.  (This is very common in Canada, where we get some parts of show content rehosted on a Canadian site, but not all the web extras that are available on the US site.)

Access 2008 preliminary programme up

http://access2008.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca/program/

open source, mashups, browser extensions, next gen catalogues/opacs and such

via Library Boy

the difficulty of monetizing Web 2.0 eyeballs

I've written in the past that you can monetize attention

Attention is transformed primarily into money through ads and other affiliate linking arrangements.  The more attention, the more clicks, the more clicks, the more money.  I'm not sure whether attention can be exchanged for anything else.

But it's a little more subtle than that.  You can monetize attention, if the intention was information gathering about something that is related to a purchasable item (i.e. e.g. you can monetize searching about hybrid cars, but not searching for a particular individual).

This nuance is part of the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

Web 1.0 looked a bit like traditional media - you visit a web page to get some information or entertainment, in the same way that you read a magazine or watch a TV show.  You accept advertisements alongside or intermixed with the content.  You may even be reading your computer magazine and get value from the ads, "oh cool, Protovision".

Or if I'm searching for cool LED clocks and you show me a neat Thinkgeek ad, maybe I click (assuming you haven't hit my adblock and flashblock filters).

But Web 2.0 is about connecting with other people.  Web 2.0 is like the telephone.  So imagine this scenario: you're talking on your telephone with your friend about how tired you are from the new baby and your phone goes BEEP and a voice says "The following is a paid advertisement: Diapers from BabyCorp, $9.99  This ad has been provided by VoiceMatch Algorithmics International".  I don't know about you, but I would be inclined to throw my phone in the river.

The point being, when you're making social connections with your friends, you have a completely different intentionality.  Not only are you not looking to buy anything, commercial interruptions are unwelcome.

So this is a huge problem.  You can monetize a Web page on a particular topic, or a Web log (err, blog) on a particular topic, as long as it has any commercialisable aspect.  But Gmail? Twitter? Facebook?  Not only are people not in purchase mode, they may be actively annoyed by any ads they actually notice.  The counter-argument is you can "target people by their characteristics and interests" but this, in my opinion, doesn't work.  People don't want to be targetted in a social environment.

Technology Review has a good issue on the Web 2.0 bubble (registration required, plus ads... which are easily adblocked/flashblocked).

Social Networking Is Not a Business* (July/August 2008). 

Goldstein should know, since his company, Social Media, sells advertising linked to the applications developed for Facebook and MySpace--products like Scrabulous and Compare People, which are hugely popular among the sites' users. "The trouble," says Goldstein, "is we're putting ads up in front of users, where they can ignore them. We've got to get them between users."

Goldstein's comment had the air of a slightly worn sound bite, but it did acknowledge a problem that outside observers describe more bluntly. "It's a really bad place to advertise," Jason ­Calacanis, founder of Webblogs and Mahalo.com, says of social-­networking sites. As he wrote in an e-mail, members of social networks "are busy in conversations and don't want marketing messages."

If you take this out of the virtual space, "getting ads between users" is clearly mad, as in the telephone example I gave above, or think of it like this: you and a friend are at a party talking about last week's skiing outing and some stranger steps IN BETWEEN YOU and offers to sell you ski equipment.

For this reason, I'm not entirely convinced that Twitter, FriendFeed and other similar social services are going to survive beyond their VC funding.  They're valuable communications infrastructure, but who is going to pay for them?

Mashed Libraries UK 2008

Owen Stephens, inspired by Mashed Museum, is proposing Mashed Libraries UK 2008.

the idea is to have a reasonably informal event at which we try to do interesting stuff with library technology and/or data

He's put together a starting list of possible APIs... there must be many more that people could add or offer...

Services/APIs/Systems/Technology/Data that we could use

via Twitter