Cameron Neylon

[![The petition at 25,000
signatures](http://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/25k.jpg "25k"){.wp-image-16677
.alignleft decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="600" height="460"
srcset="https://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/25k.jpg 784w, https://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/25k-300x230.jpg 300w"
sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px"}](http://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/25k.jpg)

I'm afraid I went to bed. It was getting on for midnight and it looked
like another four hours or so before the [petition](http://wh.gov/6TH)
would reach the magic mark of 25,000 signatures. As it turns out a final
rush put us across the line at around 2am my time, but never mind, I
woke up wondering whether we had got there, headed for the computer and
had a pleasant surprise waiting for me.

What does this mean? What have [John
Wilbanks](http://creativecommons.org/about/people/#34 "John Wilbanks"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage" target="_blank"}, [Heather
Joseph](http://www.arl.org/sparc/about/staff/joseph.shtml), [Mike
Carroll](http://crailtap.com/ "Mike Carroll (skateboarder)"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage" target="_blank"}, and [Mike
Rossner](http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=18701899) achieved by
deciding to push through what was a real hard slog? And what about all
those people and groups involved in getting signatures in? I think there
are maybe three major points here.

**Access to Research is now firmly on the White House (and other
governments') agenda**

The petition started as a result of a meeting between the
[Access2Research](http://access2research.org) founders and [John
Holdren](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holdren "John Holdren"){.zem_slink
rel="wikipedia" target="_blank"} from the White House. John Wilbanks
[has written about how the meeting
went](http://del-fi.org/post/23466490850/access2research) and what the
response was. The US administration has sympathy and understands many of
the issues. However it must be hard to make the case that this was
something worth the bandwidth it would take to drive a policy
initiative. Especially in an election year. The petition and the
mechanism of the "We the people" site has enabled us to show that it is
a policy item that generates public interest, but more importantly it
creates an opportunity for the White House to respond. It is worth
noting that this has been one of the more successful petitions. Reaching
the 25k mark in two weeks is a real achievement, and one that has got
the attention of key people.

And that attention spreads globally as well. [The Finch
Report](http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/wg-expand-access/) on
mechanisms for improving access to UK research outputs will probably not
mention the petition, but you can bet that those within the UK
government involved in implementation will have taken note. Similarly as
the details of the
[Horizon2020](http://www.nature.com/news/europe-science-ministers-approve-2014-20-funding-framework-1.10774)
programme within the EU are hammered out, those deciding on the legal
instruments that will distribute around \$80B, will have noted that
there is public demand, and therefore political cover, to take action.

**The Open Access Movement has a strong voice, and a diverse network,
and can be an effective lobby**

It is easy, as we all work towards the shared goal of enabling wider
access and the full exploitation of web technologies, to get bogged down
in details and to focus on disagreements. What this effort showed was
that when we work together we can muster the connections and the network
to send a very strong message. And that message is stronger for coming
from diverse directions in a completely transparent manner. We have
learnt the lessons that could be taken from the fight against SOPA and
PIPA and refined them in the campaign to defeat, in fact to utterly
destroy, the Research Works Act. But this was not a reaction, and it was
not merely a negative campaign. This was a positive campaign,
originating within the movement, which together we have successfully
pulled off.Â There are lessons to be learnt. Things we could have done
better. But what we now know is that we have the capacity to take on
large scale public actions and pull them off.

**The wider community wants access and has a demonstrated capacity to
use it**

There has in the past been an argument that public access is not useful
because "they can't possibly undertand it", that "there is no demand for
public access". That argument has been comprehensively and permanently
destroyed. It was always an arrogant argument, and in my view a
dangerous one for those with a vested interest in ensuring continued
public funding of research. The fact that it had strong parallels with
the arguments deployed in the 18th and 19th centuries that colonists, or
those who did not own land, or women, could not possibly be competent to
vote should have been enough to warn people off using it. The petition
has shown demand, and the stories that have surfaced through this
campaign show not only that there are many people who are not
professional researchers who can use research, but that many of these
people also want, and are more than capable, to contribute back to the
professional research effort.

The campaign has put the ideas of Open Access in front of more people
than perhaps ever before. We have reached out to family, friends,
co-workers, patients, technologists,Â entrepreneurs, medical
practitioners, educators, and people just interested in the world around
them. Perhaps one in ten of them actually signed the petition, but many
of them will have talked to others, spreading the ideas. This is perhaps
one of the most important achievements of the petition. Getting the
message and the idea out in front of hundreds of thousands of people who
may not take action today, but will now be primed to see the problems
that arise from a lack of access, and the opportunities that could be
created through access.

**Where now?**

So what are our next steps? Continuing to gain signatures for the next
two weeks is still important. This may be one of the most rapidly
growing petitions but showing that continued growth is still valuable.
But more generally my sense is that we need to take stock and look
forward to the next phase. The really hard work of implementation is
coming. As a movement we still disagree strongly on elements of tactics
and strategy. The tactics I am less concerned about, we can take
multiple paths, applying pressure at multiple points and this will be to
our advantage. But I think we need a clearer goal on strategy. We need
to articulate what the endgame is. What is the vision? When will we know
that we have achieved what we set out to do?

[Peter
Murray-Rust](http://twitter.com/petermurrayrust "Peter Murray-Rust"){.zem_slink
rel="twitter" target="_blank"} has [already quoted
Churchill](http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/06/04/celebration-of-25000-signatures-for-open-access/)
but it does seem apposite. "...this is not the end. This is not even the
beginning of the end. But it is perhaps, the end of the beginning."

We now know how much we can achieve when we work together with a shared
goal. The challenge now is to harness that to a shared understanding of
the direction of travel, if perhaps not the precise route. But if we,
with all the diversity of needs and views that this movement contains,
we can find the core of goals that we all agree on, then what we now
know is that we have the capacity, the depth, and the strength to
achieve them.

 

::: {.zemanta-pixie}
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I’m afraid I went to bed. It was getting on for midnight and it looked like another four hours or so before the petition would reach the magic mark of 25,000 signatures. As it turns out a final rush put us across the line at around 2am my time, but never mind, I woke up wondering whether we had got there, headed for the computer and had a pleasant surprise waiting for me.  What does this mean?

25,000 signatures and still rolling: Implications of the White House petition

Github for science sounds like a great plan? But do we have the underlying stack of equivalent services needed to provide “http for science” and “tcp/ip” for science. I argue that until we do we will struggle to really deliver on the excitement that examples (rightly) inspire.

::: {.wp-caption .alignleft style="width: 310px"}
[![Mapa mental do
TCP/IP](http://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/300px-tcp-ip2.jpg "Mapa mental do TCP/IP"){.zemanta-img-inserted
.zemanta-img-configured decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="300"
height="186"}](http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TCP-IP.jpg)

Image via Wikipedia
:::

Itâ€™s one of those throw away lines, â€œBefore we can talk about a
github for science we really need to sort out a TCP/IP for scienceâ€?,
thatâ€™s geeky, sharp, a bit needly and goes down a treat [on
Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/CameronNeylon/status/171688972710453248).
But there is a serious point behind it. And its not intended to be
dismissive of the
[ideas](http://marciovm.com/i-want-a-github-of-science/index.html) that
are [swirling](http://www.trevorbedford.com/) around about scholarly
communication at the moment either. So it seems worth exploring in a bit
more detail.

The line is stolen almost wholesale from [John
Wilbanks](http://del-fi.org "John Wilbanks"){.zem_slink rel="wikipedia"}
who used it (I think) in [the talk he
gave](http://www.slideshare.net/wilbanks/seattle-sc-symposium-2010) at a
Science Commons meetup in Redmond a few years back. At the time I think
we were awash in â€œFacebooks for Scienceâ€? so that was the target but
the sentiment holds. As once was the case with Facebook and now is for
[Github](http://github.com "GitHub"){.zem_slink rel="homepage"}, or
[Wikipedia](http://www.wikipedia.org "Wikipedia"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage"}, or
[StackOverflow](http://stackoverflow.com/ "Stack Overflow"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage"}, the possibilities opened up by these new services and
technologies to support a much more efficient and effective research
process look amazing. And they are. But youâ€™ve got to be a little
careful about taking the analogy too far.

If you look at what these services provide, particularly those that are
focused on coding, they deliver commentary and documentation, nearly
always in the form of text about code â€" which is also basically text.
The web is very good at transferring text, and code, and data. The stack
that delivers this is built on a set of standards, with each layer
building on the layer beneath it. StackOverflow and Github are built on
a set of services, that in turn sit on top of the web standards of http,
which in turn are built on network standards like TCP/IP that control
the actual transfer of bits and bytes.

The fundamental *stuff* of these coding sites and Wikipedia is text, and
text is really well supported by the stack of web technologies. Open
Source approaches to software development didnâ€™t just develop because
of the web, they *developed* the web so its not surprising that they fit
well together. They grew up together and nurtured each other. But the
bottom line is that the stack is optimized to transfer the grains of
material, text and code, that make up the core of these services.

When we look at research we can see that when we dig down to the
granular level it isnâ€™t just made up of text. Sure most research could
be represented as text but we donâ€™t have the standardized forms to do
this. We donâ€™t have standard *granules* of research that we can
transfer from place to place. This is because its complicated to
transfer the stuff of research. I picked on TCP/IP specifically because
it is the *transfer* protocol that supports moving bits and bytes from
one place to another. What we need are protocols that support moving the
substance of a piece of my research from one place to another.

Work on [Research
Objects](http://wiki.myexperiment.org/index.php/Research_Objects)Â \[see
also [this paper](http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18555/)\], intended to
be self-contained but useable pieces of research is a step in this
direction, as are the [developing set of workflow
tools](http://www.wf4ever-project.org/), that will ultimately allow us
to describe and share the process by which weâ€™ve transformed at least
some parts of the research process into others. [Laboratory recording
systems](http://www.mylabnotebook.ac.uk/index.shtml) will help us to
capture and workflow-ify records of the physical parts of the research
process. But until we can agree how to transfer these in a standardized
fashion then I think it is premature to talk about Githubs for research.

Now there is a flip side to this, which is that where there are such
services that do support the transfer of pieces of the research process
we absolutely should beÂ  experimenting with them. But in most cases the
type-case itself will do the job. Github is great for sharing research
code and some people are doing [terrific things with data there as
well](https://github.com/ehec-outbreak-crowdsourced/BGI-data-analysis/wiki).
But if it does the job for those kinds of things why do we need one for
researchers? The scale that the consumer web brings, and the exposure to
a much bigger community, is a powerful counter argument to building
things â€˜just for researchersâ€™. To justify a service focused on a
small community you need to have very strong engagement or very specific
needs. By the time that a mainstream service has mindshare and
researchers are using it, your chances of pulling them away to a new
service just for them are very small.

So yes, we should be inspired by the possibilities that these new
services open up, and we should absolutely build and experiment but
while we are at it can we also focus on the lower levels of the
stack?They arenâ€™t as sexy and they probably wonâ€™t make anyone rich,
but weâ€™ve got to get serious about the underlying mechanisms that will
transfer our research in comprehensible packages from one place to
another.

We have to think carefully about capturing the context of research and
presenting that to the next user. Github works in large part because the
people using it know how to use code, can recognize specific languages,
and know how to drive it. Itâ€™s actually pretty poor for the user who
just wants to do something â€" weâ€™ve had to build up another set of
services at different levels, the [Python Package
Index](http://pypi.python.org/pypi "Python Package Index"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage"}, tools for making and distributing executables, that
help provide the context required for different types of user. This is
going to be much, much harder, for all the different types of use we
might want to put research to.

But if we can get this right â€" if we can standardize transfer
protocols and build in the context of the research into those
â€˜packetsâ€™ that lets people use it then what we have seen on the
wider web will happen naturally. As we build the stack up these services
that seem so hard to build at the moment will become as easy today as
throwing up a blog, downloading a rubygem, or firing up a machine
instance. If we can achieve that then weâ€™ll have much more than a
github for research, weâ€™ll have a whole web for research.

*Thereâ€™s nothing new here that wasnâ€™t written some time ago by John
Wilbanks and others but it seemed worth repeating. In particular I
recommend these posts
\[[1](http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge/2009/10/open_source_science_or_distrib.php),
[2](http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge/2009/11/distributed_science_part_2.php)\]
from John.*


Image via Wikipedia  Itâ€™s one of those throw away lines, â€œBefore we can talk about a github for science we really need to sort out a TCP/IP for scienceâ€?, thatâ€™s geeky, sharp, a bit needly and goes down a treat on Twitter. But there is a serious point behind it. And its not intended to be dismissive of the ideas that are swirling around about scholarly communication at the moment either. So it seems worth exploring in a bit more detail.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

25,000 signatures and still rolling: Implications of the White House petition

Github for science? Shouldnâ€™t we perhaps build TCP/IP first?