Open Access Week kicks off for the fourth time tomorrow with events across the globe. I was honoured to be asked to contribute to the SPARC video that will be released tomorrow. The following are a transcription of my notes – not quite what I said but similar.

Cameron Neylon

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*[Open Access
Week](http://www.openaccessweek.org/ "Open Access Week"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage"} kicks off for the fourth time tomorrow with events
across the globe. I was honoured to be asked to contribute to the
[SPARC](http://www.arl.org/sparc/ "SPARC"){rel="wikipedia"} video that
will be released tomorrow. The following are a transcription of my notes
-- not quite what I said but similar. [The
video](http://www.vimeo.com/15881200)* *was released at 9:00am US
Eastern Time on Monday 18 October.*

It has been a great year for Open Access. Open Access publishers are
steaming ahead, OA mandates are spreading and growing and the quality
and breadth of repositories is improving across institutions,
disciplines, and nations. There have problems and controversies as well,
many involving shady publishers seeking to take advantage of the Open
Access brand, but even this in its way is a measure of success.

Beyond traditional publication we've also seen great strides made in the
publication of a wider diversity of research outputs. Open Access to
data, to software, and to materials is moving up the agenda. There have
been real successes. The [Alzheimer's Disease
Network](http://www.adni-info.org/) showed [what can change when sharing
becomes a part of the
process](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/health/research/13alzheimer.html?_r=2&emc=eta1).
Governments and Pharmaceutical companies are releasing data. Publicly
funded researchers are falling behind by comparison!

For me although these big stories are important, and impressive, it is
the little wins that matter. The thousands or millions of people who
didn't have to wait to read a paper, who didn't need to write an email
to get a dataset, who didn't needlessly repeat and experiment known not
to work. Every time a few minutes, a few hours, a few weeks, months, or
years is saved we deliver more for the people who pay for this research.
These small wins are the hardest to measure, and the hardest to explain,
but they make up the bulk of the advantage that open approaches bring.

But perhaps the most important shift this year is something more subtle.
Each morning I listen to the radio news, and every now and then there is
a science story. These stories are increasingly prefaced with "...the
research, published in the journal of..." and increasingly that journal
is Open Access. A long running excuse for not referring the wider
community to original literature has been its inaccessibility. That
excuse is gradually disappearing. But more importantly there is a whole
range of research outcomes that people, where they areÂ interested,
where they care enough to dig deeper, can inform themselves about.
Research that people can use to reach their own conclusions about their
health, the environment, technology, or society.

I find it difficult to see this as anything but a good thing, but
nonetheless we need to recognize that it brings challenges. Challenges
of explaining clearly, challenges in presenting the balance of evidence
in a useful form, but above all challenges of how to effectively engage
those members of the public who are interested in the details of the
research. The web has radically changed the expectations of those who
seek and interact with information. Broadcast is no longer enough.
People expect to be able to talk back.

The last ten years of the Open Access movement has been about how to
make it possible for people to touch, read, and interact with the
outputs of research. Perhaps the challenge for the next ten years is to
ask how we can create access opportunities to the research itself. This
won't be easy, but then nothing that is worthwhile ever is.

[Open Access Week 2010](http://vimeo.com/15881200) from
[SPARC](http://vimeo.com/sparcdc) on [Vimeo](http://vimeo.com).

###### Related articles {#related-articles .zemanta-related-title}

- [Open Access Week](http://www.openaccessweek.org/)
- [](http://www.openaccessweek.org/)[Open Access
  Week](http://www.downes.ca/post/53942/rd) (downes.ca)
- ["Open Access Week 2010" and related
  posts](http://blogs.library.jhu.edu/wordpress/?p=6347)
  (blogs.library.jhu.edu)
- [News: Open Letter on Open Access -- Inside Higher
  Ed](http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/23/access)
  (insidehighered.com)
- [Long Road to Open
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  (insidehighered.com)

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Image via Wikipedia
<em>
 Open Access Week kicks off for the fourth time tomorrow with events across the globe. I was honoured to be asked to contribute to the SPARC video that will be released tomorrow. The following are a transcription of my notes – not quite what I said but similar. The video
</em>
<em>
 was released at 9:00am US Eastern Time on Monday 18 October.
</em>
It has been a great year for Open Access.

Some notes on Open Access Week

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I know Iâ€™ve been a bit quiet for a few weeks. Mainly Iâ€™ve been away
for work and having a brief holiday so it is good to be plunging back
into things with some good news. I am very happy to report that the
[Open Society Institute](http://www.soros.org/) has agreed to fund [the
proposal](https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1l32FjbfBkykwMbN75FfVqxSxghINfR9JuQGLrUCauFA&hl=en_GB&authkey=CM-Ok9kC)
that was built up in response to my [initial
suggestion](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/a-collaborative-proposal-on-research-metrics/)
a month or so ago.

OSI, which many will know as one of the major players in bringing the
Open Access movement to its current position, will fund a workshop that
will identify both potential areas where the measurement and aggregation
of research outputs can be improved as well as barriers to achieving
these improvements. This will be immediately followed by a concentrated
development workshop (or hackfest) that will aim to deliver prototype
examples that show what is possible. The funding also includes further
development effort to take one or two of these prototypes and develop
them to proof of principle stage, ideally with the aim of deploying
these into real working environments where they might be useful.

The workshop structure will be developed by the participants over the 6
weeks leading up to the date itself. I aim to set that date in the next
week or so, but the likelihood is early to mid-March. The workshop will
be in southern England, with the venue to be again worked out over the
next week or so.

There is a lot to pull together here and I will be aiming to contact
everyone who has expressed an interest over the next few weeks to start
talking about the details. In the meantime Iâ€™d like to thank everyone
who has contributed to the effort thus far. In particular Iâ€™d like to
thank Melissa Hagemann and Janet Haven at OSI and Gunner from
[Aspiration](http://www.aspirationtech.org/) who have been a great help
in focusing and optimizing the proposal. Too many people contributed to
the proposal itself to name them all (and you can check out the
GoogleDoc history if you want to pull apart their precise contributions)
but I do want to thank [Heather Piwowar](researchremix.wordpress.com)
and [David
Shotton](http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/staff/academics/shotton_dm.htm) in
particular for their contributions.

Finally, the success of the proposal, and in particular the community
response around it has made me much more confident that some of the
dreams we have for using the web to support research are becoming a
reality. The details I will leave for another post but what I found
fascinating is how far the network of people spread who could be
contacted, essentially through a single blog post. Iâ€™ve contacted a
few people directly but most have become involved through the network of
contacts that spread from the original post. The network, and the tools,
are effective enough that a community can be built up rapidly around an
idea from a much larger and more diffuse collection of people. The
challenge of this workshop and the wider project is to see how we can
make that aggregated community into a self sustaining conversation that
produces useful outputs over the longer term.

*It's a complete co-incidence that Michael Nielsen posted a piece in the
past few hours that forms a great document for framing the discussion.
I'll be aiming to write something in response soon but in the meantime
follow the top link below.*

###### Related articles {#related-articles .zemanta-related-title}

- [The mismeasurement of
  science](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-mismeasurement-of-science/)
  (michaelnielsen.org)
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  manifesto](http://www.academicproductivity.com/2010/alt-metrics-a-manifesto/)
  (academicproductivity.com)
- [Archival Metrics \| Promoting a Culture of Assessment in Archives and
  Special Collections](http://archivalmetrics.org/)
  (archivalmetrics.org)
- [ReaderMeter: Crowdsourcing research
  impact](http://www.academicproductivity.com/2010/readermeter-crowdsourcing-research-impact/)
  (academicproductivity.com)
- [Ouroboros and Peer Review: New Proposals Continue to Chase Their Own
  Tails](http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/10/04/ouroboros-and-peer-review-new-proposals-continue-to-chase-their-own-tails/)
  (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)

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Image via Wikipedia  I know Iâ€™ve been a bit quiet for a few weeks. Mainly Iâ€™ve been away for work and having a brief holiday so it is good to be plunging back into things with some good news. I am very happy to report that the Open Society Institute has agreed to fund the proposal that was built up in response to my initial suggestion a month or so ago.

Beyond the Impact Factor: Building a community for more diverse measurement of research

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A few weeks ago I attended a workshop run by the [ESRC Genomics
Forum](http://www.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/forum/) in Edinburgh which
brought together humanists, social scientists, and science focused folks
with an interest in how open approaches can and should be applied to
genomic science. This was interesting on a number of levels but I was
especially interested in the comments of [Marina
Levina](http://www.marinalevina.com/) on citizenship. In particular she
asked the question â€œwhat are the civic responsibilities of a network
citizen?â€?

Actually she asked me this question several times and it took me until
quite late in the day to really understand what she meant. I initially
answered with reference to [Clay Shirky](http://www.shirky.com/) on the
rise of creative contribution on the web as if just making stuff was all
that a citizen need do but what Marina was getting at was a deeper
question about a shared sense of responsibilities.

[Citizenship as a concept is a vexed
question](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship) and there are a
range of somewhat incompatible philosophical approaches to describing
and understanding it. For my purposes here I want to focus on
citizenship as a sense of belonging to a group with shared values and
resources, and rights to access those resources. Traditionally these
allegiances lie with the nation state but, while nationalism is
undeniably on the rise, there seems to be a growing group of us who have
a patchwork of citizenships with different groups and communities.

Many of these communities live on the web and benefit from the use of
the internet as a sort of commons. At the same time there has been a
growing sense of behavioural norms and responsibilities in some parts of
the social web: a sophisticated sense of identity, the responsibility to
mark spam for takedown, a dedication to broad freedom of expression,
perhaps even a growing understanding of the tensions between that
freedom and â€œciviltyâ€?.

In the context of research on the web we have often talked about the
value of â€œnormsâ€? of behaviour as a far better mechanism for
regulation than licences and legal documents. A sense of belonging to a
community, of being a citizen, and the consequent risk of exclusion for
bad behaviour is a powerful encouragement to adhere to those norms, even
if that exclusion is just being shunned. Of course such enforcement can
lead to negative consequences as well as positive but I would argue that
in our day to day activities in most cases an element of social pressure
has a largely positive effect.

A citizen has a responsibility to contribute to the shared resources
that support the community. In a nation state we pay taxes, undertake
jury duty, vote in elections. What are the contributions expected of a
network citizen? Taking one step back, what are those shared resources?
The internet and the underlying framework of the web are one set of
resources. Of course these are resources that lie at the intersection of
our traditional states, as physical and commercial resources, and our
network society. In this context the protests against SOPA, PIPA, and
ACTA might be seen as the citizens of the network attending a rally,
perhaps even mobilizing our â€œmilitaryâ€? if only to demonstrate their
capacity.

But the core resources of the network are the nodes on the network and
the connections between them. The people, information resources, and
tools make up the nodes, and the links connecting them are what actually
makes them usable. As citizens of the network our contribution is to
make these links, to tend the garden of resources, to build tools. Above
all our civic duty is to *share*.

It is a commonly made point that with digital resources being infinitely
copyable there is no need for a tragedy of the commons. But there is a
flip side to this â€" when we think of physical commons we often think
of resources that donâ€™t need active maintenance. As long as they are
properly managed, not over-grazed or polluted, there is a sense that
these physical commons will be ok. The digital commons requires constant
maintenance. As an information resource it needs to be brought up to
date. And with these constant updates the tools and resources need to be
constantly checked for interoperability.

Maintaining these resources requires work. It requires money and it
requires time. The active network citizen contributes to these
resources, modifying content, adding links, removing vandalism. In
exchange for this the active network citizen obtains influence â€" not
dissimilar to getting to vote in elections â€" in those discussions
about norms and behaviour. But the core civic duty is to share, with the
expectation that other citizens, in their turn, will share back; that
working together as a community the citizenry will build, maintain, and
strengthen the civic institutions of the network.

This analysis scales beyond individual people to organizations.
Wikipedia is an important civic institution of network, one that accepts
a tithe from the active citizen in the form of time and eyeballs but
which gives much back to the community in the form of links and high
quality resources. Google accepts the links we make and gives back
search results but isnâ€™t always quite such a good citizen, breaking
standards, removing the RSS feeds that could be used by others.
Facebook? Well the less said the better. But good citizens will both
take what they need from the pool of resources and contribute
effectively back to the common institutions, those aggregation points
for resources and tools that make the network an attractive place to
live and work.

And I use â€œworkâ€? advisedly because a core piece of the value of the
network is the ability for citizens to use it to do their jobs, for it
to be a source of resources tools and expertise, that can be used by
people to make a living. And the quid pro quo is that the good citizen
contributes back resources that others might use to make money. In a
viable community with a viable commons there will be money, or its
equivalent, being generated and spent. A networked community will
encourage its citizens to generate value because this floats all boats
higher. In return for taking value out of the system the good citizen
will contribute it back. But they will do this as a matter of principle,
as part of their social contract, not because a legal document tells
them to. Indeed requiring someone to do something actually reduces the
sense of community, the valuing of good practice, that makes a healthy
society.

When I first applied the ccZero waiver to this blog I didnâ€™t really
think deeply about what I was doing. I wanted to make a point. I wanted
my work to be widely shared and I wanted to make it as easily shareable
as I could. In retrospect I can see I was making a statement about the
networked world I wanted to work in, one in which people actively
participate in building a better network. I was making the point that I
didnâ€™t just want to consume and benefit from the content, links, and
resources that other people had created, I wanted to give back. And I
have benefited, commercially, in the form of consultancies and grants,
and simply the opportunities that have opened up for me as a result of
reading and conversing about the work of other people.

My current life and work would be unthinkable without the network and
the value I have extracted from it. In return it is clear to me that I
need to give back in the form of resources that others are free to use,
and to exploit, even to make money off them. There may be a risk of
enclosure, although I think it small, but my choice as a citizen is to
be clear about what I expect of other citizens, not to attempt to
enforce my beliefs about good behaviour through legal documents but
through acting to build up and support the community of good citizens.

[Dave
White](http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/staff/academicstaff/profile.php?a=alpha&id=8)
has
[talked](http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2009/10/14/visitors-residents-the-video/)
and written about the [distinction between visitors and residents in
social
networks](http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3171/3049),
the experience they bring and the experience they have. I think there is
a space, indeed a need, to recognize that there is another group beyond
those who simply inhabit online spaces. Those of us who want to build a
sustainable networked society should identify ourselves, our values, and
our expectations of others. Our networked world needs citizens as well

.

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Image via Wikipedia  A few weeks ago I attended a workshop run by the ESRC Genomics Forum in Edinburgh which brought together humanists, social scientists, and science focused folks with an interest in how open approaches can and should be applied to genomic science. This was interesting on a number of levels but I was especially interested in the comments of Marina Levina on citizenship.

Rogue Scholar Posts

Some notes on Open Access Week

Beyond the Impact Factor: Building a community for more diverse measurement of research

A citizen of the network