The ethical case for free, open and effective access...
Submitted by moritz on Wed, 2010-01-06 18:07.
In the sciences, the general case for sharing of all scientific knowledge (and knowledge resources) has long been clearly articulated. Robert K. Merton, sociologist of science at Columbia made the case in 1942 -- where he said: “The substantive findings of science are a product of social collaboration and are assigned to the community. They constitute a common heritage in which the equity of the individual producer is severely limited…”
[SEE: Robert K. Merton, “A Note on Science and Democracy,” Journal of Law and Political Sociology 1 (1942): 121.] at about the same time (1941) a "Declaration of Scientific Principles" appeared in Nature -- “7. The pursuit of scientific inquiry demands complete intellectual freedom. And unrestricted international exchange of knowledge…“ [SEE:“The Commonwealth of Science, ” Nature No.3753 October 4, 1941] These scientific values have been affirmed and re-affirmed many times. In fact, the predecessor to UNESCO was the League of Nations Committee on International Intellectual Cooperation... [SEE related: "The union of International Associations" and "The Mundaneum" http://www.uia.be/node/85 ]
The principle that access to knowledge is an essential human right (and fundamental to effective citizenship) has also been widely affirmed. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 declares: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." [SEE: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml ]
In fact, the authors of the US Constitution realized that access to knowledge was essential to the public welfare -- the notion of limited monopoly on "intellectual property" -- as defined in the provisions for patent and copyright make this clear and by the recognition of the public domain. (Thomas Jefferson, corresponding with his Secretary of War in 1807, wrote: "The field of knowledge is the common property of all mankind.")
In 1954, when Edward R. Murrow asked him about patenting the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk famously commented" "That would be like patenting the sun..." 35 years later Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg was warning of the deterioration of the ethic of sharing [SEE: “Data Sharing: A Declining Ethic? -- Commercial pressures and heightened competition are testing the notion that scientific data and materials should be widely shared.” Science v. 248 p952- 957, 25 May 1990]. It seems more than a little ironic that now -- 50 years later -- "20% of human gene DNA sequences are patented" [Science Magazine Policy Forum: K.Jensen and F. Murray, "Intellectual Property: Landscape of the Human Genome," Science 14 October 2005: Vol. 310. no. 5746, pp. 239 - 240].
Thus sadly, despite clear and longstanding articulation of the principles of free and open access to knowledge, there has been a strong countervailing trend toward restriction of knowledge ["commoditization" -- SEE: J. Birkinshaw and T. Sheehan, “Managing the Knowledge Life Cycle,” MIT Sloan Management Review, 44 (2) Fall, 2002:77].
So, assuming (as in my previous post) that librarians are both stewards and advocates -- how do we make our case...? 1) We marshal all available historical and philosophical evidence for support of open access [in effect, I've cited just a few of the diverse sources for such a case...] 2) we organize and broadly disseminate by publishing, presenting, discussing, teaching 3) we insist upon evidence-based public policy with full transparency -- not only of data but of the logic that directs the definition of data as evidence 4) we insist upon transparent processes by which data can be transparently and effectively scrutinized -- this means specifying all forms of transformation to which data are subject and presenting the "chain of custody" / provenance of data thus certifying both logical validity and technical integrity 5) from a policy perspective, we begin with the "lowest hanging fruit", which politically means we start with bio-medicine (humans are naturally enough -- anthropocentric) -- thus NIH, CDC and UN/WHO and their evolving policies -- but we also push in other domains like conservation, agriculture and agrarian science, education... 6) we analyze carefully and advocate for the broad implementation of "qualified peer review mechanisms" (NSF provides an excellent model) 7) we aggressively advocate for K-gray science literacy...
More about all and each of these points will follow...
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Great points! parallels between science and govt information
Thanks Tom for cogently lining up both a strong philosophical argument for open access and a road map for how to do it. I wholeheartedly agree with you that librarians must be stewards AND advocates. It seems to me that there are many parallels between what govt documents librarians have long advocated (free and readily available govt information preserved for the long term as a prerequisite for an open Democratic society) and what you advocate for the science community.
The thing that worries me (and I think you mentioned in your previous post) is that there is a growing vein of thought in the documents community that, rather than being stewards AND advocates, documents librarians (and librarians in general) will increasingly become information advocates only with no thought toward stewardship -- or mistakenly believing that stewardship will be taken care of by someone else (GPO, Portico, Internet Archive, Hathi trust...).
So how do you propose convincing those in our own community that format doesn't matter and that the historic principles of "1) stewardship of knowledge and 2) the free, open and effective sharing of knowledge for the common good" still matter in the digital age?
"Data" and Stewardship...?
Hi James --
Well first off, it's probably essential to specify what we mean by "data" eh? And also to discuss a little more the emerging paradigm for "librarianship" -- this will lead to discussions of stewardship as well...
In my view there are several inter-related ways in which we talk about "data"... Luciano Floridi in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ("Semantic Concepts of Information")offers a "Diaphoric Definition of Data": "A datum is a putative fact regarding some difference or lack of uniformity within some context." -- this basic definition is close to what Claude Shannon referred to -- but in the context of computation -- in the first paragraph of his seminal work of the 1940's [SEE: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf ].
What I call a "technological" definition -- flows from these definitions and is probably most common(?) -- it refers to any form of coded information that can be transmitted electronically (or, in fact, any other way!) It is also -- roughly -- the definition used by the NSF "DatNet" Program: "data are defined as any information that can be stored in digital form and accessed electronically, including, but not limited to, numeric data, text, publications, sensor streams, video, audio, algorithms, software, models and simulations, images, etc." [SEE: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07601/nsf07601.htm -- "Introduction" ]
In various research disciplines, "data" has domain-specific meanings these are what I class as "epistemic" definitions -- hence data in astronomy or data in sociology or linguistics evoke very different images -- formats and standards -- in the minds of astronomers, sociologists or linguists.
At an NSF workshop on Anthropology this past May, a working group of scientists that I helped facilitate defined data as: "measurements, observations or descriptions of a referent -- such as an individual, an event, a specimen in a collection or an excavated/surveyed object -- created or collected through human interpretation (whether directly “by hand” or through the use of technologies)".
So -- coming back to your questions -- a first observation is that while we may all feel that we understand intuitively -- the difference between astronomical data (as for ex. observations generated by NASA) and Census statistics [in my college days at Georgetown I worked with raw Census data at the Census HQ in Maryland] -- ultimately from the standpoint of the obligations -- even "moral imperatives" -- of contemporary librarianship they present essentially the same problem -- and the librarian's obligation for stewardship and free, open and effective dissemination -- are the same... Despite the fact that NTIS emerged early on -- it's origins can be traced back to 1945 -- as a "separate" Federal service (interestingly enough in the Dept of Commerce!) -- librarians legitimately should be responsible for the full corpus of Federal (and other) knowledge.
ALL data is evidence -- and as such is essential...
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Also implicit in my case is an assumption about the current Balkanization of librarianship...
Our current, "traditional" model for libraries is scaled geographically and jurisdictionally,highly distributed and highly redundant -- and while not optimally efficient, it has worked quite well in many -- though not all -- respects (the knowledge deprivation of the less privileged,domestically and internationally, is a fundamental flaw -- and the fact that librarians are "low caste" in almost all instances -- has led to no-win dilemmas --the Nicholson Baker case?)
In the still emergent digital commons, interestingly, redundancy yet remains our most reliable guarantee of persistence and integrity (LOCKSS?) but it is now possible to re-consider the terms of scale and distribution of knowledge. Librarians can and must continue domain specialization but the institutional framework may shift...
The alternatives for stewardship that you mention (Hathi Trust, etc.) are all, to one degree or another, experimental. I believe that librarians and library values have a primary and fundamental role to play in stewardship. We have won the confidence of the broad community buy our centuries -long commitment to stewardship and service and we must continue to win that confidence -- even if we are "stretched" beyond our comfort zone by the demands of digital stewardship e.g. for example, grid computing...
Re-assigning responsibility for stewardship of knowledge is fraught with risks -- the notion of having a for-profit entity )GOOGLE?) assume responsibility is deeply flawed. The oldest known company in the world, Kongo Gumi, was recently acquired by another firm [SEE: http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies ] Moreover, companies can make business decisions on a dime (as did Microsoft respecting their commitment to digitization in 2008). Even not-for-profits can follow similar paths (it's a separate discussion bit who -- other than the press occasionally, is monitoring the performance of not-for-profits as defined by their putative "mission"??)
But I've already gone on far too long for today...
HathiTrust is not experimental
While certain aspects of the interface may be beta, the financial and institutional commitment of major players within the academic and digital library arenas is quite real. They are working toward TRAC certification of the repository and and you can't really demonstrate more of a commitment to stewardship than that.
http://www.hathitrust.org/documents/trac.pdf
Hathi Trust
Fair enough but, of course, this all depends on what one means by "experimental". Certainly the Hathi Trust has been seriously supported -- i.e it is not "experimental" in the fiduciary sense -- but is it perhaps premature to claim that it is a secure, persistent and robust solution that is prototypical for the global community?
k-gray?
Hi again Tom. I googled around but couldn't find anything about k-gray science literacy. Is that a common term, or does it just mean "from kindergarten to old gray hairs"?
Yes...
Yes -- it's from the informal education community...
Library science is NOT open access
It makes me uncomfortable that my profession does not practice what we preach. Most of our associations and scholarly publications are NOT open access, but toll. Visitors can see the latest journal table of contents and a few opening paragraphs of an article; if they want more, they have to pay or join.
For example, see the SLA copyright notice proclaiming "All rights reserved." Why isn't there a Creative Commons license in it's place. However, I do give SLA credit for an exemplary Publishing Agreement http://www.sla.org/PDFs/CopyrightAssignment.pdf which is a non-exclusive license with rights of serial first publication.
ALA does a better job when it comes to giving upfront permissions for certain 3rd party uses http://www.ala.org/ala/footer/copyright.cfm , but why not use a Creative Commons license instead? ALA authors have a choice of giving ALA a non-exclusive license or copyright assignment. In order to know who is the copyright owner, it would be helpful if every article had its own copyright and 3rd party use notices as a footer.
Librarians need to clean up our own act before we hold ourselves up as champions of the open access movement.
Do as we do!
I completely agree with you B Klein. We meed to push ALA harder on this issue. GODORT, the ALA org I work most closely with, follows ALA publication rules, but in the copyright packet (PDF) for Documents to the People (DttP) there's an optional open access agreement. So why can't DttP editors make the open access agreement be the standard? In other words, make it easy for ALA journal writers to choose open access. When I talk with the DttP editors next week at ALA midwinter, I'll mention this. Thanks!
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