What do we mean by “free” access to data?
Thomas Jefferson said: "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea." And also --as noted in a previous blog -- "The field of knowledge is the common property of all mankind." A century or so later US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (in the 1918 decision, International News Service v. Associated Press] wrote: "…the general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—became, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use." “Information wants to be free…” (while also noting that information is “expensive” creating an inevitable tension…) When we call for "free" access to knowledge resources (used here to stand for data, information and knowledge [for some working definitions SEE: Moritz, Building the Biodiversity Commons Appendix 3 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june02/moritz/06moritz.html ] ), we are saying that access to knowledge should not be a privilege with access granted only to those that can afford the current market price. Knowledge should not be placed behind “pay walls”. To assert this right to free access is to urge that as a national and global community our common welfare demands the free access to knowledge. The creation of mechanisms of impedance to the free flow of knowledge has tremendous societal costs. Consider the “transaction costs” entailed every time any writer or researcher must simply contact an author or publisher for permission to use any resource. (I estimate that at the American Museum of Natural History, early in the last decade, we invested about $25,000 just to perform due diligence to secure our right to freely disseminate our own scientific publications.) Consider the transaction costs implied by the "inter-library loan" industry? Add to transaction costs the possibility that additional charges may be assessed before an article can be actually used. As an independent researcher, without a current institutional base, I was forced to pay Nature/ MacMillan $32 US for access to the "Commonwealth of Science"(1941) article cited in a previous blog. Could I have found ways to circumvent? Yes, of course, that is hardly the point -- I intend to act in good faith as do most people.) Consider the plight of any teacher ambitious enough to seek use of original source materials – or of any public school student or parent for that matter… Consider costs associated with health care information...? Having asserted this right to access we are obliged to address the question of cost and of fair compensation for the creation of knowledge. Since the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher the Anglo-American polity has been in a kind of thrall – a few years ago when I proposed an alternative system of public compensation for knowledge creation – a colleague – very highly place in a professional scientific society asked me with incredulity – “you mean pay for it with taxes”? Well, yes. It has become almost an a priori article of faith that public investment is somehow bad (except, I can not help adding, when required to bail out major financial institutions and insure exorbitant bonuses for financial executives). Market fundamentalists (and “casino economists”! SEE: JM Keynes), notwithstanding, the United States has always depended upon public investment to insure the viability of our economy. Whether by investment in postal service, energy, public schools/libraries/museums, the Interstate Highway system, the National Science Foundation or the Internet, it has been public investment that has created the infrastructure for our economic success and for innovation. And it has been the economic opportunities created for individuals by public investment that have continued to draw to our shores the ambitious and the energetic, the innovative and the productive. It is the rich diversity of America’s population that is our greatest asset and that holds our greatest hope for meeting 21st Century challenges. Freeing “government information” is a fine starting point but all knowledge must be free… I believe that we need an Andrew Carnegie for the 21st Century – assets that have been locked away behind pay walls should be placed in the public domain. And we need new paradigms that sustainably support and fairly compensate research and intellectual work but require release of knowledge products for free public use. (The open access publishing model suggests one such strategy…) Next, "open"? And effective? Continue reading
Live blogging Stanford law.gov workshop
Hi all. Shinjoung and I (and hopefully others!) will be live blogging the law.gov workshop at Stanford. The twitter hashtag is #law.gov. feel free to post comments or tweet questions with that hashtag. Hope you can follow along. Agenda is below the liveblog box.
- 9AM - Coffee available for early arrivals
- 10AM - Welcome and Overview
- 10:30AM - The National Inventory of Primary Legal Materials
Discussion of how to define primary legal materials.
Discussion of how to structure the national survey, including what information to collect. - 11:15AM - General Discussion of Legal Issues
Discussion of issues such as copyright over primary legal materials, enabling legislation, and other issues of the law. - 12PM - Lunch
- 1PM-2PM - Public Presentation, Room 290
"Law.Gov - A Revolution in Legal Affairs"
Anurag Acharya (Google), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard) - 2:15-3:30 - Technical Discussion
Discussion of technical challenges, including specification of a core open source system, issues of markup and citation, issues of privacy, issues of ingestion, issues of authentication.
What is NOT “science”? Why we have a right to “data” as “evidence”…
Most of us accept a priori the institutionalized distinction between the sciences and the humanities. If asked, we can tick off the names of “disciplines” that are “scientific” and those that constitute “the humanities”… (The “social sciences” are somehow less centrally – more vaguely? -- “scientific” -- but what do we mean essentially by these distinctions?) [It's worth noting that novelist CP Snow famously posited this distinction in his Cambridge lecture and subsequent book "The Two Cultures" -- ca. 1959.] We might say that science is “empirical” meaning that it is based upon real, physical evidence? Or perhaps that it’s “inductive” – its theories or “laws” flowing from observations of facts… Or perhaps that it is “quantitative” or "technical" – its conclusions determined by the use of sometimes very complex mathematical logic or by complex apparatus. We might also say that it employs a rigorous methodology that includes exact logical provisions for “falsifiability” [SEE: Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Investigation – and elsewhere], for open peer review – including test by replication – and for validation by demonstration of predictive power… Science also is systematically accretive and depends on careful citation and documentation, building upon itself like a coral reef… But, it strikes me that any humanist should feel uncomfortable at the assumption that the humanities do not – or are incapable of – meeting these standards at least most of them in most cases? (I'll leave it to the reader to assess what is most essentially “humanist” – but I often have the uncomfortable sense that the humanities may too often depend for their esoteric authority upon the incoherence of their evidentiary base or upon the imprecision of language or between languages…?) I attribute "beauty" as a primary motive/value to “the arts”… (The American poet Randall Jarrell once said: “Criticism is the poetry of the prosaic.”) And I heard, anecdotally, a few years ago that the performance artist, Laurie Anderson, was invited to a discussion about “the arts” and “the sciences” and before too long was asking “What are we doing here?” I understood this to be an intuitive recognition that the arts and the sciences are on very similar tracks… I believe that artists are able to operate more spontaneously, intuitively and imaginatively -- perhaps more "aesthetically"? but less "systematically" ? Scientists often operate on that same frontier but with the requirement that they test their intuitions using the scientific method and then publicly disclose their “tests”. "Belief" is ultimately the subjective preserve of the individual -- and the institutional preserve of religion. Maintaining the distinction between "belief" and reason (or logic) is a fundamental value of the Enlightenment -- particularly in public discourse. OK so what am I getting at here? And why? Ultimately all policy -- whether "scientific" or not -- and all human decisions should be based on logical analysis and on evidence. Both evidence and analysis are susceptible to testing, to evaluation and thus to reasoned discussion. Our civil discourse will always be improved by clear specification of analytical logic and by free, open and effective disclosure of empirical evidence or DATA. Respecting data there are a series of fundamental criteria that must be satisfied to validate it’s “authenticity” and its probative value (its effectiveness as evidence). As citizens, we have the right to demand that public policy and public decisions be based on well-formed logic and on valid evidence… Discussion that occurs in our public fora should always distinguish between matters of logic and fact and matters of belief. We’ll pursue these notions – in the context of free, open effective access to data and in the context of science literacy – in future posts… Continue reading
Another review of Google’s Case Law Search
As announced last year, Google Scholar searches now include legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate, and supreme courts. An earlier review said that it would not replace commerical case law providers but that it does offer is an amazing place to start case research. A new review echoes those findings:
- Google Scholar: A New Way to Search for Cases and Related Legal Publications, By David Tsai and Courtney Minick, LLRX (December 30, 2009). [Previously Posted by: The Bar Association of San Francisco, republished with permission.]
...Google Scholar will not replace commercial legal publishers such as LexisNexis® or Westlaw® any time soon. The value in paid services lies mostly in the editorial work they provide on top of caselaw -- e.g., headnotes and cite checking features... Something else to keep in mind -- Google Scholar is limited to case law, and does not include statutes or regulations... All together, many lawyers have concluded that Google Scholar is a great place to conduct preliminary research, or to review new cases that have not yet been affected by precedent.Continue reading
Lunchtime Listen: How are we ensuring the longevity of digital documents?
Please check out the spring 2009 plenary at Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) by David Rosenthal, chief scientist of the LOCKSS program. He presents a "contrarian view" of digital preservation. The issues he raises are definitely important to think about for those of us working to preserve digital govt information/documents for the long term.
How Are We Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents? from CNI Video Editor on Vimeo.