1. Open Access: the Discipline of Public Knowledge
Leslie Carr
ECS, Southampton
By the beginning of the century a new technology had emerged which promised to revolutionise the storage and dissemination of information, and of scientific and scholarly knowledge in particular. This was the twentieth century and the development was microphotography. Scholars and scientists wrote of the potential for microfilm-based collections of all the world’s knowledge reproduced and made available for individual researchers. They even described browsing machines to realize links and annotations, contemplating a global hypertext network decades before the invention of the digital computer.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the emergence of a variety of applications of the Internet ( , FTP and the Web) gave scientists and scholars a practical means to distribute their own work with unprecedented ease and speed to a rapidly growing world-wide audience, without the expense and inconvenience of manufacturing and distributing printed products. The result was seen as a new and unprecedented public good: free, world-wide, open access to scientific research literature. To facilitate Open Access, research institutions and communities created repositories for their researchers to deposit their research data and publications.
However, the complex relationships between researchers, institutions, politicians and the publishing industry mean that Open Access has been slow to gain a foothold without policy leadership. Researchers are rewarded for being efficient publishers, but in many aspects they are not natural knowledge sharers, whether in the form of Open Access repositories, or even simple web pages. The study of Open Access is the study of public knowledge sharing, the economics of global knowledge transfers and of the cost / benefit of web information services in the context of scholarly communication.

2. Excitement of New Technology…
New century brings the maturity of a new technology for the storage and dissemination of information.
Scholars and scientists debating the potential for collections of all the world’s knowledge reproduced and made available for individual researchers.

3. …but we’ve been here before
Twentieth century
Microphotography
Television

4. Introduced US 3"x5" library card to Europe
Paul Otlet,
Belgian lawyer
Introduced US 3"x5" library card to Europe
Traité de Documentation (1934)
the systematic organisation of all knowledge and thought
Mundanaeum: 15 million index card bibliographic index, 1 million documents and images, classified and searchable. Use of item became part of the bibliographic record. Content interlinked.

5. H. G. Wells, World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia, EncyclopédieFrançaise, August, 1937
Encyclopaedias of the past sufficed for the needs of a cultivated minority
universal education was unthought of
gigantic increase in recorded knowledge
more gigantic growth in the numbers of human beings requiring accurate and easily accessible information

6. Permanent World Encyclopaedia
Discontent with the role of universities and libraries in the intellectual life of mankind
Universities multiply but do not enlarge their scope
thought & knowledge organization of the world
No obstacle to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements

7. Vannevar Bush, As We May Think Atlantic Monthly, July 1945
Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in USA, coordinating 6,000 American scientists during WW2
Make our ‘bewildering store’ of knowledge more accessible
“For many years inventions have extended man’s physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.”

8. The Memex
The Memex (never built) was to be a mechanised device to allow a library user to
consult all kinds of written material
organize it in any way the user wanted
add private comments and link documents together at will.
A personal library station which held all written articles and journals on microfilm.
system of levers allowed users to add links
create trails

9. Otlet, Wells and Bush
An historic theme of organising and disseminating the world’s knowledge through innovation and technology
Otlet: a manually curatedrepository
Wells : a centralised, managed global knowledge repository to combat fragmenting academic authority.
Bush : a cross-disciplinary scholarly paradigm to combat fragmenting scientific knowledge.

10. Open Access
A current movement for organising and disseminating the world’s knowledge through innovation and technology

11. Open Access: the Problem
Universities and researchers are knowledge producers and knowledge consumers
Scholarly communications have been outsourced
Literally nothing to show as evidence of research activities
researchers
publishers
read
write

12. Open Access: the Problem (2)
Researchers have have hard disks which are just organised enough to support daily activity
Disk crashes
Stolen laptops
Software upgrades that go wrong
Backups that never quite get restored
Draws and folders full of old stuff that eventually fall off the radar
“Lost in some research assistant’scomputer, the data are oftenirretrievable or an undecipherable string of digits”
Lost in a Sea of Science Data.S.Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education (23/06/2006)

13. Congratulations on your new research project!

14. Make sure your data doesn’t!
This is where your hardware will end up
Make sure your data doesn’t!
Research outputs go in research repositories

15. The Literature: As We Imagine
Integrated
Available

16. The Literature: As It Is
Inaccessible
Disjoint

17. The Twin Peaks Problem 24,000 journals with 2,500,000 articles/yr
Access
Have-Nots
Harvards
financial firewalls
Impact

18. The Budapest Open Access Initiative
Old tradition of scholarly publishing + New technology of the Internet =
Public good: free and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed journal literature
Budapest, December 2001

19. Open Access Strategies
Green: Self-Archiving
Journal processes continue as normal
Authors deposit a copy of their papers into an ‘open access repository’
Public copy is a supplement to the publishers official article for those who can’t afford a subscription
Also an institutional record of its work for sharing, reuse, marketing etc
Gold: Publishing
Journal changes business model
Readers no longer pay to read
Instead, authors pay to publish
or their funders

20. Open Access Advantage OA increases citations
Full bibliography, see

21. Contributors to the OA Advantage EA + QA + UA + (CA) + (QB)
EA: Early Advantage: Self-archiving preprints before publication hastens and increases usage and citations (higher-quality articles benefit more: top 20% of articles receive 80% of citations)
QA: Quality Advantage: Self-archiving postprints immediately upon publication hastens and increases usage and citations (higher-quality articles benefit more)
UA: Usage Advantage: Self-archiving increases downloads (higher-quality articles benefit more)
(CA: Competitive Advantage):OA/non-OA advantage (CA disappears at 100%OA, but very important today!)
(QB: Quality Bias):Higher-quality articles are self-selectively self-archived more (QB disappears at 100%OA)
These are the most likely components of the OA citation advantage

22. Repositories &EPrints
Open Archiving Initiative - October 1999
Agreed OAI-PMH for metadata sharing
(2008 OAI-ORE for data exchange)
Among the Participants
Paul Ginsparg(arXiv)
Carl Lagoze(NCSTRL)
StevanHarnad(Cogprints)
EPrints
proposed as a ‘build your own repository’ solution
enable institutions and groups to participate in OAI metadata sharing initiative

23. Example EPrints Repositories
An institutional repository for the London School of Economics.

24. Example EPrints Repositories
A repository for a school of Electronics and Computer Science.
It achieves % full text self-deposit

25. Example EPrints Repositories
A repository for an international conference.
It records the papers and presentations of the main sessions and each workshop.

26. Example EPrints Repositories
A repository run by a funding council (NERC) in the UK.
It records the outputs of five research institutions and is being extended to handle the outputs of funded but independent researchers.

27. Example EPrints Repositories
A repository of ROV data, images and slides.
Scientific, not bibliographic, metadata.

28. Example EPrints Repositories
A repository of chemical data. Scientific, not bibliographic, metadata.
Run by the UK Crystallographic Service.

29. Example EPrints Repositories
A repository for an historic collection of digitised scientific artefacts.
Run for a society.

30. Example EPrints Repositories
A repository for an artistic artefacts and exhibitions. Not all research is scientific.
HINT: type “1-” in the quick search box for a good listing

31. Repository Challenges
Small science > big science
Data from Big Science iseasier to handle, understand andarchive. Small Science is horribly heterogeneous and far more vast.In time Small Science will generate 2-3 times more data than BigScience.
Lots of inexperienced users
Give individuals the tools to become responsible curators of their own intellectual output
Give institutions the tools to manage, assist and leverage
Give users the tools to access the global literature data - to use and reuse for many, many purposes in many, many contexts by many stakeholders

32. Fast Forward to Open Access
The Optimal and Inevitable for Researchers.
The entire full-text refereed corpus online
On every researcher’s desktop, everywhere
24 hours a day
All papers citation-interlinked
Fully searchable, navigable, retrievable
For free, for all, forever
Stevan Harnad, Les Carr OpCit International DLI Project Proposal (1999)

33. OR IS IT ???
ECS repository, 11,000 records, 4,000 full text, % open access to our research output.
Average repository, 300 items, 200 full text, negligible research output
Recent NIH request for OA achieved 4% compliance

34. Cliffhanger Back in the real world received wisdom is
Open Access is just too difficult
Repositories are too difficult
Only OA nutcases care
The only currently successful strategy is to impose mandates
What is the problem?

35. Do Researchers Use the Web?
30% of ECS academics don’t have working home page
Neither do 20% of MIT professors
Home pages are 3 years out of date
This needs proper investigation

36. How Accessible Is Researchers’ Work?
How does the outside world (external agents,journalists, industrialists, students, researchers) find out about us?
Search engines, high ranking, lots of links!
e.g. BBC story links to researcher’s home page which links to their research links to opportunities for MSc and Postgraduate study
Anecdotal evidence is that this doesn’t happen
See MIT or ECS press releases for counter-examples
This needs proper investigation

37. The Real Problem It’s not just OA Repositories that aren’t well used
Neither are home pages, or project pages
Researchers don’t make web dissemination a priority
In a world of ubiquitous web use, they start to disappear
Researchers don’t take responsibility for dissemination

38. Possible Culprit
1960s Robbins Report / expansion of higher education & expansion of science budget
After the war Robert Maxwell decided to publish scientific journals and set up Pergamon Press which was quickly and hugely profitable. (BBC News)
Up to this point, journal publishing was done by university presses and scholarly societies
The New Demand made for a very profitable system - with an increasing number of commercial publishers moving into STM.

39. Retaking Responsibility
Result is that universities further abdicated on their Wellsian responsibilities
Knowledge dissemination outsourced
Ownership of research materials given away
Scholarly communications now largely in the hands of commercial concerns
? Is this a bad thing?
What are the economic models for long-term management of knowledge?
Was Wells hopelessly utopian?
OA vs anti-capitalism?

40. Role of the Repository
Who takes responsibility for curating the knowledge of the world?
Back to OA & repositories - we do!
The Institutional repository is a place where the members of an institution can curate their intellectual outputs / knowledge capital
Share
Use
Reuse
The real Web revolution of ubiquitous knowledge will arrive.

41. Our Research (ECS)

42. Personal academic web pages
ad hoc and 2 years out of date
(on average!)

43. Portal pages: draw together all
official info from many databases

44. Semantic web portal pages: equivalent information
published as RDF. Policy establishes ontology,
individuals and persistent URIs.

45. Repository pages: metadata and data deposited
by user on a regular basis (backed by policy) for
Open Access.

46. Semantic repository pages: equivalent
information published as RDF.

47. Semantic repository pages: adhere to
discipline of referring to URIs established by external authorities, ie authors aren’t strings, they are individuals who can be tabulated.

48. The Semantic Institution
The Repository is a single player in an institution’s knowledge publishing activities
Artefacts
Agents
Activities
Different domains of authority over different kinds of information
Should be an integrated policy for information publishing
Who assigns ids to what?
Who makes statements about what?
Course
Management
Personnel
Repository
Project
Administration

49. The Semantic Nation Semantic Individuals
researchers who curate their own intellectual capital using repositories
combine to make Semantic Institutions
organisations that defines policies on naming, identification, information sharing and preservation
which co-operate to form a Semantic Nation
loose co-operation via SPARQL endpoints allow agents to query and combine all the information exported by every institution

50. A Misty Look into the Future
Ubiquitous knowledge
No need for ignorance
What are the implications for devices, services, us, education.
What would the world be like if we behaved as efficient knowledge disseminators?

51. Personal Experience
While talking on the phone (e.g. to a potential collaborator) I can appear not too uninformed if I use Google to look up all the projects and people that they mention.
I can make links between what I discover and what I know
I can do it fast enough to keep up with the conversation
BUT the keyboard clicks make it obvious to the other party

52. A Turing Test
Can you tell the difference between a real expert and someone faking it with Google?
or other more advanced knowledge tools
What are the limitations on chicanery?
How unintrusive can the technology be?
How should the queries be made?
How should the results be shown?
What sort of answers can be faked?
cfBloom Taxonomy of Educational Outcomes

53. Experimental Proposal
Who Wants to Cheat at Millionaire?
How well can you perform if one of your lifelines is 30-seconds on Google?
A minute, two minutes
All your lifelines are Google
Every answer can use Google
This is Bloom’s lowest layer - RECALL.

54. Experimental Proposal
Open Book Exams?
How well can you perform on “understanding” questions in a typical Part I undergraduate exam (with Google)?
How long do you need?
How much do you retain?
Work upwards through Bloom
comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation

55. Why is this Important
In a world with ubiquitous calculators, no-one needs to know how to use log tables or Napier.
In a world with ubiquitous knowledge sources immediately to hand, no-one needs to know ?anything?
What are the limits on knowledge support - what do people need to learn.
How can we be maximally efficient knowledge consumers?

56. What’s the Difference? Clever Chap + Learning = Expert
Idiot + Google = Expert?