FOSS and socially responsible investing

Posted on 30 June 2008
Filed under FOSS
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Check out the post at the SFLC blog. I’ve said for some time that free culture is a matter of social responsibility — I think it’s a good frame for the issue, and helps people understand why it matters.

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Hire me

Posted on 26 June 2008
Filed under Personal
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I’m looking to get out of consulting and into a full time office environment. (It gets lonely at home.) I’m interested in opportunities in organizing, outreach, advocacy, or public education on issues in information policy, tech policy, or access to knowledge. I’m willing to relocate. If you know of such an opportunity, please contact me. Thanks.

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Scientometrics and OA

Posted on 21 June 2008
Filed under Academia, Open access, Publishing, Science
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Three mathematics societies have issued a report on scientometrics, cautioning against overreliance on the impact factor.

Scientometrics is a very relevant topic to open access: the potential impacts on tenure, funding, and the like seem never to be far from an author’s mind when considering publishing activities. As long as these factors are perceived to be in favor of traditional, closed journals and against OA, we’re at a disadvantage. I won’t go so far as to say that more accurate and reliable criteria would always benefit OA, but it would certainly help make the issues clearer in researchers’ minds (and, based on experience, there is a great deal of misinformation and confusion about these issues — not helped by the perceived opacity of review processes and the high stakes involved; this confusion tends to make authors less, not more, receptive to OA).

In particular, the decoupling of journal from author/article rankings should benefit OA, both gold and green:

Because most gold journals are young, and therefore have less-established reputations and impact factors, a groundbreaking paper published in a young OA journal may expect to be significantly more influential than the journal as a whole (whereas a groundbreaking paper published in an established, high-impact journal is unlikely to be significantly more influential than the journal as a whole, which has routinely published groundbreaking papers for decades). This characteristic is not unique to OA journals — the weakness of the impact factor as an average is highlighted in the report — but it is exacerbated by their relative youth, and assuaged by their relative accessibility.
Because green self-archiving may provide an additional boost of readers/citations beyond that attributable to the distribution of the journal, a self-archived paper published in a closed journal may also expect to be more influential than similar papers published in the same journal but not self-archived, although the same impact factor will be imputed to both. (In fact, self-archiving would help boost the journal’s impact factor, with a non-excludable benefit even to authors who don’t self-archive — although the higher the rate of self-archiving by a journal’s authors, relative to other journals in the same field, the greater the overall benefit to the journal.)

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Obama on public financing: a “broken system”

Posted on 19 June 2008
Filed under Politics
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See the video where he explains why the campaign is opting out of public financing.

With this kind rhetoric, Obama might be setting up to move on campaign finance reform early in his administration…

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My column on NIH policy reprinted — in print

Posted on 13 June 2008
Filed under Open access, Personal
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My column on the NIH public access policy, which was published on Science Progress‘ Web site in January, has been reprinted for its Spring-Summer 2008 Print Edition. Grab the beautiful PDF here.

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OA at ALA: How do the chapters fare?

Posted on 12 June 2008
Filed under Florida, Libraries, Open access
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A recent post on Open Access News highlighted the fact that while the American Library Association supports OA as a matter of policy, several of its journals are not themselves OA.

I remembered having been shocked that the Florida Library Association, a state ALA chapter, didn’t provide OA to its journal. So I decided to investigate a little and see how the other state and regional chapters fare.

I went through the states, starting with A and stopping at Louisiana (after which I lost interest). I also checked the regional chapters, as well as the chapters in D.C., Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The verdict:

Of the 18 state chapters reviewed, 7 appear to provide OA to the journal they publish. (That number increases to 8 out of 19 if you include D.C., which ALA counts as a state chapter.) Methodology: I browsed the chapter’s Web site and searched Google for the journal named on ALA’s chapter list. (In a few cases, I couldn’t find the chapter’s “journal” but did find the chapter’s “newsletter” — e.g. Kentucky, Colorado, Alabama.) Louisiana is borderline, since the most recent issue online is from 2000: I’m not sure whether that’s the most recent issue published, or whether more recent issues haven’t made it online yet; I counted Louisiana as OA in my count. So that’s 42% of this (non-random) sample, or 58% if you include the newsletter-but-not-journal states.
I couldn’t find a Web site for either Guam or the Virgin Islands — neither the association nor its journal, if it publishes one. (ALA counts these as regional chapters, so I didn’t include these in the previous count.)
All four regional chapters representing the states provide OA to their journal.

It would be nice for ALA to exercise more leadership here, and lean on their chapters to provide OA to their journals (and adopt a broad commitment to OA to all their publications). (Similarly, the forward-thinking already currently providing OA could goad their hesitant peers into doing likewise.)

I’m sure it would help if ALA would provide tech support for the chapters’ publications, e.g. allow chapters to use ALA’s publishing platform, or facilitate the chapters in pooling resources to fund a system they can all use. (In almost every case for the states I reviewed, providing OA meant simply posting a PDF of the journal issue, with no HTML or Web-formatted version. This suggests the technical/administrative burden of providing OA may be an important factor, beyond any fear of lost revenue — or at least that there’s a learning curve to be overcome.)

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Why the Democrats should pass campaign finance reform in ‘09

Posted on 9 June 2008
Filed under Politics
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My friend Nelson Pavlosky and I were watching Larry Lessig’s speech at the National Conference for Media Reform — a barn-burner refrain of his recent talks on corruption. Nelson mentioned that Lessig has been affiliated with the Obama campaign, and wondered whether this suggested campaign finance reform (such as public financing) would be an early priority of an Obama administration — especially given that the campaign is opting out of public funding and is basically raising money hand over fist.

My gut reaction was: probably not. Obama will use his honeymoon and early political capital on popular priorities like the Iraq war and health care, I figured. But as I thought about it more, I realized there’s a major political argument for backing a process reform like campaign finance in the first two years of an Obama administration.

First, campaign finance reform may not be as popular as ending the war, but it reinforces his image and echoes the message of his campaign (”change”).

Second, process reforms put Obama’s stamp on the party and Congress. We know this is important to Obama — see his recent move to ban the DNC from accepting lobbyist and PAC money. Plus, process reforms are a harder sell with party insiders and elected officials than with the general public, so acting early will let Obama capitalize on the early indebtedness of Members who rode his coattails to election or re-election. And we’ve seen that the leadership of both houses has at least some stomach for process reforms: ethics reform was one of the six planks of the Democrats’ “New Direction for America” platform in 2006.

Most importantly, the first two years of an Obama administration may be the only chance for Democrats to move campaign finance reform — especially if they don’t. Here’s why.

Midterm elections are historically bad for the President’s party, when the same party controls both branches. I’ll make the case that 2002 was an outlier for the post-9/11 Republicans, but Clinton hemorrhaged seats in 1994 (the Republican revolution), Bush lost a few in 1990, Reagan lost a bunch in 1982, Carter lost some in 1978, etc. I think 2010 could be a big loss for Democrats, since so much of the progress they’ll make in 2008 (and we could also include the gains of 2006 here) is a reaction against Bush. In 2010, Republicans will have had two years to distance themselves from Bush and bury his memory, and will almost certainly try to re-frame themselves as a party. On the other hand, everything bad that happens after 2008 will be blamed solely on the Democrats, since they’re the only ones in charge.

As a result, the excitement advantage of Democratic voters vs. Republicans will almost certainly shrink from 2008: Obama won’t be on the ticket to drive up turnout, and Republicans will whip up their voters by demonizing two years of Democratic policies. This decline in advantage will apply to fundraising, as well.

But the Democrats can blunt this advantage by passing campaign finance reform before 2010. In fact, the Democrats could build themselves a long-term advantage, depending on the type of reform they pass: for instance, the Democrats could leverage their advantage raising money from small donors by basing public funding on demonstrated support from a large number of small donors, and/or by lowering the maximum donation limit for each individual.

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Gratifying positive review of Right to Research campaign

Posted on 4 June 2008
Filed under Open access, Personal
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Char Booth, an instruction librarian at Ohio University, has posted a gratifying positive review of SPARC’s Right to Research campaign (which I developed). Thanks for the kind words, Char! And thanks to Peter Suber for bringing it to my attention.

If you haven’t seen the campaign, now’s a great time to check it out!

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