Wanted: standardized behavior for email list unsubscribe

Posted on 31 December 2008
Filed under Internet
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I subscribe to a lot of email lists. I mean, a lot. In addition to the lists I’ve opted in to, there’s the grey area of lists I “joined” (or was added to) without much conscious effort on my part, e.g. because I filled out a petition, went to a conference, or bought something.

Email is my life, so I have to keep my inbox organized. That means a lot of filters and folders, tagging, and flagging as read/unread. I also use plus-addressing, which sometimes (when people share my address) means stuff ends up in funny places.

Bottom line: I do a lot of subscription management (subscribing, unsubscribing, changing my address, changing subscription options, etc.). And I’ve noticed that methods for subscription management are quite varied.

Sometimes there’s a link, sometimes there’s a reply-to address, sometimes there’s both, and sometimes there’s neither.
When there’s a link, sometimes it requires logging in (usually with a password I don’t remember), and sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes there’s a confirmation email, and sometimes there’s not; sometimes I have to reply to confirm, and sometimes I don’t.
Sometimes it simply says “click here to unsubscribe”, sometimes it says “click here to manage your subscription preferences”, and sometimes it says some other variation.

All in all, it’s not very standardized. (In fact, about the only thing that is standardized is that, when there’s information on how to unsubscribe, it’s usually at the bottom of an email.) That means more time figuring out how to make it do what you want.

There are actually some standards here. CAN-SPAM sets some requirements (although U.S. law only applies in the U.S., and there are questions about enforcement, to say the least). I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s also some RFC or other standard that exists — but if there is, it doesn’t seem to be followed significantly.

This shouldn’t be that hard. It’d save consumers a lot of grief (and, thus, senders — how many times have you seen a message posted to a public list, “Please remove me”?). Another motivation for senders to develop and apply the standard: they could use it as evidence that they’re “doing something” about spam (e.g. for PR purposes and to ward off further regulation). So can we get some of the major players in list software/e-mail marketing (e.g. Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, Mailman, L-Soft, Wired for Change, Lyris, Constant Contact, etc.) to sit down, maybe along with public interest groups like CAUCE or CIPPIC, and develop some standards? Then we can go about getting marketers to agree to use the standard — maybe something along the lines of the TRUSTe seal.

I’m not saying there should be only one way to do this. But if we can standardize the look and function, it’ll make things easier. Hopefully, we can also root out some of the more annoying practices (e.g. requiring login to unsubscribe).

Finally, maybe it could even use email headers, or something more than just text. Then we start moving toward semantic email, with the possibility for embedding functionality in client software.

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How to improve OJS: a reader’s perspective

Posted on 31 December 2008
Filed under FOSS, Open access
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Open Journal Systems is a free and open source software package for journal publishing. It’s probably the most widely-deployed platform for publishing open access journals; at least 2,000 journals use OJS. As such, it’s critical infrastructure for the OA movement: authors’, editors’, referees’, publishers’, and readers’ impression of OJS has a big impact on their impression of OA.

I haven’t used OJS as an author, editor, referee, publisher, nor as a sysadmin, but I have used it as a reader. It’s generally very usable, although there are a few areas, mostly related to current awareness, where some simple tweaks to the defaults would make things easier.

Make subscribing easier and more obvious. When you visit an OJS using a standard theme, there’s no big button that says “subscribe” or a similar term. Instead, there are two options that lead down that path: “Register” and “For Readers”.
The “For Readers” page, by default, directs readers to register to receive the table of contents of new issues via email. The “Register” page, by default, requires you to create a username and password, fill out a captcha, and give your full name in addition to your email address. It also asks, optionally, for your gender, mailing address, and other information. That’s a lot of effort just to get an email when new issues are released.

There’s a reason: OJS uses the same page to register authors and reviewers — situations where more information than just an email address is required. There may be a bit of wishful thinking here, too: the hope of converting readers into authors and reviewers. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, let’s just get people on the mailing list. This is a tenant of Web design (and publicity generally): convert one visit into future contacts. That’s why barackobama.com started with a splash page which asked for one thing: your email address.

A journal should make a prominent pitch for visitors to subscribe before they navigate away from the page and forget about the journal. More subscribers leads to more readers, which leads to more authors and referees and commentary.

The OJS default themes should include a sidebar section that says “Enter your email to receive free announcements when a new issue is released”. It should ask for only an email address. (The confirmation email can ask subscribers to register a username, if desired.)
RSS feeds by default. OJS includes a plugin to produce RSS feeds, but it doesn’t appear to be on by default; many OJS journals don’t offer RSS feeds. See above comments about the importance of turning visitors into subscribers.
OpenID support. With 2,000 OJS journals floating around, it seems a bit silly to have to create an account at each one, doesn’t it? OpenID would give users a single login not only across other OJS journals, but any site supporting OpenID. Good news, though: OpenID support is in the OJS roadmap.

As a closing comment, I’ll point out that OJS is under active development and progressing quickly. I was going to make a comment on how feed display is ugly, based on Open Medicine as an example, but I thought I ought to check the versions first, to make sure the problem hadn’t been resolved. Sure enough, Open Medicine is using OJS 2.1.1; the release notes of more recent versions mention improvements to feed handling, so this may have been fixed already.

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Opening research proposals; thoughts on virtual collaboration

Posted on 23 December 2008
Filed under Academia, Open access, Science
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I recently had my first experience with the research proposal process, or something similar. It was an interesting experience, and it suggests some important implications.

The proposal was in response to a call issued by the UK Research Information Network. I’ll start by noting that it wasn’t a traditional research proposal, but rather a tender (or as we’d call it in the States, a bid) to act as contractor to RIN (in this case, to conduct research on the topic of its choosing and write up the results in its name). Unlike a traditional research proposal, we didn’t have to convince the reviewers of the value of the research or the need for research on this topic; rather, we had to describe our plan for conducting the research and disseminating what we learned, then convince the reviewers that we were the best team to give their money to. Nevertheless, much of what I’m about to describe applies equally to more traditional research proposals, as well.

The process went like this:

RIN posted a call for expressions of interest: a short blurb on what RIN was looking to fund, with a request that interested researchers email RIN to receive more details.
Folks forwarded the call around to those who might be interested. For example, Cameron Neylon posted it on his blog, ending with the question:

So my question is: Are people interested in pursuing this? And if so, what do you think your hourly rate is?
I emailed Dr. Neylon to let him know I’d be interested in the project. He, in turn, emailed RIN.
After the deadline for expressions of interest, RIN emailed everyone who had responded to the call. Attached were the call for tenders (with the full details of what to submit) and a list of everyone who had expressed interest.
Some researchers on the list contacted each other and formed larger groups. Others dropped out. Our final team consisted of 6 people in 3 countries, from the non-profit, for-profit, and academic sectors. I don’t think I had corresponded directly with any of them before the project (although I was aware of some of them). I probably couldn’t recognize a photo of any of them.
We collaborated via email, wiki, VoIP, and chat, brainstorming a plan and then writing it up.
We submitted the tender, then waited for a response. Eventually, we got an invitation to interview. We found a time when one of our team members could go, discussed how to prepare for the interview, and held our breath. Not long after the interview, we were informed that another team had been selected.

Obviously, I was disappointed that our team wasn’t chosen to do the work. (Best wishes to the team that was.) But the experience, as well as the reviewers’ feedback, was very informative.

It was exciting to cobble together our virtual research group — in different time zones, from different backgrounds — with few, if any, of us who had ever worked together before.
It was interesting but challenging for the group to collaborate: for all the project management software and virtual research environments, we stuck to a hodgepodge of familiar tools.
It was fun to think through the issues involved, individually as well as collectively, and try to identify the questions we wanted answered — and then figure out how to answer them.
Finally, it was an interesting example of cooperation vs. competition: we knew that other teams were preparing their own tenders. They might have ideas that would make our proposal stronger, and vice versa. But if we shared ideas, we’d lose some of our advantage relative to the other team. (In the extreme example, the teams could join together, likely resulting in a stronger proposal but also in a smaller share of the grant for each participant.)

I want to highlight three implications:

Joining a team: This was an extraordinarily open project in terms of getting involved. That’s something other researchers should aim to emulate. More broadly, I know there are plenty of people like me who aren’t affiliated with a university but would like to participate in research. They may be, like me, preparing to go back to school and looking to burnish their research credentials. They may be citizen scientists interested in a particular topic, or just volunteers looking for a fun project. We need a better way of connecting these people with projects they can work on. Is there a job board for research assistants and volunteers — a Craigslist for science? Getting more people involved in the conduct of research, whether physically or virtually, could not only benefit the projects involved, but also improve public engagement with — and understanding of — science.
Groupware/VREs: The fact that we, a team steeped in Web 2.0 in our own practice (and proposing to conduct a study on researchers’ use of Web 2.0 tools), chose the staid media of email and wiki to communicate ought to say something about the state of project management software and virtual research environments. We didn’t want to take the time to learn a new tool in order to collaborate; we just wanted to collaborate. These tools need to become more ubiquitous and easier to use so that researchers are using them from the earliest stages of a project. Good tools will not only help researchers do their work better: it’ll also make it easier to preserve and share the artifacts of their research, for the benefit of other researchers.
Opening research proposals: This seems to be an aspect of research which is relatively secretive. Few funding bodies seem to post the proposals for projects they fund, let alone proposals they rejected. But wouldn’t researchers (and students) benefit from seeing the methods proposed by other researchers? Wouldn’t the full details of a project, not just a summary, improve current awareness and reduce unnecessary duplication? Wouldn’t better access to proposals increase the transparency both of funders (so anyone can see the details of what was funded as well as what was turned down) and of researchers (so anyone can compare the methodology of the published results to the methodology proposed earlier)? There may be some cases where researchers want to keep their methodology secret until they’re done working on it, but those should be the exception rather than the rule. We can start working on the low-hanging fruit now, while thinking about how to deal with the cases where researchers don’t want disclosure: there’s no reason in principle that we shouldn’t campaign for open access to research proposals alongside research data and published results. It can even be an opportunity: imagine a footnote that begins, “Using the methodology proposed by Baker et al., …”.

In the spirit of the latter, our team with Neylon et al. decided to share the tender we submitted. (An email to the project coordinator at RIN confirmed that RIN wasn’t going to post the submitted tenders, but didn’t mind if the bidders did so themselves.) So we’ve posted it at Scribd, for reading online or for download. You can find it here: Tender: Use and relevance of web 2.0 resources for researchers. Maybe someone will find it useful.

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Top U.S. health official calls for “interoperability”, decries “proprietary systems”

Posted on 22 December 2008
Filed under Open formats
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Reading the Washington Post today, I was shocked at one of the op-eds. Mike Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services — i.e., the highest-ranking health official in the United States and a member of President Bush’s cabinet — had this to say about health IT:

Congress is considering adding money for health information technology to January’s stimulus package. Doing so could spur a critical mass of the nation’s doctors to finally enter the information age, but unless the funds are tied to standards for the interoperability of health IT systems, the expenditure could do more harm than good. …

If stimulus money supports a proliferation of systems that can’t exchange information, … [c]ritical information will remain trapped in proprietary systems, unable to get to where it’s needed.

Health IT systems produce value when they are interoperable. …

We’ve also established an independent, voluntary, private-sector certifying body, the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT). This body provides “gold standard” certification that electronic health records meet existing interoperability standards. Any stimulus money for electronic health records should go only to those with CCHIT certification. …

It is important that standards be vendor-neutral. Government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. …

I can’t comment on the merit of the specific standards in question: I’m not familiar with them. But it’s fantastic to see a top-ranking government official espousing the value of interoperability in such a high-profile way. This is the kind of thinking that should drive our public sector — and our society — toward open standards, open formats, and open protocols.

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Announcing Free Culture DC, a new blog and calendar for the DC area

Posted on 16 December 2008
Filed under DC, Personal
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I moved (back) to the Washington, DC area in October. I wanted to have a space for the free culture community in DC, so I decided to start Free Culture DC, a blog and event calendar. At the time, I wasn’t sure how long I would be staying, and I wasn’t sure if I’d take a job that would require me to be careful about what I say in public, so I didn’t announce it or put my name on it. Well, it now looks like I’ll be here for a while, and that I won’t be moving into sensitive work, so I’m coming out.

There’s not much at Free Culture DC yet. I’ve been adding links and calendar entries for a while; that’s about all. There’s a lot of links and events (mostly past, now), but it’s a bit haphazard and not very well-organized. The calendar is using the Event Calendar plugin for WordPress, which is basic but functional.

Here’s my vision for Free Culture DC. I want it to be an essential resource for people in the DC area who are interested in free culture. I want to collect relevant local news and commentary, along with lectures, conferences, screenings, performances, parties, protests, etc. in the calendar. As to what “relevant” means, topics could include (but are not necessarily limited to):

free and open source software
open access to research / open science
open educational resources
Creative Commons
copyright, patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property rights
telecom, the digital divide, Net neutrality, spectrum policy, broadband access, etc.
open access to public sector information (government data, government publications, etc.)
open government (online transparency applications, etc.)
human rights and civil liberties in digital environments (free speech online, etc.)

I hope it’ll contribute to building a flourishing free culture scene in the DC area.

So head over to Free Culture DC and check it out. Grab the RSS feed for the blog, or the RSS or iCal for the calendar. If you’d like to get involved, drop me an email. And spread the word!

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