Slides from WI, MN presentations

Posted on 24 April 2008
Filed under Open access, Personal
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I’ve uploaded the slides from my recent presentations in Wisconsin and Minnesota; they’re here.

CopyNight Orlando, April 22

Posted on 22 April 2008
Filed under Copyright, Florida, Orlando
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The February meeting of CopyNight Orlando will be Tuesday, April 22 (Earth Day!) at 7 pm at Stardust Video & Coffee (1842 E. Winter Park Rd., Orlando). This month is an open topic: whatever participants want to discuss. Learn more at copynight.org or my CopyNight page. Hope to see you there!

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Passenger rail for Florida

Posted on 21 April 2008
Filed under Conservation, Florida
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The United Rail Passenger Alliance recently posted an extensive and thought-provoking analysis and recommendations for regional passenger rail in Florida.

Florida is currently served by two long-distance Amtrak routes, with daily service in each direction: the Silver Meteor and the Silver Star. Both routes have New York City as their northernmost terminus, to Miami in the south. In Florida, the routes vary slightly: the Silver Meteor heads south from Orlando, while the Silver Star first goes through Tampa, then doubles back. (The Silver Star also calls at tiny Okeechobee Station, while the Meteor doesn’t.)

Although Florida’s largest cities are served by the Amtrak routes, one daily train in each direction makes the routes unsuitable for most travel within Florida. If, say, you’re trying to get from Orlando to Tampa for a 9:30 am meeting, Amtrak can’t help you.

In addition, Amtrak’s Auto Train runs from Sanford non-stop to Virginia, only for passengers transporting a vehicle. The Sunset Limited, which formerly ran from Orlando to Los Angeles, has only come as far east as New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf. And of course, Florida’s had a number of schemes for various transit systems which never reached fruition, the most prominent of which was the high-speed rail system voters approved in 2000 (then repealed in 2004).

On the other hand, there’s commuter rail: the Tri-Rail system in South Florida, and the Central Florida Commuter Rail system expected to begin operations in 2010. But commuter rail doesn’t connect metro areas, so it can’t help a family in St. Petersburg get to Grandma’s house in Ft. Lauderdale for Passover.

To fill the gap, enter regional passenger rail. Many states already contract with Amtrak to provide regional passenger rail; I recently took one such train from Flint, Mich. to Chicago. Florida isn’t yet one of them. But Amtrak was in town last month, trying to drum up support for an intrastate system in Florida.

So what’s the verdict? The United Rail Passenger Alliance’s analysis makes a strong case for regional passenger rail in Florida — and lays out how it can work.

Reading the post, a number of comments came to mind. I won’t summarize the URPA report (read it first) or point out where we agree (which we mostly do), but only where my opinion differs.

I do want to highlight, though, that it’s a really interesting report, and I hope a lot of people read it. As the report emphasizes, regional passenger rail makes a lot of sense for Florida. The tracks are there, many of the stations are there; we just need to run the trains. The coming Central Florida Commuter Rail system demonstrates that we can do it — that, when it really matters, we can get the state, federal, and local governments on the same page, as well as the railroads who own the tracks.

The first point where the report seriously raised my eyebrows is the discussion of with the railroads — without a critical word for the model established by the Central Florida Commuter Rail deal with CSX. The deal has been widely panned for limiting CSX’s liability only to accidents involving their own trains; if another train has an accident on the tracks CSX maintains and formerly owned, CSX can in no way be held liable. This strikes me as an unfortunate handout; for the most part, I expect courts to assign reasonable blame, and carving out an exception like this smells like corporate welfare. There have also been accusations that the deal was improperly negotiated and less than transparent. I’ve argued in the past that we shouldn’t let these issues hold up the long-overdue Central Florida Commuter Rail system — a message echoed by Florida PIRG’s Brad Ashwell — but that doesn’t mean we should take it as a model for the future, either. Given the prominence of the issue, it seems odd that the URPA report doesn’t even mention it.

The next eyebrow-raiser were the proposed routes:

There are 11 proposed routes, which seems like a large number to start with for a state without much established ridership.
Route Six, “Palmetto Extension,” simply adds a link to Jacksonville from Amtrak’s Palmetto route, which runs from Savannah, Ga. to New York City — in effect, duplicating service available from the Silver Meteor and the Silver Star. Why?
No routes stop in Gainesville, although two stop nearby in Waldo and Hawthorne. I suspect this is due to the layout of existing track, but it’d be worthwhile to make the investment necessary to route through Gainesville. Literally thousands of students travel to Gainesville from another Florida city at least twice a year: more than 80% of UF freshmen are Florida residents, and few are originally from Gainesville. At a minimum, that’s one trip to and from campus each semester. Add the trips home for holidays, weekends with family, etc. — plus the visits by Mom and Dad, friends from home, etc. — it quickly adds up. Then consider the tourists to Gainesville, gameday visitors, alumni visits for Homecoming… there’s plenty of reason to have a station in Gainesville. Certainly, some visitors would take the train to Waldo or Hawthorne and connect to a shuttle or taxi, but many wouldn’t.
Many stops at small stations. Although I agree that regional rail should stop more frequently than long-distance trains, I’d shave off at least a tenth, and maybe as many as a quarter, of the stations proposed by URPA. For instance, I’d replace the stations in Waldo and Hawthorne with one in Gainesville. Maintaining smaller stations costs more than expanding larger stations. More stops might add convenience getting on/off, but it also increases travel time for passengers. Particularly at the beginning, when ridership is low, operating less-used stations will be a cost center. As with the overall number of routes, I take a less ambitious view of the initial scope of the system; I certainly would take issue with delaying operations until all the proposed stations and routes were online. It makes much more sense to roll out the backbone of the system first, and expand service as demand build and necessity dictates. The main advantage I could see of starting with many small stations would be the potential to garner greater support from legislators representing those cities.
This is probably another case of the existing track working against us, but we need a more direct route from Central Florida and the Gulf Coast to Tallahassee and the Panhandle. Few students from Tampa or Orlando would take the train to Florida State if it went first to Jacksonville before connecting to Tallahassee. Driving would have a significant time advantage. Even travelers from South Florida might find it considerably to take the Turnpike north. I don’t want to focus too much on colleges, but Florida’s large universities represent the potential for tens of thousands of in-state trips each year. Yet both Gainesville and Tallahassee are under-served in the URPA proposal. Linking Gainesville to Lake City could cut 90 minutes from a Panhandle-bound trip. (For comparison, this was part of the vision plan for high speed rail.) I appreciate the difficulty in making this feasible, though, even aside from the issue of track: Would a regular route bypass Jacksonville? Would you run a special connection solely between Gainesville and Lake City? How would that work with the timing of the other trains? So this isn’t so much a criticism of the URPA proposal as a comment on one difficulty of regional passenger rail in Florida.
I guess this is another issue with the track, but: no route from Orlando to the beaches? Seems like this could be a real money-maker, from tourists as well as residents. As it stands now, someone traveling from Melbourne to Tampa would have to first connect through either Jacksonville or West Palm Beach — which means, in practice, that very few people would take the train. (For comparison, this was part of the vision plan for high speed rail.)
Similarly, the lack of a connection from Naples to South Florida means that someone traveling from Fort Myers to Miami would have to first connect through Lakeland. That’d take much longer than driving, and few people would do it. (For comparison, this was part of the vision plan for high speed rail.)

(On a related note: It’s a 6.5 hour drive from Orlando to Atlanta. On Amtrak, it’s 26.5 hours, not counting time between the two connections in North Carolina. What the hell?)

Adding new track lengths — from Ocala to Lake City through Gainesville, from Orlando to the beaches, and from Naples to South Florida — is certainly a long-term goal. But I’d consider serving the smaller stations proposed by URPA (many of which don’t exist and would have to be built) a similarly long-term goal. Serving the smaller stations is easier to do than building new track, but it’s also less important. It wouldn’t be feasible (or very smart) to build an entirely new rail infrastructure in Florida, since the existing passenger-grade track — with stations in many places — is already there; but we should leave the door open to building short lengths of new track, or upgrading existing track, where doing so would have a significant benefit in terms of ridership, travel time, and efficiency.

Despite my criticisms, URPA’s proposal seems to serve most of Florida’s population remarkably well (and even better with my suggestions). A few places of significance — such as St. Augustine, Panama City, and Key West — are still more than 30 minutes away from a train station, but these could be served reasonably well by bus service (particularly buses coordinated with the train schedule, as with Amtrak’s Thruway service). Notably, these areas tend to be more significant as tourist destinations than for their resident population, so the lower fixed cost of buses can exploit the need to adjust schedules seasonally (more so than for other parts of the state). With that said, I look forward to the day when schoolchildren take trains to their field trips in St. Augustine (or at least most of the way, connecting to a bus or shuttle).

Which brings me to my next comment on the report. Amidst all the discussion of what the system should/shouldn’t do, there’s nothing about being intermodal. Intermodality is crucial for transit systems. Unless one form of transit runs to your house, your job, and everywhere you ever want to go, the system has to be intermodal. Currently, roads are the most intermodal transit infrastructure: they connect to other roads, to bus stations, train stations, airports, pedestrian infrastructure, and on and on. The more intermodal that passenger rail is, the more successful it will be — in a strictly business sense, nevermind the benefits for the environment and urban design. One good thing about the URPA proposal is it already interconnects with existing Amtrak stations, as well as Tri-Rail and Central Florida Commuter Rail. It also talks about having ample and safe parking. But there should be more emphasis on interconnecting with local and long-distance buses, airports and seaports (e.g. for cruise ships). I was saddened when I saw Ocala’s intermodal bus/train station, which is no longer actually served by trains; we need to bring that back.

In addition to ample and safe parking for cars and motorcycles, there should be ample and safe parking for bikes. Passengers should be able to bring their bike with them while traveling. Secure and clean lockers should be available in stations. Nearby sidewalks and crosswalks should be designed to handle increased foot traffic and ensure pedestrian safety (with appropriate signage or calming for motorists). Trail planners should be encouraged to consider ways to interconnect with train stations. (Many of Florida’s paved “recreational” trails were formerly railroad lines — you may think of them as a place to jog or rollerblade, but they may also be useful for pedestrians connecting to transit.)

The URPA proposal discusses amenities on board. I think they may overestimate the number of passengers interested in “premium” accommodations, but they are right to look at amenities and upgraded services as potential revenue centers. But the same approach should be taken with transit facilities. In addition to lockers and bike racks/lockers, there should be a cafe on-site or in the immediate vicinity. Clean, attractive facilities are important for building a positive image with passengers. Advertising is acceptable and can help generate revenue, but there should also be space for educational displays with information about the local heritage, culture, and environment. This helps build the sense that transit stations are “common spaces,” a feeling that will be helpful to help build Florida into a state more welcoming of transit.

Finally, I want to emphasize the part of the URPA report which states marketing will be essential. It will be. This cannot be overstated. Floridians are not used to this; it will take a lot to make us aware of the option, and to convince the skeptics. But consider how much we spend advertising the lottery, a frivolous service. We will need to take that kind of approach to publicize regional passenger rail (although the politics of creating the system, and the construction/renovation, will get a lot of attention for free). But if we build it — and if we tell people about it — they will come.

See also the National Association of Railroad Passengers’ vision for passenger rail in the Southeast. It incorporates one of my suggestions: connecting Atlanta to Lake City, as well as to Savannah, which would make it practical to take a train to Atlanta.

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The brilliance of Flickr Commons and the public domain

Posted on 10 April 2008
Filed under Copyright, Libraries, Open content, Public domain
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Flickr’s The Commons is a really clever initiative.

Flickr gets high-value historical content (the kind of stuff that drives the long tail) and some nice publicity. The collections get to bring their content to many new users in a new way. Beyond access, the collections can also accrue tags, comments, and geo-tags, potentially adding a layer of valuable data. Since the photos are in the public domain (and marked as such), everyone has full re-use rights; there’s no threat of Flickr holding the collections hostage. (I don’t know whether the collections can mass-export all the associated data in a useful format, though. If not, The Commons is basically just a neat toy and not of archival value.) All around, it’s a great collaboration between for-profit and non-profit entities, where everybody wins, including the public.

The confluence of all this is maybe best demonstrated in this blog post by Australia’s Powerhouse Museum, the latest to join The Commons:

What Flickr offers the Powerhouse is an immediate large and broader audience for this content. And with this exposure we hope that we will have a strong driver to increase the cataloguing and digitisation of the remaining Tyrrell glass plate negatives as well as many more the previously hidden photographic collections of the Powerhouse.

In other words, projects like this create demand for more digitization of open content. Now that’s a comedy of the commons.

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Upcoming presentations in WI, MN

Posted on 9 April 2008
Filed under Open access, Personal
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I’m presenting on open access for students at these upcoming events:

Saturday, April 12, 2008
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, Wisc.
3 - 6 pm
Memorial Union (TITU)
Announcement
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Macalester College
St. Paul, Minn.
noon - 1 pm
Harmon Room, Library
RSVP requested: Terri Fishel, x6343 or fishel@macalester.edu
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Carleton College
Northfield, Minn.
5 to 6:30 pm
Sayles-Hill 251
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
St. Olaf College
Northfield, Minn.
7 to 8 pm
Buntrock 144

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World Health Day + NIH Implementation Day

Posted on 7 April 2008
Filed under Open access
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Coincidence?

NIH Implementation Day: April 7

World Health Day: April 7

To health!

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Aborting OA: government interference in science

Posted on 4 April 2008
Filed under Free speech, Open access
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Sarah Lai Stirland reports on Wired’s Threat Level blog that a bibliographic database run by Johns Hopkins University has blocked all searches related to abortion — because the project receives funding from a U.S. federal agency which prohibits grantees from promoting the practice.

In a sense, this tension between scientific independence and state power (especially the power of the purse) is nothing new, as any schoolchild familiar with the trial of Galileo knows. But the timing of this story — just a few days before the new NIH public access policy takes effect, requiring funded researchers to deposit their manuscripts in a central database — begs comparison.

(First, though, it’s worth nothing the biggest difference: the funder in this case is USAID, which primarily funds development programs, unlike the NIH or similar agencies which primarily fund academic research. The latter, unlike the former, can be expected to have a culture of healthy respect for academic freedom. The former’s policy of censorship has a decades-old history and, while protested by reproductive rights activists, could be expected to draw little attention from the research community. By contrast, a new policy of censorship by an agency like the NIH could be expected to spark outrage by researchers.)

No doubt some skeptics of open access will take the opportunity to again insinuate that OA equals government censorship, as the American Association of Publishers’ consultant so famously suggested. Others, who prefer institutional repositories to those organized by funders or discipline, may add the supposed threat to academic freedom to their litany of arguments in favor of IRs (though others, in conversation, have suggested the same logic applies against IRs, by increasing the influence of the university relative to the faculty member in the dissemination of research).

In reality, funder repositories are no greater interference in the conduct of science than the funding itself (likewise with institutional repositories). Nevertheless, I’ll suggest three strategies to minimize the risk:

Recognize the importance of Peter Suber’s second principle for university open access policies. The principle, as developed by Suber in the April 2008 issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, is: Universities should not limit the freedom of faculty to submit their work to the journals of their choice.

Situations like that of the JHU database call into question Peter’s assertion that “[funders] have an interest in making that research as useful and widely available as possible, and virtually no competing interests.” (See also point 2, below.)

We must remember that the imperative is OA, not OA through a particular venue. Preserving the author’s right to publish where she wishes, and to self-archive where she wishes (non-exclusive), doesn’t prevent undue interference with academic freedom, but it leaves other options open and mitigates the damage (see also point 3, below).
Erect firewalls for academic freedom when institutions and public agencies take new roles in disseminating research. (Really, this applies to any new entrant in the field of disseminating information, but state actors and institutions which employ faculty have the most concentrated capacity for influence.)

For the avoidance of doubt, concern for academic freedom is not an argument against OA, or an argument for universities or research funders not to act in support of OA. But we should be conscious to erect basic bulwarks against the erosion of that freedom.

In the case of NIH’s PubMedCentral, a simple policy to the effect that “All NIH-funded research accepted for publication in a scientific journal shall be included in PubMedCentral without prejudice to the topic or conclusions” would establish a formal rule against situations like the Hopkins database finds itself in.

Another basic firewall should be expectation that, where information is removed or edited for any reason, that change should be transparent to the reader. (In this case, the Hopkins database contained no notification of the change.) Even in Google in China tells users that their search results are being censored.
Use copy-permissive licenses on research publications to ensure maximum dissemination.

Imagine a similar situation in which a database’s search results are censored. A mirror site could easily copy the database’s content and provide an unfiltered search interface. To be fair, an external search engine like Google could do so, too; but while that might solve this problem, imagine instead that the database is deleting publications altogether, and that (for whatever reason) the database contains the only copy of the article on the Web.

Giving permission to copy makes censorship less effective: as the saying goes, lots of copies keeps stuff safe.
- Aside: Some people have little regard for eliminating permission barriers as a goal of OA. They aren’t sure precisely why someone else should be able to copy, translate, format-shift, or mashup their research. But that’s exactly the point of eliminating permission barriers: it enables uses we can’t even imagine (in addition to the ones we can, which are important and valuable in their own right).
  
  I see it as the corollary to seemingly “harmless failures” in security systems: eliminating permission barriers to research publications may be a seemingly benefit-less success. With apologies to Ed Felten, having identified a benefitless success, there are two ways to proceed. The first way is to think carefully about the possible benefits, and realize that some of it is actually useful. The second way is to think, “This looks like a benefitless success, but we should do it anyway. Maybe good can come of this.” The first way protects you if you’re clever; the second way always protects you.

Update: Hopkins has reversed its decision. The sponsoring school’s dean released a statement, saying in part,

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.

That is precisely the right response. It’s a dedication I wish academics would live up to more often (see: progress on open access to research, open courseware, adoption of FOSS in higher ed, etc.)

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Freelancers Union membership drive

Posted on 2 April 2008
Filed under Personal
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Freelancers Union (of which I am a member) is launching a membership drive.

Freelancers Union is, as you might expect, a different sort of union: for starters, it’s a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, rather than the 501(c)(5) status typically used by labor unions. Because it’s a union for independent workers (consultants, freelancers, contractors, temps, etc.), it doesn’t do collective bargaining with employers. And it’s free to members; there are no union dues.

What Freelancers Union does, instead, is provide group plans for health care and other insurance; educational programs and resources; advocacy on behalf of independent workers; plus discounts on services and products, and networking opportunities with other independent workers.

Like I said, it’s free to join, so if you’re an independent worker, go here to check it out.

Here’s one of the ads they’re running in the New York subway: