The Guardian, on April 19, published two articles (links below) dealing with access to scientific information and knowledge. They mention the emerging open access / open science movement, which aims to make more scientific work available to more people. Especially for developing countries subscription costs for scientific journals are prohibitive and while the publishing industry argues that theirs is the only sustainable business model, fencing in information in this way — especially if it was created through publicly funded research — comes at a significant cost to society.

The first article mentions the results of a recent report to the European Commission and the second article speculates on the implications for the large publishing houses that dominate the market for scientific journals. See snippets below:

Brussels delivers blow to Reed Elsevier

Richard Wray
Wednesday April 19, 2006
The Guardian

Scientific research funded by the European taxpayer should be freely available to everyone over the internet, according to a European commission report – a blow to the lucrative scientific publishing operations of media groups such as Reed Elsevier and Germany’s Springer.

The report, produced by economists from Toulouse University and the Free University of Brussels for the EC, shows that in the 20 years to 1995 the price of scientific journals rose 300% more than the rate of inflation over the period. In the 10 years since then, price increases slowed but still significantly outpaced inflation.

…

Publishers watch in fear as a new world comes into view

Dan Milmo, media business editor
Wednesday April 19, 2006
The Guardian

The move by the European commission to free up access to scientific research is the latest challenge posed by the internet to the way Reed Elsevier does business. The Anglo-Dutch publisher of the Lancet and Variety magazine is one of the most internet-savvy media groups, but while it has harnessed the web to reduce its costs, it is also threatening the group’s lucrative core business.

…

Technorati Tags: access2knowledge, developingcountries, IPR

As a bit of a mix-up of Philipp’s post on educational e-resources and the Nature/Brittanica dispute, I would like to draw attention to an article in a Dutch daily (Algemeen Dagblad, Tuesday 18 April).

The article cites a research report by consultancy firm Motivaction which states that 82% of young students (12-17 year olds) in the Netherlands do not double-check any of the information they find on the net and use in their school assignments. 87% of the students interviewed uses the internet when searching for information. Only, a shocking (for me in any case) 4% uses library materials and only 5% of the internet users double-checks the information they found for accuracy.

More and more information is coming onto the net, and so it should, free to use for everyone. However two main issues still need to be tackled: the right to use and the value of the information provided. It seems that nothing but radical change to the way we view and value information will achieve this universal access to quality information.

Hal Varian in his short article in the Communications of the ACM (Oct. 2005, vol. 48, No. 10) comments on the right to universal access and the change needed to achieve this.
As for quality the same goes for the internet as it has for libraries in the past (and present). Without user input and vocal user criticism the internet will remain a largely low quality resource. Google Book Search, Wikipedia and the like are at the moment just a drop in the ocean.

Technorati tags: access2knowledge, education, quality of information, internet

For a number of reasons, I decided to post a short note on open education resources: I have been following the discussions at UNESCO’s open education resources forum with much interest. A participant at the recent UNU-MERIT symposium on open standards and open source asked a very simple (and very difficult to address) question why educational resources should not be available “freely”. Finally, I read this post on David Weinberger’s blog (Disclaimers seem to be the latest rage on blogs, so in lack of other things, I will disclose that I am a big fan of his blog).

Back to the topic of OERs. UNESCO has been hosting an active and inspiring email discussion on open educational resources. The group was initially invitation only (a bit ironic), but is now open for anyone to participate. I would recommend reading the reports from the initial phase — as many good points were raised during these weeks. Currently, the group is trying to define a research agenda for OERs, which is proving (maybe surprisingly) hard. I think that two reasons are that participants come from vastly different backgrounds and that the field is moving so quickly – it almost seems difficult to stop for research. Should you have thoughts on economics related research on open educational resources, please do comment here or write an email to a2k@merit.unu.edu.

I am always flabbergasted how and why publicly funded organisations are able to not make the educational materials they develop freely available. It just shows that there are significant institutional and motivational challenges that still need to be overcome. David Weinberger mentions his colleague’s work that explains another barrier to making educational resources available. Bill McGeveran, who is David’s fellow fellow at the Berkman Center found that there are four general categories of problems in how IPR restricts open educational resources:

1. The law is unclear. 2. DRM. 3. It’s hard and expensive to clear rights. 4. The gatekeepers — e.g., school systems — are very cautious about digital rights, primarily because of the first three problems.

We have reported on some of the issues with IPR before, but DRM adds a scary aspect in that it allows rights holders protect their works around and beyond existing law. Needless to say that the processes in which these limitations are created are not democratic. However, it is also important to mention that no consumer wants more limitations on how she can use her rightfully owned works of art — and DRM does exactly that.

Technorati Tags: access2knowledge, IPR, oer, education

We released this policy brief a few weeks ago in prepration for the Symposium on Open Standards and the new intellectual property rights paradigms that are coming out of the various ‘open’ movements (open science, open source software, open medicine, etc.).

Because the policy brief is a bit hidden away on the merit website, I thought it made sense to post a link to it from the A2K blog. Please note that to get a list of relevant UNU publications that we have mentioned on the blog, you can select the “publications” category link in the navigation menu.

The policy brief is here (http://www.merit.unu.edu/publications/pb/unu_pb_2006_01.pdf)

UNU-MERIT holds Research Symposium on “Open Source” and “Open Medicine” at UN Headquarters

UPDATE – Audio recordings of all presentations are now available here (http://www.merit.unu.edu/seminars/20060413_abstracts/report.php).

Can an Intellectual Property regime designed to protect private interests be reformed to open up standards and knowledge? What results when government authorities promote free, open source software in their jurisdictions? Who (if anyone) should own or control access to the human genome sequence? What parallels can be drawn with the fundamental principles of ‘openness’ for science and society as a whole?
These are among the issues to be discussed at a Research Symposium titled Challenging Intellectual Property Access to Knowledge Issues in Open Source and Medicine, at the UN Headquarters, New York, on 13 April 2006 . The event is co-organized by the United Nations University -Office at the United Nations, New York , and UNU-MERIT.

The speakers include:
Louis-Dominique Ouédraogo, Retiring Inspector, UN Joint Inspection Unit;
Tim Hubbard, Head of Human Genome Analysis, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK;
Tadao Takahashi, Principal Investigator at Project Foresight ICTs-2015, Centre for Strategic Studies in Brazil; and
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Senior Researcher, UNU-MERIT.

The event is open to interested members of the public. Registration forms can be downloaded from the website of the UNU Office at the United Nations , New York .

Please also read our related policy brief (401KB pdf).

Technorati Tags: access2knowledge, developingcountries, IPR

As I mentioned previously, UNU-MERIT Director Luc Soete participated in the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue workshop in Brussles. The report of the meeting is now available (and hopefully will be up on the TACD site soon). I am posting some snippets beforehand.

Executive Summary and key points:

Intellectual property protection needs profound reassessment if it is to do more than defend vested interests. That was the dominant message from the two-day TACD conference on The Politics and Ideology of Intellectual Property.

The broad-ranging discussions stretched from the philosophical basis for intellectual property to the most concrete examples of how lobbying had influenced the fate of the EU’s software patent directive.

Key points to emerge from the two days of debate included:

a clear sense that consumers and civil society are starting to make an impact on the global debate on intellectual property, and that the digital communications revolution is putting stronger tools into their hands to continue the campaign.
an equally clear sense that defenders of intellectual property are reinforcing their own resistance to any weakening of protection, and are energetically pursuing extension of rights.
there is still no consensus – nor agreed methodology for computing – the critical point at which protection of private interests ceases to be a gain, and starts to become a loss for innovation and the public interest.
a “one-size-fits-all” approach is inappropriate for intellectual property, in relation to different product categories and in relation to the different countries and regions of the world.
it is no longer adequate for intellectual property discussions at international level to be restricted to intellectual property professionals.
the concept is only slowly gaining currency that it is possible to share information without any loss to the transmitter of informion.

The following is a summary of Luc’s presentation (taken straight from the workshop report). It brings us back to the interesting debate regarding the role of altruism in shaping human success:

Luc Soete of the United Nations University made a plea for recognition of the particular character of human evolution: that success has come from collaborative action and altruistic behaviour. The new age of communications technology offers new opportunities for building on this strength, against a background of “creative destruction” of previous assumptions and practices.

The “creative activation” that new technologies make possible also has major implications for ownership. Unlocking access and activating users leads to the discovery of a huge diversity of creativity, which goes beyond commercial interests, but in which commercial opportunities are not eliminated.

Ownership rights in this new context require a different approach from those that have customarily been applied to physical public goods with a value from scarcity – where the sustainability of a public fish pond may, for instance, be better assured by granting ownership to an individual who then auctions the exploitation rights. A new wave of property rights for information might provide a new opportunity for monetizing value. ICT allows a radical increase in codification, access and tradability of information and communication.

But the appropriation of value out of information and knowledge depends in the first instance on the degree of “exclusiveness”, and there are clear limits to intellectual exclusion in respect of information and knowledge. The new circumstances demand a new behavioural economy.

UPDATE: Nature fires back. See today’s announcement why the journal stands by the original report. Again, it’s difficult to make an informed analysis without spending a lot of time reading the background documents, but it certainly looks like britannica is playing rough to avoid the free competition. Nature’s main argument in support of its findings is that the reviews were all done blindly, e.g. the reviewers did not know if the text they were commenting on was taken from britannica or wikipedia. One point that seems to be omitted in most coverage of the controversy is that Nature is comparing online content from britannica (and not the print version) and wikipedia.

Excerpt from Nature’s response to britannica’s attack (pdf file):

Last week, Encyclopaedia Britannica issued a statement (http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf), and this week published a half-page advertisement in the London Times criticizing our study and demanding that we retract our story.

Britannica complains that we did not check the errors that our reviewers identified, and that some of them are not errors at all. We disagree with their claims in some of the cases (others are too specialized for an immediate response), but there is a more important point to make. Our reviewers may have made some mistakes — we have been open about our methodology and never claimed otherwise — but the entries they reviewed were blinded: they did not know which entry came from Wikipedia and which from Britannica. We see no reason to believe that any misidentifications of errors would adversely affect one publication more than the other. And of the 123 purported errors in question, Britannica takes issue with fewer than half.

My original post on the topic:

The register calls the original Nature comparison of the free/open encyclopedia wikipedia with the encyclopedia britannica a nice “mash-up, but bad science.” The original article “Internet encyclopedias go head to head” caused quite a stir in December when it argued that the quality of wikipedia entries came close in accuracy for science entries to the britannica. Now britannica fires back and says the argument was based on bad reporting, rather than scientific analysis … regardless of the outcome, I am a big fan of wikipedia and there is no doubt that it provides a very useful resource to millions of people who can’t afford access to the proprietary encyclopedias. If the quality of some of its entries are not “up to par” yet, then let’s change that!

Britannica hits back at junk science

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Thursday 23rd March 2006 03:33 GMT

Nature magazine has some tough questions to answer after it let its Wikipedia fetish get the better of its responsibilities to reporting science. The Encyclopedia Britannica has published a devastating response to Nature’s December comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica, and accuses the journal of misrepresenting its own evidence.

Where the evidence didn’t fit, says Britannica, Nature’s news team just made it up. Britannica has called on the journal to repudiate the report, which was put together by its news team.

Independent experts were sent 50 unattributed articles from both Wikipedia and Britannica, and the journal claimed that Britannica turned up 123 “errors” to Wikipedia’s 162.

But Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children’s version and Britannica’s “book of the year” to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry.

Nice “Mash-Up” – but bad science. Full article is here (http://www.theregister.com/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/)

Technorati Tags: nature, wikipedia