[GOAL] Re: Open data

[Andrew A. Adams]

Jan Velterop wrote:
> The trouble with focussing on 'green', rather than on full
> BOAI-compliant OA for research literature, is that it has become an a
> priori concession and an end in itself. That only confuses matters (as
> do ill-defined labels such as 'gratis' and 'libre'). 

> We should insist on BOAI-compliant OA (CC-BY or CC-0) for all research
> articles, including for self-archived articles. And if anything, we
> should insist on institutional repositories to actually be searchable
> and accessible also for text mining. Human-readable OA is a conditio
> sine qua non, but it is not sufficient for modern science.

The trouble with focussing on this high level is that there isn't agreement 
amongst scientists that this is what is needed, and on exactly what the 
limits of this are. Indeed, opening up one's data can involve significantly 
more work for the scientist/scholar. Green OA requires a few keystrokes per 
paper. Perhaps five minutes work (so long as one's repository is set up well 
and one keeps focussed on providing the paper's text and does not get too 
hung up about more than citing meta-data).

I have a PhD student, for example, who has just finished her thesis. The 
thesis and papers from it contain various statistics and quotes drawn from 
her field work. We are still working on further papers from the thesis with 
an expectatin of two more to come. The data has been appropriately developed 
for the publications written at present, but the fullw interviews from which 
quotes are drawn have not had their source seudonymised; the numeric data has 
only been put systematised for the precise analyses used in the thesis and 
the papers. Some of it is in incompatible file formats with chunks of the raw 
data put into different tools in different (overlapping but not a single set 
in any one tool).

What rights to first publication of specific analysis on this data do my 
student and her supervisors have? Which elements of the data are required to 
be made available?

If we wait until we can answer these questions before providing the 
additional access to the existing outputs then we are likely to wait another 
twenty years or more before achieving full access to the papers. Yes, in a 
few fields perhaps, the data must be in a publishable form before a paper can 
be published, but there are currently no social mechanisms, and indeed few 
technological mechanisms, that can cope with providing this data at present. 
There is an easy, simple solution to providing access to the text of papers: 
put a pdf, word, html, rtf, odt or even plain text of the author's final 
submitted text in an institutional repository or the opendepot.

Human-readable OA is within our grasp but we're not grasping it! Let us grasp 
this first and THEN go on to sort out the more difficult issues. Otherwise 
we're just fiddling while Rome burns (struggling to reform the whole of 
scholarly and scientific communications in one go rather than doing what is 
simple and achievable now with little in the way of controversy about its 
beneficial effects on science and scholarship and then and only then dealing 
with the more difficult issues).


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/