[GOAL] COVID-19 and access to knowledge

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 4:21 PM Jean-Claude Guédon <
jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca> wrote:

>
> One last note: OA will succeed, despite what Stevan says. Let us shape OA
> the right way, and certainly not in the way supported by Elsevier: in their
> view, OA is a "charitable" gesture that is applied only in extreme cases.
> The reality is that the Great Conversation of science constantly needs it.
>

We need clear messages. Open by default. Friction costs resources and
lives.

I don't think people realise how serious friction is in the modern world.
If you have to write to an author the friction is absolute.
If you have to read a licence the friction is absolute.
If you have to work out where to find the full content is from a landing
page the friction is large.
If you have to parse PDFs or publisher HTML the friction is massive
If you have to copy text the friction is absolute.
If you don't know what you are getting , that's friction.
If you get Dublin-Core or Highwire metadata , it's out of date,
undocumented, ambiguous and serious friction.
If you crawl UK universities for theses that's Infinite friction.
If you crawl US universities for theses that's even worse than infinite.


As an example we are working on design and use of masks for COVID-19 and
actually supporting their manufacture. The best known one is N95. I
immediately go to Wikidata. This disambiguates all other "N95" so we have a
precise ontological object which machines can compute in SPARQL. Wikipedia
will be as correct and as uptodate as any other authority. That's where the
modern knowledge world is. By using Wikidata I reduce almost all friction.

See our tutorial example at:
https://github.com/petermr/openVirus/blob/master/examples/n95/OVERVIEW.md
where over 300 papers were analysed in great detail in 5 minutes.
Volunteers welcome.

My sources are now:
EuropePMC, which mirrors PMC and adds to it.
biorxiv/medrxiv which require me to write serious scrapers so huge friction
but our group will try to do it
Redalyc (Mexico) really excited about this as it's a real example of no
fees - that Latin America has pioneered so well. LatA
HAL (FR) frictionless

In the UK can I use CORE? "Please register to receive an API key ". I don't
use services that require APIs so I haven't used CORE. Why is this
necessary? I bet it's to do with IP somewhere. Also CORE is non-commercial.
So, slightly regretfully, I shan't use CORE.

The right way to go is OA free for authors and for readers, which means
> that it must be subsidized. But that is all right because scientific
> research is subsidized and scientific communication is an integral part of
> scientific research (and it costs only 1% of the rest of research).
>

Yes. I suggest we humbly approach LatAm and other parts of the Global South
where we may learn what the real purpose of publishing is. It's so people
can READ things, whereas megapub451 builds systems to stop people reading.

Let's glory the reader. Let's assess scholarship by how many citizens
OUTSIDE academia read our work. Because there are a huge number of smart
educated people throughout the world who are  - literally - killed  by the
present system.

"When I am dead, I hope it may be said. His sins were scarlet, but his
books were read." - Hilaire Belloc.

https://github.com/petermr/openVirus - we now have a wiki where you can
leave messages (I think)




-- 
"I always retain copyright in my papers, and nothing in any contract I sign
with any publisher will override that fact. You should do the same".

Peter Murray-Rust
Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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