A rough backroom brawler, [Vannevar Bush] inspired public support for pure research and helped to create some of the most terrible weapons ever known. The paradox of his career left him seeking a more benign, even avuncular image. Now the press helped him to construct one. This was no act of generosity; it was difficult for ordinary people to square how the finest among them could be both visionaries and killers, fiercely independent themselves and yet demanding of conformity in others. (pp. 355-356)
Comment: Vannevar Bush’s essential essay, “As We May Think,” electrified me when I first read it, close on the heels of the first article I ever read by Manfred Kochen. Together, they changed my world. This book tells the larger story around Vannevar Bush, giving the context that made his essay possible. I find it fascinating how his life encapsulated many of the conflicting dynamics of science communication with which we continue to struggle.
Vannevar Bush(1890-1973), Understanding American S&T Policy: the emerging crisis in historical perspective [Talk at KAIST(Prof. G. Pascal Zachary)] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82QHlhmoQXE
As standards for trustability continue to rise, the companies, brands, and organizations shown to lack trustability will be punished more and more severely. But the sting of the transparency disinfectant will be greatest when the wounds are new. Very soon, for competitive reasons, all businesses, old and new, will beging to respond to the increase in demand for trustability by taking actions that are more worthy of trust from the beginning — that is, actions that are more transparently honest, less self-interested, more competently executed, less controlling, and more responsive to others’ inputs.
Extreme Trust (2012), by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers.
Comment: The concept of extreme trust derives closely from David Brin’s work on transparency, and supports it, in a very earthy, realistic, and practical way.
Bora: The main appeal of the Open Laboratory anthology to the bloggers is that it is a community-based project, and entirely transparent in its execution. … But there is something more to it than just how much bloggers love this book. It is seen as a bridge between the online and the offline worlds. Everyone involved buys extra copies to give to friends and relatives who are not as Web-savvy and may not realize what amazing writing transpires on science blogs. (pp. x-xi)
Jennifer: Far from being irrelevant , science blogging has emerged as an essential activity for science writers as we find ourselves with a professional presence on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, not to mention “microblogging” platforms like Tumblr. And it’s become an equally essential tool for scientists themselves to connect and communicate with the general public. (p. xiv)
Comment: I love it when I observe similar thoughts being expressed by many different people before those ideas have yet hit mainstream. This signals the gradual emergence of a paradigm shift. In this series of books, the essays and authors they represent, the conference which gives them face to face time, and the enormous numbers of award-winning science books that come from these same authors and are birthed in part on their blogs, in these I believe I see the emergence of a paradigm shift in science publishing and scholarly publishing. Track this. They are important.
Influence, on the other hand, is often the currency that makes social processes work toward helping people attain what they value. Intellectual influences nourish and structure the growth of knowledge. Friendships help people obtain jobs, hearings from people in power, votes, advice, and so forth. “It is not what you know but whom you know that helps you succeed” is not all pejorative. People with great wisdom often also know and are known by a great variety of people. Among these are also included people with even greater wisdom. (p. 195)
Comment: Fred Kochen was one of my mentors in grad school, and probably the one who most strongly influenced my vision of who I wanted to be and what I wanted to be able to accomplish in my career, the WHY rather than the WHAT or HOW. Fred was a true visionary, discussing, many decades ahead of their emergence, many of the issues that have become critical to our most important current debates on social dynamics and structures, information access, and more. He predicted the World Wide Web decades before it happened, and spent much of his career trying to build towards that. I have always found it ironic that he died the same week as the release of the first Web browser, Mosaic 1.0. He was a genius at collecting voices together to emphasize issues that would become important. This book, Decentralization, is one of those collections. Many of the most important ideas expressed in this book are ones he gather from or inspired in others. The thoughts that I’ve distilled from it coalesce in forms that I remember as being from the book, but which were never actually said there. I still find this an important collection.
I wrote a chapter on transparency and privacy for the forthcoming Barbara Fister Festschrift. I mentioned this here before. Monday I got the word that the book is in the final stages and getting closer! I really spent a lot of time on that book chapter, and it was harder to write in many ways than my own book. I ended up with pages and pages of notes and quotations I wanted to use the chapter, roughly five times more pages of notes than actually went into the book chapter. And two very heavy bags of printed articles. And uncounted more downloaded articles. So I came home and took a picture of the stack of books I had kept handy while writing.
Wow. I didn’t manage to fit them all in to the chapter, but they really are wonderful books. Here are just a few tantalizing tidbits from these great thought-provoking works, with (where available) videos of the authors on the same or related concepts. Because when I finished this post, it was as long as a short book, I have broken this up into several posts.
This is a story of clashing ideologies and dizzying technologies. The ideologies did not arise with the popularity of America Online or the merger of Vivendi and Universal. In fact, they are among the oldest ideologies still around: anarchy and oligarchy. … These ideologies are rapidly remaking our global information ecosystem, and the information ecosystem is remaking these ideologies. … Freedom can be terrifying. Cultural and technological trends are increasing freedomg in ways many people find threatening. Yet the reactions (or more accurately “preactions”) to these trends are extreme, ill-considered, and imposed unilaterally without public discussion or deliberation: easy answers to difficult problems. More often than not, we have used technological quick fixes to avoid complex, serious discussion of the dangers posed by the increasing speed and amount of information. (pp. xi-xii)
Comment: I was lucky enough to actually see Siva speak when he came to campus last year to present about his newer book on Google. I had come in late, not realizing how exceptional the presentation would be, and ended up standing in the back of the room in my heavy winter coat, tweeting madly on my phone to try to take notes. At this point I suspect anything he writes is worth a read!
Consider what’s coming. Your genetic code will be imprinted on an ID card … for better and worse. Medicines will be tailored to your genes and will help prevent specific diseases for which you may be at risk. (But … your insurance company and your prospective employer may also find out that you are genetically disposed to, say, heart disease, or breast cancer, or Alzheimer’s.)
Comment: This book does make a number of useful points, and provides a very quick high level synthesis of some of the relevant emerging technologies. Personally, I found the layout (creative graphic design, heavily broken up text, massive amounts of white space) irritating and frustrating. I suspect it was designed to slow down the reader and force them to pay closer attention to the text. In my reading, I felt that the design of the book interacted with the words to undermine the significance of content, to not give sufficient deep thought to the issues raised. I found it a useful exercise, as I was reading in these issues, to read through parts of this and watch for the moments when I wanted to jump up shouting at the author, since those helped me explicitly target some of what I felt needed to be said.
Today is International Women’s Day. I already did a post highlighting a tiny portion of the information being shared around IWD, much of which has centered around issues of violence against women. While I had followed much of the debate around reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and cheered when it passed, I didn’t realize that President Obama signed the reauthorization yesterday in connection with IWD activities.
I didn’t expect to cry so much while I watched the video of the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, but listening to the speeches brought back such memories. You see, I was a battered wife back in the 70s, long long before the original passing of VAWA in 1994. Things were different then.
2. Victims and their families have access to the services they need (this includes funding the National Domestic Violence Hotline 1−800−799−SAFE(7233) or TTY 1−800−787−3224)
3. VAWA created positive change.
I’d like to take just a moment and share some personal stories illustrating each of these. What was it like before VAWA, and what does VAWA really mean.
Criminal Justice Response
Just for the record, I was extremely lucky, in very many ways. A couple years afterward, I was on a panel of domestic violence survivors, and realized just how lucky. I wasn’t one of the women who ended up in the hospital, or required facial reconstruction surgery. I didn’t end up with broken bones. I didn’t have children. I was only married a little over a year, so this was a very brief experience. I was an undergrad student, and had access to campus resources that would not have been available to most women. And I got out.
But getting out wasn’t easy. The legislation at the time restricted what service providers were allowed to do in cases of domestic violence. Even if they wanted to do more, their hands were tied. I encountered this over and over.
My husband had been threatening to kill me for years, from the first time I tried to break up with him while we were dating, and throughout our betrothal and marriage. I was used to that. I had tried to get away many times before, but nothing ever worked. I had gotten to the point where threatening to kill me meant very little, because I didn’t care if I died. I actually had tried to kill myself once following an argument with him, because I felt I could not live like this any more. Completely spontaneously, I guzzled a fifth of hard liquor in seconds, and ran upstairs to get the sleeping pills. He realized what I was doing, chased me, and locked me out of the bathroom. I begged for the pills, but he wasn’t going to let me near them, and the moment was past.
My situation went to pieces not long after that, one evening in early Spring. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but I remember the moment I realized everything had changed. He had shifted beyond threats to action. His whole body spasmed with anger, his face turned red. When he regained control of himself enough to move, he headed upstairs. To our bedroom. Where he kept his collection of knives. I realized he was going to kill me RIGHT THEN. I shouted something snarky up the stairs, hoping it would again immobilize him briefly with rage. While shouting, I quickly threw on my coat, grabbed my purse and backback, and quietly slipped out the front door.
I could head north or south. There was more initial cover to the north, but only for a little ways and then there was nothing but open fields for miles. To the south, it was open fields for about a ten minute walk, and then cover for miles, with campus and resources. I headed south, walking briskly, as fast as I could, hands in my pockets, head down. I had just passed the bridge over the river into the next group of buildings when I heard his bellow of rage. He had figured out I was gone. I shuddered, but kept moving. That night, I slept on a couch in a women’s restroom on campus.
Unfortunately, it all happened so fast, I didn’t even think of trying to grab anything else, and had left my class and work schedule taped to the fridge. The second night, at work, he phoned me.
Since threatening to kill me wasn’t working to control me anymore, he had to find some other threat that would accomplish the same ends. He explained this to me very carefully, and in great detail. He had weapons. He had knives. He had guns. He had ways to get more guns. He would not kill me, oh no. He would kill my family. And my friends. He listed them by name, in the order in which he would kill them, describing how he would kill them. He had a detailed plan, well worked out, credible, possible, doable. And after he killed all of them, he planned to kill himself, but leave me alive. If I didn’t want this to happen, he needed me to come back. That night. He graciously gave me some time to think it over.
First, I phoned my boss at home. I had a crisis on hand, and I could not do what I needed to do and take care of the library. My boss came as fast as she could, and I set to work while she helped patrons.
I phoned the local hotline for help. They could talk to me, and they could make a referral to a counselor to help me cope with my situation. That was all.
I phoned all the numbers they provided, but of course it was evening and no one answered.
I phoned both of our families and as many friends as I could reach, to warn them they might be in danger.
I phoned the police, and relayed his plan. They said there was nothing they could do. I actually remember part of the conversation.
Me (in utter disbelief): But he has GUNS!
Police: “Sorry, ma’am, there’s nothing we can do until he actually shoots someone.”
Me: You think he’ll MISS?!?!
I ended up calling him back, and agreeing to talk to him, but outdoors, not inside. He negotiated. No observers. No family. He knew their cars. Bad things would happen if he saw their cars. I agreed. I phoned my family. They lost it. Someone else HAD to be there! I couldn’t see him alone! My boss offered to be the watcher. He didn’t know her car. Heck, I didn’t know her car. It looked like a large refrigerator on wheels.
He and I talked for a little over an hour, on the street outside our house. It was cold, but not freezing. I shivered a little. The refrigerator on wheels went around the block, over and over and over again. He never noticed. He only looked at me. Eventually, I agreed, miserably, to go back in. I could tell he was past the fit of anger, and would not be violent for a while. I had a little space. I made a couple phone calls and called off the family crisis alert.
That night he held me very gently and very close while he slept. I lay awake for hours.
Access to Services
I was lucky here, too. A few months after I’d married, the stress was already getting to me, and was impacting my health. I was a music major, in composition, and my composition teacher, Gary White, could tell something was wrong, even if he didn’t know what. He insisted that I see a counselor on campus. At that time, I told my husband that my seeing a counselor was a condition of my being allowed to stay a music major. He grumbled, but as long as everything was confidential, he didn’t care what I told the counselor, as long as he didn’t have to go also. That saved my life, already seeing a counselor before the crisis started. And I had access to the counseling free through student services. Again, most women would not have had this. They wouldn’t have had access to counseling, wouldn’t have been able to afford it, wouldn’t have been able to find a way or time or travel to get to the services they needed. My counselor knew the situation. He knew I wasn’t the one who needed to be there, but we kept those weekly appointments just for my safety, as a way to track what was happening.
That cold Spring night was when I realized there was absolutely no way out. I could not protect my friends and family. I could not protect myself. I had asked for help, and exhausted all resources available to me, to no avail. I could not come up with any other ideas or ways to get help. No one I talked to could come up with any ideas I hadn’t already tried, or resources I hadn’t contacted. Someone was going to have to die.
I thought about trying to kill him, but I really didn’t think I could do it. He was freakishly strong, had a large capacity for drugs and alcohol, and slept lightly. I didn’t believe I could catch him off guard; I didn’t believe I had the physical strength to do it; I couldn’t think of a way that would work; and being compulsively honest, I didn’t think I could trick him into taking poison or anything along those lines.
Second choice. Me. If I died, he would have no one to bully. He’d have no reason to kill my family or friends, because he could no longer control me. He still usually allowed me to go to class and work, so there was some freedom of movement. I could pick up my previously aborted impulsive suicide attempt where it left off, but hiding in the woods under a tree somewhere, where it would take days or weeks for someone to find me. All I had to do was pick up the necessary ingredients after work some day and take a detour on the way home.
I explained this logic, and my plan to my counselor. He was unable to find a flaw in either. I told him that given his previous patterns, we probably had a couple weeks before my husband would explode again. Each time now was escalating. If I was going to defuse matters, I couldn’t wait too long. I didn’t want to die, but I was willing to. I did not expect to survive. I expected to die, one way or the other, within a month.
My counselor did all the right things. We knew that I would not be able to hide things from my husband, so whatever was happening needed to happen without my knowing about it. I was asked to sign a piece of paper that I carefully did not read beforehand. Afterward, my counselor contacted both families, and got my parents and my husband’s parents to sign the same paper. I received a phone call, telling me not to go home until a few hours late on one particular day, and to phone our families as soon as I arrived. When I did go home, there was a note on the kitchen table from my husband. The police had taken him away in a straightjacket, and he was on his way to a hospital for observation. It was over, mostly.
There were more services needed, though. I moved out as fast as possible, taking only what belonged clearly to me and had before the wedding, abandoning everything else, even the large things that were mine, like my grandfather’s player piano. His family took responsibility for fixing the townhouse we’d rented. Every wall, door, and window in the place was broken except for the two walls that adjoined the neighbors. It was going to be an enormous expense. I was then, and remain, deeply grateful that his family offered to take care of this. I felt awful later when I realized that doing so had put their family in an insurmountably bad financial situation. You see, it isn’t always just the DV survivor or the survivor’s family who need help. Help is needed for everyone connected with the situation. Both sides of the couple, their families, their friends, all suffer, all need support, all need resources to rebuild their lives.
Positive Change
It took me a while to realize I wasn’t going to die. The whole world was bright and sparkly for a while. I jumped at loud noises. Had nightmares. Shook when something reminded me of things that had happened. But less and less over time.
It might surprise you to hear that I didn’t even realize I was a battered wife until a couple years later when I was working on some added copies in the library. There were several copies being added of the Lenore Walker book, The Battered Woman. I checked one out, read it, and went into shock. When I started telling folk I was a battered wife, everyone looked at me quizzically, and said, “Of course. We knew that.”
I became an advocate, a supporter, someone who shared info about domestic violence with others, spoke on panels, called the police when I heard terrified screaming through the neighbor’s walls.
If I hadn’t survived that month, I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t be helping others. My two kids would never have been born. I try to make it worthwhile for others that I survived. I try to make a difference, to make things matter. But the idea of dying doesn’t scare me as much.
Obama: “[#VAWA] didn’t just change the rules, it changed the culture. It made it possible for people to speak out.” youtube.com/watch?v=LoxL7J…
Obama is right. It’s real. Changing the culture makes a HUGE difference.
When the police took my then husband away in a straightjacket, it made quite an impression on him. Frankly, he had never really understood there was anything wrong with what he was doing. The laws at the time supported that understanding. Being taken away made it crystal clear that this was not OK.
I didn’t stay in touch with either him or his family, although to this day, I still think of them often. From time to time I’d hear something about them. What I heard were things like this.
He lost all his friends.
He never hurt ANYONE ever again.
He made new friends, but very different people.
He worked hard and became a good, decent, law-abiding man.
He was very gentle, soft spoken, kind, but always retiring and unassuming.
At one point, someone asked me if I’d want him back, as the person he had become. I winced, shuddered, and said, sorry, no, I can’t get past what happened. But I wonder if VAWA had been around then, if the culture change had started a couple decades earlier, if my story, and his, might have been completely different, if he might have become the kind gentle person he evidently was somewhere inside before we got to the point of involving crisis services and law enforcement.
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE STATISTICS
“One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime.
An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.
85% of domestic violence victims are women.
Historically, females have been most often victimized by someone they knew.
Females who are 20-24 years of age are at the greatest risk of nonfatal intimate partner violence.
Most cases of domestic violence are never reported to the police.”
I find it completely appropriate that they are the same day. I will explain why, in a moment, but first, some housekeeping. What is Future Day? What is National Day of Unplugging?
Future Day – John Smart Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fngnICG__yM
John: “My focus is accelerating change, so I like to understand where things are going, and which things are going faster every year.” “We start to see the transformative solutions that are at hand for all of our problems.” “Future Day helps us to foresee both our personal potentials, and to acknowledge that we have the power to pull together and really push forward the whole global system to a whole new level.”
For Future Day, people are having parties, events, speakers, lobbying and more, to get folk together THINKING about the future, what it might be, what that might mean for us as individuals and as a society. For National Day of Unplugging, people are trying to get folk to put away connected devices and focus on each other as human beings and communities, to get outside or cook or make crafts, focusing also on personal health and calm that comes in a way impossible while searching the Internet. The background of NDP is from the Sabbath Manifesto, which gives you a richer context. And YES, I am going to do it!
|
My Thoughts
So why does it seem so appropriate to me to have these two together? To explain that, I need to use a parable of sorts, and go back in history.
When I was a child, I was fascinated by the old Greco-Roman myths and stories, and especially fascinated that the Eleusinian Mysteries were indeed mysteries that no one knew anything about. A religious order that lasted for around two thousand years as the dominant religion, and we knew NOTHING about it other than a few statues and myths that cloaked as much as they revealed. Then, when I was a young woman, important discoveries were made. It turned out that someone at the very end of the religion had actually written down information about the rites.
Super briefly, the idea of the Eleusinian Mysteries was this. Life had changed from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. This was a HUGE shift, and made all later technologies possible, probably also including ideas like, oh, I don’t know, writing? Cities? All these new blessings were credited in part to the Goddess Demeter who had taught the Greeks how to farm. The core celebration of the Mysteries were designed to help people remember and appreciate what life had been like before they had agriculture. They would go out for a week on the plains and the grasslands, live in tents in groups, slaughter a pig, roast it, throw the carcass into an abyss to keep the predators away, and tell the stories (more and more ritualized) about life before agriculture.
Fast forward.
I’ve lost track of how many science fiction books I’ve read in which there is a future where all of us have implants that connect our brains directly to the Internet, and we filter the perceptions of our bodily senses through sophisticated tools that enrich and enhance and expand our own capabilities. The way things are going, I put that maybe 20 years away? Crude prototypes already exist.
Then, in those stories, there is some crisis that shuts down the net. People have never used their minds, never perceived the world, without the filter of the Net and its associated tools. What happens? All of them feel crippled. Most of them go catatonic. Very few minds have the strength and training to even understand how to THINK without the tools that extend thought. Of course, the Amish are just fine. It’s not a crisis for them. And there is some special survivalist scouting group that has, once a year, gone for a week without, just to practice and prepare for exactly this sort of situation.
Now do you see why it makes sense to me to combine unplugging and thinking about the tech future in a single day?
My Actions
I’m doing BOTH. I’m going to try to make it to an event for makers to learn more about soldering wires on circuit boards. Conversations will, I am sure, abound. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll do some crafts and try to engage folk around me in conversations about the future. I’m going to watch movies with the kids, go to the Farmer’s Market, and go see an opera. I will put away my personal internet devices for 24 hours, and write about it later. I’ll take notes on paper. I’m not planning any pictures, for obvious reasons. And with that, I’m going “dark” for 24 hours, folks. Headed offline.
I missed last week’s post in this series because I had some sort of virus. Back now, and ready to pick up with how publication models are flipping. Publishing is flipping in the sense that the current model of publishing is broken in so many ways people have lost count. It just isn’t working. Flipping is also coming from the many ways in which communities are trying to find new ways to make things better. There are many layers to the changes going on, including economics, collaborative creation, shifts in online environments, transparency as marketing, pre-publication review, alternative archiving models, and so much more.
Coincidentally, even though this was next on my list, it turned out to be a great thing that I waited a week, because a conversation attached to the post “An Argument Against Science 2.0” has provided a ton of resources on shifts in peer review. I stumbled over this huge collection of general resources on publishing reform. Then today I heard my colleague Nadia Lalla speak about shifts in collection development, a presentation which highlighted some of the ways in which the traditional model is no longer working well.
Economics
Some of what Nadia talked about with our team included her extremely clever models of current publishing financing, including “The Evil Triumvirate” and the “I-have-a-dream pricing models.”
In the “Evil Triumvirate” model were the Great Satan, the Spawn of Satan, and the Evil Empire, all of which represent unnamed publishing conglomerates who have exceptionally poor customer service, and who seem determined to milk the dying cow for every last drop while they wring her neck. (That is my imagery, not Nadia’s.) One example she described was a publisher who refused to send an invoice so that we could pay our current bill, then cut off access to the publications, and only then agreed to send an invoice … for almost three times the previously agreed amount. Oh, right.
By the way, just for the record, other librarians seem to feel pretty much the same way, even if they aren’t quite so poetic about it.
@krafty#medlibs we used to call Elsevier the “Devil” –charge $$$ 4 subscriptions but send handsome reps 2 conferences/free pens :-/
And you probably already know about the Elsevier boycott. That said, Elsevier does some good stuff, and some not so good stuff, and there are other large publishing houses doing the same kinds of things. It is never as simple as black and white.
Cow, by Markku Åkerfelt on Flickr.
The “I-have-a-dream pricing models” described the many many ways in which publishers will change funding models with the end goal being that if you change the name of the cow, you can charge a lot more for the same cow, and maybe sell it twice! (Again, my imagery rephrasing my understanding of what Nadia said. Don’t blame her, unless you like it.) Examples included publishers who set up one price for usage and then tell you you aren’t eligible for that pricing model any more but have to switch to a tiered use model, and that means the price just went up 400%. Usage models change from FTE for faculty, or students, or by departments; by how many beds are in your hospital, and are those licensed beds or staffed beds; and so forth. Keep slicing it different ways.
Open Access
One of the frequently touted solutions is to simply commit to open access. Flip the economic model so that journals aren’t in the business of selling, but buying, and that the end result is free to all. I talk about this a lot in my forthcoming book chapter. Meanwhile, the NIH Mandate has had a huge impact on my library, with Merle Rosenzweig (and others) advising faculty on best practices, policies, and the fine points of where to publish, how to submit articles, impact on grant process, and more. This has become a big focus of the work we do, and the communities we support on campus (hint, hint, Open Michigan?).
It isn’t just the traditional publishers making a mess of money, either. It isn’t at all a black and white / us versus them dichotomy. While I tend to be a fan of open access (read Peter Suber) and transparency (read David Brin), there are abuses of the alternate systems also. It is not uncommon for someone who’s heard me talking about online publishing alternatives to contact me, quietly, privately, on the side about a publisher that has approached them, wanting them to submit an article or a new book to an open access venue. It will look reputable and professional, say all the right things, but they’ve never heard of these people or this title before. The person contacting me always wants to know, “Are they legit? Is this too good to be true?” Good question. During tonight’s #MedLibs twitter chat, Molly K (@dial_m) brought up Beall’s List of predatory open access journals.
And those predators undermine the whole open access community by creating fear on the part of authors unwilling to risk the potential economic penalties of publishing in open access journals. Of course, those “penalties” aren’t really the kind of problem people imagine.
So, at the moment, the entire market of publishing scholarly, academic, and science research works is frankly, pretty depressing. Misinformation and misunderstanding about research publishing is rampant. There are good journals and good publishers, but it takes a lot of people working hard to try to figure out which are good and which aren’t, why, how, and then even the best journals / editors / authors sometimes make mistakes. This has a bit of the feel of that famous song of a fiddler dancing on a shaky roof beam.
Peer Review Reform and Post-publication Review
Aside from the actual act of formal publication in an acknowledged journal, there is also the challenge of quality, credibility, reproducibility, and overall trust in the published products. There is SO much going on examining:
– what’s wrong with what is actually published;
– why are retraction rates skyrocketing (read RetractionWatch);
– what about ethics in research publishing (see also COPE);
– the impacts of scientific misconduct on publishing and research funding;
– how bias against negative results damages science as a whole;
– publication bias overall;
– the whole question of conflicts of interest being accurately identified and reported, and how they impact on what is published;
– how pre-publication peer review is being challenged, and can turn into a “members only” club, or worse; and
– how all of these negatively impact public belief in the credibility of science. Meaning any science, all science, and all scientists. And then, naturally, that impacts on public policy and science funding.
I particularly like this quote as a validation for arguments in support of shifting from pre-publication review to post-publication review.
“If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe?”
Lehrer, Jonah. The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method? New Yorker Dec. 13, 2010. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer
What it comes down to is how much trust you can put in the information you have. Replication tells us if the same thing will happen each time. Retraction itself is dangerous because it removes the information that is questioned, making it impossible to learn from its mistakes for the future. Biases of all sorts make it impossible to bring forth new ideas that might or might not be solutions for existing problems. In combination, these make the line between science and pseudoscience increasingly thin, and break down paths to innovation and discovery.
Let’s just say, this is not shaping up to be a pretty picture with a rosy future.
Paikan Paolao brought to my attention (comment here) the extensive crowdsourced list of tools, resources, and communities for alternatives to traditional peer review.
So many tools from wonderful people who really care and are trying to find a way to fix these problems, but so far none of them have really built up any significant traction or proven to have significant impact on the process. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but hopes are fading, and the idea of post-publication peer review as a solution for quality problems in research publishing is coming to be seen as only one part of a much larger and more complex problem.
If you aren’t already reading Curt Rice’s blog, I highly recommend it for his discussions of peer review and challenges to quality in current science publishing: quality control, plagiarism, “the politics of prestige,” peer review, bias in the editorial and review processes, manipulation by the science publishing infrastructure, and so much more. He does an excellent job of tracking and questioning the emerging issues in the conversations around these issues.
How researchers and scientists themselves assess the quality, value, accuracy, and utility of research and science discoveries is under attack from within. The very tools designed to assist with this are proving to create at least as many problems as they have ever solved. This has huge implications for politicians, developing science policy and using science to shape other policies; for librarians, who depend on these reviews and quality tools to shape collections; for the general public, who depend on both policy and library collections to inform their own personal and community decisionmaking processes.
Let’s Start Over
Recently, a related issue has been getting attention — beyond peer review of individual articles, how ranking of entire journals is also having negative impacts on the quality of science.
This is such a phenomenally important piece, I want to quote extensively from the abstract. Please note these three pieces.
“Much has been said about the increasing bureaucracy in science, stifling innovation, hampering the creativity of researchers and incentivizing misconduct, even outright fraud. Many anecdotes have been recounted, observations described and conclusions drawn about the negative impact of impact assessment on scientists and science.”
Translation: “We’ve got trouble, people, right here in River City.”
“These data confirm previous suspicions: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact.”
Translation: Our tools for determining scholarly quality (IMHO, the entire publishing system) are busted.
“Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery function of the current journal system.”
Translation: We need to try something completely different. But what?
If you’ve read this far, you’ll probably want to also read some of the other pieces talking about the implications of this report. There are several. Here are a few I read.
So with publishing not just flipping, but fragmenting like a crumbling sandcastle around us, what should we be doing differently? We know it needs to change, but in the struggle to fix the problems, we grasp at quick fixes and short-term “solutions” like so many cancer patients cling to mysterious “cures.” There are two pieces I discovered recently, both of them curiously in the same journal, Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience.
The first one, by Jason Priem and Bradley Hemminger, envisions breaking apart each of the functions currently coalesced in the journal publishing model into independent systems. From where I stand now, with what I’ve read so far, this is probably the single most important article on journal publishing reform to read.
“For instance, a scholar might deposit an article in her institutional repository, have it copyedited and typeset by one company, indexed for search by several others, self-marketed over her own social networks, and peer reviewed by one or more stamping agencies that connect her paper to external reviewers. The DcJ brings publishing out of its current seventeenth-century paradigm, and creates a Web-like environment of loosely joined pieces—a marketplace of tools that, like the Web, evolves quickly in response to new technologies and users’ needs.”
Citing Jason and Bradley’s article is this next one by a European team which pulls from an extensive and excellent bibliography those common elements emerging as consensus strategies for research publishing reform, with a focus on the review process. I strongly urge you to read the whole article, in which they unpack these ideas, but as a teaser will give here their 14 key consensus points, distilled from 18 articles.
1. The Evaluation Process is Totally Transparent
2. The Public Evaluative Information is Combined into Paper Priority Scores
3. Any Group or Individual can Define a Formula for Prioritizing Papers, Fostering a Plurality of Evaluative Perspectives
4. Should Evaluation Begin with a Closed, Pre-Publication Stage?
5. Should the Open Evaluation Begin with a Distinct Stage, in which the Paper is not yet Considered “Approved”?
6. The Evaluation Process Includes Written Reviews, Numerical Ratings, Usage Statistics, Social-Web Information, and Citations
7. The System Utilizes Signed (Along with Unsigned) Evaluations
8. Evaluators’ Identities are Authenticated
9. Reviews and Ratings are Meta-Evaluated
10. Participating Scientists are Evaluated in Terms of Scientific or Reviewing Performance in Order to Weight Paper Evaluations
11. The Open Evaluation Process is Perpetually Ongoing, such that Promising Papers are more Deeply Evaluated
12. Formal Statistical Inference is a Key Component of the Evaluation Process
13. The New System can Evolve from the Present One, Requiring No Sudden Revolutionary Change
When I saw this video it had officially 303 views and almost 7 thousand likes. Not quite sure how they managed that. I do suspect that the views are going to skyrocket at some point.
My stream in Google Plus this morning is almost nothing but buzz about Google Glasses. Since I am inexplicably unable to see my Facebook and Twitter streams, I don’t know what’s going on there, but I suspect it is similar.
The buzz is because the mythic Google Glasses are about to get out where REGULAR folk can see them. They are asking for folk to apply to get a pair (in 50 words or less) via social media. (Please note, this is NOT my application.)
I don’t expect that I will get one, since I don’t have a good track record for getting “freebies” of any sort, but I bet some of you will, and I want you to have the chance. Oh, do please read the fine print, this is NOT a freebie. You have to pay $1,500, live in the USA, and be able to fly to San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York to pick it up. Me, single mom of special needs kid, not gonna happen. So I have nothing to lose by pushing the info out to all of you, and hoping one of my friends gets one and will tell me ALL about it!
As I scan the stream for creative ideas being listed, I am seeing an enormous number of folk talking about capturing moments with family and loved ones (especially births!), and memory aid & notetaking, as well as travel of all sorts and mapping. Also mentioned often, of course, were sales, marketing, and porn. Here are some of the less common ideas I’ve seen and which have impressed me.
#AR/GAMES FOR LEARNING: Augmented reality role-playing game for learning in the forest (Luka Leduc-Boutin)
WORK: Integration with job functions for construction & architecture, hazardous waste management training (Kevin Reedy and Mark Dunton)
HEALTH: Life as a patient with an invisible disability or a child with special needs
(Frank Garufi Jr. and Lori Friedrich)
(This is what I would want to do – show folks what city life is like with no car, with a kid with special needs, helping folk find/use/understand health information and work with their healthcare teams. I’d also LOVE to see some scientists get one for a day-in-the-life 365 type of project. And I can’t wait to see what real artists do with creating new unexpected kinds of artwork and storytelling. Perhaps relive re-enact historical events? And the so obvious extension of the Virtual Photowalks project, expanding the lives of the homebound. And please give one to an astronaut, ok? And a hospice worker. And an inner city kid, if you can keep them alive long enough to use it without it getting stolen or broken. Lives that are going unseen, stories that are going untold and unwitnessed.)
And possibly the least inspirational and most amusing:
HUMOR: “i would never have a problem with bad customers because i would replace their heads with rubber chicken masks so i could retain my customer service smile.” Matthew Stone
Trend: Flipping is when what we’ve learned to expect turns upside down. Paul Courant proposed we shift from pre-publication peer review to post-publication. Changing models of publication find early drafts of work free online, and only later in the process do these become print objects. The “flipped” classroom is all the buzz in education. Sometimes it means digital learning objects such as lecture videos are consumed outside of class with class time reserved for conversation or interactive projects. Other times it means student-led and student-driven learning with the teacher as guide rather than sage. In healthcare provision, the flip is a shift away from top-down healthcare toward a more collaborative model, often referred to as participatory medicine, with patients as the “captain” of their healthcare team. Even the fundamental concept of “what is science?” and research methodology is flipping. With citizen science, crowdsourcing, life-streaming, big data, personal genomics, etcetera, the idea that data is scarce is no longer true. The hypothesis-driven model of scientific enquiry was based on the idea that data is scarce and research must be carefully designed to generate the appropriate data. When data is not scarce, is the hypothesis-drive model the right model?
Impact: The very nature of science and how we do research is shifting. Similar models demanding flexibility are emerging simultaneously in multiple fields. A few years ago, IBM published the Gaming and Leadership report. A surprise to many was IBM’s praise of young workers with experience as World of Warcraft gamers, because they adapted well to new enterprise models of teamwork, with flexible rotating leadership roles. How can we embrace the core concepts of flexibility and adaptation in our profession? Can we shift cataloging to crowdsourcing, with the cataloger as guide? What about reference? How can we partner with our public in new ways in support of collection development and management?
I was feeling a bit lost with this one, not for lack of things to say, but more where on earth to start! Then my friend, Anna, handed me a copy of a local magazine, The Ann, which featured on the cover another friend, Scott Moore (registered in my Twitter brain as @drsamoore). Well, that settled that! Somewhere to start, and I can take advantage of the topic of flipping to introduce you to my friends.
Scott and I met during Enriching Scholarship last year. We shared a fascination with innovation in higher education and online social learning environments. This year, Scott has been experimenting with a “flipped classroom” (FC) for one of his courses in the Business School. Also in the past year I attended a session in the Medical School about starting to use a FC model. What was really interesting, and which confused me quite a bit for a while, was that the different definitions for and approaches to the FC model were so very different I had trouble figuring out why they were using the same phrase.
Here are the two ideas I distilled about FC approaches.
1. Flipped classroom: tape the lectures as video, have students watch them at home, do homework during class.
2. Flipped classroom: Have the students take turns or build teams to lead and drive the learning process to meet stated guidelines. Students learn on their own time, meet during class to share, teach each other, and answer Platonic or Socratic questions from the prof to help them discover for themselves where they are going astray.
What these two approaches share is the prof taking a “guide on the side” approach rather than a “sage on the stage”. What differs is how much of the learning is in the hands of the students, and how much technology is integrated or needed.
You can read a bit about some of what Scott is trying in the article posted above with the picture. You can also see a small portion of what he’s doing with his class through his Twitter account and in the blog.
Scott is using a real variety of technology for this class: blogging, Twitter, Google Hangouts, Youtube, and probably more that isn’t quite so easy to stumble upon. The class meets in the Hangouts online, the videos of the sessions are archived in Youtube, and locked down to just the members of that group. Office hour options seem to be blended online and face to face. Announcements and questions are handled via Twitter. I suspect some email might occur.
While Scott seems to be aiming for a more Platonic/Socratic approach, there are still assignments, deadlines, and other performance measures to facilitate grading and the other structures of current higher education. The Med School, in that one very early meeting I attended, had been looking more at the model described in the infographic — watch the video, then come to class prepared to work and discuss. Obviously, there is merit to both approaches.
Now, with all this, I’ve still only barely touched on ONE of the types of “flipping” I started with. I still haven’t touched on flipping publishing, healthcare, or science. So I guess I might need a few more posts on flipping to get to those.
Last week I attended a small lunch presentation on citizen science initiatives. As I’ve said before, I go all giddy over citizen science and crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, etc. Love the stuff! There is so much going on in the citizen science space that I was pretty sure the presenter would be sharing things that were new to me, no matter how much I prowl around there. And I was right! But that wasn’t the most thought-provoking part of the talk.
This was a student group meeting over in the School of Information (what used to be the library school, back in the days I was a grad student here). There was a lot of give and take, with folk sharing their own thoughts, questions, strategies, favored examples, and so forth. Although it didn’t come up at the meeting, there have been a number of initiatives or varying success to try to engage the public in some library activities. Need a bunch of images cataloged? Stuff them in Flickr and see what people call them, then scrape the info back into your catalog. Make a game, and get people interested in tagging them. Same for movies. Or transcribing them. Or translating them. And what about old manuscripts in spidery 17th century handwriting that most people can barely read and which makes no sense at all to optical character recognition programs? Since this was a library-aware group, I wanted to be sure to mention the most library-oriented citizen science project I know of — Ancient Lives from Zooniverse and Oxford University, which recruits the public to help translate ancient papyri.
While the archives geek in the room was enchanted, the presenter was less so. He seemed slightly uncomfortable, and hinted at why. I’m going to try to put this better into words.
Is translating a papyrus truly science?
What is the difference between citizen science, and crowdsourcing for science, and simply crowdsourcing?
The public are being engaged via crowdsourcing in many types of projects, both scientific and others. They perform many different roles:
– citizen as free labor;
– citizen as sensor (data collector);
– citizen as cataloger (creating metadata);
– citizen as lab assistant (intelligent data generation/collation/curation);
– citizen as partner in discovery (taking on the actual scientific roles of questioning, generating hypotheses, designing methodologies, and proposing methods to test hypotheses).
The question is which of these roles actually qualify as “science”? Or rather, when is “citizen science” NOT science? Semantics, I know, but it has impact in many ways — recruiting people to participate in projects, gaining funding for projects, credibility of the outcomes of the projects, and much more. And if you start drawing a line in the sand, saying, “this counts” “this doesn’t”, you start to get back into an elitism that can alienate potential collaborators and end up hurting the whole idea. So let’s assume, for now, simply for the purpose of argument, that having some sort of agreement about what we call citizen science matters.
Another aspect of the semantics of science is that often the special terms used by scientists to mean one thing may mean something very different to the general public. However, when you are talking about science that is performed in collaboration with the public, this problem becomes potentially much more serious. At the same time, the very phrase “citizen science” has rapidly developed a kind of glamour around it, a mystique, a sense of being part of the “in crowd” (albeit on the fringes), of peering from the edges into misty and obscure realms, of contributing to noble and worthy efforts, of partnering with the brightest and the best and thus being one of them, of being SMART. Being able to use the phrase “citizen science” to describe a potential project is kind of sexy, both to funders and potential participants.
My next thought was about hashtags, which have become a kind of collaborative branding tool. There are many different hashtags being used in various online spaces to gather the conversation and resources of citizen science. The one I use most is #CitSci, but I’ve also seen #CitizenScience (kind of long), and #CrowdSci. #CrowdSci is a mess. At one point it was used to mean “crowdsourcing science”, and now it is used more to mean “the science of crowds.” I can see both, but it is confusing.
So, if library types of projects aren’t acceptable as “citizen science”, then what would we call them? If not #CitSci, what? I tossed this question out on Twitter, and got into a conversation with a scientist, Jason Anthony Tetro aka “The Germ Guy.”
His first thought was along the lines of “Why wouldn’t library science be science?” Good question. I’m not going there. This was a can of worms back when I was in grad school, and I’m sure it still is.
So we brainstormed a few possible hashtags for citizen engagement in the bookish world (be it print books or ebooks or simply anything librarians do, from metadata creation and management, to cataloging, to designing access methods and interfaces, to reference, to preservation, and far far more).
#CitLib
#CitBiblio
#CitRef
Now I have a few questions for you.
1. Is it necessary and appropriate to divide citizen science efforts (and hashtags) into smaller divisions or special topics?
2. What are other good ideas for citizen science or crowdsourcing in libraries and librarianship and the bookish world?
3. Do we need a separate hashtag for the bookish world and its citizen science and crowdsourcing efforts?
Trend: We’ve talked for decades about interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, and the blurring of boundaries between academic disciplines. This goes far beyond that. The idea of “what is a book?” or even “what is a publication?” is blurring. I am daily confronted with concepts beyond open access and open source to conversations about open data, data archives, proposals that software or video productions should count in tenure review as academic publications.
The idea of authorship blurs with crowdsourcing research analysis leading to articles with hundreds or thousands of co-authors. Arguments earlier this year about the #NymWars and Google Plus made it clear that real life and virtual identities are also blurring.
Devices are “blurring.” Tools are developed to allow phones or tablets to control computers, and computers to control phones. I’ve bought a wristwatch to control my stereo, and found computer software to let the computer edit my e-reader.
In healthcare, I’m fascinated by ways in which wearable computing, embedded devices in the body, nanotech, and bioengineering are blurring the idea of what is our body. Nanotech blurs it the most, with many new kinds of tattoos that can embed sensors and interactive displays in our skin. It isn’t just tech blurring the idea of our body. Now that we have the genome and personal genomics, there are all these “-omics” spinoffs — microbiome, exposome for two. These have made it clear that what we’ve thought of as a human is really more of a symbiotic creature comprised of multiple collaborating organisms. The question “What is a book?” easily morphs to become “what is a body?” or “what is human?”
Impact: We’ve depended on discrete categories for classifying information and objects we wish to discover or rediscover. The language by which we refer to concepts is changing faster than our systems can accommodate, with old terms given new meanings and new terms for old concepts. There are challenges facing how we manage information that are broader in scope than the already enormous challenge of alternative publication formats, flexible information formats, and containerless information objects.
Further Thoughts:
The blurring I describe above is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. Remember the old science fiction books about cyborgs? The word itself has become old-fashioned even as we arrive at the point it described. More and more of us “humans” are actually “cyborgs” (in the sense of having a portion of our body composed of components that are created externally and added-in at a later date, rather than growing as a direct result of the interaction of our genetic programming and our environment). Think of heart monitors, insulin pumps, titanium alloy joint replacements and jaws. Then go beyond what we think of as normal now, to what’s emerging but already present — military-inspired exoskeletons, brain-computer interfaces, grafted replacement limbs controlled by thought. Then think of what is coming but not quite here yet — replacement “hearts” that are instead super-efficient circulatory pumps that have no beat but whir in the chest, personal genomics for infants to map their health needs throughout life, or the space elevator that is going to be our leg-up toward settling Mars where we will surely evolve in new directions.
But we still think of ourselves as human. Actually, I heard the middle of a radio interview once (no idea who was being interviewed) about the idea that the idea of what “human” means has evolved dramatically over recorded history, and is still changing. Basically, the “definition” of human was who is it OK to kill. the progression went something like this:
My family group is human, everyone else is an animal.
My tribe is human, everyone else is an animal.
My town is human, …
My city state is human, …
My nation is human, those foreigners are animals (barbarians).
My race is human, those other colored folk are animals (slaves).
Homo sapiens is human, other species are animals.
Homo sapiens and their pets are human (by being part of the family), and that is different from domesticated animals for functional reasons.
Homo sapiens and species with certain levels of intelligence are human.
Etc.
Something like that is going on right now with “what is a book” where “book” means a scholarly or intellectual process of communication worth:
– spending time to understand;
– sharing with someone else;
– setting into a fixed or semi-fixed form;
– preserving for the future.
I don’t know if other folk will like that definition of “book”, but I’ll just use that for the purposes of illustration right now. So a “book” might be the printed object, which already has a variety of forms and formats. It might also be the electronic or audio version that has derived from the printed format.
But now we are getting into new forms of media, and expecting to treat them with the same kind of respect and attention. So, think dramatic performances of film, movies, videos, DVDs, CDs, television, Youtube, MP4s, holograms, and onward into the future. Think of music, from performance to recording, in whatever format, and for decades now overlapping beyond audio to film and all those. Think of the Met Opera and Royal Ballet performances streamed live to the local movie theater, but archived as streamed and later broadcast on television and sold as DVDs or other formats. Online venues like StageIt, Google+ Hangouts, and comparable tools provide a similar but more intimate experience for lesser known or smaller scale performers. (Face it, the Metropolitan Opera tend toward BIG productions!) Less on the commercial side, I’ve attended countless concerts and live performances in Second Life (a 3D virtual world), with the music and performance streamed in from the performer’s home to the virtual stage, with all sorts of artistic stage sets and custom light effects and special effects programmed into the experience, with some of these streamed out to LiveStream or Ustream type of services, and archived later in Youtube as videos.
Now, those all have experiences that are similar enough to traditional performances and media objects that it isn’t too much of a stretch to think of them as something a library might collect. Now, what about a holographic performer who always performs on a live stage in front of a live audience? No, I don’t mean a holographic or virtual representation of a live performer, as happens in Second Life. I mean a completely designed character with scripted and programmed performance, perhaps with some artificial intelligence to allow customization of the performance or response to the audience. It has already happened.
Do you keep the coding for the performer, or the character design, or tape the live performance, or … how would you preserve that? New challenges keep arising for the idea of “book” as what do we want to preserve, how do we preserve it, and how do we find it (rediscover it) and share it in the future.
Right alongside of those types of issues is how do we get credit for our contributions. Who would we call the author or artist or designer of Hatsune Miku the character, and of the Hatsune Miku performance experience? It can’t have been just design to consider either, but the technology that permitted the performance to be designed, the software packages, the visualization techniques, and so much more. Chances are even if you think just design, it’s a team, a really huge collaboration, like those for Disney animated movies, or last year’s research article on the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle (where the list of authors and their affiliations was 13 pages in tiny print for 16 pages of content). How many of the authors actually wrote the words that were published? Do we count contributing data as a significant contribution? I do, but that hasn’t been standard practice in science, and is only now moving towards data and software becoming considered publishable and worthy of preservation (thus the rising numbers of data archives, and workshops on data archiving practices and data stewardship). Who gets credit for the Youtube video of the Hatsune Miku performance? The person who posted it to Youtube? The architects of the Hatsune Miku persona and avatar?
Yesterday I blogged about Impact Story, a new tool to help academics and scientists to collect and integrate information about the uses of their content in both professional and public spaces, from academic journals to Youtube and Slideshare. It all connects. How we currently measure influence is only partially accurate and partially effective. The tools we use for assessing influence are so obscure and inconsistently applied for reputation management and influence assessment that they now serve to undermine the reputation and influence of academics and scientists in their relationships with the public. Yes, the idea of “peer review” is tucked into that statement.
I guess you get the idea. Draw a boundary? Set a limit? Right now, it is like drawing a line in the sand at the edge of the tide.
Here are some of the less common ideas I’ve seen and which have impressed me. 
