CC licensing and open access

Alun Uncategorized 9 Comments , , ,

Here’s an example of how lim­it­a­tions through CC licences can change what you do with a paper.

I’m look­ing at an image. At first I thought to use it in a blog post about organic bat­ter­ies. I thought I could do that because the paper is open access, but the licence of the paper is BY-NC-ND. Tak­ing an image from the paper and blog­ging about it is pretty much mak­ing a D of it. The ND for­bids deriv­at­ives, even if the point of the deriv­at­ive is to say “Hey go look at this paper!” The page for the image itself has no CC licence inform­a­tion, so it looks like the copy­right in the footer applies.

I can see why there’s the NC clause. This has its own prob­lems, like mak­ing it unus­able for things like Wiki­pe­dia, but I can see sense in it. But ND seems an odd clause for sci­entific papers. Surely (properly-credited) deriv­at­ive works are a good thing for sci­ent­ists? I can see there’s a reason for ND in artistic pro­tec­tion, but sci­ence papers gen­er­ally aren’t works of art. Are there good reas­ons for Nature to have the ND clause?

I’ve trimmed the image thumb­nail and descrip­tion from the link because they would be deriv­at­ive from ori­ginal paper.

#blog   #pub­lish­ing   #aca­demia  

Embed­ded Link

Lith­ium stor­age mech­an­isms in pur­purin based organic lith­ium ion bat­tery elec­trodes : Sci­entific Reports : Nature Pub­lish­ing Group

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SciAm and Stonehenge

Alun The Past 4 Comments , , , ,

Sci­entific Amer­ican has an art­icle on Stone­henge up this month. My first reac­tion would be dis­ap­point­ment if I’d bought a copy just to read the Stone­henge art­icle. It’s not bad, but there’s a lot of ideas being gen­er­ated by archae­olo­gists at the moment. The lack of space means that the three main pro­jects all get skimmed. I can see that it works for someone who hasn’t been fol­low­ing news at the site, but if you’re a henge nut it’ll add noth­ing new.

On the other hand, I did like the sup­ple­ment­ary mater­ial that SciAm has added online. This goes into a bit more detail about the work by Birm­ing­ham Uni­ver­sity. Adding this to the ori­ginal art­icle makes it a lot bet­ter. Instead of being stan­dalone, the ori­ginal art­icle works well as an intro­duc­tion to the addi­tional mater­ial. Without chan­ging a word in the ori­ginal my opin­ion has gone from dis­ap­point­ment to think­ing it’s actu­ally quite clever. It means the magazine’s web­site is more than a bro­chure for the art­icles, or a copy of them.

It’s also a crafty way of get­ting their advert­ising out on other people’s sites, but the wait (if the pre-load advert plays) is worth­while. The actual video is 5m40s.

How I published a book, thanks to The Open Laboratory

Alun Digital Academia, Science 5 Comments , ,

GIREP 2009 Proceedings cover
Avail­able at Scribd & Lulu

I’ve been busy in August, and one of the things I’ve been work­ing on has been out for a couple of weeks and I for­got to blog it. I’ve pub­lished a book.

I haven’t writ­ten a book, or edited it or any­thing requir­ing any aca­demic input. I just worked on the pub­lish­ing. The book is the first volume of the Pro­ceed­ings from the GIREP-EPEC and PHEC 2009 con­fer­ence. In Eng­lish, it was a Phys­ics Edu­ca­tion con­fer­ence. I had noth­ing to do with the con­fer­ence, but my Head of Depart­ment men­tioned to a col­league at McMas­ter Uni­ver­sity that he was going to pub­lish a pro­ceed­ings volume and she remembered I’d worked on the cover for the first Open Labor­at­ory book, and so must be an expert in publishing.

I’m not, but as Shawn Gra­ham has shown, the actual pro­cess of pub­lish­ing a book via Lulu is easy and pain-free if you’re will­ing to make some com­prom­ises. The draw­backs are things like a lack of pro­fes­sional type­set­ting, but these days pub­lish­ers often insist on camera-ready copy any­way. There’s also no mar­ket­ing. For some con­fer­ence volumes this will be a line in a cata­logue and an email and, pos­sibly a dis­play at the next con­fer­ence meet­ing of the pre­vi­ous pro­ceed­ings. You do lose some help by bypassing a pub­lisher, but you can poten­tially gain a lot more too.

Firstly we set the price. We went quite high. The print ver­sion of the book is £20. That’s about 6p a page so it’s a sim­ilar cost to pho­to­copy­ing the book. It’s not extra­vag­antly high, but it’s higher than it strictly needs to be as we’ll also be mak­ing it avail­able via Amazon. We decided to do that because people are famil­iar with buy­ing a book from Amazon, they’re not so famil­iar with Lulu, even though it’s the same product. To release a book on Amazon we have to double the retail price, to allow their mar­gin. Des­pite this a 365 page aca­demic book could often be more than £50 so it’s a saving.

But we can do better.

The book is released with a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC-ND licence and we’ve put the PDF up on Scribd. You can read and down­load it for free as a PDF. Print out the chapters you’re inter­ested in and leave the rest.

After two weeks we have 900 views and a few sales. It’s likely that it’s not 900 unique views, but it’s still not a bad res­ult for two weeks. In the Human­it­ies print runs of 250 volumes are com­mon. I don’t know about the Sci­ences, where the pub­lic­a­tion cul­ture is dif­fer­ent any­way, but we have some­thing that I think will com­pete well in terms of read­er­ship in com­par­ison to a sim­ilar volume released via a tra­di­tional pub­lisher. It won’t be any­thing like as prof­it­able as a book pro­duced by a tra­di­tional pub­lisher, but none of the aca­dem­ics would see that profit any­way so for us that’s not an issue.

It’s also a lot faster to get to pub­lic­a­tion. Cheryl Hur­kett did all the LaTeX work on the file and when she was ready she called me in. I registered her with Lulu and we set up a new pro­ject. We tried upload­ing a PDF out­put Lulu, but that didn’t work. So we sent the out­put to a .ps file instead. That con­ver­ted pain­lessly. The cover took a bit more muck­ing about as we went with a vari­ation on the stand­ard tem­plates, but the whole thing went from LaTeX to book on one Thursday. The only gripe we had was that you have to choose to get the free ISBN num­ber right at the start of the pro­ject, and once you have that num­ber your title is set. The book on the Lulu page is lis­ted with the work­ing title, which is pass­able for a first attempt but not good enough for volume 2.

There will be a volume 2, as we could show how simple the pub­lic­a­tion pro­cess was.

It’s not a pan­acea for all aca­demic pub­lish­ing. There are plenty of pub­lish­ers who do add value to a book. How­ever, for con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings the only reas­ons for choos­ing to pub­lish via a spe­cial­ist pub­lisher rather than Lulu are social. The aca­demic out­put is the same, it’s just that one is slower and more expens­ive and that’s the sys­tem we’re used to. The out­put can be traced dir­ectly back to Bora Zivkovic’s innov­a­tion with The Open Labor­at­ory so his blog­ging is con­trib­ut­ing to an observ­able dif­fer­ence in the sci­entific process.

Debunking Academics

Alun Digital Academia, Featured, Science 1 Comment , ,

Duty Calls by xkcd

I have some sym­pathy with altern­at­ive archae­olo­gists when it comes to debunk­ing. It’s com­mon to see blog­gers debunk­ing their work, but not so much other aca­dem­ics. One reason for that could be that aca­dem­ics, doing their work as a pro­fes­sional job in spe­cial­ist domains aren’t likely to make as many mis­takes as an ama­teur with a the­ory that cov­ers a couple of thou­sand years and the entire globe. But that can only be half the story. Some blog­gers don’t cri­ti­cise other aca­dem­ics at all. Wouldn’t it be a bit odd that aca­dem­ics never make any mis­takes? What should you do when they do?

A couple of months ago, I read an odd paper, we’ll call it Paper A, for reas­ons that might become clear below. Author A made a very simple and basic math­em­at­ical error. Some­thing a bit like mix­ing up a plus and a minus sign and con­clud­ing that the Great Pyr­amid was a hole around 150 metres deep. It wasn’t that bad, but the author thought the con­clu­sions flew in the face of everything known about a site. Still, the math­em­at­ics were con­clus­ive, so he had to go with it. There were more errors, but basic­ally the paper was given one big shove in the wrong dir­ec­tion, and the very intel­li­gent and cre­at­ive author tried to inter­pret the evid­ence to fit the math­em­at­ical cer­tainty. It was pub­lished in Journal A. How do you debunk that?

What I’ve done is sub­mit­ted a paper of my own point­ing out the error. Rather than shred the paper to bits, I’ve shown how any­one can make the mis­take of assum­ing a math­em­at­ical cer­tainty. The example I give is an idea I had that, after sev­eral months, I worked out was a Bad Idea — even if it looked con­vin­cing. I ima­gine I’ll annoy Author A, but I’ve tried to take the sting out of the rebut­tal. It’ll get a brief men­tion here if it gets pub­lished, and I’ll be able to host it on an insti­tu­tional repos­it­ory, or pos­sibly the uned­ited ver­sion on arXiv. I decided to sub­mit the rebut­tal as a paper and not a blog post here because the claim appeared in Journal A, so that’s the appro­pri­ate venue to dis­pute it in. Because the rebut­tal is under peer-review I’m hid­ing the name and so on to keep it anonym­ous. Sadly it’s easy to keep anonym­ous because it’s not made any pub­lic splash. This is a shame. It was a clever piece of think­ing and had a sexy con­clu­sion. If it had been sound then it would have deserved a lot more pub­lic attention.

The reason I bring it up today is that I’ve read a much worse paper today. Paper A had one big mis­take and the smal­ler ones ten­ded to fol­low from that. Paper B has at least two and I sus­pect three or more BIG errors. One is that the author has renamed a site. It makes it dif­fi­cult to track back the prior work on the site, and the bib­li­o­graphy doesn’t men­tion it. I wouldn’t blame the peer-reviewer if he thought no ser­i­ous work had been done on the site before this paper. Another prob­lem is the sci­entific method used in the invest­ig­a­tion. Have you ever laid on your back and made animal shapes from the clouds? If have you have, does that make you a zoolo­gist? If you think that’s a bit of a leap, you might have trouble with this paper.

Paper B gives me a prob­lem. I wrote the rebut­tal of Paper A, because it was close to the sort of thing I do. It is fairly well sugar-coated and hope­fully any­one read­ing it won’t simply assume author A is an idiot. Paper B is fur­ther from what I do, but still around one of my fields. It’s a lot worse.

So now I’m won­der­ing if I should be writ­ing a rebut­tal of Paper B, given that my rebut­tal of author A’s work wasn’t per­sonal and Paper A was not as bad. I think I can write some­thing ori­ginal rebut­ting Paper B, but I can also forsee drag­ging myself into a series of boil­er­plate neg­at­ive papers. It’s not my idea of fun. I think I can pull a mit­ig­at­ing factor out of it, with some effort. An altern­at­ive is to stick it up as a research blog­ging post. It that won’t be read by many people who read the ori­ginal paper and it’s giv­ing away some­thing that with a little more effort could be a paper on the CV.

Per­haps I think about it a dif­fer­ent way. Author A was worth my tal­ent, because Author A had some­thing intel­li­gent to say, even if it was fun­da­ment­ally flawed. Author B in con­trast could be a waste of time. You should insert a five-minute gap here, because while I’m writ­ing this some­thing else has occurred to me. Author B might be a waste of time, but Audi­ence B isn’t. Audi­ence B could have some inter­est­ing people in it. Per­haps a rebut­tal, if I can get the tone right, could be a way of net­work­ing with audi­ence B.

I haven’t decided where I’m going with Paper B yet. If I do write a paper, then I’ll still put up a sum­mary of the prob­lem if there’s no OA option.

Why PLoS?

Alun Digital Academia, Politics, Science, The Past 7 Comments , , , , , , ,

I’ve pub­lished a paper with PLoS One which should be out today. The most com­mon ques­tion I’ve been asked so far is: Why there? I’m apply­ing for jobs in Archae­ology and Ancient His­tory, so why would I want to pub­lish in an online journal that hardly any­one in those fields has heard of? Surely pub­lish­ing in one of the big journ­als would be bet­ter? Here’s a few reasons.

  1. It’s fast.
    The paper was sub­mit­ted on the 8th of Septem­ber and I got the accept­ance, sub­ject to revi­sions on the 30th of Septem­ber. I wouldn’t be quite so happy if it had been rejec­ted, but you have to be pre­pared for that. The faster there’s a decision the quicker you can work on the revi­sions or else re-write for another journal. The rapid response means that I can cite the data in this paper in other papers imme­di­ately rather than delay­ing writ­ing about fur­ther work.
  2. It’s access­ible.
    Research might be inter­dis­cip­lin­ary, but not so many journ­als are. For this paper the altern­at­ives would be pub­lic­a­tion in spe­cial­ist archae­oastro­nomy, clas­sics, archae­ology or astro­nomy journ­als. I can do that and will do that in the future, but writ­ing for those journ­als means writ­ing for those spe­cific audi­ences. If they’re subscription-based they also lock out a large pro­por­tion of the poten­tial audi­ence. If an astro­nomer is in a uni­ver­sity without a clas­sics depart­ment then it’s going to be hard for him to get a copy of the paper. Like­wise many uni­ver­sit­ies don’t carry archae­oastro­nomy journ­als. PLoS One gives me a plat­form to intro­duce the work and then I can pub­lish tailored art­icles devel­op­ing ideas in the spe­cial­ist journals.
  3. It opens con­ver­sa­tion.
    You can com­ment on the paper. So too can any­one else. This is par­tic­u­larly handy for inter­dis­cip­lin­ary work. I’m hop­ing the con­ver­sa­tion doesn’t end with this one paper. The article-based met­rics will included some of cita­tion search. Hope­fully in a couple of years people read­ing this paper will be able to see where they can find cri­ti­cisms and devel­op­ments in other papers. That’s amaz­ingly use­ful for inter­dis­cip­lin­ary work where sub­sequent papers could be in journ­als in a vari­ety of disciplines.

I’ve decided some form of open-access is essen­tial for inter­dis­cip­lin­ary work. The paper stands or falls on whether or not the bino­mial dis­tri­bu­tion is the right tool for the task. That means for aca­demic hon­esty I have to sub­mit it to a journal where the I can be reas­on­ably sure it will be scru­tin­ised by people famil­iar with basic stat­ist­ics. Sci­ent­ists might laugh at that as the math­em­at­ics in the paper is very simple. I think any clas­si­cist could fol­low it, but some could quite reas­on­ably be wary of it. Is it stat­ist­ical sleight-of-hand? They can read any com­ments left by stat­ist­i­cians or astro­nomers and judge how con­fid­ent they should be in the find­ings. Like­wise people unfa­mil­iar with the Greek mater­ial can read the clas­si­cists’ and archae­olo­gists’ com­ments and see if the human aspect of the research is sound.

It’s also import­ant for me because I might learn some­thing, and indeed I did. This is a bet­ter paper post-review than it was when I sub­mit­ted it. I’ve re-thought how I pro­cess some of the data and that will have a pos­it­ive on the next pro­ject I do.

After going through the pro­cess I’m impressed with PLoS. I think I hit every bump in the sub­mis­sion pro­cess, most of it due to the order­ing of the paper being dif­fer­ent to how I would nor­mally write it. Still, the every­one was very help­ful along the way. If you’re a recent PhD or grad stu­dent with a need to put out some pub­lic­a­tions, I’d recom­mend pub­lish­ing with PLoS One. Of course I’m writ­ing this before I’ve seen how the paper has been received, so you can check on my art­icle met­rics your­self to see if it’s being read or else sunk into obscurity.

Bookmarks for 16th of November through to 18th of November

Alun Life 1 Comment , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

These are my links for 16th of Novem­ber through 18th of November:

  • The Aca­demic Journal Racket « In the Dark
    Tele­scoper explains how aca­demic pub­lish­ing works. The only thing that would improbe the post would be the theme from ‘The Naked Gun’ in the background.
  • A Case in Antiquit­ies for ‘Find­ers Keep­ers’ — NYTimes.com
    You can make argu­ments in favour of repat­ri­ation of antiquit­ies. You can make argue­ments against. Being on either side doesn’t make you inher­ently fool­ish. But when you write that the Brit­ish Army took the Rosetta Stone from the French and “returned it to the Brit­ish Museum” then some­thing has gone wrong. It’s prob­ably a case of moment­ary brain­fade rather than idiocy, but it mat­ters because the whole ques­tion of own­er­ship of the Rosetta Stone is about where it right­fully belongs. Using the word ‘returned’ builds in the assump­tion that all antiquit­ies are inher­ently British.
  • Notes & Quer­ies; Sledges — The­or­et­ical Struc­tural Archae­ology
    Geoff Carter con­cluded he didn’t have evid­ence for a stag­ger­ingly early cart shed in Poland. Could it have been a used to house a sledge? I’ve just real­ised I know abso­lutely noth­ing at all about the his­tory of sleds and sledges. Not only that, but I can’t recall much atten­tion being called to them in early pre­his­toric archae­ology other than when people want to talk about mov­ing mega­liths to Stone­henge. Yet Martha Murphy (guest blog­ging) shows there’s plenty of ques­tions to ask about neo­lithic transport.
  • Brit­ish bank turns to treas­ure hunt­ing via @johnabartram
    Avast me hearties! Robert Fraser & Part­ners be scourin’ the high seas in search of booty. They be fundin’ Odys­sey Mar­ine Explor­a­tion, Inc. ter search the Carib­bean fer Span­ish gold. Arrr!
  • CRM Prob­lem in Cad­boro Bay « North­w­est Coast Archae­ology
    More on the prob­lems of pre­serving her­it­age in BC. Ancient buri­als have been scooped out of the ground, <em>after</em> an archae­olo­gical assessment.

Time and Mind launches — first issue free

Alun The Past No Comments ,

I liked 3rd Stone, which was a magazine about all things mega­lithic in a middle ground between aca­dem­ics and the fringe. Unfor­tu­nately it had to close. The people behind it are back with the help of Berg and a new journal Time and Mind. I was going to say it’s a lot more expens­ive, but I’m not sure it is — £45 for six issues over two years in print, or £25 for a year. If you want the online ver­sion then you should be pre­pared to sac­ri­fice an internal organ (it’s £125 for a year) but the print fees seem more reas­on­able than a few other journ­als I could think of.

I haven’t had time to read it, so I can’t tell you if the magic has been lost or not. I am look­ing for­ward to read­ing Jeremy Harte’s The Devil on Dart­moor, which argues that the myths of the moors are the products of the Vic­torian tour­ist industry.

I sus­pect the paper which will grab the atten­tion of most people will be Benny Shanon’s on bib­lical drug use. A quick skim raises some pretty basic ques­tions about how you tackle how his­tor­ical record was cre­ated. If the text was writ­ten some dec­ades, cen­tur­ies or a mil­len­nium after the events described by people who weren’t liv­ing the same alleged eco­sys­tems then how reli­able is the text if you want to make a dia­gnosis? It’s pos­sible he tackles this and I missed it.

For­tu­nately you can check for your­self. You can read the first issue free.

Scholarly Journals between the Past and the Future by Martin Rundkvist.

Alun Politics, The Past 1 Comment , , ,

PDQ SubmissionRundk­v­ist, M. 2007. Schol­arly Journ­als between the Past and the Future: The Forn­vännen Cen­ten­ary Round-Table Sem­inar, Stock­holmm 21 April 2006. Kon­fer­enser 65. Kungl. Vit­ter­hets His­torie och Anti­k­vitets Akademien.

It’s a meas­ure of the qual­ity of this book that I have delayed put­ting up a review until I have thought it could get the audi­ence it deserves. The volume brings together papers by nine edit­ors of journ­als across Europe, each with their own per­spect­ive on what the future holds for pub­lish­ing. Their opin­ions are diverse and pro­voc­at­ive, but even where some asser­tions are demon­strably wrong they high­light mis­con­cep­tions about pub­lish­ing which need to be tackled.

The first paper is ‘Schol­arly Open Access Journ­als and Lib­rar­ies’ by Jan Hager­lid. This can be an over­looked aspect of the Open Access debate, with aca­dem­ics con­cen­trat­ing on the con­tent rather than the medium. Hager­lid raises some inter­est­ing points high­light­ing that the aims even of of tra­di­tional and con­ser­vat­ive schol­ars do not neces­sar­ily align with those of pub­lish­ers. For example he notes that the trans­ition to elec­tronic sub­scrip­tion would have mean the end of the inter-library loan, had the pub­lish­ers been gran­ted what they deman­ded. He also argues that it would be wrong to treat pub­lish­ers as a mono­cul­ture. The big pub­lish­ers and their habit of bund­ling sub­scrip­tiosn with ever increas­ing prices threatens the sub­scrip­tion base of the inde­pend­ent journ­als. If the sub­scrip­tion model con­tin­ues to hold into the cur­rent cen­tury many smal­ler pub­lic­a­tions will either be bought out or dis­ap­pear. The paper provides an excel­lent sum­mar­ies of what Open Access means and why it is an import­ant issue. It also serves as a reminder that the changes ahead, how­ever they develop, are not trivial and will need col­lab­or­a­tion with lib­rar­i­ans if access of any sort to research is to con­tinue.
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Blog cited in a peer-reviewed journal

Alun Science, The Past 5 Comments , , , ,

Bill Cara­her men­tioned recently that Law and Lit­er­at­ure are fields which are accept­ing cita­tions of blog posts in art­icles. We can add another to the list, Archaeology.

Giulio Magli has a paper on the Ori­ent­a­tion of Roman towns in the Oxford Journal of Archae­ology this month. I’m not going to com­ment much on his con­clu­sions because it would mean writ­ing up extens­ive amounts of work in pro­gress for a blog. What I will draw atten­tion to is the bibliography.

citation

Yes it’s me.

I’ve been work­ing on a stat­ist­ical model for ana­lys­ing Greek temple align­ments. If it’s sound then it would work not only for sets of astro­nom­ical align­ments, but also pos­sibly ques­tions about coin dis­tri­bu­tions or plant pop­u­la­tions or things fur­ther afield than archae­ology. That’s if. It’s work-in-progress.
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Name that Blog Carnival / Journal

Alun Digital Academia No Comments

I put up a pro­posal for a blog car­ni­val / journal hybrid at the Ancient World Blog­gers Group. We’ve got the man­age­ment com­mit­tee and the 1st issue edit­ors. What we need is a name.

I sug­ges­ted The Past Dis­cussed Quarterly, but David Mead­ows makes the very good point that Q could be a real bind in the future if we want to change sched­ules, so I’m think­ing PD would be bet­ter. But are David and I in a minor­ity? A lot of people like PDQ. You can visit the AWBG and have your say or sug­gest some­thing else.

We’ll start call­ing for entries shortly.

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