Monday, May 13, 2013
Calculus for Jocks
In 1983, I taught my first course. The teaching assistants called it “Calculus for Poets”, but the incident I remember is about a basketball player. It gave me a glimpse into the mindset of college athletics departments in the US, and it cemented my opinion that competitive sports do not belong on campus.
I had come to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University a year earlier. Being on a computer-science research fellowship, I did not teach that first year. After switching into the mathematics department, I was a teaching assistant for one year, and I was assigned the Calculus undergraduate course.
Near the end of the first term, the basketball coach came, unannounced, to my (shared) office. He explained that this student athlete, while not a star player, was very important to the team. If the student failed calculus, his Grade Point Average (GPA) would be too low to continue on the team. This would surely hurt the team, and he needed my help.
The coach promised to work with the student in the second term and make up for the failed first term if I would just give him a passing grade now. According to the coach, this wasn't really dishonest. After all, this was calculus not history: When you fail a term of history, you have not learned what happened in a particular era, and you cannot make it up without taking that term over again. However, if you succeed in the second term of calculus after failing the first term, you really have made up your lack of knowledge of the first term, because you could not succeed in the second term without making up the knowledge you missed in the failed first term. So, I should let him pass now in anticipation of second-term success.
I had been in the US long enough to have heard about the power of coaches on campuses, and I told him I would think about it. I immediately walked over to the office of the faculty member overseeing the course. He was not available, but I described the incident to his secretary, and I asked to schedule an appointment. The appointment never materialized. Instead, I received a short note to handle the situation as I saw fit.
I felt badly about being brushed off like that. With the passing of time, it feels even stranger than it did at the time. The Courant Institute was an extremely social place. Graduate students and faculty mingled in the 13th floor lounge every day for coffee breaks and lunch. Courant faculty took their graduate students seriously, and I do not remember any other incident where a faculty member was dismissive of my concerns. Yet, in this case, a faculty member refused to examine a matter that could easily have mushroomed into something serious. In retrospect, I suspect the supervising faculty member may have been affiliated with the School of Arts and Sciences and not the Courant Institute. This would explain why I do not remember his name or face and why I have no recollection of ever meeting him, even for an orientation session.
I had to deal with the coach on my own. After another meeting, I did not give the student a passing grade, but I acquiesced to the next request from the coach. I let the student drop the course. NYU’s rules allowed for late drops, provided they were approved by the instructor. By dropping the course, the student barely satisfied the GPA requirement. Unfortunately for the team and fortunately for the student, his grades did not satisfy the parental requirement. After seeing his son’s results, the student's father stepped in. He pressured his son to stop playing basketball and start studying. The student newspaper lamented this turn of events.
This was a small incident. Many much worse incidents occur every day on every campus. Yet, NYU basketball was, and remains, a small-time program (NCAA Division III). In 2010, the Wall Street Journal thought NYU is neglecting its basketball program and should raise more money for it. A student athlete on this team, no matter how good a player, has absolutely no prospects to play professionally after college. Yet, this coach thought it totally justified to sacrifice the player's education for a few team wins.
I can only imagine what happens at a university that participates in NCAA Division I, where top players have more realistic hopes for a pot of gold at the end of their college career. Does that justify a fraudulent degree? I can only imagine how the coach of such a team deals with lowly teaching assistants, instructors, and assistant professors. His multi-million dollar paycheck, which far exceeds the paycheck of the university’s president, depends on a winning record. Given where his incentives are, how much does that coach care about his or her players and their education?
One of my fellow teaching assistants explained the system at his alma mater, a top research university in NCAA Division I. On the books, athletes took identical courses with identical numbers and the same number of credits. Somehow, they would be enrolled in special sections held at times and in locations that fit the athletes’ schedules. These sections were not listed in the catalog and unavailable to regular students. Were those sections just as hard? Were they graded on an athlete's curve? No one knew, not even the athletes. This old rumor may carry no weight as evidence, but it shows how easy it is to fix things. With millions of dollars on the line, do you trust that everyone will act ethically all the time?
Monday, April 22, 2013
The Sibyl of Cumae
“The seventh was of Cumae, by name Amalthaea, who is termed by some Herophile, or Demophile and they say that she brought nine books to the king Tarquinius Priscus, and asked for them three hundred philippics, and that the king refused so great a price, and derided the madness of the woman; that she, in the sight of the king, burnt three of the books, and demanded the same price for those which were left; that Tarquinius much more considered the woman to be mad; and that when she again, having burnt three other books, persisted in asking the same price, the king was moved, and bought the remaining books for the three hundred pieces of gold: and the number of these books was afterwards increased, after the rebuilding of the Capitol; because they were collected from all cities of Italy and Greece, and especially from those of Erythraea, and were brought to Rome, under the name of whatever Sibyl they were.”
The myth of the Sibyl of Cumae from: The Divine Institutes, by Lactantius (b. ca. A.D. 250), Book I, Chapter VI.
Publishers select, prepare, market, and disseminate information. They developed their selection processes at a time when it was expensive to prepare and disseminate information. As these costs decreased, they could publish more and be less selective. However, the selection process endows information with gravitas, a valuable commodity for marketing. Today's publishers must balance two conflicting interests: increase revenue by publishing as much as possible vs. increase profit margins by selectively publishing high-value information. Scholarly publishers found a way to do both.
Where the Sibyl of Cumae burned some books to increase the value of the remaining books, a scholarly journal rejects a certain number of papers for each paper it publishes. Many of the rejected papers may be interesting, but they do not fit the journal's mission. For the publisher, this is an opportunity to spawn new journals in the wake of its successful journals. Such portfolios of journals are less selective than their individual journals. Of course, if one considers the scholarly publishing industry at the macro level, the notion of selectivity virtually vanishes. Papers are submitted and re-submitted until an outlet is found.
The Sibyls of Scholarly Publishing perform an elaborate dance with pyrotechnic effects that give the illusion they burn papers. In fact, each Sibyl takes in new and rejected papers, packages some of them in a journal, and pretends to burn the rest before handing them off to her sisters. Each Sibyl maximizes the price in her respective corner of the universe. Academia repeatedly acts like King Tarquinius, who thinks the woman mad and pays the price she demands.
It may take years and several turnovers of the editorial board before an established journal that covers a large domain accepts papers in an emerging field. This has created a seemingly insatiable demand for new highly specialized journals. Each successful journal serves its publisher by raising revenue, its editorial-board members by raising their research prestige, and its authors by providing an avenue for dissemination of material without a natural home in existing journals. Many of these journals cater to such a small cadre of specialists that they subvert the single largest scholarly benefit of the refereeing process: a critical reading by someone with a different point of view and background. Even when run with the best of intentions, these narrow journals are echo chambers for group think. Emerging fields need some breathing room, particularly in the early developmental stages, but they should not be immune from outside criticism. Do these journals really serve the cause of good scholarship? Are they worth the super-inflationary cost increases, which they help create?
Open Access may not reduce the cost of scholarly communication as originally hoped. A large-scale conversion to Gold Open Access would shift the costs from universities to governments. Once university administrations no longer feel the budgetary pain and the costs are baked into government budgets, publishers would be free to continue the super-inflationary trajectory. There would not be any market forces that limit the introduction of new journals, the growth of existing journals, or the price charged per paper published. The access problem would be resolved by hiding, compounding, and postponing the cost problem. In the end, the scholarly-communication market would remain as dysfunctional as ever.
Technology has eroded the foundation of the current scholarly-communication system. It assumes that there is a scarcity of dissemination, and it uses that scarcity for the purpose of gatekeeping. In fact, dissemination is abundant and nearly free. The scarcity and associated gatekeeping are marketing illusions.
The reluctance to change is understandable. A scholarly-communication system is a delicate balancing act. It must be fair, but critical. It must discourage poor research, yet be supportive of new ideas, including ideas that challenge established views. Because scholarly communication is tied to research assessment, any changes to the system must gain wide institutional acceptance.
Ultimately, we have little choice but to accept today's reality. Anyone has the power to disseminate any information, regardless of quality. No one has the power to be a gatekeeper. At most, editorial boards have the power of influence in their respective communities; they can highlight important achievements and developments. But even this power to influence may soon be challenged by crowd-sourced quality labels of alternative metrics. (Perhaps not.)
We should be elated about the recent successes of the Open Access movement. We should also recognize that Open Access is not an end point. It is only the first step in the reinvention of scholarly communication.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Open Access Politics
The Open Access (OA) movement is gaining some high-level political traction.
The White House Open Access memorandum enacts a national Green OA mandate: Most US funding agencies are directed to set up OA repositories for the research they fund. This Green OA strategy contrasts with the Gold OA strategy proposed by the Finch report in the UK. The latter all but guarantees that established publishers will retain their revenue stream if they switch their business model from site licenses to Author Page Charges (APCs).
The White House memorandum is likely to have the greatest impact. As its consequences ripple through the system, the number and size of Green OA repositories is likely to grow substantially over the next few years. Large-scale validation of altmetrics and the development of new business models may lead to the emergence of new forms of scholarly communication. Green OA archivangelist Stevan Harnad hypothesizes a ten-step scenario of changes.
There are also reasons for concern. As this new phase of the OA movement unfolds on the national political stage, all sides will use their influence and try to re-shape the initial policies to further their respective agendas. The outcome of this political game is far from certain. Worse, the outcome may not be settled for years, as these kind of policies are easily reversed without significant voter backlash.
At its core, OA is about an industry changing because of (not-so-)new technology and its accompanying shift in attitudes and values. In such cases, we expect established players to resist innovation by (ab)using politics and litigation. The entertainment industry lobbied and litigated against VCRs, DVRs, every Internet service ever launched, and now even antennas. In the dysfunctional scholarly-communication market, on the other hand, it is the innovators who resort to politics.
To understand why, suppose university libraries were funded by user-paid memberships and/or service fees. In this scenario, libraries and publishers encountered the same paper-to-digital transition costs. When library prices sky rocketed, students and faculty created underground exchanges of scholarly information. They cancelled their library memberships and/or stopped using their services. The publishers' revenue streams collapsed. Only the most successful journals survived, and even they suffered. Publishing a paper became increasingly difficult because of a lack of journals. This created an opening for experiments in scholarly publishing. This bottoms-up free-market transition would have been chaotic, painful, and forgotten by now.
We do not need to convert our libraries and research institutions into free-market enterprises. We do not need to abandon the fundamental principles on which these institutions are built. On the contrary, we must return to those principles and apply them in a new technological reality. Rebuilding the foundations of institutions is hard under the best of circumstances. When users are shielded from the external incentives/hardships of the free market, it is near impossible to disrupt, and continuity remains an option far beyond reason.
Green OA is an indirect approach to achieve fundamental change. It asks scholars to accept a little inconvenience for the sake of the larger principle. It asks them to deposit their papers into OA repositories and provide free access to publicly-funded research. It is hoped that this will gradually change the journal ecosystem and build pressure to innovate. It took dedicated developers, activists, advocates, and academic leaders over twenty years to promote this modest goal and create a movement that, finally, seems to have achieved critical mass. A growing number of universities have enacted OA mandates. These pioneers led the way, but only a government mandate can achieve the scale required to change the market. Enter politics.
Scholars, the creators and consumers of this market, should be able to dictate their terms. Yet, they are beholden to the establishment journals (and their publishers), which are the fountain of academic prestige. The SCOAP3 initiative for High Energy Physics journals shows how scholars are willing to go to unprecedented lengths to protect their journals.
Market-dominating scholarly publishers are paralyzed. They cannot abandon their only source of significant revenue (site licenses) on a hunch that another business model may work out better in the long term. In the mean time, they promote an impossible-to-defend hybrid Gold OA scheme, and they miss an opportunity to create value from author/reader networks (an opportunity recognized by upstart innovators). This business paralysis translates into a lobbying effort to protect the status quo for as long as feasible.
Academic libraries, which enthusiastically supported and developed Green OA, now enter this political arena in a weak position. The White House memorandum all but ignores them. Before complacency sets in, there is precious little time to argue a compelling case for independent institutional or individual repositories preserved in a long-term archive. After all, government-run repositories may disappear at any time for a variety of reasons.
The Gold OA approach of the Finch report is conceptually simpler. Neither scholars nor publishers are inconvenienced, let alone disrupted. It underwrites the survival of favored journals as Gold OA entities. It preempts real innovation. Without a mechanism in place to limit APCs, it's good to be a scholarly publisher in the UK. For now.
The White House Open Access memorandum enacts a national Green OA mandate: Most US funding agencies are directed to set up OA repositories for the research they fund. This Green OA strategy contrasts with the Gold OA strategy proposed by the Finch report in the UK. The latter all but guarantees that established publishers will retain their revenue stream if they switch their business model from site licenses to Author Page Charges (APCs).
The White House memorandum is likely to have the greatest impact. As its consequences ripple through the system, the number and size of Green OA repositories is likely to grow substantially over the next few years. Large-scale validation of altmetrics and the development of new business models may lead to the emergence of new forms of scholarly communication. Green OA archivangelist Stevan Harnad hypothesizes a ten-step scenario of changes.
There are also reasons for concern. As this new phase of the OA movement unfolds on the national political stage, all sides will use their influence and try to re-shape the initial policies to further their respective agendas. The outcome of this political game is far from certain. Worse, the outcome may not be settled for years, as these kind of policies are easily reversed without significant voter backlash.
At its core, OA is about an industry changing because of (not-so-)new technology and its accompanying shift in attitudes and values. In such cases, we expect established players to resist innovation by (ab)using politics and litigation. The entertainment industry lobbied and litigated against VCRs, DVRs, every Internet service ever launched, and now even antennas. In the dysfunctional scholarly-communication market, on the other hand, it is the innovators who resort to politics.
To understand why, suppose university libraries were funded by user-paid memberships and/or service fees. In this scenario, libraries and publishers encountered the same paper-to-digital transition costs. When library prices sky rocketed, students and faculty created underground exchanges of scholarly information. They cancelled their library memberships and/or stopped using their services. The publishers' revenue streams collapsed. Only the most successful journals survived, and even they suffered. Publishing a paper became increasingly difficult because of a lack of journals. This created an opening for experiments in scholarly publishing. This bottoms-up free-market transition would have been chaotic, painful, and forgotten by now.
We do not need to convert our libraries and research institutions into free-market enterprises. We do not need to abandon the fundamental principles on which these institutions are built. On the contrary, we must return to those principles and apply them in a new technological reality. Rebuilding the foundations of institutions is hard under the best of circumstances. When users are shielded from the external incentives/hardships of the free market, it is near impossible to disrupt, and continuity remains an option far beyond reason.
Green OA is an indirect approach to achieve fundamental change. It asks scholars to accept a little inconvenience for the sake of the larger principle. It asks them to deposit their papers into OA repositories and provide free access to publicly-funded research. It is hoped that this will gradually change the journal ecosystem and build pressure to innovate. It took dedicated developers, activists, advocates, and academic leaders over twenty years to promote this modest goal and create a movement that, finally, seems to have achieved critical mass. A growing number of universities have enacted OA mandates. These pioneers led the way, but only a government mandate can achieve the scale required to change the market. Enter politics.
Scholars, the creators and consumers of this market, should be able to dictate their terms. Yet, they are beholden to the establishment journals (and their publishers), which are the fountain of academic prestige. The SCOAP3 initiative for High Energy Physics journals shows how scholars are willing to go to unprecedented lengths to protect their journals.
Market-dominating scholarly publishers are paralyzed. They cannot abandon their only source of significant revenue (site licenses) on a hunch that another business model may work out better in the long term. In the mean time, they promote an impossible-to-defend hybrid Gold OA scheme, and they miss an opportunity to create value from author/reader networks (an opportunity recognized by upstart innovators). This business paralysis translates into a lobbying effort to protect the status quo for as long as feasible.
Academic libraries, which enthusiastically supported and developed Green OA, now enter this political arena in a weak position. The White House memorandum all but ignores them. Before complacency sets in, there is precious little time to argue a compelling case for independent institutional or individual repositories preserved in a long-term archive. After all, government-run repositories may disappear at any time for a variety of reasons.
The Gold OA approach of the Finch report is conceptually simpler. Neither scholars nor publishers are inconvenienced, let alone disrupted. It underwrites the survival of favored journals as Gold OA entities. It preempts real innovation. Without a mechanism in place to limit APCs, it's good to be a scholarly publisher in the UK. For now.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Crowd Sourcing Gun Control
Background checks deter only those with prior offenses. For more comprehensive gun-violence prevention, we need systems that help law enforcement focus on high-risk individuals before their first offense. Such prevention systems must operate within important legal and political constraints: they must be compatible with the second amendment, they must be relatively effortless for the vast majority of low-risk gun buyers/owners, and they must respect the privacy of all citizens.
Graph theory makes it possible to extract strong information from a large set of weak relationships. It is the foundation of companies like Google and Facebook. It is the basis for alternative metrics that assess the quality of scholarly papers. Graph theory also applies to gun control. As individuals, we absorb all kinds of information about others and decide to like or dislike, befriend or avoid, trust or distrust them. These individual assessments are rather unreliable, but they become a powerful resource when connected with one another in a graph. For gun control, imagine a system in which gun owners recommend one another. This creates a graph on which to unleash the power of graph theory.
Consider a concrete example (no graph-theory knowledge required):
The impact on high-risk gun owners is more substantial. Very few law-abiding gun owners would be willing to sponsor someone they consider dangerous because of mental health, behavioral issues, or criminal connections. Convicted criminals cannot be QRs, because they cannot be legal gun owners. This reduces the pool of available QRs for their non-convicted associates. Law enforcement can reduce that pool even further: when they arrest someone, they could revoke the QR status of the arrestee and of his/her QRs (under the theory that these QRs are unreliable).
Consider a few scenarios.
Scenario 1. Joe is a gun owner. His QRs are his wife (Mary) and two friends (John and Pete).
Scenario 1a. Joe develops a mental-health problem and is in therapy. Mary convinces Joe to dispose of the guns. Mary withdraws her recommendation and, perhaps, approaches John and Pete to withdraw theirs. There are no legal proceedings of any kind.
Scenario 1b. Joe develops a mental-health problem, refuses therapy, and develops violent tendencies. The QRs and the police develop a plan to withdraw their recommendations and, simultaneously, to impound Joe's weapons. After the emergency intervention, Joe's fitness to own guns is evaluated.
Scenario 1c. Joe is arrested under suspicion of committing a violent crime.
Upon his arrest, Joe's QR status is revoked immediately. Joe's gun rights depend on the resolution of the criminal case against him. Mary, John, and Pete are not legally liable for failing to intervene in time, but their QR status is revoked.
Mary, John, and Pete remain legal gun owners. If they acted as each other's QRs, they have to find replacement QRs. For most gun owners, these circumstances are an extremely rare occurrence, and replacing QRs is a low hurdle. For criminal gangs, every arrest eliminates QRs from their environment and increases their difficulty of replacing QRs.
Scenario 2. Bill sells his recommendations. As soon as he is identified as a shady operator, the police subjects his network to heightened scrutiny. With the first arrest in Bill's network, he loses his QR status, and his recommendations are voided. As Bill's clients find replacement QRs, they leave useful network trails.
Scenario 3. Mary, a law-abiding citizen living in a gang-infested neighborhood, wants a gun for protection. Some of her relatives and friends have arrest records, and she cannot find three QRs. She is a high-risk gun buyer because of the circumstances of her life: her gun is at much higher risk to be stolen and/or misused. She is able to buy a gun after passing an in-depth background investigation.
Scenario 4. Bob is a criminal and does not care about gun laws. Because his guns are illegal, he faces a much harsher sentence if arrested and convicted.
Bob's guns are most likely stolen or obtained from sources that claim their guns were stolen or lost. If one of his guns is traced back to Mary, her QR status is revoked immediately. If Mary is an innocent bystander, losing her QR status is no big deal. If she is a member of a network that traffics guns illegally, this incident reduces the pool of available QRs.
Other Scenarios. The QR system implements a form of social control that occurs organically in small communities where everyone knows their neighbors (a rarity nowadays). The process of finding QRs provides opportunities for a community to intervene in a non-confrontational manner and to help prospective gun buyers make a realistic assessment of their own risk profile.
The QR system shows that gun-violence prevention does not require storing detailed personal information. It shows that an alert and involved community does not need to become a society of snoops that report every eccentricity to the police. Yet, the QR system is just one example. Graph theory provides a lot of flexibility to respond to legal and political concerns.
I call on the graph-theory community to contribute to the gun-control effort. It is up to you. Criticize. Amend. Propose. Do something. Anything. Save lives.
Graph theory makes it possible to extract strong information from a large set of weak relationships. It is the foundation of companies like Google and Facebook. It is the basis for alternative metrics that assess the quality of scholarly papers. Graph theory also applies to gun control. As individuals, we absorb all kinds of information about others and decide to like or dislike, befriend or avoid, trust or distrust them. These individual assessments are rather unreliable, but they become a powerful resource when connected with one another in a graph. For gun control, imagine a system in which gun owners recommend one another. This creates a graph on which to unleash the power of graph theory.
Consider a concrete example (no graph-theory knowledge required):
- Every gun buyer/owner registers three Qualified Recommenders (QRs). Without assuming any legal liability, QRs state that the gun buyer/owner is not presently a danger to himself/herself or to society and that they will withdraw as QR if their opinion changes or if they should lose contact with the gun owner.
- Most legal gun owners may act as a QR. However, law enforcement may revoke anyone's QR status at any time for any reason. Such action prevents this person from submitting new recommendations, and it voids his/her existing recommendations. Revoking the QR status carries no other consequences. One's own QR status does not affect one's right to own guns.
- A gun buyer who is unable to obtain three QRs is subject to a background investigation that may include interviews with family, friends, and neighbors.
- A gun owner may lose recommendations because (1) QRs may withdraw their recommendation, (2) QRs may die, or (3) QRs may lose their QR status. A gun owner who does not maintain three QRs is subject to increased scrutiny.
The impact on high-risk gun owners is more substantial. Very few law-abiding gun owners would be willing to sponsor someone they consider dangerous because of mental health, behavioral issues, or criminal connections. Convicted criminals cannot be QRs, because they cannot be legal gun owners. This reduces the pool of available QRs for their non-convicted associates. Law enforcement can reduce that pool even further: when they arrest someone, they could revoke the QR status of the arrestee and of his/her QRs (under the theory that these QRs are unreliable).
Consider a few scenarios.
Scenario 1. Joe is a gun owner. His QRs are his wife (Mary) and two friends (John and Pete).
Scenario 1a. Joe develops a mental-health problem and is in therapy. Mary convinces Joe to dispose of the guns. Mary withdraws her recommendation and, perhaps, approaches John and Pete to withdraw theirs. There are no legal proceedings of any kind.
Scenario 1b. Joe develops a mental-health problem, refuses therapy, and develops violent tendencies. The QRs and the police develop a plan to withdraw their recommendations and, simultaneously, to impound Joe's weapons. After the emergency intervention, Joe's fitness to own guns is evaluated.
Scenario 1c. Joe is arrested under suspicion of committing a violent crime.
Upon his arrest, Joe's QR status is revoked immediately. Joe's gun rights depend on the resolution of the criminal case against him. Mary, John, and Pete are not legally liable for failing to intervene in time, but their QR status is revoked.
Mary, John, and Pete remain legal gun owners. If they acted as each other's QRs, they have to find replacement QRs. For most gun owners, these circumstances are an extremely rare occurrence, and replacing QRs is a low hurdle. For criminal gangs, every arrest eliminates QRs from their environment and increases their difficulty of replacing QRs.
Scenario 2. Bill sells his recommendations. As soon as he is identified as a shady operator, the police subjects his network to heightened scrutiny. With the first arrest in Bill's network, he loses his QR status, and his recommendations are voided. As Bill's clients find replacement QRs, they leave useful network trails.
Scenario 3. Mary, a law-abiding citizen living in a gang-infested neighborhood, wants a gun for protection. Some of her relatives and friends have arrest records, and she cannot find three QRs. She is a high-risk gun buyer because of the circumstances of her life: her gun is at much higher risk to be stolen and/or misused. She is able to buy a gun after passing an in-depth background investigation.
Scenario 4. Bob is a criminal and does not care about gun laws. Because his guns are illegal, he faces a much harsher sentence if arrested and convicted.
Bob's guns are most likely stolen or obtained from sources that claim their guns were stolen or lost. If one of his guns is traced back to Mary, her QR status is revoked immediately. If Mary is an innocent bystander, losing her QR status is no big deal. If she is a member of a network that traffics guns illegally, this incident reduces the pool of available QRs.
Other Scenarios. The QR system implements a form of social control that occurs organically in small communities where everyone knows their neighbors (a rarity nowadays). The process of finding QRs provides opportunities for a community to intervene in a non-confrontational manner and to help prospective gun buyers make a realistic assessment of their own risk profile.
The QR system shows that gun-violence prevention does not require storing detailed personal information. It shows that an alert and involved community does not need to become a society of snoops that report every eccentricity to the police. Yet, the QR system is just one example. Graph theory provides a lot of flexibility to respond to legal and political concerns.
I call on the graph-theory community to contribute to the gun-control effort. It is up to you. Criticize. Amend. Propose. Do something. Anything. Save lives.
Monday, January 14, 2013
MOOCs Teach OA a Lesson
Just four years ago, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were tentative experiments promoted by a handful of professors. (Wikipedia, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education) Today, universities across the world are rushing in, and millions of students are enrolling. Contrast this with the Open Access movement (OA). More than twenty years after the introduction of the hep-th database (which became arXiv), OA remains a struggle. There have been significant OA advances, but universal open access to the scholarly literature remains a distant promise, probably requiring many more years.
Why did OA never reach the kind of momentum MOOCs seem to have?
Because successful MOOCs serve many thousands of students, their per-student costs are extremely low when compared to traditional teaching. Yet, the cost of producing a series of high-quality large-scale interactive multimedia events is significant. Compared with MOOCs, the start-up cost of OA is almost negligible. After an institutional repository is set up, the only barrier to OA is a few key strokes per scholarly paper.
Why were academic leaders so concerned about the minimal costs of OA? Why are they not concerned about the far more significant costs of MOOCs?
MOOCs have the potential of disrupting thousands of teaching positions. MOOCs are a threat to admissions offices and a system of university reputations based on rejection rates. On the other hand, universal OA would primarily disrupt libraries, publishers, and their middlemen, not academics. Yet, academic leaders are enamored with MOOCs, and they treat OA like a chore for which there is always some excuse to postpone. If MOOCs really prove to be as disruptive as hoped or feared, they figure it is preferable to be on the side of the disrupters.
Why do academic leaders not make the same calculation with respect to OA? Why do they fear the potential of OA-caused disruption? Why do they embrace the potential of MOOCs-caused disruption?
In my search for answers, I arrived at four tentative conjectures.
Conjecture 1. MOOCs are in their infancy. The wave of initial excitement will pass, and the hard MOOC work lies ahead. OA is further along in its evolution. Passed its own wave of initial excitement, OA is now in the slow process of building its infrastructure. Some form of OA will soon emerge as the inevitable path.
This conjecture provides cover to continue on the current path.
Conjecture 2. With MOOCs, first movers have a clear advantage. They have the most time to develop the know-how for producing successful MOOCs. With little competition, they can afford to make mistakes and learn from them. With OA, first movers provide a service to those on the sidelines and get little in return. (This perverse incentive explains, in part, the need for OA mandates.)
This begs for initiatives that reward scholars who make their works OA.
Conjecture 3. With MOOCs, faculty control their work, and they do what they do best: they innovate an area in which they are experts. OA feels like an external imposition. To add insult to injury, some repository managers have turned simple light-weight OA repositories into a bureaucratic mess with useless policies that turn faculty off. And it is not just repository policies. Scholars are increasingly awash in conflicting and confusing OA-related policies from funding agencies, publishers, universities, and libraries. Discussions about OA mandates do not help the cause either. It is irrelevant that OA mandates require very little effort when enacted; the discussion itself is a turn-off.
This is an argument to reduce the heavy-handedness of current OA approaches. Eliminate the bureaucracy, and replace institutional repositories with self-managed individual repositories. These may not eliminate all institutional policies, but they give scholars a greater degree of control and flexibility. Individual repositories are also portable when scholars move from one institution to the next. There are at least two options that make it easy for scholars to manage their own individual repository: academia.edu and myopenarchive.org. ORCID, the recently launched initiative to manage the identities of scholars, could also evolve into a system of individual repositories.
Conjecture 4. OA is not sufficiently disruptive. Hoping to minimize resistance to OA, OA advocates tend to underemphasize the disruptiveness of OA. Gold and Green OA leave the scholarly-communication system essentially intact. When presented in a minimalist frame, they are minor tweaks that provide open access, shift costs, and bend the cost curve. Such modest, even boring, goals do not capture the imagination of the most effective advocates for change, advocates who have the ears of and who are courted by academic leaders: venture capitalists. This is a constituency that seeks out projects that change the world.
This conjecture is an argument to pursue disruptive OA. What if OA completely erased the cost of all scholarly communication? That would reduce the cost of education and/or research by at least as much as some of the most disruptive MOOC scenarios.
PeerJ falls in the category of disruptive OA. PeerJ is a new model for open-access journals with peer review. PeerJ charges authors a one-time $99 membership fee and eliminates the per-paper publication charges of Gold OA journals.
One could, of course, dispose of journals altogether. Combine individual repositories with open evaluation and alternative metrics. The field of altmetrics has developed various impact measures based on usage statistics of individual papers. This fine-grained analysis is far superior to the rather coarse and often misleading Journal Impact Factor. To succeed, open evaluation and altmetrics must win over the entrenched interests that control academia's prestige machine.
Perhaps, none of these conjectures fully explain differing attitudes towards MOOCs and OA. Perhaps, it is a combination of all four. Perhaps, there are other factors at play. If so, what are they, and how should those factors influence our approach to OA?
Why did OA never reach the kind of momentum MOOCs seem to have?
Because successful MOOCs serve many thousands of students, their per-student costs are extremely low when compared to traditional teaching. Yet, the cost of producing a series of high-quality large-scale interactive multimedia events is significant. Compared with MOOCs, the start-up cost of OA is almost negligible. After an institutional repository is set up, the only barrier to OA is a few key strokes per scholarly paper.
Why were academic leaders so concerned about the minimal costs of OA? Why are they not concerned about the far more significant costs of MOOCs?
MOOCs have the potential of disrupting thousands of teaching positions. MOOCs are a threat to admissions offices and a system of university reputations based on rejection rates. On the other hand, universal OA would primarily disrupt libraries, publishers, and their middlemen, not academics. Yet, academic leaders are enamored with MOOCs, and they treat OA like a chore for which there is always some excuse to postpone. If MOOCs really prove to be as disruptive as hoped or feared, they figure it is preferable to be on the side of the disrupters.
Why do academic leaders not make the same calculation with respect to OA? Why do they fear the potential of OA-caused disruption? Why do they embrace the potential of MOOCs-caused disruption?
In my search for answers, I arrived at four tentative conjectures.
Conjecture 1. MOOCs are in their infancy. The wave of initial excitement will pass, and the hard MOOC work lies ahead. OA is further along in its evolution. Passed its own wave of initial excitement, OA is now in the slow process of building its infrastructure. Some form of OA will soon emerge as the inevitable path.
This conjecture provides cover to continue on the current path.
Conjecture 2. With MOOCs, first movers have a clear advantage. They have the most time to develop the know-how for producing successful MOOCs. With little competition, they can afford to make mistakes and learn from them. With OA, first movers provide a service to those on the sidelines and get little in return. (This perverse incentive explains, in part, the need for OA mandates.)
This begs for initiatives that reward scholars who make their works OA.
Conjecture 3. With MOOCs, faculty control their work, and they do what they do best: they innovate an area in which they are experts. OA feels like an external imposition. To add insult to injury, some repository managers have turned simple light-weight OA repositories into a bureaucratic mess with useless policies that turn faculty off. And it is not just repository policies. Scholars are increasingly awash in conflicting and confusing OA-related policies from funding agencies, publishers, universities, and libraries. Discussions about OA mandates do not help the cause either. It is irrelevant that OA mandates require very little effort when enacted; the discussion itself is a turn-off.
This is an argument to reduce the heavy-handedness of current OA approaches. Eliminate the bureaucracy, and replace institutional repositories with self-managed individual repositories. These may not eliminate all institutional policies, but they give scholars a greater degree of control and flexibility. Individual repositories are also portable when scholars move from one institution to the next. There are at least two options that make it easy for scholars to manage their own individual repository: academia.edu and myopenarchive.org. ORCID, the recently launched initiative to manage the identities of scholars, could also evolve into a system of individual repositories.
Conjecture 4. OA is not sufficiently disruptive. Hoping to minimize resistance to OA, OA advocates tend to underemphasize the disruptiveness of OA. Gold and Green OA leave the scholarly-communication system essentially intact. When presented in a minimalist frame, they are minor tweaks that provide open access, shift costs, and bend the cost curve. Such modest, even boring, goals do not capture the imagination of the most effective advocates for change, advocates who have the ears of and who are courted by academic leaders: venture capitalists. This is a constituency that seeks out projects that change the world.
This conjecture is an argument to pursue disruptive OA. What if OA completely erased the cost of all scholarly communication? That would reduce the cost of education and/or research by at least as much as some of the most disruptive MOOC scenarios.
PeerJ falls in the category of disruptive OA. PeerJ is a new model for open-access journals with peer review. PeerJ charges authors a one-time $99 membership fee and eliminates the per-paper publication charges of Gold OA journals.
One could, of course, dispose of journals altogether. Combine individual repositories with open evaluation and alternative metrics. The field of altmetrics has developed various impact measures based on usage statistics of individual papers. This fine-grained analysis is far superior to the rather coarse and often misleading Journal Impact Factor. To succeed, open evaluation and altmetrics must win over the entrenched interests that control academia's prestige machine.
Perhaps, none of these conjectures fully explain differing attitudes towards MOOCs and OA. Perhaps, it is a combination of all four. Perhaps, there are other factors at play. If so, what are they, and how should those factors influence our approach to OA?
Monday, November 5, 2012
Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke
Publishers are manipulative capitalists who extort academia by holding hostage the research papers they stole from helpless scholars on a mission to save the world. This Hitler vs. Mother Teresa narrative is widespread in academic circles. Some versions are nearly as shrill as this one. Others are toned-down and carry scholarly authority. All versions are just plain wrong.
Scholarly publishers do what is expected of them: they offer a service and maximize their profit. Prices are set by a free market, where consumers make cost-benefit evaluations and decide to buy or not. If journal prices keep rising at exorbitant rates, assess why publishers have the power to dictate prices, and fix what is wrong. Do not blame the bee for the sting; it is what bees do.
Scholars submit their manuscripts to journals to expose and validate their work. They are referees because they benefit from the peer-review system or hope to benefit eventually. When they become editor of a journal, scholars advance up the prestige ladder in proportion to the reputation of the journal. Every step of the publishing process rewards scholars in the currency of academic prestige, the foundation of a portfolio that leads to academic appointments.
If journals were only about the dissemination of information, they would not survive current market conditions. There are free resources (not all legal) to obtain scholarly papers: from open-access repositories, from colleagues by e-mail, or from Twitter-enabled exchanges. There are free resources to disseminate research: blogs, web sites, or self-published e-books. None of these alternatives to acquire or disseminate research have affected the scholarly-information market. Scholarly journals are expensive not because they disseminate information, but because they disseminate prestige.
Authors and editors benefit from a journal's prestige, and the survival of “their journal” is important to their field's prestige and, by implication, their own. They never personally face the cost-benefit question (Is a journal's prestige worth its price?), but they influence their organization's subscription decisions. In faculty discussions, the issue of access often serves as a proxy for prestige. For authors and editors, the university canceling “their journal” is outright institutional rejection. To a certain extent, journal subscriptions are a means to divvy up prestige. This inherently dysfunctional market is further distorted by site licenses. (See a previous blog post.)
There are no Hitlers. There are no Mothers Teresa. There are just individuals and organizations looking out for their self-interest in a market complicated by historical baggage (site licenses modeled after paper-journal subscriptions) and competing interests (access, prestige, cost, profit). Academic leaders are concerned about the cost of scholarly communication, but they are equally reluctant to undermine the established system for assessing and rewarding excellence in scholarship.
Scholarly publishers create value by attaching prestige to (what has become) a commodity service. This is not unlike Coca Cola, which ties its commodity products to various nostalgic sentiments. Where Coca Cola invested in mass-marketing campaigns, publishers invested in relationships with academia. They developed the capability of identifying emerging disciplines ready for new journals. They learned how to select editors. They learned how to acquire and disseminate academic prestige. They achieved the power to set prices by seamlessly attaching their prestige infrastructure to the academic enterprise. However, just like team spirit, family togetherness, and the desire for world peace would survive the loss of sugary flavored water, the pursuit of prestige will survive new dissemination methods for scholarly communication.
From a free-market perspective, Gold Open Access journals seem to have the right structure. When authors pay to be published, they weigh the prestige of the journal against its price. Yet, there is a problem. To survive, a Gold journal only needs a relatively small base of paying authors. It does not need subscribers. It does not need a high impact factor. This presents an opening for opportunists to create vanity platforms. To counter this, universities could prohibit the use of institutional funds to pay for publication in low-impact journals. Unfortunately, this would also increase the difficulty of launching legitimate new Gold journals, decrease competition, and increase prices.
Scholars who grew up with the web will, eventually, question the paper-era structure of all journals. The burgeoning field of alternative metrics uses graph theory to produce article-level quantitative assessments based on correlated web usage. Altmetrics will first complement, then compete with, and ultimately replace the journal impact factor. When articles are assessed based on their own metrics, bundling articles into a journal loses much of its significance. Today, respected academics will not accept a blog post, a self-published e-book (long or short form), or a web site as a valid method to establish academic credibility, let alone prestige. This skepticism is justified, dismissiveness is not.
The journal impact factor exerts its influence through an infrastructure of editorial boards and related organizations that took decades to develop. To achieve that kind of institutional impact, altmetrics need their own social constructs. It may take considerable time and effort to develop these constructs and to have them institutionally accepted. But if it succeeds, such a prestige infrastructure could herald a new era of scholarly communication based on personal dissemination methods.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
A Physics Experiment
Researchers in High Energy Physics (HEP) live for that moment when they can observe results, interpret data, and raise new questions. When it arrives, after a lifetime of planning, funding, and building an experiment, they set aside emotional attachment and let the data speak.
Since 1991, virtually all HEP research papers have been freely available through an online database. This repository, now known as arXiv, inspired the Green model of the Open Access movement: Scholars submit author-formatted versions of their refereed papers to open-access repositories. With this simple action, they create an open-access alternative to the formal scholarly-communication system, which mostly consists of pay-walled journals. The HEP scholarly-communication market gives us an opportunity to observe the impact of 100% Green Open Access. Following the scientists' example, let us take a moment, observe this twenty-year-long large-scale experiment, and let the data speak.
When publishers digitized scholarly journals in the 1990s, they added site licenses as an add-on option to paper-journal subscriptions. Within a few years, paper-journal subscriptions all but disappeared. At first, publishers continued the super-inflationary price trajectory of subscriptions. Then, they steepened the price curve with assorted technology fees and access charges for digitized back-files of old issues. The growing journal-pricing crisis motivated many university administrators to support the Open Access movement. While the latter is about access, not about the cost of publishing, it is impossible to separate the two issues.
In 1997, the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) launched the Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP) as an open-access journal. JHEP was an initial step towards a larger goal, now referred to as Gold Open Access: replacing the current scholarly-communication system with a barrier-free system of journals without pay walls. The JHEP team implemented a highly efficient system to process submitted papers, thereby reducing the journal's operating costs to the bare minimum. The remaining expenses were covered by a handful of research organizations, which agreed to a cost-sharing formula for the benefit of their community. This institutional-funding model proved unsustainable, and JHEP converted to a site-licensed journal in 2003. This step back seems strange now, because JHEP could have copied the funding model of BioMed Central, which had launched in 2000 and funded open access by charging authors a per-article processing fee. Presumably, JHEP's leadership considered this author-pay model too experimental and too risky after their initial attempt at open access. In spite of its difficult start, JHEP was an academic success and subsequently prospered financially as a site-licensed journal produced by Springer under the auspices of SISSA.
Green Open Access delivers the immediate benefit of access. Proponents argue it will also, over time, fundamentally change the scholarly-communication market. The twenty-year HEP record lends support to the belief that Green Open Access has a moderating influence: HEP journals are priced at more reasonable levels than other disciplines. However, the HEP record thus far does not support the notion that Green Open Access creates significant change:
- Only one event occurred that could have been considered disruptive: JHEP capturing almost 20% of the HEP market as an open-access journal. Instead, this event turned into a case of reverse disruption!
- There was no change in the business model. All leading HEP publishers of 2012 still use pre-1991 business channels. They still sell to the same clients (acquisition departments of academic libraries) through the same intermediaries (journal aggregators). They sell a different product (site licenses instead of subscriptions), and the transactions differ, but the business model survives unchanged.
- No journals with significant HEP market share disappeared. Even with arXiv as an open-access alternative, canceling an established HEP journal is politically toxic at any university with a significant HEP department. This creates a scholarly-communication market that is highly resistant to change.
- Journal prices continued on a trajectory virtually unaffected by turbulent economic times.
In an attempt to re-engineer the market, influential HEP organizations launched the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³). It is negotiating with publishers the conversion of established HEP journals to Gold Open Access. To pay for this, hundreds of research institutions world-wide must pool the funds they are currently spending on HEP site licenses. Negotiated article processing charges will, in aggregate, preserve the revenue stream from academia to publishers.
If SCOAP³ proves sustainable, it will become the de-facto sponsor and manager of all HEP publishing world-wide. It will create a barrier-free open-access system of refereed articles produced by professional publishers. This is an improvement over arXiv, which contains mostly author-formatted material.
Many have praised the initiative. Others have denounced it. Those who observe with scientific detachment merely note that, after twenty years of 100% Green Open Access, the HEP establishment really wants Gold Open Access.
The HEP open-access experiment continues.
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