Post Open Access

AcaWiki

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

AcaWiki† officiously launches tomorrow. The goal is to make academic knowledge more accessible through wiki community curated article “summaries” — something like long abstracts aimed at a general audience rather than specialists.

This could be seen as an end-run around access and copyright restrictions (the Open Access movement has made tremendous progress though there is still much to be done), but AcaWiki is a very partial solution to that problem — sometimes an article summary (assuming AcaWiki has one) would be enough, though often a researcher would still need access to the full paper (and the full dataset, but that’s another battle).

More interesting to me is the potential for AcaWiki summaries to increase the impact of research by making it more accessible in another way — comprehensible to non-specialists and approachable by non-speedreaders. I read a fair number of academic papers and many more get left on my reading queue unread. A “human readable” distillation of the key points of articles (abstracts typically convey next to nothing or are filled with jargon) would really let me ingest more.

Probably the closest things to AcaWiki summaries are Research Blogging and the idea that journal authors should contribute to Wikipedia. While both of these are great, blog posts don’t obtain the benefits (and costs) of distributed authoring and maintenance and direct contribution of research to Wikipedia has very limited applicability. So I think AcaWiki can make a big contribution. It could turn out that some granularity other than individual article summary is the sweet spot for community curation of academic knowledge — one could imagine field and sub-field and sub-sub-field surveys organized in WikiProject†† fashion as that — but article summaries are a very concrete place to begin, and more should naturally grow out of the AcaWiki community’s efforts to figure out the best ways to create and organize article summaries.

I’ve written a summary of Steven Levitt’s Why are Gambling Markets Organised So Differently from Financial Markets? I’d be really appreciative of article summaries in the following categories:

†I’ve been somewhat involved in AcaWiki over the past year — I’m on its board and Creative Commons has done some technology consulting on the project, credit to Nathan and bits from Steren, Nathan K, Alex and Parker — and note that Neeru Paharia, AcaWiki’s founder, was one of CC’s earliest employees. AcaWiki summaries are of course contributed under a CC Attribution license, so you can do anything you want with them so long as you link back to the summary.

††I urge anyone not already impressed by the contribution of WikiProjects on Wikipedia or generally interested in community curation and quality to check out Martin Walker’s WikiProjects: Improving Wikipedia by organising and assessing articles presented at Wikimania 2009.

Posted in Creative Commons, Open Access, Prediction Markets, Wikipedia | 9 Comments »

Peer producing think tank transparency

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency from the looks like a reasonable exhortation for the U.S. jurisdiction government to publish data in so that government activities may be more easily scrutinized. The paper’s first paragraph:

The federal government makes an overwhelming amount of data publicly available each year. Laws ranging from the Administrative Procedure Act to the Paperwork Reduction Act require these disclosures in the name of transparency and accountability. However, the data are often only nominally publicly available. First, this is the case because it is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the data that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. If government information was made public online and in standard open formats, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the transparency and accountability that is the reason for making information public in the first place.

That’s great. But if peer produced (a more general and less inflammatory term than crowdsourced; I recommend it) scrutiny of government is great, why not of think tanks? Let’s rewrite that paragraph:

Think tanks produce an overwhelming number of analyses and policy recommendations each year. It is in the interest of the public and the think thanks that these recommendations be of high quality. However, the the data and methodology used to produce these positions are often not publicly available. First, this is the case because the data is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the analysis that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. Third, nearly everything published by think tanks is copyrighted. If think tank data and analysis was made public online in standard open formats and under open licenses, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the quality and public benefit of the policy recommendations that are the think tanks’ reason for existing in the first place.

Think tanks should lead by example, and improve their product to boot. Note the third point above: unlike , the output of think tanks (and everyone else) is restricted by copyright. So think tanks need to take an to ensure openness.

(Actually think tanks only need to lead in their domain of political economy — by following the trails blazed by the movement in scientific publishing.)

This is only the beginning of leading by example for think tanks. When has a pro-market think tank ever subjected its policy recommendations to market evaluation?

Via Reason.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Access, Open Source, Open Standards, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets, Public Domain, Semantic Web | 3 Comments »

Democratic singularity

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

Also at today’s Singularity Summit, Jamais Cascio spoke about Openness and the Metaverse Singularity. The metaverse (and other scenarios) portion seemed to be merely a lead into a call for a democratic singularity. Cascio rightly said that we probably don’t know what that means, but he has a prescription that I’m all for:

My preferred pathway would be to “open source” the singularity, to bring in the eyes and minds of millions of collaborators to examine and co-create the relevant software and models, seeking out flaws and making the code more broadly reflective of a variety of interests.

The funny thing is the extent to which “democracy” and open source, open access, and transparency are conflated. Voting was not mentioned in the talk. Which is fine by me — I suspect that such forms of openness do much to promote freedom and other liberal values, which are themselves often conflated with democracy. (The most interesting parts of ’s The Wealth of Networks concern how peer production facilitates liberal values. I’ll blog a review in the fullness of time.)

However, in Q&A Cascio expressed some preference for representative democracy — or rather that’s the sense I got — the question prompting the expression had a lot of baggage, which I won’t try to describe here.

My unwarranted extrapolation: the ideal of free software has some potential to substitute for the dominant ideal (representative democracy), but cannot compete directly, yet.

Update 20070912: Baggage-laden question mentioned above explained.

Posted in Open Access, Open Source, Politics | 4 Comments »

SXSW: Semantic Web 2.0 and Scientific Publishing

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

Web 2.0 and Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing, probably the densest panel I attended today (and again expertly moderated by Science Commons’ John Wilbanks), covered , new business models for scientific publishers, and how web technologies can help with these and data problems, but kept coming back to how officious Semantic Web technologies and controlled ontologies (which are not the same at all, but are often lumped together) and microformats and tagging (also distinct) complement each other (all four of ’em!), even within a single application. I agree.

Nearly on point, this comment elsewhere by Denny Vrandecic of the Semantic MediaWiki project:

You are supposed to change the vocabulary in a wiki-way, just as well as the data itself. Need a new relation? Invent it. Figured out it’s wrong? Rename. Want a new category of things? Make it.

Via Danny Ayers, oringal posted to O’Reilly Radar, which doesn’t offer permalinks for comments. This just needs a catchy name. Web 2.0 ontology engineering? Fonktology?

Posted in Creative Commons, Microformats, Open Access, Semantic Web, SXSW, Wikipedia | 2 Comments »

Buckingham markets

Monday, May 22nd, 2006

Via Chris F. Masse, who does not provide a permanent link to his “external link” post, The Journal of Prediction Markets is launching late this year with several usual suspects on the editorial board. I used Inkling’s make your own market feature to create a play market in whether the journal will be Open Access:

Pays if the Journal of Prediction Markets is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals before 2008/01/01.

See the Wikipedia article for background on Open Access.

Just for kicks — as an insider decision, this is probably not a good subject for a prediction market.

I noted with interest that the journal is to be published by the , the publishing arm of apparently the only university in the UK jurisdiction not funded by the state. Although it is small I am surprised I had not heard of this university previously due to its free market connections or in the Economist, which loves to write about the sorry state of British higher education and the even sorrier state of higher education on the European continent.

Should I take this opportunity to ask Mr. Masse (who is entirely above insinuation, a better person than I) about French universities?

Addendum 20060523: Masse thinks I’m crazy for creating a market on Inkling. He doesn’t like Inkling because they removed one of their founders from their site (irrelevant, Masse-ive overreaction) and believes that liquidity is the most important attribute of an exchange, implied corollaries being that it is dumb to start a new exchange in an area where one already exists and it is dumb to allow user-created markets, both of which will lead to diffuse, thinly-traded markets. I think the field is far too young to say that a newcomer cannot topple existing exchanges even if they are natural monopolies (We’ve discussed this before) or that large numbers of niche (and thus thinly traded) claims will not prove valuable.

Why has Masse not created a market at Inkling? Is his consultancy page correct?

Each player in the field only sees his/her little part of it —I have to have the complete, global, situational, long-term, overview outlook perspective.

Is he overconfident in his negative assessment of Inkling or merely falling behind in his research?

Posted in Economics, Open Access, Open Source, Prediction Markets | 5 Comments »

SXSWi wrap

Saturday, March 18th, 2006

There were a surprising number of panels more or less concerning entrepreneurship. I only attended one of these, Sink or Swim: The Five Most Important Startup Decisions. It was very mildly amusing but as far as I could tell the only important decision discussed was whether to look for outside funding or not, a well-trod topic if there ever was one. There was even one panel on Selling (Big Ideas to Big Clients).

I understand that was mentioned in passing on many panels. Attendees coming to our booth were much better informed than in years past, part of a greater trend.

The Digital Preservation and Blogs panel I was on was interesting for the self-selection of the audience — I imagine every librarian and historian attending were present. A writeup, photo, and my narrow take.

Both accepted panels I helped conceive went very well, especially Open Science. Though an outlier for SXSW the audience Q&A as high quality. Moderator John Wilbanks did a great job of keeping a diverse panel (open access journal editor, synthetic biologist, IT standards person, and VC) on point.

Commons-Based Business Models included Ian Clarke of Revver, which encourages sharing of short videos with an unobtrusive advertisement at the end under a CC license that does not permit derivative works. This licensing choice was made so that stripping out the advertisement is not permitted. Jimmy Wales challenged Clarke to think about opening up some content on an experimental basis. Sounds like a good idea to me. I suggested from the audience that attribution can require a link back to Revver, so even modified videos are valuable. Clarke responded that advertising at a link away is far less valuable. True, but the question is whether derivative works that could not otherwise exist become popular enough to outweigh those that merely remove advertising. I suspect many derivatives would be uploaded directly to Revver, allowing the company and original creators to take full advantage of additional revenue and to become the leading site for explicit remixing of video, a la ccMixter for audio. Seems worth an experiment — Revver is in no danger of becoming the leading video site at the current rate.

I also asked Clarke about interest in his patronage system. He said Revver is aimed at the same problem (funding creators) but was easier to implement. In the same vein I met John Pratt of Fundable, which is based in Austin. I got the impression he didn’t think the service could be viral (I disagree). I’ve written about FairShare, Fundable and related ideas several times in the past, mostly linked to in my Public Goods Group Shopping post and its comments. The field is ripe for a really good service.

The EFF/CC party was very well attended, even not considering its obscure location (an Elks club). In the middle of the facility was a room of Elks members, playing cards and other games, oblivious to the SXSW crowd that outnumbered Elks even in that room. I gave a very brief thank-you speech for CC, which I closed with a prayer (because we were in Texas) to J.R. “Bob” Dobbs (because we were in Austin).

At the end of the trade show Rob Kaye alerted me to the giveaway of every book at a well-respected computer publisher’s booth to “cool geeks” or similar. 5-10 years ago this would’ve really excited me, but this time I was mostly concerned about bulk and weight. I took a few. I suspect they’ll be among the last computer books I obtain, free or otherwise.

James Surowiecki gave a presentation which I did not attend but I hear focused on prediction markets. I should’ve made the time to attend simply to see the crowd reaction. Several of the latest sites cropping up in that field certainly look like they were designed by potential SXSW attendees — circa 2004/5 generically attractive web applications. I should have some posts on that topic soon, starting with Chris F. Masse’s 2005 Awards.

Posted in Advertising, Books, Creative Commons, Economics, Open Access, Prediction Markets, Public Goods, SXSW | 2 Comments »

MPrize impact predictions

Monday, January 2nd, 2006

Last June I wrote about Methuselah Mouse Prize related prediction market claims and suggested that claims conditioned on MPrize fundraising goals would be interesting. I just noticed that Mprize.org makes predictions of its own via its ill-explained The Life Line Equation calculator.

I couldn’t find any discussion of the calculator and it is not very prominent on the Mprize.org site. I suspect not much thought was put into it, but the implicit claims are interesting anyway. Given a year of birth, the calculator provides an expected lifespan and an estimate of funds required to reverse aging before you die, as well as a plot like the following:

One problem with the calculator is that it apparently doesn’t use . The average 75 year old is not expected to die next year, as per the calculator.

In the table below I’ve taken the output of the Life Line Equation calculator, supplemented with age-adjusted data from U.S. National Center for Health Statistics life tables (italicized).

Birth Expected
Death		 Funds
Needed
1990 2072 2068 $244,000
1980 2061 2058 $407,000
1970 2050 2049 $800,000
1960 2040 2040 $2,100,000
1950 2029 2031 $9,850,000
1940 2018 2023 $226,800,000
1930 2007 2017 $40,000,000,000

The implication is that to reverse aging by 2029, the MPrize needs $9,850,000, and furthermore that aging could be reversed very shortly with enough incentive and that aging will be reversed 2030 or so regardless of MPrize funding (the funds needed to reverse aging after that date are insignificant, so I think it would be fair to discount the role of the MPrize in reversing aging after that date, if not much sooner).

MPrize funding currently stands at $1.4m, with an additional $1.8m committed. So according to MPrize.org I (born 1970) have nothing to worry about. Hooray!

Well, perhaps not. The calculator seeems pretty poorly conceived and implemented. Still, it would be very interesting to obtain estimates of the impact various levels of MPrize funding might have on anti-aging breakthroughs. Such estimates would be great marketing fodder for MPrize fundraisers–even a very modest impact would save many lives.

As I mentioned before one means of obtaining such (collective) estimates would be to condition anti-aging prediction contracts on MPrize funding levels. Very simplistically, “what is the chance aging will be reversed by 2030?” and “what is the chance aging will be reversed by 2030 if the MPrize raises $100m by 2010?” (Obviously a real claim would define some specific indicator for aging reversal, e.g., a 90 percent drop in 75 year old mortality relative to 75 year old mortality in 2005.)

I still strongly recommend supporting the Methuselah Mouse Prize and the generally.

While I’m peeving away, I wish Rejuvenation Research were an journal. “[M]most important of all: this journal needs to be read.” At $263/year for a personal online-only subscription I don’t think so.

Addendum 20060118: There is a claim on FX very much like the aging reversal claim I outlined above — 90% drop in overall death rate before 2050 relative to 1994 rate. I almost certainly read this claim in the past and forgot about it, but not its general thrust.

Posted in Health, Open Access, Peeves, Prediction Markets | 2 Comments »

Sort of open source economic models

Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

Mark Thoma is building an “open source” repository for economic models. Well, sort of open source. Unfortunately none of the four models included so far, nor the initial post, which Thoma says is open source, say anything about copyright or licenses.

Unfortunately under this default copyright regime, explicit licensing (or dedication to the public domain) is required for an open source project to scale. If five people contribute to a model posted to Thoma’s repository none of the contributors, including the original author, nor anyone else, has any right to distribute the resulting model, or allow others to further modify the model.

That’s why open source projects use explicit open source licenses and open source repositories require each project in the repository to use an explicit license. That’s what an open source economic models repository, or indeed any repository that wants to emulate the open source model, should also do.

NB creators of open source economic models may wish to consider an open source-like license intended for “content” rather than code, e.g., the Free Documentation License (that’s what Wikipedia uses) or a liberal Creative Commons license (e.g., Attribution or Attribution-ShareAlike).

Also see the open access movement, commons-based peer production and Science Commons. I don’t know how familiar the mainstream economics profession is familiar with these concepts, but “they” ought to be.

Via Alex Tabarrok.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Open Access, Open Source | 1 Comment »

Speculate on Creators

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

Alex Tabarrok writes about An Auction Market for Journal Articles (PDF). Publishers bid for the right to publish a paper. The amount of the winning bid is divided by the authors and publishers of papers cited by the paper just auctioned. Unless I’m missing something all participating journals taken together lose money unless the share of cited authors is zero and transaction costs are nil. Still, the system could increase incentives to publish quality papers, where “subsequent authors will want to cite this” is a proxy for quality.

I’m reminded a tiny bit of BlogShares (“Blogs are valued by their incoming links and add value to other blogs by linking to them”), but especially of Ian Clarke‘s FairShare, which is a proposal for speculative donations:

Anybody can “invest” in an artist, and if that artist goes on to be a success, then the person is reward in proportion to their investment and how early they made it. But where does this return on investment come from? The answer is that it comes from subsequent investors. For example, lets say that you invest $10. $4.50 might go straight to the band, $1 might go to the operator of the system, and the remaining $4.50 would be distributed among previous investors in the band, those who invested more early would get a bigger proportion than those who invested less, later-on. Of course, most people will not make a profit, but they are rewarded by knowing that they contributed towards an artist that they liked, and helped reward others who believed in that artist, and who may have brought the artist to their attention.

Under FairShare participating creators taken together and individually would make money, as payments are from without the system, driven by the generosity and greed of fans and speculators.

A system in the spirit of one or both of these proposals could perhaps help fund a voluntary collective licensing scheme of the sort contemplated for digital music, but conceivably applicable to other types of work.

If the journal market idea really could foster a self-sustaining business model it could be a boon to the open access movement. Restricting access is rather pointless when your main business concern is to get your articles cited.

I’ve rambled about open access models elsewhere.

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Access, Public Domain, Public Goods | 3 Comments »

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