"Cloud" (?) computing

Today's Guardian newspaper carries a supplement on the implications of cloud computing for business and government and it got me thinking about the use of the term 'cloud'.  This follows a question after my keynote at ASIST last week relating to the permanence of material on the Web.

The problem with the term 'cloud' is that it has ethereal connotations, something in space, with very little seeming materiality to it and, therefore, perhaps immune to the problems that affect the material world.  Whereas, in fact, the 'cloud' is simply a server network, very material and prey to the usual problems of material things: flood, fire, earthquake, etc.  The fact that we save things to Google Docs, or Apple's iCloud, or Amazon's cloud, does not protect them from such things, nor from potential file corruption.  I suppose that "shared server space" does not have the same appeal as "cloud", but we need to remember that that is the cloud. 

Academic publishers the most ruthless capitalists...

...so says George Monbiot in a major article in today's Guardian newspaper tears into the academic publishers with no holds barred, and it will be interesting to see what their response may be.  He kicks off with:

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.

and, in passing, notes that a Deutsche Bank (surely no socialist concern) report said, in examining the publishers' claim of adding value:

We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available.

Monbiot summarizes the situation by commenting:

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

None of this will be new to readers of this blog and to proponents of open access in general, but the fact it is given centre page status in a major newspaper and is simultaneously available (by open access!) to the world outside the UK is a major step in revealing to the world at large the crazy business model of academic publishing and the cost to the community at large of restricting access to the products of research.

Monbiot calls for the situation to be referred to the UK's Competition Commission, but I suspect the likelihood of this is remote: after all, Parliament's Science and Technology Committee did nothing to promote open access when it reviewed the situation some years ago and the Research Councils in the UK have been following the lily-livered politicos in their refusal to demand open access publishing of work they fund.  The publishing lobby is a very powerful one and academics by comparison are lambs to the slaughter.  However, they are lambs to another slaughter in their pandering to the demands of university bosses that they should publish only in certain "top-ranked" journals - the only people who can bring about change are those currently burrowing their heads in the sand and hoping that the next research evaluation exercise will not bury them altogether.

Redirect links, please!

It really annoys me (and apologies if I haves blogged about this before) when links on sites prove to be dead.  It is so easy to enter the bit of code on the original page to automatically direct the browser to the correct location.  It is even more annoying when the organization knows this is going to happen and still does nothing about it.  This has just happened to me with the Which? consumer information site: one page contains a link to another but, instead of being transferred to the new location, up pops a different page telling me to go to the home page or do a search!  It's their site, dammit, why must the user do the work?  Essentially, it's down to idle Webmasters who don't want the bother and decide that the user (or customer in some cases) should have the bother instead.  I shall be mailing them about this as soon as I've vented my frustration here!

Peer review

The UK's Parliamentary Committee on Science and Technology has published its report on peer review, with an interesting section on costs.  They quote an estimate from JISC that peer review costs the UK Higher Education sector "between £110 million and £165 million per year for peer review and up to £30 million per year for the work done by editors and editorial boards".  So what happens next, up pops a man from Elsevier to claim that publishers too have invested hugely in improving peer review - by installing journal management systems.  He suggests that,

Overall, one of the biggest investments for everyone in the publishing industry in the last decade or so has been migration to some of the electronic platforms. Across the industry, our estimate is that somewhere in the order of £2 billion of investment has been made. That includes the technologies at the back end to publish the materials as well. The technology has included submission systems, electronic editorial systems, peer review support systems, tracking systems and systems that enable editors to find reviewers.

Precisely how this "improves" actual peer review is not explained, since the quality of review depends entirely upon the reviewers and not on whatever technology might be employed to manage the process. New technology was introduced by publishers to improve efficiency and reduce costs, not to improve peer review and, in any event, from the table provided by Elsevier showing a total of more than £2,130,000,000 in investment, industry-wide, a mere £70,000,000 is attributable to "Author submission & editorial systems" in which the peer review process would be swallowed up by everything else and £1,500,000,000 is spent on electronic publishing systems.

As usual,  the publisher "doth protest too much methinks".  They know they get away with murder in the scholarly publishing business - the only business to acquire its raw materials free of charge and then to have a significant proportion of its labour costs delivered freely.  The newspapers are gradually coming to understand the significance of the Internet and its impact on their business models, but the scholarly publishers, supported by government and university heads, will resist to the end.

Typical of this support, the report concludes,

..we consider that there should be an external regulator overseeing research integrity. We recommend that the Government set out proposals on the scope and powers of such a regulator and consult with the research community and other relevant parties to develop them.

It is also recommended that all academic institutions should have someone responsible for 'research integrity' - in other words, more costs to the Higher Education institutions.  Elsevier must be giggling all the way to the bank.

Is open access biting?

News that Elsevier is changing its policy on allowing authors to archive papers suggests that the publisher may be feeling the pinch of open access, as users turn to archives for copies rather than to the journal.  I don't know how many individual copies of papers Elsevier sells, in addition to its subscription list, but a copy obtained from an archive is a copy unsold.
The new policy requires institutions to have specific agreements with Elsevier:

...deposit in, or posting to, subject-oriented or centralised repositories (such as PubMed Central), or institutional repositories with systematic posting mandates is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository, agency or institution, and only consistent with the Publisher’s policies concerning such repositories.

 This policy applies to the manuscript version of an accepted paper.  For actual published papers, the policy is even more restrictive:

Elsevier does not permit the posting of PJAs (Elsevier-provided PDF or HTML files) on any open web sites.  This is to ensure that the final published version of an article, which has been edited and peer-reviewed according to the publishing standards of an Elsevier journal, is always recognized as such only via the journal itself, whether in print or electronic format.

Publishers behave this way because they believe that they are the owners of the research output and the answer to their stranglehold on the distribution of research findings lies in the hands of the institutions and the researchers.  It is only by refusing to transfer copyright and by insisting that the publisher only has the right to publish a specific version of a paper, that authors will be able to do what they wish with their research outputs.
The response of the Swedish open access programme to this change in Elsevier's terms is as follows:

•    We strongly object to Elsevier’s new policy which requires separate agreements for author’s rights and we urge Elsevier to withdraw the new clause.
•    We recommend Swedish universities with open access mandates to not conclude separate agreements with Elsevier. Instead, this issue should be transferred to the negotiations of the national license agreements with Elsevier.

It seems likely that institutions will be in conflict with the major publishers to an increasing extent as more and more adopt policies on open access to their research outputs. The SciComInfo newsletter reports, for example, that the Karolinska Institute, one of the world's leading medical research institutions, has adopted an open access policy, and many institutions are now using the deposit of papers in their institutional repository as one way of assessing research performance. Limiting open archiving in any way will run counter to these trends.

No need for private universities in the UK

The current government's higher education strategy is now in a complete mess - although it must be said that previoius governments have contributed.  Two strategies were evolved by this governement: allow universities to charge up to £9000 a year for an undergraduate programme; and encourage the development of private universities.  Budgeting was done on the assumption that the average cost of a course would be £7,000 but now more than half of the universities will be charging the maximum - problem number one.

Problem number 2 is that very few organizations appear to be coming forward to create private universities and one that has is now under investigation in the USA for suspected fraud - welcome to the world of big business Mr. Cameron.  A bunch of presumably right-leaning academics, including Richard Dawkins - noted evolutionary biologist - have also proposed a new university college offering courses in the humanities but, hello!, what's this - it turns out that the published syllabuses have been ripped off from existing courses in the University of London - welcome to the world of the self-seeking academic, Mr. Cameron.

Further problems exist with the government seeking to adopt an 'American' approach to higher education - and why that dysfunctional system is of any interest at all to us, I do not know - which are outlined by Howard Hotson in an article in the London Review of Books for the 19th May.  He points out that the "72 US universities in the top 200 [world wide] represent fewer than 5 per cent of those offering four-year degrees" (there are 5,758 recognized HE insitutions in the US). By contrast, the 29 UK universities in the world's top 200 represent almost 20% of the 165 insitutions in the UK.  This means that the chance of a UK student attending a top university is much greater in the UK than it is in the USA - in other words, the UK system of publicly funded higher education works.  Hotson points out that it also works in terms of value for money and he notes that "If value for money is the most important consideration, especially in an age of austerity, the American model might well be the last one that Britain should be emulating".

Will Hotson's analysis make the slightest difference to government policy?  Of course not - the Tories are wedded to the notion of the market, come what may, they are ideologically incapable of rational analysis and, therefore, the decline of the higher education system in England and Wales will continue - the Scots need to be thankful that education is in their hands, not in those of the idiots in Westminster. 

The problem of conference proceedings

I'm sure I'm not the only journal editor (or copy-editor, proof-reader, etc.) to have noticed that the bibliographic control of conference proceediings is now a complete mess.  This is mainly the result of the digital environment in which we now all operate.

What's the problem?  Well, it is this:  authors present papers at conferences and then cite those papers and other papers presented at the same conferences and very few authors are capable of providing a full reference entry for the paper.  APA, for example requires:

author-date-paper title-'In'-editors names-conference title-pages of the paper-place of publication-publisher

and what authors provide is generally something like:

author-paper title-conference title

Then, when you try to track down the actual paper, to provide a correct bibliographical entry, what do you find?  There are several possibilities:

1. The conference proceedings have indeed been published by one of the large number of recognised publishers, some of whom specialise in publishing conference proceedings. The papers are often accessible at the publisher's Website.

2. The conference proceedings have been published by the local organization, often a university or a scientific society, responsible for the conference organization. The papers may be accessible also at the publisher's Website, but often there is no such provision for electronic access.

3. The proceedings have been made openly available at the conference Website - run by either the organizing body, or by the organization hosting the conference.  There is no print version.

4. The proceedings were made available in print form to those attending the conference. There is no other form of publication, unless 3 applies and, hence, there is no 'publication' in the formal sense.
5.  The papers was presented at the conference, but there were no conference proceedings and the author has subsequently published in a journal.

6.  The paper was presented at the conference and the author(s) have made it available through their home page, an institutional repository, or a disciplinary repository.

7.  The paper was presented at the conference but not made more widely available by either the organizers or a publisher, or by the author(s).

The responsibility for indicating which of these applies to the conference papers cited by an author clearly lies with the author of the citing paper but, very often, all they have is a pdf file or associated paper copy and they have no idea as to the details of its provenance.  Telling the author what is missing from a reference entry is almost as time-consuming as actually doing the search for the item oneself.

I can only imagine the situation becoming worse: we already have audio and video files of conference presentations although, thankfully, I have not yet had to deal with any citations to such objects.  The only actors in this situation who can influence the situation for the better are the conference organizers: it is their responsibility to do something about this mish-mash of alternative modes of publication.  Many conferences do inlcude a note on how and by whom the papers will be published, but many more leave this to one's imagination.

There's another conference paper problem and that is the "salami slicing" of research outputs to get three conference papers where one would suffice, and even straightforward duplication - paper 1 at Conference A in 2009 and paper 2 (sometimes identically titled) at Conference B in 2010.  But perhaps I'd better leave that for another day.