[Open-access] Crowdsourcing request + BMJ OA Policy

Tue Mar 25 14:49:59 UTC 2014

>How to make a paper copy "stable"
<snip>
>How to make a digital copy "stable":
<snip>
>The illusion? Stability.

I like it Mark, though saying that digital information lives in "a room" is
a bit of a stretch for what is in fact "a worldwide computer network." What
you say chimes with this rather wonderful quote I found recently while
researching the fate of the library at Alexandria (of antiquity, not
http://www.bibalex.org):

"Dereliction, alas, is a more frequent and pervasive cause of the ruin of
books than even fire, flood or slaughter. What preserves books is not
edifice, but intellect--the continuous, assiduous, intelligent care by human
beings for the fragile and precious artifacts that transmit the thoughts of
a moment for generations or even, perhaps, for all time."

[extract from the 'Libraries' entry in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient
Greece and Rome vol IV, Gargarin M, Fantham E. (eds) OUP, 2010.]

Mediawiki makes document versioning straightforward, though it looks like
it's still a tricky install if you want to run it locally yourself:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_requirements

I suspect that among the major impediments to taking scholarly knowledge to
that public, democratic plane we're all dreaming of are the sneaking,
pervasive doubts about the provenance of these slippery electronic 'files'
we deal in these days--and the PDF is the idiot reassurance presently
found.Some kind of easy-oasy, bish / bash / bosh, drag'n'drop,
yes-we're-all-singin'-from-the-same-hymnbook, file versioner and verifier
that didn't require a short lifetime of acquiring Unix skills to have
confidence in it would be a great boon...

Of course it's easy enough to compare two md5 checksums, and to diff if you
find a difference, but that requires continuous doubt, which is much more
tiring state of mind to hold than faith.

Regards to all,

D.

2014-03-25 13:29 GMT+01:00 Mark MacGillivray <mark at cottagelabs.com>:

> How to make a printed copy "stable":
>
> * make lots of copies. Give them a name. Put them in rooms. Put people in
> those rooms to look after them.
>
> * hope that people reference it properly. They probably will.
>
> * hope that things stay as they were, where they were, when you last saw
> them. They probably will.
>
> * hope that the room does not go anywhere. It probably won't.
>
> * if things change unexpectedly, have someone fix it.
>
> * when errors, or the unexpected, arise, hope that others can spot and
> work around them. They probably can.
>
>
> How to make a digital copy "stable":
>
> * make lots of copies. Give them a name. Put them in "rooms". Put people
> "in" those rooms to look after them.
>
> * hope that people reference it properly. They probably will.
>
> * hope that things stay as they were, where they were, when you last saw
> them. They probably will.
>
> * hope that the "room" does not go anywhere. It probably won't.
>
> * if things change unexpectedly, have someone fix it.
>
> * when errors, or the unexpected, arise, hope that others can spot and
> work around them. They probably can.
>
>
> The difference? Technology.
>
> The similarity? People.
>
> The illusion? Stability.
>
>
> Mark
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:03 PM, Bjoern Brembs <b.brembs at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, March 25, 2014, 9:46:31 AM, you wrote:
>>
>> > railed against the "completely unstable and
>> > unpredictable new world of ephemera" , and they may have a point.
>>
>> Like Mike said, we are the masters and the rules are the slaves. We can
>> easily create "versions of record" where they are useful and get rid of
>> them where they are not.
>>
>> It's not like everything digital is now all of a sudden ephemeral and
>> everything paper is not. If we control it, it will be as ephemeral and as
>> stable as we make it to be.
>>
>> Versioning is one way of doing it, perhaps superimposed by 'staging', e.g.
>>
>> - preprint
>> - reviewed by <X experts
>> - reviewed by >X experts
>> - no dissent/with dissent
>> - retracted
>> - recommended by >X experts
>> - patented
>> - re-used
>> - cited >X times
>>
>> Any rule we build upon this could, e.g. prevent certain stages from
>> becoming a version of record or revoke a version of record status.
>>
>> This is just a modern version of what we already have: manuscripts,
>> pre-prints, proofs and 'paper', we'd just be upgrading it to the digital
>> age, 20-30 years after the digital age arrived :-)
>>
>> Simply by having our digital objects under our control allows us to
>> invent a few organizational components, the potential combinations of which
>> should allow for sufficient flexibility to serve all communities within
>> science. We design an open standard that grows with the needs of the
>> scientific community and with its increasing diversity and specialization.
>> If we want our infrastructure to serve our needs and not vice versa as it
>> is now, we need to be in charge of the rules that govern the
>> infrastructure, not 30k different journals.
>>
>> Obviously, this infrastructure needs to include our other digital objects
>> as well, code and data, in a similar/analogous fashion.
>>
>> The only possible way I can see to realistically finance this
>> infrastructure is by using the funds we currently waste on publishing - or
>> who is going to tell politicians they need to pay us an additional 10b
>> annually, because we can't get our act together? I mean it took us the
>> better part of 10 years to get politicians to support mandates and gold OA
>> funds. How will we sell a "sorry, the whole OA thing for the last ten years
>> was actually completely misguided, can you pretty please give us a hundred
>> times of what you've reluctantly have us so far to get things right and
>> keep a useless, dysfunctional publishing landscape artificially alive in
>> the process?" to any politician without bribing them? When we have already
>> given all the money to bribe them with to the publishers? :-)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Bjoern
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Björn Brembs
>> ---------------------------------------------
>> http://brembs.net
>> Neurogenetics
>> Universität Regensburg
>> Germany
>>
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>>
>
>

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