[open-science] [cc-community] Web Payments in Open Science

Fri Feb 14 16:26:25 UTC 2014

Andrew,

I agree with you. In addition, webpayments for documents on the web make me
feel uncomfortable too. This is not the position I am taking. Rather I feel
that webpayments should be used for other products or interactions that
companies traditionally sell. This is rather an ambiguous statement. The
presentation (1) that John Wilbanks gave at Oxford in 2007 illuminates
this. He goes into explaining that movement to a commons model could help
incremental innovation in pharmaceutical innovation, but that it might not
work everywhere. For example he says that, "the commons does not work very
well if the materials are very expensive and intentionally acquired". This
distinction is very confusing for me. I do not know if I can understand it.

What I am proposing is the open value network approach (2). By doing this,
interactions may be visualized as graphs as in chapter 2 of Verna Allee's
book (3) and hopefully all data may be represented as linked data (4). In
this way I hope that value streams (5) may be visualized that do not harm
others. I believe with these valuestreams an envisioned universal
webpayments standard, such as Payswarm, might be appropriate.

I must admit that I have not given much thought to crowdfunding vs. social
payments. I would guess that using value streams would be closer to using
social payments. Thanks for your questions. I hope that what I have written
makes sense.

Thanks,

Brent

(1)John Wilbanks, Second-Generation Open Access: Building an Open Content,
http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20070208_179
(2) Open Value Network, P2P Foundation,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Value_Network
(3) Verna Allee, Value Networks and the True Nature of Collaboration,
Chapter 2: Mapping the Value Network Value Network Mapping Basics,
http://www.valuenetworksandcollaboration.com/mapping/networkmappingbasics.html
(4) Tim Berners-Lee, Linked Data - Design Issues, last change: 2009/06/18,
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
(5) Value Streams, https://github.com/valnet/valuenetwork/wiki/Value-Streams

On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 9:54 AM, Andrew Rens <andrewrens at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Brent
>
> I am still somewhat puzzled as to the link you see between open
> science and web payments.
>
> You mention
>
> "It appears that both Dave Raggett (1) and Manu Sporny (2)
> > have led initiatives. Manu Sporny, CEO of Digital Bazaar and proponent
> of a
> > web payments standard, wrote a post (3,4) about Web Payments with Open
> > Access journals. In this post, he does mention paying a small fee to read
> > journal articles. I suppose this could include PDFs."
>
> Manu Sporny's idea is: "that researchers would set access prices on
> articles such that any purchase to access the research paper would
> then go to directly funding their current research".
>
> Requiring payment of any fee to read journal articles is not Open
> Access. The Budapest Initiative on Open Access states " By "open
> access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the
> public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy,
> distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these
> articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or
> use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or
> technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to
> the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and
> distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should
> be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the
> right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
>
> The Berlin Declaration on Open Access states "Open access
> contributions must satisfy two conditions:The author(s) and right
> holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free,
> irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy,
> use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make
> and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any
> responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship
> (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for
> enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published
> work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of
> printed copies for their personal use."
>
> The Pantone Principles for Open Data in Science stipulate
> "By open data in science we mean that it is freely available on the
> public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse,
> re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose
> without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those
> inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. To this end
> data related to published science should be explicitly placed in the
> public domain."
>
> The consensus that emerges from these statements is that requiring web
> payments for access to knowledge, however allegedly micro the payment,
> is inimical to open science.
>
> It is not hard to see why. In a country like Mozambique researchers
> often don't have research budgets, if they do then they often use
> their entire research budget just to obtain access to the Internet.
> Even 0.1 cent (US) per article is too great a price for most
> researchers indeveloping countries to pay. What commitment is there
> that the nature of the  payment system would not rely on existing
> infrastructure such as credit cards and bank accounts which many in
> the developing world simply cannot access? Any web-payment system for
> access to scientific data or journals simply perpetuates the current
> system of barriers which hinder developing country researchers from
> tackling deadly diseases such as malaria.
>
> Although Manu tries to invoke him Aaron Swartz would not have
> supported imposing barriers. "Providing scientific articles to those
> at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the
> Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. "
> The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
>
> > I very much enjoyed the article that Ullrich linked to. It speaks of
> three
> > tools to enable research: crowd funding, social payments, and virtual
> > currencies. From the article, crowd funding and social payments seem to
> be
> > different in that crowd funding allocates resources to something that has
> > yet to exist and social payments allocates resources to something that
> > already exists.
>
> Both crowd funding and social payments are readily distinguishable
> from the webpaymetns which for access which is simply a refinement of
> the current system of extracting a toll for access to scientific
> knowledge. Crowd funding does not require that the end products be
> closed, and any proponent of open science will only support crowd
> funding when the results will be open.
>
> Social payments require only labour and one level of privilege,
> Internet access, rather than the multiple privileges required to make
> web payments.
>
> It is not clear whether you intend to distinguish between web payments
> as barriers to access to knowledge and web payments voluntarily made
> to support the creation of knowledge. That is an important
> distinction, at least to proponents of open science.
>
>
> Andrew
>
>
>
>
>
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