[open-science] OKFN Open Science Mailing List will close on 31 Jan 2020 - where to next?

Sun Nov 17 20:06:59 UTC 2019

Jenny Molloy, 17/11/19 18:39:
> Open Knowledge Foundation will be closing down their mailman lists by
> January 31st, 2020 [...]

Thanks for telling us! I had no idea.

> There are two things for members of this list to think about:
> 1 - where are the important conversations on open science happening now?
> What new lists should we join as this one closes and are there gaps that
> need to be filled?

In my experience it's usually the mailing lists by associations of 
librarians. In Italy there are a couple; globally, the most active ones 
are probably Scholcomm and GOAL:
https://lists.ala.org/sympa/info/scholcomm
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

Several more are listed at:
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Discussion_forums

The most closely overlapping list might be the openaccess list at Wikimedia:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/openaccess

On the "more research practices than access" side, perhaps the 
publishing reform forum is closest:
https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues

> 2 - where to preserve the list archives? Open Knowledge Foundation do not
> plan to do so publicly and there is value (I think) in preserving
> conversations dating back 12 years to a time when open science was at a
> completely different level of development. If anyone has ideas or could
> help with archiving that would be great - I have asked for a copy to be
> kept but I don't know in what form it will arrive!

I suggest that you download the mbox. It's at 
<https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/private/open-science.mbox/open-science.mbox> 
and you need to login. From this, you can recreate the archives entirely.

Keeping the pipermail archive online is trivial (for the public lists), 
it's just a bunch of HTML. If the workload is caused by people asking 
redaction of the public archives, typically noindexing the archives 
reduces the requests a lot. Hopefully OKFN can keep at least a redirect 
to whatever webserver holds the archives.

It's also possible to move the mailing lists to another mailman server, 
it's not especially difficult. For the public archives there should be 
no privacy issue, while exporting the subscribed addresses might be more 
complicated if you want the users' consent (but that could be done too).

The mailman admin could ask the mailing lists to be created/moved to 
Wikimedia with this process:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists#Create_a_new_list

According to <https://markmail.org/search/?q=OKFN>, other lists where 
OKFN appears frequently are OSM and W3C. I also know that at least the 
Italian and Finnish users of this server are often on the FSFE mailman 
server, so that could be another target. It's IMHO better to transfer 
all mailing lists to the same server, so that email aliases can be set 
up easily.

> [...]
>     3. We are currently implementing a new strategy within Open Knowledge
>     Foundation which will focus the organisation on several key themes, namely
>     Education, Health and Work. We want to keep fostering conversations but let
>     groups choose what the best platform is for that.

I don't understand, according to this new OKFN strategy does open 
science fall under one of those three themes or not?

Federico