Opening keynote

Notes for discussion from the program committee: (Comments are welcome below the horizontal line below)

SPARC 2008 Digital Repositories Meeting November 17-18

Opening Keynote: John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science, Creative Commons

I. Why is there a disconnect between planning to share and the actual sharing? Why have repositories proliferated but not federation of repositories into networks? Can planning get in the way of sharing?

Disruptive processes can't be planned in advance. Disruptive processes arise from people hacking, not planning to hack. Planned innovation tends to to be slow and incremental, not innovative. The current models of digital sharing are based on print models, and are not innovative.

Stable systems are resistant to change on multiple levels, with interlocking barriers to change. Wilbanks identifies three interlocked barriers to change in scholarly communication:

1. Copyright: Even though copyright only locks the container and not the facts, in a digital world locking the container can lock use of the content, through contractual restrictions on access to the container/content, and through the assertion of copyright on databases.

2. Incentives: In the world of scholarship, pre-tenured researchers cannot afford to be distracted by activities that do not lead to tenure. Despite the small amount of work involved in submission to a digital repository, there is no tenure-linked incentive to participation.

3. Staffing: Installing and maintaining the software is hard work, a burden for people already challenged with adding content and providing services.

II. Building a commons is really really hard.

Science Commons:

• 1000 journals worldwide under a Creative Commons license

• Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine (http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/scae/): easy to integrate into local website (a widget: scholar's copyright integration). Primary use is to radicalize faculty, ease compliance with NIH.

• Policy papers: ◦ "Open Doors and Open Minds" (http://sciencecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/opendoors_v1.pdf): What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution - a SPARC / Science Commons whitepaper

◦ "Complying with the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy: Copyright considerations and options" by Michael Carroll (http://sciencecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/nih_copyright_v1.pdf). Jointly released by SPARC, Science Commons and ARL

• Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data (http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/). Database integration: copyright laws are relatively easy to harmonize, but database contracts are much less consistent. SC wrote a "protocol for implementing open access data" (not a license) to reconstruct the public domain to the best extent possible, given local legal environment.

However, open access only solves the content problem, not the container problem. The stand-alone database is not a solution. Building a web for data: the semantic web.

Making computers understand links between documents is not the same as making computers understand relationships between concepts. Google indexes documents but not the relationships between papers or the concepts that researchers ultimately want.

How can we use the web to integrate information from different places and different names?

Science Commons: Open source Knowledge Management Platform: a repository for ontologies (e.g., MeSH, NCBI), name spaces, and integrated databases: "out of many, one."

Transforming complex queries into links, helping scholars remix queries, building a corpus of queries as links.

NeuroCommons (http://sciencecommons.org/projects/data/) and HealthCommons (http://sciencecommons.org/projects/healthcommons/)

3. How to Build a Commons

Re-use cultural tools for scholarship: Nothing replaces hacking.

We face two possible futures: a network of repositories, or islands of repositories. OAI, ORE, and other technical initiatives are intended to create network, but still don't address the incentives necessary to create a commons.

"simple + open = win"

open copyright, balanced incentives, and distributed workloads

What problems/questions can only a network of populated IRs answer/solve?

If the repository gives more answers than Google, it will be used

process revolutions: the network institutional revolutions: the network

Preservation is a critical consideration. How can namespaces persist? Universities and governments are the institutions likeliest to persist, so universities need to take on the network.

Invest in your repository staff.

Conclusion: don't wait. The best time to create an open system is when non one is watching. Use existing systems. Work around problems. Create new ways to measure.

Openness:

Free as in speech vs. Free as in beer vs Free as in a puppy: openness requires continuing long-term investment.

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