Why thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal ; Guardian, May 29, 2018

Neil Lawrence, Guardian;

Why thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal  

"Many in our research community see the Nature brand as a poor proxy for academic quality. We resist the intrusion of for-profit publishing into our field. As a result, at the time of writing, more than 3,000 researchers, including many leading names in the field from both industry and academia, have signed a statement refusing to submit, review or edit for this new journal. We see no role for closed access or author-fee publication in the future of machine-learning research. We believe the adoption of this new journal as an outlet of record for the machine-learning community would be a retrograde step."

States Offer Information Resources: 50+ Open Data Portals; Forbes, April 30, 2018

Meta S. Brown, Forbes; States Offer Information Resources: 50+ Open Data Portals

"The United States federal open data portal, data.gov, launched in May, 2009, with just 47 datasets. It was not an instant hit.

 Today, with more 200,000 datasets, it’s a lot more popular. Still, real-life demands for information about our governments, people and economy exceed the supply of available data.

The creation of a centralized portal for federal government data has fostered open data initiative across the country. Dozens of cities have established their own open data portals (here are 90 examples).

 In the 50 years since the federal Freedom of Information Act was passed, US states have been gradually introducing similar laws (see freedom of information laws by state). Likewise, many are now developing state-level open data portals.


These state data resources vary in style and depth. Some look much like data.gov, and include a wide variety of datasets. But not every state has a comprehensive data portal yet, let alone deep selections of data.

Here’s a listing of general and geographic open data portals for US states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico..."

How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public; The Washington Post, May 7, 2018

Ted Genoways, The Washington Post; How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public

"Now, according to the Vulture introduction, the Zora Neale Hurston Trust has new representation, interested in getting unpublished works into print and monetizing those archives. That’s great, from a reader’s perspective, but it also reveals a larger problem where scholarship of literature between World War I and II is concerned. It’s mostly due to the Walt Disney Co.’s efforts to protect ownership of a certain cartoon mouse. Over the years, the company has successfully worked to extend copyright restrictions far beyond the limits ever intended by the original authors of America’s intellectual property laws. Under the original Copyright Act of 1790, a work could be protected for 14 years, renewable for another 14-year term if the work’s author was still alive. In time, the maximum copyright grew from 28 years to 56 years and then to 75 years. In 1998, Sonny Bono championed an extension that would protect works created after 1978 for 70 years after the death of the author and the copyright of works created after 1922 to as long as 120 years.


This worked out great for Disney — which, not coincidentally, was founded in 1923 — but less so for the reputations of authors who produced important work between the 1920s and 1950s. Because copyright law became such a tangle, many of these works have truly languished. Here, Hurston is the rule rather than the exception. I have a file that I’ve kept over the years of significant unpublished works by well-known writers from the era: William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson and Weldon Kees, among others. The works aren’t really “lost,” of course, but they are tied up in a legal limbo. Because of the literary reputations of those writers, their unpublished works will eventually see the light of day — whenever their heirs decide that the royalties are spreading a little too thin and there’s money to be made from new works. But other important writers who are little-known or unknown will remain so because they don’t have easily identifiable heirs — or, worse, because self-interested, or even uninterested executors, control their estates."

SCIENCE’S PIRATE QUEEN; The Verge, February 8, 2018

 Ian Graber-Stiehl, The Verge; SCIENCE’S PIRATE QUEEN

"The legal campaigns against Sci-Hub have — through the Streisand effect — made the site more well-known than most mainstay repositories, and Elbakyan more famous than legal Open Access champions like Suber. The threat posed by ACS’s injunction against Sci-Hub has increased support for the site from web activists organizations such as the EFF, which considesr the site “a symptom of a serious problem: people who can’t afford expensive journal subscriptions, and who don’t have institutional access to academic databases, are unable to use cutting-edge scientific research.”

The effort may backfire. It does nothing to address disappointment scientists feel about how paywalls hide their work. Meanwhile, Sci-Hub has been making waves that might carry it further to a wider swath of both the public and the scientific community. And though Elbakyan might be sailing in dangerous waters, what’s to stop idealistic scientists who are frustrated with the big publishers from handing over their login credentials to Sci-Hub’s pirate queen?"

Open house held for Open Data Buffalo Portal; WGRZ, August 5, 2017

WGRZ; Open house held for Open Data Buffalo Portal

""Open Data Buffalo is an initiative to open up Buffalo's data to the public, to the community, to be able to share the many, many, many pieces of information that we have in the city, to inform people in a variety of different ways about what is happening in their city," explained Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown Saturday at the event.  "It will give us the ability to educate residents, to enlighten residents, to provide information to researchers, to business people, and rank and file members of our community to engage in projects and do things that will make our city stronger.""

Elsevier Wins $15 Million in Copyright Suit Against Piracy Sites; Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2017

Clara Turnage, Chronicle of Higher Education; Elsevier Wins $15 Million in Copyright Suit Against Piracy Sites

"A federal court has ruled in favor of one of the world’s largest science publishers in its lawsuit against websites that provide free, pirated access to millions of scholarly-journal articles, Nature.com reported on Thursday.

In a judgment handed down this week, Judge Robert W. Sweet of the U.S. District Court in New York City ruled for the company, Elsevier, in the absence of any representatives of the defendants, which include Sci-Hub, LibGen, and related sites, and awarded the publisher $15 million in damages for copyright infringement."

UM System announces plan to adopt open educational resources; Missourian, June 21, 2017

Gabriela Velasquez, Missourian; UM System announces plan to adopt open educational resources

"Open educational resources are published with open access copyrights, are free for students and can be distributed and used for little to no cost. Instructors also can write and add chapters to tailor textbooks to specific courses. They are accessed online, usually as PDFs, and can be revised and updated fairly quickly, according to previous Missourian reporting.

The UM System and MU will partner with OpenStax and with faculty members to develop open educational resources for students."

Amazon has a patent to keep you from comparison shopping while you’re in its stores; Washington Post, June 16, 2017

Brian Fung, Washington Post; Amazon has a patent to keep you from comparison shopping while you’re in its stores

"Amazon was awarded a patent May 30 that could help it choke off a common issue faced by many physical stores: Customers’ use of smartphones to compare prices even as they walk around a shop. The phenomenon, often known as mobile “window shopping,” has contributed to a worrisome decline for traditional retailers.

But Amazon now has the technology to prevent that type of behavior when customers enter any of its physical stores and log onto the WiFi networks there. Titled “Physical Store Online Shopping Control,” Amazon’s patent describes a system that can identify a customer’s Internet traffic and sense when the smartphone user is trying to access a competitor’s website. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos is also the owner of The Washington Post.)...

Just because a company wins a patent doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll use it. Sometimes companies file for patents to ensure they have the option to put the idea into practice later, or to keep other companies from implementing the concept. So, a system such as the kind Amazon’s envisioning might never be rolled out. And even if it is, chances are shoppers could still get around the system by staying off the in-store WiFi."

Five questions about open science answered; Phys.org, May 30, 2017

Elizabeth Gilbert, Katie Corker, 

Phys.org; Five questions about open science answered

"What is "open science"?

Open science is a set of practices designed to make scientific processes and results more transparent and accessible to people outside the research team. It includes making complete research materials, data and lab procedures freely available online to anyone. Many scientists are also proponents of open access, a parallel movement involving making research articles available to read without a subscription or access fee."

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: "Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them."; The Atlantic, April 20, 2017

James Somers, The Atlantic; Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: "Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them."

"After the settlement failed, Clancy told me that at Google “there was just this air let out of the balloon.” Despite eventually winning Authors Guild v. Google, and having the courts declare that displaying snippets of copyrighted books was fair use, the company all but shut down its scanning operation.

It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up."

Information Access and the 800-Pound Gorilla; Inside Higher Ed, February 20, 2017

Bryn Geffert, Inside Higher Ed; 

Information Access and the 800-Pound Gorilla

"The first copyright statute, enacted in 1790, allowed authors to retain copyright in their work for 14 years. And they could, if they desired, renew that copyright for an additional 14 years. Congress believed that a maximum period of 28 years offered the “limited” protections authorized by the U.S. Constitution to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

Under the original statute, the Library of Congress, my library and any library in the world could digitize and disseminate without charge Miller’s, Flexner’s and Furtwangler’s studies of Hamilton to the homeschooled fifth-grader, to my 15-year old son, to the high school student in rural Arkansas, to the college student at a state university and to the scholar in Niger.

We have now, today, the technology to achieve the vision endorsed by our new (and possibly best) librarian of Congress -- a vision ostensibly shared by her admiring senatorial colleagues who, though they agree on little else, appear to agree on this.

What we lack and what we need is an old law -- an old law to serve new technology.

But first we need our new chief librarian to point at the gorilla, yell for Congress’s attention and beg the legislators who confirmed her to act in accord with the ideals they articulated last spring."

Penn State joining Open Textbook Network to support affordable course content; Penn State News, 1/31/17

Penn State News; 

Penn State joining Open Textbook Network to support affordable course content

"Penn State University Libraries is joining the Open Textbook Network to help support Penn State faculty’s use of and students’ availability to free, openly licensed academic course content.

“Penn State’s membership in the Open Textbook Network supports faculty and students’ access to a large volume of free, openly licensed course content, available online, to help reduce students’ overall cost of attendance,” Joe Salem, the University Libraries’ associate dean for Learning, Undergraduate Services, and Commonwealth Campus Libraries, said. “Joining the Open Textbook Network was one of the recommendations of the University’s Open Educational Resources Task Force as part of a multi-faceted approach to supporting open and affordable course content throughout the curriculum.”

The Open Textbook Network (OTN) helps support colleges and universities’ instructional use of open textbooks and practices. Its Open Textbook Library is the premiere resource for peer-reviewed academic textbooks, all of which are free, openly licensed and complete, according to its website...

Penn State is among the largest universities to join OTN, which was established in fall 2015, and an early supporter among its peer institutions. Other Big Ten Academic Alliance members participating in OTN include the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Ohio State, Purdue, Rutgers, and the Milwaukee and Stout campuses of the University of Wisconsin system."

No Deal: German Universities Prepare For Cut-Off From Elsevier Journals; Intellectual Property Watch, 12/16/16

Intellectual Property Watch; No Deal: German Universities Prepare For Cut-Off From Elsevier Journals:

"After licensing negotiations between German university libraries and Elsevier failed at the beginning of the month, over 60 university libraries in Germany are preparing to be cut off from hundreds of journals of the British publisher, after a standoff over pricing and access.

The university libraries organised in the DEAL initiative rejected an offer made by Elsevier earlier this month for a first nationwide licence, because of an aggressive pricing and flaws in the access models...

With the stop of the negotiations access to future journal editions be cut off on 1 January, when current licenses are expiring. But there will also be no access to archived editions of journals licensed under “individual e-packages for the economic sciences in particular,” according to the message."

Erasing the Past From Google Search; New York Times, 11/11/16

J.D. Biersdorfer, New York Times; Erasing the Past From Google Search:

"Q. Is there a “right to be forgotten” in the United States? How do you get false or damaging personal information removed from Google search results?"

Trade Secret Protection Blocks Sick Samsung Workers From Data; Claims Journal, 8/12/16

Youkyung Lee, Claims Journal; Trade Secret Protection Blocks Sick Samsung Workers From Data:

"An Associated Press investigation has found South Korean authorities have, at Samsung’s request, repeatedly withheld from workers and their bereaved families crucial information about chemicals they were exposed to at its computer chip and liquid crystal display factories. Sick workers are supposed to have access to such data through the government or the courts so they can apply for workers’ compensation from the state. Without it, government officials commonly reject their cases.

The justification for withholding the information? In at least six cases involving 10 workers, it was trade secrets. Court documents and interviews with government officials, workers’ lawyers and their families show Samsung often cites the need to protect trade secrets when it asks government officials not to release such data.

“Our fight is often against trade secrets. Any contents that may not work in Samsung’s favor were deleted as trade secrets,” said Lim Ja-woon, a lawyer who has represented 15 sick Samsung workers."

Pennsylvania wades into open data; GCN, 8/26/16

Matt Leonard, GCN; Pennsylvania wades into open data:

"The data currently available on OpenDataPA supports Gov. Tom Wolf’s three governing objectives -- education, employment and government services -- includes prison population numbers, school performance profiles and summary information on well inspections. The state also plans to release datasets from other state agencies on the site...

The administration’s main goals for releasing this data is three-fold: accountability, modernization and innovation. The portal will allow citizens to keep track of government projects, find this information in one place and use if to “make data-driven decisions.”"

Sci-Hub Controversy Triggers Publishers’ Critique of Librarian; Library Journal, 8/25/16

Lisa Peet, Library Journal; Sci-Hub Controversy Triggers Publishers’ Critique of Librarian:

"“I was surprised that AAP would take the tactic of trying to say ‘don’t talk about Sci-Hub,’ as if ignoring the problem, or not shining light on it, would make it go away,” Joseph told LJ. “That seems kind of a backwards way to approach this issue to me, because what we’re seeing, frankly, is Sci-Hub really growing in popularity.”

Sci-Hub’s various clashes with the world of scholarly publishing, Joseph noted, is helping to raise awareness of the issues surrounding journal access outside the library walls. “It’s not just a library problem…. When researchers are going to the lengths of using an illegal resource to get access, I think it’s really showing institutions that it’s not a departmental problem. It’s an institutional problem.”

And the problem doesn’t only lie within academia, Gardner added. As a member of ALA, he said, it would be unethical for him to promote Sci-Hub’s use given the constraints of the legal system. “But I do think that copyright is far too strong, and that the system is in need of reform. The reason why services like Sci-Hub exist is because we have a copyright system which is too draconian.”

“This is an area where tempers run high, and I think that reasonable people can disagree,” he said. “There are a lot of people, scholars and librarians, who think that using Sci-Hub is civil disobedience and I’m personally very sympathetic to that argument. But it’s also obvious to me that under the current legal system, this is totally illegal.”

Gardner is working on research that he will present at ACRL’s 2017 conference, again using data from the Science survey to examine Sci-Hub’s potential impact on inter-library loan practices."

John Oliver’s newspaper rant hits a nerve: “We’ve watched it being not-so-slowly destroyed by forces beyond our control”; Salon, 8/10/16

Scott Timberg, Salon; John Oliver’s newspaper rant hits a nerve: “We’ve watched it being not-so-slowly destroyed by forces beyond our control” :

"So part of what’s interesting about Oliver’s bit — which looked at both the causes of the decline as well as the effects, with his usual combination of hyperventilating moralism and comic exaggeration — is that some seem frustrated with it. And not just people who hate the press, but people who value what it does.

The most visible of these criticisms so far has come from the president of the Newspaper Association of America, who praised the segment’s opening. “But making fun of experiments,” David Chavern wrote, “and pining away for days when classified ads and near-monopolistic positions in local ad markets funded journalism is pointless and ultimately harmful.”

Sullivan, who was once the executive editor of the Buffalo News and the public editor of the New York Times, hit back sharply in a Post piece:

Actually, no. What Oliver did was precisely nail everything that’s been happening in the industry that Chavern represents: The shrinking staffs, the abandonment of important beats, the love of click bait over substance, the deadly loss of ad revenue, the truly bad ideas that have come to the surface out of desperation, the persistent failures to serve the reading public."

Journalism: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO); HBO via YouTube, 8/7/16

HBO via YouTube; Journalism: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) :

"The newspaper industry is suffering. That’s bad news for journalists — both real and fictional."

Are MOOCs Forever?; Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/14/16

[Podcast and Transcript] Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education; Are MOOCs Forever? :

"Think back to the early days of MOOCs. Professors at Stanford and Harvard and other places were suddenly teaching really big classes, free. Hundreds of thousands of students at once were in those courses. It was an unprecedented giveaway of what had traditionally been the most expensive education in the world.

Back then, I met several students who were binging on the courses the way you might binge-watch a season of your favorite show on Netflix. They took as many courses as they possibly could, powering through and finishing as many as 30 courses in a year. When I asked why they were in such a hurry, the most popular reason was that they thought it was all too good to last. As one of those binging students told me, "I’m just afraid this whole thing might end soon." Surely, universities would change their mind about this, or the start-ups working with colleges might lock things up.

Fast forward to last month, when Coursera did something that stirred up all of those concerns again. On June 30 the company deleted hundreds of its earliest courses, as part of a shift to a new software platform. Reaction, as you might expect, was negative on social media and blogs. One programmer called it cultural vandalism...

Hello, and welcome to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning Podcast. I’m Jeff Young, and I recently had the chance to talk with Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, about those issues."