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Two years and counting. What do we need to implement the Nelson Memo? Recording
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Two years and counting. What do we need to implement the Nelson Memo? Recording
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Upload Date:
2024-03-06T00:00:00.0000000
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Hi, everyone.
Welcome to this NISO+ session. Two years and counting. What do we need to implement? The Nelson memo? My name is Qiana Johnson and I will be the moderator for this session. Our panelists today come from a variety of perspectives in the profession, and I'm looking forward to our discussion, so please allow me to take this time to introduce them.
Howard Ratner is the Executive Director of CHORUS He has played a key role in developing innovative technology solutions for scholarly communications. He co-founded ORCID to help establish the DOI, as well as the founding and technical development of Crossref and CLOCKSS. He was the Chief Technology Officer for Nature Publishing Group and held production and technology positions at Springer-Verlag and Wiley.
He is also a NISO/NFAIS Miles Conrad awardee. Our next speaker is Alix Vance, she is the CEO of AIP Publishing and has spent more than 20 years driving growth for innovative, academic, scholarly and professional publishing organizations. Before joining AIP Publishing in 2020, Alix was the CEO of GeoScienceWorld, a leading non-profit publisher of books, journals and data in the Earth sciences and partner to nearly 30 publishing organizations.
She has held executive and advisory roles in nonprofit commercial and startup organizations in publishing and technology services, including SAGE and eBookLibrary. And our final speaker is Karen Wolf, the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Director and Librarian at the John Carter Brown Library and Professor of history at Brown university. A historian of early America, from 2013 to 2021, she was the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute in Early American History and Culture and Professor of history at William and Mary Wolfe earned her PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University.
And she writes for public and academic audiences about early American history, the worlds of scholarship and scholarly publishing at the Scholarly Kitchen, and is now finishing Lineage Genealogy and the Power of Connection and 18th century British America for Oxford University Press. And I'll now turn it over to our speakers for what I'm sure is going to be an exciting conversation.
Well, thank you very much to so for giving me the opportunity to speak to us to speak to you all today. So first off, a bit of background. About CHORUS, we're a not-for-profit community effort trying to reduce the burden of complying with open and public access mandates. We're comprised of an ever-growing number of institutions, learned societies, society publishers, as well as commercial publishers.
We make up more than 75% of the world's published output from funded research. Our partner agencies listed here, such as the NSF, DOE, DOD, NASA, USDA and others are invaluable allies in helping us to move forward. We're dedicated to making open research work and have been doing so since our inception with the OSTP memo in 2013. Our goals are to help our main stakeholders scale their OA compliance, and we're working to develop metrics about open data.
We help our stakeholders improve the quality of their metadata related to open research. And most recently, we've been hosting forums and workshops to connect our stakeholders. So they can learn and hopefully build trust. So I've been asked to give a quick primer about the OSTP's August 2022 public access mandate. It's an unfunded mandate to all US agencies asking them to revise or develop plans for public access to funded research.
It calls for all funded research to be made immediately available upon acceptance for publication. The publicly accessible articles can be found in the forms of an accepted author manuscript or the version of record. The mandate applies to all grantees who receive funding from a US agency, not just the corresponding authors. And like the Holdren memo of 2013.
It also includes the data from the funded research, but now also includes conference proceedings, book chapters, posters and more. OSTP has specifically called out a focus on metadata and persistent IDs, and OSTP is also highlighting their interest in making sure that the agencies address equity and research integrity in their plans. The agency plans are due to be submitted to OSTP in early 2023 for the agencies that give $100 million in funding and the other agencies by this summer.
The agency plans are due to be effective by the start of 2026. So in January, OSTP announced several initiatives to advance open science. They said that 2023 was designated as the Year of Open Science, and they announced a government-wide definition of open science The principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reproducibility and equity.
It also provided updates to federal agency public access plans as well as individual agency activities. So NASA was the first funder to announce the revision to their public access plan, and they did so in December 20, 2022, along with their Transform to Open Science program called TOPS. So one example of a new service that's come out of all of this is from the DOE in January, and they announced their PIDS@OSTI service, which pulls together their existing services that they offer to DOE labs and other US agencies, helping them register their PIDs, such as data and software via DataCite, text documents and grants and awards via Crossref, people via ORCID and institutions via ROR.
So, I'm going to leave you with this. As we have our conversation today, I would like us all to keep in mind how do we ensure the following How do we ensure the identification of open research? How can we make sure that it can be discovered? How can it be accessed in an equitable manner? And then ultimately, How can it be preserved for future generations to use?
Thank you. Thanks, Howard. That was terrific. Hopefully you all can see these slides. I'm Alix Vance. And full disclosure, I'm also the Board Chair of CHORUS. So I have dual interests in the topic. But my task today is to provide a publishing point of view and to encourage further discussion in the chat.
Relative to the Nelson memo and the transition to open, there are few areas that are top of mind for me and for publishers like me economic, technological and infrastructural. Each, in my opinion, calls for alignment, collaboration and joint solution seeking, versus polarization. To start with the financial and economic We're financing a significant re-engineering of our systems while, at the same time, seeking a publishing model that works while minimizing unintended consequences.
Specific to the Nelson memo, AIP Publishing, where I work, is already making AAMs available without embargo, so that is not my primary topic. However, my sense is that zero embargo Green will still not be sustainable for all at scale. And this directs publishers in the way of travel of Gold, versus Green. Gold, unfortunately, still presents multiple problems. Authors lack an appetite for APCs given uneven and inequitable access to funding.
Gold incentivizes rapid acceptance and poses risks to quality. Scale is the mechanism for driving costs down and supporting APCs and Gold models, and this decidedly favors the largest publishers. The emphasis on scale could have the undesirable consequence of driving some non-profits out of publishing. But, because non-profits play a valued and vital role in research, development, communication, research, integrity, and reinvestment in their respective communities, Gold might need to be a stepping stone towards a multi-payer model development that has not occurred yet.
In sum, neither gold nor zero embargo Green in their current forms provide optimal models for research continuity and for the research community. We haven't collectively landed yet on what does. The second challenge has to do with the pace of technology, specifically with manipulation of information and risks to research integrity. Open will introduce more opportunities for the manipulation of research information.
Are we able to foresee how emerging technologies will act upon research? There are security and privacy risks and risks for "fake scholarship". Technologies like ChatGPT also pose significant risks for plagiarism and challenges to research integrity. Are we already prepared for a wholly open and machinable global research economy? The ways that technology and monetization exploit research are likely to develop more quickly than policies preventing their exploitation and misuse.
Powerful and potentially monied interests will be the first movers. Curation and verification will be more important than ever, and these are simply not solved problems. Thirdly, we are contending and grappling with questions of infrastructure, specifically around metadata. Our vision for research advancement outstrips the infrastructure that exists today.
Underpinnings and the still-needed metadata layer are decades away from being sufficient. Persistent identifiers for people, institutions, funders, labs and datasets will enable the kinds of processing and querying we are seeking. Metadata, not just content, needs to be robust, ubiquitous, consistent, open and non-proprietary. Organizations like CHORUS, CrossRef, ORCID, NISO and NIST are working in these areas.
And it's extremely positive to see OSTP with other agencies emphasizing PIDs and metadata in their responses. In terms of shared objectives and facilitating steps, what we need most is alignment, collaboration, jointly developed solutions and co-investment if our aim is to accelerate while managing these complex risks. Regardless of our roles in the ecosystem, at this point, we ALL see that public access is the future.
What we uniquely share is our expertise and commitment to the scholarly community. Should we lack coordination and co-funding, we will expose ourselves to outcomes that are opportunistic versus intentional. In my sense, we will generate better long term outcomes by aligning and solving problems together. This is a shared project, not a battle of opposing forces. So in conclusion, on behalf of AIPP and my colleagues, I am hoping for more energy put towards co-prioritization and co-investment in planning that accelerates our joint progress, specifically calling for expertise, cooperation and deep trust.
Thanks very much. Thank you so much to NISO for the invitation to join my esteemed colleagues and thank you to Howard and Alix for their expertise. So I'm coming from a different perspective as a historian and as a humanist and as a library director who runs a rare book library, not a circulating library.
All of my comments have to be seen in that context as well as someone who has worked in higher education in the United States. The Nelson memo sets out an ambitious agenda to make research work better for the public to be of public service. And that's the public access language. I think we can all get on board with that. I loved Alex's comment about how this is not a competition, this is a shared enterprise, and I fully support that.
I also want to note that Alondra Nelson-- it's always odd to me to call this the Nelson memo--. She was then the acting director of OSTP. But Alondra Nelson is an outstanding scholar and leader whose scholarship has influenced my own. She is a social scientist. I like to think with a humanist perspective. But--. But if the ultimate goal is to make research a better public service, we have to stop talking about and acting as if research equals science.
The public is served by robust evidence based Scholarship across disciplines. And of course, I'm speaking here, of course, my own perspective as a historian. That's my experience, that's my vantage, and I own that as well as someone coming from the US. But we know that history is as ripe for and has a longer history, in fact of disinformation and political distortion than science.
History actually as a discipline has pre-existed science for quite a long time. Historical expertise and the work of historians is essential to functional, self-governing societies. Autocrats know that. We should know that, too, and we should be highly attentive to this. As President George W Bush said at the founding of the African-American History and Culture museum, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, a great nation does not hide from its history.
And there is a corollary, which is a weak nation hides and distorts its history, or perhaps even doesn't support exploring history. Let me back up for a minute. The research University as we know it. Perhaps you won't be surprised to know. I'm going to insist on some historical context here. But the research university, as we know it, is a product of two historical moments.
First, the late 19th century and an insistence on methodology for all disciplinary endeavors. And secondly, post-world War II and the explosion of funding and the founding of research universities across the United States and Western Europe and elsewhere. This explosion of funding primarily came for Science in the Public interest, often for national security purposes. It also meant labs and publishers and a change in every dimension of the research cycle, including libraries.
But there have been two consequences to that. One is the very different dollar requirements and different perceived values associated with science versus, say, the humanities. So, for example, the dramatic divergence in funding for NSF 10.3 billion, as opposed to the National Endowment for the Humanities $275 million. And secondly, that science has come to stand in for research in the Nelson memo and even in the conversation we've already had today, this is obvious.
We talk about open science. Now, I know elsewhere in the world, science actually covers all research. But in fact, if we look at all of the drivers here, all of the examples in the Nelson memo, the guidance and who was consulted right up to the very end of August and its release, and we think about the examples that have been provided elsewhere, the advantages of open science for climate, for example, for biomedical cancer research, for vaccines, all of which I'm hugely in favor of as a human living on this planet, don't get me wrong.
But these are all critically important things that also need historical context and without it actually suffer, and so do we. So, I mean, even as Howard described in his first slide, the Nelson memo means to be sweeping. It means to capture all research in this monolithic requirement for open. So what I would say is historians are 1,000% in favor of public service.
It is hard to find a historian hiding themselves away and not advocating for the public use and public audiences for and public service of their work. But what we should be asking is what would make for what would actually support better public service? What would be better support? I would say either treat disciplines the same. I'll take that 10.3 billion.
That goes to NSF for the National Endowment for the Humanities. I'm not sure they're asking for it, but I would take it or acknowledge that we have differential situations here. Historians, for example, work quite differently than scientists. They tend to work longer. For one thing, I'm sitting in a library where just above me there are scholars looking at rare manuscripts and books who are poring over materials at a very human scale.
Endeavor of research and the products of our research are also very human scale. They require a lot of intensive and expert editorial labor to put words together to mean something quite particular. In fact, AI does not work for this, nor should we want it to, no matter what other kinds of uses. It can be put to. The funding is very partial, and small. Scholars get small grants of a couple of thousand dollars at a time for maybe a month of research.
How many of those small grants are put together for a single book? And so if a scholar gets a month of Scholarship support from NEH, does that mean then that they are required to publish with open access? Most of our publishers are non-profit and small. There are so many ways in which I could say that the differences are profound, but it doesn't mean that the humanities are less important.
In fact, I would say as humans, we should embrace the critical significance of the humanities. And we should be asking, how can we help support the humanities to be of the best public service? And I don't think this is it. Thank you. Thank you so much to our speakers for getting us started with what's going to be a really exciting discussion.
Thank you also to the folks who have joined us for the recorded session of this. And we'll now move on to our live discussion. Thanks so much.