Bundled APCs Considered Harmful

In More From Mackie-Mason on Gold Open Access I wrote

The publishers ... are pushing bundled APCs to librarians as a way to retain the ability to extract monopoly rents. As the Library Loon perceptively points out:

The key aspect of Elsevier’s business model that it will do its level best to retain in any acquisitions or service launches is the disconnect between service users and service purchasers.

I just realized that there is another pernicious aspect of bundled APC (Author Processing Charges) deals such as the recent deal between the Gates Foundation and AAAS. It isn't just that the deal involves Gates paying over the odds. It is that AAAS gets the money without necessarily publishing any articles. This gives them a financial incentive to reject Gates-funded articles, which would take up space in the journal for which AAAS could otherwise charge an APC.

Poynder on the Open Access mess

Do not be put off by the fact that it is 36 pages long. Richard Poynder's Copyright: the immoveable barrier that open access advocates underestimated is a must-read. Every one of the 36 pages is full of insight.

Briefly, Poynder is arguing that the mis-match of resources, expertise and motivation makes it futile to depend on a transaction between an author and a publisher to provide useful open access to scientific articles. As I have argued before, Poynder concludes that the only way out is for Universities to act:

As it happens, the much-lauded Harvard open access policy contains the seeds for such a development. This includes wording along the lines of: “each faculty member grants to the school a nonexclusive copyright for all of his/her scholarly articles.” A rational next step would be for schools to appropriate faculty copyright all together. This would be a way of preventing publishers from doing so, and it would have the added benefit of avoiding the legal uncertainty some see in the Harvard policies. Importantly, it would be a top-down diktat rather than a bottom-up approach. Since currently researchers can request a no-questions-asked opt-out, and publishers have learned that they can bully researchers into requesting that opt-out, the objective of the Harvard OA policies is in any case subverted.

Note the word "faculty" above. Poynder does not examine the issue that very few papers are published all of whose authors are faculty. Most authors are students, post-docs or staff. The copyright in a joint work is held by the authors jointly, or if some are employees working for hire, jointly by the faculty authors and the institution. I doubt very much that the copyright transfer agreements in these cases are actually valid, because they have been signed only by the primary author (most frequently not a faculty member), and/or have been signed by a worker-for-hire who does not in fact own the copyright.

Postel's Law again

Eight years ago I wrote:

In RFC 793 (1981) the late, great Jon Postel laid down one of the basic design principles of the Internet, Postel's Law or the Robustness Principle:

"Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others."

Its important not to lose sight of the fact that digital preservation is on the "accept" side of Postel's Law,

Recently, discussion on a mailing list I'm on focused on the downsides of Postel's Law. Below the fold, I try to explain why most of these downsides don't apply to the "accept" side, which is the side that matters for digital preservation.

RFC 4810

A decade ago next month Wallace et al published RFC 4810 Long-Term Archive Service Requirements. Its abstract is:

There are many scenarios in which users must be able to prove the existence of data at a specific point in time and be able to demonstrate the integrity of data since that time, even when the duration from time of existence to time of demonstration spans a large period of time. Additionally, users must be able to verify signatures on digitally signed data many years after the generation of the signature. This document describes a class of long-term archive services to support such scenarios and the technical requirements for interacting with such services.

Below the fold, a look at how it has stood the test of time.

Coronal Mass Ejections (again)

Back in 2014 I blogged about one of digital preservation's less well-known risks, coronal mass ejections (CME).  Additional information accumulated in the comments. Last October:

"President Barack Obama .. issued an Executive Order that defines what the nation’s response should be to a catastrophic space weather event that takes out large portions of the electrical power grid, resulting in cascading failures that would affect key services such as water supply, healthcare, and transportation.

Two recent studies bought the risk back into focus and convinced me that my 2014 post was too optimistic. Below the fold, more gloom and doom.