Trump's Shutdown Impacts Information Access

Source

Government shutdown causing information access problems by James A. Jacobs and James R. Jacobs is important. It documents the effect of the Trump government shutdown on access to globally important information:

Twitter and newspapers are buzzing with complaints about widespread problems with access to government information and data (see for example, Wall Street Journal (paywall 😐 ), ZDNet News, Pew Center, Washington Post, Scientific American, TheVerge, and FedScoop to name but a few).

Maybe when/if the government opens again, we should scrape the NIST and CSRC websites, put all those publications somewhere public. It’s worrying that *every single US cryptography standard* is now unavailable to practitioners.

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) January 12, 2019

Matthew Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins, said “It’s worrying that every single US cryptography standard is now unavailable to practitioners.” He was responding to the fact that he could not get the documents he needed from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) or its branch, the Computer Security Resource Center (CSRC). The government shutdown is the direct cause of these problems.

They point out how this illustrates the importance of libraries collecting and preserving web-published information:

Regardless of who you (or your user communities) blame for the shutdown itself, this loss of access was entirely foreseeable and avoidable. It was foreseeable because it has happened before. It was avoidable because libraries can select, acquire, organize, and preserve these documents and provide access to them and services for them whether the government is open or shut-down.

Go read the whole thing, and weep for the way libraries have abandoned their centuries-long mission of safeguarding information for future readers.

The long tail of non-English science

Ben Panko's English Is the Language of Science. That Isn't Always a Good Thing is based on Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science, a paper in PLOS Biology by Tatsuya Amano, Juan P. González-Varo and William J. Sutherland. Panko writes:

For the new study, Amano's team looked at the entire body of research available on Google Scholar about biodiversity and conservation, starting in the year 2014. Searching with keywords in 16 languages, the researchers found a total of more than 75,000 scientific papers. Of those papers, more than 35 percent were in languages other than English, with Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese topping the list.

Even for people who try not to ignore research published in non-English languages, Amano says, difficulties exist. More than half of the non-English papers observed in this study had no English title, abstract or keywords, making them all but invisible to most scientists doing database searches in English.

Below the fold, how this problem relates to work by the LOCKSS team.

Talk on Private LOCKSS Networks at PASIG

I stood in for Vicky Reich to give an overview of Private LOCKSS Networks to the PASIG meeting. Below the fold, an edited text of the talk with links to the sources.

National Hosting with LOCKSS Technology

For some years now the LOCKSS team has been working with countries to implement National Hosting of electronic resources, including subscription e-journals and e-books. JISC's SafeNet project in the UK is an example. Below the fold I look at the why, what and how of these systems.

Access vs. Control

Hugh Rundle, in an interesting piece entitled When access isn’t even access reporting from the Australian Internet Governance Forum writes about librarians:

Worst of all, our obsession with providing access ultimately results in the loss of access. Librarians created the serials crisis because they focussed on access instead of control. The Open Access movement has had limited success because it focusses on access to articles instead of remaking the economics of academic careers. Last week Proquest announced it had gobbled up Ex-Libris, further centralising corporate control over the world’s knowledge. Proquest will undoubtedly now charge even more for their infinitely-replicable-at-negligible-cost digital files. Libraries will pay, because ‘access’. At least until they can’t afford it. The result of ceding control over journal archives has not been more access, but less.

and:

As Benjamin Franklin might have said if he was a librarian: those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little access, deserve neither and will lose both.

From the very beginning of the LOCKSS Program 17 years ago, the goal has been to provide librarians with the tools they need to take control and ownership of the content they pay for. As I write, JSTOR has been unable to deliver articles for three days and libraries all over the world have been deprived of access to all the content they have paid JSTOR for through the years. Had they owned copies of the content, as they did on paper, no such system-wide failure would have been been possible.

Preserving Long-Form Digital Humanities

Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed reports on a sorely-needed new Mellon Foundation initiative supporting digital publishing in the humanities:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is aggressively funding efforts to support new forms of academic publishing, which researchers say could further legitimize digital scholarship.

The foundation in May sent university press directors a request for proposals to a new grant-making initiative for long-form digital publishing for the humanities. In the e-mail, the foundation noted the growing popularity of digital scholarship, which presented an “urgent and compelling” need for university presses to publish and make digital work available to readers.

Note in particular:

The foundation’s proposed solution is for groups of university presses to ... tackle any of the moving parts that task is comprised of, including “...(g) distribution; and (h) maintenance and preservation of digital content.”

Below the fold, some thoughts on this based on experience from the LOCKSS Program.

"National Hosting" of archives

The LOCKSS team are working with some countries to build in-country Private LOCKSS Networks (PLNs) to preserve the content such as e-journals and e-books that they pay for. Other countries are considering outsourcing their national archive of this content to foreign providers. One of the questions that countries ask about these efforts is "where is the data stored?" Recent developments in the US and the UK mean that this is no longer the right question to ask. Follow me below the fold to find out what the right question has become.