Do Digital Signatures Assure Long-Term Integrity?

Duane Dunston has posted a long description of the use of digital signatures to assure the integrity of preserved digital documents. I agree that the maintaining the integrity of preserved documents is important. I agree that digital signatures are very useful. For example, the fact the GPO is signing government documents is important and valuable. It provides evidence that the document contains information the federal government currently wants you to believe. Similarly, the suggestion by Eric Hellman to use signatures to verify that Creative Commons licenses have been properly applied.

However, caution is needed when applying digital signatures to the problem of maintaining the integrity of digital documents in the long term. Details below the fold.

Wiley's Financials

Two postings by Ann Okerson to the "liblicense" mail alias about Wiley's latest financial report reveal a detail about the way Wiley reports its financial data that I missed, and that means I may have somewhat over-estimated its profitability in my post on What's Wrong With Research Communication?. Follow me below the fold for the details.

ACM & Copyrights

ACM's copyright policy has been a subject of controversy. The latest Communications of the ACM has an article by Ronald Boisvert and Jack Davidson, the co-chairs of the ACM Publications Board, outlining recent changes. One change they feature is:

One new feature that ACM will roll out in the fall will enable authors to obtain a special link for any of their ACM articles that they may post on their personal page. Anyone who clicks on this link can freely download the definitive version of the paper from the DL. In addition, authors will receive a code snippet they can put on their Web page that will display up-to-date citation counts and download statistics for their article from the DL.

Below the fold I look this gift horse in the mouth.

Preserving Linked Data

I attended the workshop on Semantic Digital Archives that was part of the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries conference in Berlin. Only a few of the papers were interesting from the preservation viewpoint:

• Kun Qian of the University of Magdeburg addressed the fact that the OAIS standard does not deal with security issues, proposing an interesting framework for doing so.
• Manfred Thaller described work in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia to use open source software such as IRODS to implement a somewhat LOCKSS-like distributed preservation network for cultural heritage institutions using their existing storage infrastructure. Information in the network will be aggregated by a single distribution portal implemented with Fedora that will feed content to sites such as Europeana.
• Felix Ostrowski of Humboldt University, who works on the LuKII project, discussed an innovative approach to handling metadata in the LOCKSS system using RDFa to include the metadata in the HTML files that LOCKSS boxes preserve. Unlike the normal environment in which LOCKSS boxes operate, where they simply have to put up with whatever the e-journal publisher decides to publish, LuKII has control over both the publisher and the LOCKSS boxes. They can therefore use RDFa to tightly bind metadata to the content it describes.

My take on the preservation issues of linked data is as follows.

Linked data uses URIs. Linked data can thus be collected for preservation by archives other than the original publisher using existing web crawling techniques such as the Internet Archive’s Heritrix. Enabling multiple archives to collect and preserve linked data will be essential; some of the publishers will inevitably fail for a variety of reasons. Motivating web archives to do this will be important, as will tools to measure the extent to which they succeed. The various archives preserving linked data items can republish them, but only at URIs different from the original one, since they do not control the original publisher’s DNS entry. Links to the original will not resolve to the archive copies, removing them from the world of linked data. This problem is generic to web archiving. Solving it is enabled by the Memento technology, which is on track to become an IETF/W3C standard. It will be essential that both archives preserving, and tools accessing linked data implement Memento. There are some higher level issues in the use of Memento, but as it gets wider use they are likely to be resolved before they become critical for linked data. Collection using web crawlers and re-publishing using Memento provide archives with a technical basis for linked open data preservation, but they also need a legal basis. Over 80% of current data sources do not provide any license information; these sources will be problematic to archive. Even those data sources that do provide license information may be problematic, their license may not allow the operations required for preservation. Open data licenses do not merely permit and encourage re-use of data, they permit and encourage its preservation.

Modeling the Economics of Long-Term Storage

I gave a talk at the Library of Congress workshop on Designing Storage Architectures entitled Modeling the Economics of Long-Term Storage. It was talk about work in progress with Library of Congress funding, expanding ideas I described in these two blog posts about ways to compare the costs of different approaches to long term storage. I had only 10 minutes to speak, so below the fold is an expanded and edited text of the talk with links to the sources.

Ithaka Does A Good Thing

I've been very critical of Ithaka, so it is only fair that I point out that yesterday they did a very good thing:

"Today, we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This content includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR."

It was, after all, hard to justify charging JSTOR's punitive or obscure per-article access charges for content that had entered the public domain. These charges may seem like a bug, in that they are so high as to almost completely deter access and thus generate very little income. But in fact they are a feature. Suppose Ithaka was to decide that, since there was very little use of per-article access and thus very little income, they would charge for it on a cost-recovery basis. The marginal cost of an extra access to the JSTOR system is minimal, so per-article access would be very cheap. Libraries that currently subscribe to JSTOR would drop their subscriptions and go pay-per-view, destroying the subscription business model. Punitive per-article charges are essential to preserving Ithaka's cash cow.

They are, however, part of a much bigger problem that I touched on in my post on the problems of research communication. It is well illustrated by Kent Anderson's vehement response to George Monbiot's diatribe against academic publishers:

"Let’s assume I can read the whole paper. Like 99.9% of the population, I’m not going to know what to make of it. It’s for specialists, or better, subspecialists ... There is no price in the world that’s going to make that scientific paper, or thousands of others, intelligible, relevant, or meaningful to me in any way that’s going to affect my ability to function in a democracy."

In other words, the general public has no business reading the academic literature.

But it is the general public that pays for the research that results in the papers that Kent thinks they shouldn't be reading, and that JSTOR and other academic publishers price beyond their means. If the general public is going to continue to pay for the research, and pay for the entire research communication system that includes both Ithaka, and Kent's Society for Scholarly Publishing, they need to believe that they're getting benefits in return.

Increasingly, thanks for example to well-funded campaigns of denial (e.g. tobacco, global warming, evolution) or fraud (e.g. MMR vaccine), the public is coming to believe that science is a conspiracy of insiders to feather their own nests at public expense. Even if I agreed with Kent that lay people would be unable to understand his example paper, the pricing model that ensures they can't afford to read it, and the attitude that they shouldn't be allowed to read it, are both very unhelpful.

There is a lot of research into the effect of Internet information on patients. The conclusions in terms of outcomes are fewer, but positive:

"Provision of information to persons with cancer has been shown to help patients gain control, reduce anxiety, improve compliance, create realistic expectations, promote self-care and participation, and generate feelings of safety and security. Satisfaction with information has been shown to correlate with quality of life, and patients who feel satisfied with the adequacy of information given are more likely to feel happy with their level of participation in the overall process of decision making."

These studies don't distinguish between the academic literature and sites targeted at lay readers, but it is clear that patients searching for information who encounter paywalls are less likely to "feel satisfied with the adequacy of information given" and thus have poorer quality of life.

The story of the illness of Larry Lessig's newborn daughter Samantha Tess (about 11:10 into the video) makes the case against the elitist view of access to research. To be sure, Larry is at Harvard and thus has free access to most of the literature. But consider an equally smart lawyer with an equally sick daughter in a developing country. He would no longer have free access via HINARI. According to Larry, he would have had to pay $435 for the 20 articles Larry read for free. Would he "feel satisfied with the adequacy of information given"?

What's Wrong With Research Communication

The recent Dagstuhl workshop on the Future of Research Communication has to produce a report. I was one of those tasked with a section of the report entitled What's Wrong With The Current System?, intended to motivate later sections describing future activities aimed at remedying the problems. Below the fold is an expanded version of my draft of the section, not to be attributed to the workshop or any other participant. Even my original draft was too long; in the process of getting to consensus, it will likely be cut and toned down. I acknowledge a debt to the very valuable report of the UK House of Common's Science & Technology Committee entitled Peer review in scientific publications.