Signposting the Scholarly Web

At the Fall CNI meeting, Herbert Van de Sompel and Michael Nelson discussed an important paper they had just published in D-Lib, Reminiscing About 15 Years of Interoperability Efforts. The abstract is:

Over the past fifteen years, our perspective on tackling information interoperability problems for web-based scholarship has evolved significantly. In this opinion piece, we look back at three efforts that we have been involved in that aptly illustrate this evolution: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, and Memento. Understanding that no interoperability specification is neutral, we attempt to characterize the perspectives and technical toolkits that provided the basis for these endeavors. With that regard, we consider repository-centric and web-centric interoperability perspectives, and the use of a Linked Data or a REST/HATEAOS technology stack, respectively. We also lament the lack of interoperability across nodes that play a role in web-based scholarship, but end on a constructive note with some ideas regarding a possible path forward.

They describe their evolution from OAI-PMH, a custom protocol that used the Web simply as a transport for remote procedue calls, to Memento, which uses only the native capabilities of the Web. They end with a profoundly important proposal they call Signposting the Scholarly Web which, if deployed, would be a really big deal in many areas. Some further details are on GitHub, including this somewhat cryptic use case:

Use case like LOCKSS is the need to answer the question: What are all the components of this work that should be preserved? Follow all rel="describedby" and rel="item" links (potentially multiple levels perhaps through describedby and item).

Below the fold I explain what this means, and why it would be a really big deal for preservation.

DRM in the IoT

This week, Phillips pushed out a firmware upgrade to their "smart" lighting system that prevented third-party lights that used to interoperate with it continuing to do so. An insightful Anonymous Coward at Techdirt wrote:

And yet people still wonder why many people are hesitant to allow any sort of software update to install. Philips isn't just turning their product into a wall garden. They're teaching more people that "software update"="things stop working like they did".

Below the fold, some commentary.

Talk on Emulation at CNI

When Cliff Lynch found out that I was writing a report for the Mellon Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and IMLS entitled Emulation & Virtualization as Preservation Strategies he asked me to give a talk about it at the Fall CNI meeting, and to debug the talk beforehand by giving it at UC Berkeley iSchool's "Information Access Seminars". The abstract was:

20 years ago, Jeff Rothenberg's seminal Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents compared migration and emulation as strategies for digital preservation, strongly favoring emulation. Emulation was already a long-established technology; as Rothenberg wrote Apple was using it as the basis for their transition from the Motorola 68K to the PowerPC. Despite this, the strategy of almost all digital preservation systems since has been migration. Why was this?

Preservation systems using emulation have recently been deployed for public use by the Internet Archive and the Rhizome Project, and for restricted use by the Olive Archive at Carnegie-Mellon and others. What are the advantages and limitations of current emulation technology, and what are the barriers to more general adoption?

Below the fold, the text of the talk with links to the sources. The demos in the talk were crippled by the saturated hotel network; please click on the linked images below for Smarty, oldweb.today and VisiCalc to experience them for yourself. The Olive demo of TurboTax is not publicly available, but it is greatly to Olive's credit that it worked well even on a heavily-loaded network.

SSDs: Cheap as Chips?

Four and a half years ago Ian Adams, Ethan Miller and I proposed DAWN, a Durable Array of Wimpy Nodes, pointing out that a suitable system design could exploit the characteristics of solid-state storage to make system costs for archival storage competitive with hard disk despite greater media costs. Since then, the cost differential between flash and hard disks has decreased substantially. Below the fold, an update.

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.

You get what you get and you don't get upset

The title is a quote from Coach Junior, who teaches my elder grand-daughter soccer. It comes in handy when, for example, the random team selection results in a young lady being on the opposite team to her best friend. It came to mind when I read Kalev Leetaru's How Much Of The Internet Does The Wayback Machine Really Archive? documenting the idiosyncratic and evolving samples the Internet Archive collects of the Web, and the subsequent discussion on the IIPC mail alias. Below the fold, my take on this discussion.

SPARC Author Addendum

SPARC has a post Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum to secure your rights as the author of a journal article announcing the result of an initiative to fix one of the fundamental problems of academic publishing, namely that in most cases authors carelessly give up essential rights by signing unchanged a copyright transfer agreement written by the publisher's lawyers.

The publisher will argue that this one-sided agreement, often transferring all possible rights to the publisher, is absolutely necessary in order that the article be published. Despite their better-than-average copyright policy, ACM's claims in this regard are typical. I dissected them here.

The SPARC addendum was written by a lawyer, Michael W. Carroll of Villanova University School of Law, and is intended to be attached to, and thereby modify, the publisher's agreement. It performs a number of functions:

• Preserving the author's rights to reproduce, distribute perform, and display the work for non-commercial purposes.
• Acknowledges that the work may already be the subject of non-exclusive copyright grants to the author's institution or a funding agency.
• Imposes as a condition of publication that the publisher provide the author with a PDF of the camera-ready version without DRM.

The kicker is the final paragraph, which requests that the publisher return a signed copy of the addendum, and makes it clear that publishing the work in any way indicates assent to the terms of the addendum. This leaves the publisher with only three choices, agree to the terms, refuse to publish the work, or ignore the addendum.

Of course, many publishers will refuse to publish, and many authors at that point will cave in. The SPARC site has useful advice for this case. The more interesting case is the third, where the publisher simply ignores the author's rights as embodied in the addendum. Publishers are not above ignoring the rights of authors, as shown by the history of my article Keeping Bits Safe: How Hard Can It Be?, published both in ACM Queue (correctly with a note that I retained copyright) and in CACM (incorrectly claiming ACM copyright). I posted analysis of ACM's bogus justification of their copyright policy based on this experience. There is more here.

So what will happen if the publisher ignores the author's addendum? They will publish the paper. The author will not get a camera-ready copy without DRM. But the author will make the paper available, and the "kicker" above means they will be on safe legal ground. Not merely did the publisher constructively agree to the terms of the addendum, but they failed to deliver on their side of the deal. So any attempt to haul the author into court, or send takedown notices, would be very risky for the publisher.

2012 data from Alex Holcombe

Publishers don't need anything except permission to publish. Publishers want the rights beyond this to extract the rents that generate their extraordinary profit margins. Please use the SPARC addendum when you get the chance.