Yes, well, me too. So I've built a new site to do it all for you, and I'm calling it Curatr.

• Built on all the shiniest and most proprietary technologies, from HyperCard to Flash
• Automatically builds the most appropriate storage and interaction models based on computerized analysis of provided data. No documentation needed!
• Auto-organizing. Never touch metadata again!
• Can be managed by a single graduate student in two hours a week without any prior training
• Wholly grant-funded, so you never have to worry about cost or sustainability
• Never needs updating. Curatr does all the pesky link-breaking for you, as its underlying technology stack migrates to keep up with the times.

Join the Curatr perpetual beta today!

• One argument I rarely see made for open access that should perhaps be made more often is that it reduces friction in both accessing and providing information. Want to reduce the overhead of responding to FOIA requests? Post the information online.
• Data, data, we love data! Data is at the heart of new science ecosystem and Preserving the Data Harvest. Oh, and if you hadn't noticed, The Data Singularity is Here.
• Some good lay-level explanations of digital preservation from Gizmodo and from Alan's notes.
• FXPAL asks Whither data privacy? in the wake of reidentification research.
• Are Article Influence Scores Comparable across Scientific Fields?: In a word, "no." More musings on impact: On article-level metrics and other animals.
• The cake test of freedom: Clever! It's only open data if you can paint it on a cake... See also O'Reilly Radar on Truly Open Data.
• The scientist and the librarian should be friends: Texas water researchers working with the Texas Digital Library.
• Curation as contextualization: The importance of curation in a metadata driven information architecture and Some thoughts on curation – adding context and telling stories
• Did you know there was a Bioinformatics Blog Carnival? Me neither. Now we both know.
• A rundown on the research-collaboration tool HubZero: Doing science on the hub.
• Look what data can do! Chile Earthquake Moved Entire City 10 Feet to the West But apply data with care: We're so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong.

As always, drop a comment or use the tag "trogool" on del.icio.us to bring something to my attention. Thanks!

I hope someone is writing a biography of Henriette Avram. I will be first in line to buy it. I desperately want to know how she did what she did.

Her achievement is generally, and appropriately, recognized as a technical one: designer and implementer of the MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) format still in use in hundreds of thousands of libraries worldwide. If that had been all: dayenu, it would have been enough. For all its baroqueness, its bizarre redundancies, its even more bizarre limitations, I find a lot to like in MARC, especially taking into account the computing environment under which it was developed.

But that is hardly all Henriette Avram did. Consider: she led a team of male engineers. How did that work, exactly, in the 1960s? Just to add to the mystery, Henriette Avram had no college degree. How did she win their respect for her obviously fearsome intellect? I don't know, but I bet there's one hell of a story in it. If winning the respect of male engineers in the 1960s and designing and implementing MARC had been all Henriette Avram did: dayenu, it would have been enough.

But consider: Henriette Avram also succeeded in getting MARC adopted in libraries across the nation and eventually across the globe. This, despite not having a library degree at the time (she was lavished with honorary degrees later), in a profession that (as non-library-degreed software engineers even today will attest) is extremely conscious of its professional degree. This, in an extraordinarily insular profession with a propensity to view anything digital as a diabolical plot! (No, that loathing is not of recent vintage, not one bit. Nor has it disappeared.)

So Henriette Avram designed and implemented MARC, and she led teams of male engineers, and she succeeded in winning adoption of her new system. Dayenu, and dayenu, and dayenu.

How did she do it? How? Please, library historians, write this book before we lose all the people she worked with. I can't even begin to express how important her story is to me, a librarian who's run afoul of both boy's-locker-room software-development types and librarians who fear and loathe the digital.

Henriette Avram died in 2006. A selection of obituaries:

• New York Times
• Washington Post
• San Francisco Gate
• American Libraries

I'm sorry, authors. I know you tried, but those PDFs are terrible-looking. Times New Roman, really? (The one in Arial is the worst, though.) Could we discuss your line-height and why it's not tall enough? Line-length, and why it's too long?

Sniff at me for an ex-typesetter if you like (I am an ex-typesetter, as it happens), but the on-the-ground reality is that I didn't read as much of those articles as I'd have read if they were, you know, readable. As for JoDI, their lack of a consistent look damages their brand and their credibility among their readers. Like it or not, centuries of print journals have created certain expectations for the quality of typesetting in a PDF.

So what's a shoestring open-access journal that can't afford professional typesetting to do? Believe you me, this is a common and vexing dilemma. It's not as though authors will lift a finger to make a publisher's production or branding job easier, as JoDI trenchantly demonstrates.

My answer: If you're not going to put effort into typesetting, chuck PDF. HTML is where it's at for you. Embrace the Web and its pitifully low standards for typography.

This is, of course, easier to say than to do. It does still take more technical savvy to produce decent HTML than to produce a bad PDF from the most typical manuscript formats. Making a print CSS stylesheet for your journal—which is also a good idea, to avoid grumbling from the print-dependent—is also eggheady. If your subject area is math-heavy, you have an entire new suite of problems.

On the whole, though, it's much easier to produce good HTML than good PDF. Moreover, bad PDFs are essentially irredeemable; there's nearly no way (and definitely no easy way) to reflow, re-typeset, or otherwise reformat them. If you go the HTML route, as your skills improve you will (trust me!) learn to fix your bad HTML, and if your content-management system is any good, you'll be able to go back and fix your old articles in a decently automated fashion.

As you rebrand your journal and its look and feel, which you eventually will unless and until the journal dies, you get a bonus: automatic rebranding of your old articles! They never have to look out-of-date, as old-school PDFs often do.

For those of you who have hopes of sending your journal to PubMed Central, there's an even more compelling reason to stick with HTML: PMC demands NLM XML, which you have no hope of producing straight from PDF. (From your typesetting format, perhaps, but you have to know what you're doing.) The skills you will learn from making HTML will transfer. PDF, not so much.

I admit that part of my reason for writing this is that I am hopelessly in love with the Readability bookmarklet and wish I could use it in more contexts. (I can't read Emerald or Informaworld HTML without it.) Still, my advice is heartfelt and I believe it's good.

I don't even have to use the Readability bookmarklet to read the code4lib journal. Just sayin'.

I think OASPA is right not to offer to police every OA journal in existence. There isn't enough money in the world. It's also a clever stance that invites additional membership.

It's not perfect, however. OASPA had a choice to make between complete transparency—of accusers, of accused, of the process—and the sort of hush-hush under-wraps procedures that invite elevated eyebrows. Obviously, I think they made the wrong decision; they'll regret it most when some half-rabid academic sends in scores of complaints and cannot be reined in by public embarrassment.

I'm not entirely happy with "cannot investigate the circumstances surrounding individual editorial decisions, unless there is evidence of systematically flawed processes," either. "Usually will not" I can understand—again, resources are finite, and half-rabid academics tend to be on about individual editorial decisions!—but if this statement is their way of saying "won't investigate the Dove Medical Press matter," then I disapprove. One excruciatingly bad editorial decision should suffice to prompt OASPA to look for systematically flawed processes.

Still, it's a decent start. I daresay someone has sent the necessary email about Dove Medical Press, though again, transparency would be a virtue here. I look forward to seeing OASPA live up to its lofty intent.

Something for folks to chew on in the meantime: can anybody explain to me what this tool (if it is a tool) actually does? I clicked over thinking it might be a good thing to add to a tidbits post, but I confess myself wholly flummoxed by the jargon therein.

Any ideas, anyone? Especially anyone with a health-care background?

I quite agree with John when he says that the ferment over publishing models disguises a larger question, "the role of scholarly and professional societies in a changing publishing and social networking landscape." My own history with professional societies, I think, bears this out nicely.

John asks first: What societies do you belong to?

I belong to the American Society for Information Science and Technology. I was a member of the American Library Association for a time as a library-school student, until unchallenged racist statements from its then-president Michael Gorman made me reconsider ALA's value proposition; I wound up dropping the membership.

I am also a member/supporter of the Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which reminds me that it's about time I kicked another donation over to the latter). These aren't scholarly or professional societies in the sense John means, but I invite you to consider two things. One is, of course, that professional societies are competing with advocacy groups like CC and EFF for my money, attention, and time. The second: an often-rehearsed refrain justifying joining ALA in particular is the lobbyists that ALA sponsors in Washington, and the other advocacy and education work that ALA does.

I'm not knocking that work. In fact, if I could donate to ALA's Office of Information Technology Policy (makers of the highly useful Copyright Slider, among other things) and be assured that every penny of my donation would go to OITP's work, I would gladly do that. I'm happy to support advocacy I believe in. I just want to do it without having to support ALA per se, which I don't particularly believe in as presently constituted.

Next question: What value do you get from your membership?

For a while, I had a pretty good streak going of one ASIST-sponsored conference per year. That streak ended last year, but it's as likely as not to pick up again; of the major library and info-sci organizations, the likeliest one to sponsor a conference I'm interested in (and thus cut me a break on conference fees) is ASIST. (ACM is competitive in this regard, but they lost any chance of hooking me when they played games with Harvard over its OA policy. You can stop sending me marketing materials now, ACM. You lose.)

There is also professional-identity value in an ASIST membership. It's a signifier; it signals not only that I'm serious about my profession, but what elements of the profession I'm serious about. Not a few librarians belong to ALA and some of its subsidiary organizations for similar reasons.

Value I don't get from ASIST includes professional-networking value; I do just fine for myself on the interwebs. Because I'm not tenure-track, I also don't have service obligations required of me. If I did, ASIST would unquestionably be the outlet for my labor. Again, the need to demonstrate national-level service is a motivation for many academic librarians who are tenure-track.

I'm also not particularly invested in ASIST's publications. JASIST contains eggheadery on a level I simply can't rise to, and the Bulletin isn't in my experience terribly interesting.

Third question: Is how you're thinking about your membership and the society's role in your professional life changing?

Not noticeably, but I haven't been in the profession all that long, so it hasn't had much time to change, has it? I will say that I expect personal value out of my ASIST membership that I don't expect from CC and EFF. All I expect CC and EFF to do is keep on keepin' on with their missions, without wasting money (which they don't) or creating huge mission-unrelated scandals (which they haven't). At such time as the signifier value of an ASIST membership drops significantly for me, that membership may be in trouble.

Does this mean that scholarly/professional societies need to think harder about what they do instead of what they are? Quite possibly. Instead of esse quam videri (yes, I grew up in North Carolina), facere quam esse. I'm happier to throw money at doing than at being.

John saves the best for last: Do you think societies should be in the scholarly publishing business?

Oof. That's a loaded question, because it's different from the question should scholarly societies publish journals? I am on record as saying that societies have no particular right to fund their non-publishing activities from their publishing activities at the expense of library budgets. I still believe that.

Still, scholarly societies are in a good place to mobilize much of the labor that underpins journal publishing. The authors, peer reviewers, and acquisitions editors pretty much come to them! (Per this just-out D-Lib editorial, that's 80% of the total labor cost of journal publishing anyway. Admittedly, that's a bit of a red herring, because all the shouting is really over the other 20%; there are other eyebrow-raisers in that editorial, but let that go for now.) It would be a shame to lose that, and my sense is that online networking cannot presently replace it because of the low participation in online networking by academia generally (with exceptions, of course).

However, I also believe that any journal-publishing operation needs to operate responsibly. In the present environment, it is irresponsible not to use the Internet to reach the widest possible audience. (There are exceptions, but they are vanishingly few.) It is irresponsible to withhold uncompensated knowledge from emerging nations, from non-profit organizations, from practitioners, from governments, from anyone who could benefit from it but cannot pay out-of-pocket for it and does not (for whatever reason) have a proxy such as a library available. It is irresponsible to operate exclusively in the digital world without strong preservation plans in place. It is irresponsible to charge fees or to allow one's publishing partners to charge fees (no matter the business model; this goes for author-side fees as well as subscription charges) that wildly exceed the true out-of-pocket costs of publication.

A whacking lot of society publishers are flagrantly irresponsible by the above criteria. Should they be publishing? I'll say "no." Not until they can get their heads back on straight. If that means they fold, because they put all their revenue eggs in the subscription-journal basket—I'm not unhappy with that outcome. Whatever they did that is still necessary will resurface; that I believe.

Hope these are the kinds of answers you're interested in, John.

Unfortunately, out there in the wild I find a tremendous amount of misunderstanding about various flavors of open, sometimes coming from otherwise perfectly respectable communications outlets. (Pro tip: If you're not completely sure you understand, please find someone to ask. A librarian is a good start!)

Make no mistake, getting these things wrong sometimes does serious harm. The open-access movement exhausts itself contending with the same old misunderstandings over and over again, and I'm sure we're not alone in that.

So here—free, gratis, libre, and open—is a brief, simplistic guide to several flavors of open, organized around the following questions:

• What is the target of this movement? What is being made open? As compared to what?
• What legal regimes are implicated?
• How does openness happen? What are the major variants of open works of this type?

Onward. We'll start with:

Open source

What is being made open? Software, specifically its human-readable "source code." Software that is not open-source is usually distributed solely in non-human-readable "binary" form, and (as copyrighted expression) cannot legally be reverse-engineered or changed.

What legal regimes are implicated? Copyright, mostly, though patents sometimes rear their ugly heads. The legal tools are copyright licenses specific to source code, such as the GPL and BSD license.

How does openness happen? Programmers place the source code they have written on the web, associating an open-source license with it. Other programmers are then able to read, use, and change the code. As open-source projects grow, they may have hundreds or thousands of programmers working on the code.

One of the two major ideological variants in the open-source world is the "free software" movement, which holds that opening source code is insufficient without ensuring that those who build upon open source code also make their code open (except when they are using it only privately). This movement produced the GPL. The "open-source software" movement holds that open code can and should be employed in proprietary, closed-source projects, and so tends to prefer licenses like the BSD license, which does not require open release of derivative code.

Open standards

What is being made open? Specifications for how to accomplish particular tasks or build particular (tangible or virtual) objects. Open standards cover everything from computer cables to metadata to the building blocks of websites.

What legal regimes are implicated? Our old friends copyright and patent. Open standards generally want to be implementable without treading on royalty-requiring copyrighted or patented intellectual property.

How does openness happen? Generally a "standards body" does the design and outreach work. This may be an ad-hoc collection of engineers (IETF), a group of interested commercial and/or nonprofit entities surrounding a particular trade or technical phenomenon (IDPF or W3C), or a national or international organization whose specific remit is standards (ISO, despite quibbles about having to buy their specifications' text).

Open access

What is being made open? The academic literature: specifically, the peer-reviewed journal literature which is not written for royalties or any other direct monetary reward to its authors. (While open-access advocates happily cheer for open access to books and other research media, the different money-flows in these areas mean they are not a focus of the movement.) Open-access literature is in opposition to literature which is not available to be read unless a subscription, per-article, or other fee is paid by the reader or the reader's proxy (e.g. a library).

What legal regimes are implicated? Copyright, again. Typical practice for the academic article is that its author(s) transfer their copyright in its entirety to the journal publisher, allowing the publisher to control reuse.

How does openness happen? In two basic ways. Yes, two! One is the soi-disant "gold road," in which authors publish in journals that make their contents available on the Web immediately upon publication without charging reader-side fees. The other is the "green road," in which authors reserve or are granted by the publisher sufficient rights in their article to make some version of it (usually not the final typeset, copy-edited publisher's version) available openly online.

Another division can be drawn between "gratis" open access, in which articles are available freely to be read but require explicit permission for most reuse, and "libre" open access, in which articles are clearly licensed up-front for reuse, often with a Creative Commons license.

Open educational resources

What is being made open? Many sorts of classroom materials, including syllabi, lecture audio/video, assignments, and instructional material such as self-contained web-based "learning objects."

What legal regimes are implicated? Copyright and the related work-for-hire doctrine, that last because some educational institutions claim copyright in instructional materials created by instructors in the course of their regular job duties.

How does openness happen? Typically, through institution-based "courseware" programs or learning-object repositories. Some instructors share educational material through consumer web applications such as SlideShare.

The open-textbook movement is worth mentioning here. Though it is logically affiliated with the OER movement, in practice it bears more resemblance to the open-access movement.

Open (research) data

What is being made open? Data resulting from the research process, in a form less "cooked" than the graphs, tables, and charts in journal articles. ("Data" is a vague word, granted.) Ideally, sufficient description of the data and how they were obtained is included for the data to be verifiable and reusable.

What legal regimes are implicated? In some countries, copyright. For data from industry, trade-secret law.

How does openness happen? Researchers, with or without help from librarians and IT professionals, make their data open. Some journals and science funders are beginning to demand open data; others demand data-sustainability plans that align well with the open-data movement.

Open (government) data

What is being made open? Information gathered by governments in the course of business: geographical information, demographic information, research data gathered by government agencies, sometimes records.

What legal regimes are implicated? For pure data, none in the United States; data are not copyrightable. For other works, copyright, sometimes. Though works authored by (employees of) the US federal government are in the public domain, works authored by (employees of) other governments in the US can be copyrighted.

How does openness happen? Usually, the government in question releases the data online. There is considerable stir and excitement at present over "linked (open) data," which means data expressed in such a way as to be easily and usefully combined with data from other sources.

Open notebook science

What is being made open? The process and progress of a particular research project, analogous to placing a lab notebook on the Web for public view.

What legal regimes are implicated? Copyright, insofar as making original expression available in tangible form (yes, the Internet counts as "tangible" for copyright purposes) immediately creates copyright in it. Patent, insofar as making a patentable invention available removes patentability (in the US), but also creates prior art such that subsequent patents can be challenged.

How does openness happen? At present, researchers employ whatever tools come to hand, from wikis to Google Docs to FriendFeed to github, to document their research process on the Web as the research is happening. Some institutions are trying out "electronic lab notebooks" which could facilitate open notebook science if they are not kept behind firewalls, or if researchers have the option to move their workspaces into the open.

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Any effort such as this will be nitpicked endlessly. That's what the comments are for, so go to it—but be warned, religious wars and diatribes will be ruthlessly deleted. Emacs and vi are both awful, I don't like Windows or Linux as a desktop environment, and progress in both the green and gold roads to OA makes me happy.

Edited to add: I extend many thanks to the commenters on this post, and have revised it in light of their comments. Any remaining errors or infelicities are of course mine. I strongly recommend supplementing this post with Sarah Glassmeyer's post on free law.

I will happily pass any questions in the comments on to Peggy for response.

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Dryad is a repository for data underlying scientific publications, with an initial focus on evolution, ecology, and related fields. It's not an institutional repository, or one focused on only a single type of data -- it's designed for the multitudes of data underlying published articles that would otherwise be scattered ineffectively, hard to find, or lost. Dryad enables researchers to archive their data at the time of publication, dedicate it to the public domain, and get a citable DOI for it. In so doing, Dryad promotes the discovery and reuse of data by others.

The Dryad repository model has these strengths:

• all data is associated with a published article (this collection policy provides a qualitative measure and enables links between journal articles and their data)
• data archiving is facilitated at the point of publication, when authors' motivation to share is strongest and the data are at hand
• Dryad is governed and supported by a growing Consortium of major international journals and societies (see list here)
• partner journals support a Joint Data Archiving Policy that requires data archiving at the point of publication
• all types of data and formats are welcome; journals may specify standards appropriate for particular data types.
• data submission is facilitated by Dryad's integration with the manuscript processing systems of its partner journals; authors publishing in these journals don't need to input bibliographic details
• data submitted to Dryad will be also served to select specialized repositories (like GenBank), further reducing the burden on authors to submit data to multiple sites
• all data is made freely available under the Creative Commons Zero waiver
• data receive DataCite DOIs and receive an independent citation when they are reused
• descriptive metadata will be automatically generated from the article and data content, allowing authors and curators to review & select proposed descriptors from multiple ontologies and thesauri. For more details, see the HIVE project page. Don't miss the nifty video.
• Dryad plans to expose its contents through a variety of web standards, to enable metadata harvesting, remote queries, and linked-data applications.

Dryad allows future investigators to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose the data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies such as formal meta-analyses.

The repository is being developed at the National Center for Evolutionary Synthesis, or NESCent, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information Science, and the Dryad Consortium of partner journals. A number of the partner journals have recently announced their intention to require data deposition in a publicly available archive as a condition of publication:

• Whitlock, M. C., M. A. McPeek, M. D. Rausher, L. Rieseberg, and A. J. Moore. 2010. Data Archiving. American Naturalist. 175:145-146, doi:10.1086/650340
• Rieseberg, L., T. Vines, and N. Kane. Editorial and retrospective 2010. Molecular Ecology. 19:1-22, doi:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2009.04450.x
• Rausher, M. D., M. A. McPeek, A. J. Moore, L. Rieseberg, and M. C. Whitlock. Data Archiving. Evolution. doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00940.x
• Allen J. Moore, Mark A. McPeek, Mark D. Rausher, Loren Rieseberg, Michael C. Whitlock. The need for archiving data in evolutionary biology. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 2010 Published Online: Feb 9 2010. doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.01937.x
• Uyenoyama, M. K. (2010). MBE editor's report. Mol Biol Evol, 27(3):742-743. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msp22

Dryad currently has a staff of about 7 (curator, repository architect, programmer, communications officer, etc.) led by

• Project Director: Todd Vision, Associate Professor of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Associate Director for Informatics at NESCent
• Jane Greenberg, Professor and Director, SILS Metadata Research Center School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Funding comes from the National Science Foundation, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has funded HIVE (Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering) a 3-year project that will enhance Dryad's metadata.

For more detailed information, including upcoming features, details of the metadata format, and other development plans, please see the Dryad website and the team Wiki. Also, you can follow Dryad's activities on the Dryad blog: http://blog.datadryad.org/ and Twitter: @datadryad.

Only it turns out that data anonymization can be frighteningly easy to reverse-engineer. We've had some high-profile examples, such as the AOL search-data fiasco and the ongoing brouhaha over Netflix data. Paul Ohm's working paper on the topic is a great way to get up to speed.

We librarians are fairly dogmatic about this sort of thing, owing to our professional-ethics commitment to your freedom to read. We wipe your checkout record clean after you turn your items back in. We do keep passive-voice usage records on our materials: "this book has been checked out X times since Y date." But that's it. (And no, we don't keep track of when you visit the library, so it's not possible to connect a formerly checked-out book with you based on the date of checkout.)

This long-standing design decision is being challenged on social-media grounds; it's hard to build Web 2.0-ish applications around your library behavior if we don't keep records of your library behavior! I used to be on the Web 2.0 side of this particular controversy, but as I've been reading about reidentification, my mind has changed. Information about which local public library one goes to isn't precisely "zip code," but it's awfully, awfully close.

Anyway, the application to human-subjects data of all stripes is, I hope, obvious. It's not as simple as anonymizing data; even aggregating it and only permitting queries may not solve the problem. Certain data breakdowns (e.g. from survey data) may be problematic.

Taking heed of the problem is the first step to solving it—but only the first. The sooner we have data-release guidelines that take reidentification into account, the happier I will feel about open data in the social sciences and medicine.

Incidentally, are you as sanguine about governments providing "linked data" as you were? Because I'm not.

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Apologies for duplication, and please forward/repost as appropriate...

We are working on comparing four digital-repository software packages (DSpace, ePrints, Fedora, and Zentity) in hopes of helping libraries and other institutions select the most appropriate software for their requirements. Read more about our project at
http://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/rep/.

We invite anyone who has recently embarked upon planning for a digital repository to tell us what criteria were used to select a software package. (We are not interested in hosted repository services at this time, only repositories managed in-house.) Your input will inform our testing criteria.

Please leave your comments at http://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/rep/2010/02/25/a-comparative-analysis-of-institutional-repository-software/. Pointers to public planning documents or lists of criteria are equally welcome. Though we will read all comments submitted, we plan to respond only by private email so as not to bias the public comment-stream.

We very much appreciate your assistance!

Siddharth Singh, Michael Witt, and Dorothea Salo

For now, tidbits!

• As world plus dog probably knows already, The Economist tackled the data deluge.
• Adam Christensen gives us the modest, unassuming Data. The foundation for everything on an intelligent, interconnected, instrumented planet.
• Rethinking scholarly communication from the ground up: SciBling John Dupuis asks Are computing journals too slow? and Dan Cohen muses about how best to deconstruct the humanities' reverence for the print codex, while Craig Mod brilliantly deconstructs book design in an iPad world.
• So-called "digital natives" have digital histories; the Library of Congress asks whether and what they think about preserving them. (For more on personal digital preservation, I strongly recommend Microsoft Research's Cathy Marshall. Her two D-Lib articles are wonderful; also keep an eye on her recent presentation at the code4lib conference, which there should shortly be video of.)
• The city of Vancouver is taking digital archiving seriously. No "put floppy disks in the fridge" here (no, seriously, I've seen that hailed as innovative archival practice!). I like what I see of Archivematica.
• Stefano Costa hopes to make data in archaeology open. While there are serious and legitimate concerns about making location data on some finds and digs public—my father the anthropologist used to call himself a "grave-robber and junk-picker" in jest, but there are real robbers out there—in the main, archaeology data is a great target for open.
• Sarah Askew once again explains why the software turned loose on data should be kept and scrutinized, with astronomy as her case study. Good insight into why "one software suite fits all" doesn't work, which should give some web4science developers pause.
• Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Science interviews Stuart Shieber, in a treatment of open access refreshingly free of hyperbole on one side and panic on the other.

As always, if there's a link I should see, comment here or tag it "trogool" on del.icio.us. Thanks!

This is the same school that plays horrendous anti-library, anti-education games with their flagship Harvard Business Review.

My head hurts.

The discovery of the glaciers mistake has focused attention on the IPCC's use of so-called grey literature: reports that do not appear in conventional scientific journals, and are instead drawn from sources such as campaign groups, companies and student theses. The IPCC's rules allow such grey literature, but many people have been surprised at the scale of its inclusion.

Oh my, oh dear. Let's take that apart a bit at a time, see what's likely going on, and suggest some remedies.

That's a fairish definition of grey literature, but what it leaves out is that the importance and acceptance of certain genres of grey literature varies considerably by discipline (although I think most accept dissertations as quality, citable work, assuming they're recent enough). For example, quite a few social-science disciplines have a flourishing working-papers culture; the expectation is that many (though probably not all) working papers will go through the peer-review wringer at some juncture, but it's important both for authors and readers to circulate the ideas fast.

I don't know of any literature on this specific point (which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that I haven't looked), but from my admittedly anecdotal experience, one factor that seems to create a grey-literature–friendly culture is a desire for influence beyond the academy: influence on practitioners, policymakers, non-profits, or the public generally. The IR I run has several grey-literature collections predicated on precisely this, and I don't think it's any coincidence that a strong vein of public-policy discourse runs through the research blogosphere generally and ScienceBlogs specifically.

Why is grey literature a better choice than the peer-reviewed journal literature in this context? Simply because it's much more accessible. Practitioners, policymakers, and particularly nonprofits have limited if any access to toll-access peer-reviewed journals. If you want them to see it and use it, placing it in a toll-access journal is tantamount to shredding it.

Now go back and read the paragraph from the Guardian again. "Surprised at the scale of [grey literature's] inclusion." Well, I'm not. I think a mixture of two factors is an odds-on bet in this clash of the literatures: a grey-literature–friendly discipline working with a grey-literature–unfriendly one, and the simple matter of access I just explained.

Climate science strikes me as grey-literature–unfriendly for cogent reasons. One is that the peer-review process (one hopes!) does yeoman's work eliminating bad science and bad data in a field where plenty of people grinding axes are happy to pollute the discourse with bad science and bad data. Another is that climate scientists need to limit their discourse population somewhat, or they'll be overwhelmed with axe-grinding bizarrerie from outside the field. I would guess it doesn't trouble them much that their literature isn't open-access, and it may even please them, by way of getting on with their work without having to stop every five seconds to deal with some ignorant lout who Googled their latest paper.

But social scientists, they love their grey-lit—and thus the clash of cultures. Neither the social scientists nor the climate scientists realized that they didn't have the same standards for reliable, citable previous work. The social scientists applied their normal quality standards and search techniques, not realizing that the climate scientists had different ones, not even thinking to ask. What the social scientists found on the open Web about climate science had a high probability of being junk, given that peer-reviewed climate science is almost entirely toll-access. (I found only 22 journals in DOAJ, two of which are Bentham Open and thus liable to be junk; on the green-OA side, I certainly haven't heard that climate scientists are heavy self-archivers.) I expect similar clashes play out in quite a few interdisciplinary collaborations.

So what do we take away from this?

• Scientists, if you want people outside your discipline to read your work in preference to whatever they can find on the open Web, make it open access; that may not be sufficient, of course, but it's absolutely necessary. However, all of us need to take into account that the knee-jerk call for everything to be OA removes a shield from a significant set of researchers, those poor hot-spotlighted souls whose professional lives OA would make a living hell.
• If you're troubled by bad science and bad data on the open Web, the answer is to make better science and better data open access. There will always be bad science and bad data, and it will seek the path of least resistance to earn the most eyeballs possible. Locking up the broccoli only increases candy consumption.
• Interdisciplinary collaborations had better start by establishing common ground for citable literature. Disciplinary cultures differ, and for legitimate reasons; practices do not necessarily transfer.
• Post-publication review and commentary don't just offer an alternative to peer review. They may help keep junk science from taking over the wider discourse, to the benefit of all.

I would never recommend that libraries discontinue collecting grey literature, especially in digital form. For one thing, some grey literature gets much more scrutiny than the average peer-reviewed article: consider how often and by how many people dissertations are reviewed, and how many rewrites they get! For another, I see no reason collection practices should be governed by the most restrictive disciplinary cultures out there.

I do acknowledge grey literature for what it is, however, and I hope this culture-clash sparks discussion about how best to manage differing citation practices when collaborating.

• In the "didn't anyone teach you to show your work in grade school?" department, we have NIWA unable to justify official temperature record, as well as the radical notion of using actual data to gauge the effectiveness of review boards in stopping unethical research.
• In the "open is not a panacea" department, we have Nat Torkington rethinking open data, or at least its funding models (hat tip to Trevor Muñoz), and JISC's Clarion project trying to convince principal investigators that sharing data is a useful thing to do.
• In the "let's kill all the lawyers" department, we have troubling privacy questions about the sharing of personal genome data, and on a happier note, the wonderful Panton Principles for making data properly open and reusable once the decision to share them has been made.
• In the first-principles department, the redoubtable Carole Palmer tells us that data need to be curated. AAAS wonders who's going to do the work, and JISC comes up with a good-practice guide for those willing to dive in.
• In the tools-and-toys department, we have Stuart Lewis building a SWORD library in PHP aimed at making quick, easy, even one-off repository-deposit tools. I am all in favor!

As always, tag a delicious link with "trogool" or leave a comment here if you have something tidbit-worthy. Thanks!