The Scholar’s Space

In the continuing arms race between data protectors and those who don’t like things that way, encryption has been the trick-taking card. Packages that allow users to encrypt data are really quite capable, more than enougt to scare off the casual cracker and quite difficult to break through even for powerful and dedicated systems. But it seems that experiments at Princeton have shown that skilled use of some simple tools can allow a hacker to recover the codes used as encryption keys from the DRAM chips in the machine.  The thought used to be that the chips lost data as soon as power was shut off. But, some DRAMs retain the information for seconds or even minutes after the loss of power. And, freezing the chip with a blast of air cleaner or some commercial Freeze can extend this period even longer; enough for a hacker to tap the chip and recover the keys. With the keys, the hacker can read the cypher with relative ease.  I’m sure there will be more comment on this in the future. It all adds to the drama.

I’ve been trying on different dissertation topics over the last couple of weeks and blogging about the ideas at Lifelong Learning, but today I read some good news/bad news about the Columbia University Press, American Historical Association and Columbia’s Library Gutenburg-e collaboration, with respect to the very subject I wanted to explore, week-before-last, as noted by Peter Suber, Open Access News: innovative interfaces and business models for e-monograph publication and distribution.

Peter Suber’s post quotes at length from the Robert Townsend post at the American Historical Society Blog, about the aims of the original project (Gutenburg-e), how they were grant-funded, and how those sponsoring or undertaking the project feel that it has failed in very important respects — no viable sustainable business model has emerged, and scholarly journals would not review the monographs that the Press published in the Gutenburg-e series.

Geez. These are pretty serious failures. Pretty depressing failures. But on the other hand, I visited the project’s OA portal for these books and had a look at one on sewing and wow, the interface is really cool with very well-done features, finely crafted, very functional, and elegant. The scholarship would have to be first rate, wouldn’t it, given the pedigree and the process Gutenburg-e put in place. Putting on a scientist’s hat, a failed experiment is just as valuable as one that succeeds. In fact, from what I’m told, failure is the norm, and it advances science just as steadily as success. So, hurray? No, not hurray. This just does not feel right.

If Columbia University Press and the American Historical Society can’t motivate scholarly journals to even *review* its innovative e-books, whose authors were chosen in some cases from among the best history dissertations in the country, what does this say about humanities support for presses? Presses are on the ropes. Can their authors really afford to turn their backs on efforts to find a viable way forward? I really am, quite simply, appalled. Maybe I’ve misunderstood what this story says. I hope I have.

Today news is flying all over the net about Harvard’s faculty vote to implement an “opt-out” process for institutional posting of scholarly research materials. Peter Suber comments on Robert Darnton’s opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson, making the case for open access to the Harvard community: Peter Suber, Open Access News. And Bill Patry comments on the irony of publishers’ claims that what bothers them about mandates (the NIH mandate in particular) is a lack of choice for authors. That claim has got to cause a lot of eyes to roll. The original NYTimes article that got the conversation going doesn’t give us much detail, but since the vote is today, we will know more by tomorrow. If the vote is yes, the Harvard Library will be taking a most active role in implementing the will of the faculty, and a leadership role in the development of substantively important institutional repositories. Go crimson!!

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman was a best-selling exploration of the opening weeks of WWI.  Since then various authors have rendered hommage to the work and to the author by appropriating the title for their own creations. Among these is Prof. Peter Suber who writes The SPARC Open Access Newsletter  or SOAN. In the issue for Feb. 2, Prof. Suber explores, in The Mandates of January, the numerous policy releases and recommendations for OA publishing  issued by various governmental agencies or other groups during the month of January. Among them of course was the NIH policy. He is very, very thorough on the NIH document and I  have recommended his analyis to inquirers at our campus. He includes the necessary links to primary documents and web sites.  I think we are very fortunate to have an able and articulate expositor for OA concerns, and one who comes from a background in philosophy and law. These are fields in which you have to pay attention to texts and read them closely, to see both what is and isn’t there.  I hope  you can take a moment to visit SOAN and read his summary.

SOAN

There is a very interesting discussion on danah boyd’s blog, apophenia. In the wake of just having published an article in Convergence (which I can’t find on UT’s Website), she declares her intent to boycott publishing in locked-down journals, in favor of open-access only, followed by at last count 14 comments, including one by an editor at her locked-down journal, Convergence, and a fellow contributor: apophenia: open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals.

I am, predictably, a supporter of open access, and I have made my own personal commitment as a Ph.D. student not to publish anywhere that prevents me from posting on the Web a copy of whatever I publish as soon as it’s published (if not before). I realize I’ll have to negotiate this with some publishers, those that I would count myself lucky to get to publish with that unfortunately do not routinely allow immediate open access. danah does not mention this option, but it may be that she just is unaware that she might have negotiated such a right with her publisher.

But even if she had negotiated that right for herself, she still would have a gripe. She resents that all of the other articles in her issue are unavailable to most people. Even though the journal permits authors to post their articles after a 1 year embargo, as we know, most won’t follow through on that. If there are 10 articles, with a 5% self-archiving rate, we can imagine that 1/2 of 1 article will be posted… a year from now or longer. In a field like new media, a year is as a really really long time.

So, negotiating with publishers on an article-by-article basis, and even green OA (permission to post after an embargo) are inferior to open-access journals if we value real availability, not just theoretical availability. It is going to take quite a while to fully transition science, social science and humanities academic publishing to open audiences. But maybe danah boyd’s rant and her commitment are just another brick in the wall - uh, er, actually, that would be another brick *out of* the wall in this case.

Or at least that’s what they say in the blurb for BioMedExperts, a product launched recently by a parent group consisting of Collectis Holdings, Inc and Dell Computer. The point of it all is to serve as a kind of clearinghouse for information on the research interests and contributions of life sciences investigators all over the world. A searcher can look for potential collaborators and partners in a particular area of research, or by geographical region. Collaboration is all the rage, and the moreso since bad news on the science budget in the UK and in the USA (at least as proposed by the President) could mean some leaner times. The company’s announcement makes explicit comparison to social networking programs such as FACEBOOK, but the goal is to get  some real biological discovery going as a result of putting the right people with the right skills together.  I’ve heard worse ideas.
BioMedExperts

The Stasi was the East German secret police, and it took its work of “internal security” very seriously.  In fact, it so  was serious  that  it often tipped over into the absurd, but that’s another story. Most of the stuff gathered about East Germans  was  meaningless,  and, in retrospect, the surveillance effort seems both ridiculous and a colossal waste of personnel and resources. With the end of the German Democratic Republic and the disappearance of Stasi as an organization, came questions about the files gathered with such Teutonic thoroughness. Stasi bosses had started to shred a lot, but there was so much that, in desperation, they resorted to basic manual tearing-up, with the shreds stuffed into mailbags. For a while there was a kind of archeological effort underway, in which humans tried to restore the documents, but it was slow going. Along came a clever young guy who saw that if ever a project called out for IT rationalization, this was it. Bertram Nicolay of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute had some ideas on how to reconstruct the tatters into readable documents.  To make a longish story a lot shorter, Nicolay came up with a system that allows the reconstruction of eye-readable documents drawn from  tatters. It seems to be a kind of overlay system, in which the searcher chooses between stated options: white paper or blue, lined or plain, etc. Each choice narrows the field until only highly similar pieces are left, and then the chances of restoring the original go up considerably.  Some other countries with histories of similar  intrusiveness on the  part of the secret services have expressed interest in the Fraunhofer program.  Stasi relied a great deal on informers, so much of what was carefully collected was  gossip or rumor or malicious denunciation, and it makes sad reading indeed.  It’s not easy to find out after many years that your friend or kinsman or colleague was an informer, and had talked about you. It’s also depressing to find out that many people in the arts, academia, business and other areas were Stasi finks, who got on the payroll for what now seem like trifiling privileges: a little foreign travel, a small promotion. But that’s the human side. People who want to know what happened should be allowed to find out, and Nickolay’s ideas make it possible.
 The story appeared originally in Wired magazine, but you can get access to it through Arts and Letters Daily.
Stasi