newspeak

This is very encouraging!

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) today introduces the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license on its 19 NPG-owned academic journals. From December 2012, the CC BY license will be available to authors choosing open access publication options in these journals, in addition to the two non-commercial Creative Commons (CC) licenses currently on offer. This follows NPG’s introduction of a CC BY license option on Scientific Reports in July 2012.

Effective 1 April 2013, Wellcome Trust and RCUK funders will require a CC BY license when they pay open access article processing charges (APCs). NPG intends to offer CC BY options on further open access and ‘hybrid’ journals over the next few months, in keeping with its commitment to author choice and meeting the needs of funders and the research community.

 

However….. The APCs listed are not insignificant. They are a lot. What it means is that the author pays for the privilege of having her article published in a peer-reviewed journal guaranteed to be tracked by colleagues. This means that the cost of publication and distribution (and all other processing fees) is relocated to the author and more accurately, her employer or granting office. As those tend to be in the public sector or private sector money administered by a public sector or independent body (imagine all the scare quotes you want), it refers cost back to those who are in the end benefiting from the knowledge created: us. But what this finally means is that a recognition (and thus responsibility) of the role the public plays and implicitly assumes must be foregrounded. 

And that means moving away from the illusion of the startup market funded by VCs as the source and driver of all value and a more realistic understanding of the complexity of the situation.

But the APC costs:

An APC is levied per article accepted for publication for authors choosing to make their work open access. Authors choosing the CC BY license will pay a premium APC. Full details will be available on nature.com in December and are listed below.

 

….

Press release archive: About NPG.

A Hard Look at U.S. Reactor Hardware After Fukushima – NYTimes.com.

For me, the most interesting point here lies in the acknowledged need to evaluate risk to the populace, even when that risk seems low and costly to diminish. The effort takes the need of communal intervention beyond the valuations the immediate market provides to those that are predicated on very long time scales indeed, as time measures likelihood. It’s an immensely difficult issue to deal with and one that cannot be managed only locally but must be undertaken nationally and even internationally. Thus, international organizations monitor earthquakes and tsunamis, as no one polity can do that alone, and other examples are not hard to come by.

But what about something like nuclear waste? Storing it has been a company obligation, perhaps a sub- or national one, not an international responsibility, at least not that I know of, though nuclear waste is traded, I believe. And what then about carbon waste? Or other byproducts that not only affect the region’s populace and ecology but the globe’s, if not now, eventually?

It’s the “eventually” that needs to be appreciated, for it obviously doesn’t mean status quo until then, nor that prior risk makers are not already affecting us. Just look at global warming and curse our grandparents for not having had the foresight, back when the logic started turning bleak, to prevent the present course.

But governments and communities in general have not imagined their remit has having such a long trajectory. Such future planning is not even taught in graduate schools–at least I don’t think it is. When a building is designed, when a road is paved, a subway tunnel excavated, and so on–is a future of consequence stretching decades ahead imagined? 

No.

But it has to be. It need not be a paresis of the present to do so, either. Fairly simple steps and procedures are likely all that are required, as the main point is to build in to any design the probability of its failure under duress, and to create templates of such instances of duress.

This is perhaps the most important lesson for governments. Listen to your users.

It’s not rocket science, but it bears repeating, since so few governments seem to look at how their citizens actually use their websites when redesigning them. The Code for America team in Honolulu did wonderful work prioritizing links on Honolulu’s site by connecting it to Google Analytics to help discover what citizens were actually looking for. It’s clear that using data to design and prioritize decisions sits at the core of gov.uk. This is a conversation that may make many senior public servants and politicians unhappy as their pet projects, photos and press releases get reshuffled, but it will likely lead to happier citizens that spend less time looking for online government services and more time enjoying life.

via Getting it Right: Gov.uk | TechPresident.

I know I just posted on this, but the point that Dave makes is important and bears repeating: listen to your users. This is not the same as staging focus groups and presenting sets of selected users with options, with establishing formatted personae that they must perforce identify with to exit the process. No: this is about seeing what actual users do, want; and then providing that.

Rhetoric and Reality: Comparing Obama and Romney’s Talking Points versus the Real Role that the Government Plays in Innovation.

It always bothers me that so many Americans (not Canadians or Mexicans) choose to obliviate the role that national and sub-national government has played in the post-WWII economy, especially that enriched by Cold War anxiety. But then I went to UC Berkeley, one of the greatest beneficiaries of cold-sweat money. But this and so much other funding really did make the liberal ideal of knowledge for its own sake possible. And that has, so obviously, enriched any number of ecosystems with new ideas, approaches, and brilliantly educated and inquisitive people.

La Béatrice (Beatrice) by Charles Baudelaire.

I wandered lonely as a Cloud by Wm. Wordsworth

London by Wm. Blake

In reverse chronological order, and I should start, and finish by declaring that Blake’s London is probably the greatest poem written in English, an astonishing performance of economy and simplicity, of situation and relentless affect. There is no loss of immediacy; the opposite: things are too immediate. Wandering, picked up by Wordsworth less than 10 years later, is forcibly cheerful but at what cost!: people. In Blake, the sounds the calls the sensual all of his persona ties always to people, and without metaphor or translational escape. Baudelaire, nods to  Blake, refutes Wordsworth, and all the poetic license of self indulgence, to imagine that in the sight and sound of isolated memory there were not always people.

How Profligate Was the Greek Government? « Multiplier Effect.

Worth reading, along with Yanis Varoufakis‘ works & blog on the Greek situation–which is implicitly a critique of the European project.

Why Apple doesn’t care about its competition | Felix Salmon.

I confess that I’m becoming a Felix S. junkie. He’s right about Apple and his critique of the clueless in their approach to Apple as a mere computer company competing with others is right on:

But if you look at what actual consumers are asking, it turns out that only an ultra-geeky minority is out there weighing up the relative merits of the iPad mini and the Galaxy Note. Note Nick Bilton, today:

Now that the Apple iPad Mini is here, I’m fielding one particular question from friends, family and readers: Which model should I buy?

The point here is that Apple has already done the work of persuading people to buy the iPad mini — it’s done it through many years of creating products which are a pleasure to use.

Which is why the bellyaching about the iPad mini’s pricing is very weird to me. Apple’s job, when it developed this device, was not to create something to compete with the Nook HD+. Rather, it was to build something which fit easily into the existing lineup, right between the iPod Touch and the iPad, and which would delight its customers as much as those two products do. The iPod Touch starts at $300; the iPad starts at $400. And the iPad mini, at $330, is right in between, where it belongs.

He argues a not unrelated point about Chipotle (CMG), where fool analysts (in particular, D. Einhorn) compare it to Taco Bell, in particular its higher-end Cantina. Einhorn is wrong to short CMG and even to imagine that consumers would consider as a choice Chipotle or Taco Bell, however fancier it pretends to get. The distinctions are categorical, and just because both are, to US consumers, “Mexican” “fast food” does not make them at all equivalent.

The issue is an evolution of what counts nowadays for many as a kind of class identifier. It’s not a simplistic one, but one whose thread is not easily broken and which weaves its adherents into a fabric of likes: a community of resilient consumers who rather than acting “rationally” (as Einhorn imagines it), act analytically, and seek to distinguish themselves, to prove their identity, not lose it.

Argentina’s stunning pari passu loss | Felix Salmon.

The headline is seemingly accurate, and Salmon’s argument toward the end of the article about the consequences of the ruling (and process) to sovereign states merits attention. But those of us following the seemingly relentless path of the many (and often darklight) trade treaties that essentially favour not just industries but particular businesses….

Creative Networks in Eastern Europe – P2P Foundation.

As with so much produced by the P2P Foundation, or promoted by them, this new book sounds very interesting indeed.

And I am struck again by how much terrific work is being done in this area, which is as much about establishing level playing fields and markets as it is about enabling local and regional communities so that they can manage themselves–and thus become, in the end, better producers as well as consumers.

Keith’s blog :: new paper: How new media affords network diversity.

Keith Hampton’s work is quite interesting. His new paper, How new media affords network diversity: Direct and mediated access to social capital through participation in local social settings, in print in New Media & Society. Co-authored with my former students Chul-joo Lee (The Ohio State) and Eun Ja Her, addresses, as he puts it, “two important questions:

1. Are people’s social networks (the real stuff, not just Facebook) less diverse as a result of their participation in mediated activities? In other words, does the Internet create silos?
2. If ICTs are are associated with higher levels of diversity, how does the diversity associated with online engagement compare to the diversity associated with offline engagement (in public spaces, voluntary groups, church, cafes, neighborhoods, etc)?”

I leave it to the reader to investigate his argument, but his conclusion surely resonates with those engaged in online community development and management:

The pervasive awareness afforded by many new technologies has more in common with a traditional village-like community than it does with individualized person-to-person contact. Pervasive awareness provides a shared history, familiarity of daily labor, shared context, density, and public life that is reminiscent of traditional village life. The fundamental difference between a village-like community and the person-to-network structure that characterizes contemporary networks is the possibility for personal networks that are larger and more diverse than at any time in human history. I go on to explore how newer technologies, such as “social search,” in which the use of the internet to search for information privileges or limit exposure to information 
collected or accredited by members of a person’s social circle, may promote prevailing ideology and information while omitting important bridges, divergent views, and unique resources that exist between networks – possibly reversing the trend found in this paper and the advantages of network diversity.

Emphasis mine. 

What this means is of course… well, it won’t really alter how I others conduct our business. But what it does do is, for me, emphasize the nature of our commons-based community projects and, arguably, the expectations attached to them by our sponsors, say. I suppose that one way of thinking of it–at least the way I’ve long advocated–is that open source communities are not circles of friends but of colleagues and collaborators; and that though trust is the currency of any community, here it is stamped by the credit earned through accountable work and good-faith effort. Perhaps this is not too different from the kind of manners one would find structuring a Rousseau-vian social contract, where the public expectation speaks nothing to the inner man but everything to the obligation to live up to one’s dynamic in the world.