Project Free Our Knowledge -- a collective action platform for researchers

[CooperSmout]

Project Lead: @CooperSmout

Mentors: @luispedro and @Lilian9

Welcome to OLS-2! This issue will be used to track your project and progress during the program. Please use this checklist over the next few weeks as you start Open Life Science program 🎉.

---

Week 1 (31 August - 4 September 2020): Meet your mentor!

• Create an account on GitHub
• Check if you have access to the HackMD notes set up for your meetings with your mentor
• Prepare to meet your mentor(s) by completing a short homework provided in the HackMD notes
• Complete your own copy of the open leadership self-assessment and share it to your mentor
  If you're a group, each teammate should complete this assessment individually. This is here to help you set your own personal goals during the program. No need to share your results, but be ready to share your thoughts with your mentor.
• Make sure you know when and how you'll be meeting with your mentor.

Before Week 2 (7 - 11 September 2020): Cohort Call (Welcome to Open Life Science!)

• Create an issue on the OLS-2 GitHub repository for your OLS work and share the link to your mentor.

• Draft a brief vision statement using your goals

  This lesson from the Open Leadership Training Series (OLTS) might be helpful

• Leave a comment on this issue with your draft vision statement & be ready to share this on the call

• Check the Syllabus for notes and connection info for all the cohort calls.

Before Week 3 (14 - 18 September 2020): Meet your mentor!

• Look up two other projects and comment on their issues with feedback on their vision statement
• Complete this compare and contrast assignment about current and desired community interactions and value exchanges
• Complete your Open Canvas (instructions, canvas)
• Share a link to your Open Canvas in your GitHub issue
• Start your Roadmap
• Comment on your issue with your draft Roadmap
• Suggest a cohort name at the bottom of the shared notes and vote on your favorite with a +1

Before Week 4 (21 - 25 September 2020): Cohort Call (Tooling and roadmapping for Open projects)

• Look up two other projects and comment on their issues with feedback on their open canvas.

Week 5 and later

• Create a GitHub repository for your project
• Add the link to your repository in your issue
• Use your canvas to start writing a README.md file, or landing page, for your project
• Link to your README in a comment on this issue
• Add an open license to your repository as a file called LICENSE.md
• Add a Code of Conduct to your repository as a file called CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
• Invite new contributors to into your work!

This issue is here to help you keep track of work as you start Open Life Science program. Please refer to the OLS-2 Syllabus for more detailed weekly notes and assignments past week 4.

[CooperSmout]

Vision statement

We're building a platform that helps researchers use collective action to establish positive cultural norms in academia, so that individuals can adopt open and reproducible research practices without placing their careers at risk.

[CooperSmout]

Open Canvas

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19_M1y9tYn3Lb_LOFVE-Syz9EWtFaFxuoPxFIFUdAAi4/edit?usp=sharing

Roadmap

https://github.com/FreeOurKnowledge/community/blob/master/ROADMAP.md

Project Repositories

Community (for discussion) and Platform (for source code)

[kevinxufs]

Hi, this looks like a really interesting project and much needed in the state of academia.

I think it might be helpful to clarify what this platform will look like. Reading some of your issues I get the impression that it's about a campaign of some sort.

What sort of thing would this campaign be doing and to what extent is a community important to campaigning?

Is the platform a website where the campaigns are hosted?

[CooperSmout]

Hi @kevinxufs, thanks for the feedback. You are spot on -- the platform is a website that will host a variety of collective action campaigns (not just one). You can see the beta website and a few prototype campaigns here.

The idea is to organise a 'critical mass' of support for progressive research behaviours, prior to their adoption, so that we can create new cultural norms together and protect vulnerable individuals from potential repercussions that might come from acting alone. For example, individuals might not want to publish in fee-free open access (OA) journals because they are instead rewarded for publishing in more 'prestigious' (but expensive) paywalled journals. But journal prestige is a direct function of the valuable contributions (articles, reviews) researchers donate to them, and thus the prestige of OA journals could be boosted to a 'safe' level if a critical mass of researchers were to commit to exclusively supporting those journals at the expense of legacy journals. This is the basic premise behind the OA campaigns we currently have up on the website.

These kinds of collective action problems are everywhere in academia, but we don't yet have a mechanism for researchers to communicate and coordinate their actions effectively. Our platform aims to serve that purpose. We've just started designing a new range of campaigns for the website here, if you have any feedback :)

[evaherbst]

Hi! I'm really interested in this project, it's a really creative approach to tackle the problems with publishing in academia.

I wanted to ask how you would define a "critical mass" of researchers. I guess it's not an easy question to answer, because how would you predict the quantity of researchers needed to change the status quo that Nature publications are still held in much higher regard than most other journals?
But I'd like to know for the campaigns how you would set the number for the critical mass.

Also, my friend just shared this with me, and it's pretty relevant to your project: https://www.libscie.org/

[CooperSmout]

I wanted to ask how you would define a "critical mass" of researchers.

Hi @evaherbst, thanks for the great question! You're right, it's not easy to pick a certain number of researchers, especially since not all researchers are equally influential (or publishing in Nature). For this reason I thought we could use an impact-based threshold in the OA campaigns, rather than a simple headcount. The basic idea would be to add up all the citations generated by people who have signed the pledge, and express this as a proportion of the entire field (more details here). This way, we can make sure we have a decent number of influential researchers in our ranks before we activate pledges.

But I'd like to know for the campaigns how you would set the number for the critical mass.

As for how big the threshold should be -- well, that's another tough question! Different people will have different risk-tolerances and circumstances, and so rather than forcing people to adopt a single threshold, I thought we could let people pick for themselves. That's why currently, when you make a pledge, it pops up a slider that lets you choose the % at which your pledge will activate. The idea here was that pledges could activate sequentially in 'batches' over time, with the boldest researchers going first and paving the way for more conservative researchers down the track. In theory, if we could get everyone to just pick a threshold, then we would eventually reach full compliance regardless of the levels they pick (even 100% of people picking a 100% threshold would still trigger the pledges).

Having said all that -- the OA campaigns have been up there a year now and not taken off in a huge way, and one of the possibilities for this (aside from my poor marketing!!) is that what I've proposed is just too complex. I've fielded some feedback along these lines, and so opened this issue in our Github repo to discuss further. Would love to hear your thoughts if you have any feedback!

Also thanks for the link to Libscie -- I'm a huge fan of what Chris and the team are doing there, but feel their project (and others like it) will likely suffer the same kinds of adoption problems that has plagued the OA movement for decades. Hopefully Project FOK can help there, e.g. by organising a critical mass of researchers to support Libscie when it is fully functional :)

[GeorgiaHCA]

Hi, this looks like a fanntastic project. I think much needed. I took a look at your website and I think it gives an excellent call to action with clear ways to make a difference, so it seems to fit the vision statement really well.

[smklusza]

This is a great initiative and I think the project goals are laid out well in the OpenCanvas. This is definitely something I've been thinking long and hard about as a new assistant professor of biology and what it means when my students who come from underrepresented groups cannot afford to access knowledge and be competitive because my university is smaller and lower on the totem pole than other universities with 70,000 or more students. It is very nice to have a website that offers ways for researchers to promote best practices for open science. Count me in!

[CooperSmout]

Thanks @GeorgiaHCA and @smklusza! If it helps your students @smklusza, this blog contains a list of ways for people to access the literature without a library subscription (e.g. SciHub, which is illegal in many countries but very effective -- I would also add the OA button to that list).

Personally, I agree with the author of that blog when he says that access should be the least of our concerns, and we should be much more worried about commercial interests silently gobbling up the rest of the research pipeline and creating the mother of all vendor lock-ins (including countless initiatives that were 'born open', but subsequently sold out, like PubPeer). Unfortunately most researchers aren't aware that our science is becoming increasingly commodified, or that this is something we need to stand up and fight against. Hopefully FOK can help there!

[evaherbst]

Thanks @CooperSmout! The batch system and the impact-based threshold are really clever ideas!

Regarding various concerns, I think there are many but I do think access is a big concern (especially in terms of the public engaging with science). Tax payers are funding our research and often can't even get access to the papers. I'd guess most non-scientists don't know of SciHub, and don't know that the money is going to the journals, not us, and that we'd happily share our papers with them for free!

I'm probably preaching to the choir here but I just wanted to say I do think access is a big concern - both from the taxpayer side and the researcher side.

I have another question regarding the pledges and your ideas. What about junior scientists collaborating on papers (for example as a co-author) where they might not have the option to pick the journal? There is always the option to put other ideas forward but I think many PIs would recommend that junior scientists go for the highest impact factor possible, for their careers..
I guess this ties into your points that the people at the top of the current system will really have the most "weight" in changing how it works. I just frequently find myself stuck between wanting to be as open as possible and realizing the realities of the current system and how to get the next job (which sadly is so tied to publications and the journals they are in)

[CooperSmout]

I think there are many but I do think access is a big concern (especially in terms of the public engaging with science). Tax payers are funding our research and often can't even get access to the papers

I'm probably preaching to the choir here but I just wanted to say I do think access is a big concern - both from the taxpayer side and the researcher side.

Don't worry, I love a good harmony and totally agree :) I guess I was just trying to point out that there's now (finally) a movement toward open access, which looks likely to become the norm within a decade, but we shouldn't take this as a cue to take our foot off the gas. Point in case, many publishers are switching to an author-pays open access model, which may solve the access problem per se, but just switches the cost burden from the reader (library subscriptions) to the author (APCs), and will inevitably disadvantage researchers who can't afford to publish in expensive OA journals (e.g. Nature Communications charges $5000 to publish), while still costing the public $$$ (via grant money). The open access movement was originally conceived in 2002 to reduce costs as well as make research available, but publishers have managed to co-opt the movement and use it to maintain their exorbitant profit margins.

What about junior scientists collaborating on papers (for example as a co-author) where they might not have the option to pick the journal?

The open access campaigns let people pick which research outputs their pledge applies to, in terms of authorship position (first/middle/last). This means that someone could specify that only their first-author papers will be published in OA journals, as per their pledge, but not their middle-author papers.

I just frequently find myself stuck between wanting to be as open as possible and realizing the realities of the current system and how to get the next job (which sadly is so tied to publications and the journals they are in)

Me too! As an ECR, this was my motivation for starting this project -- I don't think it's fair to ask us to choose between our careers and what's best for science and society. But at the same time, ECRs make up the majority of academia and also publish the majority of first author papers, and so could be a powerful driving force if we can just organise ourselves effectively. Imagine if all of the ECRs in the world decided one day that we wanted to do things differently... we could literally change the system overnight.

[da5nsy]

Hi @CooperSmout! This sounds like a super cool project.

one of the possibilities for this (aside from my poor marketing!!) is that what I've proposed is just too complex

This is my initial thought - it seems like a well balanced mechanism that would work if it could be in the background, but the investment needed to understand the process is currently on the high side. This isn't helped by the complexity of terms in this area (thinking of green/gold/platinum etc). I really think it would be beneficial to think about ways to simplify/streamline this project to lower to barriers to entry. I was wondering if there is anything which could be borrowed from the licensing world (they have a relatable problem - many complex messy concepts that they want to be able to express succinctly. e.g. "CC:BY")

I was also wondering if you had thought about the ways in which people could 'wear these commitments on their sleeves'? I can't think of a particularly good location that is a universally accepted 'profile' of a scholar (google scholar or ORCiD are the closest I guess, or maybe Twitter profile). It seems to me that making a personal commitment is one thing, but that offering a way to make that commitment public might help to spread the message. The 'badges' world comes to mind.

The open access campaigns let people pick which research outputs their pledge applies to, in terms of authorship position (first/middle/last).

I love this idea - guiding people through the complex elements of the decision process, including forcing them to think about things that they might not have considered otherwise. This is particularly great because it's easy (I'm currently in this position) to have a vague commitment because of the complexities (Thinking: "I'll push vaguely towards these goals but it's so complex that I'll have to think about everything on a case-by-case basis") which will likely slide into "well I didn't commit and X is easier than expending the mental energy/arguing with co-authors so I'll do X".

I particularly like the idea of being able to bring this to a conversation with co-authors. E.g. "I have committed to X, can we please try to find a way to do X".

Imagine if all of the ECRs in the world decided one day that we wanted to do things differently... we could literally change the system overnight.

I would personally want to see commitments from hiring committees as well - that is what would make me feel comfortable. (Thinking of SF-DORA)

@evaherbst:

I just frequently find myself stuck between wanting to be as open as possible and realizing the realities of the current system and how to get the next job

I have this conversation very frequently with my PI and other members of my lab! How do we balance the goals of succeeding within the current framework vs. changing the framework (vs. succeeding within the future framework. For example, I think there will be value in being able to show a track record of ethical and innovative/progressive publishing behavior). It's a tough task! Especially difficult to have this discussion with people who are in the positions that they are because they have done well from historical/present frameworks.

[CooperSmout]

Thanks for the detailed feedback @da5nsy!

I was wondering if there is anything which could be borrowed from the licensing world (they have a relatable problem - many complex messy concepts that they want to be able to express succinctly. e.g. "CC:BY")

Great minds think alike ;) @RP87 suggested something similar in this thread. I agree it would help our cause greatly if these ideas were already organised into some kind of taxonomy, but unfortunately no such taxonomy exists right now and so I think creating one just for this project would complicate things rather than simplify them. But I'm keeping it in mind for down the track, if and when things pick up steam.

I was also wondering if you had thought about the ways in which people could 'wear these commitments on their sleeves'? I can't think of a particularly good location that is a universally accepted 'profile' of a scholar (google scholar or ORCiD are the closest I guess, or maybe Twitter profile). It seems to me that making a personal commitment is one thing, but that offering a way to make that commitment public might help to spread the message. The 'badges' world comes to mind.

Yes -- badges for the win :) I designed this generic badge that we can adapt for each campaign as we roll it out. In the early days it might be simplest to just email badges to people as they sign up, but in the future would be great to have it all integrated into the website for easy sharing. ORCID is another great option, and I'm hoping that we can populate people's ORCID profile with third party information (pledges) if/when we partner with ORCID. I was also thinking it could be cool if people could download a graphical display of their 'pledge histories' from the website, e.g. for use in job applications etc. All of these features would be great in principle, but will require a lot more development support than I currently have (luckily one person has recently offered to help!) and so I'm trying to stick to the absolute necessities for these early campaigns, but then test and implement additional features as we go. Please keep additional ideas coming!

The open access campaigns let people pick which research outputs their pledge applies to, in terms of authorship position (first/middle/last).

I love this idea - guiding people through the complex elements of the decision process, including forcing them to think about things that they might not have considered otherwise. This is particularly great because it's easy (I'm currently in this position) to have a vague commitment because of the complexities (Thinking: "I'll push vaguely towards these goals but it's so complex that I'll have to think about everything on a case-by-case basis") which will likely slide into "well I didn't commit and X is easier than expending the mental energy/arguing with co-authors so I'll do X".

Glad you like it! My thinking on this was based on an analysis of the Cost of Knowledge boycott, which showed that a relatively high proportion of people had broken their pledge to boycott Elsevier (23%). That campaign didn't allow people to specify authorship positions, so I figured if we give people that option they'll be more likely to uphold their pledge. Having said that, I'm now wondering if this is working against us by making the pledges more complicated, and holding people back from pledging. Another option could be to just specify that the pledge applies to first-author papers only, rather than give people the option to choose...? If you have any thoughts on this, would be great if you could comment in this thread on simplifying the OA campaigns to keep things organised.

[RP87]

Hi,

Glad you like it! My thinking on this was based on an analysis of the Cost of Knowledge boycott, which showed that a relatively high proportion of people had broken their pledge to boycott Elsevier (23%).

"38% of the publishing signatories abandoned their “won’t publish in an Elsevier outlet” commitment" is the figure I keep in mind.
I've whole lot of question about this study. One particularly : Where did they publish ?

Two thing raise my interest.

a) This frontier journal has stressed out a need : "Due to the time-consuming nature of this research, we limited ourselves to two subject areas, Chemistry and Psychology"
This is a community or text mining work > how could it be an article project for our community ? (i] distributed - collaborative work ->publication to RAC ? or alike ii] a geek text-mining project > publication to JOSS ? ) 🔢
b) It shows a publishing community searching for alternative or finding it (1-0,38)

c) the third of these two things : where could have Tom Heyman published in 🄯-MR-NoPEAC ? (half just kidding, not just a transition) ;-)

"able to express succinctly. e.g. "CC:BY"" Great minds think alike ;) @RP87 suggested something similar in this thread...

I still don't know if I'm a great mind, but I've had further ideas about that.
"🄯-MR-NoPEAC" is (I think) what I'll use as 'journal target attributes' (I've not made my mind about it yet).

• Copyleft
• Machine Readable
• No Paywall
• (No) Embargo
• (No) Author publication Charges

Lucrative companies have for long now being using non-lucrative structures for 'image' purpose. So a non-lucrative entity can use lucrative process, a 'NL' attribute seems difficult to apply without strong controls. But it seems a good alternative with N-AC (no author charges). 🄯-MR-NoPEL
And there is also the "structure dependencies I haven't figured out yet. @

I thought about 🄯-MR-No-PEACH (that seems easier to set a pronunciation)
with for H hybrid, instead of B (bundled in the previous thread) but it would be redundant with other criteria (no paywall + no APC).
I thought about a "Community Owned" attribute, but it's not clear it help (I'm waiting interview with MathOA/LingOA to figure that out).
I'm still low in "economical information" to make such judgment. In FairOA, "an absolute maximum of $1000 per article published or $50 per page for the total expense of any journal" feels still a big barrier. And the per page doesn't feel quite rational for an e-journal.
An idea to make FOKommunity working on such questions ?

S(p)eed-idea : here on issue table or in a sister-project, a special column > open document (tex file) and the goal is to make an article out of it (so it's a positive nudge for the research community) 🔢 [a FOKjournal like JOSS] (https://github.com/openjournals/joss/)

RQ: Purists may disagree with working on a Microsoft-Bill-Gates-owned platform (witch make us loop to the "economical informations" for community owned research platforms and debate about state-managed or international community managed research. *@*ex: can a JOSS-like journal be considered a NL journal while beeing hosted on GitHub ("a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.[5]" < yeah !w)

Arf, we need a FOKing taxonomy ;-)

Yes -- badges for the win :) I designed this generic badge that we can adapt for each campaign as we roll it out. In the early days it might be simplest to just email badges to people as they sign up, but in the future would be great to have it all integrated into the website for easy sharing.

With the same idea that must have pushed Tom Heyman to make his article, how could Badges show 'actions'. (like a global contribution page for a wikimedian account (random example )

In this line, I've also had ideas about not 'journal attributes' but 'author attributes'.
I still believe we should apply some publishing/reviewing ratio as an indicator. (1/3 seems an interesting limit, but how would evolve an article with a 1/5 setting ?)

🄯-MR-No-PEACH-1/5 badges ready ? (ho, I'm starting inkscape fun)

[malvikasharan]

@all-contributors please add @CooperSmout for idea and content.

[allcontributors]

@malvikasharan

I've put up a pull request to add @CooperSmout! 🎉

[malvikasharan]

@all-contributors please add @kevinxufs for review

[allcontributors]

@malvikasharan

I've put up a pull request to add @kevinxufs! 🎉

[malvikasharan]

@all-contributors please add @da5nsy for review

[allcontributors]

@malvikasharan

I've put up a pull request to add @da5nsy! 🎉

[malvikasharan]

@all-contributors please add @RP87 for review

[allcontributors]

@malvikasharan

I've put up a pull request to add @RP87! 🎉

[CooperSmout]

"38% of the publishing signatories abandoned their “won’t publish in an Elsevier outlet” commitment" is the figure I keep in mind.

Emphasis on publishing signatories. That number doesn't include people who stopped publishing or the authors couldn't identify, so personally I think it's slightly misleading. But still, not a great number either way.

• Copyleft
• Machine Readable
• No Paywall
• (No) Embargo
• (No) Author publication Charges

Again, I think this idea is great but beyond the immediate scope of ProjectFOK. But if you're really keen on developing it, I think you should repost these ideas in a new thread in the Publishing Reform forum, so we can discuss it properly. I'd also recommend looking into Transpose, which is already categorising journal peer review policies, and so wouldn't be too much of a stretch to build in some kind of acronym system like you suggest. They might be willing to contribute/partner up.

[CooperSmout]

Readme

https://github.com/FreeOurKnowledge/community/blob/master/README.md