Two Three weeks ago, I attended the WikiSym 2010 conference. WikiSym is the “International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration”; it’s sort of the “Academic Wikimania”, where people researching wikis, Wikipedia and generally open collaboration get together and share their findings.
The WikiSym 2010 banner, designed by yours truly (except for the logo, by David Bailey).
WikiSym & Wikimania in Gdańsk
I couldn’t attend WikiSym the previous years for various reasons, the main one being money: they were too far away and the registration fee was too expensive. This year, WikiSym was collocated with Wikimania in Gdańsk, Poland, so it was a perfect opportunity for researchers & Wikimedians (or “practitioners”, as researchers call them) to get together and meet. We have to thank my friend Phoebe Ayers for that, who was this year’s Chair/Organizer of WikiSym.
I was pretty excited because WikiSym seemed to be at the crossroads of two of my circles: academia & open collaboration. I was also really looking forward to meeting researchers: the Wikimedia Foundation is currently engaged in an effort to include research into their decision-making process in order to make it more data-driven. Thus, it was the perfect time to try and build awareness, understanding and relationships between the two communities.
Open space schedule boards at WikiSym 2010
Program & Sessions
The symposium was a mix of regular conference talks and an unconference-style Open space track. I wasn’t necessarily a big fan of the unconference style, but one of the most productive discussions I had (about quality assessment tools) actually happened in a group I walked in a bit randomly. I was a bit disappointed by the quality of some talks, but overall the event was great.
One major issue, though, was the number of conflicting talks: there were up to eight concurrent open space sessions, conflicting with each other, as well as with the main sessions and workshops. It was just impossible to take part in everything one was interested in. While this is a usual problem with large events, I didn’t expect to have this issue in a relatively small conference like WikiSym.
I gave a presentation entitled Understanding the users of Wikimedia Commons, a summary of the user research I did for the Multimedia usability project, and it was pretty well received. The audience particularly liked the video I showed from our UX study. The supporting slides are available on Commons (download the PDF – 504 KB). Unfortunately, the presentation wasn’t recorded, but it was similar to the one I gave at Wikimania, whose recording will be available soonish.
Me trying not to burst into song, being on stage in such a nice Concert hall (CC-by-sa by Blue Oxen Associates)
Not as open as you might think
The second day ended with a discussion in the “Open circle” about copyright. Specifically, the participants asked if they could publish their work (that they presented at WikiSym) under a free license. I was particularly interested, since I had had the very same discussion a few months before.
« Open circle » at WikiSym 2010
In March 2010, I submitted a scientific paper to WikiSym about my work. I had written papers for scientific journals & conferences before, but it was the first time I submitted one in this specific field of research. As a consequence, I was quite happy when my paper was accepted.
Then came the copyright transfer issue. WikiSym partnered with the ACM to publish the proceedings of the conference, and the ACM asked me to transfer my copyright to them. While this is fairly standard in the scientific publishing industry1, I was surprised by this requirement considering the field of research involved (open collaboration and free knowledge).
I shared my concerns with Phoebe and with Felipe Ortega (Chair of the Program Committee), who reached out to the ACM. The ACM wouldn’t let me release my work under a free license such as Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC-by-sa). I felt my research belonged to the Wikimedia community, and I didn’t want to enclose my work within the ACM’s intellectual property prison.
Hence, I refused to sign the copyright transfer form, even though it meant not being able to present my work at WikiSym. In the end, thanks to Phoebe & Felipe’s efforts and discussions with the WikiSym committee, I was allowed to present my work, but only as a lightning talk, and it wasn’t included into the conference proceedings.
I do hope, though, that at some point we’ll be able to move towards a more open access & reuse model2, in accord with the philosophy of open collaboration and free works.
Notes
- Standard and outrageous, but you don’t have much flexibility when your degree or career depends on it, unless your employer/university encourages you to publish in Open Access journals (like the MIT does). ↩
- “Gold”, and not just “green” open access. See The ACM is NOT Open Access, by Michael Mitzenmacher, for more information, and More on the Author Addendum Kerfuffle (and Counterproductive Over-Reaching), by Stevan Harnad, for an opposing view. ↩
Photo gallery
Journal en français
Good post! I think still too much scientists do not realize that their publications are not accessible to general public, and more important practitioners.
Societal impact of research is becoming more important in The Netherlands and EU. Open Access is an important starting point of:
Improving this by cross over to the practitioners
Exploring the impact by measuring page views/ downloads, instead of only looking at citation scores.
One of the reasons I go to wikisym, is the access to the publications at the conference. But access during the whole year would allow me to improve my business during the whole year and encourage me more to contact researchers to provide data or testing opportunities.
This is an important that is bound to be raised for other conferences too. My advice would be to simply drop ACM and publish all papers online under an appropriate open license such as CC-BY-SA. Of course, the ACM and other publishers are invited to offer the possibility of CC-BY-SA publication, which we should accept and hope other conferences to follow.
Most researchers require the credibility of the ACM DL to stand behind WikiSym or else their publication doesn’t count as much and they won’t get the travel funding, sadly enough.
WikiSym makes all papers from all years available on the WikiSym website for easy (and free) retrieval. This is covered under the ACM rules of non-commercial use of papers.
The ACM is actually “good” in comparison – it remains a difficult topic though; some more thoughts here: http://dirkriehle.com/2009/10/20/open-access-and-open-source/
I understand the different perspectives on this. It helps to understand the larger context. There are for-profit publishers, which dominate the major literature in fields such as biomed, and much support for open publishing is a reaction to their practices. There are non-profit publishers such as university presses and professional organizations, such as ACM. ACM has a staff, but much of its activities policies are influenced or shaped by volunteers. ACM has handled things for computer scientists that they didn’t want to do themselves, such as coordinating the publishing side of journals and proceedings, and providing advance funding and guaranteeing contracts for large conferences. ACM long kept proceedings available for minimal cost by postal order prior to the digitual library, and the digital library is now site licenced by most research universities around the world. ACM permits authors to put their most recent version on their web site or their employers’, so they do not block free access to a paper. Guillaume could have had his paper in WikiSym, put it on his web site where anyone could easily find it by search, linked to it from his blog, etc. I have no problem with people who have any position on these issues, but they need to understand why it is that they are not likely to make as much headway with ACM augthors as they will with those reliant on for-profit publishers.
Yes, but I would still have had to transfer the copyright to the ACM, and I wouldn’t have been able to publish the paper under CC-by-sa on one of our wikis, where the Wikimedia community could reuse it or part of it. That was a no-go for me.
Perhaps so, although people could reuse part of it under fair use, and probably could reuse all of it — I have not heard of a case of ACM pursuing such issues , and I doubt they would unless it was e.g. published verbatim in a for-profit book, in which case they might ask the publisher to fork over a couple hundred bucks. If anyone knows of counterexamples I would love to hear about it. I am fine with people adopting legalistic positions, but much of the world doesn’t usually operate legalistically, it operates more through common sense and social conventions. Some publishers talk belligerently, particularly those with monopoly control over a field’s publications. Computer science isn’t like that, so relatively few of us are likely to be motivated by arguments such as these.
Are there examples of your papers reused by the Wikimedia community in this way? I’d be interested in seeing what it looks like. I interviewed acquisition librarians and tried to get a full view of this topic a few years ago. I published anarticle on the subject in an ACM journal, though it is freely available on my web site, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/coet/Grudin/crossing.pdf.