Part of the reason I’m . . . → Read More: Science and copyright]]> I swear, in my next post, I’ll give all the details I think I can give (that is, all the details which are set in my head) about my “great” idea for the future of scientific communication. In the meantime, I just want to have a little chat about science and copyright.

Part of the reason I’m going through this thought process and devising this master system (I’d use the word framework, but for personal reasons, I hate the word framework) is that I believe there’s something wrong with how scientists communicate. I’m not saying that scientists are doing everything wrong when it comes to communication. In fact, I think many things scientists do are right! Let me outline this in 3 points:

1. The fundamental spirit of how scientists approach communication is perfect. The open-ness of scientific communication should never change. All scientists I know, not only recognize this fact, but probably worship that principle. I don’t think I’m teaching anyone, anything here.
2. The current use of copyright is dangerous. Basically, we’re going about our business, applying number 1 just above to our results, but giving our copyright away to scientific journals, some of which are looking to use it, as the PRISM initiative shows us.
3. The tools and methods we use to disseminate our scientific results and ideas are outdated and inefficient. This is where my framework idea comes in. I’m really not looking at revolutionizing scientific communication (although I’ll claim it at some point so I make noise and people notice what I’m doing), but rather to evolve it to the next step. The underlying principle (number 1 above) will remain. Only the packaging and the speed at which it traves will change.

Let me discuss points 1 and 2 a little here today. More explicitely, let me depart from the usual and try to take an idea from science and apply that to another field.

In number 1 above, I praise the principle of open-ness of scientific communication. What I’m saying is that the founding principle we use to do science is that anyone can take what I’ve done, scrutinize it, critic it, replicate it (in fact, we’re happy when someone redoes something we’ve done and confirms we’ve done it properly), expand on it, etc. All that scientists ask is that when you re-use what someone’s done, you mention who’s done it first, done it wrong, done it partially. Expressed in this way, it sounds a lot like the attribution creative commons license. What’s a creative commons license?

Simple. The Creative Commons is a non-profit organization whose sole purpose is to create lienses which can be used by content creators. These licenses come in different forms, a machine readable form, a lawyer-ese form and a human-speak (for laymen) form. As a content creator, you select which rights you WANT to give to people over your work and you attach the appropriate license to your work. This indicates to potential (re-)users of your work “These are the things you can do with this copyrighted work.”

The attribution license says that you can re-use, use, distribute, mashup (the new buzzword on the internet), remash, paint over, trace over, deform and enjoy the current work. All you have to do is attribute the source properly. This is exactly what we do in science.

One point of clarification though. Legally, copyright extends over EXPRESSIVE WORKS and not over IDEAS AND FACTS. So technically, someone can take your paper, extract the actual data points and re-use that information. Information is not copyrightable. So people don’t even need to attribute the source. In this case, the “science code” goes beyond copyright. When re-using INFORMATION laid out by a previous scientist, we still attribute the source.

On the other hand, there are behaviours scientists exhibit, which don’t respect copyright. For example, we often re-use images from other scientists and only attribute the source. In my master’s thesis, there are images from the phd thesis of a student at Caltech. I still attributed the source, of course. I’m sure I can pull loads of master’s/ph.d. thesis in my field with copies of images from older papers, probably from many recent papers. In the case where one pulls an image DIRECTLY from a copyrighted work and only attributes, one is technically breaking copyright law. Now, I doubt Caltech is going to sue me for using that image (or the copyright holder for that matter, whom I know well enough by now). In the end, using that image and simply attributing the source FEELS right. This is a case where using the creative commons attribution license would work well. This would have enabled me to use the image without worrying about the copyright detail. I still didn’t care, but technically I should have. Were I to be sued, I would argue fair use (as a critic of the work). Still I’m really not likely to be sued by Caltech for this.

This is where my point 2 comes in. We’re using our traditional distribution methods (archival journals and the such), knowing full well that we’re signing our copyright away in most cases, yet without caring about the consequences. Basically, because there have been no real consequences so far. Once in a while, there’s the odd over-zealous journal staff who sees infringiment and sends a letter to the infringer without clearing it with a boss first. Yet, I’m not aware of anyone getting really screwed over this. I’m willing to bet most (all?) scientists are more worried of being discretited because of accusations of plagiarism than because of lawsuits over copyright infringiment.

So in light of this unwritten policy in the scientific domain (we could call it the no-sue poliy), why should we care? While the danger isn’t imminent, groups like PRISM are worrisome. They show that someone, somewhere cares. That person hasn’t used their right yet, but they know it exists. I don’t like the status quo, especially when I’m not in a situation of power. My solution to this is to say that while we devise a system to revamp our distribution methods, let’s take the opportunity to cut-out the middle-man and use licensing schemes which solve this issue. More on this next time.

For now, as promised, let me draw a parallel between what happens in the scientific world and what happens in the music world.

As I outlined above, the way science is done (on a global scale, not on a laboratory scale) is that we constantly re-use, re-hash, re-mash other scientists work. Joe A, in Italy in 1971 publishes a paper which is really interesting. He shows that a species of frogs in Madagascar has the ability to spontaneously change sex. (I’m making this up as I go along now, in case you hadn’t noticed.) Fast-forward to 2002, when Jane B, in South Africa, shows that all frogs have the genetic makeup to do this, it simply happens that only a fraction of those species have the need to use spontaneous sex change. (Again, it’s completely out of thin-air, just an example. I’m pulling this out of the script of a bad science-fiction/cataclysm movie right now.)

In the end, Jane B simply writes in her article that “Joe A has previously shown that…” and maybe pastes in a graph from the original 1971 article, showing the main conclusions. Re-use of previous science to make new science.

What about music? Listen to this clip about the song “Amen Brother”.

Basically, from the sampling of a few seconds of a rather unknown 1969 song, a whole genre of music was born. A spoon-full of copyright infringiment over a bed of creative re-use led to a whole genre of music. In the most basic sense, the birth of hip-hop was basically the same as the evolution of science.

Does the comparison really apply? I would say that it does. Joe A might publish an article with a picture and say, “I have no idea what this means.” Jane B then comes along, realizes what the picture is, scans it from the paper, applies some image transformations to get some features out and say “Ah ah! It is now clear that the large feature in the image from the article of Joe A is …” Remember. FACTS are not copyrightable. EXPRESSIONS OF FACTS are copyrightable. Images are expressions of facts. Scientific images may be argued either way. They’re data, really, we (scientists) wouldn’t differentiate them from raw fact, at least conceptually. But they’re still images. In the modern scientific community, we wouldn’t think twice about this. We might phone up Joe A and say, “Look at this! I’ve figured it out!” Joe A will be happy. And so we’ll publish our new result, with attribution, feeling quite content. Unfortunately, Joe A has signed his copyright away to the international journal of frogs back in 1971. Not too unfortunate, because we don’t really enforce it. In comes PRISM… and I get a little worried. Not that much, but a little. And so I ask, given that we have the technology to solve this problem easily and make our system more efficient, why not?

Now, to give you something to chew on, think about what would happen to science if somehow, we weren’t allowed to re-use other scientists stuff. Think about what would happen if we started suing each others every time re-use occured.

Now, having thought about that for a minute, think about what would have happened to music if every DJ in the 80′s had been sued out of existence?

Consider the approach the mainstream expressive industry is taking to the application of copyright law. The “copyright should last forever and nobody should be allowed to use even a single second of my work withouth paying me” camp. Forward the clip above to the 14:00 mark and listen to what the author considers as the significance of learning the origin of the amen break. When samplers came to light, the industry in place let it slide. They may not have regarded the technology and its uses as viable in any way. Now, copying and sampling possibilities are at everyone’s fingertips. It doesn’t seem they’ll make that “mistake” twice.

Now, what if all musicians agreed to say that “You may reuse portions of my work for the purpose of sampling and creating new expressive works.” How would hip-hop and electronica evolve?

[Update 1: I edited this post to add some links to the PRISM webpage and the Creative Commons website. --CBK]
[Update 2: Fixed link to the youtube video. It seems wordpress' visual editor doesn't quite like the embed tag. --CBK

First, here’s how it works when you publish a . . . → Read More: Of science and music]]> After my last post, I had a comment by Alex, who didn’t believe one could compare science publications with musical records. I’ll give him right that there are many differences between the two, although I still think there’s one important parallel that can be drawn between the two.

First, here’s how it works when you publish a paper. Once your paper is accepted, you have to sign a form, transferring your rights to the journal. (I’m assuming the more common “traditional” journal. There are open-access journals, where you retain the copyright, but typically you have to give them away.) Editorial edits (grammar) are finished and the journal sends you a bunch of preprints to give to colleagues and to impress your mom. To be serious, I don’t think it really matters nowadays. You just end-up sending them the pdf with the proper citation information. Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t but their library probably subscribes anyway. It’s just easier this way than telling people to go click through twelve web pages just to get to your article. I guess you could send a link. Anyway, you get the idea. People get an electronic version of your paper and you end up with a pile of dust-gathering preprints (minus the one you sent to your mother). Once that’s done, to get access to your paper (technically), you’re supposed to go onto the journal website. Technically, if you’ve signed away your rights, you’re supposed to ask for permission before reusing a figure from your paper as well. Some journals (in fact, I would guess/hope most, but I haven’t done an exhaustive study) have “rules” in place so that people can re-use material for a certain purpose or the authors can reuse material if it’s in a publication owned by the same organization/company.

In any case, the point is that you sign away your rights and the journal then sells access to your paper to people, including to you. You, as a scientist, don’t get a dime from it. But you probably know that already.

Now my understanding of how the music industry currently works is that artists sign away certain rights to the label in exchange of financial support to produce one or more albums. These albums get sold, debts get repaid and, in the end, the artist really gets very little from the sale of the CD (or vinyls if you’re radiohead). The money artists make really comes from putting shows together, selling t-shirts, appearing in magazines, endorsing products in ads, etc. At least, that’s my understanding of it. I may be slightly wrong. Some artists may make more money from CD sales than I think. Still, I don’t think artists without 1 billion fans (and let’s face it, of all artists trying to make a living, superstars are a minority) really make much from every CD you sell. I don’t have hard data at this point, this is from reading journal articles left and right and meeting several artists (none of them superstars, mind you, so I can’t compare).

In any case, my point is that you have artists who produce music and labels who profit from the distribution of the actual music in album form.

This is where I see the similarity. In, both, the world of science and the world of music, we have people who make actual content (scientists write scientific papers and musicians record music) and people who wrap that content up in plastic and ship it to you to make money. In both cases, content distributors (scientific journals and record labels) profit from distributing the content, while content producers (the scientists and the artists) profit in some other derivative way.

This is where Alex’s criticism comes in. ”

Business chases profit, scientists chase prestige. Profit means you hoard as much as possible, releasing carefully controlled product to people for as much money as possible, build barriers for competitors, etc. Prestige means you try to distribute as widely as possible, collaborate with the best people possible, have the best and coolest ideas possible, etc. They lead to totally opposite outcomes.”

I disagree. Artists (and I’m not implying record labels here, but really artists) are after both profit and prestige. They want to win a Juno award, or a grammy award, or get one of those platinum records. That’s not money, that’s “prestige”. Let’s call it recognition. Artists want to be told by others that they’re good. They want people to write books about them that say they created a whole new genre and revolutionized the world of music. Artists also want money. Who wouldn’t want a million dollars? Do artists (in general, if there’s such a thing) want money more than fame? I don’t know. I don’t quite care. Both money and fame are “profit” in a loose sense. You start out with goals, you do something, you get to your goals. You’ve profited from what you’ve done. Important to note is, as I’ve said up there, the money artists make (presumably) doesn’t come primarily from record sales, but through other means. Even more important to note is that people get to like an artist by listening to their music. This is what leads to the blog post I quoted the last time. As an artist, you want to get your music out there, by any means possible. You want everyone to get to listen to it. The most efficient way to do this used to be to sign to a label. They had huge distribution channels. They could get your albums sold in China and Europe while you were enjoying a beer in Canada. Labels still have huge distribution channels. But they’re no longer the biggest. Now, if your goal is to get your music out there to as many people as possible, you put it up for free on the internet. THAT gets you listeners.

Now in all this, the business model of the artist hasn’t changed. First, you find a way to get your music listened to by people, then you sell them concert tickets. The business model of the record labels changes, though. They’re less and less valuable to artists.

Now, just as equally as artists are after both monetary profit and recognition, so are scientists. Hold on, are you so sure? Yes. Nobody has any trouble recognizing that scientists want recognition. We all would like a nobel prize, or a medal from a mathematical society. Scientists also want money. Seriously. Some more than others I’m sure. Still, when applying for a research/teaching position, everybody negotiates the best deal. So you’re not doing this out of the kindness of your own heart. You’re not going to tell your kids you’ll never be able to take them to disneyworld because you have a greater goal to achieve. Some want millions and whole building for them and their graduate students. Some just want to be able to afford a decent living and do interesting stuff. Some may not want money at all really and would be fine living in the basement of the school. It’s irrelevant to the discussion. Both are ways of “profiting”. You start out with goals, you do something, you end up closer to your goal. You’ve gotten something out of it, whether money or fame, that’s your profit.

Now, the business model of the scientist hasn’t really changed. You do research. You write out papers. You get the papers out there. You get more research contracts/medals/students/book deals/newspaper articles/biography/office space/lab space/money from your employer so you don’t end up at another university (pick as many as you’d like). It used to be that scientific journals were the best way to get your stuff out there. They’d bundle the papers together and they were quite good at shipping these bundles around the world. Not so anymore. The internet can get your stuff out there (once it’s written) faster than any scientific journal can. So the business model of scientists hasn’t changed. The business model of scientific journals, though… well… hasn’t changed yet.

One small detail remains in favour of the traditional scientific journals. Peer-review. Somehow we still believe that these journals are just better than anybody else at getting stuff peer-reviewed. Now, there is something which doesn’t happen in the music world. That’s where I say, the stage is just ripe for a new paradigm. A system which allows you, even a single person (or more realistically a group of a few people) a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Or a non-peer-reviewed journal if you’d so like. A framework which lets you also know, as a reader, what you might be interested to read.

More on that later.

 If you are an unsprung artist (unsigned, unknown, undiscovered, emerging) and your wondering how to make money from music, you should not plan your future around selling CDs . . . → Read More: Unsprung Artists and ]]> I was strolling around the tube, reading the different blogs I like to read when I came across this posting by an internet company, SONGboost. What are they saying?

 If you are an unsprung artist (unsigned, unknown, undiscovered, emerging) and your wondering how to make money from music, you should not plan your future around selling CDs or digital downloads. In fact, holding out for your portion of a $.99 cent download may be hurting your career.

They go on to show, with some back of the enveloppe math, that at a profit margin of .69$ a song, breaking even on an album which cost 100k$ (50k$ in production costs and 50k$ in advertising) would require 142 000 downloads. According to their estimate, this would require your band to be in the top 2000 artists in the english speaking world.

More back of the enveloppe calculation takes home the point that there’s a simpler alternative.

Because nobody completely appeals to 100% of the population, your music needs to be in 200,000 to 300,000 iPods now, to convince and convert 5,000 fans (2 to 2.5% conversion rate) to pay to attend your show, to buy a shirt, buy a hat and/or visit your website numerous times over the next year.

Omitted but implied is that this alternative is much closer to reach than the former. Their final conclusion is interesting. Basically, you should treat digital music as a publicity (I would imagine this to lower to marketing costs, so your initial investment is then more in the line of 50k$) and get it out there to make fans and get them to your shows.

I believe you should put your music on every site/system, legal and not, in the world. You should turn on the download option and deploy download buttons everywhere you can. You need spins to get to the point where you can sell shit that has a higher margin than .69 cents. The CD is dead, digital music is here to stay, illegal file sharing will live on, and the sun will shine tomorrow. Go for exposure and get to a point where you can make money; if you hold out for digital music download revenue, that business may not be around in three years.

Is this correct? I don’t know. Is it an interesting point of view? Absolutely. Thinking about this issue recently I came to the (uninformed) conclusion that this shift is happening right now, though. My understanding is that, traditionally, the music labels would take most of the profits from music sales and that artists would take more profits (I don’t know if it’s most) from shows and other stuff they sell (shirts, hats, etc). So as far as the artists are concerned, the model hasn’t changed. Your  income is still from shows and what not. The problem is for the music labels, whose business model is basically dead. We’re now able to distribute music in far more countries at once, in far more convenient form, at much faster speeds and for much lower cost then they could by pressing little plastic coasters and packaging them in 3 layers of plastic

How does that relate to the distribution of knowledge in the scientific world? Good question. I don’t think the analogy is very easy to make, mostly for two reasons:

1. There isn’t a direct monetary gain for scientists from their knowledge. Basically, we don’t sell papers. Well, we kind of do. We sell reports and teaching time, the idea being that if the papers we’ve written before were good, we’re likely to produce more good ones in the future. Still, we don’t perform our papers, really, in the same sense as artists do.
2.  The distribution system has been intimately intertwined with the appreciation system. And that’s not fun. So, depending on how your stuff gets out there sort of influences how good people think you are. We know it’s not right. Just because nature publishes your stuff doesn’t actually make it right. It just makes it published in nature. We assume that nature has more stringent rules and that nothing gets passed them (or at least less does). It may well be so. I’ll have to look around and see if someone has a compilation of # of retractions per journal or something similar compared with the impact factor of the journals. (The current “good” method of assessing whether you’re writing crap or not. Well, really, it’s a way of saying whether people are reading the crap you write, not really how good it is, but anyway. It’s a proxy for how good we are and we don’t really challenge it these days.)

In any case, I’ll have to dwell on this analogy for a little and write more later on.

Of most interest to . . . → Read More: An interesting talk]]> I saw a talk this week, by John Fleck, science writer for the Albuquerque Journal. It was an interesting talk by all measures. Titled “Communicating Science: What the News Media Can Do, and What It Can’t”, I would have entitled it “Science Writing for General Audience Publication: How I do my job”.

Of most interest to me, was the discovery that, while trained in philosophy, this man was quite well versed or at the very least aware of what science really is, how it’s done, how to approach it, etc. Assuming he’s a representative sample of science writers, it made me realize that the divide between those who do science and those it impacts may not be in the news media (or the middle man, as I’d like to call it), but rather between those who write for news media and those who read it.

In developping (well, thinking about) the great idea I’ve been outlining on these pages, I’ve been thinking it should include tools for scientists to communicate (or at least to motivate scientists to communicate) outlying scientific ideas (to paraphrase a dicotomy Fleck used between the “core of a scientific subject” and the “outlying science in a field”) to the general public. In that sense, I’m suggesting we do exactly what I hinted at when asking Fleck a question after his talk. Cut the middle-man.

Traditionally, we have worked in a “proxyfied” way. I make science. I speak to a reporter. The reporter speaks to the people. If you’ve seen the movie “Office Space” (and if not, I highly recommend it), you might recognize one of it’s characters.

“I deal with the clients so the engineers don’t have too. I have people skills! What’s wrong with you people! Can’t you see that!”

I was happy to hear Fleck agree with me and encourage the audience to communicate directly to the public, blog,… I was concerned, although I did expect it, to hear him admit that, regarding communicating scientific developments to the general public,”It’s hard.”

All in all a good talk, although I would have like something a bit more confrontational. I would have liked Fleck to bring forward his vision for how we ought to bridge the divide between the world and the geeks. I like to think my idea could be it. (I often have visions of grandeur and live happily despite it.) We’ll see, although for that, I’ll need to find someone who’s much better at coding these things than I’ll ever be. Anyone interested? The job is open. Flexible hours, can work from home, you get an equal share of the company and no pay. Deal?