A
potential
model
for
academic
knowledge
dissemination and filtering
Gábor Vályi
Assistant lecturer
Centre for Media Education and Reseaerch Department of Sociology and Communication Budapest University of Technology and Economics e-mail:
[email protected]
A shorter version of this paper was presented at the Dissolving and Emerging Communities. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age Conference, 23rd of May 2004.
The author is a scholar of economy and cultural studies, currently participating in a PhD programme in communications studies at the University of Pécs. He is an assistant lecturer and researcher at the Centre for Media Education and Research (Department of Sociology and Communication, Budapest University of Technology and Economics). His main areas of interest include grass-roots methods of cultural production, the cultural history of recorded music, and conflicts between new media technologies and copyright. e-mail:
[email protected]
Gábor Vályi From peer-review to peer-to-peer. A potential model for academic knowledge dissemination and filtering
Abstract After a brief introduction to the traditional print-based and electronic tools of academic knowledge dissemination and filtering, the paper explores the potential use of peer-topeer (P2P) file-sharing systems as the technological basis of an alternative method of publishing and circulating scientific documents. The paper argues that currently existing P2P software – coupled with the establishment of simple standards for naming and structuring files and folders - could already 1) become an effective tool for increasing the availability of academic texts, 2) provide limited collaborative filtering features that would enable readers to finding content that is relevant to their scientific interest. The possibility of the application of P2P technology in academic grassroots-publishing is raised not as a new and exclusive solution to already existing methods of self-archiving, rather as a complementing alternative.
Introduction Academic print journals used to be our most important source of scholarly ideas and research results. During the last decade of the twentieth century we saw the emergence of a number of internet-based alternative electronic publishing forms. Print publishing still maintains its priority over new on-line models of publication in terms of prestige and overall acceptance within the scholarly community. Hower, these new forms are already capable of sufficiently fulfilling themost of the roles that the traditional journals played in the public spheres of academics in maintaining the flow of information about events, institutions and products, as well as circulating, debating and further developing scientific ideas. Altough electronic publishing still does not comply with the official requirements set for scholars as the basis of their elevation within the academic hierarchy, they can share their knowledge, get feedback, establish priority and establish themselves as authorities in their field through making their papers freely and openly available on-line. The selfarchiving initiative (Harnad, 2001) encourages grass-roots not-for-profit electronic publishing of academic writings and fights for the acceptance of this activity within both the academic institutions and the profit-oriented publishing industry. After an introduction to traditional print-based and electronic tools of academic knowledge dissemination and filtering, the paper explores the potential use of peer-topeer (P2P) file-sharing systems as the technological basis of an alternative method for the electronic publishing of scientific documents. I will argue that currently existing P2P software - coupled with the establishment of simple standards for naming and structuring files and folders - could already 1) become an effective tool for increasing the availability of academic texts, 2) provide limited collaborative filtering features that would enable readers to finding content that is relevant to their scientific interest. The possibility of the application of P2P technology in academic grassroots-publishing is raised not as a new and exclusive solution, rather as a complementing alternative to already existing methods of self-archiving.
From peer-reviewed journals to e-prints archives. Tools for academic knowledge dissemination and filtering The pace and scale of the circulation of scientific ideas always depended on the tools and methods
academic
knowledge-networks
used
for
recording,
reproducing
and
disseminating information. However, it would be wrong to assume that the development of such methods and tools only served the double objective of increasing the the speed at which scientific ideas could be communicated as well the amount of information that can be accessed by any person at a given time. With the growth of available academic publications, filtering have become a key function of academic knowledge dissemination systems. Academic journals work as information-lighthouses: in order to help readers finding relevant papers they usually maintain a certain coherence regarding their object or method of study. The scholarly public also knows journals by their level of authenticity based on the impact and quality of their past and present publications as well as on the academic profile of members in the editorial board. The key information-filtering feature of journal-based publication is the system of peer-review, which besides selecting what gets published also aims to correct and improve papers before they go in print. The peerreview process takes time - often over a year - and thus slows down the spread of scientific information, allowing feed-back to the author from the wider community of scholars often when she is already working on a different subject. Print based publishing also limits access to scientific ideas as it is way beyond the possibilities of any – private or public - library to subscribe to every academic journal. With the emergence of the Internet we’ve seen the development of a number alternative electronic publishing models. Putting academic texts on-line is now generally seen as an effective way of reducing the costs and increasing the speed of the publishing process. On-line presence is also increasing the visibility, accessibility, impact and application of academic texts.1
1
Steve Hitchcock’s bibliography of studies is a good starting point to understanding the effect of open access on citation impact.
There are already many working models for electronic publishing within the academic sphere. Closest to the culture of print-journals are electronic journals (e-journals) that are either on-line versions of already existing print publications - sometimes offering different content than the print version (Hitchcock et al, 1996) - or only available digitally. Of course when the e-journals are subject to subscription or offer their content on a pay-per-view basis the global accessibility of academic papers published this way is only potential.2 The self-archiving initiative intends to abolish such financial boundaries to the free flow of scientific ideas by encouraging scholars and academic intitutions to put all their papers on-line and allow free access to these for anyone. Self-archiving has no definitely set rules of what, where, when and how to publish (Harnad, 2001). Ad hoc self-archiving activity is widespread on websites, weblogs of academic interest, although self-archiving activists recommend the publication of both pre- and post-print papers in Open Archive Initiative3 (OAI) compatible archives that store the meta-data - author, title, keywords, abstracts, etc. – according to the OAI standards thus allow for anyone to ”harvest” this data and make it searchable through her own academic paper archive. ”Harvestable” meta-data is the basis for linking up physically separate academic paper-databases into distributed global archives where all published papers are searchable through the search engines of all the co-operating parties. There is already a free, open-source self-archiving software (e-prints4) available that allow scholars and academic institutions to publish their papers in OAI compatible format on the Internet. However, OAI compatible, web-based publishing has its limitations. This disciplined and standardised form of self-archiving tends to lead to the preservation and dissemination of well-prepared texts – almost or already published papers – as one is un-likely to put effort - uploading the document to a server and attaching the necessary meta-data to it - into the preservation of electronic documents that contain less structured and developed ideas. The scholarly skywriting (Harnad, 1990) that happens on academic mailing-lists or newsgroups is unlikely to be found in OAI compatible archives, although we often see 2
See (Kling and Covi, 1995) for the problems, possibilites, economic background and potential future of ejournals. 3 http://www.openarchives.org 4 http://www.eprints.org
the publication of these new and yet undeveloped ideas on weblogs and other ad hoc selfarchiving platforms. There is a number of obstacles that hinder the spread of self-archiving5 as a general norm of academic publication: 1) the official/traditional academic infrastructure does not reward self-archiving as it rewards publication in print journals; 2) there is no peer review process involved in self-archiving, involving less prestige; 3) scholars are affraid of giving away their new ideas or research results before getting them published in traditional journals and thus losing their „competitive edge” as well as making plagiarists work easier; 4) there are also copyright concernes involved as prestigious journals and publishing houses often claim exclusive rights to publishing the texts; 5) self-archiving demands time and effort. The conflict between not-for profit electronic publishing of academic papers and the currently established copyright norms and contractual forms within the academic publishing industry seems to be the most difficult problem to solve. Publishing houses usually see freely and openly available electronic versions of „their” content as a direct threat to their businesses. Steven Harnad (2003) provides a good insight into the unbalanced power-relations in the field of current publishing industry copyright conventions as well as to their effects in slowing down the free flow and development of ideas, reducing the impact of scholarly work and limiting scholarly discourse. Although Harnad is critical of copyright, he is by no means a “free-all-information-for-all” enthusiast. He points out the following important differences between self-archiving initiative and P2P file sharing: 1) Whereas scholars write their papers primarily in order to share their ideas with their peers and not for making profit by selling them, entrepreneurs of other industries - authors, musicians, movie makers and software - live from selling the information - books, music, movies and sofware - they produce. P2P softwares provide a platform for pirating products of primarily commercial nature thus undermine their enterprise of those who produce it. 5
These are mostly fears of scholars that hold them back from taking part in the self-archiving initiative. the Self-archiving FAQ lists “32 prima facie concerns” about self-archiving disproving some of these worries while offering potential solutions to others (The self-archiving FAQ, 2004). I only list the most obvious ones here.
2) Whereas self-archiving of academic papers is based on the free decision of scholars about whether to publish their papers or not producers of commercial information don’t have a choice in the P2P universe: it is their consumers who pirate their products usually against their will (Harnad, 2000). Making this strong distinction between self-archiving and P2P file-sharing is necessary in order to avoid bluring academic free access initiative with general free-content advocacy and illegal piracy in the public eye. Such a confusion of movements and terms might negatively effect the on-going battle for making principles of self-archiving the norm within the academic sphere. Drawing these lines is also to undermine any pro copyright status quo arguments from the academic publishing industry that might liken selfarchiving to for example music-piracy. This reasonable attitude is probably why selfarchive iniciative activists keep a distance from considering P2P softwares as potential distribution channels for academic papers. In the following section, however, I will argue that these new technological tools of information distribution could be put in use for publishing and sharing content – notes, draft versions, charts, tables, database files, illustrative pictures, sound-files or movieclips, published and unpublished papers - of academic nature. This application of P2P technology in academic grassroots-publishing is raised not as a new and exclusive solution that threaten already existing methods of self-archiving, rather as an alternative that complements them.
Why should we put peer-to-peer to use for grass-roots academic publishing? First of all, it would be wrong to mistake P2P for piracy. Peer-2-peer file-sharing softwares allow users to share files that are stored on their hard drives with other people using the same P2P application. These files can be copyright protected – as commercially released music mp3-s or ebooks - as well as files that are created by the users themselves on a not for profit basis in order to be shared with their peers. The association of P2P applictaions with piracy is a result of the on-going political, legal and PR-campaign lead by the content industries in order to ban technological tools that enable people to illegally
sharing their copyright protected content. Although Napster – the first P2P file-sharing software to gain wide recognition in 1999 - was succesfully defeated in court, numerous similar applications sprung up that used slightly different technical solutions and thus could not be defeated on the same grounds as Napster. While there is yet no final word on the legal status of P2P file-sharing, we see more and more uses of P2P technology that fall very far from practices of “theft” or “piracy”. Some of these uses use P2P systems as alternative distribution channels that operate in the less defined gray-zone of copyright legislation in order to serve higher public interests, such as the freedom of expression or the freedom of public information. Intellectual property rights – such as copyright and trade mark laws - are now often abused by large corporations in order to silence opposition, forbid artistic or critical appropriations of their products and logos (McLeod, 2005 and Vaidhyanathan 2001). The case when students of the Swanmorth College published internal memos of Diebold Election Sytems through P2P is good example of putting P2P in use for such rightgeous reasons. Dieblod is a company that provided electronic voting systems in some US states during the 2001 US presidential election. Their voting-machines were clearly faulty as in some cases they came up with such non-sensical results as a negative number of votes. The memos clearly demonstrated the confusion of the employees of the company as well as the efforts made to keeping quiet about these failures in public as it would negatively effect the chances of the company gaining governmental orders for further elections. When the students first published these memos on the web the company tried to silence them claiming it owned the copyrights of the memos. The students then took the availability of the memos was maintained through P2P networks and finally resulted in a huge public debate about the case6. Ross Anderson of Cambridge University argues that P2P networks function as alternative media channels in countries with strong political censorship maintainig the flow of news broadcasts that are abolished from the local TV and radio stations. They are also effective tools of distributing news about small or
6
See: http://P2pnet.net/votes.html.
marginal cultural or activist groups that never make it to mainstream news channels7 (Logan, 2004; Pantic, 2004). Now there are P2P applications like PeerCast, Streamer and StreamOnTheFly8 developed for radio stations that are willing to share their own content with other radios and/or would like to syndicate programs made by other stations that use the same P2P network9. I believe the above applications of P2P technology clearly show that there are plenty of legitimate objectives these file-sharing softwares effectively serve than mere music, video or software piracy. There is thus no reason to avoid their use as a means of sharing academic papers, drafts, notes, charts, multi-media files and data-bases considering that they have a number of advantages over accepted, traditional methods of self-archiving: 1) Publishing a document in either OAI compatible archives or ad hoc on the web demands time and effort: the sholar has to either fill out meta-data forms or tinker around with his webside and upload the file. Although these processes are relatively simple and take only a few minutes per document if one is familiar with the technology, one still has to take a break from his everyday routine and publish files whenever they are ripe for sharing with others. This might result in publishing only what is finnished, and will probably lead to delaying the publication for weeks if one is overwhelmed with other tasks or just not in the mood for doing it. The “costs” of putting a document on-line might also lead to publishing less, only what one considers finished or significant enough and might keep other scholars from accessing relevant information that their authors overlook or misjudge. P2P doesn’t require consciouss effort from those who create these documents or files: once they download the software and dedicate a folder for files to be shared, they only have to save all files that they don’t want to keep secret in this folder and it will be accessible to all other users. 7
An already existing examples of media activist P2P use is v2v (http://www.v2v.cc/). V2V is a video sharing initiative that is used by activist groups to syndicate their video files – in genres such as action, agitprop, animation, documentary, fiction, music clip - on topics such as anti-fascism, anti-racism, culture and media, ecology, gender, global regions, history and memory, reclaim the spaces, repression, war and military. V2V is rather a common platform than an application as it allows the use of the following P2P networks and applications as distribution channels: e-donkey 2000 (http://www.edonkey2000.com), magnet (http://www.magnetlinks.org), bittorrent (http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent). 8 PeerCast is at http://www.peercast.org, Streamer is at http://www.chaotica.u-net.com/streamer, StreamOnTheFly is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sotf/. 9 For more information about P2P-radio see (Wen, 2002).
Some conservative self-archivists might fear that scholarly publishing in P2P will lead to chaos of files, unprocessable ammount of data with no signposts of relevance and quality. However, clever naming of files that include the name of creators and title and very possible type or status – note, draft, yet unpublished, etc – and keywords along with logical directory structures could already provide useful points of orientation for other users with no advanced metadata-layer present. 2) The other strength of P2P is the possibility of looking at files not as stand-alone entities but as objects attached to the knowledge network of people. One can find a document he looks for in a search and then start browsing the shared folders of the person who shared it for other documents of similar content and quality. This strong collaborative filtering effect is already at work in already existing P2P systems. Of course the very possibility of share “digital libraries” raises the question whether it would be useful to share not just one’s own documents but all relevant academic content one recieves for review, comes across at conferences, web-sites and gets from his peers as suggestedreading. Such digital libraries already exist anyway on all personal computers that scholars use for their work, hidden from the eyes of others. It would be great to learn from what electronic papers other – important, trusted, authoritive - scholars read and it is already possible if they use their own names in P2P systems or make their user IDs available at their websites. P2P systems are great because the immediacy and ease of publishing as well as because documents are organized in them in a way that they are connected to both people and other documents and thus peer-2-peer file-sharing could be a great complementing alternative method to already accepted methods of self-archiving. However, there are a number of issues that are not resolved by already existing P2P application that were not designed with scholarly publishing in mind: 1) The lack of a metadata-handling layer – custom-tailored for academic use that allow users to attach keywords and other information to their documents.
2) The lack of a method for authenticating users, that is, ensuring that all users are logged on to the system can be identified by their real names and institutions. 3) Piracy. Authentication combined with a monitoring/moderating of file-sharing activity would be the key of solving the problem of
impeding on the
exchange of copyright protected material as well as unwanted non-academic content such as pornography. If there was a way of ensuring that users only share not copyrighted content we should no longer worry about whether one has the right of dowloading and then sharing other peoples creations. Once their creators have shared them via P2P or published them on the web allowing free use and distribution by a simple declaration or use of copyleft licences such as those of the Creative Commons inititative10 the more people download and share them, the closer their authors get to achieving their initial purpose. 4) The lack of stability or continuity within the distributed digital archives that P2P file-sharing creates. That is, a paper shared with P2P are only available as long as the user who created and shares it or any other user who have already downloaded it and shares it is on-line. 5) Currently existing P2P systems are not searchable through the search engines of OAI compatible academic paper archives, neither can these web based archives be searched through the search engines of P2P applications.
The future of P2P file-sharing for academic self-publishing The above text is a slightly extended version of a tought experiment, an idea that I played around with at the Dissolving and Emerging Communities - The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age Conference in May 2004. As I expected, it provoked heated debate about whether adopting P2P technologies would send out the wrong message about self-archiving without stepping beyond the capabilities already 10
See http://www.creativecommons.org.
available through accepted methods and technologies and thus threaten the project seriously. By the time of writing this paper, the above question is no longer just the object of a theoretical debate in a conference room, but is just a step before becoming a very real one. By the time of writing this conclusion at least one P2P applications designed to sharing academic files is already in the beta-testing phase. Lionshare11 is a joint collaborative development project by Penn State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Knowledge Initiative, researchers at Simon Fraser University, and the Internet2 P2P Working Group. The first public version is scheduled for release as an open source softwere by fall 2005. Besides enabling users to share “various learning resources including, but not limited to, digital images, audio, video, simulations, text, documents, research papers, Web resources, and other learning resources and activities. The LionShare network is also open to the sharing and publication of personal multimedia collections” (Lionshare Faq, 2005) . Besides being a file-sharing platform Lionshare will provide tools for scholars to handle and organize their content - for example add metadata to it - as well as facilitate scholarly communication such as bulletin-boards and chat rooms. According to the project homepage, the Lionshare project also aims to solve the problems - that now existing non-academic P2P can’t handle yet - we listed by the end of the last section: •
“ LionShare will search academic databases of digital resources in addition to the shared files residing on personal hard drives that other P2P applications are limited to.
•
Users must be authenticated and, hence, cannot remain anonymous.
•
Network monitoring and safeguards will be in place to enforce copyright laws.
•
The LionShare network allows users to share files while not connected via "always on" library repository servers.” (Lionshare Faq, 2005)
With the growing acknowledgement of copyleft licences such as those of the Creative Commons inititative12 in academic knowledge production, sharing/re-distributing other 11 12
http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main/ http://creativecommons.org/
peoples free and open access content may soon become just as natural and important as publishing one’s own works. This might of course lead to a far bigger number of publications one is able to share. Sharing private digital libraries that extend from one’s notes to open access e-learning multimedia applications created by others with accepted methods of self-archiving would be too time consuming and demand more efforts from scholars that they are willing to make. This tendency would raise the potential importance of P2P in grass-roots scholarly publishing. P2P applications like Lionshare have a potential in becoming legitimate scholarly networks. Their success or failure partly depends on whether they will really be capable of authenticating their users and keeping their networks free of copyright infringement and unwanted non-academic content, however, institutional resistance based on false preconceptions of P2P technology or opposition from better established grass-roots scholarly publishing movements such as the self-archiving initiative might also influence their fate. I strongly believe that scholars who fight for a free and fast flow of academic ideas shall mutually support and tie into each other’s work rather than fight for the universal and monolithic acceptance of the technological standards they propagate.
References Harnad, Stevan (1990) “Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry” in Psychological Science, Vol. 1, pp. 342-343. Available on the Internet: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html (03.01.2005) Harnad, Stevan (1993) “Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals”, In: Peek, R. & Newby, G. (szerk.) Scholarly Publication: The Electronic Frontier, Cambridge: MIT Press. Available on the Internet: http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad96.peer.review.html (03.01.2005) Harnad, Stevan (2000) “Re: Napster: stealing another' s vs. giving away one' s own”. In th American Scientist Open Access Forum, 19 of May 2000. Available on the Internet: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0672.html. (03.01.2005) Hanard, Stevan (2001). “The self-archiving initiative” In Nature, Vol. 410, pp. 10241025. Available on the Internet: http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/eaccess/Articles/harnad.html. (03.01.2005)
Harnad, Stevan (2003) “Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access.” In: Law, Derek & Andrews, Judith (eds.) Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing. Available on the Internet: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm. (03.01.2005) Hitchcock, Steve (2004) The effect of open access and downloads (' hits' ) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies. Elérhet az interneten: http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html. (03.01.2005) Kling, Rob; Covi, Lisa (1995) “Electronic Journals and Legitimate Media in the Systems of Scholarly Communication”, in The Information Society, Special issue on Electronic Journals and Scholarly Publishing Vol. 11. No. 4. Available on the Internet: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/chwp/kling/index.html. (03.01.2005) Koku, Emmanuel F.; Nazer, Nancy és Wellman, Barry (2000) “Netting Scholars Online and Offline” in American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 43. Special issue: Mapping Globalization. Available on the Internet: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/nettingscholars/scholnet-abs9a.pdf (03.01.2005) Lionshare Faq (2005) Available on the internet: http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/docs/build/site/users/faq.html (03.01.2005) Logan, Tracy “File-sharing to bypass censorship” in BBC News On-line (2004.04.09.). Available on the Internet: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3611227.stm (02.22.2005) McLeod, Kembrew (2003) Cease and Desist: Freedom of Expression in the Shadows of Intellectual Property. Available on the Internet: http://www.uiowa.edu/~poroi/ms_mcloed.htm (03.25.2003) Pantic, Drazen (2004) “Anybody Can Be TV: How P2P Home Video Will Challenge the Network News” in PlaNetwork Journal. Available on the Internet: http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=pantic0704 (02.22.2005) Self-archiving FAQ (2004). Available on the internet: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ (03.01. 2005) Vaidhyanathan, Siva (2001) Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, New York: New York University Press. Two chapters of this book are available on the Internet: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~sv24/Chapter4.PDF http://homepages.nyu.edu/~sv24/Chapter5.PDF(03.16. 2004)
Wen, Howard (2002) “Internet Radio the P2P way” in Open P2P. Available on the Internet: www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/09/24/p2pradio.html. (02.22.2005)
