Scientific research fostered the Internet. Ironically, it may also be a threat to the Web as we know it.
Growing momentum behind scientific collaboration and the use of cloud services for research has fostered a backlash by companies threatened by the trend while exposing fundamental obstacles to online collaboration.
Let's start with the argument over Web access to information. As pointed out by Internet Evolution contributor George Taylor in his blog today, there's a movement under way to revise the age-old presentation of research results online. Traditionally, those results have appeared in papers gated by service providers demanding expensive subscriptions. As George notes, scientists and other interested parties are protesting that research results should be provided free, especially since the projects that yielded those results are often publicly funded.
It's an argument that's been going on for a while. In a column in the UK Guardian in December, George Monbiot railed against academic publishers who gate their research:
Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist?... My vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but -- wait for it -- to academic publishers...
Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.
Hand-in-glove with the issue of open access to scientific results is the issue of collaborative, cloud-based scientific facilities. After all, if one wants to keep data under expensive lock and key, it follows that there will be resistance to services that open up the research to wider participation and even to crowdsourcing.
But clouds loom for scientific research, despite the resistance. Back in 2010, the telecom analyst Bill St. Arnaud noted in a blog that universities had already begun to turn to cloud services as an alternative to expensive high-performance computing facilities. And last summer, the IT consultant Mary Shacklett cited the creation of enormous scientific networks to cope with vast amounts of data emitted by projects worldwide.
All this is accelerating moves to make clouds more secure and practical for scientific use, and sparks will probably fly as resistance builds from universities, publishers, and even cloud providers themselves.
As St. Arnaud wtore in an email to me today:
The roadblocks being thrown up by publishers such as Elsevier I don’t think will impact use of clouds by researchers. There are other issues such as data computability standards... Data stored in Amazon, for example, may not be compatible with formats used by Microsoft Azure.
As science continues to move toward the use of clouds and collaboration, the tension among various constituents is thrown into stark relief. At the same time, you can expect clouds and collaboration to produce some fascinating innovations.
What needs to happen, in my view, is for a group of major universities to agree that research published elsewhere than in the journals owned by that small cartel of academic publishes - Elsevier et al - can count towards the requirements for tenure. It can't be beyond the wit of our seats of learning to establish - or recognize - a web space for publication with a sound peer review system.
Since when were scientific results supposed to be secret?
Well, Mary, it's a matter of a difference in the broader definition of the word "deleted." This has nothing to do with the license, and whether or not the uploading, distribution, or deletion is legal.
The content on MegaUpload is probably going to get deleted from MegaUpload. But, whether you view the situation from a pro-copyright or pro-piracy point of view, that content never belonged to MegaUpload, insofar as it ever belonged to anybody. The very act of putting content into a distributed file-sharing system is also essentially saying "Anybody who wants this, come and get it." The sharing happens continuously, and is not limited to a particular platform. So the fact that MegaUpload probably hosted, for example, an .avi file of Casablanca, does not mean that now, with the shutdown, the distribution of Casablanca that may have began there has ceased. The movie is widely desired, so once a copy of it was offered to the commons, it became part of the commons. I'm using "commons" here in the general sense of what belongs to the people as a collective by natural law, not the Creative Commons.
Much pirated (and non-pirated) content gets distributed online via peer-to-peer systems, and the whole idea of those systems is that they can't really be shut down, because (like the Internet itself, but perhaps moreso), they are decentralized. The Pirate Bay is mostly a front end for that type of system. So, when the MIT guy "uploaded" all that scientific data from JSTOR, it's not like he was just putting it in a vault. If a single person made a copy, then he succeeded... not just morally, but in getting a copy out there to some random compatriot who, at any time, can offer it as a torrent. And people like P2P sharing more than centrally hosted sharing, because (besides the host being less likely to get busted) there's more content out there, it's less gated, and the more people hosting a particular piece of content, the faster is the download.
Uploading anywhere always *could* result in comment deletion. But the guy who "stole" that data from MIT didn't put it on Google Docs, he put it on The Pirate Bay. Which is to say, he opened it up to a decentralized, distributed file sharing network. Stuff that gets donated to the commons, and for which there is a demand, doesn't get deleted, because it becomes, in a sense, self-replicating.
90% of computer users are not hard core geeks-techies. Like programming a remote, backing up on a regular schedule is to much of a hassle for the average person. They don't want to deal with it. So who does? Most people don't even read the fine print of deals they get into.
I'm not sure, KMT568. It appears that scientific journal publishers are akin to the big record companies: They aren't likely to make changes that end their gravy train. In some instances, their business lives may be at stake.
Eh... of course most consumer-oriented cloud services aren't going to guarantee data per se. They don't want to get sued, they don't want to get bogged down in dealing with millions of small complaints. That's part of the reason that Gmail was in "beta" for so long, even though (much like the Death Star in Return Of The Jedi) it was actually fully operational.
But that doesn't mean that you're going to lose your data. All those companies need to create a reasonable expectation of security, or they'll go out of business.
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