Dan Kennedy’s written a terrific story about Dan Gillmor and the Center for Citizen Media… [Tags: dan_gillmor media blogging newspapers journalism]

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Wendy Seltzer is leading a lunchtime discussion at the Berkman Center about how copyright works not just as law but as technology policy. Copyright tech has been shaping law and culture, she says. [As always, I'm paraphrasing, missing big chunks, making the elegant clunky, etc.]

She looked recently at the 1995 federal policy statement on the “national information infrastructure” (= da Net). It reads as if the Clinton administration wanted to promote the Internet by protecting “intellectual property.” But it turns out that the Internet has even more value by letting us communicate with one another. Yet, the copyrighted content has been wagging the dog, restricting what and how we can communicate. E.g., the DMCA (which encourages ISPs to take material down), restrictions on fair use, the anti-circumvention laws (including the Broadcast Flag). Laws that give an incentive to create can then become a barrier to communication and access, Wendy says. “So far this limited monopoly is the best way we’ve found to give artists and authors an incentive to create.” We don’t want to return on patronage, she says. The market seems to be the best mechanism. “But this market has its own inefficiencies.” E.g., every computer makes copies (just by visiting a page), so tightening copyright laws can inhibit us unnecessarily, not to mention preventing remixes and mashups that make political points.

While the Internet makes infringements easier, the laws passed in response have given copyright holders new tools to go after infringers, swinging the balance against users. E.g., section 512 of the DMCA says that ISPs should “expeditiously” take down material that someone—anyone—claims infringes. So, ISPs don’t have to examine every piece posted to their system, but the incentive is to err on the side of removing materials.

Q: I’ve heard that YouTube is only taking down potentially infringing clips longer than five minutes. [A quick search on YouTube for "daily show" clips supports this—weak evidence.]

Q: What’s going on with the counter-notice provisions of the DMCA (section 512g) which lets someone whose material was taken down complain.
A: It’s rarely used. Many of the infringement notifications are invalid, and still few people counter-notify. Out of a thousand notices, there were only two counter-notices.

Q: How should the industry respond to the real threat?
A: The data suggest that encrypting songs on iTunes doesn’t stop them from being available unencrypted on filesharing networks immediately, but it does stop people from building their own music players and integrating them. E.g., because DVDs are locked, there’s been no new technology that lets you do more with your DVDs.

Q: The music industry doesn’t care about secure DRM any more. Will that happen to other industries?
Wendy: That’s encouraging.

Wendy hopes artists will insist on having more open licenses of their material.

Q: What should, say, Sony do?
A: Reinvent themselves. They still provide “taste” services. But it’s not the high margin business it used to be. They should pare down to the services they provide that have value.

Q: Isn’t the ease of ripping an argument for stronger IP, so Tower Records can stay in business?
A: Copyright is about protecting the artists, not Tower Records. If the market no longer needs Tower Records…

Q: How about AllofMP3.com?
A: the business model seems to be: “We’re in Russia and will ignore everyone else’s copyright law.”

She says that she thinks the successful sites will be differentiated not by their content but by their navigability, guarantee of quality, etc.

Q: Protecting artists is a good ting. Art is a public good. You mentioned patronage. But in Europe, arts get funded through grants.
A: It’s great to have government support for the arts, but artists shouldn’t be solely dependent on that.

Q: How can the communication side make a claim against the entertainment industry?
A: If citizens demanded it…

Wendy likes subscription models that don’t track the data too closely (for privacy reasons) and that allocate revenues to the artists.

Q: If we were negotiating copyrights with individual artists, what would the DMCA look like?
A: I’m not convinced artists want the DMCA.

Q: But when I listen, the artist would get ten cents…
A: (someone) That’s what Rhapsody does now.

Wendy: That’s what DMX does. Would artists give their rights over to bulk licensing agencies? Do what you will with the music and we’ll figure out who to give the money to? If the agency was transparent enough…

[Tags: copyright drm digital_rights wendy_seltzer music itunes ipod berkman]

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Ethan Zuckerman discovers that Google Coop’s roll your own search engine has high precision but poor recall, i.e., it gives few irrelevant returns, but misses stuff it should find.

A little poking solves the mystery pretty quickly. Google Coop Search works by searching against the main Google search catalog, retrieving 1000 results and filtering them against the sites you’ve included in your catalog. This makes sense, computationally - these searches are fast, almost as fast as normal Google searches. Rather than conducting 3000 “site:” searches and collating and reranking the results, Google is sacrificing recall, getting 1000 results and discarding those not in your set of chosen sites, which requires one call to the index and a really big regular expression match.

…

…In other words, the little engine I’ve built is useful only if the sites I’ve chosen are relatively high ranking and authoritative sites on the topics I’m searching on.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman google ]

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Reddit, one of my favorite social front pages, has been acquired by CondeNet, the CondéNast online group. Good news for the Reddit folks. And maybe a very very smart move by CondeNet…if they let the Reddit folks heavily influence how the service is developed. [Tags: reddit news condenet media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Yesterday, the Berkman Center hosted a small party for local political bloggers. John Palfrey had us pause for a moment so the attendees could introduce themselves. A sampling: Betsy Devine has tracked the NH phone bank scandal. A professor from Northeastern blogs as a media watchdog. Rick Burnes of FaneuilMedia is plotting political donations on Google maps. Several folks from BlueMassGroup, a Democratic blog that’s also a community, were there. Matt Margolis, founder of Blogs for Bush, a site that’s kept its flame alive two years after the election, was there; he runs a Massachusetts site to rally the state’s overwhelmed conservatives. Steve Garfield told how he posted fantastic footage he’d shot of Deval Patrick at a rally, while the conventional news media all missed the moment. And many more; I didn’t do a systematic job of writing down names and blogs.

My point isn’t that there was a cloud of luminaries at the Berkman last night, well la-di-da. I don’t think there was an “A-list” blogger among us. And that’s my point. As we went around the room, I got chills realizing how far we’ve come. Capturing remarkable moments, tracking scandals — every issue has her blogger — monitoring the media, rallying supporters, mashing up financial info…we’re doing it all. We take it for granted. But it’s changed how the world works. And we’re only at the beginning.

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The Boston Globe’s circulation is down 7% this year, falling from 414,000 to 386,000. Boston’s other daily paper (well, not counting the Metro), fell 12% to 203,000. The Globe’s Sunday circulation fell 10% to 587,000.

The Globe was already in financial trouble. The path it’s currently on predictably leads to scaling back in coverage and running more syndicated articles. If the current decline continues it’s hard to see how the Globe can survive. And that would be a disaster. A newspaper is greater than the sum of the knowledge, talent and experience it aggregates.

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Another reminder of how much things have changed: The discontent about the use of electronic voting machines has become an issue almost entirely because of the Web. The people who have made it an issue are not reporters but scientists and researchers who have published directly to readers. That’s how they’ve gotten traction. And that’s new. [Tags: media politics blogging berkman]

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Scott Rosenberg has a great interview with Steve Johnson about Steve’s new book, The Ghost Map. It’s one smart writer interviewing another smart writer. Plus, Scott and Steve are both really nice, a virtue often under appreciated, especially when it shows up in folks whose egos could justifiably be way bigger than they are.

Scott closes with a question about Steve’s new site, Outside.in that aggregates stuff by zip code. [Tags: steve_johnson ghost_map scott_rosenberg books]

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Jeff Jacoby is a conservative columnist for the Boston Globe, so I disagree with his conclusions quite frequently. But, over the years I’ve also disagreed with his reasoning almost as frequently. He seems to me to be one of those columnists who comes up with a provocative conclusion and then tries to figure out how he can support it…and doesn’t always succeed.

This morning he complains about people accusing their political opponents of “playing the race card.” That’s the new McCarthyism, he says. He points to the GOP ad that “pokes fun” at Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee:

And a bare-shouldered bimbo squeals, “I met Harold at the Playboy party” — a reference to Playboy’s 2005 Super Bowl bash in Florida, which Ford attended. The ditzy blonde returns at the end to whisper, with a wink, “Harold: call me!”

It was a witty, entertaining ad — and it promptly had liberals and Democrats and even the odd Republican screeching about how “racist” it was.

Ford went to a Superbowl party sponsored by Playboy, which clearly means he’s on the prowl for white “bimbos.” Nothing offensive about that! And talk about witty! [Note to the sarcasm impaired: That was sarcasm.]

Jacoby then lays the smack down (or whatever that slang phrase is that the kids are using):

But the plain fact is, there is nothing remotely racial about the Tennessee ad. And I can prove it: The ad would be just as effective if Ford were white.

Jacoby furthers his case:

The same litmus test exonerates Kerry Healey’s much-maligned TV commercials against [the black Democratic candidate] Deval Patrick in the Massachusetts governor’s fight. In one ad, a woman of indeterminate race is shown walking to her car in a parking garage, while a voiceover reminds viewers that Patrick has “praised a convicted rapist.”

Jacoby’s point is that the “ad would be precisely as effective if he [Patrick] were white.”

And on what basis does Jacoby claim this? Has he done a study to test the ad’s effect if the candidate were white or black? No. The best I can figure is that Jacoby means that the explicit argument made by the ad would apply equally to a black or white candidate. But, as he acknowledges, the “McCarthyites” who claim that this is a covertly racist ad point to implications and code words that only make sense within the context within which the ad is actually heard. In this case, everyone who sees the ad knows that Patrick is black, and many — thanks to Healey’s manipulative and cynical raising of the issue — know that the rapist in question is black. In a world truly free of racism, there would be no residue of former cultural associations between rapists and black men. But this is not that world.

So, let’s apply Jacoby’s “proof” to a hypothetical ad attacking Deval Patrick. In this ad, a gang of male, black youths are following a pretty young white woman through the darkened streets. “They’re over-sexed, and they want our women,” says the voice over. Then the ad shows a photo of Deval Patrick. “He’d be fine shining your shoes, but do you really trust him as governor?” According to Jacoby, this ad would be equally effective if Patrick were white because we’re all against crime, and you don’t have to be black to be a good shiner of shoes. But you have to have a brick ear not to recognize that my hypothetical ad is wildly racist. Jacoby’s test fails the real-world test in which ads have meanings beyond the literal words intoned. In context — that is, in the real world — the anti-Ford and anti-Patrick ads are racist, and I believe deliberately so.

Jacoby simply misses the point, not because he’s racist but because (I believe) he’s too intent on being controversial. Conclusions should come last, not first.

Or maybe just as Bush’s speechwriters talk about the “soft racism of low expectations” (a great phrase, despite how it’s used), we should talk about the “soft racism of ignoring racism.”

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The Globe today warmly endorsed Deval Patrick for governor, pointing to his ability to listen to those who disagree and his refusal to polarize the electorate for his own personal gain. I’m an enthusiastic supporter — I’ve worked the phone banks for him — and hope that his resounding victory will help rip the Willy Horton page out of the Republican playbook.

[Tags: jeff_jacoby deval_patrick racism politics massachusetts bostin_globe media]

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I emailed Jeff Jacoby to tell him I blogged this. He wrote back and gave me permission to run his reply here:

Of course your ad would be wildly racist. But what does your hypothetical
ad have to do with the real ones I wrote about? Healey’s ads, unchanged in any way, would be equally effective against Deval Patrick if he were a white liberal. The Tennessee ad, unchanged, would be equally effective if Harold Ford were white. That tells me that the ads are not racist — or even racial. I appreciate your taking the time to comment on my column, but you seem to have completely missed the point I was making.

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Britt is an ever-youthful 64 today and writes:

What do I want for my 64th birthday? I’d like some reporter to stand up at a press conference on live TV and ask, ‘Mr. President, on what date do you believe that we will all agree that the Iraq War has turned out no better than every other project you fucked up in your life?’

Ouch! [Tags: britt_blaser iraq bush politics]

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I’ve spent the past couple of days going through the copy edit of Everything Is Miscellaneous. The copy editor, Christopher O’Connell, has done an incredible job. Not only has he corrected every bad comma, transformed every errant “that” into “which” and vice versa, and capped every uncapped capitalized word, but he’s also unearthed an embarrassing number of factual and thoughtual errors that would have mortified me if they’d seen print. I am impressed with the number of ways I’ve managed to go wrong, even though I was rather careful (or so I thought) when taking notes. I misspelled names, don’t know whether 350 BCE is in the third or fourth century BCE, and am wrong about the citizenship of some important historical personages. (What, Napoleon wasn’t Irish???)

It is a usefully humbling experience for which I’m very grateful.

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Pito Salas explains how BlogBridge’s topic guides work, and how you can use their Feed Library software product to create your own. BlogBridge is a well-intentioned, free, open source blog aggregator that works across platforms. I’m a user and an advocate. (I’m also an uncompensated advisor: disclosure) [Tags: blogbridge aggregators open_source pito_salas rss]

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I like the phrase “Net neutrality” because it has some resonance outside of the techie world. But It’s vague and it’s a bit of a compromise. The real way to get Net neutrality is to separate the companies that deliver bits from the companies selling content and services made out of bits. And that’s exactly what a bill passed unanimously (or maybe almost unanimously - reports are ambiguous) by the Dutch Parliament proposes, according to a post by David Isenberg. Writes La Isenberg:

…in my opinion, the only sustainable way to have enforceable network neutrality is to give force of law to the separation between operating the network and operating the services that the network carries. Otherwise, the temptation to gain advantage (.pdf) by tying certain services to the network is so great that US telcos and cablecos are spending an estimated $1.5 million per week to lobby for the privilege. And, unless there’s clear and forceful separation, as per the Dutch resolution above, US telcos and cablecos will spend more lobbying, litigating and legislating against any compromise language about treating different applications differently, or about “deliberate” or “anti-competitive” discrimination. The network carrier should be prohibited legally from knowing or caring what’s carried on network — the Dutch Parliament has proposed one way to do it.

[Tags: berkman net_neutrality]

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Steven Streight suggests three business models that “always work for everybody who uses them correctly and persistently, heck, even sporadically and lazily like me.” I wouldn’t go that far, but the fact that they ever work is proof that the world is better than we think it is. [Tags: business steven_streight]

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I am reminded of Larry Lessig’s post on the three economies. Hey, they’re both about economics and have three alternatives.

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Ken Schafer of OneDegree and Tucows asked me at the Canadian Marketing Association meeting in Toronto how people misinterpret Cluetrain. I answer in this brief video. [Tags: ken_schafer marketing cluetrain]

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From the Berkman Center:

Blogging the Vote in 2006: A Celebration of Political Bloggers

Monday, October 30, 5 pm
Berkman Center
23 Everett Street, Second Floor, Cambridge, MA

With each election cycle of the 21st century, more and more citizen journalists have been getting in on the act of covering campaigns and the stories that swirl around them. The race for governor of Massachusetts in 2006 has been covered by dozens of bloggers — as well as by journalists who are writing blogs in addition to their video, audio, and print stories in mainstream media outlets. The role that these citizen journalists are playing ha s been the topic of intense interest among pundits, academics, candidates, and their campaigns alike. One thing is for certain: these citizen journalists, and mainstream journalists experimenting with new media, should be celebrated for their role in making public the discussion about who should be the next Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Please join us at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society for an informal and social celebration to honor all those who have been blogging the vote here in Massachusetts in 2006. Whatever party, perspective, or new medium you call your own, or however you get your news about this election, we’d love to meet you and raise a glass to all those whose hard work has been making the 2006 campaign here in Massachusetts more vibrant and exciting than ever before.

Please let us know if you plan to attend, so we can be sure there’s plenty of snacks & drinks for all rsvp cyber.law.harvard.edu.

[Tags: berkman politics blogging]

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Oy™.

See also “Silence is golden.” [Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the link.] [Tags: marketing trademarks nestles ]

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Firefox 2.0 is running on my laptop invisibly. In the Windows Task Manager, there’s no entry in the Applications tab, but the Processes tab shows “firefox.exe” running.

Here’s how I fixed it, thanks to googling around for help.

First, end the firefox.exe process. Control-Alt-Delete and open the Processes tab. Select the “firefox.exe” process, and right click to get the menu for ending the process.

Now start Firefox in safe mode. To do this, create a shortcut to the firefox.exe program you just installed. Select the shortcut, choose Properties, and add “-safe-mode” to the command, so that it looks something like:

“C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe” -safe-mode

Double click on the shortcut and you should see the Firefox “safe mode” dialog box. If you don’t, go find some other blogger to help you because I’m all out of tips.

Click on “Disable all add-ons” and press the “Make Changes and continue” button. Firefox should start. If it doesn’t, try relaunching it from the shortcut and click every box in the “safe mode” dialog.

In Firefox, go to Tools > Add-ons. All of them are disabled. Enable one. Close Firefox. Start it up, but not using the safe mode icon. You want to start it in full mode to see if it opens. If it does, you know that the add-on (nee extension) you just enabled is not the culprit. Repeat until you find the culprit.

Now do control-alt-delete and kill the Firefox process. Start it up in safe mode again. Turn off the add-ons. Enable them all except the culprit(s).

Good luck.

BTW, the culprit in my case was McAfee SiteAdvisor (disclosure). [Tags: firefox siteadvisor]

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From PRX, the public radio exchange:

[Tags: prx halloween]

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The current issue of Wired has a feature I like a lot: They got 33 sf writers to contribute six-word short stories. So, I’m shamelessly ripping off that idea, but with a twist. Here’s the six-word version of today’s DOEP:

Six-word story. Any genre. Surprise ending.

For example:

Duel to death at noon. Eclipse.

Brother impregnates sister. Disgusting. They’re bees.*

For extra points, make it Web-themed… [Tags: doep puzzle]

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*I know that bees don’t get pregnant, and I’m not sure that the concept of brother and sister really applies, but let’s just say that’s all part of the surprise ending.

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Yesterday I flew from Boston to Chicago in the window seat of a three-across row. The person next to me, who seemed to be a vigorous man of around seventy, talked non-stop the entire way. Non-stop. He’s done a lot of traveling, he has a lot of opinions.

I saw what was coming and ducked out quickly, donning a head set and pretending to work and listen to music. But I felt terrible for the woman in the aisle seat who absorbed the blunt force of the man’s self-absorbed river of spews. I wondered if I should make up an excuse for her or engage him in “conversation” so she could have a break. But I lacked the fortitude. Besides, she’s a grownup — maybe in her late forties — and should know how to break it off politely.

So, here’s the twist ending. It’s not exactly O. Henry, but…

About two hours in, the man went to the bathroom. I leaned over and asked the woman if she was ok.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“He hasn’t stopped talking. Omigod!”

“I’m enjoying it.”

Maybe I would have thought so if I had been willing to listen. Maybe I missed an opportunity.

On the other hand, as we were leaving the plane, the man skipped ahead. “You’re a nice person,” I said to the woman. And the woman directly behind her said, “And how!” [Tags: misc]

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Amnesty International is gathering signatures on a statement it’s going to present to the UN in November calling on “governments to stop the unwarranted restriction of freedom of expression on the Internet – and on companies to stop helping them do it.” You can sign it here. [Tags: digital_rights amnesty_international ]

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Firefox 2.0 is going to be available soon and I feel like a gift is in the mail. I get to anticipate it and then unwrap it to see what goodies are inside, thanks to the thousands of contributors. And its extensibility means that the gifts just keep on coming.

Thanks, y’all! [Tags: firefox open_sourcea href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/berkman" rel="tag">]

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Given my difficulties with space, Portal (from Valve) sounds like exactly the sort of game that will leave me like a hound trying to untangle his leash. But, the web site vaguely associated with it is hilarious.

It’s like an Easter egg, but not hidden inside the application (which means it’s mainly not like an Easter egg). PCGamer ran instructions for entering it:

Go to www.aperturescience.com. Type “login” at the prompt. Enter any user name. Type “portal” as the password.
Type “dir” to get a listing. Type “Apply”

I actually chuckled out loud at some of it… [Tags: humor games portal]

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Joe Jaffe has announced he’s forming a company to try to do the new marketing right. It’s called Crayon, and the announcement will be in Second Life.

Good luck to Crayon. I hope it can keep in mind the fundamental fact of marketing: We don’t like being marketed to, whether in commercials, billboards, or conversation. [Tags: marketing joe_jaffe]

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I am so poorly oriented in space that I cannot make a checkers move without first physically moving the piece. I can stand on a marked street corner with a map and a compass and still go wrong 50% of the time. When I take a shirt out of a drawer, I can’t predict which half will be on my left, although I do pride myself on rarely going wrong about which will be the outside.

So, this “procedure” for solving a Rubik’s Cube is to me indistinguishable from gibberish, even though I’m certain that it’s right. [Tags: rubik's_cube puzzles]

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I haven’t blogged anything about the recent discovery that “Wal-Marting across America,” a blog recounting the travels of a couple from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart, was in fact funded by Wal-Mart through Edelman PR. In its wake (1 2), Edelman disclosed that Working Families for Wal-Mart and its subsidiary site, Paid Critics, are also Edelman sites. It seems to me unambiguously wrong for Edelman to fund sites for clients without making that clear on the sites themselves. I haven’t blogged that (until now) in part because it’s so obvious and in part because, as a consultant to Edelman, I’m in a conflict.

By contract and body language, Edelman has not attempted to control or influence what I blog. Never. There are, however, three important inhibiting factors. First, no matter how genuine and warm the relationship, taking money from an organization taints what one thinks about that organization; that’s why I have repeatedly disclosed my relationship. Second, as a consultant, I’ve been in a position to observe how the company interacts, what sorts of ideas it contemplates and rejects, and what it embraces enthusiastically or reluctantly. It would betray their trust — and get me fired as a consultant, and keep other companies from hiring me — if I were to blab about that stuff. But that makes it hard for me to write about an affair such as the Wal-Mart one, even though I didn’t know about it beforehand. Third, As a result of consulting to the company for the past year and a half or so, I’ve developed personal relationships with people there, including with Richard Edelman, whom I’m proud to count as a friend. I’m not objective.

So, with that in mind:

Edelman’s non-transparency about its Wal-Mart programs erode the trust that makes the Blogosphere valuable. It also forces the question of whether professional PR has any place in the Blogosphere.

I think it does, but it’s not going to be an easy transition. Full transparency is the minimum requirement. But, that’s not enough. Being transparent about funding blogs is hardly what it means to do enlightened PR on the Web.

I personally think there are two fundamental roles for PR in the new world: Transparent advocacy and facilitating open, genuine engagement among customers and companies. Transparent advocacy means that the agency argues for its client, providing useful information to people who want to receive it. Genuine engagement means the agency helps its client participate in the Web conversation honestly and frankly, whether that’s through employee blogging, customer forums, or ways yet to be invented. Just as the agency can be a transparent advocate for the client on the Web, it should be an advocate for Web values to the client, counseling the client to be frank, honest, and open to criticism. (An agency may also create publicity stunts, but there’s nothing particularly webby about that.)

I also want to add — keeping in mind the three factors that mitigate against my credibility on this topic — that I believe that Edelman PR overall is genuinely committed to behaving well on the Web. That it has gone so wrong in the Wal-Mart instances is an indication of just how different the Web is, and how difficult it is for an agency that has bet its future on getting the Web right to break free of its long-learned instincts. PR has a long road ahead of it.

[Tags: blogging pr edelman wal-mart]

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Rebecca Bollwitt writes entertainingly about the sub-slicing of greeting card categories. Here’s a place where the complexity of the taxonomy has direct and positive economic benefits, i.e., if you create a “Loss of Cat” category (one of Hallmarks’), you’ll sell cards to friends of people who have lost cats. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy rebecca_bollwitt hallmark]

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Ed Felten has a paper (pdf) on the Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality (revised in July ‘06) that is a highly readable explanation of the technical issues. It is not foaming-at-the-mouth partisan. [Tags: net_neutrality ed_felten ]

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Larry Lessig’s excellent op-ed in The Financial Times has stirred up some discussion on his site, here, here and here.

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Hemai Parthasarathy who’s the managing editor of PLoS Biology, is leading a discussion at the Berkman Center. She was an editor at Nature for five years. PLoS was started to put scientific papers into the public domain. It started with genomics three years ago. It’s a peer-reviewed open access journal. They hired editors from established journals.It wants to be “inclusive of top-tier papers”: Instead of trying to determing the top .001% of papers, it aims at publishing maybe the top 1%.

PLoS has an “intrinsic tension” she says because most of the people who started the journal don’t believe in elite publishing. “We think it’s wrong for tenure committees to pass the buck” to the editors of the top-tier journals. That’s why they’ve started PLoS One. It launches in November. “The idea is to take the editorializing out of the peer review process.” It asks whether a paper is sound enough to be published, but not how important the paper is. “Publish everything worth publishing” that’s submitted, and then put a layer of open peer review conversation about it. “When I was at Nature, I’d reject ten papers a week in neuroscience alone because they weren’t important enough.” Then the papers would be passed on to the next five journals, and you’d lose all the information generated in the reviewing of that paper. “It’s incredibly inefficient.” “Peer review is overwhelming scientists. Scientists are getting asked to review twenty papers a week.”

PLoS’ “impact factor” is high — the average number of times papers in that journal are cited. But the measure is flawed, Hemai says. E.g., reviews and notes don’t get counted as articles but do draw citations, so the citations / articles number goes up; that’s why more journals are running more reviews, etc.

PLoS, she says, is “the thinking man’s open access journal.” It takes about 1% because it wants to keep quality high. Also, it raises the impact factor which helps them recruit high quality papers.

PLoS will have some type of quantifiable ranking system based on the open peer review system. “We’ll also do some topdown filtering. Some editorial board members will pick some articles from PLoS One to write about in PLoS Biology.” They haven’t decided whether to allow pseudonyms. Hemai seems to favor requiring real names, but she says the other side is that a post doc may be relucant to criticize a Nobel Laureate.

PLoS One will have a giant editorial board. Currently they have 180+ editors. Editors’ will append their name to the articles they approve.

Charlie Nesson points out this is a fascinating example of Internet governnance. “How can we help?” he asks. Hemai responds: “Make some of the subscription pool available to open access publications. And top down say that if you publish your papers in a way that other people can access them, that will be rewarded.” MIT, she says, has been working with Science Commons to make a copyright agreement and negotiate with the journals to allow articles to be open access. E.g., Harvard could require its scientists to deposit their articles in an open acccess archive, and could negotiate with the non-open journals to permit that.

PLoS raises money through advertising and through publication charges. Generally it’s the funding agencies — research institutions, universities — who pay these charges for the scientists. At PNAS (a journal), they can charge thousands of dollars to publish a color diagram. She says that Elsevier’s distributor, Sell Press (Cell? sp?), charges $5,000 to authors to make their articles available for free. “If you sponsor research, you want to sponsor its dissemination as well.”

There’s discussion about what Harvard can do and how publishing in open access journals can be rewarded. I say that it comes down to generating a reputation system that becomes a reliable guide so that someone going up for tenure can say not only that she was published at PLoS but that it got a something score of whatever (or some other metric).

There’s discussion of what university libraries can do. E.g., they can negotiate copyright permissions so that professors don’t get prevented — as they are now — from using their own materials in a class.

PLoS One is thinking about allowing revisions of papers to be published afterwards and associated with it. “The least publishable unit has been getting smaller and smaller as time goes by.”

PLoS will be built on open source software. “Long term, anyone can start their own journal.” (And maybe someday the journals are assembled on demand based on metadata because…wait for it…everything is miscellaneous.) [Tags: berkman plos science publishing everything_is_miscellaneous open_science]

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I’m thinking about writing about the current state of peace studies in universities, especially in the US. How have the current climate and events affected the curriculum? How about enrollments? (This is a backhanded way to approach the topic “What is peace today?” in a form that I’m hoping a magazine will find appealing.)

Do you have any leads or thoughts?

(FWIW, I used to teach a course called “Peace and Conflict,” back in the early ’80s. I tried to remove the usual coercive elements, including grading and the teacher-student barrier. Yes, I was that sort of teacher. In fact, I wrote a bad book in dialogue form about nuclear deterrence, called Nuclear Dialogues. The book was actually me working out my issues about the topic. How very fascinating.)