Implementing Open Access Policy: First case studies

When implementing open access, policy pioneers and flagship institutions alike have faced considerable challenges in meeting their own aims and achieving a recognized success. Legitimate authority, sufficient resources and the right timing are crucial, but the professionals charged with implementing policy still need several years to accomplish significant progress. This study defines a methodological standard for evaluating the first generation of open access policies. Evaluating implementation establishes evidence, enables reflection, and may foster the emergence of a second generation of open access policies. While the study is based on a small number of cases, these case studies cover most of the pioneer institutions, present the most significant issues and offer an international overview. Each case is reconstructed individually on the basis of public documents and background information, and supported by interviews with professionals responsible for open access implementation. This article presents the highlights from each case study. The results are utilized to indicate how a second generation of policies might define open access as a key component of digital research infrastructures that provide inputs and outputs for research, teaching and learning in real time.</p

Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier

As universities recognize the inherent value in the data they collect and hold, they encounter unforeseen challenges in stewarding those data in ways that balance accountability, transparency, and protection of privacy, academic freedom, and intellectual property. Two parallel developments in academic data collection are converging: (1) open access requirements, whereby researchers must provide access to their data as a condition of obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals; and (2) the vast accumulation of 'grey data' about individuals in their daily activities of research, teaching, learning, services, and administration. The boundaries between research and grey data are blurring, making it more difficult to assess the risks and responsibilities associated with any data collection. Many sets of data, both research and grey, fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities are exploiting these data for research, learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities are besieging universities with requests for access to data or for partnerships to mine them. The privacy frontier facing research universities spans open access practices, uses and misuses of data, public records requests, cyber risk, and curating data for privacy protection. This paper explores the competing values inherent in data stewardship and makes recommendations for practice, drawing on the pioneering work of the University of California in privacy and information security, data governance, and cyber risk.Comment: Final published version, Sept 30, 201

Testimony of Dr. George H. Baker, Senior Advisor to the Congressional EMP Commission

This is the script of testimony before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It offers a vision for a future in which our electric power systems will be able to operate through or quickly recover from catastrophic failure due to electromagnetic pulse (EMP), cyber, and physical attacks. The scope of the term ‘EMP’ used in this testimony includes both naturally occurring solar storms and the more energetic man-made EMP hazards. The vision has been discussed with members of the electric power industry, and prominent EMP/cyber/physical protection advocates who find it to be supportable and actionable. The nature of EMP, cyber, and physical threats to the United States’ electric power grid are severe, to be sure. Bounding consequences could include risk measurement units of millions of casualties (EMP Commission), trillions of dollars (Lloyds of London), and, dents in the history of civilization (Center for Policy on Emerging Technology). The good news is that well-known engineering solutions are available to counter these threats

Towards a cyberinfrastructure for enhanced scientific

Scientific and technological collaboration is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. A February 2003 report to the U.S. NSF Directorate of Computer and Information System Engineering urged that funding be provided for a major enhancement of computer and network technologies, thereby creating a cyberinfrastructure whose facilities would support and transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research. The argument of this paper is that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve such an outcome; success in realizing the cyberinfrastructure’s potential, if it is achieved, will more likely to be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legal and technical transformations. The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration that is to say, its supposedly “softer” parts -- are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges facing “e- Science” will be seen to lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures created by the existing legal and administrative regimes. Although a number of these same conditions and circumstances appear to be equally significant obstacles to commercial provision of Grid services in interorganizational contexts, the domain of publicly supported scientific collaboration is held to be the more hospitable environment in which to experiment with a variety of new approaches to solving these problems. The paper concludes by proposing several “solution modalities,” including some that also could be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcends organizational boundaries.

Towards a cyberinfrastructure for enhanced scientific

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises to enable more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. A recent (February 2003) report to the U.S. NSF Directorate of Computer and Information System Engineering urged that funding be provided for a major enhancement of computer and network technologies, thereby creating a cyberinfrastructure whose facilities would support and transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research. The articulation of this programmatic vision reflects a widely shared expectation that solving the technical engineering problems associated with the advanced hardware and software systems of the cyberinfrastructure will yield revolutionary payoffs by empowering individual researchers and increasing the scale, scope and flexibility of collective research enterprises. The argument of this paper, however, is that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve such an outcome; success in realizing the cyberinfrastructure’s potential, if it is achieved, will more likely to be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legal and technical transformations. The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration – that is to say, its supposedly “softer” parts -- are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges facing “e-Science” will be seen to lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures created by the existing legal and administrative regimes. Although a number of these same conditions and circumstances appear to be equally significant obstacles to commercial provision of Grid services in interorganizational contexts, the domain of publicly supported scientific collaboration is held to be the more hospitable environment in which to experiment with a variety of new approaches to solving these problems. The paper concludes by proposing several “solution modalities,” including some that also could be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcends organizational boundaries.

Preliminary Analysis of Cyberterrorism Threats to Internet of Things (IoT) Applications

The era of Internet of Things (IoT) being a combination of various networking and computing technologies already in a state of growth that introduces a new age of data aggregation mechanism and ubiquitous connectivity among physical objects. However, the most of the cyber threats still remain unsolved and may create huge impact on our lives. One of the possible major changes in impact landscape is the imminent physical results of cyber threats as IoT technologies enable closer interactions between humans and information systems. Although the cyber threats to critical infrastructures have been highly considered by the cyber security community, the cases with catastrophic physical impacts are rare which means the impact posture has not exactly shifted from information centric impacts to physical ones. However, widespread usage of IoT technologies have the potential to accelerate this shift which may bring the threat of cyber terrorism into the picture. This paper provides a preliminary comparison of a typical IoT application in health area with an industrial control system (ICS) in order to show that IoT applications are required to be deeply assessed as terrorists may attack them with easy-to implement cyberattacks for the purpose of creating physical harm

The political imaginaries of blockchain projects: discerning the expressions of an emerging ecosystem

There is a wealth of information, hype around, and research into blockchain’s ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformative’ potential concerning every industry. However, there is an absence of scholarly attention given to identifying and analyzing the political premises and consequences of blockchain projects. Through digital ethnography and participatory action research, this article shows how blockchain experiments personify ‘prefigurative politics’ by design: they embody the politics and power structures which they want to enable in society. By showing how these prefigurative embodiments are informed and determined by the underlying political imaginaries, the article proposes a basic typology of blockchain projects. Furthermore, it outlines a frame to question, cluster, and analyze the expressions of political imaginaries intrinsic to the design and operationalization of blockchain projects on three analytic levels: users, intermediaries, and institutions.</p