Will the Open Access Movement be successful?

No doubt that from the point of view of scholars around the world, Open Access (OA) seems to be the obvious solution to the evident problems of scholarly publishing in the present age of commodi?cation. Access to the academic literature would be universally available and hence not restricted to those lucky enough to belong to wealthy institutions that are able to afford all the subscriptions necessary. Furthermore, many believe that only if we have a fully digital, openly accessible archive of the relevant literature, enhanced with overlay functions such as commenting, reviewing and intelligent quality ?ltering, we will be able to overcome restrictions of the present, paper-based scholarly communication system. Many initiatives have been launched (e. g. the Berlin Declaration1), some funding agencies have already reacted by adopting Open Access policies (notably the British Wellcome Trust2, but also the German DFG3 or the Austrian FWF4), new journal models are being tested to prove that Open Access is a viable economic model (e. g. BioMedCentral5), Open Access self-archiving servers ?ourish around the world (not least in philosophy) and even high politics has reacted (most recently the European Commission6). A few years ago, this author boldly predicted that a third phase of (re-)de-commodi?ed scholarly publishing is around the corner after the old de-commodi?ed period and the present age of almost universal commodi?cation (Nentwich 2001). But still, after a decade or so of initiatives (a well-known timeline on Open Access goes back to the 1990s, the Budapest Initiative7 dates from 2002), of testing and promoting only a fraction of the available scienti?c literature is Open Access (a rough estimate is 15 %8). It is growing, no doubt, but we are a long way from universal Open Access. So, will the Open Access Movement be successful? Or, put differently, can it be successful? What are the chances that the incumbents—the big commercial (as well as the non-pro?t, associational) publishing industry will give way to a de-commodi?ed future? Is there a middle-ground where all the players and interests could meet? This paper will contribute to this open debate by analysing recent trends and weighting the arguments put forward (this contribution, however, is not an account of the overwhelming amount of papers published on this issue, but cites them very selectively

FINANCING CANADIAN UNIVERSITIES: MAJOR CHANGES SINCE 1802

Universities began operating in the present borders of Canada in 1802. As annual enrolments grew to 1,147,233 in 2012, so too did university expenditures. Government contributions to university revenues fluctuated from 62% in 1920 to 46% in 1935, reaching a high of 81% in the mid- to late 1970s, then falling to 48% in 2014. Annual university revenues increased about 275 times between 1920 and 2014 (in constant 2014 dollars), from $129.3 million to$35.5 billion. In the two centuries between 1813 and 2013, undergraduate fees (in constant 2013 dollars) increased by a factor of 24, from $236 to$5,720.

Managing the consistency of distributed documents

Many businesses produce documents as part of their daily activities: software engineers produce requirements specifications, design models, source code, build scripts and more; business analysts produce glossaries, use cases, organisation charts, and domain ontology models; service providers and retailers produce catalogues, customer data, purchase orders, invoices and web pages. What these examples have in common is that the content of documents is often semantically related: source code should be consistent with the design model, a domain ontology may refer to employees in an organisation chart, and invoices to customers should be consistent with stored customer data and purchase orders. As businesses grow and documents are added, it becomes difficult to manually track and check the increasingly complex relationships between documents. The problem is compounded by current trends towards distributed working, either over the Internet or over a global corporate network in large organisations. This adds complexity as related information is not only scattered over a number of documents, but the documents themselves are distributed across multiple physical locations. This thesis addresses the problem of managing the consistency of distributed and possibly heterogeneous documents. “Documents” is used here as an abstract term, and does not necessarily refer to a human readable textual representation. We use the word to stand for a file or data source holding structured information, like a database table, or some source of semi-structured information, like a file of comma-separated values or a document represented in a hypertext markup language like XML [Bray et al., 2000]. Document heterogeneity comes into play when data with similar semantics is represented in different ways: for example, a design model may store a class as a rectangle in a diagram whereas a source code file will embed it as a textual string; and an invoice may contain an invoice identifier that is composed of a customer name and date, both of which may be recorded and managed separately. Consistency management in this setting encompasses a number of steps. Firstly, checks must be executed in order to determine the consistency status of documents. Documents are inconsistent if their internal elements hold values that do not meet the properties expected in the application domain or if there are conflicts between the values of elements in multiple documents. The results of a consistency check have to be accumulated and reported back to the user. And finally, the user may choose to change the documents to bring them into a consistent state. The current generation of tools and techniques is not always sufficiently equipped to deal with this problem. Consistency checking is mostly tightly integrated or hardcoded into tools, leading to problems with extensibility with respect to new types of documents. Many tools do not support checks of distributed data, insisting instead on accumulating everything in a centralized repository. This may not always be possible, due to organisational or time constraints, and can represent excessive overhead if the only purpose of integration is to improve data consistency rather than deriving any additional benefit. This thesis investigates the theoretical background and practical support necessary to support consistency management of distributed documents. It makes a number of contributions to the state of the art, and the overall approach is validated in significant case studies that provide evidence of its practicality and usefulness

Cyberscience 2.0 oder 1.2? Das Web 2.0 und die Wissenschaft

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Bedeutung des Web 2.0 für die Wissenschaft: Einleitend werden die Begriffe Cyberscience sowie Web 2.0 beschrieben und zueinander in Beziehung gesetzt. Im Hauptteil werden typische Web 2.0-Dienste im Einsatz in der Wissenschaft untersucht: Soziale Netzwerk-Dienste, virtuelle Welten, Wikipedia, (Micro-)Blogging sowie Social Tagging. Darauf aufbauend wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie funktional die Web 2.0-Dienste für die Forschungspraxis wären und welche potenziellen Folgen von deren hypothetischem, universellen Einsatz bislang diskutiert werden. Der Beitrag kommt zu einer vorsichtigen, abwartenden Schlussfolgerung: Angesichts der Frühphase der Nutzung (viele Dienste sind weniger als drei Jahre im Einsatz und wurden von den WissenschafterInnen kaum entdeckt) ist eine Potenzialabschätzung noch kaum möglich. Freilich gibt es einige gewichtige Argumente, die sachlich gegen eine rapide Verbreitung sprechen (Zeitmangel, fehlende Anreizsystem, mangelnde Nutzenerwartungen usw.). Während erste Schritte auf dem Weg der Weiterentwicklung der Cyberscience bereits gesetzt worden sind, erscheinen die möglichen Folgen für die Wissenschaft jedoch nicht wesentlich über das hinauszugehen, was bereits vor dem "Hype" des Web 2.0 absehbar war. Im Softwarejargon gesprochen, ist somit durch das Web 2.0 anstelle einer neuen "Release Cyberscience 2.0" eher ein "Update auf Cyberscience 1.2" zu erwarten.Cyberscience, Web 2.0, social media, Twitter, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, social bookmarking, social tagging

Issues in Canadian Geoscience - Women in the Geosciences in Canada and the United States: A Comparative Study

The literature on women in the geo-sciences is mainly limited to the experiences of women in Canada and the United States. Compared to women in other scientific careers, women in the geosciences have historically been disadvantaged relative to men because of restrictions on working in the field combined with the lesser value accorded to laboratory and office work. Recently, however, times have changed; linear extrapolation of data from the USA suggests that women earned 50% of undergraduate geoscience degrees in 2008. In Canada the situation has been similar, with 45% of bachelor’s and other undergraduate degrees in geological and earth sciences/geo-sciences disciplines in 2005–2006 having been awarded to women. However, current trends suggest that US women will not attain 50% of geo-science doctorates until about the year 2021 and will not make up half of geoscience faculty until 2084. Increasing the proportion of women faculty is appropriate, given that gender parity has been achieved at the undergraduate student level. The obvious geoscience departments to begin recruiting more women would be those with the lowest percentage of female faculty. Faculty gender representation should better reflect the fact that 34% of geoscience doctorates were awarded to women in North America in 2002, and probably approached 40% in 2010. Overall in Canada in 2006, 18.8% of all geologists, geochemists and geophysicists were women and in the USA for the same year, 16% of geoscientists were women, so the percentages are low for both countries. SOMMAIRE La documentation sur la présence des femmes en géosciences est principalement limitée à la main-d’œuvre canadienne et étasunienne. Par rapport aux femmes dans d’autres domaines scientifiques, les femmes en géosciences ont été historiquement défavorisées dû aux restrictions du travail de terrain combiné à la sous-évaluation du travail de bureau et de laboratoire. Mais la situation a changé récemment; l’extrapolation linéaire de données étasuniennes montre que les femmes ont obtenu 50 % des diplômes de premier cycle en géosciences en 2008. Au Canada la situation a évolué pareillement, où 45 % des diplômes de baccalauréat et de premier cycle en sciences géologiques ou sciences de la Terre ou géosciences ont été décernés à des femmes en 2005-2006. Cependant, les tendances étasuniennes actuelles montrent qu’il faudrait attendre autour de 2021 avant que 50 % des doctorats en géosciences ne soient décernés à des femmes, et que ce ne serait qu’en 2084 qu’elles représenteraient 50 % du personnel enseignant universitaire. L’accroissement de la proportion de femme enseignant à l’université est justifié étant donné que la parité a été atteinte au niveau des étudiants du premier cycle. Évidemment, les premiers départements de géosciences visés devraient être ceux comptant le moins de femmes dans leur personnel enseignant. La représentation des genres chez les enseignants universitaires devrait mieux refléter le fait que 34 % des doctorats ont été décernés à des femmes en Amérique du Nord en 2002, et approchera probablement 40 % en 2010. Globalement, au Canada en 2006, 18,8 % de tous les géologues, géochimistes et géophysiciens étaient des femmes et, aux É.-U. pour la même année, 16 % des géoscientifiques étaient des femmes; des proportions faibles pour les deux pays on en conviendra

Cyberscience: Die Zukunft der Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien

Dieses Papier beschäftigt sich mit den Auswirkungen der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien auf den Wissenschaftsbetrieb. Zwei Thesen stehen im Zentrum: (1) Erstens, daß die I&K-Technologien einige Rahmenbedingungen und praktisch alle Formen wissenschaftlicher Tätigkeit betreffen. Ein systematisches Screening macht deutlich, daß sowohl der organisatorischen Rahme des Wissenschaftsbetriebs wie auch die Wissensproduktion sowie die Formen der wissenschaftlichen Kommunikation und schließlich die Wissensvermittlung (Lehre) direkt betroffen sind. (2) Eine zweite, darauf aufbauende These lautet, daß die vielen Entwicklungen, mit denen sich die WissenschafterInnen konfrontiert sehen - angefangen von der ständigen Nutzung des Computers am Arbeitsplatz, über die Verlagerung der Kommunikation mit KollegInnen in Richtung E-mail, bis zu neuen elektronischen Publikationsformen - nicht nur, wie zumeist angenommen, die Kommunikation beschleunigen, sondern das Potential zu qualitativen Veränderungen des Wissenschaftssystems haben. Diese These wird mit Hinweisen auf bereits eingeleitete bzw. möglicherweise bevorstehende Veränderungen hinsichtlich eines Kernstücks der wissenschaftlichen Kommunikation, nämlich des Publikationswesens, weiters der Ortsgebundenheit von Forschung und schließlich hinsichtlich der Verteilung der Rollen im Wissenschaftsbetrieb belegt. -- This paper deals with the impact of information and communication technologies on the research system. Two hypotheses are central: (1) First, the I&C technologies affect several framework conditions and virtually all forms of scholarly activity. Systematic screening reveals that both the organisational setting and the production of knowledge as well as scholarly communication and finally the transfer of academic knowledge (teaching) are directly affected. (2) On this basis, the second hypothesis argues that the many developments faced by scholars - constant use of the computer at the work place, shift of the communication with colleagues to E-mail, new electronic publication formats - do not only accelerate communication, as frequently assumed, but also have the potential to lead to qualitative changes in the scholarly system. This is substantiated by hints to actual or expected changes in the publication system (i.e. the heart of the scholarly communication system), the removal of spatial limitations of research and finally with respect to the distribution of roles in academia.

Enlarging the European Union: the short-term success of incrementalism and de-politicisation

"Dieser Artikel analysiert die wesentlichsten Themen des EU-Erweiterungsprozesses. Zunächst diskutieren wir das empirische Paradox der Erweiterung, nämlich daß sich zwar einerseits die ursprünglichen Europäischen Gemeinschaften in eine Union mit wichtigen supranationalen Befugnissen und immer mehr politischer Durchsetzungskraft entwickelt hat, dies aber die Erweiterungskandidaten keineswegs abgeschreckt hat. Warum sind immer mehr Staaten bereit, ihre ansonsten gehegte nationale Souveränität durch einen Beitritt zur Union aufzugeben, während sie sich sogar dessen bewusst sind, daß auch weiterhin noch mehr Souveränität abzugeben sein wird? Anschließend widmen wir uns den wichtigsten Herausforderungen, denen sich die EU vor der anstehenden Erweiterungsrunde stellen muß, nämlich den finanziellen und institutionellen Fragen wie auch der Festlegung ihrer internen und externen Grenzen. Der abschließende Teil diskutiert die früheren und aktuellen (sowohl impliziten wie auch expliziten) Erweiterungsstrategien der EU. Wir weisen darauf hin, daß der inkrementelle und entpolitisierte Charakter der jüngsten Beitrittsdiskussion zwar kurzfristig erfolgreich scheint, aber langfristig gefährlich sein könnte." [Autorenreferat]"This paper analyses the most important issues of the EU enlargement process. We first discuss an empirical paradox involved in enlargement: the obvious development of the original European Communities into a Union with important supranational features and ever more policy clout has by no means discouraged aspirant member states. Why is it that more and more states are willing to give up much of their otherwise cherished national sovereignty by joining this Union, knowing that even more sovereignty will be eroded over time? Then we address the major challenges the EU has to face before actually widening any further, in particular concerning financial and institutional issues as well as internal and external boundaries. The concluding section discusses implicit and explicit EU enlargement strategies of past and present times. We argue that there is a danger that the incrementalist and de-politicised character of the recent enlargement (non-)discussions are successful only in the short term while actually being rather dangerous in the longer run." [author's abstract