Marcus' World

Scholarly Work as a Public Good

Last week the faculty of UC San Francisco (my former employer) unanimously approved an open access policy, effective immediately.  Several years ago, UCSF faculty voted down a similar proposal.  Since then library staff, and UCSF faculty member Rich Schneider, have promoted the goals of open access publishing carefully and patiently.  The reward was last week's vote.

I think this is a great development.  Researchers at one of the nation's largest recipients of NIH funding have formally endorsed the value of maximal access to their work.  And UCSF is one of the few US public institutions to develop an open access policy, which till now has been the province of private institutions like Harvard.  That's especially important, because the public mission of the UC's remains intact (hopefully) even during these grim state budget times.

The proof will be in the pudding, as the policy is implemented.  Will UCSF researchers really utilize an addendum to the copyright transfer agreement that supersedes the terms set by publishers?  They've gone on record supporting this step, but who will enforce it and how?  This remains to be seen, once the excitement of passing the policy fades.

In my head I hear my good friend Scott talking about how open access is just the start and not the end, that we should set our sights higher towards building truly integrated digital libraries that exceed the narrow bounds of papers.  This is the point Scott made on Capitol Hill recently.  Kent Anderson regularly strikes a similar note on the Scholarly Kitchen.

Point well taken.  The paper is an antiquated delivery device, which takes no real advantage of the capabilities of the Web.  But it is still very much the lifeblood of academia; it's how research is reported and promotions are decided.  As long as this old-fashioned device has that much power then the best we can do is find ways to increase access to the scholarly literature. 

Increasing such access does not mean shutting down publishers because the information yearns to be free.  That rhetoric has faded, except among the staunchest open access partisans. As I learned in 2008, when I tried to move publication of Biomedical Digital Libraries from BioMed Central to other platforms, publishers add a great deal of value.  In my case BioMed Central offered immediate citation in PubMed and archiving in PubMed Central, none of which I could replicate on my own.

And yet...business models that rely on restricted access to publicly funded research are not just. We have to find a middle way.  I'm starting to starting to like the idea of treating scholarly work as a public good, subject to regulation that ensures very broad access but which still allows publishers to run a business. (Let's hope that business evolves to support publishing models that use the native capabilities of the Web.) This is like electricity or other utilities; access is regulated but private enterprise still exists.  The same thing could and should happen with scholarly publishing, at least for any research that is publicly funded. 

The New York Public Library Controversy

Thanks to Zite, this week I found myself reading Jon Reiner's account of the state of main branch libraries in many US cities.

Reiner begins by reporting on the controversy surrounding the New York Public Library's plan for re-purposing its iconic building at 42nd and 5th.  Fewer stacks, more computers and possibly even a coffee bar.  Just like everywhere else.  But to a greater extent than most everywhere else, the NYPL's main branch has a storied place in the history of libraries. Denunciations have been plentiful.

After setting this context, Reiner reports on his own tours of America's major public libraries.  A book tour brought him to many major cities, and in every one he stopped at the downtown branch. Without fail he noticed people congregating near the coffee bar and power outlets, and not a single soul in the stacks.

Reiner decides that libraries have sold their souls, and that if they'd only found a way to make print books cool instead of building a computer lounge things would be different.  Reiner: "Maybe the new libraries had gotten it all wrong. Maybe people would still touch the books if they didn’t look so pitiful compared to the shiny new objects decorating the atrium. A case of the tail wagging the dog that the NYPL would be wise to recognize. What did the social engineers of modern libraries expect would happen when they provided lounge chairs?"

I decided to be a librarian by wandering the stacks of the Northwestern University library.  Per Reiner I touched the books.  And through the wonders of "serendipity" facilitated by good cataloging and shelf placement, I learned about books I would never have known about otherwise.

But....ahem.  Those stacks were not exactly crawling with young student scholars.  I was usually alone, or at most one of the few people on the floor.  This was in 1996, when the Web existed but neither Google nor Wikipedia were household names.  I had a similar experience in 1986, when as a 9 year old I wandered the stacks of the Ohio State University library.  Back then there was no Web at all to compete with the books.  But suffice it to say I didn't face much competition for stack access. 

To blame Google and Wikipedia for a decline of interest in the printed word assumes that things used to be different.  Not true.  The 80/2o rule applies to libraries too; 20% of the collection gets 80% of check-outs. 

True scholars can dig deeper today just as they always could, and in fact the Web enables this pursuit in ways never before possible.  Wonderful collections have been digitized, but those who care the most will still travel to touch the real thing.  And those who can't afford to travel to far-flung libraries can at least see the digital versions online.  To take one of hundreds of examples, the UCSF Library recently digitized Hahneman's Organon, a Bible for homeopaths. Those who insist on the primacy of physical objects would deny any access to Hahneman's treasure to all but the select few.

So Reiner misses the mark.  He hearkens back to an imagined era of stack crawling that never actually occurred, while overlooking the unique benefits of the Web for expanded access to information.

Was it all just a big mistake, this academic library thing?  If most books were destined to gather dust unread anyway, what was the point? The point was to provide access to a wide range of content just in case someone might need it, in a framework not dicated by the cruel pressures of the market.  Hear hear, now and forever.

The NYPL still wants to do this, actually; their plan merely calls for relocating books off-site, not getting rid of them.  But apparently it makes more sense to keep them on-site and un-read, because this is what we are used to and this is all a library can ever be.  That's the crux of the outcry--to keep things the same no matter what.  It reminds me of the wonderful cartoon that recently appeared in the New Yorker, with which I close.

 

Daniel Kahneman Take 2

Last week I offered my perspective on Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.  This week I can't resist offering another, now that I've finished the book.

Kahneman distills a life's worth of brilliant research (often with Amos Tversky) into three points:

• That our minds are alternately fast (System 1) and slow (System 2).  System 2 sometimes works as a check-and-balance to the automatic System 1, but that's hard work and System 2 is usually lazy.
• Classical economic theory posits a rational actor who responds logically to incentives.  Human behavior is far less logical than advertised.  People will refuse to place a bet if the terms are phrased one way, but will take the same exact bet if the framing is different.  Nothing to brag about here.
• Our memories are related to our actual experiences, but not really informed by them.  For any episode, we remember the end and the most intense moment.  We forget the rest. Our memories seem real but are just a mirage.

Last week I was struck by how random much of life is, a theme Kahneman stresses in the first part of the book.  Our System 1 reaches rapid conclusions that inform narratives about the events in our lives.  But really, life is just one damned thing after another.

Kahneman's deep probing of how our minds work is impressive.  He recounts experiment after experiment over more than 40 years, and also describes his own intellectual maturity.  Amazing work.  But there is so much that even this genius was unable to tackle.  How do we live a good life? How should we treat each other?  Kahneman has exposed the foibles of our minds, but it's up to the theologians and philosophers to guide us in how to live. 

Even the brighest theologians and philosophers can only move this needle a tiny bit.  What we do not know and will never understand will always outpace the knowledge we acquire.  This should be enough to keep us all humble.

As a writer who strives for coherent narratives I don't know what to make of the fundamental randomness of things. Narratives give us meaning and momentum even if they are illusory.  Maybe that's ok. Or maybe I'm unable to accept the cold truth Kahneman offers.  If that's being irrational I'll live with it.

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow

Recently Pi Wen ordered Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow. After it sat around for a week I picked it up, and now can't put it down. I'm halfway through, so this assessment is provisional.

Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, for work he completed with his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky.  As David Brooks pointed out when Thinking came out, Kahneman and Tversky caused a revolution in understanding of how we think.

The main premise of Thinking is that we each have two mental "systems."  System 1 is automatic, fast, associative, and prone to error.  System 2 is slow, deliberate, and cautious. System 1 is easy, system 2 is hard. Ideally system 2 would check system 1's excesses, but-alas-system 2 is "lazy."  In many cases it simply endorses the biases and preconceptions of system 1.

To really check ourselves we must be very deliberate. Find people we disagree with.  Make sure we're not giving in to the availability of easy-to-accept-but-hard-to-justify arguments. This is exhausting but rewarding work, whenever we manage to pull it off.  This isn't often.  But all humans are in the same boat.

Kahneman also points out, with many examples, the limits of expertise.  For example, stock picking is no better than random coin flipping, even by seasoned advisors.  Simple statististical formulas better predict a student's success in college than in-depth interviews with a guidance counselor.  Innovative management stratategies may have some impact in improving a company's position in the market, but much less than commonly believed.  The world is mostly random and ummangeable, even though we all develop our own explanatory narratives to seek order.

This is all very disconcerting.  Of course there's been a backlash.  One of Kahneman's friendliest antagonists is Gary Klein, who studies naturalistic decision making.  Where Kahneman is skeptical about the mind's limits, Klein is optimistic about the mind's strength.  Kahneman downplays the power of intuition, Klein sees its potential.  They recently set out to see where they agreed and where they disagreed, resulting in a harmonious collaboration even if they could not bridge the gap entirely.

As ever, much more work remains to be done.  Kahneman: "The line that separates the possibly predictable future from the unpredictable distant future remains to be drawn."  David Brooks predicts that Kahneman and Tversky will still be lionized centuries from now.  Maybe.  But Kahneman himself would surely state that that time-scale is part of the "unpredictable distant future."  In general all we can deal with is what's right before our eyes, even while knowing that this is not all there is.