I have a couple of notes to add.
Publishing datasets:
Anonymization can take time and should take careful thought. Rushing publication of a dataset is probably not a good idea in that respect. Also, I feel that it is unreasonable to expect researchers to publish their dataset before their work has been accepted for publication. In scientific publishing, being first is everything. It is possible to spend substantial amounts of time (years even) working on a project only to receive no credit for being "scooped". I'm very wary of proposing draconian restrictions such as these without involving the larger researcher community.
Survey particularly often contain private data that must be anonymized before release. If we are considering such anonymized data the "RAW results" of a survey, I would fully agree that that should be the version to be published--as opposed to some limited subset with questions removed for other reasons than to preserve anonymity.
For datasets, I find that licenses like cc-by-sa to be too restrictive in that it requires that derivative works be equally as open. I'd much rather allow the person who uses a dataset decide for themselves how to license their own work. It's important to make the dataset widely available, but I think that specifying future licensing unnecessarily restrictive. For example, IANAL, but I imagine that if someone wanted to publish a book with a plot of a cc-by-sa dataset (derivative work), they'd have to license the book cc-by-sa.
Publishing the manuscript:
As far as the manuscript goes, I still feel confident that requiring researchers to give up rights for modification/derivative works could never work. However, I'm open to the idea of requiring researchers to giving up rights for distribution to a trusted party (e.g. the WMF, arXiv.org, etc.) to ensure that the manuscript remains freely available to the community. This is possible with the current licensing structure employed by ACM (who I am most familiar with) if the manuscript to be distributed was created prior to submission to ACM (i.e. pre-editing/pre-review/pre-print). See arXiv.org as an example of a mass collection of preprint science.
-Aaron
On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter
<putevod@mccme.ru> wrote:
> I Open licensing. Anyone who wants to broadcast research surveys to our
> editing community needs to agree that the anonymised results of those
> surveys will be available under cc-by-sa, and not just a statistical
digest
> but the actual dataset so that variables can be cross tabbed. But I can
> live with the researcher(s) also having a copy of the data under a
> different
> copyright if they are narrowcasting to a small group of editors rather
than
> broadcasting to a large group.
>
Now it seems to me that the disagreement between you and Aaron during the
last RCom meeting was a misunderstanding. I would agree (and, hopefully,
Aaron would agree too) that the RAW results of the survey should be
cc-by-sa licenced. On the other hand, the results of the research itself
(by this I mean the analysis and conclusions the researchers make from the
raw results, and/or eventually manuscripts) should be open access, but I
would not require the cc-by-sa for the manuscript.
> II Timeliness. The cc-by-sa anonymised dataset needs to be published
pretty
> much as soon as it could be, and not kept back until after the
researcher
> has published their analysis of it.
May be some fixed period would be reasonable? Let us say one month after
the end of the survey? This is enough to analyze the data without fearing
the competition from other researchers.
>
> III Transparency. The nightmare scenario to me would be if a top
thousand
> website or aspirant:
>
> 1. Sponsors some Academics to do research in an area where they are
> having difficulty or want to improve their own online community.
> 2. Sponsors Wikimedia (most of our money comes from individuals, but
> sometimes a company gives us a few thousand dollars)
> 3. Their sponsored researcher has private discussions with some or
all
> of
> us, and gets dispensation not to release part or all of the data they
> collect in a way that would enable their sponsor's competitors to get
> the
> same benefit of it.
> 4. Either they attribute part of their subsequent turnaround to
> "insights
> achieved via research sponsored on Wikimedia", or someone
independently
> links the three previous points and accuses the WMF of selling
research
> access to its editorship, and selling it cheaply.
>
> So far the only argument I've seen for confidentiality is that
researchers
> don't want the data subjects to have a preview of the questions as that
> could skew the results. I'd accept that as reasonable, if a bit tenuous
-
> the chance of there being a significant overlap between this list and
any
> conceivable research sample is low. But it could be resolved by holding
the
> discussion on an Email thread that doesn't get posted until after the
> surveys are posted.
>
I think pooling to share the questions (as we discussed at the meeting)
would be possible without actually disclose the questions to the public -
we just need to find a proper way to do it, like may be OTRS. I think
asking about sponsorship is pretty much possible and reasonable.
Cheers
Yaroslav
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