The Book of Trogool

Battle of the Opens

Category: Jargon • Open Access

I'm committed to a lot of different kinds of "open." This means that I can and do engage in tremendous acts of hair-splitting and pilpul with regard to them. "Gratis" versus "libre" open access? Free-speech versus free-beer software code? I'm your librarian; let's sit down and have that discussion.

Unfortunately, out there in the wild I find a tremendous amount of misunderstanding about various flavors of open, sometimes coming from otherwise perfectly respectable communications outlets. (Pro tip: If you're not completely sure you understand, please find someone to ask. A librarian is a good start!)

Make no mistake, getting these things wrong sometimes does serious harm. The open-access movement exhausts itself contending with the same old misunderstandings over and over again, and I'm sure we're not alone in that.

So here—free, gratis, libre, and open—is a brief, simplistic guide to several flavors of open, organized around the following questions:

• What is the target of this movement? What is being made open? As compared to what?
• What legal regimes are implicated?
• How does openness happen? What are the major variants of open works of this type?

Onward. We'll start with:

Open source

What is being made open? Software, specifically its human-readable "source code." Software that is not open-source is distributed solely in non-human-readable "binary" form, and (as expression copyrighted to its personal or corporate maker and not otherwise licensed) cannot legally be reverse-engineered or changed without permission.

What legal regimes are implicated? Copyright, mostly, though patents sometimes rear their ugly heads. The legal tools are copyright licenses specific to source code, such as the GPL and BSD license.

How does openness happen? Programmers place the source code they have written on the web, associating an open-source license with it. Other programmers are then able to read, use, and change the code. As open-source projects grow, they may have hundreds or thousands of programmers working on the code.

One of the two major ideological variants in the open-source world is the "free software" movement, which holds that opening source code is insufficient without ensuring that those who build upon open source code also make their code open (except when they are using it only privately). This movement produced the GPL. The "open-source software" movement holds that open code can and should be employed in proprietary, closed-source projects, and so tends to prefer licenses like the BSD license, which does not require open release of derivative code.

Open standards

What is being made open? Specifications for how to accomplish particular tasks or build particular (tangible or virtual) objects. Open standards cover everything from computer cables to metadata to the building blocks of websites.

What legal regimes are implicated? Our old friends copyright and patent. Open standards generally want to be implementable without treading on royalty-requiring copyrighted or patented intellectual property.

How does openness happen? Generally a "standards body" does the design and outreach work. This may be an ad-hoc collection of engineers (IETF), a group of interested commercial and/or nonprofit entities surrounding a particular trade or technical phenomenon (IDPF or W3C), or a national or international organization whose specific remit is standards (ISO, despite quibbles about having to buy their specifications' text).

Open access

What is being made open? The academic literature: specifically, the peer-reviewed journal literature which is not written for royalties or any other direct monetary reward to its authors. While open-access advocates happily cheer for open access to books and other research media, the different money-flows in these areas mean they are not a focus of the movement. This is in opposition to literature which is not available to be read unless a subscription, per-article, or other fee is paid by the reader or the reader's proxy (e.g. a library).

What legal regimes are implicated? Copyright, again, with a notable diminution of the (United States) doctrine of first sale for articles in digital form. Typical practice for the academic article is that its author(s) transfer their copyright in its entirety to the journal publisher, allowing the publisher to control reuse. The doctrine of first sale allows certain uses of print journals in libraries (including lending out and interlibrary loan) that must be specifically negotiated for in e-journal licenses, sometimes unsuccessfully.

How does openness happen? In two basic ways. Yes, two! One is the soi-disant "gold road," in which authors publish in journals that make their contents available on the Web immediately upon publication without charging reader-side fees. The other is the "green road," in which authors reserve or are granted by the publisher sufficient rights in their article to make some version of it (usually not the final typeset, copy-edited publisher's version) available openly online.

Another division can be drawn between "gratis" open access, in which articles are available freely to be read but require explicit permission for most reuse, and "libre" open access, in which articles are clearly licensed up-front for reuse, often with a Creative Commons license.

Open educational resources

What is being made open? Many sorts of classroom materials, including syllabi, lecture audio/video, assignments, and instructional material such as self-contained web-based "learning objects."

What legal regimes are implicated? Copyright and work-for-hire, that last because some educational institutions claim rights in instructional materials created by instructors in the course of their regular job duties.

How does openness happen? Typically, through institution-based "courseware" programs or learning-object repositories.

The open-textbook movement is worth mentioning here. Though it is logically affiliated with the OER movement, in practice it bears more resemblance to the open-access movement.

Open data

What is being made open? Data resulting from the research process, in a form less "cooked" than the graphs, tables, and charts in journal articles. ("Data" is a vague word, granted.) Ideally, sufficient description of the data and how they were obtained is included for the data to be verifiable and reusable.

What legal regimes are implicated? In some countries, copyright. For data from industry, trade-secret law.

How does openness happen? Researchers, with or without help from librarians and IT professionals, make their data open. Some journals and science funders are beginning to demand open data; others demand data-sustainability plans that align well with the open-data movement.

Open notebook science

What is being made open? The process and progress of a particular research project, analogous to placing a lab notebook on the Web for public view.

What legal regimes are implicated? Copyright, insofar as making original expression available in tangible form (yes, the Internet counts as "tangible" for copyright purposes) immediately creates copyright in it. Patent, insofar as making a patentable invention available removes patentability (in the US), but also creates prior art such that subsequent patents can be challenged.

How does openness happen? At present, researchers employ whatever tools come to hand, from wikis to Google Docs to FriendFeed to github, to document their research process on the Web as the research is happening. Some institutions are trying out "electronic lab notebooks" which could facilitate open notebook science if they are not kept behind firewalls, or if researchers have the option to move their workspaces into the open.

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Any effort such as this will be nitpicked endlessly. That's what the comments are for, so go to it—but be warned, religious wars and diatribes will be ruthlessly deleted. Emacs and vi are both awful, I don't like Windows or Linux as a desktop environment, and progress in both the green and gold roads to OA makes me happy.

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Profile: Dryad

Category: Miscellanea

We have a guestblogger today! At my request, Peggy Schaeffer kindly sent me the following introduction to Dryad, which I reproduce as I received it (save for minor formatting details).

I will happily pass any questions in the comments on to Peggy for response.

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Dryad is a repository for data underlying scientific publications, with an initial focus on evolution, ecology, and related fields. It's not an institutional repository, or one focused on only a single type of data -- it's designed for the multitudes of data underlying published articles that would otherwise be scattered ineffectively, hard to find, or lost. Dryad enables researchers to archive their data at the time of publication, dedicate it to the public domain, and get a citable DOI for it. In so doing, Dryad promotes the discovery and reuse of data by others.

The Dryad repository model has these strengths:

• all data is associated with a published article (this collection policy provides a qualitative measure and enables links between journal articles and their data)
• data archiving is facilitated at the point of publication, when authors' motivation to share is strongest and the data are at hand
• Dryad is governed and supported by a growing Consortium of major international journals and societies (see list here)
• partner journals support a Joint Data Archiving Policy that requires data archiving at the point of publication
• all types of data and formats are welcome; journals may specify standards appropriate for particular data types.
• data submission is facilitated by Dryad's integration with the manuscript processing systems of its partner journals; authors publishing in these journals don't need to input bibliographic details
• data submitted to Dryad will be also served to select specialized repositories (like GenBank), further reducing the burden on authors to submit data to multiple sites
• all data is made freely available under the Creative Commons Zero waiver
• data receive DataCite DOIs and receive an independent citation when they are reused
• descriptive metadata will be automatically generated from the article and data content, allowing authors and curators to review & select proposed descriptors from multiple ontologies and thesauri. For more details, see the HIVE project page. Don't miss the nifty video.
• Dryad plans to expose its contents through a variety of web standards, to enable metadata harvesting, remote queries, and linked-data applications.

Dryad allows future investigators to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose the data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies such as formal meta-analyses.

The repository is being developed at the National Center for Evolutionary Synthesis, or NESCent, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information Science, and the Dryad Consortium of partner journals. A number of the partner journals have recently announced their intention to require data deposition in a publicly available archive as a condition of publication:

• Whitlock, M. C., M. A. McPeek, M. D. Rausher, L. Rieseberg, and A. J. Moore. 2010. Data Archiving. American Naturalist. 175:145-146, doi:10.1086/650340
• Rieseberg, L., T. Vines, and N. Kane. Editorial and retrospective 2010. Molecular Ecology. 19:1-22, doi:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2009.04450.x
• Rausher, M. D., M. A. McPeek, A. J. Moore, L. Rieseberg, and M. C. Whitlock. Data Archiving. Evolution. doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00940.x
• Allen J. Moore, Mark A. McPeek, Mark D. Rausher, Loren Rieseberg, Michael C. Whitlock. The need for archiving data in evolutionary biology. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 2010 Published Online: Feb 9 2010. doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.01937.x
• Uyenoyama, M. K. (2010). MBE editor's report. Mol Biol Evol, 27(3):742-743. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msp22

Dryad currently has a staff of about 7 (curator, repository architect, programmer, communications officer, etc.) led by

• Project Director: Todd Vision, Associate Professor of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Associate Director for Informatics at NESCent
• Jane Greenberg, Professor and Director, SILS Metadata Research Center School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Funding comes from the National Science Foundation, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has funded HIVE (Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering) a 3-year project that will enhance Dryad's metadata.

For more detailed information, including upcoming features, details of the metadata format, and other development plans, please see the Dryad website and the team Wiki. Also, you can follow Dryad's activities on the Dryad blog: http://blog.datadryad.org/ and Twitter: @datadryad.

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Sensitive data, linked data, and the "reidentification" phenomenon

Category: Praxis

One of the truisms in data curation is "well, of course we don't let sensitive data out into the wild woolly world." We hold sensitive data internally. If we must let it out, we anonymize it; sometimes we anonymize it just on general principles. We're not as dumb as the Google engineers, after all.

Only it turns out that data anonymization can be frighteningly easy to reverse-engineer. We've had some high-profile examples, such as the AOL search-data fiasco and the ongoing brouhaha over Netflix data. Paul Ohm's working paper on the topic is a great way to get up to speed.

We librarians are fairly dogmatic about this sort of thing, owing to our professional-ethics commitment to your freedom to read. We wipe your checkout record clean after you turn your items back in. We do keep passive-voice usage records on our materials: "this book has been checked out X times since Y date." But that's it. (And no, we don't keep track of when you visit the library, so it's not possible to connect a formerly checked-out book with you based on the date of checkout.)

This long-standing design decision is being challenged on social-media grounds; it's hard to build Web 2.0-ish applications around your library behavior if we don't keep records of your library behavior! I used to be on the Web 2.0 side of this particular controversy, but as I've been reading about reidentification, my mind has changed. Information about which local public library one goes to isn't precisely "zip code," but it's awfully, awfully close.

Anyway, the application to human-subjects data of all stripes is, I hope, obvious. It's not as simple as anonymizing data; even aggregating it and only permitting queries may not solve the problem. Certain data breakdowns (e.g. from survey data) may be problematic.

Taking heed of the problem is the first step to solving it—but only the first. The sooner we have data-release guidelines that take reidentification into account, the happier I will feel about open data in the social sciences and medicine.

Incidentally, are you as sanguine about governments providing "linked data" as you were? Because I'm not.

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RFC: Repository platform comparison

Category: Miscellanea

I interrupt your regularly-scheduled blog to ask for some help... comments closed on this post so that you'll comment where it'll do the most good.

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Apologies for duplication, and please forward/repost as appropriate...

We are working on comparing four digital-repository software packages (DSpace, ePrints, Fedora, and Zentity) in hopes of helping libraries and other institutions select the most appropriate software for their requirements. Read more about our project at
http://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/rep/.

We invite anyone who has recently embarked upon planning for a digital repository to tell us what criteria were used to select a software package. (We are not interested in hosted repository services at this time, only repositories managed in-house.) Your input will inform our testing criteria.

Please leave your comments at http://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/rep/2010/02/25/a-comparative-analysis-of-institutional-repository-software/. Pointers to public planning documents or lists of criteria are equally welcome. Though we will read all comments submitted, we plan to respond only by private email so as not to bias the public comment-stream.

We very much appreciate your assistance!

Siddharth Singh, Michael Witt, and Dorothea Salo

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Tidbits, 5 March 2010

Category: Tidbits

I'm in Urbana-Champaign this weekend to teach an in-person day for my online collection-development class. I'm looking forward to it; every time I teach I am reminded that students are smarter than I am.

For now, tidbits!

• As world plus dog probably knows already, The Economist tackled the data deluge.
• Adam Christensen gives us the modest, unassuming Data. The foundation for everything on an intelligent, interconnected, instrumented planet.
• Rethinking scholarly communication from the ground up: SciBling John Dupuis asks Are computing journals too slow? and Dan Cohen muses about how best to deconstruct the humanities' reverence for the print codex, while Craig Mod brilliantly deconstructs book design in an iPad world.
• So-called "digital natives" have digital histories; the Library of Congress asks whether and what they think about preserving them. (For more on personal digital preservation, I strongly recommend Microsoft Research's Cathy Marshall. Her two D-Lib articles are wonderful; also keep an eye on her recent presentation at the code4lib conference, which there should shortly be video of.)
• The city of Vancouver is taking digital archiving seriously. No "put floppy disks in the fridge" here (no, seriously, I've seen that hailed as innovative archival practice!). I like what I see of Archivematica.
• Stefano Costa hopes to make data in archaeology open. While there are serious and legitimate concerns about making location data on some finds and digs public—my father the anthropologist used to call himself a "grave-robber and junk-picker" in jest, but there are real robbers out there—in the main, archaeology data is a great target for open.
• Sarah Askew once again explains why the software turned loose on data should be kept and scrutinized, with astronomy as her case study. Good insight into why "one software suite fits all" doesn't work, which should give some web4science developers pause.
• Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Science interviews Stuart Shieber, in a treatment of open access refreshingly free of hyperbole on one side and panic on the other.

As always, if there's a link I should see, comment here or tag it "trogool" on del.icio.us. Thanks!

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Cognitive dissonance

Category: Open Access

One of the latest institutional open-access policies comes from Harvard Business School (hat tip to Stuart Shieber).

This is the same school that plays horrendous anti-library, anti-education games with their flagship Harvard Business Review.

My head hurts.

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Grey literature considered harmful?

Category: Open Access • Praxis

So the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is mired in a rapidly heating controversy over a report that apparently let some dubious information slip through the cracks. Here's the money quote:

The discovery of the glaciers mistake has focused attention on the IPCC's use of so-called grey literature: reports that do not appear in conventional scientific journals, and are instead drawn from sources such as campaign groups, companies and student theses. The IPCC's rules allow such grey literature, but many people have been surprised at the scale of its inclusion.

Oh my, oh dear. Let's take that apart a bit at a time, see what's likely going on, and suggest some remedies.

That's a fairish definition of grey literature, but what it leaves out is that the importance and acceptance of certain genres of grey literature varies considerably by discipline (although I think most accept dissertations as quality, citable work, assuming they're recent enough). For example, quite a few social-science disciplines have a flourishing working-papers culture; the expectation is that many (though probably not all) working papers will go through the peer-review wringer at some juncture, but it's important both for authors and readers to circulate the ideas fast.

I don't know of any literature on this specific point (which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that I haven't looked), but from my admittedly anecdotal experience, one factor that seems to create a grey-literature-friendly culture is a desire for influence beyond the academy: influence on practitioners, policymakers, non-profits, or the public generally. The IR I run has several grey-literature collections predicated on precisely this, and I don't think it's any coincidence that a strong vein of public-policy discourse runs through the research blogosphere generally and ScienceBlogs specifically.

Why is grey literature a better choice than the peer-reviewed journal literature in this context? Simply because it's much more accessible. Practitioners, policymakers, and particularly nonprofits have limited if any access to toll-access peer-reviewed journals. If you want them to see it and use it, placing it in a toll-access journal is tantamount to shredding it.

Now go back and read the paragraph from the Guardian again. "Surprised at the scale of [grey literature's] inclusion." Well, I'm not. I think a mixture of two factors is an odds-on bet in this clash of the literatures: a grey-literature-friendly discipline working with a grey-literature-unfriendly one, and the simple matter of access I just explained.

Climate science strikes me as grey-literature-unfriendly for cogent reasons. One is that the peer-review process (one hopes!) does yeoman's work eliminating bad science and bad data in a field where plenty of people grinding axes are happy to pollute the discourse with bad science and bad data. Another is that climate scientists need to limit their discourse population somewhat, or they'll be overwhelmed with axe-grinding bizarrerie from outside the field. I would guess it doesn't trouble them much that their literature isn't open-access, and it may even please them, by way of getting on with their work without having to stop every five seconds to deal with some ignorant lout who Googled their latest paper.

But social scientists, they love their grey-lit—and thus the clash of cultures. Neither the social scientists nor the climate scientists realized that they didn't have the same standards for reliable, citable previous work. The social scientists applied their normal quality standards and search techniques, not realizing that the climate scientists had different ones, not even thinking to ask. What the social scientists found on the open Web about climate science had a high probability of being junk, given that peer-reviewed climate science is almost entirely toll-access. (I found only 22 journals in DOAJ, two of which are Bentham Open and thus liable to be junk; on the green-OA side, I certainly haven't heard that climate scientists are heavy self-archivers.) I expect similar clashes play out in quite a few interdisciplinary collaborations.

So what do we take away from this?

• Scientists, if you want people outside your discipline to read your work in preference to whatever they can find on the open Web, make it open access; that may not be sufficient, of course, but it's absolutely necessary. However, all of us need to take into account that the knee-jerk call for everything to be OA removes a shield from a significant set of researchers, those poor hot-spotlighted souls whose professional lives OA would make a living hell.
• If you're troubled by bad science and bad data on the open Web, the answer is to make better science and better data open access. There will always be bad science and bad data, and it will seek the path of least resistance to earn the most eyeballs possible. Locking up the broccoli only increases candy consumption.
• Interdisciplinary collaborations had better start by establishing common ground for citable literature. Disciplinary cultures differ, and for legitimate reasons; practices do not necessarily transfer.
• Post-publication review and commentary don't just offer an alternative to peer review. They may help keep junk science from taking over the wider discourse, to the benefit of all.

I would never recommend that libraries discontinue collecting grey literature, especially in digital form. For one thing, some grey literature gets much more scrutiny than the average peer-reviewed article: consider how often and by how many people dissertations are reviewed, and how many rewrites they get! For another, I see no reason collection practices should be governed by the most restrictive disciplinary cultures out there.

I do acknowledge grey literature for what it is, however, and I hope this culture-clash sparks discussion about how best to manage differing citation practices when collaborating.

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Tidbits, 26 February 2010

Category: Tidbits

It's Friday! Snack on some tidbits.

• In the "didn't anyone teach you to show your work in grade school?" department, we have NIWA unable to justify official temperature record, as well as the radical notion of using actual data to gauge the effectiveness of review boards in stopping unethical research.
• In the "open is not a panacea" department, we have Nat Torkington rethinking open data, or at least its funding models (hat tip to Trevor Muñoz), and JISC's Clarion project trying to convince principal investigators that sharing data is a useful thing to do.
• In the "let's kill all the lawyers" department, we have troubling privacy questions about the sharing of personal genome data, and on a happier note, the wonderful Panton Principles for making data properly open and reusable once the decision to share them has been made.
• In the first-principles department, the redoubtable Carole Palmer tells us that data need to be curated. AAAS wonders who's going to do the work, and JISC comes up with a good-practice guide for those willing to dive in.
• In the tools-and-toys department, we have Stuart Lewis building a SWORD library in PHP aimed at making quick, easy, even one-off repository-deposit tools. I am all in favor!

As always, tag a delicious link with "trogool" or leave a comment here if you have something tidbit-worthy. Thanks!

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OASPA: act now or lose credibility forever

Category: Open Access

So the backstory of the truly horrific murders at the University of Alabama at Huntsville has taken an open-access turn: the perpetrator (not being a journalist, I don't think I need to say "alleged") got a rather dubious-looking article published in an open-access journal.

Further investigation into the journal only heightens concern; while we're not quite talking about Bentham or SJI here, we're definitely in that ballpark. I won't rehash details, because Richard Poynder has it covered with admirably succinct directness. I believe what he's recounted, and I agree with his analysis in its entirety.

Let's talk for a moment about the credibility of open-access journal publishing in general, and OASPA in particular.

As Peter Suber is fond of pointing out, open-access and toll-access journals are more similar than they are different. Both need to cover costs some way or other. Both apply peer review or don't, in roughly equal proportions. A subset of both charges author fees (yet somehow the "vanity publishing" brush only seems to tar OA, go figure). Both struggle to establish themselves when new. Both rely on free authoring, reviewing, editorial, and sometimes production labor. Et cetera.

It should seem natural, then, that both open-access and toll-access journals contain bad seeds, suffer scandal. For every Bentham, there's an Australasian Journal; for every SJI, there's an El Naschie. (Well, actually, I would guess there are quite a few more Australasians than Benthams lurking out there, because the toll-access slice of the journal pie is still so much larger, but you take my point.)

It seems to me there's one important asymmetry in a journal scandal or failure, however: its transparency. A toll-access journal belonging to a large publisher can disappear practically without a trace, especially if most hints of its existence are limited to membership in yet another gigantic Big Deal bundle. Its editors quietly sidle away; its web page quietly vanishes into pixeldust. Nobody is particularly tarnished by the failure (not that anyone necessarily should be, of course).

It's not quite that simple for an open-access journal. Most of the ones I know of that have folded never had a coherent shutdown plan. The website can't (or at least shouldn't) just vanish unless the actual content has been handed off, so it just sits there on the open web and moulders, its failure obvious to anyone who borrows a bit of Google's or the Internet Archive's all-seeing eyes.

In my more cynical moments, I wonder whether the DOAJ's journal-archiving plan was developed partly in response to this problem, in hopes of being able to shut down dead OA journals halfway gracefully. If it was, good on 'em.

Toll-access journals also have an easier time concealing scandal, not least because they are not subject to the gaze of Google's pitiless eye. Sure, once in a while they get found out and some corporate type has a few sleepless nights, but how much dross slips through the system because the system is too big and too closed to monitor after the fact? You could ask China, I suppose.

(If your knee-jerk answer to the previous paragraph is "peer review!" please take your dunce cap and go sit in the corner. Peer review is a leaky heuristic at best. It fails, often, and that's when it's done in good faith to begin with! We should in fact expect it to fail—and, given the stakes, to be gamed. Necessary? Maybe. Sufficient? Not by a long shot.)

It's not so simple for open-access journals, for reasons I hope are obvious from what I just said about toll-access ones. It doesn't help that (please pardon my bluntness) a fair few OA journals, particularly of the shoestring-budget variety, haven't really thought through such ugly scenarios as plagiarism, fraud, innocent but nonetheless major errors, and suchlike phenomena requiring article retractions. (Neither have institutional repositories. They should. I have, though I'm still stuck on how best to find out that something in the IR I run needs retraction.)

Moreover, because open-access journals are new and academia is conservative, OA-journal scandals are more likely to run into scrutiny and opprobrium. Unlike the neverending stream of FUD coming from the for-profit toll-access journal industry and its quislings, this isn't a bad thing; in fact, it's a good one! We want bad actors to be discovered and removed from the system! It's only bad insofar as it unfairly colors academia's perception of open-access journals generally—which it unfortunately does. (I dimly sense a pattern emerging in public academic discourse of PLoS/BMC/Hindawi as "okay OA" versus "all that other vanity-publishing dreck." It's not a fair or an accurate characterization, but I keep finding traces of it.)

Now we come to OASPA. When OASPA formed, I speculated about whether it would take on basic journal quality-control duties. I hoped it would, because the more OA-journal scandals can be prevented and punished, the better for OA journals' credibility. Indeed, I wondered whether transparency-led freedom from scandal could turn out to be good for open access:

I think an OASPA certification program represents a tremendous opportunity for the OA community. Gold OA is still small. It’s much easier to put meaningful quality regulation in place over a small, emerging, prestige-hungry industry. If gold OA manages to do that, then it suddenly has another competitive advantage over toll-access, which hasn’t done so and (given its extent and decentralization) very likely can’t.

Later, OASPA said outright that making decisions about quality was indeed within its scope: "OASPA aims to become the stamp of quality for open access publishing." I rejoiced.

I am not rejoicing now.

Here's the thing, OASPA: being a stamp of quality means stamping out bad practices where and when you find them. Yes, even when doing so is awkward and uncomfortable. In the case of Dove Medical Press and the International Journal of General Medicine, you have conspicuously failed to do that. Your comment to Richard Poynder regarding Dr. Bishop conspicuously misses the point: nobody is asking you to opine about Dr. Bishop or her record; they're asking you to investigate the practices of Dove Medical Press because of what looks on its face like an extremely dubious (and now, conspicuously dubious) publishing decision.

You should have jumped on that, tragic circumstances be damned. Because you didn't, your "stamp of quality" has been tarnished. It's even worse that Dove is an OASPA member; I certainly hope you're not cutting sweetheart deals for membership fees, but I'm afraid that's how it looks from my worm's-eye viewpoint. And because you've mounted your flag in the stamp-of-quality territory, your first-mover advantage means you will be hard to supplant if you go rogue—not to mention that if you do turn out to be corrupt, OA suffers a major and possibly unhealable black eye, because you're all the stamp-of-quality heuristic there is.

This gaffe can be recovered from, OASPA, but I urge you to act fast. Apologize. Own the mistake. Start an investigation of Dove now, explaining clearly and publicly what you're looking for and what you'll do should you find that Dove has erred. It's probably not too damaging that you don't yet have a standard procedure for such investigations, given how young you are, but another thing you need to say clearly and publicly—and with a due date—is that such procedures are under active development. A screening procedure for OASPA applicants is a good idea as well.

Referring screenings and investigations to a well-chosen quorum of disinterested but appropriately critical third parties—dare I suggest "academic librarians?"—might work out well for you. Please consider it.

From the bottom of my heart, OASPA, I beg you: do not compound this error. We OA advocates need a responsible steward and monitor much too badly for you to go and squander all the initial goodwill you garnered.

This seems an opportune time to remind people of Book of Trogool's comment policy. I will enforce it if I need to. I'd rather not need to, please.

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