It is easy to cherry-pick some examples of where this might work and not be problematic. This is useful as an analytic exercise to demonstrate the potential. However it is important to consider and assess negative as well as positive possible consequences.
With respect to violation of author's moral rights, under Berne 6bis http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/text.jsp?file_id=283698 authors have the right to object to certain modifications of their work, that may impact the authors reputation, even after transfer of all economic rights. Reputation is critical to an academic career. Has anyone conducted research to find out whether academic authors consider Wikipedia annotations to be an acceptable modification of their work? As an academic author, after using CC licenses permitting modifications for many years, after careful consideration, I have stopped doing this. Your work for me reinforces the wisdom of this decision. I do not wish my work to be annotated or automatically summarized by your project. I suspect that other academic authors will share this perspective. This may include authors who have chosen liberal licenses without realizing that they have inadvertently granted permission for such experiments. CC licenses with the attribution element include author moral rights and remedies for violation of such rights. My advice is to limit this experiment to willing participants. For the avoidance of doubt: I object to your group annotating or automatically summarizing my work. Thank you for the offer to contribute to your project. These posts to GOAL are my contribution. best, Heather Morrison ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Jason Priem <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 1:35:51 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Why translating all scholarly knowledge for non-specialists using AI is complicated Thanks Heather for your continued comments! Good stuff in there. Some responses below: HM: Q1: to clarify, we are talking about peer-reviewed journal articles, right? You are planning to annotate journal articles that are written and vetted by experts using definitions that are developed by anyone who chooses to participate in Wikipedia / Wikidata, i.e. annotating works that are carefully vetted by experts using the contributions of non-experts? Correct. An example may be useful here: The article "More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas" was published in 2017 by PLOS ONE [1], and appeared in hundreds of news stories and thousands of tweets [2]. It's open access which is great. But if you try to read the article, you run into sentences like this: "Here, we used a standardized protocol to measure total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany (96 unique location-year combinations) to infer on the status and trend of local entomofauna." Even as a somewhat well-educated person, I sure don't know what a Malaise trap is, or what entomofauna is. The more I trip over words and concepts like this, the less I want to read the article. I feel like it's just...not for me. But Wiktionary can tell me entomofauna means "insect fauna," [3] and Wikipedia can show me a picture of a Malaise trap (it looks like a tent, turns out) [4]. We're going to bring those kinds of descriptions and definitions right next to the text, so it will feel a bit more like this article IS for me. This isn't going to make the article magically easy to understand, but we think it will help open a door that makes engaging with the literature a bit more inviting. Our early tests with this are very promising. That said, we're certainly going to be iterating on it a lot, and we're not actually attached to any particular implementation details. The goal is to help laypeople access the literature, and do it responsibly. If this turns out to be impossible with this approach, then we'll move on to another one. For us, the key to the Explanation Engine idea is to be modular and flexible, using multiple layered techniques, in order to reduce risk and increase speed. [1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 [2] https://www.altmetric.com/details/27610705 [3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/entomofauna [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_trap Q2: who made the decision that this is safe, and how was this decision made? Hm, perhaps I should've been more careful in my original statement. Apologies. There's certainly no formal Decision here...I'm just suggesting that we think the risk of spreading misinformation is relatively low with this approach. That's why we'll start there. But the proof will need to be in the pudding, of course. We'll need to implement this, test it, and so on. Maybe I'm wrong and this is actually a horrible, dangerous idea. If so, we'll find out, and take it from there. Thanks for letting us know you are concerned it's not safe. We' take that seriously and so we'll make sure we are evaluating this feature carefully. If you're interested in helping with that, we'd love to have your input as well...drop me a line off-list and we can talk about how to work together on it. If the author has not given permission, this is a violation of the author's moral rights under copyright. This includes all CC licensed works except CC-0. I'm not sure I see how this would be true? We are not modifying the text or failing to give credit to the original author, but rather creating a commentary on it...quite like one might do if discussing the paper in a journal club. I am not opposed to your project, just the assumption that a two-year project is sufficient to create a real-world system to translate all scholarly knowledge for the lay reader. Makes sense. You may be right...could be a quixotic errand. We will do our best, and hopefully whatever we come up with will be a step in the right direction, at least. I think something like this could make the world a better place, and maybe if we aren't able to achieve it we can at least help give some ideas to the people who ultimately do. A cautious and iterative approach is wise; however this is not feasible in the context of a two-year grant. May I suggest a small pilot project? Try this with a few articles in an area where at least one member of your team has a doctorate. Take the time to evaluate the summaries. If they look okay to your team, plan a larger evaluation project involving other experts and the lay readers you are aiming to engage (because what an expert thinks a summary says may not be the same as how a non-expert would interpret the same summary). I think this sounds great! Your plan is very much what we have in mind to do. And then we will continue from there on the "cautious iterative approach" to rolling out features. I think the only area where we differ is in the timeline...sounds like you don't project that we can get everything we need to done in a two-year time frame. You may be right. Time will tell. Historically, Impactstory has been able to get stuff done pretty fast, but once again, the proof will be in the pudding 😃. We're certainly excited and motivated and will be doing our best! Thank you for posting openly about the approach and for the opportunity to comment. Thank you for your thoughtful comments! j best, Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 _ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Jason Priem, co-founder Impactstory<http://impactstory.org/>: We make tools to power the Open Science revolution follow at @jasonpriem<http://twitter.com/jasonpriem> and @impactstory<http://twitter.com/impactstory> _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
