[T]his study replicated [...] a study [...] that had first been conducted at The University of Alabama in 1996 by Carl Boening.

What follows is that the structure of the document and extensive lengths of text appears to have directly borrowed, as well. The data is original.

Does that meet the standards of originality and substance that we associate with a doctorate? Many online commenters don’t think so; obviously, the granting university and review committee (which included 2 of the same members as the earlier study) thought so.

But is it a contribution to the scientific discourse? I think so. In another context — one without the traditional expectations of a dissertation — would this behavior be inappropriate? I don’t think so.

I won’t make the argument for students, who are still trying to “prove” that they have learned and mastered the research methodology — but for professional researchers, I don’t see any reason why standards should hew to the traditional structures of a publication, foreclosing the possibility of publications which utilize more extensive copying and linking.

It appears that citation patterns already are changing due to online access to publications. Debate remains about exactly how the patterns are changing, but it’s clear that change is happening.

Not all change is good, but not all change is bad, either.

The bogeyman of plagiarism is meant to guard against appropriating another’s work as one’s own without giving them due credit. It would be a shame if the taboo of plagiarism scared the research community away from the evolution and experimentation that can come with new technologies.

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years …

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years …

No person [...] shall be eligible to the Office of President [...] who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years …

—Articles Ones and Two of the United States Constitution

The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age. …

—Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution

I’ve thought before about the conflict between these two sections of the same document. About how a 23-year-old who is afforded the right to vote, to work (and the responsibility to pay taxes), to enter into contracts, to fight and die for his country, is barred from serving in Congress. About how a citizen who believes a 28-year-old is the best candidate for Senate is prevented from voting for her.

I was reminded today when browsing the Swedish Pirate Party’s list of candidates for European Parliament. The second candidate on their list is younger than I am. A few candidates were born in the 1990s.

Any time the law sets an age-based restriction for an activity, the number will be controversial: Why not a year earlier or a year later? Thus we have controversies in the U.S. about the voting age, the drinking age, and the age of consent. But I’ve never seen any public dialogue about the minimum age to serve in federal elected office.

So let me say it: To set an age of eligibility for public office other than the voting age is hypocritical, discriminatory, and anti-democratic.

FYI:

• The current youngest member of the House of Representatives is Aaron Schock of Illinois, elected last year at age 28 — the first member of Congress born in the 1980s.
• The current youngest member of the Senate is Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, appointed this year at age 42.
• The current youngest member of the European Parliament appears to be Dimitar Stoyanov of Bulgaria, elected in 2007 at age 24.
• A handful of past Representatives and Senators entered office before the eligible age: Jed Johnson, Jr. of Oklahoma (House, 24); William Charles Cole Claiborne of Tennessee (House, 22); John Eaton of Tennessee (Senate, 28); Armistead Thomson Mason of Virginia (Senate, 29); and Henry Clay of Kentucky (Senate, 29). Rush D. Holt, Sr. of West Virginia was elected at age 29 but waited until his 30th birthday to take the oath of office.

[I]ntellectual property policy is being managed as a legal issue, whereas although this area like any other must operate through the legal system, intellectual property policy is most fundamentally an aspect of economic policy. … [T]he consideration of policy with regard to both [copyrights and patents] is dominated by IP practitioners and by the beneficiaries of the IP system. We need the expertise of lawyers in this as in many other areas of policy but it is imperative that IP policy make the transition that competition policy made over a decade ago now, from a specialist policy area dominated by lawyers, to an important front of micro-economic reform. (emphasis added)

I can’t help but nitpick: While I would welcome a shift from viewing copyright, etc. as primarily legal matters to significant matters of economic policy, it would be a failure to (continue to) not consider them as significant matters of cultural policy, as well.

(Thanks to Eve Gray for calling my attention to the quote.)

By dint of what I do, I spend a lot of time working on the Web. Here are some of my pet peeves:

No links

People, it’s the Web. The very feature that makes it a Web rather than just electronic text is the existence of the hyperlink. Use it. Do not tell me where to find it. Do not tell me to google it. Google is not a replacement for the hyperlink. Just link me.

Here’s a blog post from an academic publisher that doesn’t use any links. The post is promoting a recently-published book with a remix contest. There are no links to the contest, to the book page, to online bookstores — nothing.

The contest is hosted on Facebook (a walled garden — another pet peeve). Here’s what the post says — I wish I was making this up:

We’re hosting the competition on their Facebook fan page. All you need to do is search for the event (Remix the Remixer) on Facebook …

Despite being a walled garden, it is possible to link to the event (although you’ll need to log in to access it). Did you seriously just tell me to search for it? And presumably this was written by the company’s PR department…?

Naked URLs

Related to the above are authors who give you the URL of the page they’re talking about, but just the URL — sometimes even without a link. Let me demonstrate:

Good:

Check out this cool search engine, Google!

Bad:

Check out this cool search engine, Google! http://www.google.com/

Worse:

Check out this cool search engine, Google! http://www.google.com/

No markup

Yeah, just paste a bunch of text into a Web page. Paragraph breaks, emphasis, citations — who needs that?

Ridiculous markup

I don’t even mean terrible design choices like grey text on a white background. I just mean straight up ridiculous markup. I assume this usually results from composing in a word processor and pasting into a Web page. For instance, every paragraph will be marked as class="MsoNormal“ (a class which, of course, is never defined anywhere).

The UK PubMed Central Blog takes this a step further and marks up every word which is “misspelled”:

There’s no use for that; it’s just cruft.

And two faux pas

All of the above are errors for which I think there’s no real excuse. I’ll throw in two bonus pet peeves — I understand why people do them, but they still rub me the wrong way:

Content is not in the page

As in, “Check out this cool new document I wrote — here’s a PDF download.”

Anything that’s not (X)HTML isn’t as easy to use, copy, re-format, link to, etc. Moreover, it requires people to leave their browser (or at least to load a plugin).

I know why people do it: because it’s easier than preparing an (X)HTML version of the document (after already having made a PDF, Word document, or whatever). But it’s still irksome.

Deprecated / unsemantic markup

So you want to tell me about the book Moby Dick. Cool, let’s talk about it. But did you use the cite element — or did you use em or i?

If you used i (or span style="font-style: italic"), you told the computer that the text should be italic, but you didn’t say why. For anyone who wants to render the text in a way other than the one you intended (say, in audio), your markup doesn’t give the computer any useful information about what to do with it.

If you used em, you actually told the computer to emphasize the phrase “Moby Dick” — the same way you might emphasize Wow! or Awesome! Your markup is actually misleading now.

But if you used cite, you told the computer, “This is a citation to the title of work — render it as appropriate.” The standard way to do that in English is with italics, so unless you or the reader tells the computer to do otherwise, it’s rendered in italics.

I know why people do it wrong: we compose Web pages the way we’re used to composing text, where italics is italics. (Plus it’s just more tags to learn and remember to use.) But on the Web, rather than just making something italic, we can encode why, which gives more options to both the author and the user of how to render it, and makes it possible for computers to extract meaning from it.

I’m sure I’m not perfect when it comes to these and other Web-authoring rules of etiquette. (Plus, in email, I prefer top-posting or inline replies — gasp!) But I’m not trying to cast stones, just to call attention to problems — and, really, just to vent.

A chained library is a library where the books are attached to their bookcase by a chain, which is sufficiently long to allow the books to be taken from their shelves and read, but not removed from the library itself. This practice was usual for reference libraries (that is, the vast majority of libraries) from the Middle Ages to approximately the 18th century, as books were extremely valuable during this period. …

What an incredible metaphor! Information (and its containers) was so scare that the architecture of libraries was literally designed around chains to secure it.

I found another interesting tidbit in the page on Carnegie libraries:

The design of the Carnegie libraries has been given credit for [...] creating an opportunity for people to discover books on their own. “The Carnegie libraries were important because they had open stacks which encouraged people to browse… People could choose for themselves what books they wanted to read,” according to Walter E. Langsam, an architectural historian and teacher at the University of Cincinnati. Before Carnegie, patrons had to ask a clerk to retrieve books from closed stacks.

In both cases, the increasing availability of books meant that the literal architecture of distribution could be changed to give the public greater freedom to use them: first the ability to take books home, later the ability to browse the stacks oneself.

I don’t have to tell anyone that computers and the Internet have catalyzed the creation of architectures that give users even greater abilities to find and use information. But that’s not the end of the trajectory toward greater access to information. Rather, some very significant advances, such as open access to scholarship, are taking place right now.

There is a tendency to look at the open access movement as only of interest to researchers and educators. Though patient advocates like Sharon Terry have been speaking out about the benefits of access to the public, skeptics continue to question the value of access to the research literature for the general public.

No doubt there were skeptics who questioned the value of letting patrons take books home from the library. Doubtless there were skeptics who questioned the value of letting patrons browse the stacks by themselves. They were wrong.

I see two lessons for libraries:

• Don’t take the trajectory for granted. Moreover, don’t assume that the current form of the library will or should remain that way in the future. Instead, look at the library as an organization whose mission is to preserve and provide access to information. Libraries, then, should always aim to speed progress along the trajectory toward greater access, and should advocate for greater access, even if it’s not directly or exclusively through the library.
• Greater access to information correlates to a decline in library control. In other words, less control makes the library more useful. In a world of information abundance (or overabundance) rather than scarcity, libraries have a crucial role in helping users find, evaluate, and make meaningful use of information resources, even if they can access them outside of the library.

Academic and research libraries, then, shouldn’t be alone in advocating for open access. There is a need for greater engagement from other types of libraries, and I think we’ll increasingly see this. (That’s not to say other libraries haven’t been supporters of open access, but it’s largely been academic and research libraries at the forefront.)

In addition to public libraries, it seems sensible for medical and law librarians to take an even more active role in supporting open access. Both law and medical libraries serve practitioners who aren’t researchers but nonetheless could benefit from greater access to the latest scholarship, to apply it in their practice. In addition, medical and law libraries also serve members of the public who need access to this specialized literature: the Medical Library Association has a Consumer and Patient Health Information Section and the American Association of Law Libraries has a Legal Information Services to the Public section.

I can easily imagine the day (if they don’t already) when libraries host information sessions for the general public on locating, evaluating, and using scholarly resources, many or all of which will be open access — the same way they do now for patrons interested in genealogy or business. (Such sessions won’t substitute for a college education, but may complement or refresh it.)

In retrospect, we may find opening access to scholarship to be as empowering to the public as taking the chains off of books.

Well, I get free access online to research funded by the National Institutes of Health, within a year of being accepted for publication. But what about the research funded by all the other agencies of the federal government: energy, environment, history, economics? Unfortunately, still no guarantees there. Hopefully we’ll be further along by Tax Day next year…

So I’ll try with a public commitment — and encourage readers to hold me to this — to post at least once a week.

I append a ? to “more” in the title because, browsing over the archives for 2009 so far, it appears I’m averaging about a post per week already, excluding liveblogs and brief announcements. So I suppose I’m really just committing to maintain at least the volume and frequency so far.

I’ve got some pretty interesting stuff churning in the draft queue, so be on the lookout. At least, I think it’s interesting — hopefully you will too!

The Law Library of Congress began harvesting legal blawgs in 2007. The collection has grown to more than one hundred items covering a broad cross section of legal topics.

Questions:

• What are the criteria for inclusion here? (It’s apparently curated, not an opt-in service like I suggested previously. Note that the two strategies are not incompatible.)
• The archived pages are openly accessible (just like pages in the Internet Archive). This is contrary to concerns which some had raised about copyright in either the blog or third-party content (like blog designs). Is there a special exemption for LOC? Or are they relying on the same argument as the Internet Archive (or Google’s cache, for that matter)? (P.S. Is the Internet Archive’s argument fair use or a specific statutory exemption? What about Google?)
• Did LOC ask the authors of these blogs for permission before archiving them, or do they consider it part of their general duty to collect and preserve? (For that matter, do the authors of these blogs even know they’re being archived by LOC?) Does it matter, either as a matter of etiquette or of law?
• The archiving frequency for all the blogs seems to be monthly. Should it be more often, less often, dependent on the blog (some are updated more frequently than others) …?
• Are other branches of LOC harvesting blogs in those subject areas, too? Are other national libraries doing this?
• What’s the history of the program? What’s the case they make for doing this? What’s it cost?