Open Password – Wednesday, April 28, 2021
#915
EU – Digital corporations – Taking Back Control – Green European Journal – Kim van Sparrentak – Digital Services Act – Digital Markets Act – Donald Trump – Platforms – Transparency – Personalized advertising – Amazon – Interoperability – Alphabet – New markets – Healthcare – Education – Tech lobbies – GDPR – ePrivacy – Corona – Naomi Klein – Pandemic Shock Doctrine – Covid-tracker Apps – Google – Apple – Netherlands – Google Schools – Public Good – Rafael Ball – Johannes Gutenberg – Open Science – ETH Library – ETH Zurich – Open Access -Movement – Self-disempowerment of librarians – Science communication – Paradigm shift – Plato – Aristotle – Renaissance – Scientific journals – Disciplines – Explosion of media – Explosion of knowledge – Humanities – Natural sciences – Science Citation Index – Digitalization – Internet – Journal crisis – Open access journals – Publishers and libraries as partners – Digital texts – Looking Good – Being Good – DER SPIEGEL – Attention and perception – Social media – Sharing economy – Music industry – Publicity of research results – Reuse and sharing – Sci-Hub – Library Genesis – Shadow server – Legal framework – Absorption of customer data – Author Pays – Linear storytelling – Machine-readable formats – Transformation of the publishing system – Solutions – Platforms – Self-Publishing – Webinars – ClickMeeting – Pandemic – Foxit Europe – Paperless business processes – PDF editing – Frank Kettenstock – E-signature solutions – Document security
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Cover story: Rafael Ball – From Gutenberg to Open Science:
Changing science communication – While scientists and librarians are proclaiming the end of publishers, the publishing industry is developing a new dependency
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Outside the box: EU against the digital tech companies:
Modest steps in the right direction – Taking back control into the hands of democratic institutions and society
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Growth of webinars in the pandemicCorona as a trend accelerator towards paperless offices and digital solutions
Outside the box (43)
EU against the digital tech companies:
Modest steps in the right direction
Taking back control into the hands
of democratic institutions and society
Taking Back Control from Big Tech: The EU’s Digital Package – An interview by the Green European Journal with ME) Kim van Sparrentak (MEP = Member of European Parliament) by the Green European Journal (2021). The European Commission presented the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in December 2020. The aim is to better regulate technology companies, expand accountability, improve user safety, clarify what is illegal and prevent unfair behavior on the part of online platforms. These proposals are “at the core of the Commission’s ambition “to make this Europe’s Digital Decade”. The Greens, including Kim van Spaarentak, assess DSA and DMA positively, but see them as only first steps.
The banning of Trump and other right-wing radicals is viewed critically by the platforms… The platforms have become too big and have too much power. I find it very problematic that the platforms decide what is allowed and not allowed online, especially since they have become an important forum for debate. We must return these rights into the hands of democratic institutions and, in the case of illegal content, into the hands of judges. In connection with this, we should ensure that the tech monopolies become smaller and create incentives for advertising competitors to enter the Internet markets, so that the Internet as a whole becomes more plural.
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A total ban on personalized advertisements in the EU.
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… and the Commission’s legislative initiatives positive? DSA is a good first step with its proposals to create more transparency about algorithms and advertising flows and to oblige platforms to release requested information. Furthermore, we propose “a total ban on personalized advertisements in the EU … (to) make sure this is not their main source of income or their business model anymore”. What is commendable about the competition policy pursued by the DMA is that it reduces Amazon’s ability to enter into non-binding contracts with third-party providers and creates more interoperability in the Internet markets. A WhatsApp user, for example, should be free to continue using Signal or Facebook Messenger. Alphabet should not be allowed to easily use the data it obtains from Google Search for Google Ad or YouTube. “Gatekeepers should also not be able to use their enormous data power and nealy unlimited financial resources to conquer new markets, most notably our public services, such as healthcare or education.”
The tech lobbies in Brussels are…? “… very active and influential. They have the resources to put armies of people at work with lobbying the European Parliament, Commission, and Council. And they have carefully planned strategies. The Big Tech lobby has also weakened the EU’s privacy regulations, such as the GDPR and ePrivacy. … We really need more transparency about lobbying in the EU.”
But GDPR got passed. “We can actually set an example again. … We see that, in other areas of the world, they are trying to have stricter rules on platforms. Because we have such a big market share, when we introduce legislation, we know it has a big effect on the rest of the world. Secondly, the way that we are looking at this legislation is much more from a consumer point of view. “This is important to make the internet free, democratic, and user-friendly again.”
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The tech companies as the big winners of the pandemic.
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In the context of the pandemic, we’ve seen huge gowth in telehealth, remote learning, work telephone conferences, and so on. Now more than ever we socialize, exercise, shop, learn, and complete administrative tasks online. This has led to schools, hospitals, doctors’ offices, local authorities, and police all outsourcing many of their core functions to private tech companies, giving them a massive boost. Naomi Klein has referred to this as “pandemic shock doctrine”. I think it has just shown even more how much we rely on these big companies and how the basically control our digital infrastructure. When you lock on the Covid-tracker apps that have been rolled out, many countries tried to create their own app, but in the end, they all had to go with the app made by Google and Apple together, because they just own most of the knowledge how to create such apps. This meant that if you wanted to download or install the Covid app, you needed to be an Apple or Google user as it was distributed through their app stores … In the Netherlands, it’s more than 60% of all primary schools that are official “Google schools”. People are proud of this, rather than worried by it.”
Should we make online platforms a public good? The internet started as a very activist, revolutionary place where people from social movements found each other. This space has been taken over by big corporations who only want to make profit. With the upcoming regulations, we’re trying to take the control of these companies back into the hands of democratic institutions and into society. I think it’s going to be a very long time before the internet works as a commons again. But this is a very important first step from hyper-capitalist, data-surveillance internet to getting back to a more democratic and public space that we could all benefit from.
Rafael Ball
From Gutenberg to Open Science:
Changing science communication
While scientists and librarians
proclaim the end of publishing, the publishing industry is developing a new dependency
Rafael Ball, Science Communication in Transition – From Gutenberg to Open Science, Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2021.
Rafael Ball in the ETH reading room
The director of the ETH Library at ETH Zurich, who is also heavily involved in publishing, discusses science communication as an “immanent part of science and research”, which is “at the same time part of the scientist’s necessary tools such as methods, technologies and libraries”, and presents its Developments and revolutionary upheavals in the past, present and future. With 128 pages, the book is a compact reference work on long-term developments and the status of current discussions, for example on the open access movement and on “publishers and libraries in scientific communication”. To put it bluntly, the old acquaintances, systematically placed in a suitable context, we meet them all again. The book is aimed “equally at interested scientists, practitioners in libraries and publishing houses” and is “also suitable as an introduction and compendium for students and interested laypeople.” The contents of the book, a future-oriented conclusion and a quote are presented below Balls on the self-disempowerment of librarians:
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Emergence and rise of science communication and the explosion of knowledge.
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1 The emergence of institutionalized scientific communication: The development of language and the invention of writing – From oral to written communication: The first paradigm shift in scientific communication (from Socrates and Plato to Aristotle) – The invention of printing and its importance for the dissemination of knowledge in the Renaissance – Correspondence as a medium of scientific communication – The first scientific journals
2 The rise of the sciences, the differentiation of disciplines and the spread of magazines and books in the 19th century: The differentiation of the sciences and the diversity of disciplines – The explosion of scientific means of communication
3 Science as a mass phenomenon: The explosion of knowledge and its media in the 20th century: Science at the beginning of the 20th century (countries, languages, topics) – The differences in science communication between the humanities and natural sciences (which also lead to different strategies at Open access and licensing negotiations) – The quantification of knowledge: The Science Citation Index as a model for science assessment
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Problems of science communication in the present and future.
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5 Science communication in the present: The digitization of science communication – The Internet and the consequences for science communication – The magazine crisis and its significance for science communication – A short history of open access – The first open access journals – Publishers and libraries as partners in of science communication.
6 The future of science communication: From the cognitive process to publication and Digital Science – The end of the digital text.
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The scientists in the attention economy. Will Looking Good become more important than Being Good?
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In his outlook, Ball draws the following conclusion: “The challenges of science communication in the future are diverse and full of opportunities. A central issue is the volume of publications. Eight million scientists worldwide produce 35,000 articles every day. Der Spiegel headlines an article on March 12, 2015 with the title: “The number of scientists and the number of their publications is increasing immeasurably. Who else is supposed to read all of this?” This means that science communication at least makes it into popular reporting. The topic of “attention and perception” is becoming an increasingly important concern in the evaluation of science and its output. Scientists are preparing for this and acting strategically. They will and must prefer forms and formats that guarantee them the appropriate attention. These are no longer just (and increasingly fewer) the classic magazine articles, books and conference presentations, but increasingly articles in the various social media channels and other new formats…
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The blurring of all boundaries between legitimacy, legality and criminality.
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The ideas of the sharing economy and re-use initially led to disruptions in the music industry, as the idea of undivided reuse and subsequent use was incompatible with the idea of intellectual property and economic rights of use. Science faces similar challenges. Not every scientist wants to see their research results reused, used for a relevant publication, to produce a product or to award a prize to a colleague. Here too, the right to ideas, publications and commercial use is in contradiction to the public’s (justified) claim to research results and the idea of sharing.
The boundaries between illegal and legal are beginning to blur in the information market. We are observing the dissolution of the boundaries between legally obtained information and illegal access, between paid information and free information on the Internet. Increasingly, illegal ways are being used to obtain information that could not exist in the printed world. The careless and often thoughtless reuse and sharing of content is even less of a problem. Shadow servers and shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub* or Library Genesis, on the other hand, cause great economic damage through the mass piracy of scientific publications. This is justified with the intention of breaking publishing monopolies. In addition, the subtle equation “e” (electronic equals “free”) has a very special effect here. It will be necessary to quickly and functionally adapt the legal framework to the needs of digital science communication and all its stakeholders and to achieve a fair balance of interests, as the publishing industry’s jurisprudence and business models are still based on the framework conditions of the print era. The wishes of scientists and society for free access and dissemination of research results, the understandable demands of scientists to protect their intellectual rights and the legitimate economic interests of publishers and libraries pose fundamentally new challenges for stakeholders from science and publishing.
If the payment barrier falls and a large proportion of relevant (research) information is to be available free of charge, it must be clarified who pays for the conception, creation, production and distribution of relevant and high-quality information. New business models are emerging here in which the goods and services are no longer paid for through license and subscription models, but rather through the indirect delivery and extraction of (customer) data or (as with scientific publications) by the authors themselves (author pays ).
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The end of linear storytelling and texts in general.
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In the future, research data will no longer just be supplementary and additional information, but rather a constituent part of a publication. They are no longer a supplementary archive, but become an equal channel for the scientific outcome. Because reading is hard work and a scientist today cannot read more articles than he could fifty years ago, the use of machine-readable publications and data will be increasingly used. These publications will then no longer be primarily natural language texts. The narrative journal article will come to an end and will be supplemented and partially replaced by alternative, machine-readable formats.
It is not just the open access and open science initiatives of the public sector that are leading to a transformation of the publication system and a complete reassessment of scientific communication. The large companies in the publishing industry (publishers) are also preparing products and services that are intended to once again tie science and its output to their services. These companies were and are stakeholders in the publishing process and will not stand quietly by as scientists, research funders and librarians proclaim the end of publishers. For example, the establishment of (research) data servers and other comprehensive forms of publication by publishers (which have huge amounts of data) will later create dependencies again, especially if Looking Good becomes more important in science than Being Good and the evaluation of publication data supports this trend. The publishing industry offers “solutions” for this purpose, thereby subjecting the entire value chain to a single product. This means that the previous modular elements simply dissolve when publishing and converge into a single platform, which then remains fluid and permanently unfinished. It is a short-sighted view that the open science initiatives and the transformation of the publishing system will decommercialize the science and publishing process and break the dependencies on monopolies.”
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Librarians’ struggles with their own self-disempowerment.
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Quote about the partnership between libraries and publishers: “Publishers and libraries were (and to some extent still are) reliable and central partners in science communication. Without them there would not have been a centuries-long tradition of publishing, dissemination or archiving. Content that we still refer to today, sources that science still largely evaluates and uses to gain knowledge, would neither have been published nor made available and archived without publishers or libraries.
It is therefore downright fatal to turn away without reflection from the services of the publishing world and libraries as partners in the hope of being able to rely on functioning “self-publishing” at a time when the mass of scientists and their output are increasing dramatically and the fragmentation of disciplines while at the same time requiring interdisciplinarity will massively increase the complexity of publishing. Against this background, the massive participation of librarians in their own self-disempowerment through their involvement in the open access movement is a unique, almost absurd phenomenon in the history of the profession.”
*Sci-Hub is an illegal shadow library that currently maintains more than 70 million scientific journal articles in its database that were obtained without payment.
Webinars
Growth during the pandemic
(ClickMeeting) The pandemic continues to have a strong impact on online events. According to a study by the ClickMeeting platform ( https://clickmeeting.com ), webinars are primarily used for educational purposes. They accounted for 44% of online events in 2020. 36.5% of online events in 2020 were related to sales and marketing. This category is divided into product demos (22.5%), where webinars are a solution to present and sell products, and marketing events (14%), which are about sharing knowledge to generate leads generate and maintain. Around 19% of online events were business meetings. Overall, the number of events on the ClickMeeting platform increased by 266% in 2020 compared to the previous year. In March 2021, 7.3 million users used the platform, including 340,000 users in the DACH region.
In 2020, 1.5 million live webinars took place on the platform. In the first quarter of 2021 there were 150,000 such events worldwide and 15,150 in the DACH region. Free on-demand webinars still played a small role with 8,800 webinars in 2020. However, this option is relatively new. In addition, 106,500 free automated webinars took place in 2020. In the first quarter of this year there were 31,000 such events worldwide, including 6,300 in the DACH countries.
Collaboration features, working on projects together, and sharing information during meetings have become even more popular since the start of the pandemic. In 2020, organizers of online events particularly preferred the presentation tool (53%) and screen sharing (used in 18% of web conferences). Additional spots are occupied by whiteboard (7%), YouTube integration (6.5%) and surveys (5%).
Foxit Europe
Corona is accelerating the trend towards paperless offices and digital solutions
(Foxit Europe) According to a global survey of almost 2,400 managers and employees, companies have significantly increased the use of paperless business processes and digital solutions (e.g. PDF) since the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey was conducted by Foxit Software , a leading provider of innovative PDF products and services that help knowledge workers increase their productivity and do more with documents.
67 percent of respondents said that their company’s need for paperless business processes increased during the pandemic (need decreased: 1.2 percent) 59 percent said that PDF solutions have become even more important (no, less important: 0.5 Percent). 70 percent think that the pandemic has not had a negative impact on their work performance (no, it has decreased: 18 percent). 71 percent said they were working from home more often because of the pandemic.
“While paper use was already declining in many companies, the pandemic has significantly accelerated the overall decline,” said Frank Kettenstock, Chief Marketing Officer at Foxit Software. “PDF editing and related technologies such as e-signature solutions have become essential to working and conducting business.”
Further results: For around 68 percent of those surveyed, PDF solutions play a more important role in communication with customers. – 53 percent have had a greater need for e-signature solutions since the pandemic. (For less than one percent, the need has decreased.) – 42 percent have read PDF documents more often on mobile devices since the start of the pandemic. – 45 percent have a greater need for document security due to the pandemic. (Less than half a percent say the opposite.) – For 43 percent, the pandemic has made work more difficult.
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