Stefaan Verhulst

The citation graph is one of humankind’s most important intellectual achievements

Curated on April 15, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Dario Taraborelli at BoingBoing: “When researchers write, we don’t just describe new findings — we place them in context by citing the work of others. Citations trace the lineage of ideas, connecting disparate lines of scholarship into a cohesive body of knowledge, and forming the basis of how we know what we know.

Back in the 1950s, reference works like Shepard’s Citations provided lawyers with tools to reconstruct which relevant cases to cite in the context of a court trial. No such a tool existed at the time for identifying citations in scientific publications. Eugene Garfield — the pioneer of modern citation analysis and citation indexing — described the idea of extending this approach to science and engineering as his Eureka moment. Garfield’s first experimental Genetics Citation Index, compiled by the newly-formed Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1961, offered a glimpse into what a full citation index could mean for science at large. It was distributed, for free, to 1,000 libraries and scientists in the United States.

Fast forward to the end of the 20th century. the Web of Science citation index — maintained by Thomson Reuters, who acquired ISI in 1992 — has become the canonical source for scientists, librarians, and funders to search scholarly citations, and for the field of scientometrics, to study the structure and evolution of scientific knowledge. ISI could have turned into a publicly funded initiative, but it started instead as a for-profit effort. In 2016, Thomson Reuters sold its Intellectual Property & Science business to a private-equity fund for $3.55 billion. Its citation index is now owned by Clarivate Analytics.

Raw citation data being non-copyrightable, it’s ironic that the vision of building a comprehensive index of scientific literature has turned into a billion-dollar business, with academic institutions paying cripplingly expensive annual subscriptions for access and the public locked out.

Enter the Initiative for Open Citations.

In 2016, a small group founded the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) as a voluntary effort to work with scholarly publishers — who routinely publish this data — to persuade them to release it in the open and promote its unrestricted availability. Before the launch of the I4OC, only 1% of indexed scholarly publications with references were making citation data available in the public domain. When the I4OC was officially announced in 2017, we were able to report that this number had shifted from 1% to 40%. In the main, this was thanks to the swift action of a small number of large academic publishers.

In April 2018, we are celebrating the first anniversary of the initiative. Since the launch, the fraction of indexed scientific articles with open citation data (as measured by Crossref) has surpassed 50% and the number of participating publishers has risen to 490. Over half a billion references are now openly available to the public without any copyright restriction. Of the top-20 biggest publishers with citation data, all but 5 — Elsevier, IEEE, Wolters Kluwer Health, IOP Publishing, ACS — now make this data open via Crossref and its APIs. Over 50 organisations — including science funders, platforms and technology organizations, libraries, research and advocacy institutions — have joined us in this journey to help advocate and promote the reuse of open citations….(More)”.

Blockchain Slashes US Govt. Contract Award Time From 100 To 10 Days

Curated on April 15, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cameron Bishop: “…The US General services Administration built the first federal procurement blockchain proof of concept about six months ago. The procurement blockchain was built to demonstrate how the distributed ledger technology can modernize federal procurement. The pilot project made them realize that blockchain, when combined with artificial intelligence and robotics, provides the foundational architecture for widespread automation.

The proof of concept, which was built in seven weeks, automated the procurement process. More importantly, it reduced the average contract award time from 100 days to less than 10 days. Complex tasks such as financial review was automated through the use of blockchain. It also eliminated human error, bias and subjectivity from the process. A smart contract deployed in the blockchain automatically calculated the financial health score from the offerors’ balance sheets and income statements. The entire process was standardized using commercial and government practices.

Furthermore, the use of blockchain ledger ensured that vendors were kept abreast of the developments. Vendors received alerts on a real-time basis as the offers progress through the workflow. This made the process transparent, while preserving the privacy of each transaction. The success of this pilot project is expected to bring a drastic change in the federal procurement process.

While a blockchain can be public, permissioned, and private, federal agencies may opt for a private blockchain to facilitate procurement transactions among pre-screened vendors with digital identity certificates.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) provides guidelines to ensure integrity, openness and fairness in federal procurement. The blockchain technology will enforce those policies through a system of procedural trust embedded into the platform.

By using blockchain technology, the federal procurement process can be more transparent, efficient, faster, and less vulnerable to fraud and abuse. More importantly, by design, a blockchain preserves the integrity of the assets and transactions between multiple parties within the value chain. Additionally, blockchain will avoid unnecessary litigations, while promoting competition in a healthy manner. It will also provide an organization with unique insights into the procurement value chain unavailable previously….(More)”.

Participatory Budgeting: Step to Building Active Citizenship or a Distraction from Democratic Backsliding?

Curated on April 12, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

David Sasaki: “Is there any there there? That’s what we wanted to uncover beneath the hype and skepticism surrounding participatory budgeting, an innovation in democracy that began in Brazil in 1989 and has quickly spread to nearly every corner of the world like a viral hashtag….We ended up selecting two groups of consultants for two phases of work. The first phase was led by three academic researchers — Brian Wampler, Mike Touchton and Stephanie McNulty — to synthesize what we know broadly about PB’s impact and where there are gaps in the evidence. mySociety led the second phase, which originally intended to identify the opportunities and challenges faced by civil society organizations and public officials that implement participatory budgeting. However, a number of unforeseen circumstances, including contested elections in Kenya and a major earthquake in Mexico, shifted mySociety’s focus to take a global, field-wide perspective.

In the end, we were left with two reports that were similar in scope and differed in perspective. Together they make for compelling reading. And while they come from different perspectives, they settle on similar recommendations. I’ll focus on just three: 1) the need for better research, 2) the lack of global coordination, and 3) the emerging opportunity to link natural resource governance with participatory budgeting….

As we consider some preliminary opportunities to advance participatory budgeting, we are clear-eyed about the risks and challenges. In the face of democratic backsliding and the concern that liberal democracy may not survive the 21st century, are these efforts to deepen local democracy merely a distraction from a larger threat, or is this a way to build active citizenship? Also, implementing PB is expensive — both in terms of money and time; is it worth the investment? Is PB just the latest checkbox for governments that want a reputation for supporting citizen participation without investing in the values and process it entails? Just like the proliferation of fake “consultation meetings,” fake PB could merely exacerbate our disappointment with democracy. What should we make of the rise of participatory budgeting in quasi-authoritarian contexts like China and Russia? Is PB a tool for undemocratic central governments to keep local governments in check while giving citizens a simulacrum of democratic participation? Crucially, without intentional efforts to be inclusive like we’ve seen in Boston, PB could merely direct public resources to those neighborhoods with the most outspoken and powerful residents.

On the other hand, we don’t want to dismiss the significant opportunities that come with PB’s rapid global expansion. For example, what happens when social movements lose their momentum between election cycles? Participatory budgeting could create a civic space for social movements to pursue concrete outcomes while engaging with neighbors and public officials. (In China, it has even helped address the urban-rural divide on perspectives toward development policy.) Meanwhile, social media have exacerbated our human tendency to complain, but participatory budgeting requires us to shift our perspective from complaints to engaging with others on solutions. It could even serve as a gateway to deeper forms of democratic participation and increased trust between governments, civil society organizations, and citizens. Perhaps participatory budgeting is the first step we need to rebuild our civic infrastructure and make space for more diverse voices to steer our complex public institutions.

Until we have more research and evidence, however, these possibilities remain speculative….(More)”.

Inside the Jordan refugee camp that runs on blockchain

Curated on April 12, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Russ Juskalian at MIT Tech Review: “…Though Bassam may not know it, his visit to the supermarket involves one of the first uses of blockchain for humanitarian aid. By letting a machine scan his iris, he confirmed his identity on a traditional United Nations database, queried a family account kept on a variant of the Ethereum blockchain by the World Food Programme (WFP), and settled his bill without opening his wallet.

Started in early 2017, Building Blocks, as the program is known, helps the WFP distribute cash-for-food aid to over 100,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan. By the end of this year, the program will cover all 500,000 refugees in the country. If the project succeeds, it could eventually speed the adoption of blockchain technologies at sister UN agencies and beyond.

Building Blocks was born of a need to save money. The WFP helps feed 80 million people around the globe, but since 2009 the organization has shifted from delivering food to transferring money to people who need food. This approach could feed more people, improve local economies, and increase transparency. But it also introduces a notable point of inefficiency: working with local or regional banks. For the WFP, which transferred over $1.3 billion in such benefits in 2017 (about 30 percent of its total aid), transaction and other fees are money that could have gone to millions of meals. Early results of the blockchain program touted a 98 percent reduction in such fees.

And if the man behind the project, WFP executive Houman Haddad, has his way, the blockchain-based program will do far more than save money. It will tackle a central problem in any humanitarian crisis: how do you get people without government identity documents or a bank account into a financial and legal system where those things are prerequisites to getting a job and living a secure life?

Haddad imagines Bassam one day walking out of Zaatari with a so-called digital wallet, filled with his camp transaction history, his government ID, and access to financial accounts, all linked through a blockchain-based identity system. With such a wallet, when Bassam left the camp he could much more easily enter the world economy. He would have a place for an employer to deposit his pay, for a mainstream bank to see his credit history, and for a border or immigration agent to check his identity, which would be attested to by the UN, the Jordanian government, and possibly even his neighbors….

But because Building Blocks runs on a small, permissioned blockchain, the project’s scope and impact are narrow. So narrow that some critics say it’s a gimmick and the WFP could just as easily use a traditional database. Haddad acknowledges that—“Of course we could do all of what we’re doing today without using blockchain,” he says. But, he adds, “my personal view is that the eventual end goal is digital ID, and beneficiaries must own and control their data.”

Other critics say blockchains are too new for humanitarian use. Plus, it’s ethically risky to experiment with vulnerable populations, says Zara Rahman, a researcher based in Berlin at the Engine Room, a nonprofit group that supports social-change organizations in using technology and data. After all, the bulk collection of identifying information and biometrics has historically been a disaster for people on the run….(More)”.

Behavioral Economics: Are Nudges Cost-Effective?

Curated on April 12, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Carla Fried at UCLA Anderson Review: “Behavioral science does not suffer from a lack of academic focus. A Google Scholar search for the term delivers more than three million results.

While there is an abundance of research into how human nature can muck up our decision making process and the potential for well-placed nudges to help guide us to better outcomes, the field has kept rather mum on a basic question: Are behavioral nudges cost-effective?

That’s an ever more salient question as the art of the nudge is increasingly being woven into public policy initiatives. In 2009, the Obama administration set up a nudge unit within the White House Office of Information and Technology, and a year later the U.K. government launched its own unit. Harvard’s Cass Sunstein, co-author of the book Nudge, headed the U.S. effort. His co-author, the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler — who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics — helped develop the U.K.’s Behavioral Insights office. Nudge units are now humming away in other countries, including Germany and Singapore, as well as at the World Bank, various United Nations agencies and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Given the interest in the potential for behavioral science to improve public policy outcomes, a team of nine experts, including UCLA Anderson’s Shlomo Benartzi, Sunstein and Thaler, set out to explore the cost-effectiveness of behavioral nudges relative to more traditional forms of government interventions.

In addition to conducting their own experiments, the researchers looked at published research that addressed four areas where public policy initiatives aim to move the needle to improve individuals’ choices: saving for retirement, applying to college, energy conservation and flu vaccinations.

For each topic, they culled studies that focused on both nudge approaches and more traditional mandates such as tax breaks, education and financial incentives, and calculated cost-benefit estimates for both types of studies. Research used in this study was published between 2000 and 2015. All cost estimates were inflation-adjusted…

The study itself should serve as a nudge for governments to consider adding nudging to their policy toolkits, as this approach consistently delivered a high return on investment, relative to traditional mandates and policies….(More)”.

Everything* You Always Wanted To Know About Blockchain (But Were Afraid To Ask)

Curated on April 11, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Alice Meadows at the Scholarly Kitchen: “In this interview, Joris van Rossum (Director of Special Projects, Digital Science) and author of Blockchain for Research, and Martijn Roelandse (Head of Publishing Innovation, Springer Nature), discuss blockchain in scholarly communications, including the recently launched Peer Review Blockchain initiative….

How would you describe blockchain in one sentence?

Joris: Blockchain is a technology for decentralized, self-regulating data which can be managed and organized in a revolutionary new way: open, permanent, verified and shared, without the need of a central authority.

How does it work (in layman’s language!)?

Joris: In a regular database you need a gatekeeper to ensure that whatever is stored in a database (financial transactions, but this could be anything) is valid. However with blockchain, trust is not created by means of a curator, but through consensus mechanisms and cryptographic techniques. Consensus mechanisms clearly define what new information is allowed to be added to the datastore. With the help of a technology called hashing, it is not possible to change any existing data without this being detected by others. And through cryptography, the database can be shared without real identities being revealed. So the blockchain technology removes the need for a middle-man.

How is this relevant to scholarly communication?

Joris: It’s very relevant. We’ve explored the possibilities and initiatives in a report published by Digital Science. The blockchain could be applied on several levels, which is reflected in a number of initiatives announced recently. For example, a cryptocurrency for science could be developed. This ‘bitcoin for science’ could introduce a monetary reward scheme to researchers, such as for peer review. Another relevant area, specifically for publishers, is digital rights management. The potential for this was picked up by this blog at a very early stage. Blockchain also allows publishers to easily integrate micropayments, thereby creating a potentially interesting business model alongside open access and subscriptions.

Moreover, blockchain as a datastore with no central owner where information can be stored pseudonymously could support the creation of a shared and authoritative database of scientific events. Here traditional activities such as publications and citations could be stored, along with currently opaque and unrecognized activities, such as peer review. A data store incorporating all scientific events would make science more transparent and reproducible, and allow for more comprehensive and reliable metrics….

How do you see developments in the industry regarding blockchain?

Joris: In the last couple of months we’ve seen the launch of many interesting initiatives. For example scienceroot.com. Pluto.network, and orvium.io. These are all ambitious projects incorporating many of the potential applications of blockchain in the industry, and to an extent aim to disrupt the current ecosystem. Recently artifacts.ai was announced, an interesting initiative that aims to allow researchers to permanently document every stage of the research process. However, we believe that traditional players, and not least publishers, should also look at how services to researchers can be improved using blockchain technology. There are challenges (e.g. around reproducibility and peer review) but that does not necessarily mean the entire ecosystem needs to be overhauled. In fact, in academic publishing we have a good track record of incorporating new technologies and using them to improve our role in scholarly communication. In other words, we should fix the system, not break it!

What is the Peer Review Blockchain initiative, and why did you join?

Martijn: The problems of research reproducibility, recognition of reviewers, and the rising burden of the review process, as research volumes increase each year, have led to a challenging landscape for scholarly communications. There is an urgent need for change to tackle the problems which is why we joined this initiative, to be able to take a step forward towards a fairer and more transparent ecosystem for peer review. The initiative aims to look at practical solutions that leverage the distributed registry and smart contract elements of blockchain technologies. Each of the parties can deposit peer review activity in the blockchain — depending on peer review type, either partially or fully encrypted — and subsequent activity is also deposited in the reviewer’s ORCID profile. These business transactions — depositing peer review activity against person x — will be verifiable and auditable, thereby increasing transparency and reducing the risk of manipulation. Through the shared processes we will setup with other publishers, and recordkeeping, trust will increase.

A separate trend we see is the broadening scope of research evaluation which triggered researchers to also get (more) recognition for their peer review work, beyond citations and altmetrics. At a later stage new applications could be built on top of the peer review blockchain….(More)”.

App facilitates charity work in Jordan

Curated on April 11, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “We have already seen how technology can be harnessed to help facilitate charitable and environmental efforts. For example, the recycling organization which helps businesses rehome unwanted goods, donating money to charity in addition to helping businesses be more economical. Another example in which technology has been used to raise awareness is through the charity chatbot, which teaches users about women’s daily journey to find water in Ethiopia.

JoodLife is a start-up which aims to make the most of technology and take advantage of it in order to help voluntary efforts in Jordan.

The application works as a social platform to connect volunteers and donors in order to facilitate charity work. Donors can register their donations via the app, and then all the available grants are displayed. The grants can be searched for on the app, and users can specify the area they wish to search. The donor and the volunteer can then agree a mechanism by which they wish to transfer the grant. At which point the available grant will no longer be shown on the app search. The app aims to serve as a link between donors and volunteers to save both parties time and effort. This makes it much easier to make monetary and material donations. The social aspect of the app also increases solidarity between charity workers and makes it much simpler to distribute roles in the most efficient way….(More)”.

A Tool to Help Nonprofits Find Each Other, Pursue Funding and Collaborate

Curated on April 11, 2018October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

DrexelNow: “…More than 40 percent of Philly nonprofit organizations operate on margins of zero or less, and fewer can be considered financially strong. With more than half of Philly’s nonprofits operating on a slim-to-none budget with limited support staff – one Drexel University researcher sought to help streamline their fundraising process by giving them easy access to data from the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Census. His goal: Create a tool that makes information about nonprofit organizations, and the communities they’re striving to help, more accessible to likeminded charities and the philanthropic organizations that seek to fund them.

When the IRS recently released millions of records on the finances and operations of nonprofit organizations in format that can be downloaded and analyzed, it was expected that this would usher in a new era of transparency and innovation for the nonprofit sector. Instead, many technical issues made the data virtually unusable by nonprofit organizations.

Single-page location intelligence tool: http://bit.ly/PhillyNPOs

Neville Vakharia, an assistant professor and research director in Drexel’s graduate Arts Administration program in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, tackled this issue by creating ImpactView Philadelphia, an online tool and resource that uses the publicly available data on nonprofit organizations to present an easy-to-access snapshot of Philadelphia’s nonprofit ecosystem.

Vakharia combined the publicly available data from the IRS with the most recent American Community Survey data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. These data were combined with a map of Philadelphia to create a visual database easily searchable by organization, address or zip code. Once an organization is selected, the analysis tools allow the user to see data on the map, alongside measures of households and individuals surrounding the organization — important information for nonprofits to have when they are applying for grants or looking for partners.

“Through the location intelligence visualizer, users can immediately find areas of need and potential collaborators. The data are automatically visualized and mapped on-screen, identifying, for example, pockets of high poverty with large populations of children as well as the nonprofit service providers in these areas,” said Vakharia. “Making this data accessible for nonprofits will cut down on time spent seeking information and improve the ability to make data-informed decisions, while also helping with case making and grant applications.”…(More)”.

To serve a free society, social media must evolve beyond data mining

Curated on April 11, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Barbara Romzek and Aram Sinnreich at The Conversation: “…For years, watchdogs have been warning about sharing information with data-collecting companies, firms engaged in the relatively new line of business called some academics have called “surveillance capitalism.” Most casual internet users are only now realizing how easy – and common – it is for unaccountable and unknown organizations to assemble detailed digital profiles of them. They do this by combining the discrete bits of information consumers have given up to e-tailers, health sites, quiz apps and countless other digital services.

As scholars of public accountability and digital media systems, we know that the business of social media is based on extracting user data and offering it for sale. There’s no simple way for them to protect data as many users might expect. Like the social pollution of fake news, bullying and spam that Facebook’s platform spreads, the company’s privacy crisis also stems from a power imbalance: Facebook knows nearly everything about its users, who know little to nothing about it.

It’s not enough for people to delete their Facebook accounts. Nor is it likely that anyone will successfully replace it with a nonprofit alternativecentering on privacy, transparency and accountability. Furthermore, this problem is not specific just to Facebook. Other companies, including Google and Amazon, also gather and exploit extensive personal data, and are locked in a digital arms race that we believe threatens to destroy privacy altogether….

Governments need to be better guardians of public welfare – including privacy. Many companies using various aspects of technology in new ways have so far avoided regulation by stoking fears that rules might stifle innovation. Facebook and others have often claimed that they’re better at regulating themselves in an ever-changing environment than a slow-moving legislative process could be….

To encourage companies to serve democratic principles and focus on improving people’s lives, we believe the chief business model of the internet needs to shift to building trust and verifying information. While it won’t be an immediate change, social media companies pride themselves on their adaptability and should be able to take on this challenge.

The alternative, of course, could be far more severe. In the 1980s, when federal regulators decided that AT&T was using its power in the telephone market to hurt competition and consumers, they forced the massive conglomerate to break up. A similar but less dramatic change happened in the early 2000s when cellphone companies were forced to let people keep their phone numbers even if they switched carriers.

Data, and particularly individuals’ personal data, are the precious metals of the internet age. Protecting individual data while expanding access to the internet and its many social benefits is a fundamental challenge for free societies. Creating, using and protecting data properly will be crucial to preserving and improving human rights and civil liberties in this still young century. To meet this challenge will require both vigilance and vision, from businesses and their customers, as well as governments and their citizens….(More).

The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete

Curated on April 10, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

James Somers in The Atlantic: “The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.

The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.

The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it’s contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you’ve actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.

Perhaps the paper itself is to blame. Scientific methods evolve now at the speed of software; the skill most in demand among physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, even anthropologists and research psychologists, is facility with programming languages and “data science” packages. And yet the basic means of communicating scientific results hasn’t changed for 400 years. Papers may be posted online, but they’re still text and pictures on a page.

What would you get if you designed the scientific paper from scratch today?…(More).