Notes

The previous post described possible ways of removing artificial scale parameters from a political system, the most important being a way to remove the representational scale dependency via “direct democracy plus scripting” (for which I still need a better name). This post will describe how one might try to achieve such a system. Besides the obvious reason for such a discussion, the transition from one system to another provides an excellent thought experiment to evaluate the merits of both current and future systems. Here are two proposed principles which encapsulate why:

1. A good political system should be able to take over an existing inferior one from the inside out, gradually.
2. A really good political system would be excellent at being taken over from the inside out by a better system.

The second one is supposed to sound backwards.

The first principle says that any kind of full revolution is an extreme measure, one to avoid if at all possible. Moreover, the need for revolution implies a limit on how much better the better system could be: if it was better for everyone, for example, no one would complain about the switch. Of course, this is never the case: there are always those who benefit disproportionally from the status quo. In the past (e.g., last October) violent revolutions have been necessary to overcome the resulting opposition, since the large majority of people who prefer the new system have little to no official power. However, at least in this country we have a system that at least theoretically derives all power from individuals. Overall it’s worked quite well, and the first thought in response to any problems should be whether we make progress using the existing system rather than fighting it directly.

Incidentally, Le Guin’s world of anarchists in The Dispossessed completely fails the first principle, at least according to the majority of the inhabitants, who are terrified that any interaction with the conventional capitalist parent world would destroy their society. The same applies to American fears of communism: if we really believed in the superiority of capitalism over communism, we wouldn’t have been so terrified of secret communist plots and takeovers.

The second principle says that if a system is really good, it should admit the fact that it’s highly unlikely to be the best, and should provide mechanisms for calm and efficient transition to anything better which arises without sacrificing stability. Since “better” is a wildly subject term, and will vary over place, time, issue, etc., flexibility is key.

So, how would one go about trying to get to direct democracy plus scripting? To recap the previous post, the idea is to let everyone vote directly on every issue, and recover practicality by allowing individuals to assign their votes to others, often on an issue by issue basis. The assignment mechanisms are completely open: anyone who proposes a new method for collecting and organizing votes could implement it, collect votes from those who think the new mechanism is superior, and start wielding political power. Assignment is also optional: an individual who decides to vote directly on some issue is free to do so. In practice vote assignment would be implemented by nonbinding messages from the representative to the individual (or lower level representative), so there’s no need to codify any of the particular details or mechanisms of vote assignment into the basic structure.

Trying to achieve this with anything like a constitutional amendment would be a terrible idea. First, it would fail, since it’s way too different from how government is structured currently. Second, even if it did somehow succeed, it would immediately fail, since the practical success of the scripting bit would depend on a large ecosystem of independent assignment mechanisms, small and large scale networks of friends and advisors and representatives, etc. Instead, the right approach is to start at the other end: pick a single city and a single city council seat, say, and try to elect one representative that agrees to vote exactly according to the collective will of the system. To make it easy, choose the easiest possible city and district, ideally one that’s fairly well off and has a fairly large technical population, in order to reduce the effort required to get people internet access and educate them about how it works. In the beginning the system would be very far from completely fair: not everyone would know about it, and not all that did would be able to use it. However, the fraction of people in a district who currently maintain influence over their representative is miniscule, so I doubt we’d be worse off in that regard.

The basic infrastructure, or rather the first implementation of that infrastructure, would need to be in place before this first representative is elected. Technical issues aside for the moment, part of this infrastructure is the interpersonal networks of representatives required to make the process efficient, and we need some way of bootstrapping these networks. To do this, we need a stream of hypothetical issues to vote on, which can be found either via an interested city councilperson or simply by sending people to every single city council meeting to take notes. Only once these networks are in place and functioning smoothly (gauged by asking people to vote on whether their networks are functioning smoothly) could we proceed to the next step of actually trying to elect someone.

At this point I run out of steam, since my knowledge of how politics works in practice at local levels is nonexistent. I’m not at all sure such a system really makes sense at a very small scale; for one, the issues it’s trying to tackle may be less important (more trust, less distance between voter and representative, etc.). However, I’m fairly confident that if it failed at a small scale, it would fail at a large scale, and failure is good if it highlights problems or indicates early that the entire approach is wrong.

Happily, I have at least one hiking friend who’s fairly involved in local Marin politics, and has the added benefit of being one of the rare people who seems to read this blog. Hopefully this post can at least fuel interesting conversation on an upcoming hike.

I read The Dispossessed again recently, which is a wonderful book by Ursula K. Le Guin about a society of anarchist/revolutionaries where ideally everyone shares everything and is never compelled to do anything by anyone else. In practice all sorts of societal and structural compulsions arise, and half the book is about struggling with these internal contradictions (the other half argues how much better it is, contradictions and all, than the alternative).

Reading that kind of thing always makes me want to think about an ideal political system would like. Hopefully such an ideal system would also be simple, in the sense of having few (and therefore general) rules. Simplicity isn’t necessarily a good thing, since it’s usually a bad idea to carry anything in politics to extremes. However, all else equal simpler systems mean fewer opportunities for mistakes, easier analysis, etc. Moreover, an ideal simple system would hopefully be able to avoid extremes by way of complicated policies derived through simple (or simply regulated) decision making processes.

So, let’s talk about various ways a governmental system could be simple. To provide some sort of unification, we’ll focus down from “simple” to “scale free”, where a system is scale free if it avoids some sort of tunable parameter. The different scales heavily overlap, so there will be some repetitiveness. Here goes.

Representational vs. direct

All current large scale democracies are (mostly) representational, in the sense that citizens vote for representatives who then vote on the actual policies. Scale dependency is typically minimized by having representatives at a variety of different scales, with various levels of power and electoral bases.

The natural way to avoid representational scale dependence is to switch to direct democracy, where each person votes on every single policy. To make this practical, representatives can be reintroduced as an optional, “convenience” feature, allowing citizens to assign their votes to other people. For extra flexibility, these assignments could be issue specific, which is useful if you believe one friend is very knowledgeable about financial policy but has terrible environmental views, for example. The vote assignments could also be hierarchical, funneling upwards from individuals through knowledgeable friends to politically active knowledgeable friends to local representatives or policy wonks or whoever else has enough time and interest to actually do the final voting. Or not: anyone would be free to vote directly if they feel like it.

The key is that all the extra hierarchical stuff would be open and extensible; anyone could propose a new scheme for aggregating votes, implement it, and start collecting power without explicit permission or legal authority. Presumably someone would set up a joke site that collected assigned votes and voted on policy based on the results of Google keyword searches, and a few people would give it their votes, and it would have actual political power. And presumably most people would assign their votes in serious ways (or not vote).

We can think of this system as “direct democracy plus scripting”. Clearly I need a better name.

A typical worry about direct democracy is that individuals are too lazy and ill-informed to make reasonable decisions on actual policy issues. However, due to the scripting we can’t be worse off than normal representative democracy if the individual is both lazy and ill-informed; they’ll assign their votes to a better informed representative. People interested in power would scramble to set up easily noticeable catchalls to collect exactly these votes, tailored specifically for people who want to strictly follow some party line (itself chosen by an arbitrary, possibly scripted method). Voters who are ill-informed but also motivated are problematic, but no more problematic than in representative democracy. Moreover, many problems associated with current instantiations of direct democracy, such as referendums, immediately disappear. First, if you don’t believe in referendums, assign all your votes to representatives. If an issue is passed by the equivalent of a referendum but most people decide it should have been decided representationally by someone more knowledgeable, they simply reassign their votes.

All the issues associated with reliable and private voting still apply: we don’t want people to buy or sell votes, for example. However, various secure schemes for voting exist (see e.g. [RS07]), and voting more often doesn’t make these any less sound. It does require some level of guaranteed occasional internet access; that requires money, but likely not very much at least in this country. Moreover, any problems with voting irregularities are massively reduced by voting more often: if a vote goes wrong, vote again.

Federalism and nations

Our second scale dependency is the amount of power controlled by uniform, large scale policy (federal or national laws) vs. heterogeneous, small scale policy (state and local laws). At the small extreme of this scale, we have individual rights, where no other person is granted control over a certain class of actions of another. The other extreme is uniform national or global policy. We clearly need a large dose of the small extreme: individual rights promote diversity of ideas, culture, life, etc., and diversity is both fundamentally good and (perhaps equivalently) vitally important to long term survival. McCarthy has (or, sadly, had) a great quote about this further up the scale:

Civilization might recover from the damage of a nuclear war, but … it might never recover from world government, there being no chance of external intervention.

Unfortunately, for better or worse, a wide variety of issues can only be efficiently resolved by large scale uniform policy. These include externalities (global warming), public goods (infrastructure and basic scientific research), any type of insurance against predictable future events (such as health care), and education (I don’t know the best way to abstract this one).

By analogy with our previous scale elimination, we could try to eliminate the federalism scale dependence by pushing all the way to one end of the scale, and inventing a flexible scheme for finding practical middle grounds. Flexibility is key, since federalism has to be decided entirely on a case by case basis: the power of speech should be almost purely local, and the global level of carbon emissions should be, yes, global.

At the moment, I have no idea whether there’s a way to make either of these extremes work. That is, I see no obvious proof that either could not work. Pure libertarianism could work in a system where (1) no one individual has sufficient power to do dramatic harm by acting alone and (2) the vast majority of people are reasonable. In cases where a particular issue actually warrants libertarianism, we’re done. If global coordination is required, the majority of reasonable people would look at the issue and decide to collectively organize on that issue, e.g., by making their decisions based on the above flexible voting scheme. Some fraction of people would refuse to comply, and they would be appropriately shunned or ignored by the others. For example, someone who decided to burn coal would either find no one to work with, or no one to sell the energy to, because most people would have agreed that burning coal is a really awful idea. Again, I’m not saying this clearly works, only that it’s not clear that it couldn’t work with (1) a sufficiently educated populous and (2) flexible, low overhead schemes for issue specific collective organization.

The reverse extreme of pure global voting could also work, as long as the majority of people realize that local control is often a good thing. Again, possible, though I have no idea about the details.

Time scales

Good policy must be stable over a reasonable time scale, order to ensure predictability for both those who work in government and those affected by the policy. Policy stability should not be confused with long term planning: it’s possible to make long term plans even if the policy’s are adjusting rapidly based on new knowledge. As with federalism, the correct practical time scale is entirely dependent on the issue.

Remove the time scale dependence from the system itself is easy: we set it to zero. Anyone who wants to propose a vote on an issue can do so at any time. Voters (i.e., everyone, or their hierarchically chosen representatives) need time to ponder their decisions, which they do simply by voting “no” for a while, and then either leaving it “no” or switching it to “yes”. A default vote can be set either to “no” always, signifying a preference for stability, or to “no vote”, signifying a preference for a reduced quorum on a particular issue or family of issues. These defaults would be part of the scripting level, and therefore completely extensible.

The key is that as long as the space of decisions voters can make is sufficiently rich, we’ll naturally avoid rapid flip flopping even on contentious, equally divided issues. Even on binary decisions, voter preferences will almost always be smoothly distributed from strongly in favor, to weakly in favor, through to weakly and strongly opposed. The distribution may be sigmoidal, with most voters on one side or the other, but there should be a decent population of voters in the middle. Most voters are reasonable people, and will place nonzero value on policy stability. For voters sufficiently close to the middle, the value of stability will trump their weak preferences towards one side or the other, so they’ll vote “no” or “same” or whatever else is required to prevent flipping. The resulting policy will therefore tend to change on a time scale where the noise (or rational changes) in voter preferences balance the fraction of people who value stability more. I keep picturing a galaxy viewed edge on thinking about this: a large one dimensional space with a bulge in the middle where another dimension kicks in.

Another somewhat orthogonal way to reduce time scale dependence is to convert as many issues as possible from binary decisions into smooth parameter choices. For example, the limit or price on various pollutants may need to fluctuate fairly quickly to take account of new information or temporal events (weather, etc.). As long as enough people agree that some limit is warranted, so that the necessary monitoring and infrastructure can be put in place, the limit itself can vary dynamically based on some continuous time voting scheme. One such continuous scheme would be for everyone to post a suitable ordering of the real numbers, and have the system constantly recalculate instant runoff voting as subsets of individuals change their preferences (which could themselves be scripted). The requirement that people agree on some limit is a serious one, though, and is essential in any area where enforcement or compliance involves significant overhead. Not all issues can be made smooth.

Incidentally, both these mechanisms for recovering correct time scales work by expanding the space of voter decisions. I think similar tricks will arise frequently, each different, so it’s vitally important that our system doesn’t require use to know them all in advance.

Majority rule vs. consensus

Any decent governmental system must include mechanisms for protecting minorities and minority rights from the will of the majority. There are at least two approaches to protect minorities: federalism and consensus. Minorities can be protected under federalism by giving the majority in question some of the power over themselves directly, most importantly in the case of the individual. Of course, federalism can also damage majority rights, such as when certain states disagree with a certain majority right. However, we’ve already discussed federalism, and I’ve admitted that I don’t know how to make it safely scale free, so I’ll set it aside again.

The other mechanism is requiring a supermajority in order to enact or change a particular policy, somewhere between pure majority rule and pure consensus. There are two logical reasons to require a supermajority: a desire for stability and a belief that past decisions were more accurate than present decisions. I personally don’t believe in the second reason: that is, I think our knowledge and decision making abilities are gradually improving over time, at least if we average out the noise. Stability is critical, but we’ve already covered it in our discussion of time scales. Therefore, very tentatively, we can resolve the scale choice between majority rule and consensus by dialing it all the way to pure majority rule.

In order for pure majority rule to work, it’s vitally important that our system allow general principles with wide support to overrule individual, local decisions. For example, as least in the U.S., a vast supermajority of voters will support the general principle of free speech, but pockets of voters either in time, place, or issue may want to choose otherwise. I’m not sure whether this overruling needs to be built in at a fundamental level or not, it may be sufficient to let voters know when they’re about to vote in violation of a larger principle that has already been decided, or perhaps only that they’ve already voted for. Moreover, there are some rights issues such as abortion where both sides believe their position derives from some general principle. Of course, I’d love for decisions on issues like abortion to always be decided in accord with my personal views, but this may be too much to hope for. More stability definitely isn’t always the answer: see gay marriage.

To summarize, I think defaulting to majority rule is likely the way to go, but only if we could be sure the rights of minorities would be sufficiently protected.

Anonymity

In our current system individual votes are anonymous, but the votes of regions as a whole and the votes of their representatives are public. It’s almost certainly a terrible idea to remove the anonymity of the individual, due to the dangers of voter coercion, buying and selling votes, etc. However, in our proposed system individual votes are the only type of voting built in; everything else is built up in a flexible, hierarchical manner. Therefore, we need to check whether we can recover the advantages conferred by non-anonymity at higher levels in our current system.

Regional vote tallies are almost certainly unimportant: the news loves these, and they’re important for analysis and understanding of the spread of opinions in a society, but in both cases exit polls are perfectly sufficient replacements.

Lack of anonymity of votes by representatives is necessary in the our current system so that voters know whether to vote people back into office, and the same applies in our scheme so that individuals know where to assign their votes. However, there’s no need to build this requirement into the system itself. It’s quite easy to set up a representative so that every high level vote is communicated back to the individual, simply by giving the representative no direct power: the representative votes by sending a message back to the individual (or rather the individual’s computer or hosted voter account) to do the actual voting. Even if we give the voters the choice of doing it some other way, such as by handing representatives cryptographic subkeys which allow them to vote anonymously, the vast majority of voters will naturally prefer to know where their votes are going, and will assign accordingly.

It’s also easy to make the choice of representative anonymous. It’s even easy to make the representatives not know how many people support them: the representative can announce their views publicly, and completely unconnected individuals can vote accordingly by reading a public website (automatically or manually). However, some degree of representative knowledge is useful to reduce wasted effort and allow responsiveness to constituents. Voters will want both, so the correct level of knowledge should develop naturally.

Incidentally, lack of anonymity of representative votes has plenty of disadvantages in our current system, since it allows lobbyists and special interest groups to indirectly buy votes. The same disadvantages apply to some degree here, but are greatly ameliorated by the ability to switch representatives quickly and choose different representatives for different issues.

One person, one vote

Let’s end with a fun one. Right now, the concept of “one person, one vote” is a tremendously good idea, since one human individual is such a natural scale. All the other animals are too stupid to vote, and single individuals pretty much stay single individuals. All this goes out the window as soon as we get strong AI. Machines will have to start voting reasonable soon thereafter, and machines and software have a tendency to copy themselves. It’s likely bad if a machine makes a thousand copies of itself and gets a thousand votes as a result. Conversely, if a thousand machines decide to merge together into a single superintelligent, jointly decision making cluster, do they now get only one vote?

As with pretty much everything else in this post that I have no idea how to solve, this one is related to federalism. The need for “one person, one vote” goes away completely in the case of pure libertarianism, since the thousand copies simply do what they like, and the joined superindividual does likewise. If the pure libertarian solution doesn’t work (which may be likely, but as noted I see no obvious proof), I’m not sure what to do.

Notes and conclusion

I’d love to hear other people’s opinions on this stuff, especially the direct democracy plus scripting approach. I hope we get to something like it eventually, and it might even be possible to start pushing towards it now. The first step would be to set up the infrastructure to allow people to easily assign votes. If enough people are interested in the result, the next step would be to try to elect a representative who agrees to vote in accord with the collective decision of the system. If it works, it would increase interest, and the system could expand further and eventually take over the surrounding political system from the inside out.

Incidentally, if we do get closer to an ideal political framework, the whole notion of “protest” might vanish, in that someone who wants to protest could take direct action instead. Or at least protest would take a different form, with different connotations (fighting from the inside rather than the outside).

Finally, part of this was written sitting in a booth next to a bunch of people dancing (in a class beyond my level), which turns out to be a lot more fun than writing from home. Maybe I should find more places like that.

From CBS News:

On the one hand, [Obama's] administration has defended a free, open Internet as it watched repressive regimes fall in the Middle East with help from social media such as Twitter. It has also been a proponent of the concept of “net neutrality,” which prevents Internet service providers from slowing online traffic that comes from file-sharing sites known to trade in pirated content.

On the other hand, Obama and other Democrats have gone to Hollywood dozens of times to raise campaign funds over the years.

Let’s see if we can do something about this, shall we?

Here’s a wonderful article by Lawrence Lessig from a while back on the Citizens United Supreme Court case, which prohibited congress from regulating independent campaign expenditures by corporations:

Lawrence Lessig, Democracy after Citizens United

This is linked off of rootstrikers.org, but I hadn’t read it in detail before. His core argument is great: in key places in their decisions, the justices made statements such as

The appearance of influence or access . . . 
will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.

Apparently the legal term for this is Lochnerism, which means to present an issue as being a matter of interpretation and opinion when it’s actually a factual question. From the article (emphasis added):

Does the influence or threat of independent expenditures within the economy of influence that is privately funded campaigns further weaken the effectiveness of Congress to do its job? Does it further weaken public trust of Congress by confirming that “money buys results”?

Again, the answer depends on the facts. It is not simply a matter of logic, but instead hangs upon the actual expectations of an actual public. I have my intuitions. Maybe they are wrong. Maybe American cynicism is already so great that even a radical increase in a conflicting dependency won’t further weaken public trust.

Lochnerism, however, will not permit us to know. So long as First Amendment Lochnerism prevails on this Court, so long as Justices are prepared to let their own factual speculations trump legislative fact-finding, and so long as judicial intuitions about the impact of disclosure requirements are permitted to decide the issue, Congress will be unable to address institutional corruption directly by limiting expenditures that create a reality or appearance of unacceptable dependency.

Ah, facts.

I sent this message to Representative Nancy Pelosi, Senator Barbara Boxer, and Senator Diane Feinstein:

Representative Pelosi / Senator Boxer / Senator Feinstein:

I am writing to express my opposition to the anti-piracy legislation SOPA and PIPA.  As a member of a private industrial research lab, my life and work depend critically on a free environment of information on the internet, and I believe this environment would be dangerously infringed by either of these bills.

However, I do not believe it is optimal or sufficient to attack these bills directly.  Rather, the true culprit behind such legislation is a campaign financing system which disproportionally rewards lobbying efforts and shifts the interests of congress away from the constituents who elect them.  Therefore, I urge you to strongly support legislation for citizen funded elections to return control to individuals and voters.  Even if SOPA and PIPA are the more important problem, campaign finance reform is the first problem, since its failure lies at the root of nearly all other issues.

Thank you for your time,

Geoffrey Irving

More information

Here’s a collection of links borrowed from Jed Brown with more information on these subjects.  I intentionally left this kind of thing out of the above message, since I think it has more weight if I express a direct personal opinion rather than a copied sentiment (even though its entirely both). Please let me know if you think including links in such messages is better.

SOPA and PIPA

1. Simple video introduction
2. Technical overview
3. SOPA details and money trail
4. PROTECT-IP

Campaign finance reform

1. Lawrence Lessig’s proposal: http://rootstrikers.org
2. Daily Show interview: part 1, part 2

The White House is asked for public comments on public access to federally funded research.  Here are the relevant links, including the rather alarmingly title blog post by Aram Harrow where I found this:

1. Could Elsevier shut down arxiv.org?

2. Call to action from the alliance for taxpayer access

3. The details

The deadline for comments is tomorrow, January 2.  My comments follow.  If you read this and have much better ideas for how to expand open access, please send your own!

My comments

I am writing in response to the request for information on public access to federally funded research.  As a member of a small private research lab without university level access to most publications, I am constantly obstructed by the lack of public access to papers in computer science, mathematics, and many other areas of interest.  Open access to federally funded research would have a significant streamlining effect on the daily work of myself and many other researchers and developers in similar positions.  Detailed responses to the specific questions follow:

Question 1

Are there steps that agencies could take to grow existing and new markets related to the access and analysis of peer-reviewed publications that result from federally funded scientific research? How can policies for archiving publications and making them publically accessible be used to grow the economy and improve the productivity of the scientific enterprise? What are the relative costs and benefits of such policies? What type of access to these publications is required to maximize U.S. economic growth and improve the productivity of the American scientific enterprise?

Response 1:

The single and most important step to take is to explicitly grant the authors of federally funded scientific papers the right to make copies of their work freely available, either through personal or institutional websites or public sites such as arxiv.org.  I believe the overwhelming majority of researchers already want this freedom, but many are prevented from doing so by publishing agreements with private journals.  Therefore, mandating public access is unnecessary if researchers have full rights to distribute their own work alongside journal and conference publication.  Specific policies for archiving publications are useful but less important than the right to distribute, since arxiv, Google Scholar and other services already provide ready methods for archiving and finding publications.

The main benefit of such a policy is reduced overhead for individuals and smaller institutions which cannot avoid blanket access to the majority of journals (as would typically be available through a university).  The main downside is reduced revenue for conventional publishers.  However, government policy should not be geared towards the interests of publishers: the sole metric should be interests of the taxpaying public as a whole.

Question 2:

What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders involved with the publication and dissemination of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded scientific research? Conversely, are there policies that should not be adopted with respect to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications so as not to undermine any intellectual property rights of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders?

Response 2:

The easiest way to safeguard the rights of scientists is to make open access an optional but guaranteed right, as mentioned above.  In the long term, mandatory open access to federally funded research may be desirable, but I believe most of the benefits can be achieved with rights alone.  Moreover, open access to research need not interfere with the patent system, which is the primary mechanism for helping scientists and institutions to commercially profit from their work. The intellectual property rights of publishers could be maintained for past work by enforcing the right to open distribution only for future research.  Although open access to past work is also highly desirable, a retroactive forced change to publishing agreements would constitute far more interference with private contracts, and is therefore more questionable.

Question 3:

What are the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized approaches to managing public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally funded research in terms of interoperability, search, development of analytic tools, and other scientific and commercial opportunities? Are there reasons why a Federal agency (or agencies) should maintain custody of all published content, and are there ways that the government can ensure long-term stewardship if content is distributed across multiple private sources?

Response 3:

The pros of a decentralized approach are flexibility and diversity in exploring new methods of distribution, peer review, and search.  The pros of a centralized approach are uniformity and simplified access, and institutional levels of security and redundancy.  I do not believe it is important to discuss cons of either, since both centralized and decentralized approaches can exist simultaneously.  If researchers are guaranteed the right to open distribution, they will naturally take advantage of a variety of distribution mechanisms, including arxiv, self-distribution on websites, and any open government databases.  The relative success of the various options can then be judged and evaluated on their merits.  In this framework, a government database of open work would constitute both an alternative access point and a long term backup of published work, without interfering with nongovernmental mechanisms and institutions.

Question 4:

Are there models or new ideas for public-private partnerships that take advantage of existing publisher archives and encourage innovation in accessibility and interoperability, while ensuring long-term stewardship of the results of federally funded research?

Response 4:

Access to existing archives is a more delicate issue, since it requires enforced or negotiated change to past publishing agreements. Therefore, it may be best tackled after open access to future works, especially since solutions for the latter will inform those for past work.

Question 5:

What steps can be taken by Federal agencies, publishers, and/or scholarly and professional societies to encourage interoperable search, discovery, and analysis capacity across disciplines and archives? What are the minimum core metadata for scholarly publications that must be made available to the public to allow such capabilities? How should Federal agencies make certain that such minimum core metadata associated with peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded scientific research are publicly available to ensure that these publications can be easily found and linked to Federal science funding?

Response 5:

Due to the availability of efficient search, I do not believe it is necessary to mandate any particular set of metadata for text publications themselves.  Instead, any government publication databases should provide support for optional metadata such as source code and data sets, or at a minimum links to external storage of such metadata.

Question 6:

How can Federal agencies that fund science maximize the benefit of public access policies to U.S. taxpayers, and their investment in the peer-reviewed literature, while minimizing burden and costs for stakeholders, including awardee institutions, scientists, publishers, Federal agencies, and libraries?

Response 6:

As mentioned above, I believe much of the benefit of complete open access can be achieved simply by guaranteeing the right to freely distribute federally funded work.  The costs for such a step are minimal, especially since efficient distribution and search mechanisms already exist, and will likely proliferate further if a greater fraction of publications can legally take advantage of them.

Question 7:

Besides scholarly journal articles, should other types of peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded research, such as book chapters and conference proceedings, be covered by these public access policies?

Response 7:

The right of researchers to freely distribute federally funded work should be applied as widely as possible.  Conference proceedings are particularly important, especially in fields such as computer science where conferences are often the dominant publication venue for many subfields.  Book chapters are less clear, since authors benefit financially from the purchase of each book, and therefore have less incentive to take advantage of free publication rights.  However, making free distribution a right rather than a requirement would allow authors to either choose the status quo or explore a variety of ways to take full or partial advantage of free distribution.

Question 8:

What is the appropriate embargo period after publication before the public is granted free access to the full content of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research? Please describe the empirical basis for the recommended embargo period. Analyses that weigh public and private benefits and account for external market factors, such as competition, price changes, library budgets, and other factors, will be particularly useful. Are there evidence-based arguments that can be made that the delay period should be different for specific disciplines or types of publications?

Response 8:

The embargo period should be negative: researchers should be allowed to freely distribute their work whenever they choose, including before publication or even before completion.  This will minimize the delay between the completion of work and the time when other researchers can begin building on it.  Producers of research that do not want their work to be immediately distributed can choose not to do so, and consumers of research that prefer to wait for the filtering and improvement effects of peer review are free to wait.  Any other embargo period, even zero, would cause an unnecessary drag on the speed of dissemination and advancement of scientific knowledge.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on this issue.