profit institutions and partly by the
“publish or perish” dynamic in the
academic world. Library budgets have
not kept up with the cost of increasing
numbers of publications. Changing
this dynamic may necessitate revising
the metrics of value: favoring quality
over quantity. Academic tenure decisions often seem to turn on quantity
and perhaps that must change.
Reproducibility of reported research is an important trend and is
aided by funding-agency requirements for the preservation of research
data, associated metadata, software
and equipment documentation, as
well as reported analytic results. This
is the essence of the scientific method and is a laudable goal. The U.S.
National Science Foundation sponsors the Research Data Alliance that
undertakes to achieve this objective.
Preservation of software and its execution environments is a topic about
which I have written more than once
in this column so I will simply reiterate here the challenge and importance
of achieving this objective.
One of the challenges associated
with data and publication preserva-
tion is the creation of business mod-
els that can sustain long-duration ar-
chives over decades, if not centuries.
Present publication business models
often sustain significant portions of
the operating costs for academic or-
ganizations. For many research pub-
lishers, all of their operating costs
must be covered this way. Ironically,
researchers have often noted that aca-
demic colleagues at little direct cost
to publishers undertake the editing
and review functions of most scien-
tific journals. This has led some insti-
tutions to consider the formation of
digital publication processes staffed
by volunteer editors and reviewers.
It should be noted, however, that
considerable infrastructure must be
maintained to ensure access to digital
content over long periods of time and
that, too, has an underlying cost.
In a recent National Academy of Engineering Spring Symposium, one of the
speakers, Bret Victor, offered a working
example of a modern-day digital publication that was far from static. Indeed,
the tables and charts were fully interactive. Readers could alter parameters to
see how the results might look under
varied conditions. This kind of composite publication might indeed become
the forerunner of a mechanism for reproducibility, especially if the researcher’s tools might be accessed through
the publication to test new hypotheses
or to feed new data into the system.
In the ensuing discussions, it
seemed clear the participants who
might have been expected to be at odds
on the economics of research publication were in fact open to exploring new
ways to ensure increasingly open access to research results and data. I was
reminded of the success of the Human
Genome Project and the role that publishers played: if your papers were to be
published, you had to agree to put your
discovered genetic sequences into one
of three international human genome
databases. The resulting sharing of
this key information accelerated our
understanding of the human genome
and its implications.
Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist
at Google. He served as ACM president from 2012–2014.
Copyright held by author.
It is June and as we do every year, ACM
celebrates the extraordinary accomplishments
and contributions of some of our colleagues
in computer science and information
technology. This year, we honor Sir Tim
Berners-Lee as the recipient of ACM’s
most prestigious 2016 A.M. Turing
Award. The impact of the World Wide
Web has steadily increased since it was
first introduced in late 1991 and stands
as a remarkable infrastructure, enhancing the value of the Internet, datacenters, smartphones, and all manner
of other programmable systems.
This year also marks the first time
the new ACM Prize in Computing is
awarded—the inaugural recipient is
Alexei A. Efros, for his groundbreaking,
data-driven approaches to computer
graphics and computer vision. Many
other deserving recipients will be feted
at the annual ACM Gala in San Francisco
on June 24 and I hope to see many of you
there to celebrate the achievements of
our colleagues.
I recently spent a half-day with a
group of government agency, publishing industry, and academic institutional representatives to discuss key considerations leading to improved access
to academic research results, associated data, and analytic software. The
sponsoring organization is the Open
Scholarship Initiative ( osinitiative.org)
and its primary goal is accessibility of
research and scholarly output. This
was not necessarily about free access
as much as making things easily discoverable and accessible.
The world of scientific and academic
publishing has grown over time and
this is not surprising. The number of
narrowly focused academic publications is increasing, partly driven by
business models of profit and non-
Open Access to Academic Research
DOI: 10.1145/3084224 Vinton G. Cerf