Created Tuesday 27 October 2020
Open scholarship, Proprietary videoconferencing
Alexandre Hocquet, Université de Lorraine
text under CC-BY license.
In the middle of the covid pandemic, several major publishers came up with the idea of opening up access to scientific literature to everyone, a gesture applauded both by the community and in the media.
Yet, free access to literature does not equate to open literature. Deciding unilaterally to remove barriers temporarily and unilaterally put them back later is more akin to a technique to lock in readers, one that is popular with software vendors.
Indeed, this is a good example of the ambiguity of "open science". It's also a good reminder that open science and open access draw their inspiration from the free software movement. This movement began in the 1980s as a reaction to proprietary lock-in business practices originating precisely from the computer industry, and more particularly the software industry.
The 1980s correspond to the irresistible rise of Microsoft. The extermination of the IBM OS / 2 operating system by Microsoft's Windows marks a turning point in the history of computing: it is the time when the software industry became more important than the hardware industry. This event also marks the success of Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" method at the expense of IBM, a business strategy at odds with free software, in reaction to which the Free Software Foundation was establishing its principles.
For science to be open, one can reasonably think that it would have to use open software. However, being completely open is not that easy. As anthropologist Chris Kelty has shown, each of the steps involved in the activity should be open so as not to risk any form of enclosure (open scientific software, open operating system, standard hardware, open protocols, open file formats, internet neutrality, etc.). One can have a fatalist attitude and view it as unattainable. But we can adopt a vigilant view: every part of science, every piece of software that could be free but is locked up by a company represents a defeat.
At the same time that the literature has been so generously made temporarily accessible, the pandemic has made videoconferencing crucial in academic circles and the existing open solutions put in place by national structures or universities have been shattered in front of the exponentially growing demand (which increases the need for bandwidth and therefore for infrastructure). It rushed French universities towards proprietary solutions : many of them opted for Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Video conferencing has become strategic in the sense that all of a sudden this medium has turned into an essential reality for thousands of people who until the beginning of 2020 had a vague understanding of it. It is at the same time a tool that allows to imagine new ways of teaching or communicating between researchers. It is also a piece of software, that is to say a device incorporating values in it, and that shapes its users: for example, using Teams videoconferencing means aligning to Microsoft's vision of what is a conference, a piece of software intended to lock in users within the Microsoft environment.
To be able to communicate between scholars in an era of computer mediated communication: this is historically how electronic mail was conceived, and email remains the last non-proprietary messaging protocol out there. It is a media born from the mutual acculturation of computer engineers and scholars. Forty years later, academics have given away their professional communication tools (like mailing lists) to proprietary systems (like Researchgate) that offer marketing services in return for data harvesting. Communication between scholars has many other facets, in addition to publications. Video conferencing is increasingly becoming part of it. Here again, scholars are becoming passive users.
Many articles have already been written about Zoom's propensity to harvest and use personal data without consent. As for Microsoft, its strategy of acculturation through lock-in is notorious. All French childhood and youth are programmed to use Windows, Office, Outlook... thanks to Microsoft's takeover of national education among general indifference.
It would have been possible to invest for the academic community in an open solution guaranteed by a national or university infrastructure (at country level, the cost is low). In France, this is even the role of Renater, the national network. In fact, Renater has for several years created services in this direction based on free software. Rendezvous Renater is based on Jitsi for example. Yet, the state still needs to provide resources for its national infrastructure. At a time when French universities are turning to Gmail for their academic email service because Google is offering them for free what Renater is forced to charge them a hefty sum, one can be pessimistic. As with the national health system, infrastructural decisions are dictated by the disengagement of the state and the demand for profitability.
Open science in a proprietary format is a bit as if the proactive "national open science plan" of the French state was written in Microsoft Word or Google doc. Its brochure, in any case, was produced under Adobe Indesign for Macintosh, as the pdf metadata teach us....