 Exactly one year ago, I woke up from a 15-year-long open-access coma. For 15 years, I refused to read, hear about or be aware in any shape or form anything to do with open access, scholarly communications, anything like that. That doesn't make me different from a number of colleagues that both you and I can mention. What perhaps makes me slightly different is the fact that between 2000 and 2003, I worked obsessively on a project that some of you with grey hair and long memories may remember. It was called Evels, this electronic society of social scientists and the modest aim of replacing Elsevier as a publisher of economics journals. When the project didn't achieve the success I was looking for, I vowed never, ever to get involved with scholarly communication again. Before I tell you why I've broken my vow, perhaps I can tell you my experience because it was, I believe, quite unique. I had these two snapshots, 2003, 2018, and what has happened to open access? Well, there are some good news, such as Plan S, the REF in a sense, institutional repository in 2003 but not very well developed. Now they are well developed and populated. And that's about it. I was involved with the PEST initiative back in 2001 and to be locked in the same room with Stevan Harnat for eight hours. This has been recorded, right? It's exhausting. So, well, let me tell you that I don't see a huge amount of progress. I see the old mistakes being repeated again. The old evil seer is still there ruining our lives. So, why did I get involved with this? Well, I was essentially forced into it by my co-author who's got a maths and medical background and something that we tend to forget is that open access is not just kind of an academic issue. He was working in Africa and the lack of open access reduces and diminishes the lives of millions of people. We tend to forget that. We talk about diversity. Imagine the stunting of talent in places like Africa that the lack of open access produces. That's diversity in action, wouldn't you say? Right, so I was forced to come back because my conscience was troubling me. And we think we have a potential solution that is cheap, doable, and with a fair chance of success. So, I will now skip to the last slide. When views are counted properly, thanks to the project that I'm going to talk about briefly and counter, then views will count. And when views count, authors want to be viewed. And if authors want to be viewed, then they have to make their own research output visible. And what is the best way of making your research visible is to deposit in an open access repository. That is the one slide that I would like you to take home. Okay, now the rest is details. Suppose that the World Confundation wants to assess the impact of something about emergency medicine. As far as I understand, the only way of doing that would be by some form of citation-based metric, which of course is completely useless. Okay, so... Oh, sorry. This is maybe the next important slide here. I work on this assumption that it is feasible to aggregate online usage data for peer-reviewed papers in a consistent, validated, and auditable fashion. Okay. And my claim that I hope to convince you about is that that will provide an indirect but powerful way to open access. The second claim, which I will not expand about, but I think we should not forget about it, is that by doing that, we can reduce the knowledge gap between rich countries and poor countries. So this is sometimes forgotten. Okay, why is any kind of citation metric useless? Let me give you some evidence here. In the last five years, 27 African countries covering 200 million people have produced zero research articles. Therefore, they cannot cite anything because they haven't produced anything. Okay, so you might say, so what? Clinicians in those countries will have accessed papers in some fashion, okay? And those views are not recorded. Who cares? Well, that's the wrong way to look at it because it skews research production. Why would I write a paper that is relevant for, for example, these 27 countries if I know that I'm not going to be cited? Okay, so the very fact that alternatives to citations are not available skews research in a way that is not beneficial to humanity. Okay, so I have no incentives to do research, any topic that may be relevant to countries that don't produce citations, okay? So lack of incentives, that is the major theme of my talk and the problem why we are still here talking about open access nearly 20 years since the beginning of the story. Okay, so again, incentives. Who would gain and who would lose if you move things in terms of academic rewards away from citations and towards non-citation impact? Well, again, let's look at emergency medicine journals in Africa and let's see what happens if you repress ranking by citation, ranking by views, okay? The top two journals, resuscitation and also emergency medicine, both published by, you know, who, will move from 1st and 2nd to 6th and 11th. On the other hand, international journal of emergency medicine which is currently languishing in 20th place according to citations moves up to 4th, right? Okay, so there you are. Don't expect very profitable publishers to move in any way towards anything other than citation. Okay, now I could spend a lot of time here and you can fill in the details what's wrong with counting views downloads, okay? I may even resist the temptation to tell you that the third most downloaded paper in the public library of science is fallacious by fruit bats prolongs copulation time, okay? We all have read that and they're very from it. Okay, so I could have a very long list and it's totally irrelevant. The question is not whether we should collect viewing data, okay, but rather who should do it and for whose benefit, okay? That ship has sailed, okay? Viewing data are being collected but not by you. Okay, let's play spot the difference. There you go. This is what I referred earlier on in one of my questions. The standard else of your journal subscription contract, section 2.4. There you are, okay? The subscription you are paid for for your viewers. Elsevier is gracious enough to keep the data to you for internal use only. Therefore, they're useless. Is that inevitable? And nope. Look at the very same clause for the University of California. Elsevier, go and yourself. We can do with our data what we like, right? By the way, it wouldn't be interesting and ironical if the University of Lancaster had this contract. In fact, maybe you want to check whether you fall in this category or this category. So, I bet again to eat again my bag if there aren't some vice chancellors or there are, say, head librarians who talk about open data, et cetera, and still have this. Right, okay. So, of course, for viewing data to be valuable, they have to be collected on a worldwide system. So, what's the problem? We've got lots of repositories. We've got PubMed, ResearchGate, publishers, platforms, just collect all the data, and that's not a problem. So, obviously, this was what Pyrus was about. Some of you may be familiar with it. And the idea was, why don't we collect all the data from everybody, and the P stands for publishers. And had you asked me at the time in 2009, I would have made the easiest prediction that anyone can make. The P will disappear. And it did. So, problems with it, large volume of data, need of a central cleaning house, allocation of costs. Why did Pyrus fail? Don't read the paper. The true reason is that publishers didn't want to buy into the project. Why? Because as soon as you give weight to views, you shift the value from articles that are owned by publishers to post-prints that are not owned by publishers. So, expecting Turkish to vote for Christmas is always the wrong idea. And publishers, I'm sorry to tell you, they are always several steps ahead of you. Follow the money. What is Evel Sier doing? They have bought pure, plan analytics areas. They have bought SSRN, and so on and so forth. Right. So, there is a different way of doing it. Okay. That is very simple. The problem with Iris slash Pyrus was the idea of a central cleaning house. Who maintains that, who pays for it, and so on and so forth? Well, there is an alternative way. That is cheap, absolutely reliable, and is blockchain. Okay. Now, as soon as I say blockchain, some of you will think about Bitcoin. Oh, isn't that terrible? Cryptocurrencies, billions of pounds disappearing overnight, blah, blah, blah. Bitcoin is not just blockchain. It's got all other technologies into it, and money is involved. Okay. So, but the key idea of the blockchain part of Bitcoin is very simple. It's to do with validated transaction. So, I want, Amanda, I want to send a one-bit coin to Bob, okay? Then it sends the message to a node. Can be anybody. I'll tell you more about that. Then there is a validation system. Does Amanda have one-bit coin to send? And if everything, if the rules of the game have been complied with, then this transaction is recorded on the ledger that can never, ever be manipulated, okay? No one has ever managed and will ever be able to break the ledger, okay? That's the whole point of blockchain. Right. So, why, you can see where this is going. I'm going to replace coin with views, okay? Hence, bit views, right? When you view my article, you are transferring one view to my account, okay? And all of this is done without human intervention, okay? So, cost zero. All right. So, suppose I want to see this, I'm seeing this article from an Elsevier Journal. What will happen? Counter comes in. Counter is a system for essentially cleaning up viewing data, okay? Is it perfect? No. That's another problem that you guys have. You want perfection. No. Good enough is good enough. What's wrong? Okay. Perfection is always attainable next year. Start with something that works. That's what will, it's been cut by someone. Okay. That's what will be recorded. The DOI of what I looked at, where I am, and when I've done it. Okay. So, then someone else looks at the same thing. That's what the ledger would show who looked at what, when, and from where. Okay. So, instead of this that tells me who has cited this particular article, I would be able to see this. Who has viewed the article where, and you can also have a little widget that tells you the evolution of the time, blah, blah, blah. All open data, zero cost. You can have this and do whatever you like with it. Okay. One of the problems with Bitcoin is that anybody can check the validity of a transaction. That creates a huge amount of problems that BitViews doesn't have. What I envisage is you guys and only you guys, research libraries, would be able to do the checking. When I say you, I mean your servers. No one will spend one second doing this. It's all automated. Okay. So, what about storage, blah, blah, blah, the loss of data? No. Look, can I mention SciHub in polite society? Sorry. Okay. Take the entire activity of SciHub in 2011. It's a four gig, a four gig file. Okay. I can store this on my smart phone. Right. So, you guys are worried about storage. No problem. Okay. Okay. This is all technical. I don't care. Right. So, why, if this was all that BitViews was concerned with, I might be interested. I wouldn't be excited and I wouldn't be here. Okay. What I think the true value of BitViews is, it provides an indirect way of making individual researchers want to use open access, because it is in their own interest, not because they are told to do it, not because they are forced to do it, not because they will be punished if they don't do it. Okay. Right. And essentially, this is my last point. Are there problems? Are there technical difficulties? Yes, there are, but they are all solvable, and quickly and cheaply. Okay. I'm sure you could set up a committee that would produce a report and they would tell everybody how to do it. Okay. Economic obstacles. One might say this very same problem that beset Pirates are going to beset BitViews. Guess what? The big publishers are not going to like it. Well, they will try to sabotage it. They will say, as they did for Pirates, I'm not going to give you my data. Well, I can get your data anyway. Not only that, try and tell your authors that you are trying to limit the visibility of their work when they know that they are going to be rewarded also in terms of views and downloads and citations. Right, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right. So, of course, set enough BitViews will cost a small amount of money. The Mellow Foundation has given nearly half a million dollars to a tiny, open-access, extremely niche journal in English. I need half of that amount of money to do this. Okay? But everybody thinks that it's everybody else's job to find it, so there's going to be a problem. Now, I'm sure you can do your advocacy work fantastically well, and authors will be very receptive. For example, in the UK, 25% of the REF money is going to be allocated according to non-citation impact. Every single university in the UK has got someone called a impact director, and they are scratching their heads. They have no idea what that means. All right, this would give them something to work through. Okay? But I think that there is a bigger problem with the success of this project, and that is to do with your attitude. Your attitude is this. Open access is obviously a good thing. How can you not like it? 85% of the researchers agree with you, okay? Do they practice what they preach? The answer is no. Why? Because it's not in their personal interest to do so. Okay? So, it needs a change of attitude. Instead of saying, wouldn't it be nice if we had open access? You have to make self-interested academics want open access. And that's it. Thank you very much.