My PhD thesis was published today despite copyright screw-ups

Since I embrace the concept of open access very much, I published it on the electronic document server of Humboldt-University Berlin. It can be accessed here. The great advantage of doing it this way lies in the possibility of people finding your work through a google search. By putting the document on an open access server, you make the full text available to the entire internet. Fortunately for me, my science (Psychology) is internet-dominated enough to not devalue this publiation channel. From my perspective, open access has many advataes: It is quick, cheap, and ensures the highest possible range.

However, it comes with at least one issue. My dissertation contains quite a few figures. A lot of those were taken or adapted from other sources. I thus had to seek permission to reprint from the respective copyright owners. I made the worst experience with Oxford University Press. I sent them a request to use a small diagram (boxes with text) from a book they published in 1995. Their very brief reply:

I am afraid that we would not grant permission for this as it is our policy not to allow our material to be placed upon open access websites.

Simple as that, with no further explanation whatsoever. I can understand some of the reservation that copyright owners might have, but forbidding me to use a simple figure that consists of four boxes and a swirl in an academic content just because it is available on the Internet is too much. Screw you, OUP. What year do you think it is?

Because Change Happenz

I hereby make it official: I have moved to Zürich! I am based at the chair of social psychology at the Institute of Psychology at Zürich University (UZH) now. And no, that does not mean that I have handed in my PhD (although I'd say it's 99% complete). I will document my move to Zürich and my impressions on a separate blog (in German) soon. I now live outside of the European Union!

My EndNote/Word Nightmare...

...looks like this:
(translation: Not enough RAM. You cannot undo the operation. Proceed?)
Or like this:
(A COM exception has occurred)
Both windows pop up regularly when I open my PhD thesis (about 210 pages) in Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac on my MacBook (1,83 Ghz, Mac OS X 10.4.10, 1 GB RAM) and try to edit a citation. When I wrote the thesis, I did not use CiteWhileYouWrite, but inserted EndNote in-text citations like this: {Author, Year #Record} (or {, Year #Record} if I wanted to omit the author's name). It was just faster to type. When I finished my document, I clicked on "format bibliography" in my EndNote PlugIn, and Word started working, until the above COM exception occurred. Now dare you, this is a legal and fully registered Version of EndNote (I spent 100 EUR for an upgrade to Mac in January!), so I contacted EndNote support. They were friendly and asked me to send in the document and my library, which I did. Then they formatted my document on a Windows machine for me without any substantial advice on how to avoid the problem in the future. Which is not much use because some citations were arbitrary (I forgot to place the #Record) and of course they didn't get it right. So I did the following thing: I opened a clean and fresh Word document and pasted my thesis chapter-by-chapter into the new document. I avoided two citations which the EndNote support suspected for having caused the error. After every chapter (about 20 pages), I formatted the bibliography. Guess what, already after the 3rd chapter, Word started to slow down extremely, and to re-run page breaks over and over again. After the fifth chapter, both above error messages started to show up again. Citations would remain unformatted untiil I manually clicked into them, this would sometimes help. It took me an ENTIRE DAY to auto-format my bibliography and as a result I have a complete document BUT: Whenever I open the document and try to edit a reference in the text (or add a new one), Word freezes and the above errors appear. Sometimes that happens without me doing anything.

Thus, I have a frozen version of my PhD that I cannot edit. This is a complete nightmare and a catastrophe beyond belief. I now switched to LaTeX (gwTeX / TeXShop / BibDesk) and typeset the entire document again. I should have done that right from the beginning. Not only does it produce a beautiful thesis, but its also a much better workflow. My advice to everyone: Do not write your PhD on a Mac with Word/Endnote. Both pieces of software appear to be badly ported from Windows to the Mac (see here for Word), and their shortcomings in terms of performance multiply into one big piece of junk. What an annoying waste of time and money. I am frustrated beyond belief. I will NEVER EVER use Word/EndNote again for scientific purposes.

My PhD thesis

Time to sum up the process. Since updating my page at the institute is so cumbersome, I can as well do it in my blog. My PhD thesis is about knowledge: what it is, how it's represented and how to measure it. It is also about how knowledge influences performance and how knowledge overlap in groups affects group performance. I don't really have a catchy title yet but it will be something like 'structural knowledge assessment and knowledge-related determinants of performance in complex problem solving' or something similar. It basically consists of the following parts:

1. What is knowledge and how is it conceptualized in the field of knowledge management? I've written a paper with Kozo Sugiyama on this, it will appear in the February issue of the Journal of Knowledge Management. One of its core assumptions is that unconscious access to structural knowledge is part of individual implicit memory.

2. Based on that assumption, I developed a computer-based psychometric test, the association structure test, that derives a knowledge graph for a given stimulus based on free term associations and reaction times. Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite as good as I expected as I explain in a paper that I successfully submitted to the WM2007 conference. I am also co-chairing the workshop on new approaches for implicit knowledge in knowledge management (NAIK2007) with Wolfgang Scholl at WM2007.

3. Based on structural assumptions from (1), I have developed a similarity algorithm for the skillMap. The skillMap started as a Knowledge Management System envisioned by Dr. Sarah Spiekermann and I have contributed to its actual design and development. There is an own post on that project, but the algorithm calculates a similarity measure between persons based on their knowledge self-assessment. That seems to work pretty good, but I currently cannot publish anything on this as we're trying to spin off a company and sell the technology.

4. Prof. Scholl, the supervisor of my PhD, formulated some theories on how knowledge overlap inside teams influences their performance. Hy says that there is a second-order polynomial connection between cognitive similarities of team members, knowledge increase and performance. I was able to validate his claim with an experiment I conducted in summer 2006. The paper on this is completed and I am currently waiting on his feedback prior to submitting it.

I hope to turn it in in June...