Good afternoon everyone and welcome to today's webinar. My name is Chloe Hill and I'm the Policy Officer for the European Geosciences Union. I'm very happy to welcome you to the webinar today that will aim to answer all of your questions about open access. Now, if you aren't already aware, the EGU actually runs these webinars on a relatively regular basis, so about once per month. But today's webinar is a little bit different because instead of having our regular three to four panellists who present some information, it will be a one-on-one interview. And this interview series is something that we are going to do more of throughout 2021. So if you do have suggestions about particular topics you think we should focus on or specific speakers you think we should invite to one of these webinar interviews, please do let us know. You can comment down in the chat box or if you're watching the recording on YouTube, you can actually put it into the comment section down below. We really do welcome all suggestions. Now, today we are featuring Ulrich Plutul who has a PhD in chemistry from the Technical University of Graz. He is the director of the Multiface Chemistry Department at the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry and a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University. Ulrich is a founder and co-chair of the International Open Access Initiative OA 2020. He is also the founder and editor in chief of the EGU's Open Access Journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics or ACP as it is commonly known. He is also the former chair and current member of the EGU's Publications Committee. So welcome, Ulrich. Chloe for the kind introduction and good afternoon everyone. Alright, so I'm going to get to our very first question now. Now, Ulrich, you clearly have a good understanding of publishing in Europe and have been advocating for open access for a long time. Open access and open science are terms that are being used more and more frequently, but for those people who are watching today who might not know what these terms mean, can you give a short explanation of what they are, the difference between open access and open science and what a DOI is and why it's important for open access publishing? Yeah, so maybe let's start out with the biggest term that's open science, right? So this is really all sorts of open approaches to the scientific enterprise, both to the products, to the raw data, to source code, to all tools. So it really, open science essentially includes open access as a key component to which we come back, of course, later on. Then open data, meaning that you really have open access and free usage of data as they are being gathered or later on. And then also open source is coming more from the engineering sector, right, with code, but that's also relevant, of course, for scientific research. And then also the whole area of citizen science, right, involving people. So all this comes together in open science. And indeed open access was one of the very first pillars, you could say, or elements of open science, namely to give and generate access, free access and free use. So it's more than just free access. It's really getting to the stuff really, but then also reusing it properly on the web and for other purposes for scientific research publications. So usually the term open access really refers to this access and reuse of scientific research publications in journals or other formats. And then in some ways, it sometimes also includes other, for example, artifacts in museums or the like. So in the humanities, it's then used a bit broader for books and so on. But when we discuss it in the scientific area, science, technology, medicine, it's really mostly about journal articles and other publication formats that you may have. And maybe just to add still here before getting to the DOI. So open science is something very good that we should pursue at all levels, but in some areas there are some subtleties. For example, open data is a very good thing. But there is a legitimate interest, for example, for a PhD student to use their data during their PhD work and maybe also a little bit after that before sharing all their data with the entire world before they even have finished their PhD work, for example. But the postdoc is in a similar situation and senior scientists sometimes also. So open data is very good, but it's more delicate how and when to implement and so on, right? Similar with open source, whereas open access is really a no brainer because publications from the very Latin original term are meant to be publicly available. That's why it's called publication. And so in that sense, open access is really a no brainer. It was started for preprints already by the high energy physicists at CERN in the early 1990s, at the beginning of the 1990s. And then actually at EGU, we were among the very early open access proponents before even the term was coined in 2002-2003. There were several declarations for open access, but EGU already started out this approach in the year 2000. So that's quite a while back. And maybe to get back to the other part, the digital object identifier is one way and currently I think the most prominent and most widespread way of uniquely identifying individual objects on the Internet in particular or any digital object, which is of course important to keep track of different versions or so you normally want to use them different DOIs, digital object identifiers. But again, we started, for example, open access without DOIs. So we did open access publishing when DOIs were then again only starting and you can also do other naming systems that are very systematic versioning also and so on on the Internet. So DOI is really just one very important but just one way of identifying uniquely identifying objects in the Internet. Yeah. Okay, I think that's a really nice introduction into the topic, especially for those people who might not have heard the terms before. So a bit more of a personal question now, you've obviously been working in this area for a really long time. Can you tell us a little bit about what first sparked your interest in open access and why you do think it is open access publishing is so important? Yeah, yeah, that's actually a funny story in a way because indeed for us originally open access was more of a byproduct rather than a goal in itself. So when several colleagues and I really started this kind of interactive open access publishing with EGU, with the journal atmospheric chemistry and physics, we were mostly concerned about public peer review. So we wanted to make peer review more transparent, more efficient and effective, more thorough also actually. This would be a topic for a whole separate interview, I guess, but we can prove now since 20 years that this works extremely well. I mean, transparency is important in every sector of societal life, whether it's politics or anything else, right, without transparency, it's very hard to keep things straight in any kind of community and society. And so this transparency also really works very, very well in our peer review system.  On the other hand, when people have questions or even concerns, you can publicly clarify and straighten that out. So this was very attractive from the beginning. And so this was really our approach to this whole thing. And Anne Richter, who was back then the executive secretary of EGU or rather of one of the predecessors EGS, he told us young guys who wanted to start this new public peer review. He said, well, if we do it on the internet, let's make it free. These were his words and we said, oh, yeah, sure. That's nice. And so then we developed this free access so to say right in parallel to archive.org was already there for preprints and one or two journals in the physics community, the new journal of physics and a couple of other things. But these were individual really accessible initiatives on the internet. And then only a couple of years later in the Budapest Bethesda and Berlin declarations. Open access was defined like I explained it earlier on. And so then it was coined open access and then over the years I realized that even without public peer review still actually efficient peer review and discussion is more near and dear to my heart than near open access so to say. But over these many years I realized that open access alone is already really a key ingredient to modern science, not just open science. And it's a no brainer and really urgently needed, especially now in these days of alternative facts and post factual claims and so on. So we need to make public or scientific knowledge publicly accessible and usable. So, one of the, there are actually besides public peer review and this interactive approach of EGU to open access to me there are two other key issues. One is to reintegrate scientific and common knowledge, for example, to allow Wikipedia to use also good plots and graphs right mostly the contents of Wikipedia are quite okay, depending on where you look or very good even. But the graphs are not so great because they are not allowed to copy and use proper scientific graphs. And so this is one very important thing and another very important thing for science itself is to end this citation counting only go poly that we have had forever with the web of science. The ISI it was called in the past now it's clarivate analytics. These are commercial companies that provide good services for some purposes but science should not rely on one commercial company to do all its analysis of scientific output. There are also Scopus and Google Scholar, but these are all commercial entities with their own commercial interests and only open access actually allows science to regulate itself with proper citation and usage counting and how to really use and analyze scientific output. And actually, it enormously important point nowadays to go beyond this citation counting only go poly of the past with article level metrics and all these things. So I think, again, the short answer is open access is really advancing both science in itself, very much the scientific discourse and exchange, but also the outreach of science to the public and to deliver to society. Very, very passionate answer and you also you already mentioned EGU journals a little bit there and EGU has had open access publications for well over 15 years now. In 2020, EGU decided to evolve its publishing structure to include preprints and rebranded as the EGU sphere. Now, what exactly is the EGU sphere? Can you tell us a little bit how about how it works. So the EGU sphere is now really a big open access repository for all sorts of scientific content. On the one hand, you really have the abstract from conferences and the presentations from conferences you can upload. So this is really a whole microcosm or actually it's a macrocosm of scientific work at all levels. And this is something that is now in this form. Well, it's not new that the abstracts were already online, but for the presentation, it's really a new additional feature. And on the other hand, actually our journals, the interactive open access journals of EGU, since now indeed almost 20 years, I think we should also celebrate that this year actually later this year or next year at the latest, that it's almost 20 years of interactive open access publishing. And there we had from the beginning a preprint server, but it's sort of an upper class preprint server because it's a discussion form, not just preprints, but also preprints together with some preselection and discussion. This we had always with all these journals. Actually, some of the old journals of EGU did not, they had the traditional classical peer review, also no open access for quite a few years. And one more thing that we could demonstrate successfully with EGU is that you can convert traditional subscription journals into open access journals, and you can add a discussion form to any journal and convert it into an interactive open access journal. And this interactive discussion form, as we called it from the beginning in 2000, was already kind of a preprint server, but you had a preselection by editors, whether this manuscript is suitable in principle to be published later on in the journal, right? And a normal preprint server, so to say, like archive.org is the archetype of preprint servers, and now also EGU sphere will also allow to just post a paper, a manuscript, where you are not sure whether you want to go for a classical journal, for a journal somewhere outside EGU later on, or to which of the EGU journals you may want to go, or if you just want to have this manuscript there and don't even aspire for full peer review and acceptance by an editor or editorial board. And so this is now the extension. So to say that we open up for something that we had already at a higher or different level anyhow, but now we unify these across the different journals, we merge them together and open it up also for other types of preprints, not just these discussion papers or preprints, whatever you call it, that then can go into final publication in a journal. And so in a sense, it's really complementing and completing the array of publication venues of EGU, because it was also not a sudden idea. Actually, we had thought about these options, almost also since 20 years, but in the past it was just, we didn't have the capacities to do it in the same way as it is now the case. And now finally both EGU and our service provider Copernicus who does these services for EGU really wanted both to take this step forward and we're able to. And so this is great. I'm really happy that we now have the full portfolio. So to say we can offer to our members but also to any scientist on the planet. We can offer essentially any kind of publication nowadays and that's that's a great step forward. And now this is all under the umbrella of EGU sphere. Great. I'll also just mention to those who have more recently joined the conversation if you have any of your own questions to ask about halfway through my list now so if you have any of your own questions asked you can put those into the Q&A box down the bottom. But onto my next question. So a few people who are listening might already be aware that the submission deadline for the EGU Virtual General Assembly is coming up actually already next week. And in previous years some members have been a little bit concerned about submitting an abstract covering research that isn't yet published because it's going to be shared online. So some researchers worry that someone else might use their ideas and that kind of thing. And is there a risk to publishing open access data before it has been fully peer reviewed? Well, let me put it this way. There is always a risk in any kind of scientific communication and publication that in the end people might not give you the full credit that you deserve for sharing your ideas no matter which way you do it, right? So in fundamentally there is a certain risk but this risk is not so much greater than in other forms of publishing. So, and here we have to distinguish one thing is open access as such once the publication is a publication and you have it open access, there is actually no additional risk at all it's just the same risk as traditionally, right? And so it's not really related to open access but in sort of sharing things a bit earlier than after the peer review as you said. There is of course a certain risk that somebody if you then are very slow and somebody picks your idea and publishes it peer reviewed faster than you do, then you might get less credit than you deserve. That's true. But on the other hand, anything that you post on the internet in a permanent way and all of this stuff is meant to be permanently out there, the preprints and the discussion papers of our journals and abstracts and so on. It is already a publication so we had actually long nowadays the whole scientific community and not just science but also in the humanities and everywhere. One is sort of converging on the terms posting a preprint and so on, right? And to distinguish it a bit from publication but if you're really serious about terminology which is always good for a scientist, then you have to say that also a preprint is a publication, full stop, right? Because you have published the stuff so making it publicly available and it's just not a peer reviewed publication, right? And this is actually for abstracts, it's also very common. So I would say the short answer within the long one is I wouldn't be concerned at all about publishing an abstract early on because this is very common since ever actually, right? I mean a conference presentation and the abstract of the conference are non peer reviewed in our field, right? There is the electronics engineering field or so there actually these are very rigorously peer reviewed and are the main form of publishing there. But in our field it's typically a light peer review if at all, but a session conlina but then it's published out there and it always has been like that, right? And so this I wouldn't be worried at all. What is a bit more to be considered is whenever you put the preprint online, if you want to pursue peer reviewed publication to get full credit for a peer reviewed product, right? Peer reviewed article. Then you should of course keep going in order to avoid somebody bypassing you inadvertently or intentionally. But again, we had these discussions intensely in the early 2000s or in 2000, 2001 when we launched ACP with these discussion papers and that was really back then in this form unheard of in our field. But there we could convince authors also that the advantages of putting out the preprint or discussion papers outweigh the real advantages outweigh the potential disadvantages of somebody stealing your idea or so normally this doesn't happen fortunately, especially not in public, whereas sometimes if you go for hidden traditional peer review, some of the reviewers maybe competitors and your paper may get rejected and it has happened to many scientists that here or there one or the other idea did migrate without full credit. And actually this is much more of a risk in traditional hidden peer review than it is nowadays in public peer review and in posting where you can always say, hey guys, I posted this half a year earlier. So obviously I should also get some credit for this nice idea. So I think openness in the end, in the end it always helps and pays off in science and even in general. Good. So that can be some encouraging words to anyone who might be looking to submit their abstract in the next week. Absolutely. I would say go for it and then look forward to then having also the opportunity. I'm not even sure if the abstract already can be commented currently. Maybe not yet, but any kind of commenting if you haven't experienced it, you will enjoy it. Also back then really people were very concerned in the early 2000s whether our approach would ever fly, but very soon, especially junior scientists, especially PhD students and postdocs loved it because they would get immediate feedback and recognition and exchange with colleagues and so on whom they wouldn't know otherwise. So I would say just go for it and enjoy the interaction. Great. Great. So I'm going to ask one more of my questions and then one of our participants has also asked a question. So I'll get to theirs after that. So my next question is, can you still publish open access if you're working with confidential data? Now, I think you've already answered this somewhat. Hardly, yes, but let me go for it explicitly. So it's linked, it is related of open access and open data, but it's not the same thing. I think actually also some traditional subscription closed access journals demand that you disclose the data that you are using either the whole data set in a data repository or at least the data that you have in the plots in your article need to be added also in a table at the end or in the supplement or so. This is a matter of good practice in principle, both in traditional subscription journals, which hopefully won't exist much longer actually, we are working on it to convert everything into open access, which is long overdue anyhow. And then again, the open data thing is a bit more tricky, because indeed I'm also of the opinion that things where you publish data in a plot, you should make these very same data also accessible. Anyhow, people can also read it off the plot electronically and so on. It's just good practice to make that accessible. If you have more data that are just underlying your analysis. Again, for the reasons outlined before, for people who have worked for years on this project and then also would like to have a few more months or even a couple of years to work on their own data before everybody else does it. I think this is a legitimate interest, although it's also nice to immediately share data there is a balance. And so in that sense, ideally, of course, you combine open access publications, papers with open data and actually open source as well. So one of our EU interactive open access journals Geo scientific model development, which is also very successful and very visible. They actually request open source also so if you publish there a model description and evaluation, you must essentially I'm not sure if and how many exceptions they allow, you must also make the whole code fully accessible. And all journals encourage you to make data available also and code available, but we don't fully enforce it necessarily because there are again subtleties if you want to share or not. But the bottom line is you can publish in open access your article, even if you don't share the data or whatever reason and the only really good reason not to share data is indeed, if these are confidentially sensitive data that you got from some agency environmental agency somewhere who don't want to share it fully or whatever. And this is fully respected so so every journal I know of has a policy that if you have good reasons not to share your data. And then they will accept that whether it's an open access journal or a traditional closed access subscription access journal doesn't matter so also there I would say the short answer is no concerns no worries. Just double check the policy of the specific journal. And if you can make your data available as well because then you simply, you will also profit from others using your data referencing your data citing you, but also the whole planet will profit from having more good scientific data out there. Great. So I'm going to, I'm now going to move on to the question asked by a member of our audience. He says during our interest during this interesting interview, you have spoken about pre prints in physics and geosciences. Have there been some minor controversies with pre print repositories in the past, particularly with the archive X dot org archive. Now in the post truth epoch pre prints have also have also been used to disseminate disinformation. Do you have any idea about how to filter the content in the edu sphere without censoring ideas that may generate generate controversies. Thanks for the great interview. Okay. Well, thank you for the positive feedback and for the very good question indeed. And it's very, very important and valid aspect. So, first of all, in archive.org that was in the past, I think it's a bit clearer described now that was also never totally free to post anything. Because for example, there are countless attempts of, of proving a perpetual mobility or so. And they have also their mechanisms of trying to sort out and who knows I mean maybe something come up comes up one day that opens our eyes to to previously unthinkable things. But in principle, they also always had some ways of trying to keep unscientific papers let's put it like that, out of archive.org. And indeed, this issue of trying to avoid it and all other repositories by now there are a lot of repositories in various fields. All of them are all serious ones right there may be also junk repositories, but all serious scientific repositories try to keep out unscientific stuff. And so, indeed one of the reasons why at EGU we did not advance this regular repository idea so early was also within our journals also for the discussion papers you have a pre selection. And so things that absolutely make no scientific sense we tried. And I think in most cases also succeeded to keep out of our discussion forums already right so this was called access and still is access review. Into the discussion form, then you have the full public peer review, and then you can still iterate the review and then you have the final paper. Now in each year sphere, we will also have this thing and I would like to advertise to everybody present here and others please also convey the message further. We are currently inviting all scientists, I actually also registered as a preprint, preprint moderator we call it for each year sphere. In a double function so to say trying to simply experience it myself don't worry I will not take away the work from everybody else. But especially to junior scientists also to experienced senior PhD students and to postdocs who should have a little bit of experience with publishing themselves otherwise it's a bit hard to judge others work when you haven't even published your own first paper. I mean, judging the work yes but judging a manuscript as such is a bit difficult and right so. But for every junior scientist who has some experience with peer review and publishing the invite them to apply to become preprint moderators. And these will then so if people submit the manuscript it doesn't immediately go online, but somebody out there in the EU community a preprint moderator, or if people try to go then right away for a journal publication but go through each year sphere there will be multiple pathways. Then we'll have a look and say is this scientifically meaningful at all or not. Right. And so if it's a very controversial topic, but scientifically valid, then it should go in there for sure. And we will accompany it. And then one could afterwards post a commentary and official one and say, Well, this is maybe questionable or whatever right and also you would have in the public peer review of journals. You will have reviewers commenting and the editors will accept it or not and so on. This will all be transparent and visible. But the key concern, the very valid concern is not to open the doors to totally unscientific stuff denying the basics of science and so on, and and just muddying the waters essentially. And in order to avoid this we will have this is again sort of access review or moderation into the discussion forum, and we very much hope that junior scientists but again also senior scientists and meritus professors whoever will also join us and help to keep the repository the whole each year sphere at a high scientific level, but a high level from the beginning also our interactive journals were meant to attract controversial papers right so controversy is the essence of science, but it should be constructive discussion controversy is maybe already a bit intense. But still it's real progress comes then out of controversial questions and this discussions right. And so in that sense we welcome controversial manuscripts but they have to have a proper scientific level. And this we will, we certainly will achieve and hopefully very well achieve with this group of preprint moderators so again, if you haven't heard of it, please, afterwards serve on to the ego web page and there you should quite prominently see if you do a search. We'll find it preprint moderator application, and then you will be listed as a preprint moderator and you can then decide about which manuscripts should go in for just being posted or later on can go for peer review and which not and the journal editors will also support that and the Publications Committee all involved parties. Great, I think I think that's an answer we might have to share in our social media as well to get more people interested, even yes. And maybe let me add one thing because I should also advertise that we have had very good experience with our discussion forums of the interactive journals with controversial papers. There's a prominent one in ACP, and maybe still so atmospheric chemistry and physics and maybe also the most, the biggest volume of discussion of all journals so far was the paper by Jim Hansen, the climate scientist he was the first one to to to testify to us a long ago right about climate change. And he had a paper with colleagues in ACP in 2015 right before the Paris conference on the fact it unfortunately it is a fact that climate change might be quite traumatic might become quite traumatic already at two degrees C right so this was the content that two degrees C might also be an awful lot in the end, but it's an open question of course what will always difficult to make predictions, but he raised this issue and then we had for example lots of commentaries. Not lots we had a critically discussion in the scientific community and then a few comments came in from classical not only climate change but science denialists saying, there is no black body radiation no thermal radiation no nothing right so it's the basics of really of modern physics of quantum theory of a lot of things. And so we had a few of these comments. But these were surprisingly easy to stop in this formalized environment when you go to the blogosphere about this Hansen et al paper in 2015, you find thousands of comments of very awkward comments many of them. But in the in our discussion from you find a hundred comments and answers all together and and only a handful of those went really out of the scientific arena and then we also said the editor declares this thread as closed we didn't even have to block anybody or anything. And then it was closed and stopped. And so we were actually pleasantly surprised how well in a proper setting and environment like each you has and now also each use fear will be how well you can regulate a proper scientific discussion. So have a look at Hansen et al. I think it has in the title is includes the term super storms or so because this is one of the concerns that when you have a heating of climate that really storm intensity might go up. And, but you'll find it it's the most commented paper in in atmospheric chemistry and physics. I'm going to check that out after this interview for sure. So I'm actually that brings me to my last question, which is opening, opening the open access up a little bit into a broader context. So I mentioned at the very start of today's webinar that you are a founder of 2020. So I'm wondering away and 2020. 2020 and the coalition s have worked quite closely together in the transformation of open access publishing and the open access landscape in Europe. So if our attendees a bit of an overview about a and what plan s is and how the open access landscape has changed in Europe over the last few years. Yeah, let me just because here it's getting dark. So I just add a bit more light here. Yes. Let me maybe briefly go back to the beginning here. So, in principle, open access that's also very important to emphasize both within science and to the outside is a bottom up initiative right. It's self always to be a bottom up society where really scientists decide how things are run and also really the newcomers and junior scientists and so on all together. Also design the program of the General Assembly and so on and so on. And, and this I think is a high value that we should cherish and bring forward, and it's not top down but bottom up and open access itself was also bottom up so some scientists. There is Paul Ginsberg at CERN, or in the high energy community rather, they then put up this archive.org. And then afterwards various journals come came up including our ego journals, and then only after that, in the years 2002 and the scientific institutions which are still normally led by scientists so it's still sort of bottom up scientific institutions adopted the idea of open access and these declarations the Berlin declaration is the one that was signed by now almost close to 700 scholarly institutions, some of which have themselves hundreds of members. So it's a huge body, majority of leading academic institutions worldwide actually has signed up to this Berlin declaration for open access. It was at the institutional level, but still bottom up. And then from this Berlin declaration and actually the EU was one of the first signatories to the Berlin declaration also and I think it was the first. Research performing organizations like universities or research institutions and so on. And each EU was the first learned society, I believe, or one of the very first who signed up for for this Berlin declaration and demand for open access in 2003. And then over the next few years actually it was also always still also bottom up in the sense that these scientific institutions were pushing the traditional publishers to give them open access and we as each EU and some other societies and more innovative publishers anyhow wanted to offer open access also. And so, this was still a hard struggle and by the year 2013 roughly 10 years after the Berlin declaration, still only some 10% of the whole scientific output was open access, so and this is just too slow progress right we want to have open access now not in 100 years. So then in the early 2010s 2013 around we thought we need to do something more and then I co initiated also this OA2020 initiative, which is still bottom up I'm primarily a scientific researcher and university teacher and not primarily a science administrator or so. And so we said we want this we want to push forward and go for open access OA2020 is more about bringing open access to the scientists rather than pushing scientists into open access most scientists wanted anyhow if they get it right. This is the OA2020 approach. And then fortunately, we had also the exchange with with Robert John Smith's from the European Commission and or Director General for Science and and he and colleagues and Mark Schiltz and others so they science Europe is an entity that then also push this forward. And develop the plan as sort of on top of OA2020 as a top down initiative so in this case really the research funders. So these are the institutions and people running these institutions who provide funding for research projects at the universities or research institutes or wherever. Now we will also demand that people who use the public money for research, make the final product open access which again is a no brainer in principle, but it needed to be set in a good way, and in a clear way. And so it's an excellent compliment. I'm a big fan also of plan as because these compliments OA2020 and our each EU bottom up approach of offering open access to the world. This is demanding open access also from anybody who spends public money essentially that's the idea of plan as top down. And so both together have already crossed fertilized each other over the past few years. And so now we have a rapid increase of open access output, and some countries in Europe have converted up to 60 70% of the whole research output because in open access you have to count the output right what becomes openly available into open access by converting individual articles or journals or whatever. And individual institutions like the Max Planck Society where I'm working and have contributed to that also, we have now already 80% of all our output is open access. Part of it is really proper published proper open access publishing with publishers like each EU and our service provider Copernicus. And part of it are these transformative agreements where you say, I pay the same as in the past for subscriptions, but for paying you the same you give me open access at least for all my authors from my institution. And so in a, in a cost neutral way, you can convert everything to open access and then afterwards, most of these traditional publishers are much more expensive and offer less value actually than each EU Copernicus for much more money. And now actually they can do so in this protected oligopoly of subscription publishing, but by making this transformation, we will force them into a proper competition and market of open access publishing. And so then, they will either deliver much more value or both actually for less money, which is what each EU does and Copernicus offering more value, namely, will publishing with public peer review and public discussion in addition to the traditional system. But then the prices and costs of each EU Copernicus are much lower than the average prices of other open access publishers and the traditional publishers. So for orientation maybe still at the end, because all of the things that I said now in this interview I can back up with with hard numbers, trust me on this one. I won't tell you all the hard numbers from now, but just on this last item on average, every article that has been published over the past decade or so has cost the taxpayer four thousand dollars or euros it doesn't matter right this the exchange rate is that's in the noise, but four thousand is the number there right and the average Copernicus each EU article, which where the quality is on average higher this is mirrored by many parameters including impact factors and all these things. If anything, then it's better than the average of other publications. And it is actually much better than the average. It's really in the upper upper tier and and this was for less than 2000 euros right maybe only 1500 or so it was almost only a third it always depends on how you count the tax and its euros or dollars or whatever. But the bigger picture is it's half the price or one third of the price for the average article from all other publishers traditional subscription publishers, although our value visibility reuse through being open access and so on is a lot higher right you could argue multiple times higher because of the openness, but in terms of impact including impact factor and visibility and other quality metrics. It's also higher than average right so there is a huge discrepancy here and we and this discrepancy has persisted now since almost the year 2000 2001 right. So, but at least for 10 years from 2003 to 2013 much too little has happened. And now for the past few years we have ramped things up again bottom up that's us top down that's plan s. And so I'm very confident that in the near future, we will be able to establish open access at the global scale for most research publications. And as I said before, individual countries and institutions achieved already in 2020, which is why we chose the term away 2020 achieved already the goal of having a majority namely 60 to 80% already in open access so we are doing quite well. And we just need to together further momentum and maintain the momentum. And then I think we'll be there in an open access environment where we can shape science even much nicer for the near future. And I would really like to invite everyone again to engage in each use fear where we can really then shape the open access environment again in a bottom up way to the liking of scientists and in particular also junior scientists of what is good and useful for them. Okay, I think that is a fantastic place to leave this interview this webinar interview. Thank you so much for your time, Lee, and we hope to see you soon. Thanks so much. Many thanks and a happy new year to everyone.


Hi, this is your something party and we are here at open source summit in Vancouver. And today we have with us Gabriel Eleanor. You are director of developer relations at permit.io. Gabriel, it's great to have you on the show. Yeah, good to be here. Good to be at the conference. We cover permit on regular basis or, you know, audience.  So first of all, just for a lot of folks who don't know what is cedar and what is its importance when it comes to, you know, identity access management. So cedar is a policy language and mostly the first one that designed for application level authorization. So policies code is not new, right? We see the exponential growth of open policy agent with the Rigo language for a couple of years now. But most of the languages used to be for that mission level, which services can go to where and what, what is the authorization level in deployments and machine. And for the last two years, we see a trend coming up together with permit.io to do policies code also in application. Cedar language that's released by AWS show that even the tech giants believe in that idea. And this is what AWS come and say, we want application developer to declare policy instead of just write imperative policy in their software. And what does it, you know, mean for the larger community and also ecosystem that AWS has kind of released a project. AWS also has a cloud product to support cedar called AVP, Amazon Verified Permissions. But as you can see, they decided to release the cedar as an open source, which gives the whole community a chance to create better software Access control is one of the most critical aspects of software, right? We can see in the top 10 of OWASP from the day of the beginning, there is one thing that is always in the top three, broken access control. It was broken authentication and then became broken access control because authentication is already in a good place today. But authorization is still a challenge. And the way that AWS come and say, hey, we don't want to keep it for us, we want to get the community develop much safer and secured application by using our standards, by using our contracts, show how they believe that this is the future of application level authorization. How is it integrated? And what does it mean for permit IO customers? The way that AWS released cedar is a language and a library to get policy decision. This library is actually written on Rust. The product side, right? So policy is not only getting decision, it's also sync data. To get policy decisions, you need data from a lot of resources, your identity management, your billing system, CRM system, external resources, could be anything. And the way that AWS released it, right, show that they are saying, we want to give you the backbone, right? We want to give you the backbone to do what you need with us. And for permit IO is actually a great chance because what permit does in the open source area is the step above the obstruction level of policy engines, right? So there was a lot of policy engines out there. We mentioned open policy agent and now also the cedar engine. But you need a tool that helps you orchestrate everything, that helps you keep in sync the three parts, the data that you get decision based on, the policy that you declare in Git repository, and the enforcement point, the application that needs to get decisions based on. OPAL, open policy administration layer by permit IO, is actually the only tool around, which is an open source tool, that get you deploy policies in scale. And when AWS released cedar, they contact us like month before they release it and say, hey, we see that you are not trying to reinvent the wheel by developing policy languages or develop policy engines. We see that you are winning and excelling in having much better orchestration and administration around policies code. And we want your insight about what we are doing. And then when they decide to release it open source, we said, why not we will just join forces and have a better open source for administration too. So we add and support in cedar language and cedar agent, which is another open source tool that we just released in OPAL, in open policy administration layer. And for the day one, you can get a whole solution for policy as code in application level authorization. What does it mean for other tools? Are you going to prioritize this one? Or it doesn't really matter. You are totally agnostic. OPAL itself by definition. And I'm speaking now not on permit, but the open source of permit, OPAL. OPAL is actually agnostic to the policy engine and to the data that it's get. It's actually a pluggable system. You can plug policy engines and you can plug the many data sources that you want. In our plan, and also people can find it in our GitHub open issues, we are planning to add support in more policy engines. The thing about policy engines and policy languages, they are different with their purpose. So for example, if we look at open policy agent, it started as admission level language, but then shifted left into application level. This is why we based our cloud product now on open policy agent, because this is the wider support. But now we can see also Cedar, which came from the application perspective and the language and the engine is more fit for application. We can see, for example, Google Zanzibar implementations like OpenFGA that is more intent to be on a rebuck relationship based access control. We see a lot of engines out there. We are trying to priority the order of the engine that we will implement in Opal, but if someone from the community fill the need in orchestrate or administrate more policy engine, we invite them to contribute to our open source or the community open source and make Opal excel in more policy engines. When we look at the whole cloud native landscape, one more tool, one more open source tool, it's already a cloud market. The fact is that this complexity is not going to go away. There's just no way it's going to get more and more. What we have to do is to help customers deal with it, to kind of lower the benefit of entry so they can leverage it. So also talk a bit about what does this mean for complexity and once again how to make it easier for users. That's a great question. That's a great question. The thing with cloud native community is the community is the most, let's say, grow community around software. And the reason for that is because every day something new came. As you said, and as a DevTool developers, as there are people who bring tools into that space, we need to think of people as our friend. We try to make them software more simpler. And the way we are thinking of permit, we said shift left is not left, is not end in DevOps developer. We should shift left more. We should make all the deployment, all the CI CD transparent so application will have left to focus only with their application functionality. We can see now that you can create complex application with chat GPT support. So what we are understanding is the more and more shift left, the more developer that will excel in a specific domain, in a specific language and it is not any more technology domain. I don't want developer to be excel in authorization or to be excel in security. I want developer to be excel in what they need to deliver now, what the business value they need to deliver. And the way we see authorization now shifted left, so developer not need to worry anymore about the complexity and they just simplify all the need with low code tools, a tool that can just deploy with one row of deployment script and then use it with no complexity and more bugs in the application as a good way to go. And this is why we believe that the cloud native now that you can see we've been in Kubecon like two weeks ago and we see more and more developer that are not DevOps developer that coming there. You see for example platform engineering. Many people in platform engineering now are not DevOps developer. They are developer authentication system, they develop authorization system and again the reason for that is we are shifting left the simplification of creating complex implications. One more thing I want to ask you before we wrap this up is also when we talk about complexity, complexity also translates into cost and companies are once again becoming more and more cost effective. So how is permit also making that this is not another cost center that once again not just a complexity but helping companies also tame their cost? Again, great question. The thing about cost is fun because if you look today we are deliver much more software than before, right? We all for decades in the area, in the landscape of software development and we see that the amount of the functionality and application that we are developed has exponential growth and in the other end we have more and more developers that work on stuff and also the cloud cost is actually grow and grow and as a DevTools developer I don't want application developer to pay more. I want them to deliver more functionality, right? So if I'm developing an application for developers in my developing DevTools my first set of mind is that I don't want them to give me money. I want them to deliver more functionality and this is actually the key to get back to the previous question is simplicity. The more I'm simplifying the way to deliver better software the more I create way to deliver more functions. More functions equal low cost. Gabriel, thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about Cedar Project. Permits you know involvement in the product early on and how you are making it easier and also not easy help with complexity and also cost. So thanks for those insights and as usual I would love to chat with you again soon. Thank you. Thank you. See you soon.


Hi, I'm David, I'm Stacy, and we're from Leeds, England, and you're watching Trucker Josh Vlogs.  Who likes bananas?  What? The other boys missed out. They didn't even hear me peel the banana back. That's a first. They must be tired. I'm the handsomest monkey. I'm a big, handsome, fluffy, good boy. Are you? Look at me. I got a new outfit. You want to show them? I do want to show them. What do you think, Diesel? I thought we told you to stay in your house. I am so sorry. Oh. You're okay. He probably wants to go in there anyways. I put a cushy blanket in there. You were just wondering, you were wondering what was going on. You heard your winky something about banana.  I'm a monkey too. We'll have another one later, and I'll give it to you. Alright, so we're going into town. We've got to run some errands today. Maybe we'll look good while we do it. Oh, that butt. I'm allowed to say that because I'm married to you. Yeah? They can't even judge me. Well, most of my audience is men, so... You're welcome. I could make them all uncomfortable right now. Twerk, babe. No, that's too far. That's too far. Take it too far. I want them to keep watching. So we're just running around town. This is our curling club in town here. I've never actually... No, have I been inside? I might have. I have a feeling that my sister's wedding reception was in there. You have a feeling, or it was? I don't know. I have a feeling I've been in there for some time before. It was like 17 years ago, so... It makes sense why you might not remember. 17, 18 years? You know, I'm not a Ford fan, but that Mustang Cobra. It actually looks like a snake. It looks like a cobra. It's pretty nice. It looks nice. It doesn't have any Ford logos on it, so that's a Ford I'd buy. If I was into muscle cars and stuff. That is really nice. I like that new design. So this is the Centennial Arena. This is where Steinbeck wants to build a new 2,500-seat arena. 3,200-seat max event center. But no parking lot. With 600 parking spots. 3,200 people are going to be in there. Right in the middle of town. They're just as smart as Winnipeg. Building things right in the middle of town where there's no parking. Yep. So I was actually interviewed by our local news station. I'm going to turn in here. Interviewed by our local news station about this. And my biggest criticism was that this is a terrible location. Because this outdoor rink, they'll still have an outdoor rink. It'll be in the back. That was some people's concern. And this arena is old, but it's still functional. And I think the more arenas the better. We have two indoor arenas and at least one outdoor. But they want to tear this older one down and leave that one. And then build a 2,500-seat arena right here. And we have so much space in Steinbeck like Highway 52. We have all kinds of vacant land. They could build anything down there. We have an abandoned Safeway building. A big grocery store that's just abandoned. Huge parking lot. Knock that down. People coming around me and parked in the middle of the lot here. He's wearing those white shades that you like so much. And he's got a fart can on the back of this car. Hey, that's cool. I was a cool dude when I had my fart can on my Cavalier. You know, and another thing. The theater's here on the other end of the arena. And for some reason they decided to build a one... One room theater. Yeah. One cinema. You can only see one movie at a time. It's never open. It's so silly. And the seating is terrible. Yeah. We don't want to sound like we're being all super negative. These are great things. I'm really glad we got a nice cinema in town. That's better than nothing. This new facility. I'm actually in favor of it. I'm really glad that they're going to build this new arena. We need that in the southeast of Manitoba. It's just... I just think that when they're making these decisions, they're not asking enough people maybe. They're maybe not getting enough opinions. They're doing the same mistake that Winnipeg did with their event centers. They built their arena. Their hockey arena downtown. No parking. We've got to use all these different... Parkades. Parkades.  And what if it was raining? I could bring an umbrella. Okay. What if it was minus 30? What if you have a child and it's minus 30? And you're going to like Disney on Ice or something.  They didn't really think that out. I understand they want to revive downtown. The Bomber Stadium. The new one. Yeah. The football stadium. 50,000 seats. 4,000 parking spots. The one and only time. Really? I had to... One and only time I ever went to a bomber game. We had to walk like two miles to get to the stadium. It's cold up here. And these event centers are necessary. They're great. They're awesome. But they don't think about the parking. We're a very rural community here. So we don't have any public transit in Steinback. We don't have any buses. Taxis are pretty expensive for the average person to take all the time. People are coming in here. Yeah. Everyone drives big pickup trucks. A lot of farmers coming in. A lot of that rural community. Everybody's going to be driving. Now we've got 3,200 people coming to an event center here. And only 600 parking spots. So maybe I'm trying to play devil's advocate. Like it's a great idea. But what about this? What about this? Did you think about this? What if we did it over there? All of these problems would be fixed. But nobody asks me. Nobody asks me. Yeah. Actually they did. They did. I got contacted by Steinback online for an interview. And they included my opinions. But it's not like it's going to change anything. They've already... I'm sure they've already got the permits and the contracts to knock this down. And build their event center here. Everything's set in stone already. So now they announced it to everybody. And now everybody's like, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? Nobody asked us. If you would have asked us first, we would have told you that's not a good spot at all. But... And all of these residential streets around here are all going to be plugged with people. Yeah. Sorry for the people that live nearby. But again, I don't want to sound like I'm being all negative because it's a really great thing. It's just... Well, it's awesome that our city... It's not technically our city. We don't live right in town. But you know, it's nice that the city wants things for people to do. And you know, it's a good sense of community. But you know, they need to think about location and convenience. Yeah. But other people think differently than us too. I mean, 600 parking spots. There's another 600 across the street there at our credit union that you can use in non-business hours. That's only if SCU doesn't one day decide, okay, we want our parking lot back or we're going to charge you to park. Yeah. But that's anyways. We're just talking about this because we're right in the area. And this is sort of like the big news of the town right now. If you're from southeast Manitoba, you've heard of this new event center. Everyone's really excited about it. And everyone's sort of over bypassing the fact that, you know, when there's a nice concert in town, where are you going to park? Yeah. It's minus 40 outside in February and you want to go to a concert with your kids. I'm selling my tickets. You got to park across town. But yeah, anyways, that's figured I just mentioned that. I am excited for the event center to come up. It's something new in town. It's going to be big. There's going to be a 500 seat banquet center in there. This old thing. It doesn't even look that old. They're taking good care of it. Yeah. It's in decent shape. This is the arena. I played hockey games in this arena when I was a kid. Lot of memories. And then they built this new one over here. That's the dinosaurs from the year. Yeah. So it's exciting. And figured I just mentioned. What would you guys think? You think it's better to build downtown with little parking and people can sort of just figure it out? Or what would you say? What's your opinion? Anyways, that's the talk of the town. Now you know what's going on in Steinbach. We're going to Mr. Q restaurant. I'm meeting my mom here for lunch actually. This is a newer Chinese restaurant in town. All day buffet. It rhymes. It rhymes. Yeah, so we're going to go give them our money. Just because it rhymes. Oh, it's closed. It said all day buffet. That's lies. Monday closed. All day except Monday. They could have put that in the rhyme. That would have been great. It would have flowed. All day except Monday. Okay. Well, no all day. No money for them today. I guess we could go to Lee's. Lee's? Well, let's get a hold of mom. See where she wants to go. Mom had requested this place. He did. We're taking her out for lunch. I mean, it's Chinese after you. Hey. Anyone going to come say hi to me? Hey. Hey, Deja. Whoa. Hey, buddy. Chevy. Hey, buddy. Hey. Whoa. Hey. Big Frank. What are you doing, buddy? The wiener's back there somewhere, but I think he went into the bathroom with breath. I'm going for a walk. Well, let's see what the creek's up to. Had a little bit more rain again. So I guess we'll see what mother nature's up to out here. What the beavers are up to. All these trees losing their leaves. Man, it's thinning out quick. Got to mow this lawn one more time this season yet sometime this week. Well, it's still pretty high. I'd love to go swimming in that pond already. I could just jump in, I guess. Not now. Where are my new pants? Look at this, hey? So much water. Oh, and this fell through even more. Even more of this is falling down now. Careful, Chevy. This fell down. It was just that little section there before. This fell in, and look at that. This is falling in here, too. Yeah, it's eating away. Eating away at it all the way out to where? All the way out to at least here. Whoa. Yeah, that's soft. That's really soft. That's going to fall in. This whole section here. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, and right where that rapid is there. Most of you have seen this already. Yeah, that beaver dam is completely demolished. This little dam here is washed away. I guess the beavers have sort of gave it up. Good victory. We'll build your dam elsewhere. Far, far from here. Somewhere, maybe on like crown land where no one's going to care. How about that? There's our creek. Some of you have asked if this land there is all ours, too. Yes, it is. All of this and the ways behind there. There's a big open grassy area behind these trees yet. And over there is mostly all forested. Yeah, we got a big chunk here. And that side is actually a lot bigger than this side that we have. We own more property on that side. We just got to build a bridge to be able to get across to it. Because right now there's no way of accessing it. But in the next couple of years we're going to build a bridge down over here.  Because we want to go and cut down these dead trees on this side.  What do you guys think? What do you guys think? Hey, hey, what do you think? Diesel, what do you see? What do you see down there? I think there's been a beaver here, man. It smells very beaver-y. It's been beaver somewhere. You're hiding. What's a beaver? It's heavy. Beaver is like a very large rodent. It's a pest.  Very smart. They're very smart, but they're very damaging to property. Very damaging because they won't take your dead trees. They'll take your best live trees because those are the best trees for their dams. Well, we ventured further down the creek to a place where I haven't really been to yet. Sort of trekking through the long grass and I found where those logs ended up. So I came down from over there, ended up over here right in my shadow. So I don't know if the beaver put it here or not. It looks like they just sort of collided here and just sort of got stuck here. There. Chevy, don't go in the water. Chevy, don't go in the water, buddy. Mom would be so mad. You get the whole house all wet, man. I'm taking a break right here.  Good idea, Diesel. Good idea. Let's keep going. No time for breaks, man. Five-second break. That was good. Gotta be careful. It might get lost out here. We're on an outdoorsy trek. A little bit of a hike going through our bush here. Diesel, don't go in the water. How do I got to keep reminding you? I guess you want to swim, man. Don't go in the water. Don't go in the water. There's some kind of pathway here, beavers, I guess. Oh, boy. Don't go in the water. All right. Diesel, back up. Can you go back here? I don't see. Okay. Very nice. Very nice. Found so many little beaver highways in here like this. They come out of the ground. Pardon me. Where they come out of the water? Onto the ground. And up into the bush. We just trucked right through all of this bush.  They're big guys. These two guys are troopers. Okay, let's keep going. We can't go here. Chevy, no. You go in the water. Mom's gonna be so mad. I'm so mad. Come on. Come on. I shouldn't have brought my shades in there. Ouch. Okay. Careful, careful, careful. There you go. And we've got to find a way to get up this hill, buddy. You coming with us, Chevy? We've got to find a way up the hill. Awesome. I'll ferry you off four-wheel drive. Oh, and you can do it. You can do it, buddy. I can do it. You can do it. Come on. Good boy, Diesel. Good boy. You figured it out. You figured it out. Good boy, Chevy. Good boy. Okay. Oh, there's a little trail here. Looks like from deer. Oh, I can't get up this hill. Oh, I need four-wheel drive. Okay. Okay. Okay. We made it up the hill. Cool. Never gone that way before. What do you know? A trail? Hey, guys, this place looks familiar, right? How'd we end up here? Where'd we come from? This is the trail here. Got to remember, I'm going to widen that. All right, guys, that was fun. That was fun. A little bit of an outdoors trek. Let's go this way now. My two little hikers, come on. Come on, my backwoods, country boys. Come on, let's go. That was actually pretty fun. I love just walking through the bush exploring. Oh, except for this bush. We've got to clean this up. You know, I actually want to go further in there. I got to be careful because this is the area where I got that bad poison oak in spring. So I am wearing long pants, long sleeves. That should be okay. And once again, I'm just finishing up this vlog, just finished putting it together. It's been beautiful the last couple of days. Today is no exception. Absolutely wonderful outside. It was a nice, nice day to go for a little outdoorsy trek. I might do another one tomorrow. Tomorrow's look, I'm not too sure. Because that was only one little part of this side of the creek. I'd like to take you guys to the other side of the creek. It's just, I don't have a bridge yet. So I've got to go all the way, ways around, or I got to like wade through the creek. That'd be the fastest way just to like go through it. But the creek is so deep right now. I'd have to swim across it. So eventually we'll have a bridge. You're probably not next summer yet.  I'm going to be sanding down this whole deck here and restaining it. Not painting it, I don't know, stain it. All the way around. And this deck goes all the way around the side of the house over there. Like where we do our barbecue and stuff. And then like I said in other vlogs, this back door is going to go a sliding door right in here. So that we have a back door in the house, right? So I'm building a big deck back here. All the way where that wall is over there where that G is. Deck's going to go out about 12 feet, maybe 16. 12 to 16 feet out, depending on how far out these trees are. I have to measure it. Pretty much right up to those trees though. And all the way along, all the way to over there, you see our gazebo. It's going to line up with that. And there's our deck over there. It's going to meet up with that. So there's going to be one deck all the way around the house.  That's the big project for next year. We also have to do our garage roof either next summer or the summer after we're doing it to match the roof of our house. And we got to paint our house or redo the siding. I think we're going to paint it because it's got good aluminum siding on it. So we probably just paint it, get away with that.  And then we got to do the garage to match as well.  It's driving me crazy that we got a different roof on our house and we're doing our garage already and different color siding. Drives me nuts. I guess I got a little bit of OCD. It's all going to match. So anyway, thanks for watching today. Give it a thumbs up if you liked it. Still a lot of home time content coming yet before we get back on the road. But don't worry, I know the comments are coming, so I'll answer them right now. Yes, we are going to get back to trucking. Yes, we will get back in the truck. No, not right now. We're going to be at home for a while. Life as a trucker is like when he's not trucking. We'll see you later. Thanks for watching. Hi, I'm David. I'm Stacy. And we're from Leeds, England. And you're watching Trucker Josh Vlogs.


Appalachian Wireless now has new forward pay prices where you can pay up front and get the data and features you desire. Five gigabytes of data, just $39.99, unlimited, just $79.99, better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. The Letcher County Fiscal Court today approved purchasing an 80-foot steel bridge to replace this one that collapsed a month ago. In a special meeting, the Letcher Fiscal Court approved an emergency measure to purchase a new bridge to replace the Perkins Branch Bridge. The court also approved bidding out the installation of the bridge. The original span, the only access into Perkins Branch from adjacent Kentucky Highway 7, was damaged by flooding in February and collapsed in early March, stranding dozens of families across Rockhouse Creek at Jeremiah in Letcher County. This bridge is longer than the other bridge and we can spread out and it don't have a centerpiece, so it'll keep all that blocks, which is part of the problem for catching it on the centerpiece. I know the residents of the families of that community should be very happy too. I know we worked hard. We had to wait till our emergency money was, we got confirmation on our emergency money so that we could be able to purchase the bridge. A Perkins Branch resident attending Wednesday's Fiscal Court meeting was happy to hear the news about the new bridge. We realize, you know, times are hard and money is tied, but through their efforts, looks like we're going to get a bridge and I'm so thankful for that. It's hard for us to get in that. We don't, like I said, we don't even have a walkway out of the holler when the low-water bridge washes out. That temporary low-water bridge washed out about three weeks after it was installed, but has since been repaired. The new bridge, which will cost around $77,000 plus installation costs, will restore permanent access to Perkins Branch. I think everyone would agree that it is an emergency down there for these families. We drive the low-water bridge. It has washed out once already. Now this frame, we're getting this frame here to say it's not going to wash out again, so I believe this is the appropriate way to get these folks access to their homes as quickly and affordably as possible. Judge Executive Jim Ward said he hopes to have the project completed in about six weeks. In Letcher County, Chris Anderson, EKB News.


What do you do for work? I'm a product owner. So you own a product? No. Then why are you called a product owner? If it wasn't for me, the backlogs would be all messed up and the stakeholders at the sprint review would be like, ah, and scrum would pretty much be obsolete. I don't know any of the words that you just said.  Put the scrum inside it, mix it around, add in a peppering of product value maximization. You get this, you get a product owner. But you never said what is a product, like what is the product you're selling? Different materials. Oh my God.


From the Conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Venetha Srivastava. There are a lot of folks who watch Netflix and they see the recommendations list and they're not necessarily part of these conversations and they will just watch it and never know that there is this other discussion happening. Life is that new dark comedy series that everyone is talking about. When the show premiered this month, it was the show on Netflix. The series follows two LA strangers, brilliantly played by Ali Wong and Steven Yan, who get into a road rage incident and end up in an escalating feud. It's a beautiful meditation on life and survival that highlights universal issues of alienation and loneliness as well as class and race and gender. Critics have lauded beef for its performances and for its revolutionary representation of Asian Americans. But with the show's success has come a horrifying story about one of its supporting actors, David Cho. Over the weekend, a Twitter storm erupted about an old podcast episode featuring Cho. In the 2014 podcast, Cho vividly relays a sexual assault story where he is a perpetrator. In years past, he has said that the story is fiction and he has even apologized.  Unfortunately there has been no response from the producers of beef, which include co-stars Ali Wong and Steven Yan. But the controversy continues to swirl and raises questions about whether the brilliance of beef will be overshadowed by Cho's past. Joining us today to discuss this is Michelle Cho, an assistant professor of East Asian studies at the University of Toronto. She specializes in Korean film, media and popular culture. Also with us is Bianca Mabute-Lui, a PhD student in sociology at Rice University with a background in Asian American studies specializing in racial justice work. And before we get started, just a note to our listeners, this episode contains discussions about gendered and sexual violence. Welcome to you both. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Bianca, let's start with you and then let's talk about beef. What did you think of the show and how did you feel when you saw it? Even before it came out, very excited about it. I was on a trip and texting my partner, don't start this show without me waiting for me to come home. The day after I came home we binged it in two days, which I don't know if I recommend because it's a very intense show. I mean it was very exciting to see this huge range of humanity in the cast because there were so many Asian American characters. I think a few things that stand out are the intricacies and nuances of being part of the Asian diaspora. So that includes interracial socioeconomic conflicts and dynamics of working class and upwardly mobile, as well as intricacies of little comments about, oh, is your husband Japanese? And if you understand history, you know how loaded that is. And then as someone who studies religion and sociology of religion, I mean my colleagues tonight were just having a field day, analyzing the church scenes and what it means for people and what a formative space it was, whether you've experienced harm from the ethnic church or still are enthusiastically part of it. There's no doubt that it is an important piece of a lot of our immigrant communities. That scene with Steven Young in the church, where it just breaks down, it's, I think it's, I mean I've never seen anything like that, it was so beautiful. Yeah.  How does beef stand out for you from other TV shows out there? A lot of commentators on the show have remarked on the fact that the Asian-ness of the main characters is, you know, it's portrayed in ways that counter ethnic stereotypes or especially the model minority stereotype. And while the character's immigrant experience or Asian-American experience is very important to the specific experiences that they're having on screen, they're not necessarily drivers of the plot. And so in some ways their identities are incidental. So I think that's pretty unique. And on the other hand, because I am Asian-American, I definitely related to a lot of the experiences that I saw, especially because I spent my grad school year, so almost a decade in Southern California. And so I really understood the specific references that were being made. But I also researched Korean media and K-drama is huge nowadays. And so I am accustomed to seeing characters who are Asian but have lots of different things going on and don't always have to represent a certain group or category. So it's thing to compare these two realms of Asian representation and how much they are both becoming mainstreamed. That's what me and my partner did during lockdown as we turned to K-dramas. Like sometimes you just want to see good whole representations, especially of Asian men, which I feel like beef does so well. It really disrupts some of those common stereotypes of Asian masculinity. One of the other things is that depiction of anger. There was an article I read last night in Huffington Post and the writer's name Ian Kumamoto, who talks about this idea of finally a show that depicts Asian-American rage. And how important that is. You know, it's interesting because I read a review in The New Yorker by In-Goo-Kong, who's a Korean-American film critic, who characterized the show as focusing specifically on male experience. As in my viewing, I didn't necessarily think that was the case. And so I think it's kind of subjective. I found it a really compelling portrayal of Asian-American women's experience or female rage and the nuances of living in a world in a society that expects a certain type of docility and a placid surface and then fighting to keep anger and other difficult emotions, negative emotions contained. That dynamic was portrayed really successful, I think, by Ali Wong. To add on to that, I think the rage part was cathartic and thrilling in many ways, right? And like you said, Michelle, from Ali Wong's character's perspective, the suppression of the rage, especially with her, the person that she's trying to make this deal with and the response to the Orientalism in the art world that is part of her life. I think I just related a lot to that as an academic and predominantly white field and institution and academia. It's like visceral. You feel it in your body, right? The suppression of your just very natural reactions to the Orientalism, tokenism that happens in our industries. And to see her just go off unhinged was extremely cathartic for me. Yeah. She really holds it together. You're talking about the deal she's trying to make with the wealthy white owner, the woman who's going to buy her business or says she's going to buy her business and how polite she has to be with her. So let's just say that we all felt very moved by this show and we loved it for many reasons. And I wonder in the post lockdown era with the rise of anti-Asian violence, does this show also represent a response in that to some way as well? I have interpreted the show as a commentary on the way that isolation produces really differing realities, like the kind of common space of intersubjective experience seems to have been really diminished by the ways that we were forced to be by ourselves or be in these very small units. Bianca, I know you're doing all the work to try and educate the public on issues of anti-Asian violence and also interracial dynamics. And so I wonder if you were connecting the show to what's been happening in the last few years. It makes me think of Cathy Park-Pong's thesis of minor feelings and also racial melancholia, a lifetime and generations of indignities and pain and racial trauma and grief that during the pandemic, because of the visibility and heightened attention on the attacks for many people, that all of the minor feelings in the melancholia related to racialization was suddenly pulled open, brought to the surface like a womb that was reopened. And so I kind of thought of an interpreted beef in that sense, that with the events and the attention in the last few years, it finally gave a lot of Asian Americans and Asian diaspora communities an outlet and an awareness to name all of these things that they actually have been feeling for many, many years. That's beautiful. Thank you. I want to turn to the larger picture this year after the Oscars, a very large moment for Asian American representation in Hollywood. Everything, everywhere, all at once, also produced by the same production company that did beef, took home many awards. Michelle, can I ask you to talk a little bit about how Asian American representation has changed in Hollywood over the last decade? That changing consumption habits in North America because of streaming platforms, because of, you know, a kind of cutting the cord as it's called colloquially in media studies has exposed people to a lot of different types of representation that don't necessarily come from their local media industry that has really expanded audiences, interests and varied representation, especially of Asians. So I feel that things have shifted a lot just in the last four or five years. So a lot of people will talk about the Korean film Parasite by director Bong Joon-ho as a watershed moment because that film was awarded the Academy Award for Best Picture. It became very visible as a foreign film that nonetheless had a lot of residents locally and would not be pigeonholed. So I think that having media from Asia, just a lot more commonly seen and consumed has also, I think, changed the horizon of what's possible, I think, in Asian American productions. So if we're talking about, you know, how we've moved to be from Crazy Rich Asians, which was also celebrated as a kind of big Hollywood studio buy-in into a film that featured Asian Americans, that film actually brought in and involved a lot of Asian film stars, Asian celebrities, it takes place in Singapore. You know, it's really a hybrid, I would say. And it also kind of presented a pretty limited scope of representation. I think our views perhaps are changing on that particular work now that we see what else is possible. Bianca, do you want to add anything? Thinking about it from an educator's point of view. I remember teaching Asian American film in 2018 and how that was for a lot of my students, Asian or not Asian, their first exposure to any ethnic studies class and a gateway where we got to talk about, yes, Crazy Rich Asians, but also white supremacy and imperialism and all these other very important things. My hope is that it does create on-ramps for people to know that it's not the end goal to have an Asian face at the Oscars. Although that's very important, but that it gives us opportunities to talk more about things like representation, power, racial identity and racism. There's a slightly cynical part of me that thinks about A24, for instance, as this studio that is really becoming the center of Hollywood. If you look at the way that the studio and its productions kind of swept all of the major awards at this year's Academy Awards, which are the industry kind of awarding itself. But nonetheless, the people who are in power ultimately are the people who have been in power in Hollywood for decades.  I'm really glad that film like Everything Everywhere Out Once won the kind of popular and critical claim that it did. But I just have some reservations. So we might have gotten great success in representation last year, but it didn't necessarily shift the balance of power or who makes decisions about what gets made next. Right. Who the access points are or, yeah, who grants the opportunities. So shall we move on to this latest conversation about beef? Beef added another layer. I think to these to this new representations that we've been seeing of Asian Americans, perhaps at a time when it when we really needed it. And then the news broke that David Cho, supporting actor in the series, told a story that he says is fiction about assaulting a black female massage therapist, whether or not it's fiction or not. I don't think it matters. It's the fact that he told the story out loud. Can I turn to you, Bianca, to ask you what you think the news of Cho did in your mind to the brilliance of beef as a series? For me personally, I think it took a day or two for me to process and acknowledge it. It felt weird because I was like, why am I so grieved by this?  What I've seen, but since then unpacking it the last few days, I feel like I have this parasocial relationship with Alie Wong and Stephen Yuen, right? Where I've loved their work in the past. They seem like really great people to me who I would be friends with. And these are people who endorse this terrible person and employed and protected him. Right. And so that part felt hard. There was this disappointment in these public figures that I looked up to that they were actually part of this culture and even mob of silence that protects abusers. The second thing that I started interrogating was, unfortunately, this brand of very violent misogynist and anti-black toxic masculinity when I think about Asian American men. I have seen that in our community before. Michelle, actually you've spoken about this a little bit, this brashness of masculinity, this representation, that this is not the first time this kind of trope has been around, that some of this brashness may be a response to the demasculization of Asian men in the West. I was kind of thinking about how it's the case that someone like David Cho was able to continue to work in Hollywood or continue to get opportunities to be a public figure. And I think that also in kind of looking at some of the reactions to this news and seeing a lot of Asian Americans who and others actually who are kind of forgiving of Cho because they say, oh, he apologized, he reflected on things, which I don't really actually think he did, or the apologies are very partial. I think the support comes from this desire to see a prominent Asian American kind of bad boy figure who is pushing against stereotype and walking around with this kind of like braggadocio that is appealing because it refutes a certain longstanding image of Asian men as effeminate and as emasculated. You know, I kind of went back to look up information about David Cho, whether or not he had resurfaced before beef. And in fact, yes, he had a Hulu series. It was picked up by FX and then Hulu as an opportunity for him to continue to enact that irreverent and unrepentant politically incorrect persona that he has really clung to and maintained. I also, you know, went back and looked at his appearance in the Korean American chef, David Chang's Netflix series, Ugly Delicious, and the kind of things that he was saying there. And incidentally, he appears in an episode of that show with Stephen Yan. Oh, eating Korean barbecue in Los Angeles. And so you see these connections, his irreverence is celebrated by a certain subset of viewers or fans. There has been some scholarship actually on the specifically Asian pickup artist community or Asian American men who have become kind of prominent as like coaches and spokespeople for this form of masculinity. And it's very clearly a kind of reaction to the many hurtful stereotypes that have been circulating for decades of Asian men as as emasculated as never an object of desire, you know. And so it's it's pretty complex because there is that kind of historical backdrop and set of structural forces. And so in that sense, I feel like it's really important for us to think about David Cho as part of a structure and a system and not so much just this, you know, a singular individual who is perpetrating acts that are disconnected from his social context and also larger forces that could produce what we have here today, which is a clearly abhorrent statement and way of talking about and treating women and specifically a black woman in this case, and then, you know, the kind of silence around it and people continuing to work with this person and think of him as a valuable contribution to the world of Asian American representation.  So I'd love to hear what you what you want to say. Well, first of all, I did not know the extent to all of his activities in the past few years. That's wild. I was also thinking about how Asian American women and feminists in particular have been actually calling out David Cho for the last nine years. I think of how Jen Fang on the reappropriate blog wrote about this very interview nine years ago and the structure of this toxic patriarchal violence and misogyny that Michelle is talking about is also what conditions the silencing and dismissal of women who have been talking about this. So you're saying there's actually there's been quite a lot of work has been done in the past to try and hold Cho accountable. Yes, people have been writing and talking about this exact behavior from him.  So that's that's also hard to write what we have going on here, I think, is this dynamic in which any criticism that gets directed at him ends up being useful to him in certain ways. As confirmation, again, of his anti-establishment image, we see this argument deployed a lot these days. So. So do you think that this is going to impact audience reception of beef? Can we start with Michelle and then go to Bianca? For some. Viewers, absolutely. But I think that I am seeing more endorsements and praise and just excitement about the show in mainstream media outlets and, you know, criticism and think pieces. And I also think that there are a lot of folks who watch Netflix and they see the recommendations list and they're not necessarily part of these conversations and they will just watch it and never know that there is this other discussion happening. That's what pains me a bit because clearly it hasn't affected the production enough that it prompts a response from the people who made this show. Do you think this is going to affect the bottom line, Bianca?  Most of what I've been seeing has been on Twitter and social media. And those reactions, though, should not be dismissed because there's very real harm that was caused. And you see that in people's responses that it did impact and it is impacting their perception of the show. And particularly among women of color and black women, it is making it so that they can't watch the show because it feels violent to them. I think, you know, in this instance, maybe it should affect how we receive the show, that these things shouldn't always be separated, but we should take into account the entire process, similar to how, you know, structures of Orientalism and white supremacy and immigrant experiences are part of the show storyline. Those are all also things that are part of what conditioned and made the show and here, very clearly, larger structures of patriarchy and misogyny and anti-blackness are part of the context that we live in and that this show exists in. And so I think, you know, we can, as a culture and as a community, we're capable of having these nuanced discussions. And I hope this incident instigates those dialogues and, you know, moves on beyond did this happen or not happen, right? But that we can actually have these difficult conversations. So, you know, will this have any impact on the power structures in Hollywood at all? It's funny because I, in preparing for our conversation today, I was really looking for these kind of visible traces of the network that brings Ali Wong, Stephen Yen and David Cho together prior to this, because I think a lot of the conversation has been. But I love Ali Wong. I love Stephen Yen. We shouldn't blame them, right? And both of them are executive producers for beef. So they are both cast in it and they have some responsibility for how it came about. And Ali Wong is also a guest of David Chang on Ugly Delicious. And so there's just this kind of like tight web. It kind of shows us that within Hollywood, it makes sense that there would be a close knit community of actors, celebrities, public figures who are trying to work together and kind of join forces to be more visible and to bring alternatives in terms of representation to the media consuming public in North America. But if the way that they do that is to. Sidestep these hard questions, I think two things can be true at the same time, beef is is a really great show and we shouldn't participate in, you know, the project of brushing this stuff under the rug or kind of sidestepping it for the sake of some larger goal of continuing this momentum of Asian American representation in Hollywood. And so I hope that these conversations will continue, even if there's also a sin what beef is doing really well. The other thing that I wanted to say about David Cho and the way that he is like, how did he get cast? Yeah, how did he get cast? There's also this way that he is so he's he's presenting this bad boy. I break stereotypes and he talks about this actually often, like I'm the opposite of the model minority, but he also deploys a very kind of Western understanding of the the kind of lone genius artist. And I'm glad that we here are saying it doesn't matter if it really happened or not. The fact that he told this story as a form of entertainment. Is all we need to know. And that's the violation and that's the violence itself. So, yeah, that that image of the kind of elliptical and mysterious artist genius is also a part of, I think, why he continues to be able to work and be a figure that is public such that some viewers are going to take him as an example. I think that's really the danger that that I'm most concerned about. That people will sort of hold him up as kind of a role model, a type of role model. And Bianca, do you agree that these two things can exist at once? Yeah, the show meant a lot to people. And what does it mean to move forward with future projects and as a community to continue to, you know, strive for excellence in the art and the stories we produce, really believe in this like interconnected kind of, you know, that we're all interconnected to each other. But also to history and legacies and structures and what's going on in the world and that those things should be considered when making decisions like casting. Because they are considered in the stories we tell, transformative justice also teaches us to center the people who felt harmed. So specifically, you know, survivors, massage workers also thinking about, right, like what happened in 2021 and the vulnerability of massage workers that we learned about because of the Atlanta shooting as well as Black women and others who felt harmed. I don't know. And it doesn't seem like David Joe is in a place to be having these transformative justice conversations and go through a process of accountability. But what does it look like for us as a community and maybe even Hollywood as an industry to take this incident to really center these folks who feel harmed by what he said? I want to thank you both so much for all of the time and the thought that you've put into this conversation. It is very it is a very deep conversation. And I feel the heartbreak myself, I feel your heartbreak too. And I feel the coexistence, you both put it so well that these things do coexist together. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. I don't know about you, but I found that conversation with Bianca and Michelle incredibly thoughtful and enlightening. After listening, will you be watching or continuing to watch beef? Let me know. I'm on Twitter at Rightvenita. That's W-R-I-T-E-V-I-N-I-T-A. If you tag our producers at ConversationCA, they can get in on the conversation too. Don't forget to use the hashtag Don't Call Me Resilient. If you'd like to read more about the episode, go to theconversation.com. We have more information in our show notes with links to additional stories and research. If you like what you heard today, please tell a friend or a family member about us and please consider leaving us a review. Those ratings let others know that we're worth listening to. And if you're not already doing so, please follow us so that you don't miss any episodes coming up. Finally, if you have any ideas about news stories that you'd love to hear us cover, we'd love to hear from you. Email us at dcmr at theconversation.com. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab. The lab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Vinitha Srivastava. Bokeh Saisi is our producer. Oli Nicholas is our assistant producer and student journalist. Jennifer Morose is our consulting producer. Our audio editor is Remitula Sheikh. Attika Kaki is our audience development and visual innovation consultant. And Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Baki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.