Call for withdrawal of labour from publishers in favour of the US Research Works Act

Gary Hall posts a call for withdrawal of labor from publishers in favour of the US Research Works Act, which would make it impossible for the U.S. government to require public access to the published results of research that it funds:
http://www.garyhall.info/journal/2012/1/16/withdrawal-of-labour-from-publishers-in-favour-of-the-us-res.html

Among the publishers of critical and cultural theory on this list are:

Sage (who publish numerous journals in the area including Theory, Culture and Society and New
Media and Society)

Palgrave Macmillan (publisher of Feminist Review

Stanford University Press

Fordham University Press

Harvard University Press

NYU Press

Cambridge University Press

Early draft of my thesis

An early draft of my dissertation, Freedom for Scholarship in the Internet Age, has been posted here: http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/open-thesis-draft-introduction-march-2011/

Nature Publishing Group - supports scholarship, not Research Works Act, SOPA or PIPA!

Awesome news from Nature Publishing Group - NPG does not support the anti-open access Research Works Act, SOPA or PIPA.

Among the traditional scholarly publishers, NPG has been an early leader in supporting open access - and standing up for scholarship against the inappropriate tactics of anti-open-access lobbyists.  In 2007, it was Jim Giles' article in Nature that exposed the hiring of PR pitbull Eric Dezenhall and his bizarre strategies such as linking open access with government censorship, and NPG was among the first to disavow support for the ludicrous, quickly doomed PRISM anti-OA coalition attempt.

NPG has also been an early leader in supporting NPG authors' desires for open access, such as actively encouraging author self-archiving and being among the first to begin to compete in the open access environment. Following is a list of links to previous posts about NPG on The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. Kudos and thanks to NPG for being a stellar example of how a long-time traditional publisher can approach the process of transitioning to open access.

2007:

Opposition to open access continues, while anti-OA coalition attempt implodes

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/10/opposition-to-open-access-continues.html

We all owe a debt of thanks to Nature and Jim Giles (and to those who leaked the documents) for releasing the story on the American Association of Publishers' hiring of PR pitbull Eric Dezenhall, who recommended bizarre strategies such as linking open access with government censorship and junk science, strategies which have been reflected in OA opposition efforts, including PRISM. The latest on this can be found on Open Access News.

2011:

Nature Publishing Group and Scientific Reports: getting serious about OA competition

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/01/nature-publishing-group-and-scientific.html

2008:

Kudos: Nature self-archiving on behalf of authors

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2008/07/kudos-nature-self-archiving-on-behalf.html

2007:

NEJM and Nature evolving toward open access

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/nejm-and-nature-evolving-towards-open.html

Thanks to NPG's Grace Baynes for the links to NPG statements on the Research Works Act, SOPA, and PIPA.

IJPE supports the January 18, 2012 Internet Blackout

For information on how to take action, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation's page on Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation
or Michael Geist on why this important to Canadians, how and why we should take action

For more on this topic:

• Elsevier wants to shut down the free web. Scholars & librarians - let's shut Elsevier down instead!

• Protect the internet from censorship! Stop the stop online piracy act - some tips for all of us    

Updated January 17, 2012 - date change to sort at top of page. Internet Blackout day is January 18, 2012.

Elsevier: thy name is hypocrisy

The Elsevier Foundation just announced on the Liblicense list $650,000 in grants. Generous? Hang on a second - at the same time that the Elsevier Foundation is assessing medical library needs for an Eritrean future, helping Kenyan libraries serve health workers, and translating knowledge into practice for Uganda's rural health clinics, Elsevier is doing its utmost to take down PubMedCentral, which would be a tremendous loss of medical research information in the U.S. and everywhere else.

I must admit it is nice to see a little bit of graft money going to deserving folks in the developing world, and not all of it going to the likes of U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, but graft is graft, and Elsevier, thy name is hypocrisy.

When interpreting the enormous profits of STM publishers like Elsevier, it is important to take into account that the 36% profit margin comes AFTER graft pay-out, not before. This may help to explain how we can transition the whole of scholarly communication to a fully open access system - and save LOTS of money, too. Less than half of what we pay now, and up to 90% savings with a scholar-led system like most of the journals using Open Journal Systems.

A fully open access scholarly publishing system means that all of the Elsevier beneficiaries - and billions of others - will have access to all of the world's knowledge - and the opportunity to contribute, too. Let's not settle for a few crumbs, when all of us, everywhere, can have the whole pie, as is obviously doable when one copy of a scholarly work posted on the web is available to everyone, everywhere with an internet connection.

Illustrations of the global reach of the open access movement

These two charts illustrate the global reach of the open access movement. The first chart illustrates the regional breakdown of the 7,385 journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Please see below for citation information. The second chart below is from OpenDOAR, illustrating the regional breakdown of open access repositories. Note that the percentages are roughly in the same ballpark for Europe (highest percentage, 40% range) and North America (second highest percentage, 20% range), while South America ranks third for open access journals and Asia for open access repositories. As further research, it might be interesting to compare these percentages with GDP or number of researchers. With a superficial glance, it looks to me like everyone around the world is contributing roughly their fair share of open access.

Citation & permissions

The OpenDOAR chart is a January 11, 2012 snapshot of this live updated chart, copied here for comparison purposes with the verbal permission of Peter Millington from a couple of years ago. Please cite OpenDOAR and see the OpenDOAR site / project for permissions. The DOAJ chart was developed from the DOAJ country statistics. As of January 10, 2012 (my time / note OpenDOAR is in a different time zone), DOAJ lists 117 countries. The chart and comments are my own, developed for my thesis. Please cite: Morrison, Heather (2012). Freedom for scholarship in the internet age. PhD Thesis (in progress). Retrieved from: http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

The enormous profits of STM scholarly publishers

The following paragraph is a synopsis of recent STM scholarly publisher profits - and increasing profits. This is part of my open thesis - please cite as: Morrison, Heather (2011). Chapter two: scholarly communication in crisis. Freedom for scholarship in the internet age. PhD Dissertation (in progress). http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/chapter-two-scholarly-communication-in-crisis/

All are in the for-profit sector, and the profits are enormous. As reported in the Economist (2011): “ Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion—an operating-profit margin of 36%”. Springer’s Science + Business Media (2010) reported a return on sales (operating profit) of 33.9% or € 294 million on revenue of € 866 million, an increase of 4% over the profit of the previous year. In the first quarter of 2012, John Wiley & Sons (2011) reported profit of $106 million for their scientific, medical, technical and scholarly division on revenue of $253 million, a profit rate of 42%. This represents an increase in the profit rate of 13% over the previous year. The operating profit rate for the academic division of Informa.plc (2011, p. 4) for the first half of 2011 was 32.4%, or £47 million on revenue of £145 million, an increase of 3.3% over the profit of the previous year. 

Update January 19, 2012 - Simba Information reports 3.4% growth for STM in  2011 http://www.simbainformation.com/about/release.asp?id=2503

The knowledge commons: free resources & speaking notes for Tragedy of the Market - from Crisis to Commons

Free resources & speaking notes

For: Tragedy of the Market – from Crisis to Commons

Jan. 6 – 8, 2012

Unceded Coastal Salish Territory

Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre / Bonsor Community Centre Burnaby

Free resources

Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals

http://www.doaj.org

Over 7,000 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals

Open Access Archives

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

http://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/en/

Metasearch through over 30 million items from 2,000 contributors

Medicine

PubMed

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/

Free indexing services, U.S. National Institutes of Health, links to millions of full free-text documents

Medline Plus

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/

Consumer health information

arXiv (physics)  http://arxiv.org/

Research Papers in Economics (RePEC) http://repec.org/

E-LIS (library and information studies) http://eprints.rclis.org/

Open Education

Open Educational Resources Commons

http://www.oercommons.org/

Local resources

Public Knowledge Project

http://pkp.sfu.ca/

Free open source journal / conference publishing software

Ha-shilth-sa newsletter

http://www.hashilthsa.com/

BC Grasslands Magazine

http://www.bcgrasslands.org/magazine.htm

University of British Columbia cIRcle

https://circle.ubc.ca/

Simon Fraser University SUMMIT

http://summit.sfu.ca/

U Vicspace

https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/

Post-colonial text

http://postcolonial.org/

West Beyond the West (BC historical resources)

http://westbeyondthewest.ca/search;jsessionid=C7CB7EDFD2073342C83965CF1CA53EB7

  

Speaking notes 

Tragedy of the Market: from Crisis to Commons

The Knowledge Commons: Heather Morrison

What is the knowledge commons, what do I study?

            My area of study is the knowledge commons. What I mean by the knowledge commons is basically the vision that all of the collective knowledge of humankind will one day be freely available to everyone, everywhere, through the internet. My specialty is open access to scholarly communication, the works of researchers who work in universities. I acknowledge that much, if not most, of the world’s knowledge was not created by people who work at universities. This is just what I study. First I will give a very brief overview of the history of enclosure in scholarly communication. Then, I have good news to share about the dramatic growth of open access, and the free scholarly resources already available. Links to the resources I talk about can be found from my blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

A brief history of scholarship in recent decades

            From the 1600s to the middle of the last century, almost all scholarly journals were published by scholarly societies. Beginning in the 1950’s and continuing to the present day, there has been a strong trend for scholarly publishing to be taken over by for-profit companies. The commercial sector has gone through mergers and acquisitions so that now close to half of the world’s scholarly journals are owned by just four companies.

Prices have risen so that university libraries and scholars can no longer afford to buy the knowledge they need, even at the world’s largest and wealthiest universities. This is particularly true in the areas that are seen as creating profits for our society, that is, science, technology and medicine or STM. The costs of STM journals have become so expensive that libraries have had to cut back on almost all other spending, so that there is almost no funding anymore for scholarly books, or humanities or social sciences journals.

This is an inelastic market. That means that it does not bounce with the conditions of the market. If a university’s researchers are doing research in STM, the universities have to buy the journals. In 2010, Elsevier, the largest of the scholarly publishers, made over $1 billion dollar in profits alone. This was 36% of their total revenues. This is normal for the large commercial scholarly publishers. 2010 was a time when many of the people who do the work – the writing and peer review - at no cost to these commercial publishers, were losing their jobs, taking unpaid furlough or otherwise trying to manage on less than full-time salaries.

The fundamental problem is enclosure of knowledge for the profits of the few. As Drahos & Braithwaite pointed out in their book, Information feudalism: who owns the knowledge economy?, traditionally, knowledge was seen as the classic public good, with two characteristics. Knowledge is nonrivalrous in nature – if I know something and you do too, this does not take away from my knowledge. Knowledge was also traditionally seen as non-excludable; there used to be no way to enclose knowledge, to stop people from knowing things. Now, with the latest in information technology and digital rights management, knowledge can be enclosed. As Drahos & Braithwaite point out, enclosable knowledge can be seen as the perfect commodity, precisely because it is nonrivalrous in nature. You can sell the same thing over and over, whether it’s an old Disney movie or a scholarly article, and you still have the item after the sale, to keep on selling over and over again.

Open access to scholarly knowledge

One of the remedies to enclosure of knowledge is open access. Open access, as defined by open access guru Peter Suber, is literature that is digital, online, free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. There are two ways to make a work open access. One is by publishing open access in the first place. This is sometimes called the gold route to open access. The other way is to take a work published in the traditional way and put it in an archive for open access. This is sometimes called the green route to open access.

Dramatic growth of open access

The growth of open access in the last decade has been truly remarkable. There are now more than 7 thousand fully open access, scholarly peer reviewed journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, or DOAJ, and DOAJ is growing by about 4 titles every day. DOAJ is a vetted list. Librarians at Lund University in Sweden look at every title submitted for the list to make sure they are fully open access, which means that they are free from the moment of publication, as well as whether the journal practices peer review or an equivalent form of academic quality control.

When you add in all of the journals that make their back issues freely available and the journals that are not peer-reviewed, the total is over 30,000 free journals, as tracked by the Electronic Journals Library. The Electronic Journals Library is a list collectively created by a consortium of libraries based in Europe.

Here in B.C. we have a smaller list of free journals which we call the CUFTS Free! Open Access Collections, with just over 12,000 titles, created by local librarians. There is an A to Z list and the titles can also be found through the OutLook database, which is available through your local university, college, or public library.

There are millions of items available through open access archives. The world’s largest open access archive is PubMedCentral, a service of the U.S. National Institutes of Health with branches in Canada and the U.K. The long-term goal is PubMedCentral International, with the world’s medical literature available in every country and every country contributing their knowledge to all. If you search through PubMed, the N.I.H.’s free indexing service to the medical literature, you will find that by two years after publication, about 20% of the world’s medical literature is now freely available. Many journals actively contribute their whole journals to PubMedCentral, and this is a growing tendency.

Another very large archive is arXiv, the physics archive. In high energy physics, by the time an article is published, most of the physics community interested in the topic have already read it, because the physicists put their working papers into arXiv even before they submit them for publication. arXiv was started by one physicist, Paul Ginsparg. For years, arXiv has been supported by Cornell University Library, and now arXiv is moving towards sustainable funding by having all of the libraries at universities that have very active physics programs contribute. They are not yet at 100%, but they do have more than 130 libraries contributing so far, and they are well on their way.

Research Papers in Economics or RePEC is a scattered archive managed by a global collaboration of volunteers in this area. E-LIS, the open archive for library and information studies, is similar in this respect. The server and a little bit of staff time are contributed by the CILEA library consortium in Italy. A team of over 60 volunteers from 6 contents gathers the documents and looks after the quality of metadata.

Historical resources are being digitized and put online. Here in BC, we have something called the West Beyond the West portal. Through this portal, you can search for digitized newspapers and photographs.  The Internet Archive, in cooperation with the Open Content Alliance, has been digitizing public domain books for year. There are now over 3 million texts freely available. The Internet Archive also features movies and audio, some old and some that are being contributed today by contemporary creators. The Europeana project aims to digitize and make available all of Europe’s cultural heritage.

Open education is taking off. MIT was a leader in this area, making all of their courses freely available. Recently, MIT announced an initiative called MITx, which provides a means for people to take the MIT courses online on their own, and then go to MIT for exams and to obtain a credential – not quite the same as an MIT degree, but much better than not being able to afford an education.

Resources available

That’s the big picture. Some of the local resources available include the open access archives at UBC, called cIRcle, where UBC students and researchers are beginning to share their work; at SFU, there is a similar service called SUMMIT, and at U Vic, it’s UVicspace.

There are many open access journals produced locally, such as the Journal of Post-Colonial Texts founded by Dr. Ranjini Mendes of Kwantlen Polytechnic University. 

There are journals and magazines produced locally by people who may or may not be university-trained scholars that are shared openly by people who are seeking the truth, and these are very important to the knowledge commons. One example is the Ha-shilth-Sa newsletter developed by the Nuu-chalth-nuth tribal council, and the BC Grasslands Magazine, produced by a group dedicated to conservation of grasslands. 

The struggle continues – the challenges of success

Although there is much good news to share, I would not want to underestimate the challenges that lie before us. Scholars are still in a system that drives them to publish in journals owned by for-profit companies to obtain job security and advance in their careers. As I mentioned earlier, the profits of these companies have not diminished at all, and in some cases are still increasing. The very success of the open access movement to date is creating challenges, from my perspective. We are now seeing some of the commercial publishers shift from fighting open access to beginning to compete for what they must see as an open access marketplace. This may liberate more knowledge, but it is troubling to see companies competing for open access when at the same time they are still lobbying for laws that would further enclose knowledge. For example, Nature Publishing Group has a number of open access initiatives, while its parent company, Macmillan, is lobbying for the Stop Online Piracy Act in the U.S.

We are also beginning to see the entrance of new scholarly publishers. Some of these new entrants are, or have the capacity to become, producers of high quality scholarly publishing. However, there are also what appears to be scam artists taking advantage of scholars who want to make their work open access. Jeffrey Beall has started a list of Predatory Open Access Publishers to raise awareness about these practices.

On the other hand, scholarly publishing in spite of the high profits remains largely a gift economy. Scholars continue to give away their journal articles and their peer reviewing services for free. Scholarly societies are still involved in publishing close to half of the world’s scholarly journals, and could thrive into the future with a little bit of support. The Public Knowledge Project, initiated by John Willinsky at UBC with the lead development work now happening at SFU Library, is one source of such support, developing the free, open source Open Journal Systems used by more than 10,000 journals around the world, most of which are scholar-led, free or open access journals.

In spite of the current challenges, overall I think that open access to scholarly knowledge has much to offer the commons as a whole, for two reasons. First, there are the scholarly resources that are now available. Second, there is the success of the movement on a global scale; hopefully there are lessons learned from this that will be of benefit to building the commons in other areas of life. 

Thank you for listening!

References

Drahos, P., & Braithwaite, J. (2002). Information feudalism: Who owns the knowledge

 economy?. London: Earthscan.

Economist (2011). Of goats and headaches: One of the best media businesses is also one

of the most resented. Retrieved September 25, 2011 from http://www.economist.com/node/18744177/ (Elsevier profits)

Morrison, H. Retracting recommendation of Nature’s Scientific Reports. The Imaginary

Journal of Poetic Economics. Retrieved Jan. 4, 2011 from http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/retracting-recommendation-of-natures.html

(explains Nature – Macmillan and Stop Online Piracy Act, with links)

Heather Morrison, M.L.I.S., Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication

http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

hgmorris at sfu dot ca


Knowledge Commons by Heather Morrison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at poeticeconomics.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/education-is-public-good-not-commercial.html.