We open access advocates are unanimous in the goal of universal open access to the world's scholarly knowledge (at least in its peer-reviewed journal article form, for now). However, at times we differ about the means. Some of us favor a focus on rapid transition to a fully open access, more efficient and effective scholarly communication system - what some call the gold road of open access publishing, and Harnad refers to as the premature gold rush. Others, like Harnad himself, favor beginning with the traditional scholarly publishing system as it is, with authors self-archiving in open access archives to expand open access beyond what is provided by library subscriptions. (I fully agree with both positions!).
So what does this have to do with Elsevier? Simple: Elsevier is "green" on open access and hence the darling of the green roaders. As long as Elsevier supports this approach, the open access archives first supporters are likely to support Elsevier. However, as we saw recently with the Research Works Act, Elsevier is quite capable of doing its best to attack the open access mandates that are critical to the green road. If Elsevier keeps up this attack on open access mandates, it's a matter of time the green roaders become gold and join us in the Elsevier boycott - where they will be most welcome!
So what are the options for Elsevier? They can either support - or at least not attack - the open access mandates that are coming, particularly the U.S.' FRPAA and the growing institutional open access mandates movement, and keep the support of the green roaders - or they can attack the mandates, and face a much more united open access movement. I think that this is what people like to call "between a rock and a hard place".
Of course, Elsevier could follow the lead of other major commercial scholarly publishers such as Springer, Wiley, Nature Publishing Group, and others, and aim to compete in the obviously emerging open access marketplace. This growing tendency towards OA competition is a topic that I speak to in a bit more depth in the 4th chapter of my draft dissertation, open access as solution to the enclosure of knowledge.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
Elsevier numbers illustrate - once again - just how much more sense open access makes!
Elsevier today wrote a letter to the mathematics community, hoping to woo scholars away from the still-growing boycott, The Cost of Knowledge, now that Elsevier has publicly disavowed its support for the Research Works Act which would have forbidden the U.S. government from requiring public access to the results of research it pays for. In its letter, Elsevier commits to lowering the costs of articles in its mathematics journals to at or below $11 US per article. This sounds like a pretty reasonable step when you consider that this is just over a quarter of what Elsevier currently charges. However, when you compare this with the potential of open access, you can see how ludicrous this model really is today. If every research library in North America were to purchase a copy of an Elsevier article at $11, this would add up to $1,386 - more than it would cost to pay the PLoS ONE article processing fee for full open access to everyone, everywhere. Or, if an undergrad class of 150 students were required to purchase this article to read for class on a pay-per-use basis, the total would come to $1,650 - that's $300 more than what is needed to pay for the article to be fully open access through PLoS ONE - for access to just one class. In summary, this move by Elsevier just shows how ludicrous the current model is. Plus - why just math, Elsevier? There are many of us who signed the boycott who are not mathematicians!
Details
In the section on pricing, Elsevier commits to lowering the costs of articles in its mathematical journals to at or below $11 US per article or 50-60 cents per page.
As a for-profit corporation reporting to shareholders, I think it is reasonable to assume that Elsevier would not make such a commitment unless this cost was sufficient to not only cover costs, but return a profit. Does this mean that the current $37.95 charged for one article in Elsevier's Advances in Applied Mathematics is close to 4 times more than what Elsevier itself feels is necessary to recoup costs and make a profit? This does seem consistent with Elsevier's high profit rates.
If every one of the 126 members of the Association of Research Libraries were to pay $11 for an article in mathematics, the total would be $1,386. That's higher than the article processing fee for a fully open access article at PLoS ONE at $1,350 per article. In other words, a high quality, U.S.-based publisher working out of San Francisco (not a cheap place to live or work, I hear), can provide full open access for everyone in the world at less than it would cost to have one copy of an article at every large North American research library, at Elsevier's proposed reduced rate which is just over a quarter of what they currently charge. This is yet more proof that this old school business model of Elsevier's just doesn't make any sense any more, not even with this little modicum of tweaking after significant pressure from mathematicians like Timothy Gowers.
Another scenario: if an undergrad class of 150 students were required to buy a $11 mathematics article to read for class on a pay-to-read basis, the cost would be $1,650. In other words, the pay-per-view costs for just one class to read an article would exceed the PLoS ONE article processing fee by $300. Multiply that by all the millions of students in the world, and it's easy to see how the Elsevier model means either outrageous costs or needless barriers to mathematical knowledge, or, more likely (as things stand now) some of both.
The section from the Elsevier letter on pricing:
Details
In the section on pricing, Elsevier commits to lowering the costs of articles in its mathematical journals to at or below $11 US per article or 50-60 cents per page.
As a for-profit corporation reporting to shareholders, I think it is reasonable to assume that Elsevier would not make such a commitment unless this cost was sufficient to not only cover costs, but return a profit. Does this mean that the current $37.95 charged for one article in Elsevier's Advances in Applied Mathematics is close to 4 times more than what Elsevier itself feels is necessary to recoup costs and make a profit? This does seem consistent with Elsevier's high profit rates.
If every one of the 126 members of the Association of Research Libraries were to pay $11 for an article in mathematics, the total would be $1,386. That's higher than the article processing fee for a fully open access article at PLoS ONE at $1,350 per article. In other words, a high quality, U.S.-based publisher working out of San Francisco (not a cheap place to live or work, I hear), can provide full open access for everyone in the world at less than it would cost to have one copy of an article at every large North American research library, at Elsevier's proposed reduced rate which is just over a quarter of what they currently charge. This is yet more proof that this old school business model of Elsevier's just doesn't make any sense any more, not even with this little modicum of tweaking after significant pressure from mathematicians like Timothy Gowers.
Another scenario: if an undergrad class of 150 students were required to buy a $11 mathematics article to read for class on a pay-to-read basis, the cost would be $1,650. In other words, the pay-per-view costs for just one class to read an article would exceed the PLoS ONE article processing fee by $300. Multiply that by all the millions of students in the world, and it's easy to see how the Elsevier model means either outrageous costs or needless barriers to mathematical knowledge, or, more likely (as things stand now) some of both.
The section from the Elsevier letter on pricing:
Pricing
Mathematics journals published by Elsevier tend to be larger than those of other publishers. On a price-per-article, or price-per-page level, our prices are typically, but not always, lower than those of other mathematics publishers.
Our target is for all of our core mathematics titles to be priced at or below US$11 per article (equivalent to 50-60 cents per normal typeset page) by next year, placing us below most University presses, some societies and other commercial competitors. Where journals are more expensive than this, we will lower our prices, as we already have in recent years for journals such as the Journal of Algebra and Topology and its Applications, among others.
We realize that this is just part of the concerns about pricing -and we will seek to address concerns about the nature and composition of the large discounted agreements, through which most Universities now access journals - but addressing the base line pricing is a necessary first step.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Darkroom and open disclosure: two library solutions for dealing with copyright extremists
Elsevier, the scholarly publisher currently being boycotted by close to 7,000 researchers, does not appear on the exclusions list of the copyright extremist group Access Copyright. To me, this raises the question: are Elsevier and ilk receiving monies from Access Copyright in addition to the substantial fees paid by libraries for subscriptions, and if so, is this a breach of the typical "entire agreement" clause in a library license? Since Access Copyright does not tell us who they are giving money to, why not ask when we purchase? We could call this an "open disclosure" policy. Whenever libraries are purchasing or subscribing to resources, let's ask - IS this really the entire agreement, or are you looking for money from copyright collectives, too?
Of course, open disclosure would be most effective if it were practiced by Access Copyright. If people knew who they are representing (rather than who is excluded), then we could take appropriate actions. Such actions could include:
Of course, open disclosure would be most effective if it were practiced by Access Copyright. If people knew who they are representing (rather than who is excluded), then we could take appropriate actions. Such actions could include:
- not buying their stuff
- buying their stuff if we must, but putting it away in the most dark, remote corner we can find, in a separate room covered with stern warnings like: "These materials are covered by Access Copyright". Don't even THINK about copying!
- set up a bank of computers that people pass by on their way to the dark room featuring open access resources
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Could the University of Iowa Libraries save over $2 million from their subscriptions budget with a flip to open access?
Thanks to Wendy Robertson at the University of Iowa Libraries for posting some very useful information about their library's expenditures on journals.
This post is an informal research collaboration designed to build on Robertson's work, explore the cost of a full flip to open access for this particular university and some of other not yet quantified possibilities that may be of interest along with a flip to open access.
By my calculations, the University of Iowa Libraries could save over $2 million dollars or 60% of the expenditures for journals listed on this web page with a full flip to open access, paid for entirely out of the library budget, assuming a mixed model composed of half of the articles published in the scholar-led publishing sector as illustrated by OJS (Edgar & Willinsky), with an average per-article cost of $188; and the other half published using an article processing fee with the PLoS ONE fee of $1,350 as an average. It is assumed that 1,960 articles were published by the University of Iowa Libraries in 2010, based on a Google Scholar Advanced Search.
More information would be most helpful to refine my calculations. In particular, it would be really helpful to have a better estimate of the number of journal articles published by the University of Iowa faculty in a given year. If anyone has data to help with this project, please share! In order to facilitate this sharing, I plan to turn on the comment feature on my blog. For calculations, download the data. Method note: the reason I used the 2008 google scholar article numbers is because this was the highest count in recent, i.e. to obtain a conservative figure.
Food for thought
I argue that we need to look for savings in the process of transition to open access, because libraries have many new areas where funding is needed, such as services to support research data, preserving electronic information, research commons type services and embedded librarianship.
One of the reasons why the scholar-led publishers that are the primary users of Open Journal Systems have such a low per-average article cost is that many are built on efficient, not-for-profit library publishing services. Perhaps the transition to full open access will open up opportunities for our librarian colleagues? For example, I hear that there are (understandably) many concerns about potential layoffs at Harvard's libraries. Getting into publishing could be a great freelance opportunity for some of these highly qualified people - after all, who better to help libraries make the transition to OA than our own professional colleagues? Or, I wonder if Harvard has considered that this might be a good time to grow their own publishing services? Then they could simply transition acquisitions budgets into funding for new opportunities to retain their own great staff.
Speaking of job opportunities, growth in the not-for-profit publishing sector could open up many a part-time or full-time opportunity for some of our faculty members, too - no doubt this would be very welcome considering the impact of the financial crisis on university professors. I wonder if even those who have secure jobs themselves might like the idea of transitioning high profits for commercial publishers into more and/or better job opportunities for their colleagues and graduating students? We could spend a lot more than that average $188 per article and still save a bundle, too!
For more of my writing on the economics of scholarly communication in transition to open access, please see this draft chapter of my open thesis.
Reference
This post is an informal research collaboration designed to build on Robertson's work, explore the cost of a full flip to open access for this particular university and some of other not yet quantified possibilities that may be of interest along with a flip to open access.
By my calculations, the University of Iowa Libraries could save over $2 million dollars or 60% of the expenditures for journals listed on this web page with a full flip to open access, paid for entirely out of the library budget, assuming a mixed model composed of half of the articles published in the scholar-led publishing sector as illustrated by OJS (Edgar & Willinsky), with an average per-article cost of $188; and the other half published using an article processing fee with the PLoS ONE fee of $1,350 as an average. It is assumed that 1,960 articles were published by the University of Iowa Libraries in 2010, based on a Google Scholar Advanced Search.
More information would be most helpful to refine my calculations. In particular, it would be really helpful to have a better estimate of the number of journal articles published by the University of Iowa faculty in a given year. If anyone has data to help with this project, please share! In order to facilitate this sharing, I plan to turn on the comment feature on my blog. For calculations, download the data. Method note: the reason I used the 2008 google scholar article numbers is because this was the highest count in recent, i.e. to obtain a conservative figure.
Food for thought
I argue that we need to look for savings in the process of transition to open access, because libraries have many new areas where funding is needed, such as services to support research data, preserving electronic information, research commons type services and embedded librarianship.
One of the reasons why the scholar-led publishers that are the primary users of Open Journal Systems have such a low per-average article cost is that many are built on efficient, not-for-profit library publishing services. Perhaps the transition to full open access will open up opportunities for our librarian colleagues? For example, I hear that there are (understandably) many concerns about potential layoffs at Harvard's libraries. Getting into publishing could be a great freelance opportunity for some of these highly qualified people - after all, who better to help libraries make the transition to OA than our own professional colleagues? Or, I wonder if Harvard has considered that this might be a good time to grow their own publishing services? Then they could simply transition acquisitions budgets into funding for new opportunities to retain their own great staff.
Speaking of job opportunities, growth in the not-for-profit publishing sector could open up many a part-time or full-time opportunity for some of our faculty members, too - no doubt this would be very welcome considering the impact of the financial crisis on university professors. I wonder if even those who have secure jobs themselves might like the idea of transitioning high profits for commercial publishers into more and/or better job opportunities for their colleagues and graduating students? We could spend a lot more than that average $188 per article and still save a bundle, too!
For more of my writing on the economics of scholarly communication in transition to open access, please see this draft chapter of my open thesis.
Reference
Edgar, B. D., & Willinsky, J. (2010) (In press). A survey of the
scholarly journals using
open journal systems. Scholarly and Research Communication, Retrieved August
27, 2011
from http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2773
Monday, February 13, 2012
A way of saying "this is open access"
In honour of the 10th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 14), here is a way of saying "this is open access" based on BOAI. I am hoping that this kind of approach can lend clarity and avoid some of the complexities that come with Creative Commons licensing. In brief, the basic idea is to make a statement that a work is made open access in accord with the definition and the spirit of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. People can link to BOAI, or copy the text; and add specific permissions if these apply.
Here is an attempt at such a license for my scholarly blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics:
This blog is open access in the definition and spirit of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Note that sometimes I copy bits from other peoples' works, so please watch for this as my permissions apply only to my own work. What the definition and spirit of BOAI means to me is that you are free to take my work and reuse it, with attribution, as long as you make any copies or derivatives freely available and with the caveat that you may not sell my work, or place it behind a paywall.
Following are the relevant excerpts from BOAI -
Statement of spirit (intent)
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
Definition of open access
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
This statement does not (yet) replace my CC-BY-NC-SA license for IJPE, but is rather presented as one idea to help in the struggle to Articulate the Commons. Comments are welcome - join me in Google G+ for discussion.
Here is an attempt at such a license for my scholarly blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics:
This blog is open access in the definition and spirit of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Note that sometimes I copy bits from other peoples' works, so please watch for this as my permissions apply only to my own work. What the definition and spirit of BOAI means to me is that you are free to take my work and reuse it, with attribution, as long as you make any copies or derivatives freely available and with the caveat that you may not sell my work, or place it behind a paywall.
Following are the relevant excerpts from BOAI -
Statement of spirit (intent)
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
Definition of open access
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
This statement does not (yet) replace my CC-BY-NC-SA license for IJPE, but is rather presented as one idea to help in the struggle to Articulate the Commons. Comments are welcome - join me in Google G+ for discussion.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
PLoS ONE is in the lead...but could a well thought out noncommercial approach give a competitor an edge?
PLoS ONE has often been the source of attention on IJPE and elsewhere, becoming in 2010 the world's largest journal then doubling in size in 2011, publishing close to 14,000 articles that year. No wonder PLoS ONE is leading the new tendency to competition in open access, attracting a number of clones.
No doubt many a competitor is wondering how they'll ever get a edge when PLoS ONE is so far ahead - that's my guess as to why Mary Anne Liebert is starting out by providing free publishing services.
So here is a thought - could a well thought out noncommercial approach give a publisher an edge over PLoS ONE, with its insistence that all authors accept the CC-BY license? There just might be something to this. My own perspective is that as an open access advocate of course I want to freely share my work - but not for sale! My preference for including the noncommercial element in a CC license is by no means unusual - my understanding is that NC is the most popular of the CC elements. I've even been thinking that when I next get around to doing some writing to submit for publication, I just might go for Nature's Scientific Reports rather than PLoS ONE - much as I like PLoS and PLoS ONE, Nature will let me have my preferred NC license, and PLoS ONE won't.
When we scholars come up with our own open access mandates, sharing our work, "but not for a profit" is part of the deal, as illustrated by the leader with this approach, Harvard, and MIT. This kind of suggests that scholars don't want to give away their work to just anyone to sell for a profit, doesn't it?
So what would a good noncommercial policy look like? First of all, if authors are paying to make their work open access, then it should be open access, and the copyright (including any reserved commercial rights) should belong to the author. This would protect the publisher from having a competitor take their whole journal and use it for commercial purposes that would undermine the working publisher's revenue streams, while making it clear to authors and funders alike that the purpose is not to sneak in other enclosures for the purpose of making more profits.
This is a concept I am just starting to explore. Comments are welcome, via email at hgmorris at sfu dot ca. This post is part of the Articulating the Commons series.
No doubt many a competitor is wondering how they'll ever get a edge when PLoS ONE is so far ahead - that's my guess as to why Mary Anne Liebert is starting out by providing free publishing services.
So here is a thought - could a well thought out noncommercial approach give a publisher an edge over PLoS ONE, with its insistence that all authors accept the CC-BY license? There just might be something to this. My own perspective is that as an open access advocate of course I want to freely share my work - but not for sale! My preference for including the noncommercial element in a CC license is by no means unusual - my understanding is that NC is the most popular of the CC elements. I've even been thinking that when I next get around to doing some writing to submit for publication, I just might go for Nature's Scientific Reports rather than PLoS ONE - much as I like PLoS and PLoS ONE, Nature will let me have my preferred NC license, and PLoS ONE won't.
When we scholars come up with our own open access mandates, sharing our work, "but not for a profit" is part of the deal, as illustrated by the leader with this approach, Harvard, and MIT. This kind of suggests that scholars don't want to give away their work to just anyone to sell for a profit, doesn't it?
So what would a good noncommercial policy look like? First of all, if authors are paying to make their work open access, then it should be open access, and the copyright (including any reserved commercial rights) should belong to the author. This would protect the publisher from having a competitor take their whole journal and use it for commercial purposes that would undermine the working publisher's revenue streams, while making it clear to authors and funders alike that the purpose is not to sneak in other enclosures for the purpose of making more profits.
This is a concept I am just starting to explore. Comments are welcome, via email at hgmorris at sfu dot ca. This post is part of the Articulating the Commons series.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Mary Anne Liebert enters the open access megajournal competition
Mary Anne Liebert has just announced their entry into the open access megajournal competition with Bioresearch Open Access on a loss leader (no article processing fees - yet) basis.
Highlights
My comments, in brief: this development is most welcome, as yet another example that open access has moved into a competitive phase for the commercial sector. Commentary on the APF will have to wait until one is announced, but note that anything above $1,300 U.S. will not be competitive with existing options such as Nature's Scientific Reports and PLoS ONE. It is hard to assess the terms based on the description from the announcement. My advice to Liebert is to use a CC license, leave copyright with the author, and clarify what "noncommercial" means as the current CC NC terms are much too broad. My recommendation is to limit noncommercial to no resale and clearly state that there is no intention of limiting educational use.
Details
Description from the announcement:
Welcome to Mary Anne Liebert and Bioresearch Open Access - yet another example that open access has moved into a competitive phase for the commercial sector. Comment on the article processing fee will have to wait until this is announced, but note that anything above $1,300 U.S. would not be competitive with similar services such as Nature's Scientific Reports and PLoS ONE. The default $3,200 optional open access fee for other Liebert journals suggests that this publisher has yet to take OA competition seriously. This article processing fee is nearly double the BioMedCentral standard fee of $1,895 U.S., for example, and six times the article processing fees for many of the journals published by the profitable Hindawi Publishing Company.
The description of terms Users may access, download, post, and redistribute article as well as adapt, translate, text- and data-mine content contained in the article, for noncommercial purposes needs to be clarified before serious commentary is possible. Questions that I see as needing an answer:
1. Who retains copyright? (My advice: with open access, the author should retain copyright).
2. Will a CC license be used, and if so, which one? Presumably NC, but this is not totally clear.
3. If Liebert is not planning to grant blanket commercial rights, what does this mean, exactly? Note that I fully support the CC Noncommercial license, providing that the intent is limited to prohibiting resale and that it is clear that educational use is not considered commercial. Unfortunately, this is not clear with the CC Version 3.0 licenses - I hope that this will be corrected for Version 4.0, but in the meantime clarification is necessary. The language that I use for this for IJPE http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/education-is-public-good-not-commercial.html is available to anyone for this purpose on a public-domain basis (tweak as you like, citation optional).
Thanks to Daniel Mietchen for the head's-up.
Highlights
My comments, in brief: this development is most welcome, as yet another example that open access has moved into a competitive phase for the commercial sector. Commentary on the APF will have to wait until one is announced, but note that anything above $1,300 U.S. will not be competitive with existing options such as Nature's Scientific Reports and PLoS ONE. It is hard to assess the terms based on the description from the announcement. My advice to Liebert is to use a CC license, leave copyright with the author, and clarify what "noncommercial" means as the current CC NC terms are much too broad. My recommendation is to limit noncommercial to no resale and clearly state that there is no intention of limiting educational use.
Details
Description from the announcement:
BioResearch Open Access is a journal of broad interest that has been launched to overcome unnecessary barriers to the immediate availability and use of research. BioResearch Open Access makes all content freely available to researchers worldwide. There will be no article processing fees for articles submitted prior to May 15, 2012. Article processing fees to cover the cost of publication may be announced after May 15, 2012.Comments
All articles in the Journal will be deposited upon publication, without embargo, to PubMed Central. BioResearch Open Access is fully NIH-, HHMI-, and Wellcome Trust-compliant.
Benefits to authors:
- High visibility: immediate universal access, high citations, downloads
- Accessible to researchers in low-income countries
- Fast-track publication opportunity
- Global marketing and publicity for your article
- Podcasts or Skype videocasts on selected articles
- Users may access, download, post, and redistribute article as well as adapt, translate, text- and data-mine content contained in the article, for noncommercial purposes
Welcome to Mary Anne Liebert and Bioresearch Open Access - yet another example that open access has moved into a competitive phase for the commercial sector. Comment on the article processing fee will have to wait until this is announced, but note that anything above $1,300 U.S. would not be competitive with similar services such as Nature's Scientific Reports and PLoS ONE. The default $3,200 optional open access fee for other Liebert journals suggests that this publisher has yet to take OA competition seriously. This article processing fee is nearly double the BioMedCentral standard fee of $1,895 U.S., for example, and six times the article processing fees for many of the journals published by the profitable Hindawi Publishing Company.
The description of terms Users may access, download, post, and redistribute article as well as adapt, translate, text- and data-mine content contained in the article, for noncommercial purposes needs to be clarified before serious commentary is possible. Questions that I see as needing an answer:
1. Who retains copyright? (My advice: with open access, the author should retain copyright).
2. Will a CC license be used, and if so, which one? Presumably NC, but this is not totally clear.
3. If Liebert is not planning to grant blanket commercial rights, what does this mean, exactly? Note that I fully support the CC Noncommercial license, providing that the intent is limited to prohibiting resale and that it is clear that educational use is not considered commercial. Unfortunately, this is not clear with the CC Version 3.0 licenses - I hope that this will be corrected for Version 4.0, but in the meantime clarification is necessary. The language that I use for this for IJPE http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/education-is-public-good-not-commercial.html is available to anyone for this purpose on a public-domain basis (tweak as you like, citation optional).
Thanks to Daniel Mietchen for the head's-up.
Saturday, February 04, 2012
The American Economic Association tackles ethical conflicts - good for AEA
At a recent meeting of the American Economic Association, the AEA began tackling some important ethical issues, according to this article in The Economist.
Excerpts:
Economics has internalised the views of rich patrons, according to Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago. His scathing analysis of journal publications revealed that papers providing justification for high executive pay were 55% more likely to be published than those opposed, and were more heavily cited by others.
A paper presented by Atif Mian of the University of California, Berkeley, Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago and Francesco Trebbi of the University of British Columbia, laid out why good policy is often most difficult to implement in the wake of a financial crisis...a redistribution of wealth from creditors to debtors could potentially benefit both groups by averting a deep downturn. Yet even though debtors are many, such redistributions are few. Effective lobbying by a few, concentrated creditors helps hold back a populist tide: a few powerful banks, for instance, may be better able to influence legislators than millions of homeowners.
Comment: this is very interesting, and lends support to something I am thinking about but have not yet written about, which is that the current situation of extreme and growing inequity is not good for anyone, not even the 1%. For example, what good will extreme wealth do for the 1% when everyone's favorite island nation getaways are under water due to global warming? If we continue on our current path of destroying our precious water supplies through using increasingly dangerous methods of obtaining oil and gas such as hydraulic fracturing or putting pipelines to carry oil sands oil - with leaking inevitable - right through key watersheds as per the first Keystone Pipeline proposal - it is only a matter of time before all of us are drinking poisoned water and eating food supplied by poisoned water - including the 1% and their loved ones*. The only sane way forward, from my perspective, is to remove the divide between the 99% and the 1% and become one, or the 100%, living and working in harmony with each other, and with our environment.
* perhaps the 1% is thinking no problem, they will just buy what little clean water and food there is left and to heck with the rest of us. My response: from whom will you buy this? A company that puts profit before everything, and is subject to no government regulation? (postscript Feb 4 2012).
Thanks to Kyle Thompson for the pointer to the Economist article.
Excerpts:
Economics has internalised the views of rich patrons, according to Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago. His scathing analysis of journal publications revealed that papers providing justification for high executive pay were 55% more likely to be published than those opposed, and were more heavily cited by others.
A paper presented by Atif Mian of the University of California, Berkeley, Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago and Francesco Trebbi of the University of British Columbia, laid out why good policy is often most difficult to implement in the wake of a financial crisis...a redistribution of wealth from creditors to debtors could potentially benefit both groups by averting a deep downturn. Yet even though debtors are many, such redistributions are few. Effective lobbying by a few, concentrated creditors helps hold back a populist tide: a few powerful banks, for instance, may be better able to influence legislators than millions of homeowners.
Comment: this is very interesting, and lends support to something I am thinking about but have not yet written about, which is that the current situation of extreme and growing inequity is not good for anyone, not even the 1%. For example, what good will extreme wealth do for the 1% when everyone's favorite island nation getaways are under water due to global warming? If we continue on our current path of destroying our precious water supplies through using increasingly dangerous methods of obtaining oil and gas such as hydraulic fracturing or putting pipelines to carry oil sands oil - with leaking inevitable - right through key watersheds as per the first Keystone Pipeline proposal - it is only a matter of time before all of us are drinking poisoned water and eating food supplied by poisoned water - including the 1% and their loved ones*. The only sane way forward, from my perspective, is to remove the divide between the 99% and the 1% and become one, or the 100%, living and working in harmony with each other, and with our environment.
* perhaps the 1% is thinking no problem, they will just buy what little clean water and food there is left and to heck with the rest of us. My response: from whom will you buy this? A company that puts profit before everything, and is subject to no government regulation? (postscript Feb 4 2012).
Thanks to Kyle Thompson for the pointer to the Economist article.
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Should we copyleft our personal information - including our bodies?
Data mining is a growing trend, and we can soon expect to see demand for data mining more personal information than we have seen before, such as our personal health information. My question is, should we all collectively copyleft all of our personal information, including our bodies (DNA), so that anyone who finds a way to make useful services from our information, has an obligation to provide these services in a way that benefits us?
For example, I submit that if a government or health organization authorizes the use of personal health data for research purposes leading to a commercial product, then the producer of that product has an obligation to make it available to those who provided the health information. This would not necessarily mean for free; it could mean reasonably affordable.
Could an approach like this strengthen the position of social goods such as health care?
This post is part of the Articulating the Commons series.
For further related reading, see this article in The Scientist which inspired this post:
http://the-scientist.com/2012/01/24/opinion-occupy-science/#disqus_thread
And also this post, Occupy Science | The Scientist by Dale Dougherty
Excerpt:
Genomics research increasingly depends on access to large pools of individuals’ genetic and health data, but there is mounting dissatisfaction with governance approaches that erect barriers between donors and the biomedical research in which they are participating. Typically, participants have little or no opportunity to track how their data are being used, what discoveries result, and what the new knowledge might mean for them, even when findings are of life and death significance for the participant...
For example, I submit that if a government or health organization authorizes the use of personal health data for research purposes leading to a commercial product, then the producer of that product has an obligation to make it available to those who provided the health information. This would not necessarily mean for free; it could mean reasonably affordable.
Could an approach like this strengthen the position of social goods such as health care?
This post is part of the Articulating the Commons series.
For further related reading, see this article in The Scientist which inspired this post:
http://the-scientist.com/2012/01/24/opinion-occupy-science/#disqus_thread
And also this post, Occupy Science | The Scientist by Dale Dougherty
Excerpt:
Genomics research increasingly depends on access to large pools of individuals’ genetic and health data, but there is mounting dissatisfaction with governance approaches that erect barriers between donors and the biomedical research in which they are participating. Typically, participants have little or no opportunity to track how their data are being used, what discoveries result, and what the new knowledge might mean for them, even when findings are of life and death significance for the participant...
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
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
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
Sunday, January 22, 2012
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/
Friday, January 20, 2012
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.
Thanks to NPG's Grace Baynes for the links to NPG statements on the Research Works Act, SOPA, and 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
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
2008:
Kudos: Nature self-archiving on behalf of authors
2007:
NEJM and Nature evolving toward open access
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
IJPE supports the January 18, 2012 Internet Blackout
or Michael Geist on why this important to Canadians, how and why we should take action
For more on this topic:
Updated January 17, 2012 - date change to sort at top of page. Internet Blackout day is January 18, 2012.
Monday, January 16, 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.
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.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
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 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.
Saturday, January 07, 2012
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
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
Over 7,000
fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals
Open Access Archives
Bielefeld
Academic Search Engine
Metasearch
through over 30 million items from 2,000 contributors
Medicine
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
Local
resources
Public Knowledge
Project
Free open
source journal / conference publishing software
Ha-shilth-sa
newsletter
BC
Grasslands Magazine
University
of British Columbia cIRcle
Simon Fraser
University SUMMIT
U Vicspace
Post-colonial
text
West Beyond
the West (BC historical resources)
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
The
Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
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.
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.
Friday, January 06, 2012
Public access to research reports not peer-reviewed research: two major flaws in the argument
Updated January 6 - now four major flaws
David Wojick at the Scholarly Kitchen argues for public access to research reports, not peer-reviewed articles. For the benefit of those unfamiliar with open access policy, note that this comes in the context of the recent revelation that the American Association of Publishers is lauding the Research Works Act which would forbid any U.S. federal funding agency from requiring public access to the results of research that it funds. For a synopsis of what is wrong with the bill and actions to fight it, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access site.
Four major flaws with the public access to research reports, not peer-reviewed articles argument
The world does not consist only of scholars / researchers and some great unwashed "public"
Public access expands access to everyone, everywhere. For example, with medical research, public access means access for doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals, as well as social workers, teachers at all levels, journalists, entrepreneurs and other businesspeople, as well as volunteers and community-based researchers. A large percentage of "the public" in modern society has some level of post-secondary education. And there are many people without much formal education who have found reasons to teach themselves. If there is a problem people are trying to solve, or people are looking for new business ideas, they may well be motivated to learn enough to understand the scholarly literature. For more on this, see this article Andrew Waller & I wrote on this in the Letter of the LAA: http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/6842#.TwfmcyNLDNI
Intellectual freedom
Setting aside the question of whether the public can easily read the scholarly literature, a more essential matter is the fact that it is the individual's right to choose. If a patient wants consumer literature, they can go to their public library. If they want to read the actual research articles, this is their right.
Requiring more writing of researchers
Part of this argument involves more writing time for these research reports on the part of researchers. This is interesting - now scholarly publishers are now satisfied with authors giving them their work, but rather they wish to assign extra work to the researchers. If scholarly societies are advancing this argument, I would assume that they have not checked in with their members on this, as members will often be the ones required to do the extra work. Similarly, at university presses - since when does a university press have a right to assign duties to faculty? And as for commercial publishers - wow, they would have a lot of nerve to ask this!
If the services of scholarly journals publishers are not all that important, why not do away with them altogether?
The scholarly publishers who are floating this idea really ought to give this a bit more thought. If it is just fine to provide the public with results of research in a form that is not peer-reviewed, why not everyone else? That is to say, if peer review is not that important, according to the people who coordinate peer review for a living - then perhaps we can do without? That would save an awful lot of money. The Houghton studies in the U.K. found that the most cost savings with a transition to open access would come with a transformative system building peer review on top of articles in repositories and doing away with journals altogether. Costs reported are (the subscription model is with green open access):
This post is public domain for open access advocacy purposes.
David Wojick at the Scholarly Kitchen argues for public access to research reports, not peer-reviewed articles. For the benefit of those unfamiliar with open access policy, note that this comes in the context of the recent revelation that the American Association of Publishers is lauding the Research Works Act which would forbid any U.S. federal funding agency from requiring public access to the results of research that it funds. For a synopsis of what is wrong with the bill and actions to fight it, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access site.
Four major flaws with the public access to research reports, not peer-reviewed articles argument
The world does not consist only of scholars / researchers and some great unwashed "public"
Public access expands access to everyone, everywhere. For example, with medical research, public access means access for doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals, as well as social workers, teachers at all levels, journalists, entrepreneurs and other businesspeople, as well as volunteers and community-based researchers. A large percentage of "the public" in modern society has some level of post-secondary education. And there are many people without much formal education who have found reasons to teach themselves. If there is a problem people are trying to solve, or people are looking for new business ideas, they may well be motivated to learn enough to understand the scholarly literature. For more on this, see this article Andrew Waller & I wrote on this in the Letter of the LAA: http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/6842#.TwfmcyNLDNI
Intellectual freedom
Setting aside the question of whether the public can easily read the scholarly literature, a more essential matter is the fact that it is the individual's right to choose. If a patient wants consumer literature, they can go to their public library. If they want to read the actual research articles, this is their right.
Requiring more writing of researchers
Part of this argument involves more writing time for these research reports on the part of researchers. This is interesting - now scholarly publishers are now satisfied with authors giving them their work, but rather they wish to assign extra work to the researchers. If scholarly societies are advancing this argument, I would assume that they have not checked in with their members on this, as members will often be the ones required to do the extra work. Similarly, at university presses - since when does a university press have a right to assign duties to faculty? And as for commercial publishers - wow, they would have a lot of nerve to ask this!
If the services of scholarly journals publishers are not all that important, why not do away with them altogether?
The scholarly publishers who are floating this idea really ought to give this a bit more thought. If it is just fine to provide the public with results of research in a form that is not peer-reviewed, why not everyone else? That is to say, if peer review is not that important, according to the people who coordinate peer review for a living - then perhaps we can do without? That would save an awful lot of money. The Houghton studies in the U.K. found that the most cost savings with a transition to open access would come with a transformative system building peer review on top of articles in repositories and doing away with journals altogether. Costs reported are (the subscription model is with green open access):
- £230 million to publish using the subscription model,
- £150 million to publish under the open access model and
- £110 million to publish with the self-archiving with peer review services plus some £20 million in operating costs if using the different models.
This post is public domain for open access advocacy purposes.
Open Government Consultation - my response
Here is my response to Canada's Open Government Consultation. Please note that responses are due by January 16, 2011!
Open Government Consultation – Response from Independent Scholar
First,
congratulations and kudos to the Government of Canada for actively
participating in the Open Government movement, and for providing this
opportunity for citizens to be involved in this consultation. I speak as an independent
scholar and librarian.
Open data
The keys to
making open data as useful as it could be are to use open and interoperable
formats and best practices for licensing. Because both are evolving, my
suggestion is to just get the data up there and available with the best format
and license for now, realizing that worldwide standards are likely to change
over the next few years.
Opendata.bc
provides a widely recognized good model for licensing of open data http://www.opendatabc.ca/
The
European Commission’s Open Data Strategy is one that I recommend consulting:
My
interests cover the range of scholarly knowledge; any and all of the open data
sets mentioned would be most helpful.
In addition,
I would strongly suggest that datasets resulting from research funded by
Canada’s federal funding agencies be required to be made openly available as
soon as possible after collection, with appropriate privacy safeguards in the
case of research involving human subjects.
Open Information
It is
timely for the government to expand the agenda-setting Canadian Institutes of
Health Research’s Policy on Access to
Research Outputs to all federal research funding agencies. Research funded
by the Canadian taxpayer should be freely available to all. The optimum mandate
would require deposit of the author’s final peer-reviewed research scholarly
articles into an open access archive at a university (and/or PubMedCentral
Canada), immediately on acceptance for publication. In the short term, an
embargo date of up to 6 months might be set to allow scholarly publishers time
to adjust to the growing environment of open access in scholarly communication.
As a
librarian, I know that reports commissioned by the Government of Canada and
information submitted to Parliament by departments and agencies often contain
essential research or other information (that’s why these reports get funded in
the first place), that are useful far beyond the original reason for
commissioning the reports. To get full value from these reports, these reports
should retained, archived, and made accessible. Ideally, today, this means
putting the reports online for open access. Librarians are uniquely skilled in
collecting such reports, preservation, and making the works accessible online,
by providing expert metadata, and assistance to researchers. I urge the federal
government to encourage and help its libraries to transition to a role of
providers of information online.
Open Dialogue
In 2010, I
actively participated in the consultation on Canada’s Digital Economy Strategy,
and commented at the time that this is an enlightened approach.
For someone
like me, it is reasonably easy to find out about and participate in these sorts
of consultations. However, I am a scholar whose work is closely related to the
internet and public policy; I am often on the web and on the alert for messages
about such consultations, and have a strong background for participation. I am
not sure that all of this is true for most people in Canada, or would even be
true for me at a different stage in life.
What I see as needed is active outreach. People need to understand the
issues before they can provide fully informed opinions. Web-based consultations
need to provide a means for people without ready access to the internet at home
to participate. Public libraries can play an important role in this arena. We
need to keep in mind that not every community is connected to the internet;
other means are needed to engage these citizens.
Final Comments: Open Government
Strategy
Are there
approaches used by other governments that you believe the Government of Canada
could / should model?
Yes! The
United States has provided the whole world with an outstanding example in the
freely available PubMed index and PubMedCentral fulltext archive. PubMed is the
world’s premiere medical index; as recently as the 1990’s, I worked at a
library at a small university college in Canada that could not afford to
purchase access to what was then called Medline. Today, this index is freely
available, around the world, to anyone with an Internet connection. Thanks to
the policies of medical research funding agencies (including the U.S. National
Institutes of Health, Wellcome Trust, and the Canadian Institutes of Health
Research, among many others), requiring public access to the results of
research that they fund, 20% of the world’s medical literature is now freely
available within two years of publication. This expanded access makes an
enormous difference in finding solutions to medical problems. I am proud that
Canada is one of the first countries to participate in the envisioned
PubMedCentral international, through PMC-Canada.
As
mentioned above, I recommend looking at:
Opendata.bc
http://www.opendatabc.ca/
The
European Commission’s Open Data Strategy http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/11/1524&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
Also, the
City of Vancouver’s Open Data initiative:
Again,
thanks for the opportunity to participate.
Heather
Morrison
Vancouver,
BC
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser
University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic
Economics
Privacy note: the above links are
to publicly available sites.
This is a response to the
Canadian government’s Open Government Consultation http://open.gc.ca/index-eng.asp
January 6, 2012
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