Students for open access to research

We’re looking for guest bloggers as well regular contributors. For more information, see this page.

Important information for guest bloggers:

Open Students accepts guests posts on any aspect of Open Access. We welcome guest posts by students, faculty, librarians, administrators, publishers, and others.

Posts must be about any aspect of Open Access and must include a discussion of the topic’s relevance to students. The topic may reflect your work, research, or personal experience.

Join the conversation! To get started, contact Gavin at gavin@openstudents.org.

Hot off the presses!

Six library, student, and advocacy organizations today announced the Second Annual Sparky Awards, a contest that recognizes the best new short videos on the value of sharing and aims to broaden the discussion of access to scholarly research by inviting students to express their views creatively.

This year’s contest is being organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) with additional co-sponsorship by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, Penn Libraries (at the University of Pennsylvania), Students for Free Culture, and The Student PIRGs. Details are online at www.sparkyawards.org.

The 2008 contest theme is “MindMashup: The Value of Information Sharing.” Well-suited for adoption as a college class assignment, the Sparky Awards invite contestants to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information. Mashup is an expression referring to a song, video, Web site, or software application that combines content from more than one source.

To be eligible, submissions must be publicly available on the Internet – on a Web site or in a digital repository – and available for use under a Creative Commons License. The Winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a Sparky Award statuette. Two Runners Up will each receive $500 plus a personalized award certificate. At the discretion of the judges, additional Special Merit Awards may be designated. The award-winning videos will be screened at the January 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Denver.

Entries must be received by November 30, 2008. Winners will be announced in January 2009. …

Check out the Web site for more information!

Via Michael Geist:

The Canadian Federation of Students, representing a half million students from coast to coast, just released its position paper on copyright reform. The CFS position includes support for a more flexible fair dealing provision, rejection of the AUCC/CMEC educational exemption, calling for balanced TPM measures, implementation of a notice-and-notice approach, elimination of crown copyright, and limits on statutory damages.

The statement doesn’t include issues such as open access to research, but it’s still great to see the student community getting involved with information policy issues.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Dr. Samir Chopra. Dr. Chopra is an associate professor of computer and information science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is the author, with Scott Dexter, of Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software, published in August 2007.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

In this post, I’d like to offer some observations on the academic publishing process, based upon my experience in publishing my book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software with Routledge. (You can see the discussions that took place when the book was released at the book’s link).

We were not able to release the book under an open license, though my co-author and I did try for a more open license, for a paperback edition, for a cheaper book, and so on. [Ed.: List price for the book is $95.] Our experience with Routledge in attempting to make the book open access was roughly, that they said, “These are the terms; either you agree or you walk”. We did not have enough academic cachet or a great deal of power with which to try and make the publisher come around to our point of view. Both Scott and I were junior academics (I was untenured at the time) at a public university, and this was our first book, in a field that is poorly defined. The problem with university presses, our other choice of publisher, was that as we made some preliminary inquiries we realized we did not fit into their disciplinary niches. We were not sociology, not political science, not law, not philosophy, not computer science. University presses are quite conservative and do not take to interdisciplinary work so easily. Unless someone like MIT Press’ Leonardo Division becomes the norm, interdisciplinary work will often fall between the cracks. Routledge, fortunately, has the reputation of being a slightly “cutting-edge” publisher, and so they were able to “take a chance” on us. But it came with a price; our book is expensive, and is published under a traditional copyright license [Ed.: “all rights reserved”].

Did we have an option to publish with a lower-prestige press that would have accepted the book, and would it have allowed open access to the manuscript? There might have been; we tried with Blackwell and Routledge first out of the non-university presses. However, it is not clear that lower-prestige presses are better in terms of open access as they are more concerned about their financial bottom line. Ironically, the bigger the press the better placed they are to try and experiment with open access. But the less willing they are to offer contracts to first-time authors doing interdisciplinary work.

The overarching problem is that in the academic world, regular printing presses still command all the power and prestige. Online publication counts for nothing. Yes, readership is important, but if I was to apply for tenure, promotion, grants, fellowships, or get invitations for visiting positions or talks, it’s a regular publication with a regular publisher (and there is a definite hierarchy amongst presses) that counts. Saying that my book had been ‘published’ by putting it online with no peer review, even though plenty of peer review would result from readers’ comments, would not count for as much. Currency in the academic world is has a great deal to do with prestige. When you tell someone you have a book contract or have published, the first question is, “With whom?” Scott and I went to conferences when we didn’t have book contracts; two years later, when we were making the same circuit, with a book on its way with Routledge, the way we were treated was interestingly different. The political economy of this world is structured very differently from that of the music or software world.

What were our alternatives? We could have published the book’s chapters piecemeal, in Open Access journals, and we did consider this. Perhaps this way, we could have published the book’s contents as open access journal articles and then put them all together to edit and publish as not-necessarily open access book. While that might have been possible, we were both keen to go for a book for several reasons. We wanted to make a substantial contribution to an area that was new for both of us. Journals are an incredibly inefficient way to get your work published: they delay endlessly; they lose papers; and there is a huge gap in publication. Importantly, we wanted the book’s contents to go together because of the narrative impact of pointing out that the liberatory possibilities of free and open source software went together.

Once we had decided to go with a book, we had to hope we would get lucky with a publisher in making it open access. We didn’t. We hoped then, and still hope now, that this will enable us to make enough academic capital so that we can drive a harder bargain in the future (I’m still finding it hard though; I just signed a contract with the University of Michigan Press and while they have agreed to make the book available for reading online, it won’t be so for printing or downloading).

Many people pointed us to Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler’s books, and asked us why we didn’t follow their lead. The problem is that those gentlemen have tremendous cachet already. They are professors at two of the top law schools in the country. If I’d been a professor at Columbia Law school, I’d have had a far richer network of contacts, and way more academic power and clout; with that, I could have negotiated a contract more to my liking. While Lessig and others have fashioned themselves into public academics, they only did so after being academically established at a top school.

What could change this situation? For one thing, senior academics could take the lead and start publishing with more open licenses. Tenure and promotion committees have to be educated, as does the rest of the academic community. Presses have to see this pressure coming on them from not just junior academics who are desperate for tenure, but from established folks as well. I’m glad Lessig and Benkler are doing what they do; it’s a small, but very important step toward the right kind of situation. The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research is a very good online journal with very good peer review; they are starting to get good people publishing in there. This needs to happen more often, across different disciplines.

In many ways, academia is a good story of a gift economy gone wrong (Gavin made this point to me in email). It is a very conservative institution overall. It abides by the Matthew Principle: those that have, shall get more; those that don’t, can scrounge for themselves. If you land up in the not-so-fast lane in academia, your career is pretty much condemned to stay there. It becomes very hard to break out of it, and those that are in the fast lane have very little inclination to help others speed up. Go to a good school, tap into networks of influence, get the letters of recommendations, get invited to academic gigs (or contribute chapters to edited collections) and it continues. Land up in the slow lane, and you slowly, slowly, spin off into the bylanes and backwaters. Its no wonder that someone in that situation would want to tap into the sources of traditional prestige.

The only change will come when those who have sufficient power, those who can easily get their fifth book published again by Cambridge University Press, will finally say, “I choose to make my book open access and make it available online.” And we need to set up a peer-review system for online, open access publications that the community comes to recognize and give due credit to. A few years ago, Erik Sandewall, a Swedish artificial intelligence researcher, proposed a journal called Electronic Transactions in Artificial Intelligence. The idea was, submit a paper to the journal, it’d be placed online, and open for community review, mark-up and commentary. This period of review would last for a few weeks. After this, the author would take the piece offline (or leave it there) and work on revisions. The piece would be submitted again, and then subject to the editor’s final decision, based on their assessment of responses to community comments. If approved, the paper would be placed in the accepted category and marked as “published”. The ETAI started off well, and then petered out. My guess was that not enough people trusted it to bring them enough prestige. It is a frustrating situation; how do we get this ball rolling?

The student-published law review at the University of La Verne, the University of La Verne Law Review, has joined Science Commons’ Open Access Law Program. Participating journals guarantee their authors the right to self-archive their articles and to permit re-use under a Creative Commons license.

I’ll be presenting on open access at these upcoming events for students:

• Saturday, April 12, 2008
  University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Madison, WI
  3 - 6 pm
  Memorial Union (TITU)
  Announcement
• Tuesday, April 15, 2008
  Macalester College
  St. Paul, MN
  noon - 1 pm
  Harmon Room, Library
  RSVP requested: Terri Fishel, x6343 or fishel@macalester.edu
• Tuesday, April 15, 2008
  Carleton College
  Northfield, MN
  5 to 6:30 pm
  Sayles-Hill 251
• Wednesday, April 16, 2008
  St. Olaf College
  Northfield, MN
  7 to 8 pm
  Buntrock 144

Bita M. Assad, Web Site Provides Theses Online, The Harvard Crimson, April 7, 2008.

As the final round of seniors turn in their theses, a fledgling open-access initiative is encouraging students to make their work accessible to the world.

The Free Thesis Project, a Web site run by Harvard College Free Culture, currently allows seniors to upload their theses to an online repository. But while the Web site was launched in April 2007, only 20 students so far have submitted their theses for free and open access. …

The primary arguments in favor of open access for scholarly literature written by faculty and students are both pragmatic and ideological, according to Grant W. Dasher ’09, one of the leaders of the Free Thesis Project. He added that there is a need to drive down the cost of scholarly journals, which would eliminate the high subscription rates for universities.

Even as the University shifts to open access, the Free Thesis Project has yet to pick up momentum among Harvard’s senior thesis writers.

Jason E. Neal ’08, the only senior to have submitted his thesis so far this year, said seniors are often too preoccupied to think about how they would like their thesis to be distributed for future readers.

“Seniors are busy finishing their theses, and are so relieved to be done, that they don’t ever want to think about it again,” said Neal, who is a government concentrator.

Dasher acknowledged that although the shortage in submissions is partially due to limited awareness, departments have been receptive to the idea of encouraging the initiative. …

According to Dasher, the Free Thesis Project plans to expand its depository to include PhD theses and eventually to integrate the archive with faculty publications.

A recent column in the University of Pennsylvania Alamanc highlighted three open access student journals hosted in the university’s institutional repository: the Penn McNair Research Journal, the Journal of Student Nursing Research (JOSNR), and CUREJ, the College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal. Check them out!

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Gloria Tavera. Ms. Tavera is an undergraduate studying neurobiology, political science, and public health at the University of Florida. She also serves as chair of UAEM-UF, the Universities Allied for Essential Medicines chapter at the University of Florida.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

You’re looking for academic articles in a peer reviewed journal, perhaps you even have some titles and authors picked out. You think you’ve found the article and…click, click, then, “Please choose the appropriate price according to the kind of subscription you like and the area of your address of residence”. At $30 a paper? Forget it. Whether you’re researching for a class or trying to look for papers related to your latest lab experiment, open access could make things a whole lot easier.

In 2006, at my own school, University of Florida, budget cuts nearly forced the library to cancel almost $750,000 in online journal subscriptions. It’s infuriating that we had to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for access in the first place.

As far as I can see, the journal publisher’s business model is antiquated and counter-productive—it’s out with the old and in with the new. It practically blows my mind that such a backwards idea could persist in a community where it’s particularly important to share information and ideas.

It’s good to know that PLoS is around, the Directory of Open Access Journals and some OA articles, but despite OA’s growth, we’re still far from 100% OA.

For students, one of the most exciting parts about the open access campaign is the potential to make a lasting difference, while still an undergraduate/graduate student at a university. I’m currently working on a campaign, with Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), to get universities to sign on to generic licensing of their biotech to impoverished nations and nations in health crises. UAEM is a non-profit who works with student and faculty groups across the U.S. and Canada to construct creative new approaches to improving the development and delivery of public health goods. The similarities between our campaign and the potential student campaign for open access are striking.

Both have an extremely just cause, especially within the university context: ethically, you really can’t argue with what open access is about: making knowledge accessible to the public is one of the grand missions of institutions of higher education.

Another point: if you can educate and gain support from a large number of faculty (especially research faculty) at your university, your campaign is almost guaranteed to succeed. Despite how monolithic university administration may seem, they do work hard to maintain good relations with their researchers. If enough (or highly influential) researchers come to them with complaints about the way the current system works, the university will be much more receptive to the open access campaign.

A final thought: the open access campaign can also be fought in the classroom. Students can work with their professors to design and/or integrate open access education and use of open access-only materials in classes. Professors who teach classes on how to write papers and do research should adopt at least some open access coursework Into their material. Making a difference could be as simple as reaching out to them.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been having some trouble with categories on Open Students lately: namely, that they’ve disappeared. I’ve been trying to resolve this but have been unsuccessful so far. I hope to have the issue straightened out soon.

Also, I’ve upgraded WordPress, the software that runs Open Students, to the latest release candidate. As with any software upgrade, and especially with pre-stable versions, there may be some issues; if you notice anything amiss, please let me know in the comments or via email.