Category — Guest Post

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?

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.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Dr. Sigi Jöttkandt. Dr. Jöttkandt is a researcher in the theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands where she co-edits S, the open access journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique. She is also a co-founder of the Open Humanities Press, a new open access publishing collective in critical theory launching this spring.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

I was really excited to discover Open Students and to see how student activists are taking up the cause of OA. This is a very heartening sign because it means there’s real potential now for long-lasting and deep-seated changes to take place in academic publishing and scholarly communication more generally.

I asked Gavin if I could do this guest blog, however, because I’m a little worried that students in the humanities might feel a bit left out from the OA debate, which has been largely dominated up till now by the sciences. I want to emphasize how OA has enormous implications for us, too, in that it currently represents the simplest and most obvious solution to the crisis in monograph publishing that is causing an insidious contraction in our fields, and is hitting younger academics particularly hard.

The real question is why humanities academics are not taking to the opportunities represented by OA in the same way as academics in the sciences. From speaking with colleagues, my sense is that free online publishing continues to have some way to go before it is fully accepted by our peers as a credible, let alone a desirable and prestigious, medium for one’s work. There’s still a lot of FUD among us: fear, uncertainty and doubt about the changes represented by new technologies, including whether online publications will count towards job offers or tenure, or even if OA journals will still be around and available on the web after a few years. These are important issues and they need to be seriously addressed before OA - both “Gold” (publishing in OA journals) and “Green” (archiving in OA repositories, which confronts its own set of issues in the humanities) - can really be adopted by the mainstream.

This is why Gary Hall, David Ottina, Paul Ashton and I - OA advocates and journal editors - founded Open Humanities Press (OHP) last year. This open access publishing initiative is intended to offer humanities academics assurances that the OA journals affiliated with OHP meet the strictest standards of academic publishing, scholarship and archiving. These issues are typically overseen by a publishing house and this is also the role OHP is intended to play: OHP journals are not only all peer-reviewed, they also go through a rigorous external certification process by OHP’s independent editorial board whose policies are clearly laid out and available on the OHP website.

The other idea behind forming OHP was that it would enable us to pool our individual resources. As a publishing collective, we can provide each other with technical help, coordinate a permanent archiving strategy for our journals, and share graphic design skills in an effort to bring all the journals - and eventually we hope, also OA monographs - up to the visual and technical standards humanities academics expect of prestigious professional publications. We believe this will have a positive impact on how OA journals are perceived by our communities. We’re hopeful it will also help build greater trust in free, peer-reviewed online scholarship in all disciplines by showing that there is nothing inherent about the digital medium that means publications cannot be peer-reviewed and have the high editorial standards of comparable print publications.

Currently lots of exciting independent initiatives are springing up in and around the digital humanities and its implications for rethinking scholarship and the university (e.g. Media Commons, Voice of the Shuttle, NINES, The Digital Arts and Humanities of the UK Arts and Humanities Council, alt.x, The Imaginary Border Academy, The EduFactory, The Experimental University, along with the new discursive networks proposed by the Institute for Critical Climate Change to name just a few). Part of what we’re hoping OHP will do is enable these groups to find one another and lend different voices to the OA debate with the unique perspectives that come from the specific questions and theoretical approaches of humanities disciplines.

Open Students is a clear demonstration that students already “get” the way OA enables us to do more rigorous research when we have access to all the relevant materials, not just those which our library and interlibrary loan budgets can afford to purchase. What’s been interesting to discover is that some of the strongest OA advocates in the humanities are leading senior figures like J. Hillis Miller, Jonathan Culler and Stephen Greenblatt (all of whom are generously sharing their expertise on OHP’s advisory board). It suggests that what we really need now is to make overtures towards mid-career academics, many of whom have yet to fully understand what Open Access means. As OA journal editors, we are working to raise awareness and trust in OA publishing among these scholars but we would also love to hear ideas from students about how we can work together. As with many of the cultural shifts in recent history, it is students who are on the front-lines of this transformative change too.

OHP will be launching in Spring 2008 with 7 of the leading OA journals in critical and cultural theory. Gary Hall and I will be speaking at HumaniTech at UC Irvine, and at UC Santa Barbara in early April about the project. We’d love to see some of you there. But of course if you can’t make it, we would be very interested to hear your ideas, strategies, comments, suggestions, etc. either here or by contacting us at info [at] openhumanitiespress.org

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Professor Jos van Helvoort. Professor van Helvoort is a senior lecturer in Library & Information Studies at The Hague University. Professor van Helvoort has previously conducted research on benefits of open access for students in higher education (see also this video).

Opinions are solely those of the author.

Higher education in the Netherlands (and in particular the education at universities for applied science) has oriented in recent years extremely on competence based education. In this educational system students not only learn from the instruction by a teacher or professor but also by exploring a problem or a theme in its professional environment. The didactics are, in other words, based on “learning by doing”. While working on the assignment students are of course coached by a ‘tutor’ and can ask an expert for help, but they obtain a lot of the knowledge and understanding while working on the task themselves. The tasks they work on are based on real life professional situations and sometimes are indeed real life projects. Examination of learning outcomes in competence based education is mostly done by evaluating the student’s performance while working on the task, and so it is often referred to as “alternative” or “authentic assessment”.

Click here to read the rest of the entry…

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our first guest blogger, Dr. Stevan Harnad. Dr. Harnad is Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences at Université du Québec à Montréal and Professor in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at University of Southampton. Dr. Harnad has been a prominent thinker in the open access movement for more than 10 years, including his “subversive proposal,” which predicted open access and self-archiving at a time few scholars were using the Web.

Dr. Harnad has cross-posted this entry at his blog, Open Access Archivangelism. Opinions are solely those of the author.

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SUMMARY: Open Access (OA) will not come until universities, the research-providers, make it part of their mandate not only to publish their research findings, as now, but also to see to it that the few extra keystrokes it takes to make those published findings OA — by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories, free for all online — are done too. Students are in a position to help convince their universities to go ahead and mandate OA self-archiving, at long last.

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My guess is that Open Access (OA) already sounds old hat to the current generation of students, and that you are puzzled more about why we are still talking about OA happening in the future, rather than in the distant past (as the 80’s and 90’s must appear to you!).

Well, you’re right to be both puzzled and impatient, but let me try to explain why it’s been taking so long. (I say “try” because I have to admit that I too am still somewhat perplexed by the slowness of OA growth, even after sampling the sluggishness of its pace for nearly 2 decades now!) And then I’ll try to suggest what you students can do to help speed OA on its way to its obvious, optimal, and long overdue destination.

Click here to read the rest of the entry…