Category — Journals

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?

Carolyn Kenny is a professor of human development and indigenous studies at Antioch University and co-editor-in-chief of the open access journal Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. In a new interview at Create Change, Kenny describes how she got her beginning with open access:

I was a recalcitrant, traditional paper-and-pen professor, who printed out every document from the computer and worked with the hard copies. About ten years ago, one of my art students said she wanted to do a Web-based thesis. I was horrified. I said: “No way. This is ridiculous.” But she was persistent. Finally, I told her to give it a try. Once I got into it, I was totally hooked. She was able to embed photographs of the art installations of her students in the document. When she cited books and articles, we could just click onto an embedded link that took us directly to the reference list for the full citations. I was just blown away. Ever since then, I’ve been a fan. Now I encourage students to do Web-based dissertations. I’m not fluent in electronic media myself. Often I learn about new options from our librarian or my students.

Students: Ask your professors to support open access!