Category — Journals

• University of Michigan librarian Molly Kleinman writes that undergraduates have an important role to play in advocating for open access.
• An op-ed in a University of California, Berkeley student newspaper calls for students to use Creative Commons licenses for their theses and dissertations.
• A blog at Georgetown University profiles Kevin Donovan of Students for Free Culture and the chapter’s hopes to support open access and open educational resources at the school.
• Students at the University of New Mexico are criticizing traditional textbooks and calling for open textbooks.
• Uwe Thomas Müller’s dissertation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin examines peer-review processes at open access journals.
• Martin Boosen’s master’s thesis at the University of Applied Sciences Cologne looks at institutional repositories in Germany.
• Claudio Marconi’s undergraduate thesis at the Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” looks at open access as a new method of diffusion for scientific literature.

• An op-ed in Georgetown University’s student newspaper criticizes Rep. John Conyers’ bill to overturn the NIH Public Access Policy and calls for open access to publicly-funded research.
• The Göttingen Journal of International Law is a new student-edited open access journal published by the University of Göttingen.
• Two students at the University of California, Berkeley used Creative Commons licenses for their dissertations. See the story in the Daily Californian and blog posts by Creative Commons and one of the authors.
• An op-ed in the University of Maryland’s student newspaper calls for open textbooks.

After a bit of hiatus, here’s some recent news on students and open access:

• The winners of the Sparky Awards contest for videos on information sharing have been announced. The contest, sponsored by SPARC (which also sponsors Open Students), invited students to create a short video on the value of sharing information. The grand prize winner was created by a group of students from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Check out the winners here!
• Benjamin J. Keele, a law student at Indiana University - Bloomington and editor in chief of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, published an op-ed in Student Lawyer magazine calling for open access to student-edited law journals. The student newspaper at Virginia Tech editorialized in favor of open access, medical students at the University of Michigan published an op-ed supporting open access, and a Ph.D student at Queensland University of Technology published a letter to the editor extolling the school’s open access repository.
• Instructors at several colleges, including Michigan State University, University of Toronto, San Jose State University, had their students produce an open access journal as a class assignment. We previously posted a similar assignment for students at the University of British Columbia.
• Several new open access journals published by students launched: Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (by students at Erasmus University Rotterdam), New Social Inquiry ( Carleton University), PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication (University of Melbourne), Amsterdam Law Forum (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), aspeers (University of Leipzig), and Public Knowledge (Virginia Tech).
• Temple University adopted a requirement that its doctoral students’ dissertations be made open access. Meanwhile, at Lund University students may choose to make dissertation open access, and 43% of them do. A survey of open access repository managers found that they expect theses and dissertations to be a top trend for repositories in 2009.
• Mary Anne Kennan, a student at the University of New South Wales, wrote her dissertation on Reassembling scholarly publishing: open access, institutional repositories and the process of change. The dissertation is available open access.
• A collection of papers by students at the University of British Columbia on libraries and publishing, including on open access, was published (and is itself open access).
• Concern about unauthorized downloading of textbooks by students continued to grow: see e.g. articles in the Toronto Star and Times Higher Education. But Flat World Knowledge, a company dedicated to publishing open textbooks, released its first books. Nature also launched an open access educational site, Scitable, focused on genetics. Finals Club is a new open access, Creative Commons-licensed site for students to share lecture notes and discuss class topics.
• The UK Serials Group announced the winners of its essay contest for library and publishing students, on the topic of accessing academic information in the Google Era.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Chris Boulton. Mr. Boulton is a PhD student in communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst specializing in advertising, visual culture, and media literacy.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

Last year, my masters thesis served as a “guinea pig” for the new electronic submission process at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The monograph was a critical analysis of children’s fashion and included several examples of clothing advertisements. Despite lengthy efforts to secure permission to reproduce these copyrighted images, I was denied at every turn by corporations eager to protect the image of their brand. Therefore, according to rule number 88 of the UMass Graduate School’s Guidelines for Master’s Theses and Doctoral Dissertations, I was required to excise the ads from the text and “include a note in the List of Figures that directs readers to the set of illustrations on file in your department.”

As you can imagine, this was a disheartening prospect. The ads were, in short, the very basis of my analysis. Rule 88 means that any reader who wanted to view the ads would be forced to travel all the way to the UMass campus, trudge up to the fourth floor of Machmer Hall, and then request that a secretary pull out a dusty manila folder “on file in my department.” I wouldn’t go to such trouble, particularly if I had accessed the thesis online, so how could I expect anyone else?

As you can see, rule 88 put me in a terrible position. To comply would mean stripping the data from my analysis. If I ignored the rule and printed the ads, I risked rejection of my thesis, or worse. Clearly, this rule presented a serious hindrance to my intellectual freedom. Furthermore, I did not believe that it correctly reflects current copyright law as specified in section 107 of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. For example, the guidelines from the Graduate School do not even mention the right to use copyrighted images for educational and non-commercial purposes. Commonly known as “fair use,” this mechanism allows scholars and journalists to quote from copyrighted material in order to comment on it.

But of course, copyright goes both ways. For instance, I have recently been inspired by SPARC to retain the copyright of my own scholarly journal articles. There are many reasons to do this, but the most compelling for me was preserving the option to make my academic work freely available to the general public immediately following its date of publication. The 9 minute video below takes a look at both sides of the copyright coin by telling my two stories of open access in the emerging digital commons.

Fair Game: Open Access in the Emerging Digital Commons from Chris Boulton on Vimeo.

For scholars who study media, the internet has broadened research horizons and expanded the reach of teaching and publications. But powerful gatekeepers remain. From academic journals seeking to control our intellectual property to lawyers crying foul when we quote from copyrighted material, we are bombarded with a myriad of confusing and dubious restrictions. In short, the implied threat of legal action creates a chilling effect that impacts us all. Some have pushed back, arguing that our educational activities are protected under the “fair use” statute. But this is a risky game to play. The rules aren’t always clear. And when it comes to fair use, we either use it, or lose it.

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.

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!

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!

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development is a new, open access journal led by students at Columbia University. Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia’s Earth Institute and author of the 2005 bestseller The End of Poverty, helped launch the journal this week.

From the inaugural issue’s Note from Editors:

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development began as an idea: an idea that a group of ten students genuinely and passionately believed had the potential to make this world a better place. …

Widespread global poverty, hunger, environmental damage, and conflict are only some of the problems facing humanity today. As a bold collective of students intolerant of inertia, we push you to understand the urgency of forging solutions to these problems. …

The concept of consilience, “the joining together of knowledge and information across disciplines to create a unified framework of understanding,” runs through each article. With this in mind, we urge you to be active readers, to not only think deeply about each specific article but also to consider the interaction between the individual pieces.

We urge you to contrast theory against practice, one discipline against another, and your ideas against the authors’ ideas. The Editorial Board of Consilience has high hopes that this exchange of ideas, sparked by the written and visual media contained in this online space, will contribute to the progress of sustainable development.