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.

• Graduate students at the California Institute of Technology are drafting a resolution in support of open access.
• Graduate students at Simon Fraser University launched a new open access journal, called Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on controversy about open access to student creative writings.
• Heather Morrison blogged about the benefit of open access to creating a class list of reserve readings for students.
• Sean Kass, a Harvard law student, released a video on Open Access to Scholarly Publications, originally prepared for class.
• Students at the University of British Columbia had an interesting assignment: produce an open access journal as a class project.
• Oxford Journals launched Bioscience Horizons, an open access journal publishing bioscience research by undergraduate students from the UK and Ireland.
• Oberlin College’s student newspaper published an editorial in support of open access, calling on the college to adopt a policy similar to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

P.S. If you spot a story about students and open access, let me know!

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Nelson Pavlosky. Mr. Pavlosky is a law student at George Mason University in Arlington, Va. As co-founder of both Students for Free Culture and its first campus chapter, Free Culture Swarthmore, Nelson has been a leader in the student free culture movement. He made headlines in 2003 as a plaintiff in OPG v. Diebold, a case which set an important precedent protecting freedom of speech from abuse of copyright law. This summer he is interning at SPARC and advocating for open access to research.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

At the end of 2007 open access advocates won an important victory when President Bush signed into law a public access mandate for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), directing the agency to provide open access to findings from its funded research. Unfortunately, a number of publishers who benefit from high journal prices — and from charging the public for access to publicly funded research — have banded together to try to undermine or repeal the NIH public access mandate. It is essential that students become informed about this issue and join open access advocates in defending the NIH public access policy, and so I would like to explain what is at stake and how students can help.

What is the NIH?

The National Institutes of Health is a United States government agency which funds biomedical and health-related research. It is the largest funder of medical research in the world, and the largest funder of non-classified research in the US federal government. It has a $29 million budget and its funding is responsible for roughly 80,000 articles in scholarly journals every year. The impact of the NIH and similar government agencies on scholarly research is dramatic, since about half of all university research funding comes from the federal government. [See the Provosts’ 2006 letter supporting FRPAA]

It seems like a no-brainer that publicly funded research should be freely available to the taxpayers who fund it, and people are always surprised when I tell them that until recently it was not. Yes — until the NIH public access mandate was passed by Congress, about 96% of the NIH’s research was only available in expensive, restricted-access journals. In order to read the results of the research that your taxes paid for, you had to belong to an institution that could afford the increasingly absurd prices of academic journals. The comments of publishing industry analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston explain the dire situation well:

[W]e would expect governments (and taxpayers) to examine the fact that they are essentially funding the same purchase three times: governments and taxpayers fund most academic research, pay the salaries of the academics who undertake the peer review process and fund the libraries that buy the output, without receiving a penny in exchange from the publishers for producing and reviewing the content….We do not see this as sustainable in the long term, given pressure on university and government budgets. [From SPARC’s comment, page 4]

Happily, the NIH public access mandate will do a great deal to lighten this burden on the public.

What is the NIH public access mandate?

The NIH public access mandate provides free online access to full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. The NIH requires every scientist who receives an NIH research grant, and who publishes the results in a peer-reviewed journal, to post a digital copy of the article in PubMed Central, the online digital library maintained by the NIH. This free digital copy must be publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in the peer-reviewed journal. (As the Canadian Library Association recently pointed out, this kind of delay — designed to accommodate publisher concerns about loss of subscription revenues — should be seen as a temporary measure to help publishers adapt, as we eventually move to a world where access is open immediately upon publication.)

Why is the public access mandate important?

Innumerable people before me have made the case for why open access in general is important, and I highly recommend reading SPARC’s The Right To Research site for information on why open access is important to students. It is important to note that the NIH public access policy does not actually require the articles to be open access according to the BBB definition, i.e. released under a free license such as a Creative Commons license which explicitly allows for e.g. redistribution. Most of the articles that will be made available on PubMed Central will be covered by ordinary copyright. However, making all of these NIH-funded articles available for free online will have many of the same effects and benefits as open access publishing, and facilitate the transition to full open access.

The benefits of the NIH mandate in particular have also been exhaustively covered in documents such as SPARC’s response to NIH during the public comment period. Given the focus of NIH on medical research, the NIH mandate will have a huge impact on people who are ill or at risk of disease, as well as the people who care for them or who are researching treatments for their ailments. I found the comments of one mother to be particularly compelling:

My children have a genetic disease. It is rare, not well understood, and there is no treatment or cure. However, the most disturbing obstacle we face is the wall around published scientific research. Information critical to health and biomedical research is held hostage by questionable and arcane publishing practices. It is time for publishers, both private and academic, to redesign their business models in response to a new age of information sharing and a stronger sense of the scientific commons.

The research that is funded by the NIH has great potential to improve or even save lives, and it’s vital that it be made available to as many people as possible.

How are the publishers trying to get the NIH mandate overturned?

The publishers are trying to derail the NIH public access policy in a number of ways — mostly behind closed doors, since they have lost quite publicly several times. One method is publicly revealed in a comment by the Association of American Publishers which can be found on the NIH site. The publishers are making bogus claims that the NIH policy constitutes a change in copyright law, which requires further review by various executive and legislative bodies. This is silly because all that is happening here is that the people paying for the research — the US government through the NIH — are requiring a non-exclusive license to publish the research that they paid for. The NIH policy is a perfectly normal case of contract law and does not impact copyright in any way.
Nevertheless, we can expect the publishers to use this bogus interpretation of copyright law to try to overturn or undermine the NIH mandate, whether through legislative action, lawsuits, or executive action.

What can you do to support the NIH policy?

The NIH has just completed a public comment period, and the publishers have not yet made any overt moves which can be opposed by the public. However, you can be certain that your help will be needed in the future, especially if the publishers start pushing to repeal or weaken the NIH public access mandate.

To stay informed and be ready to respond if the publishers make their move, you can subscribe to the SPARC mailing list or to SPARC’s RSS feed. Check the websites for the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and SPARC now and then to catch up on the latest news. And to support open access in general, check out SPARC’s page on what students can do to support open access.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Dr. Ken Udas. Dr. Udas is executive director of the Penn State World Campus, the distance education campus of Pennsylvania State University. In addition to distance and online education administration, his professional interests include educational access, open educational resources, and internationalization of education. He is the editor of the Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources in Education series on Terra Incognita, the Penn State World Campus blog.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

I am not a professional that works with or thinks specifically about “Open Access” on a daily basis. I do distance education, and I do not even actively teach right now. I am a general manager, so I spend much of my time writing reports, doing budgets, planning, helping folks run their projects, advocating for my campus, etc. Not so glamorous a vocation, but an important role in keeping things moving. That said, I do think quite a bit about the broader set of activities around open educational resources (OER), and through writing this post I am thinking in a more disciplined way about OA.

Two of the things that I am passionate about are a) making accessible and high-quality educational services available principally to non-traditional learners and b) the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) toward that end. So, if you are a “full-time student” and spend more time at a destination campus or university library than at work, in prison, driving a cab, sitting in airports, gathering water, etc., you are probably not the student that I spend most of my time thinking about. But you probably will be someday — or your partners are, or your kids will be, because they and you will then fall into the category of “non-traditional learner,” along with the vast majority of learners in the world (who are, in fact, only “non-traditional” from the perspective of the higher education elite).

Regarding the connection between accessible education, open educational resources, and open access journal articles, it does seem that OA falls within the larger discussion about OER, which includes all sorts of stuff like open source software, graphical content, syllabi, etc. Much of the most dynamic discussion among the OER community is all of the stuff that Stevan Harnad clearly identified as “What OA Is Not” in his posting, The University’s Mandate to Mandate Open Access (which, incidentally, I enjoyed very much).

Before launching into a short story I would like to float out there for your thoughts and feedback three questions that I will return to later. They are:

1. Are there enough people using OA resources to improve educational access?
2. Are there parallels between OA and other forms of OER?
3. Is asking “What does it mean to do Open Access?” a meaningful or important question?

As mentioned, I am sort of a general manager for the Penn State World Campus, which is the distance education campus of Penn State University (PSU). One of the efforts that I am involved with is called PSU Online. The point of PSU Online is to help online learning become an effective part of the educational experience of Penn State students, so more can enjoy the benefits of “one university distributed,” which is one way that we describe ourselves.

A few weeks ago I was in a PSU Online committee meetings when the topic of Open Courseware was raised, and a wonderful discussion broke out about what we are doing to promote the development and distribution of open courseware. It started with a discussion about intellectual property policy and it led to all sorts of great questions about open courseware’s value to the university, the communities we serve, the impact on teaching faculty, etc. and finally ended with some talk about what we should be doing to provide (create, distribute, …) more open courseware.

At this point I piped up and mentioned that we should also be talking about how to ensure that we are using more open courseware, as well as producing it. Why is it that our faculty and learning designers tend to create new content rather than using, modifying, and reusing content that has already been made available and licensed for open use? Obviously there is some of this going on, but why so little, particularly given the cost associated with developing online courses? Two points were raised:

1. Many faculty members would feel as if it were “cheating” to use somebody else’s content. That is, they were expected to write their own, so it would not seem “right” to use materials already in use.
2. Open Courseware, and OER more generally, are not trusted. Many faculty members are happy to use bits and pieces of courses from trusted colleagues, but not from an OER project.

I am not sure if I fully buy either of these explanations, but I am willing to take them at face value for the time being. So, now I am back at the three questions I raised above.

These questions are not rhetorical. They are really directed at the community that this blog targets, current students and future scholars.

Are enough people using OA resources?

Apparently, there is a lot of OA material available, and I assume that there are a lot of OA articles being read and referenced. But is OA being used to directly and positively impact educational access and outcomes? Why or why not?

Is asking “What does it mean to DO OA?” a meaningful or important question?

I ask this because of a fantastic posting that Amee Godwin of OER Commons recently made, titled On “Doing OER”. In this post Amee talks about Open Educational Resources less as things and more as processes. This is a powerful and engaging direction, because it connects creation, use, and re-creation in a cycle, poking at some of the underlying principles of an ecosystem that supports the economics of “openness.”

So, is this an important question relative to OA? Has it already been asked and answered and I missed the conversation?

Are there parallels between OA and other forms of OER?

Of course, the answer is Yes, but are the parallels relevant to the questions posed above? What can practitioners of OA learn from practitioners of OER, and vice versa?

You know, it really is a risk to ask questions in a public forum. Not so much because they might be provocative, but because they might not be interesting, or at least interesting to the people who read them. I hope that some of this resonates with some of you and that we can exchange some ideas and ask each other some questions.

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.

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!

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?