The elements of an open access quiz July 22, 2009
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , 2commentsWhen I was a first-year law student, my professor for Torts used to threaten to call us up at 3 am and demand that, before we were fully awake, we be able to recite the elements of a negligence claim – duty, breach, causation and harm (thanks, Prof. Darling). I was reminded of this demand by a small part of a recent news story, and the thought of three “elements” about open access that I would like to see every member of university promotion and tenure committees remember, even if quizzed in their sleep.
The news story, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, reports on an unusual tenure process at the College of New Jersey. The Dean and faculty panel recommended against granting tenure to Professor Nagesh Rao, but the Provost and Board of Trustee disregarded that recommendation and granted tenure, after considerable internal and external protest. My interest in the story is focused on one small comment, where Professor Rao is describing the reasons he thinks the faculty panel recommended against tenure. In addition to mentioning that his subfield may be subject to some bias, he says that one of the principal places where he is published, an open access online journal called “Postcolonial Text,” may have been “arbitrarily devalued” due to its business model.
For the record, “Postcolonial Text” is a peer-reviewed journal published on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform. I recently published (shameless plug alert) an article on open access for theological studies in an OJS journal, and can testify that the peer-review process — which is determined by the editors, not by the publication medium — was as rigorous as any traditional publication I have experienced. We have reached the point, I think, where the notion that online or open access is somehow not as scholarly as print, toll-access publication is no longer a reflection on open access itself, but is an indication that some academics have simply failed to pay attention to radical changes in the environment for scholarship. If what Professor Rao says is true, it is shows an embarrassing ignorance on the part of the panel that evaluated him.
So what are the “elements” of open access I want everyone who is responsible for evaluating scholarship to be able to recite, even when awakened in the dead of the night? They are as follows:
1. Online open access journals are as likely to be peer-reviewed as are traditional print publications. The medium cannot be used as a surrogate for investigation into the editorial practices and personnel of a given forum.
2. Open access based on an author fee is not a form of vanity publishing, and these arrangements, which are usually traditional journals with an open access option added on, are peer-reviewed in precisely the same way as traditional publications in the same journal. They should be weight in an evaluation process in exactly the same way.
3. Many, perhaps most, works which an author self-archives in an institutional or other repository are also published in peer-reviewed forums. P&T committees should not dismiss works just because they can be found in an open access repository, and authors should be responsible for ensuring that sufficient metadata accompanies the article to tell anyone who finds it about its peer-review and publication history.
I’m just a bill (and a “sourcebook”) July 12, 2009
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , add a commentOpen access advocates (of which I am one) were heartened last month when the Federal Research Public Access Act, known as FRPAA (S. 1373) and not to be confused with FERPA, was reintroduced into the 111th Congress. The bill, which would mandate public access to research funded by many federal agencies, made considerable progress in the 110th Congress, and hopes are high for its passage this year.
One of the major arguments in favor of this legislation is that it would increase government accountability for the way it spends tax dollars, and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access is a major supporter of the bill. They have a nice summary of the provisions and purpose of FRPAA here.
One advantage that now exists for those who support federal access to taxpayer funded research is that we have over a year’s experience now behind us with the National Institute of Health’s public access mandate for NIH funded research. Although there have been some efforts to undo that mandate (the ironically named “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” is the most prominent), by and large most people seem to acknowledge the success of the mandate, and it is easier now to imagine extending its reach that it was a year or so ago. In fact, Sen. John Cronyn, in introducing FRPAA (he is a sponsor along with Sen. Joe Lieberman) specifically referred to the success of the NIH policy when he introduced FRPAA on the Senate floor. This is particularly interesting because it is generally thought that much of the hostility toward the NIH mandate comes from a turf war between the Appropriations Committees and the Judiciary Committees over who has jurisdiction over such mandates; since Sen. Cornyn is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that turf war ought not to derail FRPAA. And this list of Higher Education leaders who have supported FRPAA in the past (including my Provost) is testimony to the sense in the research community that better access to these funded works will advance research and teaching.
For supporters of open access, another tool was unveiled in the same week that FRPAA was reintroduced – OASIS (the Open Access Sourcebook) — that should make their tasks much easier. OASIS is a website developed by Alma Swan and Leslie Chan to serve as a portal for educational materials. A quick look through it suggests it will be tremendously helpful for those who want to understand the complexities of open access and to explain its meaning and various manifestations to others. The resources are divided to make it easier to finding material relevant to different sets of stakeholders — students, researchers, administrators, publishers, librarians and the public. One particularly valuable contribution made by OASIS, in my opinion, is the set of “briefing papers,” which are documents intended to convey essential information on selected topics in the space of two sides of a sheet of paper. Four briefing papers are available as of now, and there is the promise of more to come. Overall, this site will be a wonderful resource for all of us as we explain and advocate for open access; it will become hugely helpful when the time comes to explain the FRPAA mandate, after it is passed by Congress.
Peer review and open access June 12, 2009
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , add a commentSeveral different events have focused my attention recently on the relationship between open access initiatives and peer review. First, a new task force on “digital futures” at Duke met for the first time yesterday, and it became clear very quickly that this group sees an open access initiative as its first task. The group, which was appointed by the Provost and is predominantly made up of faculty, will evaluate various options and recommend a policy or policies to the Provost and the Academic Council. The discussion at the task force’s first meeting made in very plain that open access was an important value to the group, but also that the apprehensions and misapprehensions about how open access is related to peer review and traditional promotion and tenure processes would be a major focus for conversation and education.
Next, I ran across this blog post by T. Scott Plutchak, the Director of the Health Sciences Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, about peer review and the NIH Public Access mandate. I certainly do not agree with everything Plutchak says here. He often seems to treat copyright as a publishers’ right rather than a right that vests with an author at the moment of creation, and that error creates a significant confusion when he mentions, and rejects, the argument that “the publisher has the right to refuse to grant the license.” Of course, it is the author, as the original copyright holder, who grants a license to NIH as a condition of funding. The publisher merely decides whether or not to accept an article and the transfer of a copyright that is subject to that prior license. But Plutchak is quite right to raise the issue of peer-review and to note that the NIH clearly values such review and is gaining a benefit from a process that is managed by publishers.
That concern leads me to the article I really want to point to with this post, “Publish and Cherish with Non-proprietary Peer Review Systems” by Leo Waaijers. Waaijers raises the same point that worries Plutchek and says quite bluntly, in the context of the multiple open access mandates from funding agencies that sponsor research in the European Community, that such mandates are unfair to a large number of authors because they are forced to negotiate copyrights with a variety of publishers, and most cannot publish in fully open access journals. Most of the others must transfer copyright in order to gain the obvious advantage of the peer-review system managed by commercial publishers. Waaijers’ solution to this unfairness is striking; it is simply that funding agencies should contract directly with publishers to create “non-proprietary” peer review systems. By this he means systems that can accomplish independent peer review without insisting on a transfer of copyright; such systems would allow far more authors to make their work available directly in open access form without jeopardizing their promotion and tenure processes.
This suggestion clearly requires a lot of thought. But two interesting things seem to stem from such a idea. First, by separating peer-review from the process of proprietary publication, it would create an on-going role for some publishers even when and if their current business models become unsustainable. Waaijers’ suggestion would ask existing publishers to submit proposals to the funding agencies to run these peer review systems, which would be independent of their other publication activities, thus taking advantage of developed expertise without continuing to tie that expertise to a specific model of scholarly communication. Second, by examining the bids created in respond to a funder’s tender or request for proposals, the scholarly community would gain much better insight into what it actually costs to run a peer review system, which is, after all, the part of the current model of scholarly publication that is most important to scholarly authors and that we must take care to preserve in some form.
Presses, piracy and the slumping economy February 27, 2009
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Authors' Rights, Copyright Issues and Legislation, Scholarly Publishing , 6commentsI am sorry to say that I was not surprised when I read this article in Inside Higher Ed last week about “Pirates v. University Presses.” I had been vlissfully unaware until recently of the existence of the kinds of websites it discusses, where unauthorized scans of the full text of many books, including academic books, are made available for free. But only a short while ago, a colleague from another institution called one such site to my attention (following the lead of the IHE article, I won’t mention the site’s name) and asked me what I thought about faculty linking to such sites as an alternative to using a university’s e-reserves system. It did not take me long to find the full text for some of the most frequently read titles in contemporary classrooms.
I told my colleague that I would discourage faculty from linking to such sites whenever I was asked, both because they so clearly infringe copyright and because they are inherently unstable; what is there today may not be available tomorrow. I would love to see much more scholarly content available for free on the Internet, but the way to accomplish this is for faculty authors to retain their rights to post and license their own work, not to encourage these kinds of pirate sites. Unfortunately, this approach puts me once more in the position of saying no to instructors who want to take illicit advantage of the benefits of the digital realm because our out-dated approaches to copyright have not caught up with that potential.
Why should we discourage piracy of academic work? One contributor to an e-list discussion of the article asked a legitimate question — “Is it the same crime to spread knowledge by illegally making university press books available as to offer Harry Potter for download?” I am inclined to respond that it is not the same, since the interests of academic authors are more in being read than in making money; they seldom profit from academic publication, and profit is almost never the incentive that gets them to write in the first place. This is why our copyright system, and a publishing structure built on the transfer of exclusive rights, serves the academy so poorly. But authors are interested in controlling the texts of their writings that are available, making sure the readings they assign are stable, and getting appropriate credit for their work. For all these concerns, responsible rights negotiation and licensing, not pirate havens, are the right solution.
Moving beyond mere condemnatory hand-wringing, I am inclined to think there is a lesson to be learned in the fuss around these sites. One of the reasons faculty are tempted by such things is that libraries are increasingly unable to meet their demands for online resources, either because the resources are too expensive (either for subscription or for permission), the libraries simply cannot get permission to place materials online, or the publisher does not offer an online version of the work. The Association of Research Libraries has recently addressed these concerns about declining budgets in a document aimed at starting a conversation with publishers to preserve as much access as possible in a time when massive cancellations are inevitable. This document is a good start, but it only addresses one of the three problems listed above.
In many cases, it is the universities that are creating the digital files that students will use, because publishers have failed to do so. Several of the texts I found on the pirate site I looked at are simply not available as e-books. But libraries’ ability to fill this demand is severely limited by a narrow interpretation of fair use and extremely high permission costs for digitization that exceeds that interpretation. One thing that must be understood is that the money an institution spends on permission fees in all likelihood comes out of its collection budget. So even as those budgets are being slashed, the buying power of what remains is further reduced as permission fees go up. Education suffers, and so, in the long run, do the publishers, from whom we can buy fewer and fewer new works. Certainly the purpose of copyright law — to provide an incentive for new creativity — is left in the dust.
I wonder if there is room for a separate agreement between universities and university presses that would look more realistically at fair use for those works produced by the very faculty authors who want to make use of them and also at the cost of permission when the uses involved really are not within a reasonable understanding of fair use. The interests of both the scholars and the university presses are very different from those of J.K. Rowling or Disney or Random House; our conversations together ought not to be burdened by the perceived needs of the entertainment industries.
Why should the university publishers agree to even discuss this idea? Because library e-reserves and permission services are a bulwark against piracy, and the risk of piracy is increased when those services frequently must refuse requests made by faculty, either because they cannot obtain permission or cannot afford it. It is not that libraries would resort to intentional infringment, but that students will find what they need wherever they can, and their instructors may not be inclined to make fine distinctions about the sources of material. Academic presses also need to recognize that faculty authors feel a legitimate sense of ownership over the products of scholarly publishing, even when they have not retained legal ownership. It is simply difficult to convince some scholars that obvious academic uses of academic work are not permitted, so it may be hard to discourage all use of pirate sites unless we can provide higher education with a legal alternative that is at least as useful. This, of course, is what the music industry waited too long to do. In the long run, then, it is in the best interests of all parties to negotiate the contours of both legal ownership and legal use, and it is the presses that are likely to suffer most if we fail to do so.
The Durham Statement February 24, 2009
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , add a commentI have been delighted to see the “Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship” getting lots of attention on the blogs and e-mail lists, and I couldn’t resist adding my own comments, as much out of local pride as because I have anything to add to the discussion.
The statement grows out of a meeting here at Duke amongst the law librarians from the top dozen or so US law schools. As a call for open access, it goes well beyond most other declarations in a couple of ways.
First, the Durham Statement calls for law schools to simply stop publishing print versions of their journals. The library directors note that this is especially pressing in a time of “growing financial pressures on law school budgets,” and they are quite right. It is interesting that the issuance of this statement came only days after the Association of Research Libraries issued its own statement about how publishers and libraries should deal with the economic emergency, in which a move to online only availability is also suggested.
One could argue that it is easier for law schools to suggest the transition to electronic only, open access publication because law school publishing is a unique model, where students do the editorial work and there is very little profit motive behind the publications. But it is important to realize that the incentives for publishing legal scholarship are the same as those for all other scholarly publication — reputation and impact on the field. So a model that works for legal scholars points the way toward new models that would also work for other types of scholarship. Law journals are a proof of concept that show how unnecessary the print-based subscription journal really is to the foundational values of academia.
Another point of interest in the Durham Statement is that, in spite of its call for immediate open access, it also includes a clause urging faculty authors to retain their copyrights. One might wonder why this is important if all law journal publication was online and free. The Statement calls this “a measure of redundancy,” and that is a big part of the answer. If academics retain their copyrights, they will be in a position to respond to changes in the means for distribution and use of their work. We simply do not know what will come next as technology evolves, and it is the authors themselves who will have the best incentive to adapt and respond in ways that serve their own interests. For that reason, even in an entirely open access world, authors should reserve their copyrights; the Durham Statement acknowledges this reality and suggests use of the Association of American Law Schools model agreement between authors and journal publishers.
