Irrational publishing and recursive publics July 31, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Scholarly Publishing, Technologies , 3commentsA courtesy “heads up” from Ellen Duranceau, a scholarly communications colleague at MIT, alerted me to this podcast about scholarly communications with Dan Ariely, the author of the fascinating and best-selling book “Predictably Irrational.” This 20 minute interview is well worth the time for both librarians and scholarly authors who are concerned about the current state of scholarly publishing and interested in its future. I am looking forward to listening to the other interviews that MIT makes available.
Ariely was a Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT, which is why Ellen is interviewing him, and he recently moved to a similar position here at Duke, which is why she alerted me to the podcast. Ellen deserves great credit for the insight – “I wish I had thought of that” – that Ariely would be a really interesting person to ask about the state of scholarly publishing. Not only because has he recently made the successful transition from obscure academic author to public intellectual, which he discusses in the interview, but because the theories and experiments that have made his work so well-known themselves suggest important insights into the scholarly communications system.
Much of Ariely’s work focuses on the odd things that happen when economic and social norms collide and intermingle, which is exactly what happens in the system of scholarly publishing. Faculty authors are largely driven by social norms and reward structures that are quite different from, and increasingly at odds with, the economic incentives that drive publishers. The result is a strange and dysfunctional system.
During the interview, Ariely refers to his “back of the envelope” calculation that it costs a university over $50,000 to support the production of a single scholarly article, which indicates how badly askew the economics of publishing are, when universities not only subsidize production to that extent but also repurchase that subsidized content after publication. It is precisely because the academy is governed by an entirely different set of social norms that we have allowed the economic situation to get so far out of hand. But Ariely’s endorsement of a more open and accessible system of scholarly communications is not itself, finally, based on these economic conditions. Rather, he has discovered, through his own experiences with the public attention he has received, the great benefit both to the individual scholars and to society, of open and interactive scholarship. The ultimate take-away from this interview for me was that scholarship itself can be improved by reaching out to larger publics and incorporating those publics into the work of research and writing.
As a sort of “proof of concept” of Ariely’s claim, I was interested in the experiment in a new kind of “hybrid” publishing going on with a recent book by Rice University professor Chris Kelty. “Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software” is published by Duke University Press (you can buy a copy here), but is also available online on this author-maintained website, twobits.net. One can read the book online, comment on its various chapters, and “modulate” with it – use it in small chunks to create new scholarship. Kelty uses the concepts of re-mix and recursive publics to experiment with what we really mean when we say that scholarship builds on the works of others. This experiment with modulations will be the most interesting part of Kelty’s new model of scholarship to follow, but in light of what is discussed in the Ariely interview, I think there are two more basic questions to ask about this kind of hybrid model for scholarly publishing. First, will online availability depress sales of the print book, or will people who come to it first online be motivated to buy a hard copy (as I was)? Second, will the experiment in public comment and reuse really result in improvements to the text and to scholarly output that builds creatively upon it? This latter question is a way of asking if the results that Dan Ariely reports in his interview can really be replicated for scholars who do not attract the same level of celebrity.
Where should we spend our money? July 21, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright in the Classroom, Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , 3commentsThe attention paid in the last few weeks to the cost of textbooks and the promise, as well as the risk, of moving to e-texts has prompted me to consider the above question.
Some of the recent reportage has focused on e-textbooks as a way to reduce the costs students must pay for course materials; this article in USA Today is an example of this kind of story. There have also been several comments from open access advocates supporting the move toward open online textbooks; see this post by Georgia Harper and this one from Peter Suber.
There has also been some commentary recently on the abuse of new models of textbook distribution. The Boston Globe ran this article on “Textbooks, free and illegal, online” just a few days ago. It is unfortunate, but hardly surprising, that it is only in this article about “pirated” textbooks that the Association of American Publishers is quoted; they could do so much more if they were actively involved in a positive solution that could reduce textbook costs and improve access. But it is the faculty who write the textbooks who are quoted as seeking a legal solution, while the publishers merely resort to heavy-handed enforcement measures for a law that is rapidly becoming unenforcable in a technological environment for which it was never designed. The fuss usually works in individual cases — the Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that the specific site discussed is off-line — but it is ineffective to stem the digital tide.
But faculty do not come out unscathed in this discussion either, as is clear from this post about the practice of professors commissioning “custom” textbooks and receiving “royalties,” which William McGeveran of the University of Minnesota Law School calls “kickbacks,” from the required purchases by their students.
The lesson here seems to be that the digital environment is inevitably going to change the environment for textbooks as it has for most other kinds of intellectual property, for good or for ill. Georgia seems to feel that the publishers will eventually figure the market out and move to new profit models while supporting open access. But I think there is also an opportunity here for institutions to be more proactive and seek ways to invest in open access textbooks on a campus-wide level.
Why should schools consider doing this. First, with all the pressure that institutions of higher education are under to reduce the costs for students to attend, open access textbooks offers an avenue for proactive investment that will simultaneously reduce student costs and encourage faculty scholarship. Second, this is a place where universities actually can help combat copyright infringement. Universities have been made the scapegoats in the file-sharing wars, but there is really not a lot they can do to ameliorate that problem, especially since the vast majority of music and movie file-sharing does not occur over college and university networks. But by supporting open access to e-textbooks, we really can reduce the problem of infringement in that realm.
How can universities invest their funds in ways that will encourage open access textbooks and reduce costs (and therefore the incentive to infringe copyright) for students? I can think of three ways, off hand.
First, institutions could invest in infrastructure that would encourage new models for electronic course content. This means a great deal more than simply providing the storage space necessary for an institutional repository. Universities also need to support their faculty authors in efforts to retain copyright so that they can deposit their works in an IR and create new and unanticipated derivative works from those publications. The opportunity to combine materials located in an institutional repository in new ways would create a different spin on the custom textbook; it would offer a heretofore unimagined flexibility based on legal rights retained by the authors of the component parts and licensed to institutions or, using a Creative Commons license, to a broader group of users.
Second, universities and consortia could bring their purchasing power to bear to negotiate multi-user licenses for existing e-textbooks or new ones created in the commercial market. The current models all rely on students to each pay individually a licensing fee (putatively lower than the purchase cost of a hard copy) to obtain access, for a limited time, to an e-text. Multi-user site licenses could further reduce the price per user and give the university flexibility about whether to assess each student user for that lower cost or simply cite the funding to legislators as an investment in reducing student costs.
Finally, universities could make funds available for faculty to encourage the development of open access texts. There has been a great deal of talk recently about funding to support open access via “hybrid” publishing — traditional publications onto which an open access alternative is grafted if the author, or her institution, is willing to pay an added fee. It seems to me that a much wiser investment, and one with a greater return for the dollars spent, could be made by turning those funds to support faculty who want to create online open access textbooks that can be used by students on their own campuses and by others who teach similar courses. Adaptation by others, in that case, would provide an effective “peer-review” to measure the quality of the faculty author’s contribution. In this way, student costs could be reduced, faculty scholarship supported, and the real potential of the digital environment for collaborative learning more fully exploited.
Making Elsevier look good July 16, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Authors' Rights, Copyright Issues and Legislation, Scholarly Publishing , 2commentsFor many years, Dutch publishing giant Elsevier has been a kind of bête noir for academic librarians, serving as principal whipping-post for the exorbitant price increases that have been strangling off the scholarly communications system for over 20 years. But the ground has shifted somewhat, and we have recently observed some academic press and scholarly societies – agencies whose mission is, putatively, to serve research and scholarship – adopt policies that make Elsevier look almost scholar-friendly.
We have recently witnessed the unseemly spectacle of two at least nominally university-related presses suing a university to try to narrow the scope of fair use for academics, calling out by name some of the very authors upon whom they depend for the content that fills the pages of their publications. Now another organization that is supposed to represent scholars, the American Psychological Association, has turned to bite the hand that feeds it.
First there were the threats to sue a major American university library for allegedly using too many examples from the “APA Manual of Style” in the teaching materials it creates to help students learn how to use that citation format. Since continued sales of the Manual depend on students being trained to use it and faculty assigning it, and since there are other nearly identical and completely substitutable style formats available, it is hard to see what these threats could hope to accomplish. Shutting down one’s principal market is a radical and unproductive way to protect one’s copyright.
Now comes the news that the APA is announcing that authors publishing articles in its journals that are based on NIH-funded research “should NOT” deposit their own works in PubMed Central as is now required by law. Rather, they will be required to pay APA $2500 so that the articles can be deposited by the publisher. Since there is virtually no cost associated with the mechanics of deposit itself, and the NIH policy allows an embargo on public availability of articles of up to one year in order to protect the traditional subscription market, it is hard to see what this policy is intended to accomplish other than to force an additional income stream out of the faculty authors who already provide the APA with free content. And there is heavy irony in the APA’s assertion that they can do this “as the copyright holder.”
APA is trying to put its own authors between the proverbial rock and a hard place, and it is behaving as if theirs is a non-competitive market. This is not, in fact, the case – only two of the top ten psychology journals in 2007, based on impact factor, were published by the APA, and one non-APA journal editor expressed pleased surprise at the new policy because it was sure to benefit those other journals. But for years our faculties have behaved as if they were, indeed, captive to specific journals. As scholarly societies are driven, apparently by fear and anger more than a realistic business strategy, to treat the authors on whom they depend with such contempt, one can only hope that this misperception will begin to change.
Two simple and specific messages need to be delivered over and over to our faculty authors if this dysfunctional and abusive system is to change.
First, they need to be reminded that they do have choices about where they publish their work; there is no logic in remaining loyal to a particular journal when the publisher of that title has clearly decide to place profit and self-interest above the well-being of the academy, the discipline, or its scholarly authors.
Second, regardless of where they publish their research, scholars should resist transferring copyright to journal publishers. APA can only tell scholarly authors what that can and cannot do with their work after they have received a transfer of copyright; up to that point they must negotiate, not dictate. Academic presses can only sue universities over e-reserves because they have been given the copyright in those scholarly works in the first place. To cut the Gordian knot that is plaguing our scholarly communications system, we need to make an exclusive right to publish for a limited time (with reservation of some negotiable authors’ rights within that period) the standard for scholarly publishing agreements. As the original owners of copyright, forcing that change is within the power of faculty authors.
NOTE — Half an hour after this post was published, the APA web page referenced above no longer carries the policy announcement and says simply that the page is under review. We shall have to wait and see what APA comes up with, but the two cardinal points mentioned herein remain valid and urgent.
Getting off the copyright merry-go-round May 17, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright Issues and Legislation, Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , add a commentCongress has been talking a lot recently about the farm bill and war spending. But amidst all that rhetoric and wrangling, some copyright work has also been done in the past two weeks. For one thing, the House passed the so-called PRO-IP bill last week, fortunately without its most troubling provision. One of the major provisions of that bill as proposed was an amendment to the copyright law that would have allowed much larger damage awards for infringement. As I wrote some while ago, this was a huge grab at more money for the recording industry especially, but that provision was dropped in the House-approved version. Now what PRO-IP would largely do is further bloat the federal bureaucracy (in a way opposed by the Justice Department) for IP enforcement.
Perhaps balancing out this sop to special interests, Congress has also been working on the Orphan Works bills, discussed earlier here. The Senate version, called the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act, was unanimously reported out of the Judiciary Committee on May 15, although it is clear that negotiation about some of its provisions is still going on. The House version, which includes the objectionable “dark archives” provision, is still being marked up in the House Judiciary Committee; whether that provision will remain is something I just don’t know right now. But I do know that several issues remain in controversy in both houses, specifically the language addressing state sovereign immunity and the role of Copyright Office certified statements of “best practices” in defining the scope of a “qualifying search” that would afford a user the shelter of the orphan works reduction in liability.
Amidst all this give and take about copyright, the question ought to be asked whether any of these incremental changes will really make much difference. From the perspective of higher education, at least, there is a sense of tinkering around the edges of a severely broken system. PRO IP simply creates more bureaucracy and further trumpets the “sky is falling” approach to copyright of the entertainment industry. Orphan works is an area in which real reform is sorely needed, but one can legitimately ask if the bills being considered would actually work; the bills may be so laden with expensive and unnecessary hoops to be cleared that they will not make truly beneficial uses of orphan works any more possible or likely. Another example of this futility may be found in the recently concluded work of the Section 108 Study Group: although the Study Group’s report raises some interesting and key issues, it was only able to reach agreement to actually recommend minor changes that will not make much real difference. Instead of waiting for reforms that never come in any helpful way, it may be more fruitful in higher education to ask ourselves how we might simply get off the copyright merry-go-round.
The answer, of course, is in open access to scholarship, and there may be some recent developments that point a direction for encouraging open access as an alternative to the current system of copyright protection for commercial monopolies. An article in this month’s College & Research Libraries News by David Lewis, Dean of the Library at IUPUI, forcefully asserts that it is time for libraries to stop putting more and more money into the bloated and dysfunctional journal publishing system and to move funds to support open access infrastructure and venues. His article proposes specific steps that libraries can take to move off the endless cycle of higher journal prices that leads to less money for monographs and overall reduced access. He is suggesting an important step to get us off the copyright merry-go-round.
A major obstacle to open access, however, has always been resistance from faculty, for whom the system usually seems to work just fine. Tenure and promotion have been built around the core of commercial publishing, and it is very hard to communicate the reasons for moving away from that core. Until now. With the lawsuit filed against Georgia State by three major publishers, a real opportunity has arisen to show faculty members that giving copyright away to publishers primarily interested in share holder profit, not dissemination of knowledge, is no longer in their own best interests. At its root, this lawsuit challenges what faculty members, who provide the content for scholarly publications, want to be able to do with their own work and the work of their colleagues – communicate it to students. If the copyright system determines that they cannot do that without paying yet more money on top of the exorbitant prices charged to buy the works back initially, perhaps there will be a general recognition that they should not freely give that content away in the first place. A return to first principles would remind faculty that these works belong to them unless and until they choose to give them away, and that they are free to negotiate the terms of any transfer of copyright. Ironically, this lawsuit’s frontal attack on a core value in higher education may prove to be the best weapon yet to move scholarship off the increasingly dangerous and unstable copyright merry-go-round.
Access to legal scholarship May 5, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , 1 comment so farI have written several times before about scholarship in the field of law (here, for example, and here). For a variety of reasons, legal scholarship is an excellent laboratory for experiments in changing the traditional structures and economics of scholarship. Both open access and informal forms of scholarship have been more readily adopted and more quickly influential in law than in other fields. The unusual structure of most legal scholarship is a partial explanation for these facts, but many of the experiences and observations made in the legal arena offer substantive lessons for scholarship in other fields.
Nowhere are these experiences and observations better synthesized than in a recent article by Richard Danner, Ruffy Research Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Information Services at
One of Danner’s observations particularly struck me when I read this article, and that impression was confirmed by a conversation I had this week with several librarians. Contrary to the oft-repeated claim that open access will inevitably lead to loss of subscription income for publishers, Danner documents the experience of
Overall, Danner’s article is a masterful analysis of the structure of publishing in a particular field and how the “access principle,” a concept taken from John Willinsky’s book of the same name, could transform a field of scholarship. In spite of the oddities of legal scholarship, Danner is very successful at offering both an analysis and a call to action that deserve to be translated and applied in other fields.
