Category Archives: Open Access and Institutional Repositories

ACS v. ResearchGate – 3,143 articles and a few lessons about their authors  

In October, Elsevier and ACS filed a new US copyright infringement lawsuit against ResearchGate [complaint]. Like the German ResearchGate lawsuit I wrote about last year, the basic premise of the suit is the same. This is how Elsevier and ACS describe ResearchGate’s activities in the American lawsuit:

In egregious violation of copyright law, ResearchGate provides anyone connected to the Internet with a free trove of infringing digital copies of peer-reviewed published journal articles [PJAs]. ResearchGate has consciously designed and actively maintains the RG Website as a hub for obtaining infringing copies of those PJAs. ResearchGate is not a passive host of a forum where infringement just happens to occur. Rather, ResearchGate actively participates in the ongoing infringement, in which it directly engages by duplicating, displaying, and distributing unauthorized copies of PJAs. ResearchGate also intentionally facilitates, supports, and lures users into uploading and downloading unauthorized copies of PJAs.

Big, if true. I have some doubts that I will write about later.

As far as what this suit and the publishers’ assertions mean for authors, I suggest reading this detailed post by Brandon Butler at UVA on the subject. It’s the best explanation I’ve read yet on copyright, open access and publisher-author sharing policies.  The “tl;dr” for that post is sad but accurate: “You probably can’t share your research as widely as you thought, and this is a problem endemic to academic publishing.”

The Authors of the ResearchGate Articles

One thing I found so interesting about the complaint in the most recent lawsuit was that it had very little discussion of the authors of the articles involved, or about the research itself (to be fair, if I were writing the complaint for the publishers, I’d try to leave the authors out of it too). Discussion of the authors and their articles is important context, though, for understanding how these articles were created, who posted them to ResearchGate in the first place, and what rights those users might have. Were any authors U.S. government employees who had no rights to be transferred to the publishers? Were any subject to university open access policies that reserve rights to universities or authors? Were any subject to funder OA mandates? Or did authors pay for open access for any of these articles? 

Thankfully, to bring a copyright infringement suit, one must actually identify the content alleged to have been infringed, even if you don’t talk much about it in the complaint. In this case, ACS and Elsevier provided a list in “Exhibit A” to the complaint of the 3,143 articles that they claim were infringed. I haven’t had time to fully explore those articles (these is a spreadsheet with information for all 3,143, if you’d like to do your own research). But thanks to some advice from some fantastic colleagues here at Duke, I was able to extract that data and run some searches for information about the articles and authors. I searched those article 3,143 DOIs in Web of Science, which returned 3,082 records. Here’s some of what I learned from those records:

Author Organizations

  • Most authors of these articles are affiliated with non-US institutions. From among the 3,082 records, the top ten author organizational affiliations are:
    • Chinese Academy Of Science (176 articles, 5.7%)
    • Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique Cnr (128 articles, 4.1%)
    • Universite Cote D Azur Comue (100 articles, 3.2%)
    • University Of Chinese Academy Of Sciences Cas (68 articles, 2.2%)
    • University Of California System (60 articles, 1.9%)
    • Russian Academy Of Sciences (49 articles 1.6%)
    • Indian Institute Of Technology System IIT System (45 articles, 1.5%)
    • State University System Of Florida (37 articles, 1.2%)
    • Nanyang Technological University (36 articles, 1.2%)
    • Nanyang Technological University National Institute Of Education Nie Singapore (36 articles, 1.2%)

I think there is a whole other blog post to be written about publishers going after articles authored in large part by non-Western authors. But I’ll not touch that for now and focus on the license situation.  I can’t speak about all of those institutions, but at least one (the University of California System) has an open access policy. I’m not sure how that policy/license factors into the posting of the articles to a site like ResearchGate, but it’s worth exploring. Two of the authors are Duke authors, and I know we have an OA policy that affects whether posting the articles to ResearchGate is permissible.

Article Funders

  • Unsurprisingly, given the authorship, most articles with identified funders are not based in the US. The top 10 funders are mostly Chinese.
  • NSF funded 38 of the articles, and NIH funded 24.

Again, unclear how funder OA policies may factor into the posting of these articles, but worth further exploration.

“Open Access” Articles

These articles raise some important questions about what rights the authors thought they were getting when they paid the OA fees for their articles. Did they understand that posting to ResearchGate would be disallowed? It also raises a question about how Elsevier is interpreting the “non-commercial” clause of the CreativeCommons license (is an author posting to ResearchGate “commercial” use?) and how that matches up to, e.g, the interpretation of that language by Creative Commons and by courts such as in Great Minds v. FedEx.

I haven’t had as much time as I would like to fully explore these articles and their authors. I should say that I’m not particularly sympathetic to ResearchGate or its business practices, but I do sympathize with authors who are trying to share their research in the best way they know how. From them, I would be particularly interested in hearing what they think about this lawsuit — were they consulted before the suit was filed? Are they aware that it was even filed? Do they agree with it? Did they understand their publication contract and its effect on posting to sites like ResearchGate? I’m hopeful that someone out there will take up the important work of developing better information about authors views on lawsuits like this.

Moving into the open

Since it was announced that I will move shortly to the University of Kansas, several people have asked me if I intend to continue blogging, and have kindly encouraged me to do so.  This blog, of course, will remain one of the communication outlets for the Scholarly Communications program at Duke, and my Duke colleagues Paolo Mangiafico and Haley Walton, as well as others, will fill the space, I am sure, with interesting and worthwhile reads.

I do intend to keep blogging, however, at a different site and in a different format.  Over the past few weeks, some colleagues and I have assembled a great group of people interested in scholarship, publishing and libraries, and I am excited to announce a new, collective blog called IO: In the Open.

On this new site, this group of people will be writing about how scholarship and scholarly publishing is changing and can change in ways that better adapt to new technologies, needs, and economics:

Amy Buckland
Institutional Repository Manager, University of Chicago Library

William Cross
Director, Copyright & Digital Scholarship, North Carolina State University Libraries

Ellen Finnie
Head, Scholarly Communications & Collection Strategy, MIT Libraries

Patricia Hswe
Digital Content Strategist, Penn State University Library

Lisa Macklin
Director, Scholarly Communications Office, Emory University Library

John Sherer
Director, University of North Carolina Press

Sarah Shreeves
Associate Dean for Digital Strategies, University of Miami Libraries

Kevin Smith
Dean of Libraries, University of Kansas

Claire Stewart
Associate University Librarian for Research & Learning, University of Minnesota

Shan Sutton
Vice Dean, University of Arizona Libraries

The title of this new blog should not surprise folks.  It is born out of the conviction that scholarship should be open because…

Scholarship in the open is better business – it provides a clearer perspective on what it actually costs to produce articles, books and other scholarly output.

Scholarship in the open is better for libraries – it connects us more directly with our researchers and with the life entire life cycle of research. It improves our ability to disseminate the outcomes of research and get the materials they need into the hands of students, teachers and others quickly and efficiently.

Scholarship in the open pushes us towards better copyright laws — it encourages us to think about how copyright could better align with author incentives and reminds us that, because the reasons creators create are so various, the law needs more flexibility than it currently has.

Scholarship in the open is better scholarship – it can be read and evaluated by a much larger and more varied audience. It takes the initial process of evaluating works of scholarship out of the hands of a small elite, some of whom are ill-prepared for the task, and offers the potential for more diverse ways of measuring impact and providing more complete information for the hiring, tenure and promotion process.

Our first blog post at IO: In the Open, by Ellen Finnie of MIT, will focus on the vital issue of how we spend our money in libraries, and how we can think in broader terms about the value of scholarly resources.  Ellen’s post, with its interesting analogy to food-supply chains, will be published on IO within the next day or so.

I hope that the people who have followed Scholarly Communications @ Duke so faithfully over the years will also subscribe to IO: In the Open.  We believe you will find a interesting, committed and diverse set of voices there that will help shape the discussion of these issues in years to come.

If you follow this blog on Twitter (Twitter handle @klsmith4906), that account will also tweet out new post from IO: In the Open.  Or, you can follow our new IO Twitter account:  https://twitter.com/IOIntheOpen.  You can also subscribe directly to the IO: In the Open blog posts by using the widget on the side of the IO page.

Some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub

Radical, as I like to remind folks, means to get to the root of an issue (same derivation as radish).  So when I say I am offering some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub and the controversy it has generated, I mean that I hope to use the discussion to ask some very basic, “at the roots,” questions about copyright, not that I intend to shock anyone.

My radical thoughts have been prompted by the many very conventional reactions to stories about Sci-Hub, which collects academic papers using .edu proxies and makes them available without charge and in disregard of the rules imposed on distribution by the copyright holders.  These reactions have followed two predictable trajectories, with one group calling what the site and its founder Alexandra Elbakyan are doing civil disobedience.  Indeed, Ms. Elbakyan herself has apparently cited Article 27 of the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights as a justification of her project, which now host nearly 50 million articles.  On the other side of the debate are those who are shocked by this disregard of the law, and especially by the apparent willingness of some libraries or librarians to use Sci-Hub to obtain research materials for their patrons.  All this debate, by the way, has been provoked by a lawsuit against Sci-Hub brought by publishing giant Elsevier, a move which has predictably increased attention to the site.

One thing that has been particularly disturbing to me about the various statements expressing outrage over Sci-Hub is how focused they are on the values and opportunities of the developed world.  One comment I saw pleaded with librarians to respect the law and not to use Sci-Hub “just to save money.”  Such moralizing misses a couple of basic points, I think.  The first is that Sci-Hub seems directed at, and is certainly mostly used by, researchers and students in the developing world, where it is not merely a matter of “saving some money,” it is a question of finding any way at all to get access to scientific and medical research.  We tend to forget that a $30 paywall, while a mere inconvenience to those of us in the U.S. or Europe, can be an insurmountable roadblock for someone in Cambodia or Malawi who is trying to learn about a medical condition.

Another point about the righteous defense of “the law” in some of these comments is that laws come in different forms and carry different kinds of moral authority.  Lawyers distinguish, for example, between illegal acts that are “wrong in themselves” (malum in se) and those that are only “wrong because prohibited,” or malum prohibitum. ( there is a discussion of this distinction, for those with a sense of humor, in the movie Legally Blonde).  Copyright infringement is, of course, the latter; a violation of the law but not of any moral imperative.  Such a law merely enshrines a decision about the distribution of resources, and it can be changed without causing the collapse of human society.  Precisely the kind of situation where acts of civil disobedience to provoke discussion and change are most supportable.

This is where the radicalism comes in, when we look at what copyright law does, how it has been used over time, and what Sci-Hub is actually doing.  These questions were raised for me by the fascinating comment by Thomas Munro on this blog post, which is itself defending the idea of Sci-Hub as civil disobedience.  Dr Munro’s comment, the first that follows the post, points out that Sci-Hub is doing what U.S. publishers did for a long time — she is refusing to recognize copyrights granted by other countries.  Dr. Munro writes as follows:

What Elbakyan is doing – ignoring foreign copyright – was official US government policy for more than a century. As a result, books were much cheaper than in Europe and literacy skyrocketed. When the US finally caved, in 1888, the editors of ‘Scientific American’ thundered that “The extension of copyright monopoly to foreigners will enable them to draw millions out of the country” and that it would turn US customs officers into “pimps and ferrets for these foreigners”.
As one Senator said in voting against the bill: “An international copyright is simply a monopoly … what is known as protection, or taxing the people to make a few persons rich … It seems to me that there can be no excuse for carrying this restriction upon human knowledge.”

That the publishing industry thrived in the U.S. by ignoring copyright is a well-known but little discussed aspect of our history with scholarly communication.  Perhaps those early American publishers did not see themselves as practicing civil disobedience; they may have just been trying to maximize profits.  But their willingness to ignore foreign copyrights when it served what they believed was a more important purpose really does call us to the root of the matter.  Copyright law is an instrumentality, not a good in itself.  It’s role in our legal system is to encourage creativity and the production of knowledge.  When it ceases to do that it deserves to be challenged and changed.

I believe that copyright has a continuing role to play in the academy and in the reform of scholarly communications.  But we do no favors to that role when we treat copyright law as enshrined and inviolable,  as if it had been decreed from Mt. Sinai.  Instead we should focus on what the law is intended to accomplish, where and why it fails in its purpose, and how we can make it more adaptable for the digital age.  One key to a clearer assessment of copyright law is to know its history a little better, and in his blog comment Dr. Munro also offered us a pointer for that task —  a citation to a doctoral dissertation, now freely available an e-book:

Eric Anderson. (2010). Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States, 1831-1891.  http://archive.org/details/PimpsAndFerretsCopyrightAndCultureInTheUnitedStates1831-1891

I haven’t read Anderson’s book yet, but I am anticipating a more detailed and nuanced view of how copyright has been used and abused through the vicissitudes of American history.

Should you #DeleteAcademiaEdu?

[ Note: Many readers of this blog have probably heard by now that Kevin Smith, who has been the primary author here, will soon be leaving Duke to be the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas. We do intend to keep the blog going, and to continue to address the same issues you’ve come to expect from the site, though with a greater variety of authors. So do stay tuned. This post is by Paolo Mangiafico.]

Yesterday afternoon a kerfuffle arose on Twitter about Academia.edu, a social networking site for academics, where many academic authors have profiles, share their publications, and connect with other scholars. You can read about the beginning of the controversy in this article the Chronicle of Higher Education posted this morning.

The ensuing tweetstorm followed a fairly typical trajectory – moral outrage, call to action, a hashtag, and then of course the inevitable backlash, with each side calling into question the integrity of each other’s motivations, or at least the consistency of their actions.

The chief concern, or at least the one that appears to have caused the most heated debate initially, was whether paying for promotion of one’s scholarly work was equivalent to “vanity publishing”, but the discussion evolved into the broader issue of whether the fact that Academia.edu is a commercial service meant academics should avoid it, with several people on Twitter calling that out as hypocrisy, given the many other commercial transactions that academic life is entangled with.

My own opinion is that this is a straw man argument, and it misses an opportunity to have a more nuanced discussion about what’s really at stake here. This isn’t a morality play, and it’s not about whether charging for “monetizing” something is in itself a bad thing – for me it’s about choices, and making informed choices about keeping or ceding control to one’s own work. It’s also about being open vs being closed. Despite the impression that #DeleteAcademiaEdu is just railing against capitalism, I’d argue that it’s really about promoting a more competitive marketplace, one where the data is open for any number of potential services (consortial, member-supported, or even commercial) to do interesting and useful things with it – may the best service win, or may many complementary services thrive.

The challenge with sites like Academia.edu is that this is not possible. By most accounts, Academia.edu is a fine service, and clearly it’s meeting a need, as the number of academics who have profiles in it shows. They are doing very well at motivating academics to put their profile data and publications there. But what happens to that information once it’s there? By my read of the site’s terms of service, no other uses can be made of what you’ve put there – it’s up to Academia.edu to decide what you can and can’t do with the information you’ve given them, and they’re not likely to make it easy for alternative methods of access (why would they?). There doesn’t appear to be a public API, and you need to be logged in to do most of the useful things on the site (even as a casual reader). They were among the first to create enough value for academics to encourage them to sign up, and kudos to them for that, but does that mean your profile data and publications should be exclusively available via their platform? This is what’s called “vendor lock-in” – it’s very good for the vendor, not so good for the users.

While it’s understandable that companies will try to recoup their investments through such approaches, it nonetheless goes against the ethos of academia, and of how the Internet functions best. A few years ago at a conference I heard a speaker say

On the Internet the opposite of ‘open’ is not ‘closed’ – the opposite of ‘open’ is ‘broken’

(If I remember correctly, it was John Wilbanks)

So yesterday when I first started reading some tweets about people deleting their Academia.edu accounts, I tweeted

VIVO is an open source, open access, community-based, member-supported profile system for academics. It has been implemented by many universities and research organizations, and makes linked open data available for access and integration across implementations. In some institutions, like my own, it is connected to our open access institutional repository, so Duke researchers can easily make the full text of their publications be linked directly from their profile – open to anyone, no login required, always in the author’s control. And the custodians of the system and the data are the researcher’s home institution, as well as…  well, here I’ll quote from an article Kevin and I wrote a couple of years ago:

“this brings us to a discussion of another major player in this ecosystem that we have not yet addressed—a set of organizations that are mission driven, rather than market driven; that are widely distributed and independently operated, and therefore less vulnerable to single points of failure, and that were designed to be stable over long periods of time; that are catholic in their scope, strong supporters of intellectual freedom, and opponents of censorship and other restrictions on access to knowledge; and that are in full alignment with the mission of learning, teaching, and research that constitutes the primary reason why authors write academic articles. We are, of course, talking about libraries.”

This, ultimately, is why I think scholars will be better served by having the core data for their profiles and their research tied to open systems like VIVO, and to their universities and their libraries. Sure, the interfaces might not be as elegant, and we might move more slowly than a commercial service, but we’re in it for the long haul, we share your values, and we’re not going to try to lock in your data.

If someone wants to harvest the data from VIVO and our repository and layer on a better social networking or indexing service, that’s great – the data is available for that, and we have an open API. Do you want to charge for the service? No problem, as long as the people you’re charging know that they’re paying for your service add-ons, and not the data itself, which remains open and free to anyone else to use it outside the paid service. Do you have a service (like Academia.edu) that’s really good at convincing authors to enter their CV and upload their articles? Wonderful – make the data available unencumbered, and we might be willing to pay you to do the collecting for us (especially since institutional repositories haven’t been as successful in doing so).

The key reasons why authors should choose first to work with their scholarly communities rather than purely commercial enterprises isn’t that making money is bad – we all have to earn a living – but that the goals and values aren’t necessarily in alignment. I’ve used a lot of words to say something that Katie Fortney and Justin Gonder said in December (in “A social networking site is not an open access repository”) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick said a few months before that (in “Academia, Not Edu”), but the Twitter discussion sparked yesterday has made many more people aware of this issue, so I wanted to underline these ideas, and say a bit more about it than would fit in my tweets yesterday afternoon.

You have a choice, and the choice I hope you will think more about is whether you feel more comfortable investing your time and efforts with your home institution and your library, whose incentives and values presumably align with your own, and who will contribute to an open ecosystem, or with a service whose incentives and values and life span are unknown, and whose business model relies on being closed. If you’re comfortable with the trade-offs and risks, and willing to exchange those for the service provided, then don’t #DeleteAcademiaEdu. But I hope you will use this opportunity to look into whether alternatives exist that will meet your needs while keeping your options open and your data open, and preserving your ability to keep control of your work and make sure it’s not helping sustain an ecosystem that’s broken.

——

If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll also tolerate this shameless plug for an upcoming event that will be a forum for addressing many of the issues discussed above – the Scholarly Communication Institute. The theme of SCI 2016, to be held in Chapel Hill, NC, in October, is “Incentives, Economics, and Values: Changing the Political Economy of Scholarly Publishing.” We invite teams to submit proposals of projects they’d like to work on that fit this theme, and to build a dream team of participants they’d like to spend 4 days with working on it. For proposals that are selected, we pay expenses (thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) for the team to come to the North Carolina Research Triangle and work on their project alongside several other similar teams, in an institute that’s part retreat, part seminar, part unconference, and part development sprint. You can find out more about the institute at trianglesci.orgproposals are due March 14, so if you’re interested, start putting together your team soon.

Open Access at the tipping point

Open Access Day bookmark used under CC-BY license from http://www.openaccessweek.org/page/englishhigh-resolution-1[ guest post by Paolo Mangiafico ]

As readers of this blog almost certainly know, this week was Open Access Week, and it’s been heartening to see all of the stories about how open access is creating new opportunities for scholarship, and transforming scholarly communication.

It’s also been interesting to see organizations that one might not think of as being open access proponents proclaiming their OA bona fides this week. On Tuesday this press release from Nature came across my Twitter feed. I shared it with my colleagues Kevin and Haley, joking that our job was done and we could go home, now that even in Nature over 60% of published research articles were open access under Creative Commons licenses.

Even though Nature neglects to mention in this release that they are bringing in a lot of money from open access through high article processing charges (they aren’t doing this just to be nice) I still think it’s an important milestone because it shows that open access is becoming the norm, even in mainstream, high visibility journals. I’m optimistic that this is another indicator that we’re on our way to some kind of tipping point for open access, where other effects will come into play.

One of the statistics given in the press release is that the percentage of authors choosing CC-BY licenses in Nature Publishing Group’s open access journals rose from 26% in 2014 to 96% in September 2015. Just last year, a study by Taylor & Francis indicated that, when asked (or at least when asked with the leading questions in the T&F study), authors were more likely to choose other CC variants, yet in Nature open access journals the choice of CC-BY is now nearly unanimous. Maybe “choice” is too strong a word – they appear to have achieved this primarily by setting CC-BY as the default. Just as in the past when signing over all your rights to a publisher was the default (and, unfortunately, in many journals still is), it seems that few authors realize they can make a change, or see a strong reason to do so. What this signals is the power of setting a default.

When we were working toward an open access policy for Duke University faculty in 2010, we talked about setting the default to open. As we discussed the proposed open access policy with Duke faculty, we never called it a mandate, and we haven’t treated it as a mandate, in that the policy doesn’t force anyone to do something they are disinclined to do. But absent any expressed desire to the contrary (via an opt out) the policy enabled the faculty and the University to make as much scholarship produced at Duke be as widely available as possible. We approached the policy as a default position, and built services to make it easy for Duke authors to make their work open access via an institutional repository and have it appear on their University and departmental profile pages, so there are few reasons now not to do it. It will still take time, but I think this “green” open access option is something authors will increasingly be aware of and see as a natural and easy step in their publishing process. They’ll see open access links showing up on their colleagues’ profiles, being included in syllabi and getting cited by new audiences around the world, and linked from news stories, for example, and word of mouth will tell them that it’s really easy to get that for themselves too.

What makes me optimistic about the figures in the Nature press release is that they point to an environment where even in high visibility journals open access is no longer that thing only your activist colleague does, but is something that many people are doing as a matter of course. And as the percentage of authors making their work open access grows, suddenly various decision-making heuristics and biases start to tip in the other direction. Pretty soon the outlier will be the scholar whose work is not openly available, either via “green” repositories or “gold” open access journals, and I think momentum toward almost universal OA will increase.

Our work isn’t done, of course. Even with open access as a default, the next challenge will be to manage the costs. So far the shift to OA has mostly been an additional cost, and the big publishers who made big profits before are continuing to make big profits now via these new models. Even as OA becomes prevalent, and scholars see it as the norm, we’ll still have to work hard to find ways to exert downward pressure on author processing charges and other publishing costs, so that open access doesn’t just become another profit center that exploits scholarly authors and their funders and institutions. We need to do better to surface these costs, and to put in place mechanisms and perhaps shift to supporting other publishers and other models that will keep costs down.

But for now let’s call this a victory. Recognizing there’s still a lot to do, let’s pop the champagne bottle, celebrate open access week, and then get back to work on the next round of creating a better scholarly communication ecosystem.

 

Sit, Stay, Pay: Paywalls and Popular Research

A couple of weeks ago, an article detailing new research findings by the Duke Canine Cognition Center appeared in our Raleigh area newspaper, the News and Observer. The researchers found that tone of voice can affect how different types of dogs—calmer dogs versus more energetic dogs—respond to their owners’ commands. As a dog owner myself, this is a potentially useful discovery that could help me and many others develop better relationships with our pets.

For those readers who wanted to delve deeper into the researchers’ methods and results by reading the original article, the News and Observer thoughtfully included a link to the article from the journal in which it was published: Animal Cognition. However, clicking on the link takes the reader not to the article itself but to an intermediary page that requires a payment of $40 in order to access the article. In the parlance of scholarly communication, the reader is “hitting a paywall.” By charging prohibitively high fees to view single articles, journals create a barrier between readers without a subscription (read: most of the general public) and the research they want to access.

This problem is not a new one. The open access movement has been trying to address the paywall issue for the better part of two decades. In 2010, as a part of that effort, the Duke faculty adopted a university-wide open access policy to facilitate wider access to their research. The policy enables faculty members to archive copies of their research articles in our institutional repository, DukeSpace. Open self-archiving is accepted by most journals, and many of Duke’s faculty members have uploaded their work to the repository. Anything archived in DukeSpace is free and open to anyone with an internet connection.

For the past two years, to raise awareness about the availability of DukeSpace as resource for making faculty work available to the public, the Duke Libraries Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communication has been collaborating with our Office of News and Communication to provide open access copies of research papers that are featured in the news. When a news story is about to be released, we are alerted so that we can get in touch with the authors and request a copy of the research article. Most authors get back to us within a day or two. My colleagues and I then upload the article to the repository and provide the permanent link to Duke News to include in the story.

Since we began seeking these articles out, we’ve uploaded dozens of papers to the repository, many of which have seen very high numbers of downloads. One particular article about a new material that can harvest power from the airwaves has been viewed nearly 17,000 times since it was archived in DukeSpace in 2013. And the readership wasn’t limited to the United States. Many of the downloads came from other countries, including India, China, Russia, and Japan.

Like that article, we wanted to make the Canine Cognition Center’s paper available openly. Though the News and Observer is not a Duke publication, we still saw the opportunity to leverage our open access policy to provide wider access to the article. When the authors received my request, they were—like most of the authors we contact—more than happy to provide a copy of the article. They were quite appreciative, in fact, of the offer to upload it on their behalf, as it would help increase the impact of the article’s findings. It is now available for download free of charge in Dukespace.

I hope that this case will raise awareness among news agencies of the limited access the public has to academic research, but also of ability to collaborate with authors and institutions to provide open copies of research articles. By contacting the researchers and asking them to post an open access version of their paper, you will not be imposing on them, but helping them increase the reach and impact of their scholarship. And in so doing, you’ll be affording more readers the opportunity to engage with current research.

For all the dog lovers out there, enjoy the article.

A distinction without a difference

The discussion of the new Elsevier policies about sharing and open access has continued at a brisk pace, as anyone following the lists, blogs and Twitter feeds will know.  On one of the most active lists, Elsevier officials have been regular contributors, trying to calm fears and offering rationales, often specious, for their new policy. If one of the stated reasons for their change was to make the policy simpler, the evidence of all these many “clarifying” statements indicates that it is already a dismal failure.

As I read one of the most recent messages from Dr. Alicia Wise of Elsevier, one key aspect of the new policy documents finally sunk in for me, and when I fully realized what Elsevier was doing, and what they clearly thought would be a welcome concession to the academics who create the content from which they make billions, my jaw dropped in amazement.

It appears that Elsevier is making a distinction between an author’s personal website or blog and the repository at the institution where that author works. Authors are, I think, able to post final manuscripts to the former for public access, but posting to the latter must be restricted only to internal users for the duration of the newly-imposed embargo periods. In the four column chart that was included in their original announcement, this disparate treatment of repositories and other sites is illustrated in the “After Acceptance” column, where it says that “author manuscripts can be shared… [o]n personal websites or blogs,” but that sharing must be done “privately” on institutional repositories. I think I missed this at first because the chart is so difficult to understand; it must be read from left to right and understood as cumulative, since by themselves the columns are incomplete and confusing.  But, in their publicity campaign around these new rules, Elsevier is placing a lot of weight on this distinction.

In a way, I guess this situation is a little better than what I thought when I first saw the policy. But really, I think I must have missed the distinction at first because it was so improbable that Elsevier would really try to treat individual websites and IRs differently. Now that I fully understand that intention, it provides clear evidence of just how out of touch with the real conditions of academic work Elsevier has become.

Questions abound. Many scientists, for example, maintain lab websites, and their personal profiles are often subordinate to those sites. Articles are most often linked, in these situations, from the main lab website.  Is this a personal website? Given the distinction Elsevier makes, I think it must be, but it is indicative of the fact that the real world does not conform to Elsevier’s attempt to make a simple distinction between “the Internet we think is OK” and “the Internet we are still afraid of.”

By the way, since the new policy allows authors to replace pre-prints on ArXive and RePEC — those two are specifically mentioned — with final author manuscripts, it is even clearer to see that this new policy is a direct attack on repositories, as the Chronicle of Higher Education perceives in this article.  Elsevier seems to want to broaden its ongoing attack on repositories, shifting from a focus on just those campuses that have an open access policy to now inhibiting green self-archiving on all university campuses.  But they are doing so using a distinction that ultimately makes no sense.

That distinction gets really messy when we try to apply it to the actual conditions of campus IT, something Elsevier apparently knows little about and did not consider as the wrote the new policy documents.  I am reminded that, in a conversation unrelated to the Elsevier policy change, a librarian told me recently that her campus Counsel’s Office had told her that she should treat the repository as an extension of faculty members’ personal sites.  Even before it was enshrined by Elsevier, this was clearly a distinction without a difference.

For one thing, when we consider how users access these copies of final authors’ manuscripts, the line between a personal website and a repository vanishes entirely. In both cases the manuscript would reside on the same servers, or, at least, in the same “cloud.” And our analytics tell us that most people find our repositories through an Internet search engine; they do not go through the “front door” of repository software. The result is that a manuscript will be found just as easily, in the same manner and by the same potential users, if it is on a personal website or in an institutional repository. A Google or Google Scholar search will still find the free copy, so trying to wall off institutional repositories is a truly foolish and futile move.

For many of our campuses, this effort becomes even more problematic as we adopt software that helps faculty members create and populate standardized web profiles. With this software – VIVO and Elements are examples that are becoming quite common — the open access copies that are presented on a faculty author’s individual profile page actually “reside” in the repository. Elsevier apparently views these two “places” – the repository and the faculty web site – as if they really were different rooms in a building, and they could control access to one while making the other open to the public. But that is simply not how the Internet works. After 30 years of experience with hypertext, and with all the money at their disposal, one would think that Elsevier should have gained a better grasp on the technological conditions that prevail on the campuses where the content they publish is created and disseminated. But this policy seems written to facilitate feel-good press releases while still keeping the affordances of the Internet at bay, rather than to provide practical guidelines or address any of the actual needs of researchers.

From control to contempt

I hope it was clear, when I wrote about the press release from Elsevier addressing their new approach to authors’ rights and self-archiving, that I believe the fundamental issue is control.  In a comment to my original post, Mark Seeley, who is Elsevier’s General Counsel, objected to the language I used about control.  Nevertheless, the point he made, about how publishers want people to access “their content,” but in a way that “ensures that their business has continuity” actually re-enforced that the language I used was right on the mark.

My colleague Paolo Mangiafico has suggested that what these new policies are really about is capturing the ecosystem for scholarly sharing under Elsevier’s control.  As Paolo points out, these new policies, which impose long embargo periods on do-it-yourself sharing by authors but offer limited opportunities to share articles when a link or API provided by Elsevier is used, should be seen alongside the company’s purchase of Mendeley; both provide Elsevier an opportunity to capture data about how works are used and re-used, and both  reflect an effort to grab the reins over scholarly sharing to ensure that it is more difficult to share outside of Elsevier’s walled garden than it is inside that enclosure.

I deliberately quote Mr. Seeley’s phrase about “their content” because it is characteristic of how publishers seem to think about what they publish.  I believe it may even be a nearly unconscious gesture of denial of the evident fact that academic publishers rely on others — faculty authors, editors and reviewers — to do most of the work, while the publisher collects all of the profit and fights the authors for subsequent control of the works those authors have created. That denial must be resisted, however, because it is in that gesture that the desire for control becomes outright disrespect for the authors that publishing is supposed to serve.

Nowhere is this disrespect more evident than in publisher claims that the works they publish are “work made for hire,” which means, in legal terms, that the publisher IS the author.  The faculty member who puts pen to paper is completely erased from the transaction.  To be clear, as far as I know Elsevier is not making such a claim with its new policies.  But these work made for hire assertions are growing in academic publishing.

Three years ago I wrote about an author agreement from Oxford University Press that claimed work made for hire over book chapters; that agreement is still in use as far as I am aware.  At the time, I pointed out two reasons why I thought OUP might want to make that claim.  First, if something is a work made for hire, the provision in U.S. copyright law that allows an author or her heirs to terminate any license or transfer after 35 years simply does not apply.  More significantly, an open access license, such as is created by many university policies, probably is not effective if the work is considered made for hire.  This should be pretty obvious, since our law employs the legal fiction that says the employer, not the actual writer, is the author from the very moment of creation in work made for hire situations.  So we should read these claims, when we find them in author agreements, as pretty direct assaults on an author’s ability to comply with an open access policy, no matter how much she may want to.

As disturbing as the Oxford agreement is, however, it should be said that it makes some legal sense.  When a work is created by an independent contractor (and it is not clear to me if an academic author should be defined that way), there are only selected types of works that can even be considered work made for hire; one of them is “contribution[s] to a collective work.”  So a chapter in an edited book is at least plausible as a work made for hire, although the other requirement — an explicit agreement, which some courts have said must predate the creation of the work — may still not be met.  In any case, the situation is much worse with the publication agreement from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), which was recently brought to my attention.

ASME takes as its motto the phrase “Setting the Standard,” and with this publication agreement they may well set the standard for contemptuous maltreatment of their authors, many of whom are undoubtedly also members of the society.  A couple of points should be noted here.  First, the contract does claim that the works in question were prepared as work made for hire.  It attempts to “back date” this claim by beginning with an “acknowledgement” that the paper was “specially ordered and commissioned as a work made for hire and, accordingly, ASME is the author of the Paper.”  This acknowledgement is almost certainly untrue in many, if not most, cases, especially since it appears to apply even to conference presentations, which are most certainly not “specially commissioned.”  The legal fiction behind work made for hire has been pushed into the realm of pure fantasy here.

What’s more, later in the agreement the “author” agrees to waive all moral rights, which means that they surrender the right to be attributed as the author of the paper and to protect its integrity.  Basically, an author who is foolish enough to sign this agreement has no relationship at all to the work, once the agreement is in place.  They are given back a very limited set of permissions to use the work internally within their organization and to create some, but not all, forms of derivative works from it (they cannot produce or allow a translation, for example).  Apparently ASME has recently started to disallow some students who publish with them to use the published paper as part of a dissertation, since most dissertations are now online and ASME does not permit the  writer to deposit the article, even in such revised form, in an open repository.

To me, this agreement is the epitome of disrespect for scholarly authors.  Your job, authors are told, is not to spread knowledge, not to teach, not to be part of a wider scholarly conversation.  It is to produce content for us, which we will own and you will have nothing to say about.  You are, as nearly as possible, just “chopped liver.”  It is mind-boggling to me that any self-respecting author would sign this blatant slap in their own face, and that a member-based organization could get away with demanding it.  The best explanation I can think of is that most people do not read the agreements they sign.  But authors — they are authors, darn it, in spite of the work for hire fiction — deserve more respect from publishers who rely on them for content (free content, in fact; the ASME agreement is explicit that writers are paid nothing and are responsible for their own expenses related to the paper).  Indeed, authors should have more respect for themselves, and for the traditions of academic freedom, than to agree to this outlandish publication contract.

Stepping back from sharing

The announcement from Elsevier about its new policies regarding author rights was a masterpiece of doublespeak, proclaiming that the company was “unleashing the power of sharing” while in fact tying up sharing in as many leashes as they could.  This is a retreat from open access, and it needs to be called out for what it is.

For context, since 2004 Elsevier has allowed authors to self-archive the final accepted manuscripts of their articles in an institutional repository without delay.  In 2012 they added a foolish and forgettable attempt to punish institutions that adopted an open access policy by purporting to revoke self-archiving rights from authors at such institutions.  This was a vain effort to undermine OA policies; clearly Elsevier was hoping that their sanctions would discourage adoption.  This did not prove to be the case.  Faculty authors continued to vote for green open access as the default policy for scholarship.  In just a week at the end of last month the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Penn State, and Dartmouth all adopted such policies.

Attempting to catch up to reality, Elsevier announced last week that it was doing away with its punitive restriction that applied only to authors whose institutions had the temerity to support open access. They now call that policy “complex” — it was really just ambiguous and unenforceable — and assert that they are “simplifying” matters for Elsevier authors.  In reality they are simply punishing any authors who are foolish enough to publish under these terms.

Two major features of this retreat from openness need to be highlighted.  First, it imposes an embargo of at least one year on all self-archiving of final authors’ manuscripts, and those embargoes can be as long as four years.  Second, when the time finally does roll around when an author can make her own work available through an institutional repository, Elsevier now dictates how that access is to be controlled, mandating the most restrictive form of Creative Commons license, the CC-BY-NC-ND license for all green open access.

These embargoes are the principal feature of this new policy, and they are both complicated and draconian.  Far from making life simpler for authors, they now must navigate through several web pages to finally find the list of different embargo periods.  The list itself is 50 pages long, since each journal has its own embargo, but an effort to greatly extend the default expectation is obvious.  Many U.S. and European journals have embargoes of 24, 36 and even 48 months.  There are lots of 12 month embargoes, and one suspects that that delay is imposed because those journals that are deposited in PubMed Central, for which 12 months is the maximum embargo permitted.  Now that maximum embargo is also being imposed on individual authors.  For many others an even longer embargo, which is entirely unsupported by any evidence that it is needed to maintain journal viability, is now the rule.  And there is a handful of journals, all from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, as far as I can see, where no embargo is imposed; I wonder if that is the result of country-specific rules or simply a cynical calculation of the actual frequency of self-archiving from those journals.

The other effort to micromanage self-archiving in this new policy is the requirement that all authors who persevere and wish, after the embargo period, to deposit their final manuscript in a repository, must apply a non-commercial and no derivative works limitation on the license for each article.  This, of course, further limits the usefulness of these articles for real sharing and scholarly advancement.  It is one more way in which the new policy is exactly a reverse of what Elsevier calls it; it is a retreat from sharing and an effort to hamstring the movement toward more open scholarship.

The rapid growth of open access policies at U.S. institutions and around the world suggests that more and more scholarly authors want to make their work as accessible as possible.  Elsevier is pushing hard in the opposite direction, trying to delay and restrict scholarly sharing as much as they can.  It seems clear that they are hoping to control the terms of such sharing, in order to both restrict it putative impact on their business model and ultimately to turn it to their profit, if possible.  This latter goal may be a bigger threat to open access than the details of embargoes and licenses are. In any case, it is time, I believe, to look again at the boycott of Elsevier that was undertaken by many scholarly authors a few years ago; with this new salvo fired against the values of open scholarship, it is even more impossible to imagine a responsible author deciding to publish with Elsevier.

Listening to Lessig

Like many other attendees, I was pleased when I saw that the closing keynote address for this year’s Association of College and Research Libraries Conference was to be given by Professor Larry Lessig of Harvard.  But, to be honest, my excitement was mingled with a certain cynicism.  I have heard Lessig speak before, and I am afraid I worried that I would be listening to essentially the same lecture again.

My suspicion was not wholly unwarranted.  In part I think it is the fault of Lessig’s instantly recognizable lecture style.  It is energetic and entertaining, but because its rhythms and conventions are so idiosyncratic, I think it may flatten the message a little bit.

In any case, I sat down in the ballroom of the Oregon Convention Center on Saturday with somewhat mixed expectations.  But what I did not expect was for Lessig to begin his talk by acknowledging that all his public lectures were really the same.  Had he read my mind?  No, his point was a little different.  Over the years, he told us, he has had three major themes – political corruption, net neutrality, and copyright/open access.  But, he told his audience of attentive librarians, those three themes are fundamentally just one theme.  Each is about equality.  Not three themes, but only one — equality.  Equality of access to the political process is the heart of his current campaign against the corruption of our political system by the endless pursuit of money.  Equality of access to the means of communication and culture is key to the fight for net neutrality.  And equality of access to knowledge is what animates the open access movement.

So it turns out that my worry, prior to the talk, was both unfair and, in a sense, correct.  All Lessig’s lectures are very much the same, because the underlying value he is asking us to focus on is the same.

Thinking about this unity-behind-diversity in the messages about political corruption, net neutrality and open access set me thinking about the way my colleagues and I frame our advocacy for the last of those items, open access to scholarship.  Our messages, I think, tend to focus on incremental change, on the benefits to individual scholars, and on not rocking the academic boat too much.  Lessig reminded me that there are good reasons to rock a little bit harder.  Publishing in toll access journals and neglecting open access options or additional means of dissemination is not just short-sighted.  It is dumb, and it is harmful.  We need to say that occasionally.

Publishing exclusively through closed access channels is dumb because it ignores huge opportunities available that can, quite simply, make the world a better place.  And such publishing fails to take full advantage of the greatest communications revolution since the printing press.  Indeed, online toll-access deliberately breaks network technology in order to protect its outmoded and exclusionary business model.  Doing this is simply propping up the buggy whip manufactures because we are afraid of how fast the automobile might travel.  The academy is not usually this dumb, but in this case we are wasting vast amounts of money to support an obsolete technology.  I know that the promotion and tenure process is often cited as the reason for clinging to the old model, but this is simply using one outdated and inefficient system as an excuse for adhering to another such system.  Traditional modes of evaluation are breaking down as fast as traditional publishing and for the same reasons.  Hiding our heads in the sand is no solution.

More to the point, however – more to Lessig’s point – is the fact that this traditional system we are so reluctant to wean ourselves from actually hurts people.  It fosters ignorance and inequality.  It makes education more difficult for many, retards economic progress, and slows development worldwide.  As academics and librarians who by inclination and by professional responsibility should be committed to the most universal education possible, it is shameful that we cling to a system where only the rich can read our scholarship, only the privileged gain access to the raw materials of self-enlightenment.  How can a researcher studying the causes and treatments of malaria, for example, be satisfied to publish in a way that ensures that many who treat that disease around the globe will never be able to see her research?  How can an anthropologist accept a mode of publishing that limits access for the very populations he studies, so they will never be able to know about or benefit from his observations?  Why would a literary scholar writing about post-colonialist literature publish in a way that fosters the same inequalities as earlier forms of colonialism did?

In this wonderful column from Insider Higher Ed., the ever-insightful Barbara Fister writes about what we really mean when we talk about serving a community, and what we might mean by it.  She comments on the “members-only” approach to knowledge sharing that has become an accepted practice, and challenges us to rethink it.  Like Lessig, Fister is calling us to consider our core values of equality and the democratization of knowledge.  She also reminds us of how dumb – her word is wasteful – the current system is.

Perhaps the most vivid example of how subscription-based publishing fosters, and even demands, inequality is found in the ongoing lawsuit brought against a course pack publisher in India by three academic publishers.  Two of the “usual suspects” are here – Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press (joined, in the Delhi University suit, by Taylor and Francis) – and this lawsuit is even more shameful than the one brought against Georgia State.  The problem, of course, is that the books published by these modern-day colonialists are too expensive for use in India.  I once was told by a professor of IP law in India that a single textbook on trademark law cost over a month’s salary for his students.  Photocopying, whether it is authorized by Indian law or not (and that is the point at issue) is a matter of educational survival, but these publishers want to stop it.  Their rule – no one should ever learn anything without paying us – is a recipe for continued ignorance and inequality.  It is disgraceful.

I use the word colonialists in the paragraph above quite deliberately.  What we are seeing here is the exploitation of a monopoly that is imposed on a culture with the demand that people pay the developed world monopoly holders in order to make progress as a society.  We have seen this too many times before.

The thing I like best in the article linked above – the whole thing is well worth a careful read — is the brief story of how a student group in India began handing out leaflets about the lawsuit at a book fair where CUP representatives were hawking their wares.  They wanted to let people know that buying books from Oxford and Cambridge is supporting a worldwide campaign of intimidation that is aimed at reducing access to knowledge and culture.  Publishing with these presses is a form of colonial occupation that extorts from whole populations a high price to obtain the means of cultural and intellectual growth.  The reaction, of course, was predictable; the publisher summoned the police to protect themselves and others from these unpleasant truths.  But the technique has merit; perhaps we can also find ways to shame these publishers when they attend our academic or professional conference, when they send salespeople to our campuses, and when they recruit our colleagues to write and review for them.  A commitment to equality demands no less.