As [...]]]> The snowballing petition on which scholars pledge to boycott Elsevier is gaining a good deal of attention.  There is an article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, and this more general article about the future of Elsevier’s business model from Forbes.  As of today the boycott pledge has over 2100 signatures.

As the Chronicle article points out, the petition lists three “charges” against Elsevier:  their extremely high prices, the practice of “bundling” so that institutions have to buy journals they do not want in order to get the ones they do and hence have less money to buy other things, and corporate support for the Research Works Act and other legislation that would threaten the free flow of information.

While I agree that all of these things are significant problems in the current scholarly communications environment, I have to say that Elsevier is not the only “sinner” guilty of these infractions, or necessarily even the most culpable among commercial publishers.  This does not mean I am particularly sympathetic to Elsevier, and I am glad to see the petition for a couple of reasons.

First, the boycott movement is coming from scholars themselves.  It is not simply a matter of radical militant librarians (some of my favorite people, btw) who are upset about high prices.  This petition represents a growing awareness amongst scholarly authors that traditional publication models not only are no longer the only option, but in fact may be bad choices for those concerned with the overall dissemination of knowledge.  It is simply becoming clearer to many scholars that the values they hold are not the same as the ones that commercial publishers are pursuing.

Second, when framed as a divergence of values it is much easier to see that the core issue in this movement is who will control the the changing course of scholarly communications and the scholarly record.  It seems less and less acceptable to trust commercial publishers with the responsibility for scholarship now that we no longer will be dependent on the printed artifacts they created.  As scholarship becomes digital, we are quite rightly seeking new models of control that serve the needs of scholars first, regardless of the business models that may thereby be left behind.

One of the reasons I do not believe in the “abolish copyright” movement is because I think the control over how a work is disseminated and used by others will continue to remain important to scholarly authors.  Copyright desperately needs reform (or else it needs more scholarly authors who use Creative Commons licenses to leverage their economic rights to protect things like attribution, which actually matter to academics) but it is not likely to become irrelevant in the digital environment.  Instead, scholars will seek new ways to use the rights that vest in them (not their publishers) to control their works in ways that best serve their own needs and the interests of their particular discipline.  Boycotting Elsevier may not bring about that revolution by itself, but it is a step toward demanding that the rights and concerns of scholarly authors themselves actually drive decisions about how scholarship is shared in the digital environment.

The first caveat is that it may be a rather small experiment; [...]]]> The announcement from JSTOR of their new “Register & Read” program, reported here in Inside Higher Ed and here in The Chronicle of Higher Education, seems like a promising experiment.  It deserves both praise and a couple of caveats, I think.

The first caveat is that it may be a rather small experiment; only 5 of the 50 University of Chicago Press journals, for example, will be available through Register & Read.  The success of the experiment in teaching JSTOR about its potential readership that does not have subscription access may be limited if the size of the sample available is too small, or if the disciplinary focus of what can be read is not broad.

The second important caveat is that this is not an experiment in open access.  Allowing unsubscribed readers “read only” access to three articles from a limited archive every two weeks is nice, and addresses one aspect of the overall access problem.  But it leaves a great deal of that problem untouched.

For example, the Inside Higher Ed piece mentions Aaaron Swartz and his apparent attempt to hack JSTOR and download millions of articles.  Some have claimed that Swartz was attempting to collect these articles for “non-consumptive” text-mining research.  I have no idea if that is true or not, and I disapprove of his methods even if it is.  But the access JSTOR will permit through Register & Read does not begin to address the opportunity for cross-journal research into the characteristics of scholarly output that text-mining offers.  It does not even meet real research needs for academics at under-resourced institutions, since the scope and number of articles is so limited.  At best, and it is a step in the right direction, this program will support one-off research needs and “curiosity” reading.

Nevertheless, there are several things to like about this program.  Most important from my point of view is the recognition it implies of the unexpected reader.  Too many publishers and database vendors have denied for years that there is an access problem at all; that there are readers out there who would like to read articles in JSTOR and elsewhere but cannot do so because they are not affiliated with a subscribing institution.  One can just read the AAP’s recent statement of support for the Research Works Act to find such a fantastical denial.  JSTOR, however, is implicitly acknowledging those potential readers with this new program.  In fact, the Inside High Ed article actually makes reference to the “droves of unlikely visitors” directed to databases like JSTOR by Web search engines.  They are certainly out there, their presence supports most of the strongest arguments for open access, and it is good to see JSTOR acknowledge them.

More than simply acknowledging these unexpected, unsubscribed readers, JSTOR wants to know who they are.  That is the point of registering before one can read under this new program.  JSTOR will collect data to see if individual subscriptions or, one hopes, reasonably priced purchases of individual articles, are possible.  It seems to me that a key element for the future survival of the traditional publishing industry is finding realistic price points for these services; the $39.95 charge that we often encounter today is simply wishful thinking, perhaps intended by publishers to convince themselves that individual sales are impractical more than to actually open that market.  If JSTOR can gather data that will undercut this willful blindness and really begin a discussion of practical access for individuals or non-subscribing institutions, that would be welcome.

I have to note that a colleague suggested to me last week that registration might be a barrier for many people.  For myself, I hope potential users will not see it that way.  The information JSTOR will apparently seek is relatively modest I think, at least compared to what Apple and Amazon and Netflix already know about me!  And JSTOR has been a rather trustworthy partner over time for academic libraries.  What’s more, helping them learn exactly who the folks are that they are currently not serving can have very beneficial consequences.  So even though this is a very modest experiment in access for the under-resourced, I hope individuals will use it and help JSTOR better understand their future business models.

Of course, the most radical effort to break the Internet so that it does not [...]]]> In the past few weeks I have seen several news reports and other actions that seem to form a pattern, where the traditional publishing industry has set out to break digital technologies in order to preserve their traditional business models.

Of course, the most radical effort to break the Internet so that it does not threaten the legacy content industries is the Stop Online Piracy Act, about which much has been written.  I was disheartened by the plausible suggestion that the decision to suspend the House’s hearings on SOPA last year and renew a push for it in 2012 was not due to real objections but was merely a ploy to solicit more donations from the movie and recording industries. Unfortunately, this is often the way the legislative “sausage-making” process works.  But I want to look at some other attempts to hobble digital technologies that strike closer to the publishing that is the most common form of dissemination on our campuses.

On Christmas Day the New York Times ran this story about the “tug of war” between publishers and libraries over e-books.  The writer is very sympathetic to publishers’ efforts to maintain exactly the revenue streams they have been accustomed to in the pre-digital era, but what struck me most is the language used.  Repeatedly the article talks about “inconvenience” and “friction,” stressing that “borrowing an e-book… has been too easy.”  As the author says “to keep their overall revenue from taking a hit… publishers need to reintroduce more inconvenience for the borrower.”  This librarian commentator makes the key point: it isn’t that the technology does not work, but that publishers do not want it to work as well as it does.  They want to break the technology that is available, so that user experiences are less seamless.  They only see a role for themselves if they can offer assistance overcoming inconveniences that they have introduced in the first place!  And perhaps they are right about that.

Another example of this failure to do what digital technologies allows you to do can be found in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which reports on a study about textbook choices that found that e-textbooks offered little savings.  The problem, the authors acknowledge, is not the technology but “publisher pricing decisions.”  It seems we cannot really take advantage of the benefits offered by these new technologies until we free ourselves of ties to publishers who cannot imagine any other way of doing business than the way, and at the price, that it always has been done.

Last week Bloomberg News reported on a lawsuit brought by HarperCollins to prevent the publication of an apparently unauthorized e-version of a popular children’s book.  The suit will turn on the language of the contract between the author and HarperCollins, about which I cannot comment.  But it is striking to me that the publisher is not complaining about competition with their own e-version of the book because they do not offer one.  They simply want to stop anyone else from creating an e-book unless and until they figure it out (presumably when they decide how to introduce sufficient inconvenience).  They may have the legal right to do that, but they are clearly not interested in responding to consumer demand.  Indeed, it seems that the author of the book is interested in providing a digital version, but the publisher has told her that they have that right and she does not.  The lesson is that authors who do not want their readers to be burdened with artificial inconvenience should negotiate more carefully with their publishers.  It may often be in the best interests of authors to withhold the right to offer an electronic version of the work in an initial publication agreement and consider seeking another platform or publisher, one perhaps less wedded to inconvenience, for the e-book version.

This, of course, is a process increasingly familiar to academic authors.  For years scholarly authors of journal articles have engaged in a tug-of-war with publishers over how best to exploit digital technology to serve the best interests of scholars and scholarship, rather than just the profit motives of publishers.  Once again the publishing community has resorted to legislative attempts to try to dictate what scholarly authors can and cannot do with their own copyrights.  Over the holidays the “Copyright in Research Works act,” a re-tread from the last legislative session, was introduced again.  The bill would reverse public access programs like that of the National Institute of Health and make other such programs illegal, essentially telling taxpayers that they have to pay twice to see the research they have funded.  The publishers are clearly asking Congress to break the Internet legislatively so that their toll-access sites are the only source for scholarly information.

What I find most astonishing is the immediate expression of support for the bill that came from the Association of American Publishers, and this sentence in particular:

The Research Works Act will prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding.

I am stunned by the audacity of the claim that research articles are “produced” by private sector publishers!  I think the producers of these works are sitting at desks and labs scattered around my campus, and thousands of other college and university campuses.  They are not paid by publishers either to do the research or to write their articles.  And I do not believe that the journals that publish those articles actually add any copyrightable expression to what has been written and revised by our faculty members.  If they do, the scholarly authors have a right to complain, since such additions without the author’s cooperation would compromise the integrity of the scholarly record.

We cannot say it often enough.  The intellectual work for scholarly publications is done by academics, not publishers.  They own the copyright in those works up until they are asked to transfer it to the publisher as a condition of publication. And if publishers persist in interfering with that copyright ownership and insisting that scholars cannot take advantage of the tremendous opportunities that digital technologies offer, the solution is to stop giving them those copyrights.

COPE, of course, is the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity, a plan by which academic libraries create funds to help faculty authors pay the article processing fees (APCs) that some [...]]]> Recently I have had the opportunity to review the first 14 months of Duke’s COPE fund, and it has been an interesting exercise.

COPE, of course, is the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity, a plan by which academic libraries create funds to help faculty authors pay the article processing fees (APCs) that some open access journals charge as a way to replace subscription fees. Duke established a modest COPE fund in October 2010, and it was re-funded for fiscal year 2011-12.

Now, at the end of November 2011, I find that in 14 months we have reimbursed open access publishing fees for 20 articles written by 18 faculty members. We have six more COPE applications waiting for completion. Assuming that all of them are completed and reimbursed, we will have exhausted the available funding for COPE for the first time.

The authors we have reimbursed are predominately, but not exclusively, scholars in the biomedical sciences. That group is evenly divided between medical school and University-side scientists, but faculty in diverse fields like environmental studies and evolutionary anthropology have also benefited from the fund. The largest group of articles we helped fund were published with journals from the Public Library of Science, followed by Hindawi, Frontiers in Research, and BioMed Central. All of them are, of course, peer-reviewed publications.

With a relatively new initiative like COPE, it is not entirely clear how success should be measured. Is it more successful to spend the entire COPE fund on a campus, or to have it go unused? The answer, I suppose, would depend on the reasons behind the use or non-use.

At Duke we have been very clear that the purpose of COPE is to provide incentives for new models of scholarly publishing and to support open access. As the fund administrator, I am convinced that there is a good deal more open access publishing amongst our faculty than I previously expected. These 25+ articles are very much only the tip of the iceberg. And I cannot say for sure that the COPE fund caused an increase is that type of publishing; I am inclined to think faculty are turning to open access because of its numerous benefits, and that COPE funding is not the strongest factor for most of them. I have been told by authors, however, that COPE is an important example of the University “putting its money where its mouth is,” and I am pleased by that perception.

As open access publishing evolves, different funding models are being tried. It is important to recognize that author-side fees may not be the “winner” over time; many OA journals even now do not rely on such fees, although the best-known ones do. Nevertheless, we are clearly seeing an important transitional movement in scholarly publishing, and a COPE fund is one way for an institution to both encourage that transition and to tangibly affirm a commitment to open access for scholarship.

I expect that at Duke we will reexamine the policies and procedures we have in place for COPE, as we consider how it is to be re-funded, to see if they actually serve the incentive purposes behind the fund. In that task we will gain significant guidance from this recent blog boost by Stuart Shieber of Harvard University’s Scholarly Communications Office, about how funding agencies should assume the task of paying open access article fees. Stuart’s point about funders is important, and I hope that the policies he recommends are widely adopted. But his post is also a cogent and compelling re-assertion of those incentive purposes that COPE is intend to serve and how different policy decisions relate to the overall goals. As such, it provides a helpful guide for anyone considering a COPE fund or considering how to make such a fund more effective.

In its opening paragraph, this I have just returned from the Berlin 9 Conference on Open Access, which was held in Washington, D.C. at the lovely conference center facilities of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.   It was a fascinating meeting, and quite different in tone from the one I attended last year in Beijing.

In its opening paragraph, this Chronicle of Higher Education report on the conference captures the fundamental difference.  This year the conference was much more clearly focused on the impact of open access on research; rather than talking about how open access will be accomplished, the discussion assumed that open access is inevitable and instead emphasized the differences that the evolution to open will make.

For the sciences especially, it was clear that openness is rapidly becoming the default, because awareness of its benefits is spreading so widely.  This year the partners in the discussion included many working scientists and, significantly, many academic administrators and research funders, who are well-placed, and, increasingly, motivated, to make the transition to open access.  The recent decision announce by the National Autonomous University of Mexico to make a decisive transition to open access is testimony to the impact a commitment by administrators can have.

Some of the most compelling discussion in Washington about the impact of openness centered on the idea of unexpected readers.  For years researchers have assumed that, especially for highly technical work,  all of the people who needed access to their work and could profit from it had access through the subscription databases.  This assumption has probably always been incorrect, but now the promise of open online access has really blown it up completely.  The possibility of unexpected readers, including computers that can make connections and uncover patterns in large collections of works, is now one of the great advantages of OA and one of the primary sources of the expectation for greater innovation.

One very touching story is worth retelling here to make this point.  Philip Bourne, a professor at UC San Diego and Editor in Chief of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, told of a rather remarkable manuscript that was sent directly to him in his editorial role.  He thought it was quite a special work of scholarship, on computer modelling of pandemics, and asked some of his colleagues with expertise in that field for their opinions.  Uniformly it was felt that the article was ground-breaking.  Finally, Bourne met directly with the author and, unusually, urged her to submit it to the journal Science.   You see, the author was a fifteen-year old high school student who had done her research as a visitor in university libraries and, for a while, using a “test” login obtained directly from a vendor.

The point here is not the obstacles to access that this young author encountered and overcame.  The point is that she was not at all the person the authors of previous articles on the topic thought they were writing for.  Yet she made a remarkable advance in the field because she was able to read those works in spite of conventional expectations.

By the way, Science selected her article for in-depth review, which is itself a big accomplishment for even experienced researchers, but ultimately decided not to publish her paper, which will now likely appear in PLoS Computational Biology, as she originally hoped.

In his presentation to the Berlin Conference, law professor Michael Carroll listed five types of readers who should have access to research output, and who do have access when open access becomes the default. On his list of such “unanticipated readers” were serendipitous readers, who find an article that is important to them without knowing they were looking for it, under-resourced readers  (like the high-school author described above), interdisciplinary readers, international readers and machine readers (computers that can derive information from a large corpus of research works).  By the way, the category of serendipitous readers includes all those who might find an article using a Google search and read that work if it is openly available but will encounter a pay-wall if it is not.

Open access serves all of these unexpected readers of scholarly works.  As Carroll summed up his point,  every time we create an open environment, we get unexpected developments and innovations.  We have come far enough down this road now that the burden of proof is no longer on open access advocates, it is on those who would claim that the traditional models of publishing and distribution are still workable.