Monthly Archives: August 2007

Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing

Anthropological growing pains

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Last week’s announcement by the American Anthropological Association that it was moving it journals and database (AnthroSource) from the stewardship of the University of California Press to the more commercial hands of Wiley/Blackwell publishers has caused a lot of outrage and hand-wringing. There is a comprehensive blog post about the announcement here at Georgia State University and an excellent article in Inside Higher Education here.

The most important point that is made by the Inside Higher Ed. article is that this news should be seen in context. Alongside the Anthropology announcement the article also notes the recent decision by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nations second largest funder of bio-medical research, to join BioMed Central in order to make it even easier for the researchers it funds to place their articles in open access journals. It is tempting to see the Anthropologist’s decision as unmitigated bad news, but it is really just part of the growing pains as we move toward new forms of scholarly communications.

Several possible explanations of the move to Wiley/Blackwell have been circulating. Some people see the decision as a hardening of the line against open access taken when the Association came out in opposition to the Federal Public Research Access Act (and to many of its own members who support that initiative). Others interpret this as an economic move; more money will presumably be available to pay editors and support Association activities, although it may mean that less “commercial” research gets even less attention. A third way of looking at the decision is as just another contretemps in a highly dysfunctional organization. A blog post at Savage Minds tries to sort out these different interpretations and help us see that they are not at all mutually exclusive.

All scholarly societies are facing difficult choices these days. The same economic pressures that worry libraries – spiraling costs from commercial publishers, more journal outlets every day and consolidation of the ownership of those outlets – threaten the societies that have traditional published a great deal of their own research. Joining the march toward commercialization may not seem like the best or most far-sighted solution on the part of the AAA, but it is understandable.

Far more productive, however, given the similar situation of societies and libraries, would be cooperative innovation to find new means of disseminating scholarship. Most everyone recognizes the problems we are facing; many voices, including many within the AAA are beginning to call for all those interested in the future of scholarship to talk together and think creatively about the long term sustainability of scholarly communications. The AAA has chosen a quick and short-sighted fix that will not make the problem go away; it is hoped that more creative long-term solutions await.

Scholarly Publishing, Technologies

Why we need to collaborate.

The report from Ithaka on “University Publishing in the Digital Age” is almost a month old now, but I have delayed commenting about it until I had a chance to read it thoroughly. The report’s principal author was Laura Brown, a former president of Oxford University Press USA, so it is clearly written from inside knowledge of the university publishing industry, and the report subjects the roles of both university presses and libraries to careful scrutiny in the context of the changes taking place in scholarly communications.

University presses are criticized in the report for being slow to adapt to digital media, clinging instead to traditional models of business and distribution that are rapidly becoming out-of-date. Presses have also done a poor job of aligning themselves with the academic priorities of their parent institutions and demonstrating to those institutions that publishing is itself a core function of a university. University presses, however, show important strengths in selecting and editing quality material, developing an elaborate network for credentialing scholarly work and understanding the markets for the work they publish.

These strengths and weaknesses of university presses are the mirror image of the pluses and minuses found in university libraries, according to the report. Libraries recognized the importance of digital media early on – often pulled toward that recognition by the demands of users – and have maintained a consistently mission-focused position at the center of the university enterprise. They often have done a poor job, however, at selecting and evaluating material to be placed in digital collections; such collections are likened to attics where all too frequently random and unsorted materials are found, chosen apparently for availability and lack of obstacles like copyright restrictions rather than from a sound evaluation of the “market” need.

In view of how complimentary these flaws and strengths are, the most important recommendation that the Itaka report makes is that universities need not only to “remain actively involved in publishing scholarship,” but to recognize the strategic importance of developing a comprehensive framework to support a dynamic and multi-faceted system of scholarly communications. Only an institutional vision and commitment, the report suggests, can take advantage of the collaborative possibilities suggested by its analysis.

Clearly this report has generated, and will continue to generate, lots of discussion. There are overall descriptions and assessments of the report from Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Amongst the blogs, the most interesting to me have been the comments at if:book and Media Commons that point out what the report does not address – the changes that will be needed in how universities understand authority and scholarly credentialing as we move to the more flexible digital world, where work can be subjected to comment and criticism long before it is submitted for formal publication.

Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Technologies

Can Google inherit quality?

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That is the question posed by Paul Duguid, a professor at UC Berkeley, the University of London and Santa Clara University, about the Google Books Project. His article, “Inheritance and loss? A brief survey of Google Books” was just published in First Monday, a peer-reviewed online journal about the Internet.

Duguid’s point is that the Google Books project will really outstrip most other projects to digitize cultural artifacts, making them “appear inept or inadequate.” But the authority and quality of the Google project, Duguid argues, is based on a kind of inheritance from the reputation of the libraries involved. So Duguid sets out to see if Google really is the qualitative heir of Harvard and Stanford.

His results are disheartening. His search for a deliberately unconventional book, Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” returns results likely to confuse and discourage a casual reader. The first result on Google’s results list, a copy from Harvard, is so badly scanned that it is virtually illegible, with words cut off by the gutter on nearly every line. Elsewhere the text fades to indecipherable scratchings. And some of Sterne’s eccentricities are missing; the black page of mourning for the dead Parson Yorick simply is not included in the Google scan. When Duguid tries the second result from his search, things get worse. The first page of the scan is blank and the second page puts the reader at the end of chapter 0ne and the beginning of chapter 2 — of the second volume. Nothing informs the reader (other than comparison with a printed text) that they have been plunged into the middle of the book.

Duguid’s judgments on Google Books are harsh: the project ignores essential metadata like volume numbers, the quality of the scans are often inadequate, and sometimes editions that are best consigned to oblivion are given undeserved prominence for no discernible reason (that is his conclusion regarding the second text he found, from Stanford). Rather than inheriting quality from Harvard and Stanford, he concludes, “Google threatens not only its own reputation for quality and technological sophistication, but also those of the institutions that have allied themselves to the project.”

It is true that the real value of the Google Books Project is not so much to find reading matter for people as to direct them to which books are most likely to be of help or interest to them.  Few people, one presumes, will try to read “Tristram Shandy” in the Google Books format.  But the failures of visual quality and metadata control threaten even the more modest view of Google Books as a giant index.  Without a higher degree of quality than Duguid discovered, it is hard to argue that Google is superior in any way to a comprehensive online catalog from a major library

Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing

Yale says no to an OA flavor

The announcement this week that Yale University will no longer maintain its membership in BioMed Central is another example of the growing pains involved as scholar publishing adapts itself to new business models and forms of distribution.

BioMed Central is an open access publisher that relies on author fees and institutional memberships to pay the cost of online publishing. The resulting 180 peer-reviewed electronic journals are freely available to all users. But open access is not free, and Yale decided to withdraw its institutional membership, which covered the fees for all articles published in BioMed Central journals by Yale authors, because the price was getting too high. In one sense, this is good news for open access publishing; it means that lots of authors from this prestigious university are publishing in BioMed Central journals. Clearly quality, peer-reviewed scholarship is compatible with open access. In its response to the news from Yale, BioMed Central points out that costs have risen because the journals have grown and asserts that, on a cost-per-article basis, its journals still represent good value.

Open access based on author fees is an important aspect of the movement toward new models of scholarly publishing, but it is just one model of how OA can be accomplished. The Yale decision offers a good chance to comment on the variety of publishing models with which authors and publishers are experimenting by pointing out this article on “The Nine Flavours of Open Access Scholarship” by John Willinsky, which is itself published in an open access journal. Willinsky categorizes the various flavors (his spelling is different because he is a Canadian), including the “author fees” model and the “dual mode” model practiced by the Journal of Post Graduate Medicine, which published his article. This brief article is also a good introduction to Willinsky’s superb monograph on “The Access Principle,” where he develops the economic, social and scholarly arguments for open access and also expands his list to include ten “flavours.” Yale is not happy with the economics of one particular kind of OA (although it is keeping its membership in the Public Library of Science, another important OA publisher using author’s fees), but there are many more options to experiment with.

UPDATE — Presumably BioMed Central is feeling better these days, with the announcement (August 20) that the second largest funder of biomedical research in the US, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has joined BMC and will pay the costs for publishing all the research articles it funds in open access form.

Copyright Issues and Legislation, Fair Use

Taking a defense on the offensive

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Technically, copyright misuse is a defense that has been recognized in the federal courts but is not codified in our copyright law. In a misuse claim, if a copyright owner is found to be claiming more copyright protection than the law gives, that owner may be barred from enforcing any copyright protection until they stop making the exaggerated claim. Someone sued for infringement can raise the defense that the copyright owner has claimed too much and a court may find that even genuine infringement should be excused on that basis.

In a recent complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, however, a computer industry group took the copyright misuse defense and went on the offensive. The Computer & Communications Industry Association has filed a complaint with the FTC alleging that the National Football League, Major League Baseball, NBC/Universal and several other large content producers are engaging in unfair and deceptive trade practices by claiming copyright protection they are not entitled to. One example, discussed earlier on this site, is the copyright warning read on sports broadcasts that claims to prohibit “accounts and descriptions of this game” without written permission from the sports organizations. In spite of this dire warning, the NFL cannot prevent a water-cooler discussion of last night’s game; accounts and descriptions of the facts of the event are fine unless they are “substantially similar” to copyrighted expression, and even repeating the words of a broadcast description may be fair use, which, by definition, is permitted without authorization.

What the CCIA essentially is complaining about is copyright misuse – exaggerated claims designed to intimidate consumers and prevent them from doing things they are perfectly free to do under the law. On offense it is called an unfair trade practice; on defense it would be copyright misuse. But whichever side of the ball we are on, the idea that copyright claims can be overstated is important; consumers and users should understand the genuine contours of copyright protection and take full advantage of the educational and creative uses that the law does permit.

Read an Electronic Freedom Foundation blog post on the filing here.

For those who are interested, you can find the complete complain here.

Copyright in the Classroom, Open Access and Institutional Repositories

CCLearn

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The Creative Commons, the organization behind the increasingly-ubiquitous Creative Commons licenses, has recently announced the formation of a new division, CCLearn. The stated goal of CCLearn is to minimize the legal, technical and social barriers that impede the sharing and reuse of educational materials.

Towards this end, one of the activities of CCLearn will be to encourage those who create educational resources to make them available free of legal and technical barriers that discourage adaptation and creative reuse. The Creative Commons license, by which creators can waive their copyright claims as long as their works are used for non-profit educational purposes, is a major tool toward creating such “open educational resources.” So a major initiative of CCLearn will be to encourage those who create education resource to employ CC license or some similar mechanism to communicate their desire to share those resources with the educational community.

Equally important, of course, is the ability to find resources that are made openly available for educational purposes. An important aspect of CCLearn will be its Open Education Search, a tool that “aims to direct search engine traffic to the incredible diversity of OER repositories and communities.” This tool should make it much easier for faculty members to find resources they can use in their classes without having to worry about copyright concern. It is a frequent and bitter observation that our system of copyright law does not accommodate the needs of education very well, even as it relies on institutions of higher education for much of the material that populates that system. Careful attention as CCLearn develops its open education search tool is called for; it promises a system that could offer both a potential solution to some of these copyright problems and an immense resource for creative approaches to teaching.