The OA Interviews: InTech’s Nicola Rylett

The history of Open Access (OA) publisher InTech is a complicated and somewhat confusing one. According to a Scribd presentation, the company was founded in Vienna in 2004. Over the subsequent seven years it has undergone a series of name changes, moved country, and attracted considerable criticism, both for the quality of its peer review and the way in which it markets its services. The company appears to inhabit a strange binary world: while some accuse it of repeatedly spamming researchers, and preying on the vulnerabilities and egos of researchers in order to make money, the company itself maintains that it is a victim of misinformation and misperception, and that it has a growing and happy customer base. As evidence of the latter, it cites a survey that it commissioned earlier this year. 81% of those responding to the survey, says InTech’s new marketing director Nicola Rylett, rated their publishing experience with the company as either 'excellent' or 'good'.

What do we make of these conflicting pictures of InTech? The quality of peer review can be difficult to assess. Nevertheless, the publisher has acknowledged problems with its peer review in the past, and when I drew Rylett’s attention to a chapter in one of its recently published books she agreed that the quality was “unacceptable”. It also seems fair to conclude that the company’s marketing techniques leave a lot to be desired. However, Rylett insists that InTech is addressing these issues. To that end, she explains, it is currently recruiting a new middle and senior management team.

It seems clear that InTech has proved very successful in selling its pay-to-publish services to thousands of researchers around the world. But can it persuade the wider research community, the scholarly publishing industry, and the Open Access movement to endorse it?

Nicola Rylett

InTech first came to my attention in 2007, when researchers began to raise questions about a Vienna-based company called I-Tech Education and Publishing which, they complained, was sending out unsolicited emails inviting scientists to contribute chapters to books — for which a 380Euros publication charge was being demanded. Many appeared to be concluding that the company was engaged in either mass spamming, or scamming, or possibly both.

At the time, I contacted the CEO of the company Vedran Kordic, who posted a response to the American Scientist Open Access Forum. “[M]ore than 1,500 authors published to date in the open access mode by us,” he said. “There is no one of them thinking that this is a kind of online cheat or that we are working on pay-publish mode.”

Over the next couple of years the complaints appeared only to grow, and by now researchers were posting their grievances on blogs as well as mailing lists. At some point the company changed its name to In-Tech. It also began to launch scholarly journals.

In November 2009 the company changed its name again — to Sciyo. It also created a second web site that appeared to be running in parallel to In-Tech’s site (intechweb.org). And shortly afterwards it announced that anyone publishing a book chapter with the company would receive royalties. These would be based on the number of times an author’s work was downloaded.

An OA publisher paying royalties was a novel idea; an idea, however, greeted with some scepticism. Nevertheless, it stimulated me to contact the company again — an enquiry that led to my doing an email interview with Aleksandar Lazinica, who introduced himself to me as the CEO of Sciyo ...

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If you wish to read the rest of this introduction and the interview with Nicola Rylett please click on the link below. 

I am publishing it under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose. 

To read the interview and introduction (as a PDF file) click here.

IN-TECH HAS ISSUED A STATEMENT AND A RESPONSE TO THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS INTERVIEW. IT CAN BE READ IN THE PDF FILE LINKED ABOVE, OR ALTERNATIVELY HERE. 

The OA Interviews: Sciyo's Aleksandar Lazinica

In their efforts to derail the onward march of Open Access (OA) opponents have conjured up a number of bogeymen about Open Access publishing. First, they maintain, asking authors to pay to publish could turn scholarly publishing into a vanity press. Second, they say, OA publishing will in any case inevitably lead to lax or even non-existent peer review. Third, they argue, OA publishing is not financially sustainable. I felt the breath of all three bogeymen on the back of my neck recently, as I conducted an email interview with the CEO of OA publisher Sciyo, Aleksandar Lazinica — an interview that led the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) to ask Sciyo to remove OASPA's logo from its web site. 

A MORE RECENT INTERVIEW WITH THE PUBLISHER IS AVAILABLE HERE.


Aleksandar Lazinica, CEO, Sciyo

At the heart of the criticism deployed against OA publishing is the claim that levying an article processing charge (APC) on authors will inevitably corrupt the age-old process of scholarly publishing, and the independent peer review system on which it is based.

Certainly one obvious consequence of "author-pays" publishing is that the nature of the relationship between publisher and author changes radically from the traditional arrangement. While most researchers will doubtless obtain the necessary funds to pay to publish from their institution or funder, they nevertheless become paying customers of publishers not, as heretofore, supplicants seeking a free publishing slot.

For publishers it means migrating from a business environment in which their marketing efforts are focused primarily on selling journal subscriptions to intermediary libraries, to one where they have to sell a publishing service directly to authors.

Amongst other things, this means that many OA publishers have had to start utilising the mass marketing techniques characteristic of business-to-consumer (B2C) markets, rather than the business-to-business (B2B) methods traditionally associated with scholarly publishing. 

Cultural shift

For some this cultural shift proved difficult, with angry researchers reporting that they were being bombarded with spam messages that — they complained — were unwelcome, badly targetted and probably illegal. (Some argue, for instance, that legislation like the UK Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 and New Zealand's Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act, outlaws the "cold calling" approach that some OA publishers are even now engaging in).

The spam plague was exacerbated by a rash of new publishers entering the market and launching hundreds of new journals — for which it was necessary to recruit in double quick time thousands of researchers willing to sit on journal editorial boards and submit papers.

By the end of 2008 it was clear that unless something was done the entire OA publishing industry could fall into disrepute. Consequently a group of OA publishers — including BioMed Central (BMC), Public Library of Science (PLoS) and Hindawi — created a new organisation called the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).

One of the main tasks OASPA set itself was to "Promote a uniform definition of OA publishing, best practices for maintaining and disseminating OA scholarly communications, and ethical standards."

How effective OASPA has proved in reducing the spam plague remains for now unclear. In the middle of last year, for instance, I myself (a journalist, not a researcher) received several bulk email messages inviting me to submit papers to a couple of scientific journals published by OASPA co-founder BMC. (BMC publisher Matthew Cockerill, however, vehemently denied that the company had done anything untoward in emailing me in this way, or that it has ever been overzealous in its direct marketing activities).

But however legitimate these continuing mass solicitations may be, their effectiveness has to be in doubt — since it inevitably means asking recipients to pay to publish, and researchers are used to getting their papers published in a very different way. As Cornell postgraduate student Phil Davis put it last year: "Most of the journals in which I aspire to publish never ask me for a manuscript. They don't need to. They receive thousands of voluntary contributions each year and turn most away."

As a result, many researchers receiving these messages immediately conclude they are being invited to participate in some form of vanity publishing, particularly when the invitations arrive from unknown publishers. This serves to breathe life into the vanity press bogeyman.

These suspicions lead naturally to the further conclusion that, even if the invitations are not from a vanity publisher, since there must be huge pressure to accept papers (in order to generate revenue), the publishers concerned will inevitably set more lax peer review standards than traditional subscription publishers.

Such fears were fuelled last June when it was reported that OA publisher Bentham Open had accepted a software-generated "nonsense" paper, for which it demanded a publishing fee of $800. With a chorus of "we told you so", critics quickly wheeled out the peer-review bogeyman.

And such incidents, combined with the dawning realisation that mass email invitations are as likely to alienate researchers as they are to "clinch a sale", inevitably also feed the "sustainable business model" bogeyman, with critics arguing that OA publishers have still to arrive at a viable business proposition. 

Free for all

Against this background my curiosity was piqued last December when I received a press release from an OA publisher called Sciyo announcing that it was discontinuing charging APCs for the papers it publishes in its journals.

The release also announced that Sciyo plans, from this year, to pay royalties to authors who publish chapters in its OA books (although these authors will still pay an APC — of 470 euro). The royalties, the release explained, will be based on the number of times an author's chapter is downloaded.

Curious, I emailed Sciyo and proposed an email interview. My request was accepted, and after several interchanges with the company's Communications Director Jelena Katic, I was passed over to the CEO of Sciyo, Aleksandar Lazinica.

As the interview proceeded I also learned that Sciyo views its current strategy as a transitional arrangement only: the long-term plan, said Lazinica, is to dispense with APCs all together, and move to what he called a "free for all" environment — in which all the research Sciyo publishes (both journals and books) will be published without charge, but will nevertheless be made freely available on the Internet.

"We strongly believe that the APC has no future," Lazinica told me, adding that Sciyo is therefore exploring a number of alternative revenue streams. In the interim, he added, the APCs generated by charging authors to publish book chapters will subsidise the cost of publishing papers without charge in Sciyo's journals.

Could it be, I wondered, that Sciyo has discovered a business model able to slay both the vanity press and sustainability bogeymen in one fell swoop?

For the moment that's not clear, since Lazinica would not go into details about the alternative revenue streams he is exploring, although he did provide a clue: "We are basing our future development on the assumption that in the online environment the number of eyeballs is what counts and that people using a particular service do not necessarily have to be the ones paying for it," he told me, adding, "As soon as we're ready, we will be sharing the specifics with the community."

Time will tell. But what about the peer review bogeyman? 

Scepticism

I took time out between the to-ing and fro-ing of emails with Sciyo to do some web research.

As a result I discovered that Sciyo is not a new company, but one originally founded in 2004 as In-Tech. And I recalled that In-Tech was a publisher already known to me. I had first come across it in 2007, when I was alerted to the fact that researchers had begun complaining that they were receiving what they felt were suspicious invitations to pay to publish book chapters. On contacting the company, however, I was told that the invitations were entirely legitimate.

But similar complaints have continued to dog the company. Last year one disgruntled researcher — who said he had received repeated invitations from In-Tech — wondered whether he might have been targetted by a variation of the so-called Nigerian Scam.

A press released published last November announced that In-Tech had been renamed Sciyo. This has not, however, curtailed criticism of its email solicitations, with recipients still inclined to believe that they are being approached by a vanity press, or even perhaps a disreputable organisation. Sciyo's offer of royalties has likewise been greeted with scepticism.

To its credit, Sciyo appears to have been assiduous in its efforts to reply publicly to critics, insisting that those receiving its email invitations are not chosen randomly, and that all Sciyo's publications "undergo rigorous refereeing". As such, the company stresses, "Chapters which don't meet the quality criteria do not get published, meaning it is not vanity publishing or any sort of pay-to-publish scheme."

Faced with what appeared to be an increasingly muddy picture I emailed a dozen or so authors who had published with In-Tech/Sciyo. Only a few replied, but the responses I received were not entirely positive.

Commenting on Sciyo's plans to pay royalties, one of those I contacted emailed me: "I do not think this would be for the benefit of the authors but of the journal. It pushes authors to advertise their work (as if it were perfume in Harrods) in order to receive a small amount of money. The journal will receive more visits and therefore it will be ranked in the best places of the scientific community." 

Achilles Heel

Another one of the authors to reply was critical of In-Tech/Sciyo's peer review process. As he put it, "The review process is blind, but it is actually non-existent. We never received any real review for our papers, rather just an acceptance note for an initial abstract. The full papers were not reviewed at all and, furthermore, for some papers we did not have a chance for proof reading. Finally, two articles of ours were published without notifying us at all, in one case (the journal) the initially submitted draft was taken as it was and suddenly appeared on the web some months later (I just accidentally noticed this publication when I searched the web)."

He added: "I do not know how their review process works internally, but from what I experienced and heard from others, I fear, in comparison to all other publishers/journals/books I have experiences with, In-Tech/Sciyo ... well, I cannot even begin to compare it. It is simply highly unprofessional."
Other researchers have posted comments directly on the Web claiming that work they have published with In-Tech was also not peer reviewed.

When I asked Lazinica to comment on this he was unfazed, saying: "Admittedly, consistency in peer review is our Achilles heel and it is also one of our priorities in 2009/10. We do not have a bullet proof review system yet. We have managed to improve the process a lot but there is still an unacceptably high deviation in the quality between the publications."

From one perspective Lazinica's response could be viewed as refreshingly honest. When Bentham Open was accused of not conducting proper peer review the publisher repeatedly denied the charges — even after the editor of the Bentham journal concerned resigned, complaining that he had not seen the fake paper before it was accepted. (It is, of course, possible that the allegations made against Bentham were inaccurate).

Lazinica, by contrast, appeared to be holding up his hands and saying a loud mea culpa about the inadequacy of In-Tech/Sciyo's peer review. (Although when I asked him to confirm whether the problem was a consequence of inadequate peer reviewers, or whether the company does not always send papers out for external review, he declined to answer directly). 

Outdated

From another perspective, Lazinica's response suggests that the OA peer review bogeyman is alive and well.

For Lazinica went on to argue that the current model of peer review is in any case outdated. He added rhetorically: "[W]hat is the purpose of such reviews, other than to be seen to be abiding by some formal regulations? Scientific publishing today is still at the same level as it was in the 19^th century, with journals and the review process still the main parts of it. After more than 100 years, I believe it's time to move on and apply new mechanisms. Readers are the ones who should review the article by reading it or not."

The implication appears to be that Lazinica believes peer review would be better conducted after publication, rather than prior to it.

As it happens, many would be sympathetic to Lazinica's views. Peer review is regularly criticised for being little more than a charade.

Writing in The Lancet ten years ago Richard Horton famously put it this way: "Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong."

And since then, many believe, peer review has got worse. Only this month the BBC reported that an open letter had been sent to major scientific journals by 14 leading stem cell researchers alleging that "papers that are scientifically flawed or comprise only modest technical increments often attract undue profile. At the same time publication of truly original findings may be delayed or rejected".

The claim, said the BBC, is that "a small group of scientists is effectively vetoing high quality science from publication in journals."

Critics argue, the BBC added, that in some cases " it might be done to deliberately stifle research that is in competition with their own." 

Problematic

But however justified Lazinica's views on the inadequacies of peer review may be, it is perhaps problematic when a publisher responds to criticism of his own peer review process by arguing that the practice is outdated.

For whether one likes it or not, peer review remains the sacred cow of scholarly publishing. However inadequate and pointless the research community may at times feel it to be, any publisher speaking out against peer review needs first to be able to demonstrate that his system is as good as it gets.

Moreover, publicly Sciyo appears to take a somewhat different line on the quality of its peer-review. "We aim to provide quality tools and infrastructure facilitating science communication," it says on its web site. "That means providing first-class peer reviewed literature compliant with the highest standards of scientific publishing and then making it freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world."

And if Lazinica is happy to concede that his company does not have a bullet-proof peer review system in place those researchers paying 470 euro to publish book chapters are bound to wonder what they are getting for their money, particularly given that Sciyo expects authors to help market their work.

Finally, Lazinica's comments will doubtless concern other OA publishers who, as we have said, face continuing claims that OA inevitably means lax or non-existent peer review. As the author who spoke to me about his experiences of publishing with In-Tech put it, "It might be that I have a little bias regarding OA resulting from my past experience with this publisher."

Unsurprisingly, therefore, OA advocates were concerned to hear Lazinica's views on peer review, particularly since In-Tech was a member of OASPA (as was Sciyo until my interview), and OASPA was created to ensure high standards in OA publishing, including the best possible peer review.

As one member of the OA community commented to me (on a non-attributable basis) after reading Lazinica's remarks: "Sciyo seems to plead guilty to the charge that it skimps on peer review. First it says that peer review is the company's Achilles Heel. Then it pretends that peer review is an obsolete 19^th century practice and argues that readers should judge for themselves. Although these two replies are actually inconsistent, they both acknowledge serious laxity (in the first case, inadvertent and regrettable, and in the second case deliberate and advantageous). This laxity should be a concern to OASPA."

OA advocate Stevan Harnad also believes that OASPA should be concerned: "Sciyo seems to want to do high-volume, fleet publishing; they don't seem to be doing peer review; probably they can't find the competent reviewers willing to review for them; and now they think readers should do the reviewing. (Journals with such low-level standards and practices are just capitalising on author publish-or-perish needs to produce a product that could never survive if they had to charge subscriptions to user institutions, rather than publication charges to eager authors.)"

And with Sciyo's emailing activities continuing to attract criticism from recipients — many of whom assume that they are being spammed haphazardly — the publisher's activities seem to pose a double challenge to the OA publishing industry: OASPA's web site states quite clearly that: "Any direct marketing activities publishers engage in shall be appropriate and unobtrusive."

In other words, OASPA would appear to deprecate spamming. Yet, as Harnad points out, Sciyo's recruitment process "looks to me like spamming."

While we should certainly welcome the kind of experimentation that Sciyo is engaged in, one is tempted to conclude that its activities will make it more difficult for OASPA to slay the bogeymen that critics of OA publishing have conjured up.

However, Lazinica denies that the company has done anything OASPA should be concerned about: "All Sciyo's activities conform to OASPA's ethical standards," he told me.

And on its marketing activities he said: "Our author database to date consists of a respectable number of registered members. These are informed about Sciyo activities on regular basis."
Yet messages appearing on the Web complaining about the company's activities would seem to belie this — e.g. this message posted by Dr Sanjay Velamparambil in March 2009. 

Same but different

When I contacted OASPA President Caroline Sutton for her views, she commented: "OASPA takes very seriously the importance of compliance by its members with its code of conduct, including ensuring that peer review processes are genuine, and that email marketing is responsible. The issues raised regarding In-Tech/Sciyo will be carefully reviewed by OASPA, and action will be taken if they are found to be substantiated."

In a spirit of transparency, Sutton sent a copy of her quote to Sciyo, at which point there was a strange twist in events: Shortly afterwards, I received an email from Lazinica. "I am surprised by the review issue, and do not see where the problem is at all," he wrote.

He added that there had been a misunderstanding. Contrary to what he had said during the interview — ("Sciyo was founded in Vienna in 2004 as In-Tech. In 2008 we moved our headquarters to Croatia to cut down on operating costs. In November the company changed its name to Sciyo" ... Sciyo and In-Tech are the same company."); contrary to what the company's press release of 20^th November 2009 said ("Effective today, In-Tech is changing its name to Sciyo and continues publishing using a new website, sciyo.com ... The company ownership and management remain unchanged"); contrary to what it says on Sciyo's web site; and contrary to what its Scribd company backgrounder says — Lazinica now insisted that Sciyo is not in fact the same company as In-Tech.

"Sciyo is a new Open Access publisher," he said. "Sciyo has no publications yet; the first Sciyo book will be published in May/June this year. So how does anyone know anything about the Sciyo review process?"

He continued: "Sciyo has taken all In-Tech publications, which without doubt have high scientific quality (which can be seen by the number of readers); Sciyo has a different strategy and development policy than In-Tech."

He concluded: "We were aware of In-Tech's process disadvantages, and Sciyo has improved the services and processes which were inherited from In-Tech."

Sutton, however, emailed me to say that she stood by her earlier quote. She added: "We have taken Sciyo's name off of the OASPA website, and have asked Sciyo to remove the 'member of OASPA' logo from their site. OASPA has asked Sciyo to apply for membership at which time we will be reviewing carefully their practices and policies. Sciyo has agreed to apply for membership."
Let's hope that this matter can be settled to the satisfaction of both OASPA and Sciyo: that OASPA finds Sciyo's practices and policies sufficient to warrant membership, and that the publisher is therefore able to put OASPA's logo back on its web site.

We are, however, left with two questions:

- Did not OASPA review In-Tech's practices and policies carefully prior to accepting it as a member of the organisation in the first place?

- In the light of this comment posted on the Web a month after In-Tech became Sciyo, how confident can we be that Sciyo's bulk emailing activities are any different from those of In-Tech?

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If you wish to read the interview with Aleksandar Lazinica please click on the link below. I am publishing it under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.

If you would like to republish the article on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@btinternet.com. 

To read the interview with Aleksandar Lazinica (as a PDF file, including this introduction) click here.

PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... Rank: wait... Traffic: wait... Price: wait... C: wait...

Interview with Michael Hart

Today I am publishing an interview with Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg.

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitise, archive, and distribute cultural works, primarily the full texts of public domain books. Founded in 1971, it is the oldest digital library in the world, and currently offers 17,000 freely downloadable e-texts.

This is the first of The Basement Interviews, the introduction of which I am publishing on my blog. The full article (including introduction) is available as a downloadable PDF file (see below for details), which I am publishing under a Creative Commons licence.

Sadly, on Tuesday 6th September 2011 Michael Hart was found dead at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 64. The New York Times obituary is available here.

Preserving the Public Domain
An interview with Michael Hart, creator of Project Gutenberg


Michael Hart was born in Tacoma, Washington, USA, in 1947. His mother, who had earned three degrees before turning 18 and was a cryptanalyst during WWII, was business manager for "the chicest women's store" in the town; his father was an accountant.

When Hart was eleven his parents both decided to retrain as university professors, and the family moved to Urbana, Illinois, where Hart lives today. Even before entering high school Hart himself had regularly attended lectures at the University of Illinois. "I found nothing I couldn’t understand," he says, "so long as jargon wasn’t an issue."

When Hart went to University in his own right he completed a four-year "individual plan of study" program in two years, obtaining a degree in Human-Machine Interfaces.

However, it was when — on 4th July 1971— that Hart was given an account on the University of Illinois mainframe that he found his true métier. Casting around for a worthwhile cause with which to use the computer time he had been given, and conscious that the computer was connected to the nascent Internet, he decided to type the US Declaration of Independence into the computer — a faux parchment copy of which he had just been given at his local grocery store to mark Independence Day.

Immediately seeing the potential of the network as a revolutionary new medium for distributing information, Hart was soon typing in entire books, including the Bible, all of Shakespeare, and Alice in Wonderland. Thus was born Project Gutenberg — a project that rapidly turned into an ambitious scheme to make electronic copies of 10,000 out-of-copyright books freely available on the Internet. Hart's mission: "to break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy."

In retrospect Project Gutenberg was both prescient and revolutionary. In effect, Hart had become the first "information provider" twenty years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, and at a time when there were, says Hart, just 100 people on the network. Indeed, what was to become the Internet was then viewed as little more than a powerful mechanism for crunching data — not a publishing platform.

But for 17 years Hart had to plough a solitary furrow. Widely dismissed as "that crazy guy who wants to put Shakespeare in a computer" he had by 1997 input only 313 books. In 1998, however, he had a breakthrough. Linking up with the University of Illinois PC User Group, Hart set up a mailing list and started publicising his project. Soon he had recruited a team of volunteers to help, and by the end of that year 1,600 books had been keyed in. For his efforts Hart was honoured as one of the "Wired 25" in the November 1998 issue of Wired magazine.

Since then the number of volunteers has grown from tens, to hundreds, to thousands, and today Project Gutenberg offers over 17,000 e-texts, all of which can be freely downloaded in a wide variety of formats. In addition, there are now national Project Gutenbergs in Australia, Germany, Portugal, Canada and the Philippines, and plans are under way to create local projects in Africa, Asia, and other regions too.

New obstacles were to arise however: while copyright had always posed a challenge for Hart, the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act — extending US copyright by a further 20 years — removed one million potential eBooks from the public domain in one fell swoop. With copyright now averaging 95.5 years, and creators no longer needing to register their copyright, Hart began to fear that the public domain could disappear all together, undermining the raison d’être of what by then had become his life's mission.

When, therefore, opponents of the Sonny Bono Act decided to mount a legal challenge to the new law, Hart was the natural plaintiff. But Lawrence Lessig — the Stanford Law School professor who argued the case — refused to allow Hart to attach an appendix to the court documents expressing his personal views on the plundering of the public domain, so Hart walked away from the case, unprepared to be just a figurehead. His place was taken by Eric Eldred, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court as Eldred v. Ashcroft, only to fall at the last hurdle.

However, with an unshakeable faith in the importance of what he is doing, and calculating that 9 million books will nevertheless enter the public domain by 2020, Hart set a new mission for Project Gutenberg: to make 10 million eBooks available in 100 languages.

For Hart the stakes are high, since he views Project Gutenberg as more than just the first and largest distributor of public domain eBooks. In addition, he argues, it is a primitive example of a "replicator" (a reference to a Star Trek machine envisaged as being capable of copying any inanimate matter by rearranging subatomic particles), and so therefore also a "lever to the Neo-Industrial Revolution."

Hart believes that in the future a powerful new breed of replicators — which will include 3D printers and nano assembly tools — will be able to produce and copy physical objects as easily and cheaply as it is currently possible to make and copy electronic books and other types of digital information. This, he says will enable a new "unlimited distribution" model that will eradicate scarcity and usher in a neo-industrial revolution, benefiting mankind as radically as did the first industrial revolution.

The danger, he cautions, is that to protect vested interests, governments and large corporations will seek to artificially maintain today's limited distribution mode, making the current controversy over the ownership of digital information and the Internet a mere dress rehearsal for a more profound struggle. In short, if the battle over intellectual property and the public domain is lost, says Hart, it will set an ominous precedent for the future.

Many are quick to characterise Hart as an eccentric. While rejecting that term, Hart agrees to "not being like anyone else I've ever met". Certainly he has an unusual take on the world — a characteristic that when Hart graduated led an assistant dean at the University of Illinois to comment: "Like many young men who are brilliant, there is always the danger of [Hart] being misunderstood as simply eccentric." For that reason, he added, Hart should be "given the opportunity to pursue courses of action which might at first seem somewhat bizarre."

For its first 17 years Project Gutenberg was indeed viewed as a "somewhat bizarre" enterprise. Today, however, it is widely recognised as the first and most concerted attempt to preserve the public domain in the digital age.

Above all, however, Project Gutenberg is testimony to the determination of Hart, a man not easily deflected from his target. As his long-time friend Sue DeVries puts it: "Michael is absolutely brave, in the bone-deep sense, which makes him able to keep to a chosen path when others might find a task too daunting. He does not change his opinion or feelings with public opinion or outside pressure. He is also very funny, delights in all kinds of things, and has a great laugh."

As I discovered, Hart is also a challenging person to interview. Having a conversation with him is — as he himself puts it — like "herding cats". Nearly every question asked of him exploded into a series of related and more complex questions, and then bounced back to me. Since Hart's preferred mode of communication is e-mail, my inbox was soon throbbing with hundreds of messages; and when he eventually agreed to a telephone conversation he insisted that I turn off the tape recorder, leaving me desperately scribbling on a cascade of loose sheets of paper that constantly fell to the floor!

He also seems to be a man whose attention can quickly stray. After the hectic flurry of e-mails, and the phone conversation, I found it increasingly difficult to get Hart to respond to my requests for clarification of points he had made: his constantly active mind appeared to have wandered off — presumably to new schemes and ideas; and no doubt to more interesting questions from importunate journalists!

But eventually the interview was finished. What it reveals is a man whose whole life has clearly been dedicated to defending the public domain, but who is sometimes a little hard to fathom.


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If you wish to read the interview in its entirety please click on the link below. I am publishing it under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account. I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me. Likewise, if they chose not to contribute, that would be fine too. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: aotg20@dsl.pipex.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

I would like to acknowledge the help of the Open Society Institute, which provided a small upfront grant to enable me to get started on The Basement Interviews project.


To read the interview in its entirety (as a PDF file) click here.