I have been writing about open access (OA) for at least five years now. During that time I have found myself becoming increasingly interested in the topic, and more and more convinced that it is important that the OA movement should succeed in its objectives.
When I started, many of the publications I wrote for were experimenting with the new online medium, and as a consequence my articles were generally made freely available on the Web. Over time, however, I found more and more editors were becoming reluctant to release their content in this way — a development that increasingly frustrated me.
Of course journalists — unlike the authors of academic papers — write for a fee, and I understood that in order for editors to pay me they had to make money somehow. Nevertheless, it seemed unfortunate that I was writing about open access but my articles were being put behind a walled garden, and an entrance fee charged for anyone who wanted to read them. Not only did it mean that the number of people who could potentially read what I had written was reduced but, in the new hyperlinked world, it felt counterintuitive
Last year, therefore, I started this blog, which was a very liberating experience. Finally I could write what I wanted, when I wanted, and I could make it available to anyone who had an Internet connection.
The downside, of course, was that I was not being paid for my articles, except in those rare cases where enlightened publishers like INDICARE were happy to pay me for an article (e.g. on digital rights management and OA) that I also posted on my blog.
While I am keen to continue writing about OA, and in a way that will enable me to maximise the number of people who can read what I write, it would clearly be helpful if I could earn a little money from that writing too!
To this end I have decided to try a little experiment: to self-publish some of my articles about OA via my blog, and then invite readers to pay to read them. No has to pay to read them, but those who find some value in them, and feel they would like to help, can do — on a strictly voluntary basis.
I am publishing the first such article today. This looks at the history of the institutional repository, and its relation to the OA movement.
Below are the first 800 words of the article (which is 10,500 words in total). Anyone wishing to read it in its entirety can click on the link at the bottom of this post. If after reading it you believe that doing so was of value to you then 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. Please note that 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.
—————————————
Clear blue water
While the concept of the institutional repository is not new, there has over the past year been a sudden upsurge of interest in the topic. This in turn has led to considerable disagreement about the nature and scope of an institutional repository, and its role within the academic institution.
Indeed, when JISC recently created a mailing list for those wishing to discuss issues related to the topic, the initial flurry of posts suggested that there are as many definitions of an institutional repository as there are those with an opinion on it.
So where did the institutional repository come from, and why has it become the source of so much disagreement — at the very moment when it looks set to enter the mainstream? More importantly, how should the OA movement react to these developments?
Reshaping the scholarly communication process
The seminal text on the subject was a paper — The Case for Institutional Repositories — written by Raym Crow in 2002.
In that paper Crow defined institutional repositories as "digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multiple-university community."
Their role, he suggested, should be twofold. First: to "serve as tangible indicators of an institution's quality and to demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution's visibility, status, and public value"; Second: to provide tools to assist universities "re-shape the scholarly communication process".
As Crow put it, "While institutional repositories centralise, preserve, and make accessible an institution's intellectual capital, at the same time they will — ideally — form part of a global system of distributed, interoperable repositories that provides the foundation for a new disaggregated model of scholarly publishing."
Essentially, Crow envisaged that institutional repositories would enable universities to exploit the new digital networked world to regain control of scholarly communication. This, he said, would mean rethinking the relative roles of authors, librarians, and publishers, and "unbundling" the traditional model of publishing.
As a consequence, access to research would expand, and the monopoly power of journal publishers broken — monopoly power that publishers acquired, he maintained, as a result of their insistence that researchers hand over copyright in their scholarly papers as a condition of publication. This then allowed publishers to sell the research back to universities in the form of ever more expensive journal subscriptions.
By unbundling the publishing process into its constituent parts ("Registration, Certification, Awareness, and Archiving"), and reasserting ownership of the raw material (the papers), Crow argued, universities could break the chokehold that publishers had acquired over scholarly publishing.
"The purpose of a disaggregated scholarly publishing model," he explained, "is not to destroy the current journal system, but to weaken the monopolistic impact of that system on academic institutions and their libraries."
His perspective was not perhaps surprising: a managing partner at Chain Bridge Group, Crow’s thoughts were published as a position paper for The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) — an organisation created in 1997 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) "to be a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system."
It was clear that something had to be done: With static or falling budgets, libraries were struggling to cope with the escalating cost of journals. Between 1986 and 2000, for instance, serial prices increased by 196%, compared to a rise in the Consumer Price Index of just 57%. The consequent "serials crisis", SPARC complained, had "reduced dissemination of scholarship and crippled libraries".
Crow's thesis was that if researchers retained copyright in their papers (merely granting publishers a non-exclusive licence), and deposited them in institutional repositories, the publisher's role could be restricted to activities like managing the peer review process, creating value-added "overlay" journals based on the content of the repositories, and providing services like "citation linking, controlled vocabularies, and the like". And this would allow universities to restore a more equitable power balance.
In other words, institutional repositories would allow universities to create a more cost-effective model, and force that model on publishers.
The evidence so far, he argued, "suggests that the resources required [to create the necessary infrastructure for the new model] would represent but a fraction of the journal costs that libraries now incur and over which they have little control."
In short, institutional repositories were viewed as a way in which librarians could address the affordability problem posed by the constantly rising, and eventually unsustainable, costs associated with buying serials.
Self-archiving
But while the library community may have produced the defining document on institutional repositories, the concept was originally developed by academics.
Crow's ideas, for instance, owed a great debt to the e-print service arXiv, which had been developed in 1991 by Los Alamos physicist Paul Ginsparg. A central subject-based repository where researchers could self-archive preprints of their physics papers, arXiv had by the time Crow wrote his paper in 2002 been widely embraced by the physics community and spawned a number of imitators. Ginsparg had also published a number of papers and talks in which he had developed the idea of overlay journals..…..
To read the article in its entirety (as a PDF file) click here.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Means and Ends
Self-archiving advocate Stevan Harnad has responded to the interview published here yesterday with Catherine Candee, the director of publishing and strategic initiatives in the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of California (UC). In the interview Candee discussed the development of UC's eScholarship Repository, and outlined her vision of the future of scholarly publishing.
Below is a summary of Harnad's main points of disagreement with UC's views on open access (OA) and institutional repositories (IRs) — as described by Candee. A copy of Harnad's full commentary is available on his blog.
(1) UC considers publication reform to be the goal, OA merely a means: I would consider OA to be the goal and publication reform merely a hypothetical possibility that might or might not follow from OA.
(2) UC considers providing OA to postprints (i.e., final drafts of published journal articles) a lesser priority for IRs, I think they are the first priority.
(3) UC moved away from Eprints and postprint self-archiving because of the extremely low level of spontaneous uptake by UC faculty, assuming it was because it was "too difficult." It is far more likely that the low uptake was because UC did not adopt an institutional self-archiving mandate. Those institutions that have done so have dramatically higher self-archiving rates.
(4) UC instead outsourced self-archiving to an expensive service that, being a secondary publisher, needs to expend a lot of resources on following up rights problems for each published paper; the result so far is that UC's eScholarship IR is still not self-archiving more than the c.15% worldwide self-archiving baseline for postprints.
(5) The other reason UC moved away from Eprints and postprint archiving is because of its publishing reform goals, including university self-publishing (of journals and monographs). I think monographs are (for the time being) a separate matter, and should be handled separately from journal article OA, and that peer review needs to be implemented by a neutral 3rd party, not the author or the author's institution. The immediate priority is postprint OA.
In summary, UC seems to be giving its own hypothetical conjectures on the future of scholarly publishing — and its own aspirations for the hypothetical new publishing system — priority over an immediate, pressing, and remediable practical problem: the needless, daily loss of 25% - 250% or more of the usage and impact of 85% of UC research output.
Because researchers are relatively uninformed and uninvolved in all this, they do not have a clear sense of the implicit trade-off between (a) the actual daily, cumulative usage/impact loss for their own research output, with its tested and demonstrated remedy, and (b) the untested hypothetical possibilities with which the library community seems to be preoccupied.
Below is a summary of Harnad's main points of disagreement with UC's views on open access (OA) and institutional repositories (IRs) — as described by Candee. A copy of Harnad's full commentary is available on his blog.
(1) UC considers publication reform to be the goal, OA merely a means: I would consider OA to be the goal and publication reform merely a hypothetical possibility that might or might not follow from OA.
(2) UC considers providing OA to postprints (i.e., final drafts of published journal articles) a lesser priority for IRs, I think they are the first priority.
(3) UC moved away from Eprints and postprint self-archiving because of the extremely low level of spontaneous uptake by UC faculty, assuming it was because it was "too difficult." It is far more likely that the low uptake was because UC did not adopt an institutional self-archiving mandate. Those institutions that have done so have dramatically higher self-archiving rates.
(4) UC instead outsourced self-archiving to an expensive service that, being a secondary publisher, needs to expend a lot of resources on following up rights problems for each published paper; the result so far is that UC's eScholarship IR is still not self-archiving more than the c.15% worldwide self-archiving baseline for postprints.
(5) The other reason UC moved away from Eprints and postprint archiving is because of its publishing reform goals, including university self-publishing (of journals and monographs). I think monographs are (for the time being) a separate matter, and should be handled separately from journal article OA, and that peer review needs to be implemented by a neutral 3rd party, not the author or the author's institution. The immediate priority is postprint OA.
In summary, UC seems to be giving its own hypothetical conjectures on the future of scholarly publishing — and its own aspirations for the hypothetical new publishing system — priority over an immediate, pressing, and remediable practical problem: the needless, daily loss of 25% - 250% or more of the usage and impact of 85% of UC research output.
Because researchers are relatively uninformed and uninvolved in all this, they do not have a clear sense of the implicit trade-off between (a) the actual daily, cumulative usage/impact loss for their own research output, with its tested and demonstrated remedy, and (b) the untested hypothetical possibilities with which the library community seems to be preoccupied.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Changing the paradigm
Catherine Candee is director of publishing and strategic initiatives in the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of California (UC).
Here she talks to Richard Poynder about UC's eScholarship Repository, and outlines her vision of the future of scholarly publishing — a world in which universities would retain ownership of their scholarly output, and make it freely available on the Web via a network of institutional repositories like the eScholarship Repository.
RP: The Office of Scholarly Communication is based in UC's California Digital Library(CDL). Are you a librarian by background?
CC: I am.
RP: What does your job entail?
CC: My mission is to marry available technologies with ongoing experiments aimed at finding new publishing models for improving the scholarly publishing system.
RP: Your job grew out of the so-called scholarly publishing crisis did it?
CC: Very much so. We faced a situation in which spiralling serials costs were literally killing the University of California. Today we spend about $27 million a year on licensed content.
However, while my job certainly grew out of the scholarly publishing crisis it was also a response to the development of new technologies.
RP: You mean in the sense that the Web has allowed the University to respond to the scholarly publishing crisis in ways that would not otherwise have been possible?
CC: Exactly. In 2000, for example, we launched the eScholarship program, which was created to exploit technologies that can help us reduce the cost of scholarly materials, especially journals.
At the same time we wanted to get much closer to the classroom, and to the lab, and to find out if there were ways that the library could better support faculty — both in their teaching and in their research. As a result, we learned an awful lot about what faculty were doing with new technology, what ongoing experiments were underway (or planned), and where faculty needed help.
eScholarship Repository
RP: I guess the most visible outcome of that program has been the eScholarship Repository, which was launched in 2002?
CC: Right. And the eScholarship Repository grew organically out of our efforts to find out what faculty were doing.
RP: Talk me through the process you went through?
CC: We discovered that since the structure of the literature varies considerably from discipline to discipline, faculty were taking advantage of new technology in vastly different ways.
We found ourselves, for instance, trying to support people in humanities who were using GIS systems with a temporal aspect in order to publish their data in new ways; we found ourselves helping the social scientists put working papers online; and we found ourselves helping people in performance arts who wanted to capture performances and store them.
Before long we were involved in twelve different projects, and as we started trying to develop the infrastructure to support all these projects we found ourselves being pulled in so many different directions that we realised that none of them would be sustainable if we tried to support them all. We also knew we would need to support further projects as they arose.
So we realised that if we were going to meet all these needs adequately we would have to find some sort of generic solution. And since the predominance of the materials that we were supporting were textual we began — in a very pragmatic way — looking around and testing repository software.
RP: So while the roots of the eScholarship program lay in UC's attempt to address the problem of journal price inflation, the eScholarship Repository grew out of your growing knowledge of the specific needs of faculty?
CC: Exactly. The journal pricing issue drove us in the library to seek new solutions; but it wasn’t journal pricing that drove faculty to try new things. In the end, therefore, the eScholarship Repository grew out of the opportunistic use of new technology by faculty, and the decision by UC library to establish new ways of helping faculty.
RP: What was the appeal to faculty of your offer of help?
CC: The attraction for most faculty units was that they had a lot of materials that were at risk: they were putting seminar papers up on web sites that were disappearing, and they were frustrated at trying to manage huge inboxes — because in the preprint environment there were manuscripts flying around in a generally unmanaged way, and they were not being properly preserved.
RP: Initially you built the eScholarship Repository with the EPrints software, which was developed at Southampton University in the UK?
CC: Right. We started with Eprints, and the aim was to create what people now call an institutional repository — a repository where faculty could put materials (text and images) that they wanted to disseminate, or actually publish.
A different model
RP: You later switched to the bepress software. Why?
CC: We found it so, so, so difficult to get faculty even to test the EPrints software that we abandoned the idea of providing a platform for faculty to individually publish their own works. Around the same time we serendipitously encountered the bepress software, and right away we could see that it would to allow us to do something much more important.
RP: How do you mean?
CC: We could see that if we used the bepress software the repository could also support peer-reviewed publications. Consequently, by the time we launched we had switched to a different model, and we had adopted the bepress software.
RP: How was the model different?
CC: The bepress software allowed different units within the University of California to become the gatekeepers, with all the editorial and administrative ability resting with an academic department, an institute, or a research unit, rather than with individual faculty, or with the library.
RP: So where EPrints software assumed that researchers would do the inputting of papers themselves, bepress software was more suited to third-parties depositing them?
CC: That is one difference — although, because the software is difficult to use, Eprints submissions are often managed centrally. Additionally, the bepress software lent itself to the size of UC; and it allowed the University to decide exactly what it wanted to put in, and to brand everything in the way it wished.
RP: You were also able to outsource the hosting of the eScholarship Repository to bepress?
CC: Yes. It is hosted by bepress, but preserved here at CDL.
Harvesting citations
RP: You said the original aim was to create an institutional repository. There is some debate today over the terminology used when talking about repositories. Would you say that the eScholarship Repository, as it has developed, is still an institutional repository?
CC: I would. It is hosted by this institution, and it is managed by this institution.
RP: Certainly most agree that an important role of an institutional repository is to allow a university to make its peer-reviewed papers freely available on the Web, and thus "open access". As it happens, UC is being very proactive in this regard. It has, for instance, introduced a metadata harvesting program designed to track down papers published by faculty, and it then asks the authors to deposit postprints of those papers in the eScholarship repository. How does the program work?
CC: What we are doing is harvesting citations. We then send them to faculty members saying that the listed works may be eligible for inclusion in the eScholarship repository. It is a way to alert them to the repository, and to the fact that they have content that could be placed in it.
RP: How do they then deposit the postprint?
CC: The message sent to faculty is clickable, and when they click on the link it brings them directly into the repository, where the citation data for the paper automatically fills out the repository metadata fields for them. This, by the way, is the one case where we allow authors to put their content in directly themselves.
However, we also allow them to use a proxy — so they can legally assign someone else to put their papers in for them. The aim is to make the process as easy as possible, because time is the biggest constraint when it comes to getting faculty to participate.
Rights clearance
RP: And you have contracted bepress to do rights clearance on the papers?
CC: Right. After the papers are submitted we pay bepress to check the rights on them. That was a concession to the fact that bepress' business would be threatened if they got sued for allowing something illegal to be put into the repository. This part of the process is both onerous and expensive, and we hope we will not need to do it at some point in the future.
RP: I'm told you have acquired about 1,000 papers in this way. Does that figure represent the total number of postprints in the eScholarship repository?
CC: Yes, that is the total number of postprints in the eScholarship repository, and around one tenth of the papers currently available. [At the time of the interview there were 10,373 papers in the repository].
RP: How do the other papers get into the repository?
CC: It depends what kind of paper they are. The working papers, the technical reports, the state reports, and other professional materials that have not been peer reviewed are all deposited into the repository by the units, who act on behalf of the member of faculty.
RP: So the units allocate a member of staff to do the inputting?
CC: Exactly. And with the seminar papers we allow faculty to create the metadata for papers that are going to be given, and to add a sort of place holder in the calendar. Then, later, someone goes in and adds the paper. That is still the responsibility of the unit however.
Mandating researchers
RP: 1,000 postprints is a small drop in the ocean I guess. How many researchers are there within the UC system?
CC: UC is the largest public research university I know of. It has ten campuses and around 16,000 faculty and researchers.
RP: When you ask faculty for a postprint is it a request or a demand?
CC: It is not a demand. Clearly, incentive is the single biggest issue for getting content in. Awareness is another issue, so we are just starting some market research to discover what percentage of UC faculty even know about the repository. I suspect it is less than half.
RP: So you still have work to do in publicising the repository?
CC: We do. While we are very excited that we have more than 200 departments participating in the repository we have no idea what percentage of the faculty know about it; and we have no idea what percentage would participate if they did know — because there is no overriding incentive for them to do so today. We need to understand the situation.
RP: As your experience shows, creating a repository is only half the task. You then have to fill it. For that reason there are growing calls for funders to mandate researchers to self-archive their papers. Do you think that that is the best way of filling institutional repositories?
CC: Well, I wouldn’t say that our purpose is simply to fill institutional repositories. We built an institutional repository as one way of providing an alternative to the current publishing system, and to give faculty something to do with that copyrighted material that we keep saying shouldn’t be given away to publishers.
It may turn out that institutional repositories aren’t the way to go however. For that reason we are also interested in encouraging faculty to manage their copyrights differently, and to consider who they give their manuscripts to, and where they commit their editing and reviewing time. So our main focus is in accomplishing that, rather than filling repositories.
Managing rights
RP: Do you nevertheless anticipate that funders will eventually introduce mandates?
CC: Actually we expect that universities will make some sort of a mandate before funding agencies do. In this regard there are a number of white papers floating around the University of California right now. We are waiting to see what happens to those.
RP: Yes I saw that. Given what you say about rights, I 'd be interested to hear more about the Scholarly Work Copyright Rights Policy white paper. This proposes that UC faculty "routinely grant to The Regents of the University of California a limited, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to place the faculty member's scholarly work in a non-commercial open-access online repository." Would this apply only to journal articles or all the works of faculty, including books?
CC: Ultimately it is intended to apply to all works, but starting with journal articles.
RP: The aim is to take the citation harvesting program one step further is it?
CC: Actually the white papers are an initiative of faculty, not us. Indeed, the most exciting aspect of it is that these papers were put before the Academic Council by the Scholarly Communication Sub-Committee of the Senate. This is significant because, as everybody knows, faculty are far more likely to listen to faculty. But if implemented the white papers would clearly allow the University of California to significantly extend the work we have been doing with the eScholarship Repository.
RP: Who will decide whether the white papers are accepted?
CC: I haven’t followed a white paper process like this before so I don’t know exactly. But the papers were immediately approved for circulation by the Academic Council, and they're being circulated and talked about as we speak. I imagine each of the academic senates on the campuses will take them up, discuss them, and they will then be brought back to the system-wide senate.
We can’t know what the outcome will be but, at a minimum, there will be an awful lot of consciousness raising. And who knows, perhaps UC faculty will indeed choose to act in concert to change the way that they manage their rights.
RP: What is the likely timing for a decision?
CC: As I understand it, the aim is to get things passed and through the system before next fall.
RP: If it does go ahead would you envisage a postprint mandate following behind it?
CC: Yes.
RP: And you would welcome that?
CC: I would. While I don’t find the postprint issue as interesting or exciting as trying to encourage new forms of communication, it is strategically important — because it would allow us to put in place a production-level service capable of managing UC copyrighted material, which would better prepare us for the future.
Stepping stone
RP: So while your long-term ambitions are greater, you are keen to see UC researchers deposit their postprints in the eScholarship Repository as a matter of course?
CC: That's right. We now view the postprints project as a kind of stepping stone, or a means to an end, to changing the paradigm, and of educating faculty. Part of that process means getting hold of a lot of content so that people can see there is real value in having this managed by the University, that there is a value in making it open access, that there is value in being able to speed up communication, and that there is value in having more direct control over it. So we are keen to see any initiative that will drive content into repositories and help change the way people do things.
RP: You expect to see universities taking a much greater role in publishing in the future?
CC: I do. And as the number of repositories being developed around the world has taken off so more and more people are beginning to see them as publication and communication tools.
RP: Indeed, UC has already started publishing electronic open access journals in the eScholarship Repository hasn’t it?
CC: Yes. We have used the platform for all levels of peer review. I should add, however, that we weren’t aiming specifically to get faculty to launch new academic journals. There are too many journals already!
But we recognised that there were some niche journals that could use the repository software well. There were, for example, some in-house UC magazines that have been around for a long time that really just needed hosting. In fact, although we don’t think that it is going to be the primary use of the repository, there is now a queue of things moving into the journal part of our publishing section.
Alternative publishing models
RP: Can you say more about the alternative publishing models you envisage?
CC: Sure. One of the things that is so interesting about the repository is that about half the materials are never published in the traditional sense: they have a life all of their own. So, for instance, many conference papers and seminar papers that would never be published are now able to live as part of the Web, and of the scholarly record.
RP: This is like the concept of the Long Tail?
CC: That’s right. There is one other really interesting initiative that I should mention. You maybe know that we have something called eScholarship Editions?
RP: No. Tell me about the initiative?
CC: Actually we don’t use the repository for this: it runs in-house on a home-grown open source system we call XTF — or eXtensible text framework.
Anyway, eScholarship Editions are scholarly monographs encoded in XML. And we have marked up the backlist for University of California Press titles and are now trying to redefine a workflow that would allow us to publish in XML going forward in a cheaper way.
RP: eBooks?
CC: Yes, eBooks. And in the meantime — because they are so expensive to produce — we have also started using the eScholarship repository to do monographic publishing. We have four monographic series underway so far.
RP: What is the rationale here?
CC: As you know, the corollary to the serials crisis is that libraries have less money to buy monographs, and so fewer monographs are being published. The fact is, however, that an awful lot of monographs could be published if the UC Press had more editorial bandwidth.
So we have been experimenting with empowering UC Press editorials boards, or faculty editorial boards, to become, essentially, publishers. In this way we can extend the work of UC Press.
RP: The eScholarship Repository has also effectively become a publishing platform for the University of California Press then?
CC: Exactly. It won't be used for most of the monographs: there will be a tiered arrangement. So there will be some fabulous critical editions and glorious books that won’t ever go through the repository, but there is an awful lot of really good material out there that is worthy of publishing, and that faculty very much want to publish. We are happy to share the load in order to get it published.
RP: Will these monographs be published in print or electronic format?
CC: They will be printed if there is sufficient demand for them. The wonderful thing about publishing the first copy digitally is that print publication can be taken up by UC Press as a separate, business decision. Ultimately, we hope to offer the monographs as Print-on-Demand.
Something narrower
RP: It's clear you have a very broad view of the role of an institutional repository. Advocates of self-archiving, by contrast, insist than an institutional repository should only ever be viewed as a postprint archive. What's your response to that view?
CC: I think it is unfortunate that the term institutional repository has come to mean something narrower. As I say, the postprint component is the least interesting and ultimately the least important part of this. So while right now it is tactically extremely important to deposit postprints, ultimately I envision a very different arrangement between universities and publishers than we have now.
RP: You believe universities should be in control of the publishing process, rather than managing papers that have been published by someone else?
CC: That's right. Eventually I hope all the content will be hosted and managed by universities themselves, and the publishing services would be in the form of added value. So, for instance, a published article would refer back to the raw article in the repository.
RP: What sort of added value services do you envisage?
CC: In addition to peer-review, I can see scope for various kinds of indexing services, and for aggregation services. People love to go to processed stuff that offers them a limited view of the content. So there could be discovery mechanisms to allow people to do research in their discipline regardless of the location of all the materials — this could be a service, for instance, that harvested content from a bunch of institutional repositories and then sorted and metadata enhanced that content along a discipline line. That is certainly a model we are looking at.
RP: On the other hand, there is a school of thought that argues that rather than posting papers in institutional repositories, researchers should post them directly in disciplinary repositories — using, for instance, subject-based services like arXiv or PubMed Central.
CC: Until I realised how differently the disciplines were using technologies I also thought that discipline-based archives were the way to go. I don't any more. Moreover, now that there is a fairly well developed layer of institutional repositories becoming available it makes more sense for a service layer to develop on top of those repositories for researchers who want to distinguish material on a discipline basis.
But to go back to your earlier question, I believe it would be just too bad to limit our vision of the institutional repository to postprints alone, and to not exploit their potential for enabling faculty to put all kinds of creative output in them.
Deterrent
RP: What worries self-archiving advocates about this is that if universities try to make institutional repositories too broad in functionality they could delay the transition to an open access environment; that we need to stay focused on the narrower view until OA is achieved. You are arguing that we need to plan for the longer-term future from day one are you?
CC: I think so. Moreover, I don’t see why a broader view would slow OA down. It is a matter of getting the right platform and getting things moving so that faculty can see that there are other things that can be done.
RP: One obvious speed bump, perhaps, is the cost of building a repository. While it only costs a few hundred dollars to set up an Eprints server, the kind of repository you are building is inevitably far more expensive. Indeed, in a recent issue of the INASP newsletter, Ann Okerson, a librarian at Yale, estimated three-year start-up costs for hardware and software alone for such a repository at over $300,000. While that might be fine for a UC, a Yale, or a Harvard, it will surely act as a powerful deterrent to any smaller institution considering setting up an institutional repository?
CC: Sure. In fact I doubt every single school will have its own institutional repository. More likely their content will be hosted by the larger schools like ours. We are in conversations right now, for instance, with California State Universities — trying to figure out how to partner to make it easier for CSUs to start out.
RP: So some of the costs could be shared between institutions?
CC: Possibly. Certainly we are open to partnerships, and to maybe extending services to other universities. I should stress, however, that we are not open for business yet. We are only exploring possibilities.
Natural caretakers?
RP: Are librarians the natural caretakers of institutional repositories?
CC: Well, there is a strong argument for saying so. Libraries have a good history of looking after things. At the same time, however, they have not historically been identified as publishers. So to the extent that this is a publishing service I can see that it could work against a repository to be over identified with the library. The best and the healthiest approach would be an alliance between faculty and libraries.
RP: I wonder if we might see increasing tension between researchers and librarians over the issue of institutional repositories? I ask because the primary aim of researchers is to achieve maximum impact for their research; librarians, by contrast, are looking to create large digital libraries or even, as in the case of UC, complete publishing systems. Could this threaten the historic relationship between librarians and researchers?
CC: I can see such a tension theoretically: where resources were limited, for instance, the aim of building a digital library could seem to stand in the way of getting publishing out quickly. But ultimately I think you are presenting a false dichotomy.
RP: If someone from another university was looking to create an institutional repository and asked you for advice how would you reply?
CC: I would tell them to consider all of the new forms of communication that are taking place and to work very, very closely with faculty to determine what they need.
RP: Looking to the future, how important do you think institutional repositories will prove to be in the scholarly publishing process and will they be seen as an alternative to the traditional system or as an adjunct?
CC: In the short term I think they will be quite important. I don’t see them as a replacement but, as I mentioned, I really think we are heading towards a layering of services, where an awful lot of raw content will be managed more responsibly by universities, and publishers and aggregators will develop all kinds of services to add value to that content.
RP: So the basic content would always be free and openly available in an institutional repository, but those who wanted to could go to a publisher and pay to use enhanced search and aggregation services?
CC: I think that's right.
RP: OK. Thank you for your time.
Self-archiving advocate Stevan Harnad has commented on this interview.
Here she talks to Richard Poynder about UC's eScholarship Repository, and outlines her vision of the future of scholarly publishing — a world in which universities would retain ownership of their scholarly output, and make it freely available on the Web via a network of institutional repositories like the eScholarship Repository.
RP: The Office of Scholarly Communication is based in UC's California Digital Library(CDL). Are you a librarian by background?
CC: I am.
RP: What does your job entail?
CC: My mission is to marry available technologies with ongoing experiments aimed at finding new publishing models for improving the scholarly publishing system.
RP: Your job grew out of the so-called scholarly publishing crisis did it?
CC: Very much so. We faced a situation in which spiralling serials costs were literally killing the University of California. Today we spend about $27 million a year on licensed content.
However, while my job certainly grew out of the scholarly publishing crisis it was also a response to the development of new technologies.
RP: You mean in the sense that the Web has allowed the University to respond to the scholarly publishing crisis in ways that would not otherwise have been possible?
CC: Exactly. In 2000, for example, we launched the eScholarship program, which was created to exploit technologies that can help us reduce the cost of scholarly materials, especially journals.
At the same time we wanted to get much closer to the classroom, and to the lab, and to find out if there were ways that the library could better support faculty — both in their teaching and in their research. As a result, we learned an awful lot about what faculty were doing with new technology, what ongoing experiments were underway (or planned), and where faculty needed help.
eScholarship Repository
RP: I guess the most visible outcome of that program has been the eScholarship Repository, which was launched in 2002?
CC: Right. And the eScholarship Repository grew organically out of our efforts to find out what faculty were doing.
RP: Talk me through the process you went through?
CC: We discovered that since the structure of the literature varies considerably from discipline to discipline, faculty were taking advantage of new technology in vastly different ways.
We found ourselves, for instance, trying to support people in humanities who were using GIS systems with a temporal aspect in order to publish their data in new ways; we found ourselves helping the social scientists put working papers online; and we found ourselves helping people in performance arts who wanted to capture performances and store them.
Before long we were involved in twelve different projects, and as we started trying to develop the infrastructure to support all these projects we found ourselves being pulled in so many different directions that we realised that none of them would be sustainable if we tried to support them all. We also knew we would need to support further projects as they arose.
So we realised that if we were going to meet all these needs adequately we would have to find some sort of generic solution. And since the predominance of the materials that we were supporting were textual we began — in a very pragmatic way — looking around and testing repository software.
RP: So while the roots of the eScholarship program lay in UC's attempt to address the problem of journal price inflation, the eScholarship Repository grew out of your growing knowledge of the specific needs of faculty?
CC: Exactly. The journal pricing issue drove us in the library to seek new solutions; but it wasn’t journal pricing that drove faculty to try new things. In the end, therefore, the eScholarship Repository grew out of the opportunistic use of new technology by faculty, and the decision by UC library to establish new ways of helping faculty.
RP: What was the appeal to faculty of your offer of help?
CC: The attraction for most faculty units was that they had a lot of materials that were at risk: they were putting seminar papers up on web sites that were disappearing, and they were frustrated at trying to manage huge inboxes — because in the preprint environment there were manuscripts flying around in a generally unmanaged way, and they were not being properly preserved.
RP: Initially you built the eScholarship Repository with the EPrints software, which was developed at Southampton University in the UK?
CC: Right. We started with Eprints, and the aim was to create what people now call an institutional repository — a repository where faculty could put materials (text and images) that they wanted to disseminate, or actually publish.
A different model
RP: You later switched to the bepress software. Why?
CC: We found it so, so, so difficult to get faculty even to test the EPrints software that we abandoned the idea of providing a platform for faculty to individually publish their own works. Around the same time we serendipitously encountered the bepress software, and right away we could see that it would to allow us to do something much more important.
RP: How do you mean?
CC: We could see that if we used the bepress software the repository could also support peer-reviewed publications. Consequently, by the time we launched we had switched to a different model, and we had adopted the bepress software.
RP: How was the model different?
CC: The bepress software allowed different units within the University of California to become the gatekeepers, with all the editorial and administrative ability resting with an academic department, an institute, or a research unit, rather than with individual faculty, or with the library.
RP: So where EPrints software assumed that researchers would do the inputting of papers themselves, bepress software was more suited to third-parties depositing them?
CC: That is one difference — although, because the software is difficult to use, Eprints submissions are often managed centrally. Additionally, the bepress software lent itself to the size of UC; and it allowed the University to decide exactly what it wanted to put in, and to brand everything in the way it wished.
RP: You were also able to outsource the hosting of the eScholarship Repository to bepress?
CC: Yes. It is hosted by bepress, but preserved here at CDL.
Harvesting citations
RP: You said the original aim was to create an institutional repository. There is some debate today over the terminology used when talking about repositories. Would you say that the eScholarship Repository, as it has developed, is still an institutional repository?
CC: I would. It is hosted by this institution, and it is managed by this institution.
RP: Certainly most agree that an important role of an institutional repository is to allow a university to make its peer-reviewed papers freely available on the Web, and thus "open access". As it happens, UC is being very proactive in this regard. It has, for instance, introduced a metadata harvesting program designed to track down papers published by faculty, and it then asks the authors to deposit postprints of those papers in the eScholarship repository. How does the program work?
CC: What we are doing is harvesting citations. We then send them to faculty members saying that the listed works may be eligible for inclusion in the eScholarship repository. It is a way to alert them to the repository, and to the fact that they have content that could be placed in it.
RP: How do they then deposit the postprint?
CC: The message sent to faculty is clickable, and when they click on the link it brings them directly into the repository, where the citation data for the paper automatically fills out the repository metadata fields for them. This, by the way, is the one case where we allow authors to put their content in directly themselves.
However, we also allow them to use a proxy — so they can legally assign someone else to put their papers in for them. The aim is to make the process as easy as possible, because time is the biggest constraint when it comes to getting faculty to participate.
Rights clearance
RP: And you have contracted bepress to do rights clearance on the papers?
CC: Right. After the papers are submitted we pay bepress to check the rights on them. That was a concession to the fact that bepress' business would be threatened if they got sued for allowing something illegal to be put into the repository. This part of the process is both onerous and expensive, and we hope we will not need to do it at some point in the future.
RP: I'm told you have acquired about 1,000 papers in this way. Does that figure represent the total number of postprints in the eScholarship repository?
CC: Yes, that is the total number of postprints in the eScholarship repository, and around one tenth of the papers currently available. [At the time of the interview there were 10,373 papers in the repository].
RP: How do the other papers get into the repository?
CC: It depends what kind of paper they are. The working papers, the technical reports, the state reports, and other professional materials that have not been peer reviewed are all deposited into the repository by the units, who act on behalf of the member of faculty.
RP: So the units allocate a member of staff to do the inputting?
CC: Exactly. And with the seminar papers we allow faculty to create the metadata for papers that are going to be given, and to add a sort of place holder in the calendar. Then, later, someone goes in and adds the paper. That is still the responsibility of the unit however.
Mandating researchers
RP: 1,000 postprints is a small drop in the ocean I guess. How many researchers are there within the UC system?
CC: UC is the largest public research university I know of. It has ten campuses and around 16,000 faculty and researchers.
RP: When you ask faculty for a postprint is it a request or a demand?
CC: It is not a demand. Clearly, incentive is the single biggest issue for getting content in. Awareness is another issue, so we are just starting some market research to discover what percentage of UC faculty even know about the repository. I suspect it is less than half.
RP: So you still have work to do in publicising the repository?
CC: We do. While we are very excited that we have more than 200 departments participating in the repository we have no idea what percentage of the faculty know about it; and we have no idea what percentage would participate if they did know — because there is no overriding incentive for them to do so today. We need to understand the situation.
RP: As your experience shows, creating a repository is only half the task. You then have to fill it. For that reason there are growing calls for funders to mandate researchers to self-archive their papers. Do you think that that is the best way of filling institutional repositories?
CC: Well, I wouldn’t say that our purpose is simply to fill institutional repositories. We built an institutional repository as one way of providing an alternative to the current publishing system, and to give faculty something to do with that copyrighted material that we keep saying shouldn’t be given away to publishers.
It may turn out that institutional repositories aren’t the way to go however. For that reason we are also interested in encouraging faculty to manage their copyrights differently, and to consider who they give their manuscripts to, and where they commit their editing and reviewing time. So our main focus is in accomplishing that, rather than filling repositories.
Managing rights
RP: Do you nevertheless anticipate that funders will eventually introduce mandates?
CC: Actually we expect that universities will make some sort of a mandate before funding agencies do. In this regard there are a number of white papers floating around the University of California right now. We are waiting to see what happens to those.
RP: Yes I saw that. Given what you say about rights, I 'd be interested to hear more about the Scholarly Work Copyright Rights Policy white paper. This proposes that UC faculty "routinely grant to The Regents of the University of California a limited, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to place the faculty member's scholarly work in a non-commercial open-access online repository." Would this apply only to journal articles or all the works of faculty, including books?
CC: Ultimately it is intended to apply to all works, but starting with journal articles.
RP: The aim is to take the citation harvesting program one step further is it?
CC: Actually the white papers are an initiative of faculty, not us. Indeed, the most exciting aspect of it is that these papers were put before the Academic Council by the Scholarly Communication Sub-Committee of the Senate. This is significant because, as everybody knows, faculty are far more likely to listen to faculty. But if implemented the white papers would clearly allow the University of California to significantly extend the work we have been doing with the eScholarship Repository.
RP: Who will decide whether the white papers are accepted?
CC: I haven’t followed a white paper process like this before so I don’t know exactly. But the papers were immediately approved for circulation by the Academic Council, and they're being circulated and talked about as we speak. I imagine each of the academic senates on the campuses will take them up, discuss them, and they will then be brought back to the system-wide senate.
We can’t know what the outcome will be but, at a minimum, there will be an awful lot of consciousness raising. And who knows, perhaps UC faculty will indeed choose to act in concert to change the way that they manage their rights.
RP: What is the likely timing for a decision?
CC: As I understand it, the aim is to get things passed and through the system before next fall.
RP: If it does go ahead would you envisage a postprint mandate following behind it?
CC: Yes.
RP: And you would welcome that?
CC: I would. While I don’t find the postprint issue as interesting or exciting as trying to encourage new forms of communication, it is strategically important — because it would allow us to put in place a production-level service capable of managing UC copyrighted material, which would better prepare us for the future.
Stepping stone
RP: So while your long-term ambitions are greater, you are keen to see UC researchers deposit their postprints in the eScholarship Repository as a matter of course?
CC: That's right. We now view the postprints project as a kind of stepping stone, or a means to an end, to changing the paradigm, and of educating faculty. Part of that process means getting hold of a lot of content so that people can see there is real value in having this managed by the University, that there is a value in making it open access, that there is value in being able to speed up communication, and that there is value in having more direct control over it. So we are keen to see any initiative that will drive content into repositories and help change the way people do things.
RP: You expect to see universities taking a much greater role in publishing in the future?
CC: I do. And as the number of repositories being developed around the world has taken off so more and more people are beginning to see them as publication and communication tools.
RP: Indeed, UC has already started publishing electronic open access journals in the eScholarship Repository hasn’t it?
CC: Yes. We have used the platform for all levels of peer review. I should add, however, that we weren’t aiming specifically to get faculty to launch new academic journals. There are too many journals already!
But we recognised that there were some niche journals that could use the repository software well. There were, for example, some in-house UC magazines that have been around for a long time that really just needed hosting. In fact, although we don’t think that it is going to be the primary use of the repository, there is now a queue of things moving into the journal part of our publishing section.
Alternative publishing models
RP: Can you say more about the alternative publishing models you envisage?
CC: Sure. One of the things that is so interesting about the repository is that about half the materials are never published in the traditional sense: they have a life all of their own. So, for instance, many conference papers and seminar papers that would never be published are now able to live as part of the Web, and of the scholarly record.
RP: This is like the concept of the Long Tail?
CC: That’s right. There is one other really interesting initiative that I should mention. You maybe know that we have something called eScholarship Editions?
RP: No. Tell me about the initiative?
CC: Actually we don’t use the repository for this: it runs in-house on a home-grown open source system we call XTF — or eXtensible text framework.
Anyway, eScholarship Editions are scholarly monographs encoded in XML. And we have marked up the backlist for University of California Press titles and are now trying to redefine a workflow that would allow us to publish in XML going forward in a cheaper way.
RP: eBooks?
CC: Yes, eBooks. And in the meantime — because they are so expensive to produce — we have also started using the eScholarship repository to do monographic publishing. We have four monographic series underway so far.
RP: What is the rationale here?
CC: As you know, the corollary to the serials crisis is that libraries have less money to buy monographs, and so fewer monographs are being published. The fact is, however, that an awful lot of monographs could be published if the UC Press had more editorial bandwidth.
So we have been experimenting with empowering UC Press editorials boards, or faculty editorial boards, to become, essentially, publishers. In this way we can extend the work of UC Press.
RP: The eScholarship Repository has also effectively become a publishing platform for the University of California Press then?
CC: Exactly. It won't be used for most of the monographs: there will be a tiered arrangement. So there will be some fabulous critical editions and glorious books that won’t ever go through the repository, but there is an awful lot of really good material out there that is worthy of publishing, and that faculty very much want to publish. We are happy to share the load in order to get it published.
RP: Will these monographs be published in print or electronic format?
CC: They will be printed if there is sufficient demand for them. The wonderful thing about publishing the first copy digitally is that print publication can be taken up by UC Press as a separate, business decision. Ultimately, we hope to offer the monographs as Print-on-Demand.
Something narrower
RP: It's clear you have a very broad view of the role of an institutional repository. Advocates of self-archiving, by contrast, insist than an institutional repository should only ever be viewed as a postprint archive. What's your response to that view?
CC: I think it is unfortunate that the term institutional repository has come to mean something narrower. As I say, the postprint component is the least interesting and ultimately the least important part of this. So while right now it is tactically extremely important to deposit postprints, ultimately I envision a very different arrangement between universities and publishers than we have now.
RP: You believe universities should be in control of the publishing process, rather than managing papers that have been published by someone else?
CC: That's right. Eventually I hope all the content will be hosted and managed by universities themselves, and the publishing services would be in the form of added value. So, for instance, a published article would refer back to the raw article in the repository.
RP: What sort of added value services do you envisage?
CC: In addition to peer-review, I can see scope for various kinds of indexing services, and for aggregation services. People love to go to processed stuff that offers them a limited view of the content. So there could be discovery mechanisms to allow people to do research in their discipline regardless of the location of all the materials — this could be a service, for instance, that harvested content from a bunch of institutional repositories and then sorted and metadata enhanced that content along a discipline line. That is certainly a model we are looking at.
RP: On the other hand, there is a school of thought that argues that rather than posting papers in institutional repositories, researchers should post them directly in disciplinary repositories — using, for instance, subject-based services like arXiv or PubMed Central.
CC: Until I realised how differently the disciplines were using technologies I also thought that discipline-based archives were the way to go. I don't any more. Moreover, now that there is a fairly well developed layer of institutional repositories becoming available it makes more sense for a service layer to develop on top of those repositories for researchers who want to distinguish material on a discipline basis.
But to go back to your earlier question, I believe it would be just too bad to limit our vision of the institutional repository to postprints alone, and to not exploit their potential for enabling faculty to put all kinds of creative output in them.
Deterrent
RP: What worries self-archiving advocates about this is that if universities try to make institutional repositories too broad in functionality they could delay the transition to an open access environment; that we need to stay focused on the narrower view until OA is achieved. You are arguing that we need to plan for the longer-term future from day one are you?
CC: I think so. Moreover, I don’t see why a broader view would slow OA down. It is a matter of getting the right platform and getting things moving so that faculty can see that there are other things that can be done.
RP: One obvious speed bump, perhaps, is the cost of building a repository. While it only costs a few hundred dollars to set up an Eprints server, the kind of repository you are building is inevitably far more expensive. Indeed, in a recent issue of the INASP newsletter, Ann Okerson, a librarian at Yale, estimated three-year start-up costs for hardware and software alone for such a repository at over $300,000. While that might be fine for a UC, a Yale, or a Harvard, it will surely act as a powerful deterrent to any smaller institution considering setting up an institutional repository?
CC: Sure. In fact I doubt every single school will have its own institutional repository. More likely their content will be hosted by the larger schools like ours. We are in conversations right now, for instance, with California State Universities — trying to figure out how to partner to make it easier for CSUs to start out.
RP: So some of the costs could be shared between institutions?
CC: Possibly. Certainly we are open to partnerships, and to maybe extending services to other universities. I should stress, however, that we are not open for business yet. We are only exploring possibilities.
Natural caretakers?
RP: Are librarians the natural caretakers of institutional repositories?
CC: Well, there is a strong argument for saying so. Libraries have a good history of looking after things. At the same time, however, they have not historically been identified as publishers. So to the extent that this is a publishing service I can see that it could work against a repository to be over identified with the library. The best and the healthiest approach would be an alliance between faculty and libraries.
RP: I wonder if we might see increasing tension between researchers and librarians over the issue of institutional repositories? I ask because the primary aim of researchers is to achieve maximum impact for their research; librarians, by contrast, are looking to create large digital libraries or even, as in the case of UC, complete publishing systems. Could this threaten the historic relationship between librarians and researchers?
CC: I can see such a tension theoretically: where resources were limited, for instance, the aim of building a digital library could seem to stand in the way of getting publishing out quickly. But ultimately I think you are presenting a false dichotomy.
RP: If someone from another university was looking to create an institutional repository and asked you for advice how would you reply?
CC: I would tell them to consider all of the new forms of communication that are taking place and to work very, very closely with faculty to determine what they need.
RP: Looking to the future, how important do you think institutional repositories will prove to be in the scholarly publishing process and will they be seen as an alternative to the traditional system or as an adjunct?
CC: In the short term I think they will be quite important. I don’t see them as a replacement but, as I mentioned, I really think we are heading towards a layering of services, where an awful lot of raw content will be managed more responsibly by universities, and publishers and aggregators will develop all kinds of services to add value to that content.
RP: So the basic content would always be free and openly available in an institutional repository, but those who wanted to could go to a publisher and pay to use enhanced search and aggregation services?
CC: I think that's right.
RP: OK. Thank you for your time.
Self-archiving advocate Stevan Harnad has commented on this interview.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Current Science Group becomes Science Navigation Group
Current Science Group — the parent company of open access publisher BioMed Central — has changed its name to Science Navigation Group, effective from 1st January 2006.
The name change comes in the wake of the recent sale of Current Medicine Group to Springer Science+Business Media, a transaction that saw Springer also acquire the name Current Science.
Explains Science Navigation Group's Grace Baynes: "One of the companies sold to Springer was called Current Science Inc. Since we were planning to re-brand the Current Science Group we did not require Springer to change the name of the company they acquired." She adds "The new name Science Navigation Group more accurately reflects the mix of businesses we are now involved in."
As the company's press release explains, the independent companies that make up the Group have "increasingly moved into navigation, and Science Navigation Group reflects that the Group's businesses are both science and navigation focused."
In addition to BioMed Central (which currently publishes 140 open access journals) other companies in the Science Navigation Group include the life sciences journal The Scientist; Biology Reports, which publishes a literature evaluation service called Faculty of 1000 Biology; Medicine Reports, which publishes an online literature evaluation service called Faculty of 1000 Medicine; and Current BioData, which creates scientific databases for the pharmaceutical research community.
Indeed, the list of businesses in Science Navigation Group provides an interesting insight into where Vitek Tracz, who owns the companies, sees future investment opportunities in the science and technology publishing and information services space.
There are, for instance, also companies like Telmap, a technology and software provider in the mobile mapping arena, and Mapa Internet, a supplier of location-based services, and navigation and telematic applications for the web and mobile platforms; and there are companies like UK DataPoint, a UK events database company, and Mapa Mapping and Publishing, a publisher of maps, atlases, and travel, food and leisure guides for Israel.
Finally, there is Peoples Archive, an online collection of autobiographical videos of great thinkers and creators.
Science Navigation Group has its head office in London (UK), with additional offices in Philadelphia, Chicago, Geneva, Amsterdam, Oslo and Tel Aviv.
The name change comes in the wake of the recent sale of Current Medicine Group to Springer Science+Business Media, a transaction that saw Springer also acquire the name Current Science.
Explains Science Navigation Group's Grace Baynes: "One of the companies sold to Springer was called Current Science Inc. Since we were planning to re-brand the Current Science Group we did not require Springer to change the name of the company they acquired." She adds "The new name Science Navigation Group more accurately reflects the mix of businesses we are now involved in."
As the company's press release explains, the independent companies that make up the Group have "increasingly moved into navigation, and Science Navigation Group reflects that the Group's businesses are both science and navigation focused."
In addition to BioMed Central (which currently publishes 140 open access journals) other companies in the Science Navigation Group include the life sciences journal The Scientist; Biology Reports, which publishes a literature evaluation service called Faculty of 1000 Biology; Medicine Reports, which publishes an online literature evaluation service called Faculty of 1000 Medicine; and Current BioData, which creates scientific databases for the pharmaceutical research community.
Indeed, the list of businesses in Science Navigation Group provides an interesting insight into where Vitek Tracz, who owns the companies, sees future investment opportunities in the science and technology publishing and information services space.
There are, for instance, also companies like Telmap, a technology and software provider in the mobile mapping arena, and Mapa Internet, a supplier of location-based services, and navigation and telematic applications for the web and mobile platforms; and there are companies like UK DataPoint, a UK events database company, and Mapa Mapping and Publishing, a publisher of maps, atlases, and travel, food and leisure guides for Israel.
Finally, there is Peoples Archive, an online collection of autobiographical videos of great thinkers and creators.
Science Navigation Group has its head office in London (UK), with additional offices in Philadelphia, Chicago, Geneva, Amsterdam, Oslo and Tel Aviv.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
OA as instrumental good
Historically, Open Access (OA) has been viewed as primarily an issue for researchers in the sciences. Today, however, there is a growing debate about its relevance to the humanities. So when last week the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (PSWP) site was launched it seemed an ideal opportunity to discuss OA in the context of the humanities with Josiah Ober, the professor of classics at Princeton who, in collaboration with Stanford's Walter Scheidel, created PSWP.
Q: I understand that the purpose of the PSWP initiative is "to make the results of current research undertaken by members of Princeton and Stanford Universities in the field of classics available in advance of final publication." Why? And who do you expect to download the papers?
A: The purpose is two-fold: first, to cut down the lag time between the completion of an article or chapter and its availability to the scholarly community (the lag can be considerable, especially in the case of edited volumes, which can proceed no more quickly than the rate of the slowest contributor), and to allow authors of work in progress to get feedback from other scholars.
My guess is that most downloads will be by students and professional classicists for use in their own scholarship.
Q: Which is the more important function of PSWP in your view: to enable authors to solicit comments prior to submitting articles to a journal, or to increase the visibility of research being done by the Princeton and Stanford departments of classics?
A: I regard soliciting comments as more important than publicity per se. I am perfectly happy to have the work of our two faculties receive extra attention, but that is not my main concern.
Q: Does the PSWP concept owe anything to the physics preprint server arXiv.org?
A: I don’t know that server. My model in initially thinking through the site was social science Working Papers (WP) sites, in the first instance the WPs of the Princeton Economics Department. Gene Grossman, a professor in that department, discussed with me the history and operations of his department’s WPs. When their series began, it was distributed in hard copy. The ease of distribution via the Internet has subsequently made it a viable experiment for a relatively small humanities department like ours too — since we have fewer resources to devote to this sort of enterprise.
Q: What issues are raised when putting up a humanities preprint site?
A: I guess I don’t know yet. It is meant as an experiment — we should have a better sense of the issues in a year or so. I don’t initially see why humanities WPs would raise issues that do not come up in social science WP series.
That said, humanities fields do not seem to have as clear a hierarchy of prestige journals. Getting papers accepted at the best journals can be extremely important in promotion and tenure decisions in social science departments; humanities departments still tend to be more book and chapter driven. But whether that will make any substantial difference I don’t yet know.
Q: You maybe saw the comment made by OA advocate Peter Suber: "More OA is better than less, so I applaud this initiative. But I must say that a classics repository for all classicists would be more useful than one limited to faculty from two distinguished departments." Does he have a point?
A: Sure he does. Our initiative is constrained by two considerations: quality control and resources. The papers on the site are not refereed. So, for example, we depend on personnel decisions at our two departments, and the advice of our departmental colleagues, with respect to posting graduate student work; and we need to provide some guidance to users of the site about the quality of work they might expect to find there.
The resource constraint is both a question of staff time and of server space: We don’t currently have the resources (or for that matter the expertise) to host a high-quality site featuring the work of the worldwide community of classical scholars.
Q: Do you envisage classics departments from other universities being invited to deposit their papers at your site in future?
A: We have left that as an open question. When we began this project we knew that we would have to control costs, yet did not have an accurate sense of how much resource it would entail. Before adding other universities we would have to look carefully at the feasibility. Based on the history of economics WP series, however, we might expect other universities to set up their own sites.
The long-term answer might be for a professional association to become the primary site for hosting classics WPs. Our goal from the beginning was to run a scalable experiment in the hope that it would lead to something of genuine value to those interested in classical scholarship, and the field of classics as a whole.
Q: Suber also commented "[A]n OAI-compliant repository would be more useful than a non-compliant repository." Was there any particular reason why you chose not to adopt an open metadata harvesting standard when developing the site?
A: This is beyond my expertise level. Basically, we went with what looked to be the best cost/benefit approach, with the goal being to get a useable site up quickly, using existing resources. We assumed that we would get feedback from various quarters after mounting the site.
Q: So you have built the service using standard web tools, rather than a specialist e-print solution like Southampton University's EPrints software, or MIT's DSpace?
A: Right, the site was designed and mounted by Princeton’s great departmental IT specialist, Donna Sanclemente, using standard web tools. Walter and I are full time teaching faculty without prior experience in hosting open access sites and Donna’s time for this project is limited. Since our goal was to get a workable site up quickly in hopes of getting helpful feedback, we felt it was more cost effective to go with tools we already knew.
Q: Another point made by Suber was that a repository for both preprints and postprints would be more useful than a repository for preprints alone. Do you have any plans to include postprints? Would providing postprints raise any particular issues in the area of classics?
A: I agree it would be more useful. But I would be very hesitant to get involved in posting material that has been published under copyright not held by the author. This is not a classics-specific issue, but a general intellectual property issue. I have no idea of what sort of legal clearances we would need to get from copyright holders, or what sort of arrangement for payment to copyright holders we would need to make.
Q: In connection with PSWP, Brian Simboli, a librarian at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, raised this question on the Liblicense mailing list: "What are the patterns in humanities fields regarding whether journal publishers will accept items if they have been previously published as working papers or 'preprints'"? You are perhaps aware of the Ingelfinger Rule, which has posed difficulties for those working in the life sciences who want to post preprints on the Web. Can you see similar problems for classicists?
A: Here, we are guided by the experience of the social science WP sites that were our models — in social science fields WPs have become an accepted part of the publication process. My assumption is that humanities will prove to be more like social science than the life sciences in this regard.
Q: You say the working model for you was that of the Working Papers sites pioneered by social scientists. Does that imply that you do not envisage PSWP as an "open access" initiative as such? Perhaps you are also not very familiar with the open access movement?
A: My own knowledge of the open access movement is that of a layman who has read a few news reports, and so I hadn’t initially thought of our project as an open access initiative as such. Our goal, as classics faculty, is to further classical scholarship. Creating a WP site seemed to us an interesting (because as yet untried in the humanities) and relatively low-cost way to do so. If along the way we can also promote open access — which I regard as a good thing on general democratic principles — that’s a plus.
Q: Certainly OA today is mainly viewed as a science issue. Why do you think that is so, and do you think that in the long term OA has less, the same, or perhaps even more relevance to the humanities than to the sciences?
A: Humanities scholarship is a small area compared to natural science scholarship. Humanities work tends to be comparatively low-cost (few big labs or big grants) and individually authored. OA's immediate benefits are perhaps harder to measure in the humanities than in the sciences. OA for humanities is still something of a “green field.” There are a number of OA experiments in the area of classics; see for example, the site being developed by the Center for Hellenic Studies. I am optimistic that these and other experiments will help to keep humanistic scholarship a vital and important part of the overall intellectual scene.
Q: So is OA an inherently good thing for the humanities or just something that some researchers may find interesting to provide?
A: By calling something an inherent (rather than an instrumental) good, you set the bar pretty high. I tend to think of OA as an instrumental good, but it may be understood as an intrinsic aspect of inherent goods (freedom, democracy).
Again, I don’t see why humanities would be a special case — if humanists are producing work that is of value to others, that value is increased by its accessibility. OA is in this sense an instrument for delivering something that may be of inherent value.
Q: I get the feeling that researchers in classics have shown themselves more willing to jump into the Internet pond than those in other humanities areas (the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, for instance, was launched in 1990, making it the second oldest online scholarly journal). Do you think this is merely coincidental, or do classicists today tend to be more receptive to new ways of doing things than their colleagues in other areas of the humanities?
A: Well, it’s certainly true that classicists have been out there in the forefront of humanities computing for a long time: the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae was a revolutionary textbase (and remains among the biggest textbase projects going). Perseus began as a classics site.
So as a result, classicists have been pretty attuned to computing for a full generation now, and I would guess we are on average more computing-oriented than other humanists (though I don’t know of any actual statistics on that). It didn’t hurt that David Packard got his PhD in Classics and has been a big supporter of classics computing from the beginning.
Q: You are perhaps aware of the growing trend for science research funders to request/require that their grantees make their papers available on the Web (not least the National Institutes of Health's policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research). Can you see a logic for funders in the humanities adopting a similar approach, or is funding in the humanities sufficiently different that such an approach may not be appropriate?
A: Humanities funding is mostly personal grants for leave time to individuals, and humanists still tend to publish a lot of books. So I would guess that this sort of requirement would be unlikely in the near term.
Q: Certainly there are calls for this in the UK. The draft proposal from Research Councils UK (Access to Research Outputs), for instance, proposes mandating all publicly-funded researchers, including those in the humanities, to self-archive their papers on the Web. It's not yet clear what the final RCUK policy will be, but do you think this is how the future will look: that in the way that researchers have been required to "publish or perish" they will find themselves also being required to ensure that their papers are freely available to all on the Web?
A: My guess is that it will increasingly be the case that material that is not web accessible will be less likely to be consulted or cited, and that this will in turn result in a lot of pressure on authors and publishers to find ways to make academic work web accessible.
Yet the crunch is likely to come in quality control (to get back that issue). Academic publishing, personnel decisions, and indeed the entire modern enterprise of scholarship is predicated on detailed and careful peer review. That costs quite a lot (many hours of work by pretty highly paid people are involved).
The costs are now (in part) covered by the profits made by academic publishers. In current business models, those profits depend on ownership of intellectual property as defined by copyright law.
Q: Would you say that peer review is as important in the humanities as in the sciences?
A: Peer review is at least as important in humanities as in the sciences — maybe more so in that we do not run experiments that can be independently reproduced. The quality control issue seems to me to be a hurdle that needs to be got over in order for the OA revolution to be completed.
Q: Of course that assumes that OA and peer review are incompatible — a notion that OA advocates would strenuously reject. Commenting on PSWP, Margaret Landesman, a librarian at the University of Utah, suggested that the classics community maybe doesn’t need "formerly published" journals any more. As she put it: "Why not keep the preprint archives and dispense with the journals." Peer review could still take place, but the whole process could be done electronically — which is the Bryn Mawr Classical Review model isn’t it? Moreover, if authors retained copyright the need to obtain permission to archive postprints on the Web would go away. Does that make sense to you?
A: There are several issues here: one is the relative importance of journal articles as opposed to books or book chapters: As long as humanities remains strongly book-oriented (which may change, of course), shifting to electronic publication of humanities journals would be only a partial solution.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review is an important success story in electronic humanities publication, but peer review/quality control concerns are less demanding when publishing scholarly book reviews than when publishing scholarly articles.
The editorial work that ensures proper peer review for scholarly books and articles is very time-consuming. It must be done to a very high standard if the enterprise of scholarship is to be sustained. Following the Bryn Mawr model, universities (or professional organisations) might choose to provide senior scholars with appropriate incentives to do the necessary editorial work on electronic journals (or even books).
Universities work hard to cut “non-essential” costs. It is a matter of persuading universities and professional organisations that it is in their interest to assume costs that are currently paid for by the publishing market. That is a daunting, but certainly not an impossible, challenge.
Q: Does OA provide benefits to researchers that were not possible historically? If so, what benefits?
A: It seems to me that it a case of making things of value (the results of scholarship) readily available to a very wide audience of researchers (professional and amateur), rather than restricting them to the privileged elite that happens to have access to great research libraries.
Of course even those who do have access to major libraries may be encouraged to read more widely because the material is “right there” in front of them. So there is increased potential for cross-appropriation of ideas and facts.
Q: What future developments do you see for a) PSWP b) OA in the humanities in general?
A: I hope that our site will grow in the number of papers we offer and the number of downloads. Beyond that, I am keeping an open mind. If there is a substantial readership for the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, then I would hope that it would promote similar (or better!) sites in other humanities fields — and thereby push towards the long term goal of making more and better scholarship available to bigger and more diverse audiences.
The extension of “what is potentially known” is, I believe, extremely healthy for democratic societies — indeed, that is the subject of my current research.
Q: Can you envisage value in, say, attaching blogs to specific articles, and encouraging feedback/comments etc.?
A: There might be value in that, but my very limited experience with the blogosphere doesn’t encourage me to move in that direction. Blogging at this point seems to be best suited to matters in which opinion is of greater moment than expert knowledge; in matters of scholarship, where expertise does have a big role to play, I’d prefer to leave it to individual commentators to contact individual authors.
Q: Finally, do you think that OA is "inevitable and optimal" as OA advocates often put it? If so, what are the compelling reasons for arguing that that is the case in the area of the humanities in general, and in classics in particular?
A: Inevitable is a strong word and one I tend to avoid when speaking of social phenomena, like politics, economics, or OA. I think that there will be strong pressure for more OA over time, as students and scholars become more and more used to doing their research online. Optimal must of course depend on implementation.
So I’d say that OA is a very good bet, and stands to be a lot closer to optimal than any prior information regime I know of.
Humanists, whose work can be made readily accessible across disciplinary lines (in a way that is more difficult for highly mathematical fields), are likely to benefit disproportionately from OA — and should, therefore, have every reason to support it.
A: The purpose is two-fold: first, to cut down the lag time between the completion of an article or chapter and its availability to the scholarly community (the lag can be considerable, especially in the case of edited volumes, which can proceed no more quickly than the rate of the slowest contributor), and to allow authors of work in progress to get feedback from other scholars.
My guess is that most downloads will be by students and professional classicists for use in their own scholarship.
Q: Which is the more important function of PSWP in your view: to enable authors to solicit comments prior to submitting articles to a journal, or to increase the visibility of research being done by the Princeton and Stanford departments of classics?
A: I regard soliciting comments as more important than publicity per se. I am perfectly happy to have the work of our two faculties receive extra attention, but that is not my main concern.
Q: Does the PSWP concept owe anything to the physics preprint server arXiv.org?
A: I don’t know that server. My model in initially thinking through the site was social science Working Papers (WP) sites, in the first instance the WPs of the Princeton Economics Department. Gene Grossman, a professor in that department, discussed with me the history and operations of his department’s WPs. When their series began, it was distributed in hard copy. The ease of distribution via the Internet has subsequently made it a viable experiment for a relatively small humanities department like ours too — since we have fewer resources to devote to this sort of enterprise.
Q: What issues are raised when putting up a humanities preprint site?
A: I guess I don’t know yet. It is meant as an experiment — we should have a better sense of the issues in a year or so. I don’t initially see why humanities WPs would raise issues that do not come up in social science WP series.
That said, humanities fields do not seem to have as clear a hierarchy of prestige journals. Getting papers accepted at the best journals can be extremely important in promotion and tenure decisions in social science departments; humanities departments still tend to be more book and chapter driven. But whether that will make any substantial difference I don’t yet know.
Q: You maybe saw the comment made by OA advocate Peter Suber: "More OA is better than less, so I applaud this initiative. But I must say that a classics repository for all classicists would be more useful than one limited to faculty from two distinguished departments." Does he have a point?
A: Sure he does. Our initiative is constrained by two considerations: quality control and resources. The papers on the site are not refereed. So, for example, we depend on personnel decisions at our two departments, and the advice of our departmental colleagues, with respect to posting graduate student work; and we need to provide some guidance to users of the site about the quality of work they might expect to find there.
The resource constraint is both a question of staff time and of server space: We don’t currently have the resources (or for that matter the expertise) to host a high-quality site featuring the work of the worldwide community of classical scholars.
Q: Do you envisage classics departments from other universities being invited to deposit their papers at your site in future?
A: We have left that as an open question. When we began this project we knew that we would have to control costs, yet did not have an accurate sense of how much resource it would entail. Before adding other universities we would have to look carefully at the feasibility. Based on the history of economics WP series, however, we might expect other universities to set up their own sites.
The long-term answer might be for a professional association to become the primary site for hosting classics WPs. Our goal from the beginning was to run a scalable experiment in the hope that it would lead to something of genuine value to those interested in classical scholarship, and the field of classics as a whole.
Q: Suber also commented "[A]n OAI-compliant repository would be more useful than a non-compliant repository." Was there any particular reason why you chose not to adopt an open metadata harvesting standard when developing the site?
A: This is beyond my expertise level. Basically, we went with what looked to be the best cost/benefit approach, with the goal being to get a useable site up quickly, using existing resources. We assumed that we would get feedback from various quarters after mounting the site.
Q: So you have built the service using standard web tools, rather than a specialist e-print solution like Southampton University's EPrints software, or MIT's DSpace?
A: Right, the site was designed and mounted by Princeton’s great departmental IT specialist, Donna Sanclemente, using standard web tools. Walter and I are full time teaching faculty without prior experience in hosting open access sites and Donna’s time for this project is limited. Since our goal was to get a workable site up quickly in hopes of getting helpful feedback, we felt it was more cost effective to go with tools we already knew.
Q: Another point made by Suber was that a repository for both preprints and postprints would be more useful than a repository for preprints alone. Do you have any plans to include postprints? Would providing postprints raise any particular issues in the area of classics?
A: I agree it would be more useful. But I would be very hesitant to get involved in posting material that has been published under copyright not held by the author. This is not a classics-specific issue, but a general intellectual property issue. I have no idea of what sort of legal clearances we would need to get from copyright holders, or what sort of arrangement for payment to copyright holders we would need to make.
Q: In connection with PSWP, Brian Simboli, a librarian at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, raised this question on the Liblicense mailing list: "What are the patterns in humanities fields regarding whether journal publishers will accept items if they have been previously published as working papers or 'preprints'"? You are perhaps aware of the Ingelfinger Rule, which has posed difficulties for those working in the life sciences who want to post preprints on the Web. Can you see similar problems for classicists?
A: Here, we are guided by the experience of the social science WP sites that were our models — in social science fields WPs have become an accepted part of the publication process. My assumption is that humanities will prove to be more like social science than the life sciences in this regard.
Q: You say the working model for you was that of the Working Papers sites pioneered by social scientists. Does that imply that you do not envisage PSWP as an "open access" initiative as such? Perhaps you are also not very familiar with the open access movement?
A: My own knowledge of the open access movement is that of a layman who has read a few news reports, and so I hadn’t initially thought of our project as an open access initiative as such. Our goal, as classics faculty, is to further classical scholarship. Creating a WP site seemed to us an interesting (because as yet untried in the humanities) and relatively low-cost way to do so. If along the way we can also promote open access — which I regard as a good thing on general democratic principles — that’s a plus.
Q: Certainly OA today is mainly viewed as a science issue. Why do you think that is so, and do you think that in the long term OA has less, the same, or perhaps even more relevance to the humanities than to the sciences?
A: Humanities scholarship is a small area compared to natural science scholarship. Humanities work tends to be comparatively low-cost (few big labs or big grants) and individually authored. OA's immediate benefits are perhaps harder to measure in the humanities than in the sciences. OA for humanities is still something of a “green field.” There are a number of OA experiments in the area of classics; see for example, the site being developed by the Center for Hellenic Studies. I am optimistic that these and other experiments will help to keep humanistic scholarship a vital and important part of the overall intellectual scene.
Q: So is OA an inherently good thing for the humanities or just something that some researchers may find interesting to provide?
A: By calling something an inherent (rather than an instrumental) good, you set the bar pretty high. I tend to think of OA as an instrumental good, but it may be understood as an intrinsic aspect of inherent goods (freedom, democracy).
Again, I don’t see why humanities would be a special case — if humanists are producing work that is of value to others, that value is increased by its accessibility. OA is in this sense an instrument for delivering something that may be of inherent value.
Q: I get the feeling that researchers in classics have shown themselves more willing to jump into the Internet pond than those in other humanities areas (the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, for instance, was launched in 1990, making it the second oldest online scholarly journal). Do you think this is merely coincidental, or do classicists today tend to be more receptive to new ways of doing things than their colleagues in other areas of the humanities?
A: Well, it’s certainly true that classicists have been out there in the forefront of humanities computing for a long time: the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae was a revolutionary textbase (and remains among the biggest textbase projects going). Perseus began as a classics site.
So as a result, classicists have been pretty attuned to computing for a full generation now, and I would guess we are on average more computing-oriented than other humanists (though I don’t know of any actual statistics on that). It didn’t hurt that David Packard got his PhD in Classics and has been a big supporter of classics computing from the beginning.
Q: You are perhaps aware of the growing trend for science research funders to request/require that their grantees make their papers available on the Web (not least the National Institutes of Health's policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research). Can you see a logic for funders in the humanities adopting a similar approach, or is funding in the humanities sufficiently different that such an approach may not be appropriate?
A: Humanities funding is mostly personal grants for leave time to individuals, and humanists still tend to publish a lot of books. So I would guess that this sort of requirement would be unlikely in the near term.
Q: Certainly there are calls for this in the UK. The draft proposal from Research Councils UK (Access to Research Outputs), for instance, proposes mandating all publicly-funded researchers, including those in the humanities, to self-archive their papers on the Web. It's not yet clear what the final RCUK policy will be, but do you think this is how the future will look: that in the way that researchers have been required to "publish or perish" they will find themselves also being required to ensure that their papers are freely available to all on the Web?
A: My guess is that it will increasingly be the case that material that is not web accessible will be less likely to be consulted or cited, and that this will in turn result in a lot of pressure on authors and publishers to find ways to make academic work web accessible.
Yet the crunch is likely to come in quality control (to get back that issue). Academic publishing, personnel decisions, and indeed the entire modern enterprise of scholarship is predicated on detailed and careful peer review. That costs quite a lot (many hours of work by pretty highly paid people are involved).
The costs are now (in part) covered by the profits made by academic publishers. In current business models, those profits depend on ownership of intellectual property as defined by copyright law.
Q: Would you say that peer review is as important in the humanities as in the sciences?
A: Peer review is at least as important in humanities as in the sciences — maybe more so in that we do not run experiments that can be independently reproduced. The quality control issue seems to me to be a hurdle that needs to be got over in order for the OA revolution to be completed.
Q: Of course that assumes that OA and peer review are incompatible — a notion that OA advocates would strenuously reject. Commenting on PSWP, Margaret Landesman, a librarian at the University of Utah, suggested that the classics community maybe doesn’t need "formerly published" journals any more. As she put it: "Why not keep the preprint archives and dispense with the journals." Peer review could still take place, but the whole process could be done electronically — which is the Bryn Mawr Classical Review model isn’t it? Moreover, if authors retained copyright the need to obtain permission to archive postprints on the Web would go away. Does that make sense to you?
A: There are several issues here: one is the relative importance of journal articles as opposed to books or book chapters: As long as humanities remains strongly book-oriented (which may change, of course), shifting to electronic publication of humanities journals would be only a partial solution.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review is an important success story in electronic humanities publication, but peer review/quality control concerns are less demanding when publishing scholarly book reviews than when publishing scholarly articles.
The editorial work that ensures proper peer review for scholarly books and articles is very time-consuming. It must be done to a very high standard if the enterprise of scholarship is to be sustained. Following the Bryn Mawr model, universities (or professional organisations) might choose to provide senior scholars with appropriate incentives to do the necessary editorial work on electronic journals (or even books).
Universities work hard to cut “non-essential” costs. It is a matter of persuading universities and professional organisations that it is in their interest to assume costs that are currently paid for by the publishing market. That is a daunting, but certainly not an impossible, challenge.
Q: Does OA provide benefits to researchers that were not possible historically? If so, what benefits?
A: It seems to me that it a case of making things of value (the results of scholarship) readily available to a very wide audience of researchers (professional and amateur), rather than restricting them to the privileged elite that happens to have access to great research libraries.
Of course even those who do have access to major libraries may be encouraged to read more widely because the material is “right there” in front of them. So there is increased potential for cross-appropriation of ideas and facts.
Q: What future developments do you see for a) PSWP b) OA in the humanities in general?
A: I hope that our site will grow in the number of papers we offer and the number of downloads. Beyond that, I am keeping an open mind. If there is a substantial readership for the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, then I would hope that it would promote similar (or better!) sites in other humanities fields — and thereby push towards the long term goal of making more and better scholarship available to bigger and more diverse audiences.
The extension of “what is potentially known” is, I believe, extremely healthy for democratic societies — indeed, that is the subject of my current research.
Q: Can you envisage value in, say, attaching blogs to specific articles, and encouraging feedback/comments etc.?
A: There might be value in that, but my very limited experience with the blogosphere doesn’t encourage me to move in that direction. Blogging at this point seems to be best suited to matters in which opinion is of greater moment than expert knowledge; in matters of scholarship, where expertise does have a big role to play, I’d prefer to leave it to individual commentators to contact individual authors.
Q: Finally, do you think that OA is "inevitable and optimal" as OA advocates often put it? If so, what are the compelling reasons for arguing that that is the case in the area of the humanities in general, and in classics in particular?
A: Inevitable is a strong word and one I tend to avoid when speaking of social phenomena, like politics, economics, or OA. I think that there will be strong pressure for more OA over time, as students and scholars become more and more used to doing their research online. Optimal must of course depend on implementation.
So I’d say that OA is a very good bet, and stands to be a lot closer to optimal than any prior information regime I know of.
Humanists, whose work can be made readily accessible across disciplinary lines (in a way that is more difficult for highly mathematical fields), are likely to benefit disproportionately from OA — and should, therefore, have every reason to support it.
Friday, December 16, 2005
A real tragedy
In writing my recent article about the Royal Society's position statement on open access I contacted a number of Fellows of the Society, including some of those who had written an open letter objecting to the "largely negative stance" taken in the statement.
After publishing the article I received an e-mail from Professor Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs. Professor Roberts, who signed the open letter, had been travelling when I e-mailed my questions to him, so I was unable to incorporate his views into the article. Given the degree of interest that the Royal Society's position statement has generated I thought there would be value in publishing Professor Robert's response separately.
Professor Roberts is a Nobel Laureate, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a research editorial board member for the open access journal PLoS Biology, and senior executive editor of the journal Nucleic Acids, which is published by Oxford University Press and in January 2005 became the first traditional journal to go open access.
Q: Why did you sign the letter to the Royal Society?
A: I signed the letter because it expressed my own sentiments perfectly. I am a strong advocate of open access, and write about it and speak in favour of it whenever possible. I was appalled when I first read the Royal Society's statement.
Q: The Royal Society says that the open letter is based on a misunderstanding, since the Royal Society's position statement is only a re-statement of views it published on 24th November, and that these views were arrived at after extensive discussions that took place in February 2004. At that time these views were also approved by the Council for the Royal Society. Were you aware of those discussions? Did you take part in them? Did you object at the time?
A: The first I heard of this was when BioMed Central's Matt Cockerill sent me the statement. I had personally contacted the Royal Society about this issue several years ago and had spoken with Lord May [the former president of the Royal Society] about it. I was basically brushed off. However, I was not consulted or even forewarned of this statement.
In fact, I first drew the attention of this matter to the Royal Society in January 2001 (almost five years ago). At that time I had written an editorial piece for PNAS about open access and was lead author, and main protagonist, of a letter to Science about the issue. Now they call for a study — just 5 years too late!
Q: The Royal Society says that it has adopted its position on open access partly because of concerns raised by the mathematics, chemistry and physics communities within the Society, and that most of the signatories of the letter are from the life sciences. Is that your understanding?
A: I know that most of the signatories are from the life sciences. I have no knowledge of who has expressed opinions against open access. However, I would note that the physicists have had a form of open access of pre-publication results for a long time (thanks to Paul Ginsparg and his preprint server). The chemists seem to be held hostage by the American Chemical Society, which makes exorbitant charges for its journals and has firmly opposed open access, even to its older publications.
Q: The Royal Society says that the letter has been signed by just "a small number of the 1,274 Fellows." Is it fair to view the letter as representing only a minority view amongst Royal Society Fellows?
A: We won't know if it is a minority view because the Society has never been polled on this issue. Furthermore, I am still surprised that many scientists, and I suspect many Fellows of the Royal Society, are not even aware of the issue, or have not given it any real thought — so for such a poll to be effective there would need to be some education of the participants.
Q: How would you like to see the Royal Society respond to the letter?
A: I would have hoped to see a more conciliatory position taken and especially I would have liked to see some action. For the last three years there have been lots of words, basically opposing open access by calling for studies or more thought, but no actions. My mother taught me that actions speak louder than words.
Q: Has the Royal Society lost touch with its Fellows on this issue?
A: I think that the Royal Society has not only lost touch with its Fellows on this issue, but is out of touch with the pace of the younger scientists whose interests it should be looking after. Most young scientists don't even know where the library is these days. If they can't access the literature from their computer then it might as well not exist for them. So much for seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants! This is a real tragedy.
Q: The Royal Society's approach to open access is in stark contrast to that of the Wellcome Trust (which has mandated its funded researchers to make their papers open access). Why do you think that is? And what does the contrast signify?
A: This question gets to the heart of the matter. The Wellcome Trust has been bold and imaginative, and is to be applauded. I would note that they have no financial interests in opposing open access. The Royal Society by its own admission makes some profits from its publications, as do many scientific societies. If you really want to know why people do things I always think that one should follow the money first.
After publishing the article I received an e-mail from Professor Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs. Professor Roberts, who signed the open letter, had been travelling when I e-mailed my questions to him, so I was unable to incorporate his views into the article. Given the degree of interest that the Royal Society's position statement has generated I thought there would be value in publishing Professor Robert's response separately.
Professor Roberts is a Nobel Laureate, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a research editorial board member for the open access journal PLoS Biology, and senior executive editor of the journal Nucleic Acids, which is published by Oxford University Press and in January 2005 became the first traditional journal to go open access.
Q: Why did you sign the letter to the Royal Society?
A: I signed the letter because it expressed my own sentiments perfectly. I am a strong advocate of open access, and write about it and speak in favour of it whenever possible. I was appalled when I first read the Royal Society's statement.
Q: The Royal Society says that the open letter is based on a misunderstanding, since the Royal Society's position statement is only a re-statement of views it published on 24th November, and that these views were arrived at after extensive discussions that took place in February 2004. At that time these views were also approved by the Council for the Royal Society. Were you aware of those discussions? Did you take part in them? Did you object at the time?
A: The first I heard of this was when BioMed Central's Matt Cockerill sent me the statement. I had personally contacted the Royal Society about this issue several years ago and had spoken with Lord May [the former president of the Royal Society] about it. I was basically brushed off. However, I was not consulted or even forewarned of this statement.
In fact, I first drew the attention of this matter to the Royal Society in January 2001 (almost five years ago). At that time I had written an editorial piece for PNAS about open access and was lead author, and main protagonist, of a letter to Science about the issue. Now they call for a study — just 5 years too late!
Q: The Royal Society says that it has adopted its position on open access partly because of concerns raised by the mathematics, chemistry and physics communities within the Society, and that most of the signatories of the letter are from the life sciences. Is that your understanding?
A: I know that most of the signatories are from the life sciences. I have no knowledge of who has expressed opinions against open access. However, I would note that the physicists have had a form of open access of pre-publication results for a long time (thanks to Paul Ginsparg and his preprint server). The chemists seem to be held hostage by the American Chemical Society, which makes exorbitant charges for its journals and has firmly opposed open access, even to its older publications.
Q: The Royal Society says that the letter has been signed by just "a small number of the 1,274 Fellows." Is it fair to view the letter as representing only a minority view amongst Royal Society Fellows?
A: We won't know if it is a minority view because the Society has never been polled on this issue. Furthermore, I am still surprised that many scientists, and I suspect many Fellows of the Royal Society, are not even aware of the issue, or have not given it any real thought — so for such a poll to be effective there would need to be some education of the participants.
Q: How would you like to see the Royal Society respond to the letter?
A: I would have hoped to see a more conciliatory position taken and especially I would have liked to see some action. For the last three years there have been lots of words, basically opposing open access by calling for studies or more thought, but no actions. My mother taught me that actions speak louder than words.
Q: Has the Royal Society lost touch with its Fellows on this issue?
A: I think that the Royal Society has not only lost touch with its Fellows on this issue, but is out of touch with the pace of the younger scientists whose interests it should be looking after. Most young scientists don't even know where the library is these days. If they can't access the literature from their computer then it might as well not exist for them. So much for seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants! This is a real tragedy.
Q: The Royal Society's approach to open access is in stark contrast to that of the Wellcome Trust (which has mandated its funded researchers to make their papers open access). Why do you think that is? And what does the contrast signify?
A: This question gets to the heart of the matter. The Wellcome Trust has been bold and imaginative, and is to be applauded. I would note that they have no financial interests in opposing open access. The Royal Society by its own admission makes some profits from its publications, as do many scientific societies. If you really want to know why people do things I always think that one should follow the money first.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Not written in the stars
Like any good drama, the open access story is one full of twists and turns, dramatic unmaskings, and unexpected reversals of fortune. This has been so from day one, and it has been particularly so in recent weeks, as the spotlight has fallen on the Royal Society.
As previously reported, on 24th November the Royal Society posted on its web site a position statement on open access. Widely interpreted as an attempt to derail the Research Council UK's proposed policy on access to research output, the statement warned that OA could be "disastrous for the research community", and cautioned against introducing "policies that force researchers to adopt new models that are untried and untested" without first exploring "the likely costs and benefits to all."
Two weeks later, on 7th December, 42 disgruntled Fellows of the Royal Society — including James Watson, the scientist who discovered the structure of DNA, and Sir John Sulston, who headed the British end of the human genome project — responded by sending an open letter to the president of the Society, Lord Rees of Ludlow. Expressing disappointment that it had taken a "largely negative stance on open access", the letter urged the Society to support, rather than seek to delay, the RCUK policy.
More evidence
In its turn, the Fellows' letter elicited a reply from Lord Rees. "We certainly do not, as your letter implies," he wrote to the dissident Fellows "take a 'negative stance' to open access. We are simply concerned that open access is achieved without the risk of unintended damage to peer-review, quality control and long term accessibility of the scientific literature."
Lord Rees went on to list a number of specific issues he had with open access, and concluded that before the proposed RCUK policy was introduced "[W]e believe that a study should be commissioned to assess the relative merits of the various models that have been proposed under the rather broad banner of 'open access'".
OA advocates were quick to point out that since the RCUK was proposing self-archiving, not new publishing models, the Royal Society's stance was based on a misunderstanding. "[M]ost of the RS doubts focus on the viability of OA journals even though the RCUK proposal mandates deposit in OA archives, not submission to OA journals," commented a frustrated Peter Suber, on his blog Open Access News. "I can't count the number of times this misunderstanding has been corrected."
On the American Scientific Open Access Mailing List (AmSci), meanwhile, OA advocate Stevan Harnad was reminding list members that physicists have in any case been posting their papers into arXiv.org for fourteen years without any negative impact on journals. For that reason, he said, any further studies would be redundant, and would unnecessarily delay open access. "If 14 years of evidence of peaceful co-existence between self-archiving and journal publishing is not evidence enough, what is?" he asked.
Calls for more evidence, however, have become a mantra that no self-respecting supporter of the existing system can resist. Speaking to the BBCs' John Sudworth, for instance, the president of the Institute of Physics (and former vice president of the Royal Society) Sir John Enderby, said: "What the Royal Society has said — which seems to me to be blindingly obvious — [is] that before we abandon an economic model which has served us terribly well over the years we should make sure that any replacement is sustainable."
Once again, Sir John was clearly focused on economic models, not self-archiving. In short, the two sides appeared destined to continue talking through each other.
Greater vehemence
What was new in the discussion, however, was a greater vehemence. After asking the Royal Society for a comment on the Fellows' letter, for instance, I received a surprise e-mail from the Royal Society's senior manager of policy communication, Bob Ward.
Apparently convinced that he was unmasking the real villain of the piece he wrote: "[Y]ou may be interested to learn that the open letter from Fellows of the Royal Society on open access appears to have been at least partly co-ordinated by BioMed Central, a commercial publisher of open access journals. Matthew Cockerill, the publisher of BioMed Central, registered the domain name of the web page at which the open letter was posted for signature."
Moreover, when the letter had been sent to the Society, Ward added, it had named as contact person the marketing communications manager at BioMed Central, Grace Baynes.
The implication, it appeared, was that by co-ordinating the letter BMC had acted inappropriately, presumably on the grounds that it stood to gain financially from the successful implementation of the RCUK proposal.
"It is no secret that BioMed Central and others helped to co-ordinate the letter (for example by registering the domain name that was used)," responded Baynes, adding indignantly: "Given that many of the FRS's concerned are on our boards, or edit our journals, it was in no way inappropriate for us to do so."
As allegations about its involvement in the letter began to appear in news stories, OA advocates also leapt to BMC's defence, pointing out (again) that since the RCUK proposal called for self-archiving, not OA publishing, BMC had little to gain from co-ordinating the letter.
"I know that the Royal Society is confused about this issue, but in fact the RCUK policy does not mandate submission to OA journals, only deposit in OA archives," repeated Suber on his blog. "BMC has a financial interest in OA journals but not in OA archiving (apart from its small Open Repository service)."
Shot in the foot
As the debate raged it appeared clear that the Royal Society was in danger of shooting itself in the foot. One of the signatories of the Fellows' letter, Robin Lovell-Badge, for instance, told The Scientist that while he hadn't been aware that the letter was coordinated by BMC, it would have made no difference if he had known. "In fact it's rather insulting to [suggest] that I've been manipulated by BioMed Central," he added, "because I haven't."
Meanwhile, the number of Fellows signing the letter was continuing to grow. Within a week 61 Fellows (there are 1,274 Fellows of the Royal Society) had signed, including five Nobel Prize winners.
By now OA advocates were also keen to turn the allegation around, pointing out that the Royal Society had far more to gain from sinking the RCUK policy than BMC had from supporting it. "The Royal Society has a financial interest in maintaining subscriptions," commented Suber on his blog. "I believe that its subscriptions are not threatened by the RCUK policy. But if it wants to argue that its fears are justified, then it has to start by admitting its financial interest, which is much stronger than BMC's."
In his usual colourful way, Harnad speculated that the only people in the Royal Society who actually had a problem with open access were those working in its journal publishing division. "I'll bet this is not really the voice of the RS at all: It's just the pub-ops tail wagging the regal pooch."
Like a divorcing couple arguing over who gets the kids, both sides were now clearly locked in a dance of death, hurling accusations and insults at each other.
This reached its apotheosis when Sir John implied that open access was akin to communism. "I actually know of no economic model, apart from some extreme Marxist one," he said in an aggrieved voice to the BBC's John Sudworth, "where it is the producer who pays rather than the consumer."
Public good issue
In invoking the bogeyman of Karl Marx, Sir John appeared to underline how out of touch defenders of the traditional journal publishing system had become. However, when I e-mailed him to point out that RCUK was not proposing OA publishing, but self-archiving, and asked if he disagreed with the claim that 14 years of self-archiving without disastrous consequences suggested there was no threat to journal subscriptions, he replied: "If the version of record (as opposed to the partially edited and refereed version) were freely available, then with Google-type search engines all content can be both accessed and indexed, and [as a consequence] subscription income would dry up."
The truth, perhaps, is that publishers, and their apologists, understand only too well the difference between self-archiving and OA publishing, but have concluded that it suits their purposes better to focus on OA publishing.
On the other hand, one could argue that in constantly insisting that self-archiving offers no threat to publishers, OA advocates are being somewhat disingenuous. When the question was put directly to Robin Lovell-Badge by the BBC, he replied: "Clearly subscriptions will fall, yes."
And it's not as if OA advocates haven’t thought it through. As Harnad put it on AmSci: "Even if the imaginable risks were eventually to prove to be real, and self-archiving were to lead to cancellations and a transition to the OA publishing model, would that be grounds for renouncing the demonstrated benefits to research impact and progress?"
In other words, this is essentially a public good issue, not a question of whether or not OA represents a threat to science publishers. And who better to referee issues of the public good than the Government? Unfortunately, the UK Government appears to be deaf in one ear.
Level playing field?
We should recall that when, in November 2004, the Government rejected the UK Science & Technology Select Committee's recommendation to support open access it said it was doing so on the grounds that it believed its role should be to "facilitate a level playing field".
It now seems that what the Government meant to say was "Let's support the status quo". In any case, it has certainly not operated a level playing field when listening to the two sides of the OA debate — as evidenced by a recent Freedom of Information Act request made to the UK's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) by SPARC Europe's David Prosser.
Prosser asked the DTI how often the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science and Innovation for the UK, and head of the DTI, Lord Sainsbury of Turville had met with publishers and researchers in the past two years.
This time the unmasking was far more interesting — for what Prosser learned is that Lord Sainsbury has a special place in his heart for Sir Crispin Davis, the CEO of the world's largest STM publisher Reed Elsevier.
As Suber explained on his blog, the FOIA request shows that "Lord Sainsbury met with OA opponents roughly twice as often as with OA proponents, and met with the Reed Elsevier CEO three times more often than with any other stakeholder." The FOIA documents also show, added Suber, that "DTI apparently undertook no analysis of its own on OA."
Far from being level, it seems, the playing field is heavily tilted in favour of rich and powerful publishers.
Bamboozled
There is here a telling parallel with the drama being played out in the music and movie industries. Confronted by the challenges posed by the Internet, not least the threat of P2P technologies, the entertainment industry has — like science publishers — been desperately clinging to the past.
To this end, David Holtzman recently argued in Business Week, "key industries [have] bamboozled Congress and much of the public into believing that their wares deserve the same protection that was awarded to say, a patent for blast furnaces in the 20th Century."
In the same way, it seems, science publishers have bamboozled the British Government, whose science policy is managed by the Department of Trade & Industry. All too conscious, no doubt, that STM journal publishing makes a significant contribution to the UK economy, the DTI has gone along with the thesis that industrial-age business models need to be protected from the harsh winds of the information age.
What this ignores, of course, is that businesses need to adapt to new conditions, not seek to outlaw or ban them when they pose a threat to the settled world of industry incumbents. Indeed, argues Holtzman, the consequences of doing so are "not just ethical or aesthetic. They are financial — and eventually will lead to economic isolation."
As Holtzman points out, while protectionism may provide a short-term lifeline to individual companies and industries, it often does so by risking the future prosperity of national economies, particularly those economies most heavily invested in outdated business models.
And, ironically, in the information age those economies most wedded to outdated business models are increasingly not the developing nations, but the developed nations.
Inconsequentiality
Holtzman warns, therefore, that as we move from the industrial age to the information age, or from atoms to bits, developed countries "must avoid the trap of applying Industrial Era principles to businesses enabled by the Information Age — or face the consequence of becoming inconsequential."
In short, if developed nations insist on clinging to industrial-age business models then information-age savvy developing nations are likely to out-compete them, or perhaps merely bypass them.
For science publishers the signs are already there. On the same day that the Fellows' letter was sent (7th December), for instance, SciDev.Net reported that the Chinese government has launched a campaign to encourage Chinese researchers to publish their results in domestic — rather than international — journals, and to place their results in free archives.
Explaining the reason for the campaign, Wu Bo'er, director of the Department of Facilities and Financial Support of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology" told SciDev.NET: "At present, when the results of government-funded research is published in foreign journals, Chinese researchers often have to pay reviewing fees for their papers to be published in these journals. After that, China's institutes and other researchers have to spend more than 100 million yuan (US$12.4 million) each year to buy these foreign journals."
Good news
The good news is that, in the US at least, politicians in the developed world are beginning to heed the dangers. All too conscious that publishers succeeded in pressuring NIH director Elias Zerhouni to water down the NIH policy on enhancing public access to research — which policy Congress had instructed NIH to develop — there have been a number of recent new initiatives focused on fixing the problem.
Most significantly, on 7th December (there's that date again!), US Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) introduced a bill into the US Senate that would mandate OA to publicly-funded medical research within four months of its publication.
Officially titled the American Centre for Cures Act of 2005, but informally known as the CURES Act, the bill is concerned with more than just access to research. However, as Suber explained on his blog, it goes beyond the NIH access policy in several important ways:
"It requires free online access and does not merely request it. It shortens the permissible delay to four months. It extends the OA policy beyond the NIH to research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Healthcare Research. Finally, it explicitly says that non-compliance may be a ground for the funding agency to refuse future funding."
Time will tell whether CURES will succeed. Either way, we can certainly expect a few more twists and turns in the unfolding drama of open access before the play is done.
An important turning point will surely come when governments fully accept that the public good is far better served by supporting open access than by listening to publishers' lobbyists — and then enact the necessary legislation to make it happen.
But the final turn in the plot will probably not come until science publishers accept that they are not — as they appear to believe — indispensable. As the founder of BioMed Central Vitek Tracz put it when talking to me last year, "It is not written in the stars that we have to have science publishers, and it is not a moral imperative for us to defend them."
Clearly most science publishers still have some way to go in their thinking. Indeed, it turns out that the reason why the final RCUK policy has yet to be announced is because it is still negotiating with the Royal Society.
Now we know why that venerable institution published a position statement in November!
As previously reported, on 24th November the Royal Society posted on its web site a position statement on open access. Widely interpreted as an attempt to derail the Research Council UK's proposed policy on access to research output, the statement warned that OA could be "disastrous for the research community", and cautioned against introducing "policies that force researchers to adopt new models that are untried and untested" without first exploring "the likely costs and benefits to all."
Two weeks later, on 7th December, 42 disgruntled Fellows of the Royal Society — including James Watson, the scientist who discovered the structure of DNA, and Sir John Sulston, who headed the British end of the human genome project — responded by sending an open letter to the president of the Society, Lord Rees of Ludlow. Expressing disappointment that it had taken a "largely negative stance on open access", the letter urged the Society to support, rather than seek to delay, the RCUK policy.
More evidence
In its turn, the Fellows' letter elicited a reply from Lord Rees. "We certainly do not, as your letter implies," he wrote to the dissident Fellows "take a 'negative stance' to open access. We are simply concerned that open access is achieved without the risk of unintended damage to peer-review, quality control and long term accessibility of the scientific literature."
Lord Rees went on to list a number of specific issues he had with open access, and concluded that before the proposed RCUK policy was introduced "[W]e believe that a study should be commissioned to assess the relative merits of the various models that have been proposed under the rather broad banner of 'open access'".
OA advocates were quick to point out that since the RCUK was proposing self-archiving, not new publishing models, the Royal Society's stance was based on a misunderstanding. "[M]ost of the RS doubts focus on the viability of OA journals even though the RCUK proposal mandates deposit in OA archives, not submission to OA journals," commented a frustrated Peter Suber, on his blog Open Access News. "I can't count the number of times this misunderstanding has been corrected."
On the American Scientific Open Access Mailing List (AmSci), meanwhile, OA advocate Stevan Harnad was reminding list members that physicists have in any case been posting their papers into arXiv.org for fourteen years without any negative impact on journals. For that reason, he said, any further studies would be redundant, and would unnecessarily delay open access. "If 14 years of evidence of peaceful co-existence between self-archiving and journal publishing is not evidence enough, what is?" he asked.
Calls for more evidence, however, have become a mantra that no self-respecting supporter of the existing system can resist. Speaking to the BBCs' John Sudworth, for instance, the president of the Institute of Physics (and former vice president of the Royal Society) Sir John Enderby, said: "What the Royal Society has said — which seems to me to be blindingly obvious — [is] that before we abandon an economic model which has served us terribly well over the years we should make sure that any replacement is sustainable."
Once again, Sir John was clearly focused on economic models, not self-archiving. In short, the two sides appeared destined to continue talking through each other.
Greater vehemence
What was new in the discussion, however, was a greater vehemence. After asking the Royal Society for a comment on the Fellows' letter, for instance, I received a surprise e-mail from the Royal Society's senior manager of policy communication, Bob Ward.
Apparently convinced that he was unmasking the real villain of the piece he wrote: "[Y]ou may be interested to learn that the open letter from Fellows of the Royal Society on open access appears to have been at least partly co-ordinated by BioMed Central, a commercial publisher of open access journals. Matthew Cockerill, the publisher of BioMed Central, registered the domain name of the web page at which the open letter was posted for signature."
Moreover, when the letter had been sent to the Society, Ward added, it had named as contact person the marketing communications manager at BioMed Central, Grace Baynes.
The implication, it appeared, was that by co-ordinating the letter BMC had acted inappropriately, presumably on the grounds that it stood to gain financially from the successful implementation of the RCUK proposal.
"It is no secret that BioMed Central and others helped to co-ordinate the letter (for example by registering the domain name that was used)," responded Baynes, adding indignantly: "Given that many of the FRS's concerned are on our boards, or edit our journals, it was in no way inappropriate for us to do so."
As allegations about its involvement in the letter began to appear in news stories, OA advocates also leapt to BMC's defence, pointing out (again) that since the RCUK proposal called for self-archiving, not OA publishing, BMC had little to gain from co-ordinating the letter.
"I know that the Royal Society is confused about this issue, but in fact the RCUK policy does not mandate submission to OA journals, only deposit in OA archives," repeated Suber on his blog. "BMC has a financial interest in OA journals but not in OA archiving (apart from its small Open Repository service)."
Shot in the foot
As the debate raged it appeared clear that the Royal Society was in danger of shooting itself in the foot. One of the signatories of the Fellows' letter, Robin Lovell-Badge, for instance, told The Scientist that while he hadn't been aware that the letter was coordinated by BMC, it would have made no difference if he had known. "In fact it's rather insulting to [suggest] that I've been manipulated by BioMed Central," he added, "because I haven't."
Meanwhile, the number of Fellows signing the letter was continuing to grow. Within a week 61 Fellows (there are 1,274 Fellows of the Royal Society) had signed, including five Nobel Prize winners.
By now OA advocates were also keen to turn the allegation around, pointing out that the Royal Society had far more to gain from sinking the RCUK policy than BMC had from supporting it. "The Royal Society has a financial interest in maintaining subscriptions," commented Suber on his blog. "I believe that its subscriptions are not threatened by the RCUK policy. But if it wants to argue that its fears are justified, then it has to start by admitting its financial interest, which is much stronger than BMC's."
In his usual colourful way, Harnad speculated that the only people in the Royal Society who actually had a problem with open access were those working in its journal publishing division. "I'll bet this is not really the voice of the RS at all: It's just the pub-ops tail wagging the regal pooch."
Like a divorcing couple arguing over who gets the kids, both sides were now clearly locked in a dance of death, hurling accusations and insults at each other.
This reached its apotheosis when Sir John implied that open access was akin to communism. "I actually know of no economic model, apart from some extreme Marxist one," he said in an aggrieved voice to the BBC's John Sudworth, "where it is the producer who pays rather than the consumer."
Public good issue
In invoking the bogeyman of Karl Marx, Sir John appeared to underline how out of touch defenders of the traditional journal publishing system had become. However, when I e-mailed him to point out that RCUK was not proposing OA publishing, but self-archiving, and asked if he disagreed with the claim that 14 years of self-archiving without disastrous consequences suggested there was no threat to journal subscriptions, he replied: "If the version of record (as opposed to the partially edited and refereed version) were freely available, then with Google-type search engines all content can be both accessed and indexed, and [as a consequence] subscription income would dry up."
The truth, perhaps, is that publishers, and their apologists, understand only too well the difference between self-archiving and OA publishing, but have concluded that it suits their purposes better to focus on OA publishing.
On the other hand, one could argue that in constantly insisting that self-archiving offers no threat to publishers, OA advocates are being somewhat disingenuous. When the question was put directly to Robin Lovell-Badge by the BBC, he replied: "Clearly subscriptions will fall, yes."
And it's not as if OA advocates haven’t thought it through. As Harnad put it on AmSci: "Even if the imaginable risks were eventually to prove to be real, and self-archiving were to lead to cancellations and a transition to the OA publishing model, would that be grounds for renouncing the demonstrated benefits to research impact and progress?"
In other words, this is essentially a public good issue, not a question of whether or not OA represents a threat to science publishers. And who better to referee issues of the public good than the Government? Unfortunately, the UK Government appears to be deaf in one ear.
Level playing field?
We should recall that when, in November 2004, the Government rejected the UK Science & Technology Select Committee's recommendation to support open access it said it was doing so on the grounds that it believed its role should be to "facilitate a level playing field".
It now seems that what the Government meant to say was "Let's support the status quo". In any case, it has certainly not operated a level playing field when listening to the two sides of the OA debate — as evidenced by a recent Freedom of Information Act request made to the UK's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) by SPARC Europe's David Prosser.
Prosser asked the DTI how often the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science and Innovation for the UK, and head of the DTI, Lord Sainsbury of Turville had met with publishers and researchers in the past two years.
This time the unmasking was far more interesting — for what Prosser learned is that Lord Sainsbury has a special place in his heart for Sir Crispin Davis, the CEO of the world's largest STM publisher Reed Elsevier.
As Suber explained on his blog, the FOIA request shows that "Lord Sainsbury met with OA opponents roughly twice as often as with OA proponents, and met with the Reed Elsevier CEO three times more often than with any other stakeholder." The FOIA documents also show, added Suber, that "DTI apparently undertook no analysis of its own on OA."
Far from being level, it seems, the playing field is heavily tilted in favour of rich and powerful publishers.
Bamboozled
There is here a telling parallel with the drama being played out in the music and movie industries. Confronted by the challenges posed by the Internet, not least the threat of P2P technologies, the entertainment industry has — like science publishers — been desperately clinging to the past.
To this end, David Holtzman recently argued in Business Week, "key industries [have] bamboozled Congress and much of the public into believing that their wares deserve the same protection that was awarded to say, a patent for blast furnaces in the 20th Century."
In the same way, it seems, science publishers have bamboozled the British Government, whose science policy is managed by the Department of Trade & Industry. All too conscious, no doubt, that STM journal publishing makes a significant contribution to the UK economy, the DTI has gone along with the thesis that industrial-age business models need to be protected from the harsh winds of the information age.
What this ignores, of course, is that businesses need to adapt to new conditions, not seek to outlaw or ban them when they pose a threat to the settled world of industry incumbents. Indeed, argues Holtzman, the consequences of doing so are "not just ethical or aesthetic. They are financial — and eventually will lead to economic isolation."
As Holtzman points out, while protectionism may provide a short-term lifeline to individual companies and industries, it often does so by risking the future prosperity of national economies, particularly those economies most heavily invested in outdated business models.
And, ironically, in the information age those economies most wedded to outdated business models are increasingly not the developing nations, but the developed nations.
Inconsequentiality
Holtzman warns, therefore, that as we move from the industrial age to the information age, or from atoms to bits, developed countries "must avoid the trap of applying Industrial Era principles to businesses enabled by the Information Age — or face the consequence of becoming inconsequential."
In short, if developed nations insist on clinging to industrial-age business models then information-age savvy developing nations are likely to out-compete them, or perhaps merely bypass them.
For science publishers the signs are already there. On the same day that the Fellows' letter was sent (7th December), for instance, SciDev.Net reported that the Chinese government has launched a campaign to encourage Chinese researchers to publish their results in domestic — rather than international — journals, and to place their results in free archives.
Explaining the reason for the campaign, Wu Bo'er, director of the Department of Facilities and Financial Support of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology" told SciDev.NET: "At present, when the results of government-funded research is published in foreign journals, Chinese researchers often have to pay reviewing fees for their papers to be published in these journals. After that, China's institutes and other researchers have to spend more than 100 million yuan (US$12.4 million) each year to buy these foreign journals."
Good news
The good news is that, in the US at least, politicians in the developed world are beginning to heed the dangers. All too conscious that publishers succeeded in pressuring NIH director Elias Zerhouni to water down the NIH policy on enhancing public access to research — which policy Congress had instructed NIH to develop — there have been a number of recent new initiatives focused on fixing the problem.
Most significantly, on 7th December (there's that date again!), US Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) introduced a bill into the US Senate that would mandate OA to publicly-funded medical research within four months of its publication.
Officially titled the American Centre for Cures Act of 2005, but informally known as the CURES Act, the bill is concerned with more than just access to research. However, as Suber explained on his blog, it goes beyond the NIH access policy in several important ways:
"It requires free online access and does not merely request it. It shortens the permissible delay to four months. It extends the OA policy beyond the NIH to research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Healthcare Research. Finally, it explicitly says that non-compliance may be a ground for the funding agency to refuse future funding."
Time will tell whether CURES will succeed. Either way, we can certainly expect a few more twists and turns in the unfolding drama of open access before the play is done.
An important turning point will surely come when governments fully accept that the public good is far better served by supporting open access than by listening to publishers' lobbyists — and then enact the necessary legislation to make it happen.
But the final turn in the plot will probably not come until science publishers accept that they are not — as they appear to believe — indispensable. As the founder of BioMed Central Vitek Tracz put it when talking to me last year, "It is not written in the stars that we have to have science publishers, and it is not a moral imperative for us to defend them."
Clearly most science publishers still have some way to go in their thinking. Indeed, it turns out that the reason why the final RCUK policy has yet to be announced is because it is still negotiating with the Royal Society.
Now we know why that venerable institution published a position statement in November!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)