The Basement Interviews: Peter Suber

Free Online Scholarship

Peter Suber

Philosopher, jurist, and one-time stand-up comic, Peter Suber is widely viewed as the de facto leader of the open access (OA) movement. A senior researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Open Access Project Director for the public interest advocacy group Public Knowledge, and Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Suber is also an advisor to a number of other OA-related organisations — including the WikimediaFoundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and the Australian Open Access to Knowledge Law Project (OAK).

Peter Suber was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1951. His father was a jazz magazine publisher. His mother — Grace Mary Stern — became a prominent Illinois state senator, and in 1982 was the Democratic Party candidate for lieutenant governorof Illinois, running with Adlai Stevenson III.

Suber studied philosophy at Earlham College (in Richmond, Indiana), and then did a doctorate in philosophy and a law degree, both at Northwestern University. While at Earlham he spent a sabbatical year in Douglas Hofstadter's artificial intelligence lab as well. 

To pay his way through graduate school, Suber developed a side-career as a stand-up comedian, working in clubs, universities, tech conferences, and television. As his gigs became more plentiful and lucrative, he had to choose between full-time philosophy and full-time comedy. The choice for philosophy was an easy one, in part, he says, because teaching philosophy meant that he didn't have to leave comedy entirely behind!

Choosing philosophy didn't assure him a career, however. After turning down an unsatisfactory tenure-track job offer he realised that the tight job market did not allow him to be picky. He might have returned to comedy, but acquired Graves disease (a thyroid condition now under control), which made him too hoarse to speak in public for several months. So he started law school and remained full-time in the philosophy job market. His thinking was that if he found a good job in philosophy, he'd take it; and if not, he'd be trained for something else.

After two years of law school he got an offer from his alma mater, which he considered an ideal job. So he arranged with his Dean to finish law school before starting his job, and then returned to Earlham to teach philosophy, law, and occasionally computer science.

Intrigued by the potential of the Web

In the mid-1990s, intrigued by the potential of the Web, Suber began to put his academic papers online. To his surprise, he immediately began to receive emails from other researchers wanting to discuss his ideas. This was just the kind of feedback that he had always expected to get by publishing in print, but which rarely materialised until his work was available online.

Excited by his experience, Suber began to make contact with other academics doing the same, and started a weekly newsletter. His plan was to report on developments, and encourage other researchers to take advantage of the new medium for disseminating their scholarship. Soon he was sufficiently gripped by the possibilities of what he now called "Free Online Scholarship" (FOS) that Suber devoted a sabbatical year to furthering his aim, and eventually deciding to put his academic career on hold to devote all his energies to FOS.

For this Suber realised he would need funding. He soon secured a grant from GeorgeSoros' Open Society Institute (OSI) and in 2003, after a final post-sabbatical year of teaching, he and his wife (who had been teaching classics at Earlham) both gave up their tenured positions, and moved to Maine — where Suber threw himself his new project with energy and determination.

That he had something to offer the world in his new role became apparent at a meeting organised by OSI in 2002. Held in Budapest, the aim of the event was to explore possible synergies between a number of apparently related developments — including several initiatives undertaken by SPARC to address the so-called "serials crisis", the nascent self-archiving movement, and the emergence of new publishers like Biomed Central, who were committed to exploiting the internet to develop new publishing models that would make research papers freely available to everyone, rather than accessible only to those able to afford the constantly rising journal subscriptions.

The meeting was hugely successful, giving birth both to the open access movement and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). It also attracted $3 million in funding from George Soros, for projects aimed at providing what was now no longer called Free Online Scholarship, but open access. Those attending the Budapest meeting also decided that it would be good to produce an open access manifesto — and the task of writing it fell to Suber.

In penning the manifesto Suber first demonstrated his unique ability to articulate the aims and aspirations of the movement in strikingly clear and compelling terms. Frederick Friend, one of the other attendees of the Budapest meeting, describes it thus: "His beautiful words and phrasing gave the movement a vision which people in every country have been able to relate to."

In recognition of his important contribution to OA, OSI has continued to fund Suber's activities ever since, enabling him to develop his daily-updated blog (Open Access News) and engage in advocacy. And with additional support from SPARC Suber has been able to continue writing his (now monthly) newsletter —The SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Both publications have become key platforms for promoting open access, and for publicising and recording its progress. And along with the Budapest manifesto, they are viewed as the bible of the OA movement. Suber is also widely sought out for advice by researchers, librarians, researcher funders, publishers, and governments.

Big tent

Above all Suber's work is valued for its precision and its unemotional but tireless advocacy for a cause that he has both reported on and helped to shape. "All of his writing has an intellectual rigour that one might expect from a good philosopher or jurist," explains the director of SPARC Europe David Prosser. "He can construct and deconstruct arguments. It is amazing to see him methodically pick-apart an anti-OA piece."

Adds Prosser, "He is devastating on sloppy logic, inconsistencies, and disingenuous ideas, as well as being very clear on the distinction between opinion and fact."

It is his objectivity and rationality above all that has seen Suber become the unofficial leader of the movement. His calm and inclusive approach has also proved the essential glue to hold together an often rowdy and rumbustious collection of highly-opinionated and disputatious individuals. For like most of the burgeoning free and open movements, the open access movement is constantly riven with disagreements and factional in-fighting, most notably between supporters of self-archiving (the so-called green road to open access), and those who insist that open access publishing (the gold road) is the best way forward.

At the heart of Suber's ability to unite the movement is a commitment to what he calls "the big tent" — a tent from which no faction of the open access movement is excluded, and in which all shades of opinion are welcomed. His blog covers points of view he does not personally accept, but he gives them space to make their case before offering his own constructive, critical comments. 

In his own analytic pieces, Suber often argues that the movement will make faster progress by harnessing differences than by quarrelling about them, but he does not hesitate to criticise ideas he believes are incorrect or untenable, even from allies. He achieves the difficult balance of being inclusive but not woolly-minded or indecisive.

Behind his approach lies a belief in the principle that the best way of achieving open access is to acknowledge when different strategies are compatible and to tap the energy of everyone who wants to play a part. The way to think about it, he says, is as a division of labour.

"It's good for us that some people want to pursue OA journals first, because they will work hard to create OA journals. It's also good that some people want to pursue OA repositories first, because they will work hard to create and fill OA repositories. The two strategies are complementary and we need them both. Individuals have to decide how to spend their time, but the movement doesn't have to decide which of these strategies is more urgent. On the contrary, it should support this division of labour."

Unlike many of his fellow OA advocates, Suber also views the movement in a larger context — recognising that the internet has implications for knowledge sharing that go some way beyond scholarly journal articles alone. And while insisting that the open access movement can achieve its objectives unilaterally, he is nevertheless conscious that there are important synergies with the other free and open movements, and reasons for sometimes working in common cause.

As Clifford Lynch, director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), puts it, "Peter's interests are very broad — they go not only to open access, but to the future of scholarly communication broadly, and to questions that range from new genres of scholarly communication to open data and open notebook science. Indeed, he is also interested in questions like citizen access to government data beyond the scholarly setting."

Sitting at his computer

What is most striking is that Suber has acquired his leadership role not by sitting in smoke-filled rooms, and constantly travelling around pressing the flesh, but largely by sitting at his computer in the peaceful surroundings of coastal Maine — on an unpaved road off the Bagaduce River — from where he despatches a constant stream of news, commentary, advice and wise words.

For although Suber travelled frequently, and spoke often, in the years immediately following the seminal Budapest meeting (and the subsequent Bethesda meeting), more recently he has deliberately cut back on travel, in part from weariness and in part to cope with the rising demands of his newsletter, blog, and the informal advice and consulting he undertakes.

Indeed so successful a politician and diplomat does Suber appear to be that — despite his frequent absence at OA events — he has gained the respect even of those who oppose open access, or seek to divert it to their own ends. "Peter is the 'thinking person's OA advocate' — he is measured, reasonable and considers others' ideas (even if I don't always agree with his conclusions!)", says former chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) Sally Morris.

Or as Springer's Jan Velterop, puts it, "Peter's measured and well put arguments are never offensive and on the whole as fair as you could expect from anybody who clearly believes in one side of the argument. That in itself made open access far more credible, sensible, and reasonable than the heated arguments that flew before, and keep on flying."

In short, Suber appears to have gained the trust and respect of all the actors in the OA drama, not excluding the movement's hotheads and those who have sought to derail it. Vitally, suggests OSI's Melissa Hagemann, his non-confrontational approach has prevented the movement from "tearing itself asunder".

But it would be wrong to say that Suber has no critics. Stevan Harnad worries that has a tendency to be too non-confrontational and emollient. This, he believes, has sometimes held the movement back. Although deeply complimentary and respectful of Suber, and keen to acknowledge the central role he has played, Harnad worries that Suber's determination to be reasonable has on occasions enabled the open access publishing faction to sideline and devalue self-archiving.

"He is even handed to a fault," says Harnad. "If he were less compliant and obliging, he could have fought harder at the Bethesda meeting (where he was and I wasn't) where, vastly outnumbered by the gold contingent, OA essentially got defined as OAP [Open Access Publishing], omitting green completely, and setting OA back at least 3 years."

However, Harnad adds: "But this is all carping at minor things considering that Peter is the only other person in the 'OA' movement who has seen and understood it all, as of 2001. Without exception, all others have either gone pure-gold, over-gold, or simply never understood green properly. Peter did."

Does not look for fights

Criticism of Suber's ecumenism, however, overlooks the fact that beneath his emollient exterior lies a powerful and unbending determination, an extremely focused goal, and a well-articulated strategy. As fellow OA advocate Jean-Claude Guédon puts it, Suber "shuns controversy but will hold his stand if needed. In other words, he strikes me as someone quite courageous, but he does not look for fights."

And if he failed to get green OA an equal hearing at Bethesda, explains Suber, it was not for want of trying. Not only was he outnumbered by the gold advocates attending, he says, but many of them were simply unable to comprehend the green argument.

"The fact is that green OA has always had to fight for recognition," he explains. "Its novelty makes it invisible. People understand OA journals, more or less, because they understand journals. But there's no obvious counterpart to OA archiving in the traditional landscape of scholarly communication. It's as if people can only understand new things that they can assimilate to old things. All of us have had the experience of describing green OA at a meeting and then getting questions that presuppose that all OA is gold OA. All of us have seen critics object to green OA policies by pointing out supposed shortcomings of gold OA. This is the kind of obstacle green OA faced at Bethesda."

In short, it would wrong to suggest that Suber is in any way a pushover, or that he is not prepared to call a spade a spade. Moreover, he stressed to me, he is a strong believer in the need to take a tough stand when necessary. "When calling a spade a spade, or speaking accurately, requires a fight, then I fight, and many of my public writings are 'fighting words' in just this sense."

But he immediately adds: "Even then, however, I want to be constructive. I want to preserve the possibility that I might change minds and not just (as politicians put it) energise the base."

Certainly it is not difficult to find examples of his tough talking. In September, for instance, he criticised the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for introducing a mandate with a "major loophole".

He has also been a frequent critic of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which in 2005 retreated from a strong draft policy intended to mandate NIH-funded researchers to self-archiving their papers, to a weak request that they do so. As Suber put it, "I have to conclude that the NIH has weakened its policy and that the weakening is unjustified and harmful."

And in April Suber criticised the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) for agreeing to pay Elsevier between $1,000 and $1,500 an article to deposit HHMI-funded research into the PubMed Central (PMC) archive. After relentlessly cataloguing the failures of the agreement, he concluded: "In sum, what's wrong with this picture? HHMI is paying a fee for green OA. Despite its fee, HHMI is not getting immediate OA. Despite its fee, HHMI is not getting OA to the published version of the article. Elsevier (beyond Cell Press) is even lengthening its embargo period. Elsevier is permitting embargoed deposits in PMC, but it already permits free and unembargoed deposits in IRs. Actually making the deposits is a semi-automated clerical task that doesn't come close to justifying these fees."

Importantly, Suber is not shy to take on the formidable Harnad — the self-styled "archivangelist" who regularly and relentlessly verbally batters opponents into submission, or silent retreat. Just this month he engaged in a series of public disagreements with Harnad over copyright and "permission rights."

Firm corrective hand

I too have felt the firm corrective hand of Suber. Several years ago I published a blog-based article in which I had described Suber as an OA evangelist. Shortly after I received a terse email from him in which he said that it was "inaccurate and pejorative" to describe him in that way. "It suggests that I make faith-based appeals, which I do not, or that I raise my voice, which I do not." He would prefer it, he added, if I would refer to him as an open access "researcher" instead. Suitably admonished I edited the quote!

What is undeniable is that in putting his career on hold Suber has demonstrated a personal commitment to open access that no one else can claim to have made. As Harnad points out, "I sacrificed a lot of time to OA, but Peter sacrificed even more than that. He essentially traded his career for it, and I very much hope, if there is justice in the world, that once OA prevails he will be rewarded with the secure, prestigious position he deserves, rather than dropped by all those he has helped."

He adds: "The sacrifice is all the greater once you realise that Suber views open access advocacy as a temporary duty, and dreams of returning to philosophy, and writing a book that will combine his many interests."

In fact, Suber told me, he has plans for more than one book sketched out. "I have a dozen philosophy projects in different states of completion. Some I'll never finish even if I had time, but at least half are still high priorities for me."

As further evidence that he views open access as a "digression", rather than an exit, from his career, Suber retains a non-remunerated research post at Earlham.

In short, it is the combination of his total commitment to the cause and his ecumenical but firm guidance that has earned Suber his role as de facto leader of the open access movement. This has undeniably earned him the respect that leadership demands. When preparing to interview Suber I emailed Prosser to ask if he would comment on him. He replied almost immediately, "I'm happy to, but I'll gush — I think Peter is an International Treasure!"

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I had been hoping to interview Suber for some time, but events kept getting in the way. I was also conscious that he is an extremely busy person, and since I needed to steal at least three hours of his time to do the kind of interview I had in mind, it was not a regular journalistic request that I was making. In the event, Suber agreed immediately, and our first conversation took place the following week. This was followed up by a second call five days later.

We began our conversation on Skype, but had to switch to the regular telephone when it kept falling over. The only interruptions to our conversation were the constant chattering of Suber's parakeets — which, judging by the volume of the noise, were surely perched on his shoulder leaning into the phone mouthpiece, and for all I knew expressing strong views on the subject of open access in parakeet-speak — and a sudden whooshing noise towards the end of the conversation. The latter turned out to be a vacuum cleaner, although it wasn't clear whether the ever-busy Suber had started to multi-task, or a third party had suddenly decided that the floor under his desk was in need of urgent attention!

On later seeing the draft text of the interview Suber evidently regretted not having silenced his birds before we spoke. He commented, with some passion: "I hate those parakeets! And for the same reason dread being thought of as a parakeet person!"

In speaking to Suber I found myself constantly thinking that I was talking to an Englishman who had, by some strange accident of fate, acquired an American accent. While saying this may seem like shocking prejudice, his reserve, politeness, and extreme modesty seemed, well, distinctly un-American.

This impression was only strengthened when at the end of the second conversation he said, somewhat apologetically, that he had struggled to answer many of the questions before I threw the next one at him. From the diffident way in which he broached the subject I concluded that, while he is happy to be robust when discussing ideas, Suber is generally shy and retiring when it comes to other matters, particularly his private life — a point underlined by the almost monosyllabic replies he gave to my questions about his family.

What was surprising to me, however, was that for a man who in a former life had been a comedian, Suber appeared unexpectedly serious-minded, not to say somewhat humourless. Aside from a couple of ironic remarks, I detected no playfulness, and no hint of an absurdist view of the world. During our conversation he chuckled only once.

When I tackled him on this, Suber replied: "I used to be angry and funny. Now I am neither." He then added dryly, demonstrating that he can still get in touch with his former self, "Maybe it's just cognitive decline!"

I have always been puzzled about Suber's motivation. Why would anyone put their career on hold for a cause that, at the time he abandoned his professorship, was far from certain of success?

In the hope of finding a clue I read some of Suber's non-OA writing before speaking to him. In doing so I came across a baccalaureate address he gave at Earlham College in 1987. There he discussed how Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard had argued that in the modern age many of us are able to arrive at a position where we have no external constraints on us (a state that Immanuel Kant called negative freedom), but that most of us never move beyond that point — to find a new authority, or a new direction (positive freedom). As such, believed Kierkegaard, we never reach the state of being able to "self-legislate" about our lives, and our lives are therefore too often meaningless.

I wondered if maybe Suber's decision to abandon his career at Earlham had been inspired by a desire to "self-legislate", and to put new meaning into his life. Perhaps, I thought, it was an example of a philosopher deciding to live by the sword.

When I pressed Suber on his motives, however, he cited neither Kierkegaard nor Kant, but the founder of the Quakers, George Fox. Fox, he said, had stressed the need to live a useful life. 

Suber added, "I do believe that teachers live useful lives, but I saw a chance to be more useful."

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

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making asmall 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.

Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

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

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

To read the interview with Peter Suber (as a PDF file) click here.

This interview is number ten of The Basement Interviews.

I would like to acknowledge the help of the Open Society Institute, which provided a small upfront grant to enable me to get started on The Basement Interviews project. Further information about The Basement Interviews can be found at the Open & Shut? site.

The other interviews in the series are indexed here.

The IP world is not for the weak minded

Interview with Peter Vanderheyden, Vice President, Global Intellectual Property, LexisNexis

In a world now awash with free information it is easy to forget that there are still many companies out there making a good business from selling data, not least traditional online services like Dialog, LexisNexis, Questel, and STN International.

The raison d'être of these proprietary online services — which pre-date the Internet, and started out as dialup services — has always has been heavily focused on selling value-added data at premium rates, primarily to businesses, research libraries, and large legal firms. And the jewel in the crown of these services was always the patent databases that they offer — not least because they were able to sell access to them at very attractive rates.

Evidently, the patent information market is still considered a good business to be in: Last month LexisNexis (a division of publishing behemoth Reed Elsevier) launched a new web-based patent product called TotalPatent. This is not so much a patent database, as a collection of patent databases. As LexisNexis boasts, TotalPatent is, "the world's largest collection of searchable full-text and bibliographic patent databases".

More precisely, TotalPatent offers access to around 60 million patent documents from 22 of the world's largest patent authorities. It also includes content from 500 scholarly journals published by LexisNexis' sister company Elsevier, a number of advanced analysis tools like PatentOptimizer, and machine translation capabilities. For this, customers pay an annual subscription charge of $2,000 per user.

But it would be wrong to suggest that all is dandy in the value-added patent information market. Like most providers of proprietary information, paid-for patent information services face increasing competition from free sources on the Web, including the Google Patent Service, and an ever growing quantity of free data provided by the world's major patent offices (PTOs).

In fact, PTOs first entered the electronic patent information business way back in the mid-1990s, when they started offering CDROM products of patent information. And with the arrival of the Web, they began providing patent information on the Internet for free. Since then their offering has constantly grown and expanded over time. Moreover, while initially providing just raw data, some PTOs have begun to offer value-added data as well, and so now directly compete with commercial providers. The European Patent Office (EPO), which runs the esp@cenet service, has been particularly aggressive in doing this.

Unsurprisingly, this was controversial from the beginning, with private vendors warning that if they continued to offer free information PTOs would force commercial providers out of the market, leaving the distribution of patent information in the hands of a small group of state monopolies.

Yet 12 years later, LexisNexis clearly believes there remains a healthy market for valued-added patent data. TotalPatent undoubtedly cost a considerable sum of money to develop — money LexisNexis would not have invested had it not been confident that it could recoup it, and make a healthy profit to boot.

Is LexisNexis living in cloud cuckoo-land, or is it rightly confident that valued-added patent information will remain a good furrow to plough — even in a world flooded with free information?

I have been curious about current thinking inside commercial information vendors for a while now. So when I was invited to talk about the launch of TotalPatent with Peter Vanderheyden — vice president of global intellectual property at LexisNexis — I took the opportunity of raising some of the wider issues with him as well.

Vanderheyden has been in the patent information business for ten years. Amongst other things, he was involved in the development of the first free patent information service to be launched on the Web — IBM's Patent Server. This was released as a free service in 1997, but later re-engineered as a proprietary paid-for service called Delphion, and eventually sold on to Thomson's Derwent.

So what is Vanderheyden's take on the current environment for paid-for patent information services? While expressing confidence that the market remains a good one, he did not hide his irritation (anger even) at the activities of the EPO, and echoed the oft-repeated claim that this was threatening the viability of commercial providers. He also suggested that the EPO's actions had chilled innovation, and held back the development of new patent information services.

It is also clear that these are sensitive issues — as evidenced by LexisNexis' stipulation that I only publish the interview with Vanderheyden if I attach a statement indicating that his answers represent Vanderheyden's personal opinions alone, not the official position of LexisNexis, or its parent company, Reed Elsevier.

For me the experience was instructional. Having spent the last couple of years speaking to leaders from the various free and open movements I had formed the impression that there arenow two very distinct cultures driving the so-called "information economy," and that an ever widening gulf separates these two cultures. Venderheyden's answers to my questions appeared to confirm this.

What are these two cultures? On the one hand is the traditional corporate culture, and on the other what one might call a new culture of "the commons".

The former tends to be very narrowly focused on corporate missions, market opportunities, business strategies, and things like cash cows, and "budget realities" — usually without any reference to wider society (other than acknowledging that that is where a company's customers come from). The latter, while not anti-business, tends to take a much broader view of the world, and of society, and is often deeply interested in ethical issues, and "the public good".

What this means in practice is that corporate culture views information as essentially an asset to be exploited for commercial gain, and those who subscribe to this culture assume therefore that the default position is that information should be treated as a product to be bought and sold. Those who subscribe to the culture of the commons, by contrast, believe that information is most useful when it is shared by as many people as possible, and used to promote social good. For them, therefore, the default position is one in which information is freely available to all.

That there has been a serious breakdown in communication between these two cultures first became apparent to me when I interviewed the founder of the Free Software Movement, Richard Stallman.

When I reminded him that companies lock up their content with digital rights management (DRM) technologies because in a digital environment information can be so easily copied (which reduces its value as a commercial product), Stallman snapped back that operating from purely selfish motives is no excuse for mistreating people. (Stallman, like many, believes that DRM is socially unacceptable, since it erodes both freedom and privacy).

He added, "There is this bizarre idea nowadays that all a person has to do to excuse nasty treatment of others is to say: 'I am just trying to make money.' As if making money were so admirable that it could justify absolutely anything. 'Oh, I punched him in the nose; but I am trying to make money, so let me do it.'"

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

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account. I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me.

Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

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

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

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

The OA Interviews: Stevan Harnad

Stevan Harnad is a cognitive scientist based at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is also one of the leading lights of the Open Access (OA) Movement, and a self-styled "archivangelist".

Stevan Harnad

Harnad is often portrayed as a bully and a fanatic — a man so determined to get fellow researchers to make their papers freely available on the Web that he will brook no disagreement, responding to all contrary views and dissenting voices with such a relentless barrage of rebuttals and reproaches that his opponents are eventually forced to retreat.

But this is too simplistic a picture of the man. For Harnad, OA is not — as his critics claim — the obsession of a pedant with a one-dimensional view of the world, but the prelude to a fourth revolution in human cognition and communication. (The first three, he says, were language, writing, and print).

The goal of OA, Harnad says, is to unleash a potential long latent in mankind's unique language capacity, one that will allow us to exploit at last the full power of our collective intellect through "scholarly skywriting" — a form of communication, he contends, for which our brains were pre-adapted a hundred thousand years ago, but that has been awaiting the online era for its realisation.

However, before we can exploit the potential of this new form of communication, he says, we first need to make all research OA — an obvious next step that has been within our reach since the onset of the online era, but that we have still failed to take. And until we do, he says, we are denying ourselves access to our full potential.

If his OA advocacy is at times on the testy side, adds Harnad, this is not so much evidence of an intemperate nature as of a patience that has been sorely tried by the inordinate amount of time it is taking us to grasp what is already well within our reach.

What cannot be denied is that Harnad has exerted a very powerful influence on the development of the OA Movement. To a great extent he is the person who has articulated the main issues, and it is he who has — obsessively perhaps — kept people's minds focused, both on why OA is essential, and how we can best, and most rapidly, achieve it.

Moreover, as Harnad is keen to point out, in addition to archivangelising for the last thirteen years, he has also created and commissioned many of the concrete practical tools now being used in our faltering steps toward OA.

To put Harnad's views on OA into the larger perspective we need to explore some of his many research interests. These range from the origins of language and the "symbol grounding problem", to categorisation and scientometrics.

As a result, the interview I am publishing today is on the long side. For those wishing to dip into particular sections, therefore, a Navigation Table is provided. Simply click on the title of the section you are interesting in, and hear what Harnad has to say.

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

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account. I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me.

Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

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

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

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

Bridging the digital divide: Empowering the people

Interview with Professor M S Swaminathan, founder and chairman of the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in India

Professor Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan is a man who has gifted much to the world. A world-renowned Indian agricultural scientist, he is widely known in his home country as the "Father of the Green Revolution".

Swaminathan earned this soubriquet following the groundbreaking work he did as a plant geneticist in the 1960s — work that led to the development of hybrid wheat seeds capable of producing yields three times higher than was previously possible.

This was nothing less than a gift of life for his countrymen who, in the aftermath of WWII, found themselves unable to grow enough food to feed their burgeoning population, and so had to live a "ship-to-mouth" existence, subsisting on food grains imported from the US.

Born in Tamil Nadu in 1925, Swaminathan obtained degrees in zoology and agricultural science, and then moved to New Delhi to study cytogenetics; subsequently he undertook research in the Netherlands, at the UK's Plant Breeding Institute, and then at the University of Wisconsin.

At this point in his career Swaminathan could have settled for a comfortable academic life in the US. Instead he chose to return to India. As he put it in 1999 to TIME magazine, "I asked myself, why did I study genetics? It was to produce enough food in India. So I came back." ...

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

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The OA Interviews: Leo Waaijers

The Netherlands is a leading nation in the ongoing struggle for Open Access (OA). It has been more successful than any other country in creating a network of institutional repositories, and it has led the world in deposit rates — most notably by means of its Cream of Science and Promise of Science initiatives. Significantly, it has achieved this without the need to mandate researchers to deposit their papers. Instead it has incentivised them. Much of the credit for this success must go to the manager of SURFshare Leo Waaijers.

But how successful is successful? Can the Netherlands ensure that the entire nation's research output will eventually become freely available on the Web without a mandate? Waaijers speaks to Richard Poynder.


Leo Waaijers

RP: I believe you are a librarian by training. Can you start by saying something about your background and your current role?

LW: Actually, I am not a librarian by training. I studied mathematics and theoretical physics and I was an associate professor. But after a long odyssey through the academic managerial ranks, including an elected post on the executive board of Delft University of Technology, in 1988 I was appointed university librarian at Delft. Then, in January 2004 I became manager of SURF's DARE program, and subsequently manager of SURFshare, the successor to DARE.

RP: As I understand it, SURF is a collaborative venture of all the institutions of higher education and research in the Netherlands. Its mission is to stimulate and organise the ICT co-operation of these institutions. But what is the specific purpose of the DARE and SURFshare initiatives, particularly with regard to Open Access?

LW: The aim of both programmes is to provide better access to the results of research. DARE's focus was on textual publications; SURFshare is about the production of and access to complex documents.

RP: What do you mean by complex documents?

LW: Complexity here refers to structured multiplicity. I.e. many dislocated authors collaborating on consecutive versions of multidimensional publications (including text, data, visuals, algorithms etc.) that are distributed over a multitude of repositories.

RP: Which implies e-Science I guess. In terms of OA, however, I'm conscious that there are a number of different views as to what it is, and the purpose it should serve. How do you define OA, and what do you see as its rationale and objective?

LW: OA to knowledge means that the only access limit is your own comprehension. The need to know is fundamental in humans: Think of children; think of Eve. Sharing knowledge has always been the critical survival factor of our species.

Green and gold

RP: Ok, but in the context of scholarly literature I guess we are talking about the free availability of research papers (and increasingly primary research data) on the Internet. There are two approaches to OA: the so-called gold and green routes. What's your view on the respective merits of these two approaches?

LW: In terms of the OAI layers: green is data, gold is a service.

RP: When you talk about OAI layers you are referring to the Open Archives Initiative. This assumes a two-layered model in which data providers (research institutions) create institutional repositories (IRs) at an organisational level (and archive their research in them). Third parties then offer services on top of these repositories. Initially it was envisaged that these services would mainly be harvesters like OAIster, which are designed to aggregate the data in OAI-compliant repositories in order to create a virtual archive that researchers can use to search the entire corpus of distributed papers through a single interface.

Most people view gold OA as a complete publishing service, but one in which the costs are covered by means of an upfront Article Publishing Charge (APC), rather than a post factum subscription fee. In referring to any service built on an IR as a "gold" service you appear to be implying that for you publishers too are now just service providers (providing, for instance, peer review).

LW: Right. The point is that green is necessary but insufficient on its own ...

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

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Open Access: The War in Europe

As the battle for Open Access (OA) to the scientific literature has intensified, so different fronts of conflict have opened up. With the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) on hold as a result of the American election, the main action in February was in Europe — where the European Commission (EC) announced a number of measures intended to support OA.

However, to the disappointment of OA advocates — and despite the recommendations of its own study — the EC chose not to introduce a mandate requiring all publicly-funded research to be made freely available in open repositories. Why did the EC step back from the brink, and where does this leave the OA Movement? Richard Poynder explores the issues.

The EC's long-awaited policy on Open Access was published as a Communication on 15th February, and formally announced at a conference on scientific publishing held in Brussels.

While the Commission has decided that it will encourage researchers to publish their papers in "author-pays" OA, or hybrid, journals it chose not to introduce a self-archiving mandate. Rather it will issue programme-specific "guidelines" for making publicly-funded research available on the Web after an embargo period. This, it says, will be done on a sectoral basis, taking into account the specificity of the different scholarly and scientific disciplines.

What this guideline approach will mean in practice, commented OA advocate Peter Suber in his March newsletter, is for the moment unclear. "It doesn't tell us when it will issue the guidelines, whether the guidelines will require or merely encourage OA … [or] … what the maximum permissible embargo will be … [However] ... It does tell us that the guidelines will vary by discipline and funding program; hence even if the rules in some areas are strong enough, others are likely to be weak."

Speaking to CORDIS News on February 17th, Horst Forster, director of digital content at the EC's directorate general for information society and media, confirmed: "We [the Commission] will not have a mandate on Open Access."

In other words, the EC seems inclined to adopt a voluntary, rather than compulsory, approach. The aim, Forster told CORDIS News, is to encourage experiments with new publishing business models that may improve access to and dissemination of scientific information, and to initiate a policy debate.

So why has the EC retreated from a mandate? …


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

Please note that while I am making the article freely available to all, I am a freelance journalist by profession, and so make my living from writing. To assist me to continue making my work available in this way I invite anyone who reads the article to make a voluntary 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. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

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

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UK's AHRC to introduce Open Access mandate

The UK is a world leader in the movement for Open Access (OA). In June 2006, for instance, the country's biggest public research funder, Research Councils UK (RCUK), published an OA-friendly position paper that has led to five of the eight constituent UK Research Councils adopting self-archiving mandates. These mandates require grant-holders to make their research freely available in online repositories. 

To date, however, the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has not introduced a mandate. Moreover, the likelihood of it doing so has not looked good. 

When in February, for instance, the Chief Executive of AHRC Professor Philip Esler was invited to sign a petition calling on the EC to introduce a European-wide OA mandate, he responded by sending an e-mail to the heads of all the other Research Councils, as well as to OA advocates and journalists, saying that he did not intend to sign the petition because "to do what the petition requires in a particular case could arguably entail inducing someone to breach the copyright clause of his or her publishing contract." Perhaps as a consequence of this, only one Research Council Chief Executive signed the petition. 

OA advocates were quick to suggest that Professor Esler had misunderstood the petition; a misunderstanding he now appears to concede. But what is current thinking about OA at the AHRC? And has it ruled out introducing a mandate? Richard Poynder e-mailed Professor Esler to find out.

Philip Esler

RP: Do you envisage the AHRC introducing a self-archiving mandate at some point? If so, when will that be? PE: 

The AHRC is one of eight UK Research Councils that have a common policy on Open Access. This policy can be found on the RCUK website. The AHRC is committed to the principles articulated in that policy. A key principle among them is that "Ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research must be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable." 

The Research Councils, including the AHRC, agree that their funded researchers should, where required to do so, deposit the outputs from Research Councils' funded research in an acceptable repository as designated by the individual Research Council. Detailed guidance on this issue will, in due course, appear on the websites of each Council. 

The RCUK policy also provides that "Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example embargo periods or provisions limiting the use of deposited content to non-commercial purposes, are respected by authors. The research councils' position is based on the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies." 

The Research Councils have a round of activities in progress in relation to this policy that includes consulting with the publishing community regarding copyright and licensing issues. 

Clearly, it would be in the interest of researchers and users of research if a blanket arrangement could be reached with publishers allowing deposition of works in which the publishers hold copyright in Open Access repositories, and in as short a period as possible after publication by the publishers.

The AHRC, like other Research Councils, is moving toward a detailed policy in line with these principles.

RP: You say that the Research Councils have a common policy on Open Access. My understanding, however, is that five of the eight Research Councils have introduced a self-archiving mandate, but the AHRC has not. Does this not suggest that the AHRC is out of step? 

PE: We have announced our intention to introduce a self-archiving mandate. Our policy is the same as the other Councils and this is merely a timetabling issue. 

We are currently reviewing the Arts and Humanities Data Service (jointly funded with JISC) and that is a factor that has slowed us down a bit in comparison with the other Councils. We are not out of step with the other Councils on this! 

RP: I wasn't aware of an announcement. PE: 

We will consider the AHDS at the Council meeting on 15th March 2007, so I hope it will be shortly after that. We point out on our website that we will take into account our findings on the AHDS prior to offering our guidance. 

RP: Some argue that Open Access raises different issues for the arts and humanities than it does for the sciences? Would you agree? PE: 

In my view, the principles of Open Access are as applicable to the arts and humanities as to the sciences. That is why we are moving forward on this issue jointly with the scientific Research Councils. 

RP: In February you were asked to sign a petition calling on the EC to introduce a Europe-wide self-archiving mandate. You responded by saying that you would not sign it because to do so would amount to inducing researchers to breach the copyright clause of the contracts they had with publishers. OA advocates refuted this vigorously. Do you hold to your position? 

PE: In my message of 8th February, I did not say that signing the Open Access petition "would" be a tortious act but that it "may" be. At that time I was on a train, did not have the text of the petition before me, and was responding to a statement concerning it. I only had in mind the position of my fellow Research Council Chief Executives (the full list of participants to the conversation was not present on my Blackberry when I sent my message and I did not know I would be honoured with such a large audience!). 

What I said was also specifically restricted to the situation under English law (with which I am familiar with from my past as a lawyer in Australia, where English law forms the foundation of the legal systems of the States), not the law of any other jurisdiction. 

I was simply seeking to remind my fellow Research Council Chief Executives of the need for caution in this area, especially in light of the fact that the RCUK policy specifically refers to the copyright issue, as noted above. 

RP: So have you subsequently changed your views about the implications of signing the petition? PE: 

I have now read what I gather is the current version of this petition. It does not specifically mention copyright, but does talk of the need to have discussions with publishers, which would imply that copyright would be discussed. 

Every legal case must be decided on its own facts, but it is not easy for me to say how anyone signing this petition would, under English law, commit the tort of inducing a breach of contact. 

But anyone signing the petition should not rely on my view in doing so (I am no longer a certificated and practising lawyer) but, if he or she is in any doubt, should take legal advice in their own jurisdictions.

RP: Will you personally now be signing the petition? 

PE: I will still not be signing the petition (even though I am sympathy with its intentions). The announced position of the AHRC is in line with that of RCUK, is very clear and is actually more detailed than the provisions of this petition. 

To the extent that there might be thought to be any differences between this petition and the stated RCUK policy, it might be confusing for me to sign up to both. 

RP: The EC Communication that was the focus of the petition has now been published. In the event, the EC has decided not to introduce a Europe-wide mandate, but says that it will issue specific guidelines about providing access to research outputs for each of its research programmes (presumably on a voluntary basis). It has also agreed to provide funds to assist researchers who would like to publish in Open Access journals. What are your views on the EC policy? 

PE: The intentions of the Communication are worthy, both because it looks to opening up access to research and also because it proposes to do so in a way that will be integrated across Europe. 

This latter point is important because there is now empirical data showing that research conducted by international teams is higher in quality and impact than research carried out in one country. 

For European research, it would be inconvenient if there were different policies on Open Access operation across countries from which research teams might come.

Open Radio

As disenchantment with today's increasingly outdated economic and political system grows, so more and more people are turning to a proliferating number of free and open movements — in pursuit of alternative ways of doing things. Is Open Radio about to become the next trend?

At the end of last year I received an email from a US community radio station called KRUU-FM, which is based in Fairfield, Iowa. While surfing the Web Sundar Raman, the host of a show called Open Views, had come across the interviews I have been doing with leaders of the various free and open movements, and he wanted to talk to me about them on air.

Sympathetic to the notion of community radio, and intrigued by the raison d'être of Open Views — to explore the open source and free culture movements around the world "stretching beyond the limits of software" — I agreed to do the interview, which was broadcast in December (and can be heard here).

It was only after the interview was over, however, that I realised that KRUU is more than just a community radio station: it is also a grassroots initiative with a deep commitment to the principles advocated by the various free and open movements. Or as station manager James Moore more extensively described it during the inaugural Open Views programme, KRUU is "grassroots, community, public, non-profit, open radio."

Moore's use of the term "open radio" caught my attention. What, I wondered, did he mean?

Amongst other things, it seems, he meant that KRUU has made a commitment to use only Open Source software. As KRUU founder Roland Wells explained on Open Views, all KRUU's PCs run on the GNU/Linux operating system, and the audio editing tools (Ardour and Audacity) used by DJs at the station are also Open Source. Likewise, the office suite used by Moore to administer the station (OpenOffice) is Open Source, and the station's web site was built using Free BSD UNIX, and is hosted on the Open Source web server Apache.

By using Open Source solutions rather than proprietary software, Wells told KRUU listeners, the station has saved "tens of thousands of dollars".

A philosophy

But such cost-savings are just a side benefit for KRUU, since its commitment to openness is informed more by a philosophy than a business model.

Above all, this philosophy includes a determination to involve the community in the station as much as possible. And since KRUU broadcasts on a 24-hour round-the-clock basis — and uses only one half-hour of syndicated programming (from Free Speech Radio News) — this means that Fairfield's 10,000 or so citizens not only get to hear a lot of local content, but they provide it themselves.

As The Des Moines Register put it a November news report, "In Fairfield, any breathing resident may be stopped on the street and asked to host a radio show."

To date, 150 local residents have volunteered to help run KRUU, and 70 of them now host their own shows. Practically all these DJs, moreover, have no previous experience whatsoever of radio broadcasting.

In other words, in true Open Source fashion, KRUU has spurned a top-down model in favour of a bottom-up, do-it-yourself approach. And where traditional radio stations aspire to little more than pumping out an endless flow of anodyne, mass-produced programming, KRUU invites local citizens to select the kind of programming they want, and then produce it themselves.

"One of the reasons why we want to do this," explained Wells at the station's launch last September "is because most of the media we see or listen to these days is created somewhere else."

And the end result, Moore wrote recently in The Iowa Source is "an aural mosaic" that is a "far cry from the corporatised amalgamation so prevalent in so much of syndicated radio nowadays."

This aural mosaic includes a wide range of different musical genres (including TV theme songs) local news, and political debate — one of the first "Speaking Freely" shows featured former US Republican Congressman Jim Leach, who described the Iraq war as "the greatest foreign policy blunder in the history of our country".

There is also a rich mixture of minority programming — including "Magyar Mix" (Hungarian music selected and played by Hungarian-born Fairfield resident Laszlo Papp), a Spanish-speaking show, a drum show, and "Sleepy Time with Grandpa D", an evening spot for kids that features soft music and bedtime stories.


Laszlo Papp

As a volunteer effort KRUU has an authenticity that no slick for-profit radio station could hope to match. True, there are frequent glitches, dropped lines, and miscues. And since KRUU is located next to the railroad, the occasional clanging of passing trains provides an intermittent but atmospheric backdrop.

However, listeners are unfazed by these rough edges, says Raman. "Every DJ (myself included), regardless of their show, is accosted on the street regularly and told that the station is the best thing to have happened to the community."

"It's the realness that people are responding to," Moore suggested to The Des Moines Register ... ==>

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

Please note that while I am making the article freely available to all, I am a freelance journalist by profession, and so make my living from writing. To assist me to continue making my work available in this way I invite anyone who reads the article to make a voluntary 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. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

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

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