Hat Tip: “Would [open access] be prestigious just because we say it is? I say, why not?”

This hat tip goes to Jessica P. Hekman for her May 10, 2012 post on Scientific American’s Guest Blog, “Moving the Prestige to Open-Access Publishing.” Hekman is preparing to graduate from veterinary school. Before this, she had a twelve year career in online publishing, and got her undergraduate degree in medieval studies from Harvard University.

Hekman is reflecting on the April 17, 2012 memorandum sent by the Harvard Library Faculty Advisory Council (covered by me here), which among other things, encouraged faculty to submit their research articles to open access journals in order to “move prestige to open access.”

Implicit in the memo’s encouragement is the truth that if an academic journal has acquired prestige it is only because it originated with the scholars themselves. Recovering this truth disrupts the status quo and creates an opening for brainstorming alternatives.

In the post Hekman is brainstorming. She puts forward an interesting idea that amounts to the creation of post-publication peer review lists of open access articles, vetted by scholars in prestigious academic departments at prestigious academic institutions. Would this work? Hekman herself points out some of the challenges. But what I loved most was her simple disarming directness when she says:

Would inclusion [of open access articles in this review list] be prestigious just because we say it is? I say, why not? The big name journals are prestigious just because we say they are, and because we make hiring and promotion decisions based on publication in them.

Hey, that’s right! Hey, that’s empowering! Thanks Jessica.

Hat Tip: “The Penguin Books are…so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

I listen with fair regularity to a podcast on publishing produced by Oxford Brookes University and the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies.

The latest podcast, posted on March 15, 2012 was a re-broadcast of a BBC Oxford lunchtime program on World Book Day, March 1, 2012. One topic of conversation was the recent explosive growth in popularity of e-books facilitated by the arrival of relatively low cost e-book readers and multi-function tablet computers. The other topic pointed back to the history of the book, focusing in particular on the paperback book publishing revolution started in the mid-1930s by a man named Allen Lane. Lane founded Penguin Books. Lane didn’t invent the paperback book. But he brought high quality contemporary content and high quality design and production value to the low cost paperback format. The result revolutionized publishing and the way people viewed books and accessed quality literature.

It is a fascinating story, and I commend a listen to the podcast. Take a look, too, at the company history page on the Penguin Books website. Penguin was set up as a separate company in London in 1936, and “within twelve months, it had sold a staggering 3 million paperbacks.”

We take this book format pretty much for granted today. But it has been and is a wonderful thing. I still recall the wonder of the paperback book as expressed by Carl Sagan when he said, “For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things.” (Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980, p. 281.)

Looking back, we would not hesitate to call Lane’s innovation “disruptive” in the publishing world. Indeed, it is told that the penguin was chosen as the company logo because Lane “wanted a ‘dignified but flippant’ symbol for his new business.”

I was particularly struck by this comment on the Penguin history page, followed by a quote from George Orwell:

Traditional publishers tended to view Penguin with suspicion and uncertainty, as did some authors.

“The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

I don’t know whether to take this as ironic in view of some “traditional” publisher behavior observable today as book (and journal) publishing moves into the digital world. Although Allen Lane clearly started Penguin to sell books, he also wanted to increase the accessibility of good quality books to the general public. I see in his disruptive innovation—his flippant dignity (or dignified flippancy)—a challenge to “traditional” publishing models, and maybe even an analogy that would support the spirit, at least, of open access.

Reblog: Plato, the invention of writing, and the e-book

I have one final re-blogged post from the past that I parked last year on my library’s blog site. Take a look at “Plato, the invention of writing, and the e-book” from January 2009. As in my previous re-blogged post, the topic isn’t open access per se but musings over how long-standing scholarly communications traditions in the Humanities can successfully negotiate a fuller embrace of online technologies, which are essential if open access is ultimately to succeed.

This post originally appeared on my now inactive blog, Voyage of the Paradigm Ship, January 19, 2009.

The following is a two-part email I sent to my good friend and colleague (he is chair of the faculty Library Committee) on March 27 and 29, 2006, after he sent me an editorial written by Edward Tenner in The New York Times, entitled “Searching for Dummies” (March 26, 2006). My friend is a history professor and an avid bibliophile. Though he has largely “come around” to my way of thinking regarding the benefits of electronic delivery of journal literature, he is far more resistive when it comes to surrendering the marvelous technology expressed as the printed book. He knows he has been socialized into this preference, but insists that a full embrace of computer and electronic information resource technology is damaging his students’ capacity to think through complex ideas in a sustained and deep way. I retort that our task should not be rejection of the technology but the instruction into its proper use, and building an awareness (understanding) both of its advantages/limitations and its impact (both good and ill) on human culture and knowledge. In my argument I drew an analogy from another ancient technology—writing itself.

Greetings. Further to our on-going conversation (print vs. electronic information resources), here is an interesting excerpt from Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates tells a story of the Egyptian god Theuth, the inventor of, among other things, writing. I have not read the full piece, but it is interesting here to see Plato’s critique of the losses sustained by writing (and reading) as a new technology over oral culture and true memory…

Reblog: “When you’re used to paper rolls it takes some time to convert to turning pages of a book.”

Is it possible to give a “hat tip” to oneself? (Consider it a self-citation.) My recent thread on traditions of scholarly communication in the Humanities (here and here) reminded me of a piece I originally posted to a now mothballed blog back in early 2009. Last year I transferred the post to the library blog that I administer.

The post is entitled “When you’re used to paper rolls it takes some time to convert to turning pages of a book,” which reflects, from the context of a now well-known Norwegian television comedy sketch (with almost 3.3 million views on YouTube), on the process of social and cultural resistance and adoption to innovations in computer technology.

I imagine that many people watching this video will, in fact, identify with the described situation while thinking of an analogous modern situation, such as learning to use a computer, a new piece of software, or the latest consumer electronics gadget. But as a librarian, I am interested in the described situation itself. Although the historical time-frame is off slightly, the sketch allows me to imagine the cultural, intellectual, and (even) emotional processing that accompanied the technological transition in the form of the book from roll/scroll to codex.

With the benefit of this perspective, I can extrapolate some of the processing required as we are once again approaching a credible point of transition in book form from paper to electronic (i.e., the so-called e-book). I am not interested in speculating about the imminent demise of the ink on paper book, which I do not see. Rather, and at the risk of over-analyzing a two-and-a-half minute bit of humor, I am interested in thinking about human interaction with and reactions to technology at points of significant technological transition, such as the maturing of the e-book format, which I do think is now well underway.

…

If a codex can become a ‘real’ book even if at one time it was not deemed to be so, then by analogy an e-book should be able to acquire a similar authorization. It’s just a question of time.

That “bold” predictive statement from early 2009 now sounds almost quaint, especially in view of a report released this week from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which found that 21% of Americans had read an e-book in the last year, coinciding with a major increase in ownership of e-book readers and tablet computers (although print books still dominate).

Maybe it’s not so much physicality but ‘edges’ we are looking for in Humanities scholarly communication

In my recent interaction with Peter Suber’s 2004 article “Promoting Open Access in the Humanities,” I offered an additional point to the nine he had proposed to answer the question: Why is open access moving so slowly in the humanities? My point focused on a research tradition or ethos that has long shaped humanist scholarship and scholarly communication.

Until a few years ago, I would have added (only half-jokingly) that humanities scholars had just recently become fully comfortable working with computers in an online environment! Putting this in a more culturally-sensitive way, many areas of humanities scholarship (including religious studies) have historically operated from a strong engagement with the substantive physicality of printed texts and artifacts. This engagement has carried over into a long tradition and preference for a printed mode of scholarly communication. Part of the “weight” of a scholar’s research and argumentation is communicated through the equal physicality of his or her printed journal article or monograph (preferably in hard cover). Since open access as a mode of scholarly communication operates almost entirely in the online environment, the challenge for humanist scholars is to admit the legitimacy, viability, and preservability of the non-substantive virtuality of their research work now in electronic form. I’ve been told that folks are getting over this concern, though I still encounter hesitation from scholars and librarians who wonder if their bit-based articles and books will endure half as well and as long as the paper-based tomes and ancient manuscripts they have committed their scholarly lives to study.

Yesterday, I was catching up on some reading over at John Gruber’s (Apple and technology) blog Daring Fireball. Gruber linked to a compelling essay written by Craig Mod entitled, “The Digital-Physical: On building Flipboard for iPhone and finding edges for our digital narratives.”

Craig Mod is a writer, designer and publisher. He is interested in the future of books, and especially how book form, design and publishing negotiate the transition from print into a digital environment. It turns out I had read some of Craig’s stuff before (I thought that name sounded familiar). It’s good stuff.

Craig Mod had worked on the development team that produced the free iPhone/iPad app called Flipboard. Flipboard aggregates your social media (Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, etc.) and presents them in an attractive and engaging magazine-like interface that updates in realtime. In “The Digital-Physical,” Mod reflects on his process of chronicling the development of this piece of software through, ironically, the production of a physical book.

At first, it would appear the only commonalities between software development and scholarly communication in an electronic environment are that they both involve bits and sitting in front of computer screens. But as I read Mod’s essay, I got this overwhelming sensation that he had anticipated the heart of what I had said above about humanist scholars—even down to use of words like ‘weight’ and ‘physicality.’

We’ve entered a…binary on/off era for physicality. Big physicality. Star Trek style. To go digital-physical and back again is increasingly frictionless.

And so:
What do we gain from these jumps?
How can they reframe experiences to help us better understand them?

These are questions I’ve found myself returning to repeatedly these past few years.

Abstractly, you can think about going from digital to physical as going from boundless to bounded. A space without implicit edges to one composed entirely of edges.

For a while now it had been clear to all of us that edges are a critical framing aid in helping us consume but it wasn’t until last year — helping build Flipboard for iPhone — that I began to understand how critical they are to gain perspective on creation. To gain perspective on a journey captured in bits.

This is an essay about recognizing and reorganizing our journeys that live largely in digital space. How do we ground and bind those experiences? What is the value in giving them edges so we may hold them in our hands and hope to understand, perhaps, the weight of the work we produce? (emphasis his)

Mod characterizes the feeling experienced by many who work digitally from a computer screen as ‘thinness.’

There’s a feeling of thinness that I believe many of us grapple with working digitally. It’s a product of the ethereality inherent to computer work. The more the entirety of the creation process lives in bits, the less solid the things we’re creating feel in our minds. Put in more concrete terms: a folder with one item looks just like a folder with a billion items. Feels just like a folder with a billion items. And even then, when open, with most of our current interfaces, we see at best only a screenful of information, a handful of items at a time. (emphasis his)

The problem is a perception of boundlessness, which humanities scholars may fear as they move from the physical to the digital in their research communication. Mod brought the boundless to bounded by producing a physical book from the digital artifacts of this software project. And the weight of the physical book he produced (using an online digital printing service called Blurb) came to “nearly eight pounds.” How’s that for substantive physicality?

But Mod is talking about frictionless movement, back and forth, between the physical and the digital—not either/or but flip-flop. I infer that Craig Mod was not so much after physicality as ‘edges’ to bound the boundlessness by being able to communicate physically the work he and his team did in the digital. By the same logic, humanities scholars should be able to bring those bounding edges with them from their work in the physical as they increasingly communicate their scholarship digitally.

[W]hat projects like this speak to is the unique and increasingly important value we can give data by abstracting physicality. Jumping back and forth. Creating that space. Capturing a journey effortlessly in bits, and then giving it edges. This dance makes our digital experiences more understandable, parseable, consumable.

Edges are about feeling as much as seeing. With edges comes a sense of weight. And with that comes the ability to feel — physically and psychically. And with that, a better understanding of what we’ve built and where we’ve been. (emphasis his)

Definitely worth a read.

Open access as a public good: “He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

This “hat tip” goes to the Spring 2012 issue of JISC Inform for covering the January 17, 2012 JISC/SCONUL Lecture in London presented by Professor Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library. Professor Darnton’s lecture was entitled, “The Digital Public Library of America: Current Plans and Future Prospects.”

Darnton spoke on the Digital Public Library of America, an ambitious project that will seek to create a national digital library, bringing together the world’s cultural and scientific record and making it freely accessible to all. In the lecture, Darnton speaks passionately about open access, and coming to view knowledge as a public good.

To set the stage, Darnton references a well-known letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to an Isaac McPherson on August 13, 1813. “Jefferson developed a metaphor,” says Darnton, “which is a description of the way intellectual communication takes place—it’s a process of spreading light from one taper, or candle, to another.” He quotes the following excerpt:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

“Well,” continues Darnton, “Jefferson wasn’t exactly thinking of the Internet. But I think that is the message, and I would add to it open access—free access for humanity to the collective good of humanity.”

A bit later, Darnton again comes back to Jefferson’s metaphor to speak about how the Internet facilitates information access—exactly what I thought of as I was listening to him reading Jefferson’s words. “To get back to the idea of Jefferson’s candle-light power, enlightenment, it may seem archaic today of course, but I believe it can acquire a twenty-first century luster if you associate it with the Internet. The Internet which multiplies messages at virtually no cost.”

I have embedded Darnton’s lecture (just over an hour in length) here. It is well worth a viewing.

Richard Poynder interviews PLoS’s co-founder and open access advocate Michael Eisen

Earlier this week Richard Poynder posted an interview with Public Library of Science’s (PLoS) co-founder and open access advocate Michael Eisen. Eisen was one of the original signatories to the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative statement. Over the last twelve years, PLoS (founded in 2000) has transformed from an open access advocacy site to a successful open access life sciences publisher.

Michael Eisen recently wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times (January 10, 2012) vigorously opposing proposed House legislation known as the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), which has generated significant backlash against commercial academic publishers that supported the legislation, and has spawned alternative proposed legislation in the Senate. (See also my “Not entirely off-topic: The Research Works Act”.)

Poynder is himself a strong open access advocate, but he didn’t give Eisen a free pass. In particular, Poynder was pretty hard on Eisen and PLoS for failing (as yet) to significantly bring down the cost of scholarly journal publishing. Lower cost is supposed to be one of the principal benefits of open access.

A common approach for covering the costs of open access publication is to charge authors/sponsors an article processing fee in lieu of reader subscriptions. But these fees can be quite high, and one wonders about the sustainability of this approach (even though institutional sponsors or grant funders often foot the bill). In response, Eisen insists that marginal costs will be reduced as the technological infrastructure is more fully implemented and as authors submit articles in publishing-ready formats. He did seem to admit that we’re not there yet.

The scale of scientific journal publishing—even open access scientific journal publishing—is dizzying for scholars in Religion and Theology. Nevertheless, this is an interesting and informative read that ranges over other open access topics such as the potential for an enlarged role for article self-archiving (so-called “Green OA” vs. journal-based “Gold OA”), and alternative models for peer-review.

Today’s “Hey girl. I like the library too.” features Ryan Gosling promoting open access!

A little humor for a Friday afternoon. This “hat tip” goes to our library’s Information Resources Librarian for sharing today’s librarian-adaptation of the Ryan Gosling “Hey girl” meme (I’ll let you look that up yourself) featuring open access!

Hey girl, you know I would never publish in anything but an open access journal, because changing the existing unsustainable model of scholarly communication is really important to me, you know?

Budapest Open Access Initiative: Happy 10th Anniversary!

On February 14, 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative was publicly released online with 16 original signatories, formally giving birth to the Open Access movement.

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

For various reasons, this kind of free and unrestricted online availability, which we will call open access…

Read the rest of the Initiative here. Happy 10th Anniversary BOAI!

The Golden Rule: “If you want open access to the research in your field, as a reader, then make your own research open access, as an author.”

This “hat tip” goes to Springer’s Author Zone Newsletter (Issue 10, January 2012) featuring an interview with longtime open access advocate Peter Suber. Suber concludes his response to a question summarizing the benefits for authors to publish open access by saying:

Finally, authors who make their own work OA contribute to a milieu in which others do the same. It’s the golden rule. If you want OA to the research in your field, as a reader, then make your own research OA, as an author. (emphasis added)

Now there’s a principle that should resonate with scholars in Religion!

Springer is a large international commercial publisher that has in recent years become heavily involved in open access through their SpringerOpen division and platform. Although strongly oriented toward the sciences (STM), last week I received an email from the Senior Publishing Editor in Philosophy & Religious Studies informing me they would like to try to develop more open access journals in Philosophy and Religious Studies. An interesting development. I’m waiting for a reply to my request for more information.

The interview above links to a more extensive interview conducted by Richard Poynder with Peter Suber in the July/August 2011 issue of InformationToday (Volume 28, Number 7), “Suber: Leader of a Leaderless Revolution.” This interview is very much worth a read as a way to get an overview and insight into the issues at play in the open access publishing landscape.