Advocacy in the form of sabotaging a Facebook post. #openaccess

In the circles I run in (Scholarly Communications, Libraries) there is a petition being passed around which seeks to bring the issue of open access to the immediate attention of President Obama. You can read all about it here.

I shared a video (below) on Facebook, which was then reshared by a friend who is in a humanities PhD program asking his science colleagues what they thought. In reading the few responses, I realized quickly that the misunderstandings about open access were fraught in the conversation, so I had no choice but to dive in with a (sufficiently-opinionated) response, pasted below for your reading pleasure. (Names removed for privacy)

Original post:

To all my friends in the sciences, what are your thoughts about making all government funded research freely available? 

 

Open Access Controversy: My response to PaleoJudica blog

A faculty member here at FSU that I work closely with forwarded me this blog post from Jim Davila – Open Access Controversy – on his PaleoJudica blog. Since I couldn’t find a way to add a comment to the post, my response is below. The issue at hand is how does open access work for journals published by societies and associations? I still have more percolating to do, but wanted to get this out now. Read these first:

1. Archeology Institute of America – From the President

2. Ancient World Bloggers (response to the AIA President)

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Thank you first of all for commenting on this topic. I think more often than not, faculty are not taking a stance at all, and allowing the conversation to go on without their input. Your response is valuable and necessary for the future of scholarly publishing, whatever that will look like. 

 

That said, I believe that there are some fundamental misunderstandings in your blog post that I’d like the chance to humbly argue. The cost “to produce top-quality publications” is very quickly changing and nearing closer to zero, with the advent of the internet as a dissemination tool, as you mention. What would the cost be to the AIA if they were to utilize web structures (Open Journal Systems, or WordPress for two examples) to publish the high quality scholarship of the research community? Elizabeth Bartman states that publications are “significantly improved by the contributions of other professionals such as peer reviewers, editors, copywriters, photo editors and designers,” but in most cases the work that makes a publication valuable to the field (peer reviewing and Editorial oversight) is done for free by faculty as part of their service to the community. I do agree that copyediting and design has a cost and skill set associated, but again that becomes negligible when publications live in digital spaces, and in my opinion doesn’t justify an argument against open access from individuals or associations.  

 

One point overlooked in your post, and the two others linked therein, is that the oft-mentioned “Author pays” model of open access is actually only one business model that is being utilized. And in fact, more than half of the open access journals in existence do NOT charge author publication fees. In a perfect world, open access makes complete sense all along the scholarly publishing cycle, as faculty produce the work for free, review one another’s work for free, edit the collections of that work for free, and ultimately, under open access, have the potential to disseminate that work for free. The argument for societies to move in this direction is simply that there may be a wide, cross-disciplinary audience (cultural studies, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, etc) that could all potentially benefit from the publications of a group like AIA, but will never find them if they are not accessible outside the field-specific literature. Not to say anything of colleagues and peers in developing countries whose libraries (or personal funds) cannot purchase subscriptions or single articles. (See Here for an outline of different business models and the research I quote above.)

 

As for the bills in congress… the goal is not to undercut the societies who are publishing, but to provide the public with access to world-class research that they are funding by tax dollars. It is also my hope that out of these conversations will develop a adaptable scholarly publishing model that makes sense for all involved, with the exception of major publishing houses that charge exorbitant prices on the backs of free labor. We’ve seen this evolution happen in televison, radio, the music industry, and currently in book publishing. Academic publishing has the opportunity to decide its own fate, right now, and I do hope insights like yours will be included as we move forward. 

 

Thanks and have a great weekend, 

 

Micah Vandegrift 

MIT and Harvard leading the way… again.

After a trudging semester working on building the groundwork of our Scholarly Communications work at Florida State, it is heartening to see both Harvard and MIT being very public about their stance on open access to scholarly work. In the MIT Faculty Newsletter, Richard Holton states the following, as they are building a working group on open access:

One of the premises of the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy was that it would make it possible for “MIT” to be at the table for discussions, rather than leaving each MIT faculty author responsible for negotiating their author rights alone. We hope the Working Group will offer an efficient means of arriving at principled positions to take to Elsevier and other publishers. Elsevier has reacted to the boycott by withdrawing their support from the Research Works Act; we hope that they will reconsider their attitude to open access more generally.

The commercial journals provide an important role in ensuring quality control and we expect The Libraries will go on subscribing to them. But we need to make the articles available to those who don’t have access to a major university library.

Many individual faculty members already post their articles on their own Websites. What the Policy does is to bring some order to this process: the copyright status is made clear, then the library collects the pieces, gives them stable URLs that will persist even if the faculty member moves or retires, and makes sure that they are visible to Google Scholar, and so on.

Particularly, seeing this is useful for me in my continued work advocating for a stronger and more effective open access policy here. Letting the institutional policy govern faculty work, rather than me negotiating between individual faculty and publishers, sounds like a great idea. 

We’ll see what happens next! 

Funding, NEH and the Future of Digital Projects

Standing Ground

I’ve been invited to serve as a reviewer for a Journal. I’m very pleased to have this opportunity to grow as a scholar/librarian, especially in light of my work with scholarly communications. That said, if the system sucks, change it. Perhaps I’m shooting myself in the foot by doing this, but you know what, you gotta start somewhere. My response to the journal’s invitation is copied below.

Your move. 

Hello, 

 

Thank you very much for the invitation. I am pleased to accept and review the manuscript mentioned in your email. I have registered as a Reviewer on the OJS system. Please let me know how to proceed, and when I can access the article. 

 

I would like to publicly state that I have significant concerns and withholdings about the Copyright Notice for the Association for Library and Information Science Education. Authors do not need to, and should not be required to “grant and assign to Publisher all rights, title and interest in and to the Work and all copyrights therein or relating thereto including the right to renew.” I take the word of the Journal, as written on the Vision and Goals webpage, that “this journal should take a leadership role in the [transformation of scholarly communication] through demonstrating proactive, state-of-the-art editorial practice,” and I request that the editors seriously reconsider their stance on Copyright to submitted articles. 

 

I will serve as a reviewer under the condition that these concerns be considered by the editorial board. Please feel free to contact me regarding this issue. 

 

Sincerely, 

 

Micah Vandegrift

PS. I’m pretty surprised to see such a restrictive copyright statement from a library science Association. Aren’t we the one’s who have been fightng and complaining about this for a while? Or wait, is this the defining difference between practioners (working librarians) and educators (faculty)? Hmm…