The Scholar’s Space

I blogged on this atLibraryLink, but I think it’s worth a note here also. The July 4 issue of Science published an editorial on peer review and how it’s faring.  I found it largely predictable. The usual expressions of  PR’s  importance are there, right up front. There is also some discussion of “inefficiencies” in the process. I’ll say, when the same manuscript can go through as many as eight different reviews.  And it’s said that too many scientists want to publish in the top tier, high impact journals, which seems to surprise the authors for some reason.  There are recommendations, but they are of so anodyne a character that you wonder why anyone bothered to write them down. Researchers are being goaded by their evaluators to publish in high impact journals, or else. It’s not a matter of mis-identifying which journals are suitable, as the editorial’s authors seem to suggest, and it’s not a question of the hubris of younger scientists wanting to publish in Science and not in Transylvanian Journal of Hematology.   The same issue features a letter from some investigators who see themselves compelled to perform numerous “referee experiments”, that is , tests suggested during the review process, even though this delays publication, distracts the team, and wastes time. But, the advantages of publishing in a top tier journal force everybody to hold their  noses and do what the referees suggested.

Yesterday, the Harvard Law School announced that its faculty had unanimously agreed to make its scholarly output open access. Not surprising, really. Law review article authors have been in the forefront of the move to open access. There’s rarely an article I need these days that I can’t find on SSRN. And months, sometimes more than a year before it actually gets published in a law review or journal.

My friend Peg O’Donnell and I are preparing a syllabus for a class we are offering this summer at Catholic University (the Library School’s Dean, Kim Kelly has invited us to contribute to her summer Institute) and Peg had done a considerable amount of research on Westlaw to find articles (Peg is more traditional in her search strategies than I am). The articles were, of course, excellent and most of them very much on point. But for the rest of the syllabus, we were able to link to full text of our required and recommended readings (having located them all on the open Web). Not so with articles accessed through Westlaw. I really didn’t like the idea that the law review articles couldn’t be provided to the students conveniently (linking to full text) or that we would have to negotiate license rights (ugh). So before we finalized the syllabus, Peg Googled the articles on the open Web to find digital versions and, sure enough, all but one were on SSRN. Thank you legal scholars (and SSRN and Google and law reviews for having liberal open access policies)!

Rationality is our hallmark, for better or for worse. But, whatever its limitations, it certainly militates against doing all the work of research, writing, soliciting feedback from your peers, revising, rereading what’s come out since you started writing, and revising again, and then LOCKING UP THE RESULTS in a journal, even a very prestigious one, that comes out 18 months after you finish the article and no one can read it without a subscription, paying tuition at a college or university, or pulling out a credit card to get access to even see if you want to read it.

Law reviews are among the leaders here, in graciously accepting that lock up and lock down are not the future of scholarly communication. They are not marginal to our endeavors. They are central. And they have a prayer of remaining so simply because they have not tried to bar the door to innovation and improvement.

I’ve been trying on different dissertation topics over the last couple of weeks and blogging about the ideas at Lifelong Learning, but today I read some good news/bad news about the Columbia University Press, American Historical Association and Columbia’s Library Gutenburg-e collaboration, with respect to the very subject I wanted to explore, week-before-last, as noted by Peter Suber, Open Access News: innovative interfaces and business models for e-monograph publication and distribution.

Peter Suber’s post quotes at length from the Robert Townsend post at the American Historical Society Blog, about the aims of the original project (Gutenburg-e), how they were grant-funded, and how those sponsoring or undertaking the project feel that it has failed in very important respects — no viable sustainable business model has emerged, and scholarly journals would not review the monographs that the Press published in the Gutenburg-e series.

Geez. These are pretty serious failures. Pretty depressing failures. But on the other hand, I visited the project’s OA portal for these books and had a look at one on sewing and wow, the interface is really cool with very well-done features, finely crafted, very functional, and elegant. The scholarship would have to be first rate, wouldn’t it, given the pedigree and the process Gutenburg-e put in place. Putting on a scientist’s hat, a failed experiment is just as valuable as one that succeeds. In fact, from what I’m told, failure is the norm, and it advances science just as steadily as success. So, hurray? No, not hurray. This just does not feel right.

If Columbia University Press and the American Historical Society can’t motivate scholarly journals to even *review* its innovative e-books, whose authors were chosen in some cases from among the best history dissertations in the country, what does this say about humanities support for presses? Presses are on the ropes. Can their authors really afford to turn their backs on efforts to find a viable way forward? I really am, quite simply, appalled. Maybe I’ve misunderstood what this story says. I hope I have.

Today news is flying all over the net about Harvard’s faculty vote to implement an “opt-out” process for institutional posting of scholarly research materials. Peter Suber comments on Robert Darnton’s opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson, making the case for open access to the Harvard community: Peter Suber, Open Access News. And Bill Patry comments on the irony of publishers’ claims that what bothers them about mandates (the NIH mandate in particular) is a lack of choice for authors. That claim has got to cause a lot of eyes to roll. The original NYTimes article that got the conversation going doesn’t give us much detail, but since the vote is today, we will know more by tomorrow. If the vote is yes, the Harvard Library will be taking a most active role in implementing the will of the faculty, and a leadership role in the development of substantively important institutional repositories. Go crimson!!

There is a very interesting discussion on danah boyd’s blog, apophenia. In the wake of just having published an article in Convergence (which I can’t find on UT’s Website), she declares her intent to boycott publishing in locked-down journals, in favor of open-access only, followed by at last count 14 comments, including one by an editor at her locked-down journal, Convergence, and a fellow contributor: apophenia: open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals.

I am, predictably, a supporter of open access, and I have made my own personal commitment as a Ph.D. student not to publish anywhere that prevents me from posting on the Web a copy of whatever I publish as soon as it’s published (if not before). I realize I’ll have to negotiate this with some publishers, those that I would count myself lucky to get to publish with that unfortunately do not routinely allow immediate open access. danah does not mention this option, but it may be that she just is unaware that she might have negotiated such a right with her publisher.

But even if she had negotiated that right for herself, she still would have a gripe. She resents that all of the other articles in her issue are unavailable to most people. Even though the journal permits authors to post their articles after a 1 year embargo, as we know, most won’t follow through on that. If there are 10 articles, with a 5% self-archiving rate, we can imagine that 1/2 of 1 article will be posted… a year from now or longer. In a field like new media, a year is as a really really long time.

So, negotiating with publishers on an article-by-article basis, and even green OA (permission to post after an embargo) are inferior to open-access journals if we value real availability, not just theoretical availability. It is going to take quite a while to fully transition science, social science and humanities academic publishing to open audiences. But maybe danah boyd’s rant and her commitment are just another brick in the wall - uh, er, actually, that would be another brick *out of* the wall in this case.

As I have mentioned before, I’ve been working on a project about the status of blogs as scholarship. I have completed the “self-study” where I blogged the draft of a copyright paper at Mass Digitization,  journaled the experience, and tracked it statistically using Google Analytics. Now I’m now posting, in sections, the draft of the paper that describes the literature on blogs as scholarship, ideas for further research in the area, and the design, results and a discussion of my Mass Digitization experience. I’m blogging this draft at Lifelong learning, my research blog. I just posted the 4th section today. I estimate there might be about 8 - 10 sections. An earlier draft (about 2 drafts back) of the entire paper is posted at the Copyright Crash Course. I’ll post the final there as well.

The next step will be a survey of legal bloggers — 29 questions that grew out of my reading of the literature and my blogging experience. I’ll write up those results later next spring.

This has been a really fun project. I so enjoyed reading the blogs that were discussing whether blogs are scholarship. The same themes were circulating in the blogosphere as emerged in the literature (journals and law reviews). But it was all mere, well, very well informed, but nonetheless, opinion. Not much in the way of systematic observation. There are some really interesting assumptions, values and beliefs embedded in the discussion as well — what is the nature of information; who decides what scholarship is; who will gain and who will lose power if traditional forms of scholarship lose prominence? And the whole discussion takes place against the backdrop of the tremendous shifts occurring within scholarly publishing. A very interesting time to be a Scholarly Communications Advisor, and student studying scholarly communication!

Scholars are supposed to consult “the Literature” and contribute to it as part of their professional duties. Library types are supposed to preserve it, and make sure its treasures are available for future generations. In that subsection of  scholarly publishing that relates to medicine, however, there is growing reason to suspect that much of ”the Literature” is simply drug company flackery; very well conceived, slickly executed flackery, it is true, but flackery nonetheless.  And concern about preserving it is, to put it mildly, misplaced.  ”Ghost” authoring of journal articles has been known for a while, but studying it has been, for obvious  reasons, rather difficult.  “Opinion Leaders” are shy about admitting they allowed their names to be attached to articles they not only  didn’t write, but which were prepared by a Pharma company or its contractual agent. An article in PloS Medicine raises the ante a good bit. Why “ghost” just the article? Why not “ghost” the whole business…trial, data gathering, write-up, the works. A little judicious steering here and there, to make sure the right things get said and the wrong things left out, can do wonders for a product launch.  Read the article by Dr. Sismondo, and pay special attention to the section discussing the Sertraline trials. On the Scholar’s Space we spend a lot of time fretting about technology, assuming, operationally at least, that everything else in the hallowed research/publishing cycle is fine. What if we have it all backwards? What if the technology is the easiest, most tractable part, and it’s the rest of the process that needs worry and work?
Boo!

PS. In the context of all the hooha raised by the PRISM crowd about Peer Review and OA, notice in the PLoS article how neatly PR has been co-opted into the “marketing process”.   It’s no threat to the ghosters, and beating it is not only easy, but necessary for a successful “placement”.

Peter Suber, Open Access News, reports that an article on a popular subject (dietary supplements) was downloaded more than 16 thousand times in less than a month, and contrasts that with an article on an equally popular subject (acupuncture and pain relief), published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association). These are only anecdotes, of course, but they help to highlight the potential of open access to reach its wider audience.

Stories like these also remind me of one of reasons cited by scientists (ScienceBlogs) for wanting to participate more fully in the online environment: there’s a lot of misinformation out there and instead of simply complaining about it and disparaging the value of instant, cheap, world-wide distribution, adding accurate, peer-reviewed scientific information into the mix is a much better option.

Peter Suber announced the publication of ARL’s bimonthly report, this double issue devoted to university publishing:ARL Bimonthly Report on university publishing. I have reviewed several of the articles already and heartily recommend taking a look at the publication. I especially found David Shulenburger’s article exploring the state of awareness of university administrators regarding their institutional policies to promote publication of research. It is quite an eye-opener. Especially the part about how neither IRs nor University Presses are even on the periphery of their vision. We have a lot of work to do, folks.

I attended a viewing of the Library Journal webcast on September 13th - “Value for Money: ROI on Scholarly Journal Acquisitions.”  This led me to a report published by the University of California Libraries - The Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation.”  The approach recommended by the authors might be summarized by this quote from the report:

“3. The Elements and Methodology of Value-Based Pricing

Our model of value-based pricing assumes that prices could and should be set, or negotiated, not solely through an arbitrary producer-set price point (in which little is known to the library about publisher assumptions and expectations for generating revenue above operational costs), but rather, in relation to four key elements:

a. measures of scholarly value and impact;
b. transparent and explicit indexes for changes in production costs;
c. value-adding contributions from the purchasing/leasing institution (e.g. for original content, editorial labor, editorial overhead such as office space);
d. transaction efficiencies (e.g. through business negotiations with a library consortium; through near-zero marginal costs for an additional user).”

In the context of negotiating journal prices, the unpaid labor represented in element “c” as the creators of “original content” and as “editorial labor,” could have considerable economic power if organized and coordinated.  A library could gain considerable leverage in negotiations with publishers if editorial boards and reviewers were to “strike.”  It occurs to me that I have heard of isolated instances of this kind of action, but I am not aware of their impacts.