The Scholar’s Space

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!!

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!

I am conducting a research project that I’d like to invite anyone who is interested to take part in. It’s taking place here at TDL blogs and includes three aspects:

1. I am trying out a theme for WordPress (the blog software we’re using here at TDL) called CommentPress that allows for comments at the level of the paragraph, and might be useful to academics for refining drafts of papers, and so might be a service we could offer in the TDL;
2.  I’m conducting research on blogs as scholarship, and what I learn about blogging here in Scholar’s Space (and elsewhere), and now in Mass Digitization, the experiment in CommentPress, form the basis for a later survey I’ll do of legal bloggers;
3. I’m drafting a paper on the effects of mass digitization projects on copyright law and policy as the “draft” that’s up for review in CommentPress. I add another section to the draft each week. I’m working on section 4 for the coming week.

So… if you are interested in seeing what CommentPress is all about, or interested in how blogs are finding their place in academic scholarship, or in the effects of mass digitization projects on copyright law and policy, why don’t you come on over and see me sometime — right next door at Mass digitization.

One of the more interesting developments in web-based scientific publishing has been the growth of arXiv, a “preprint” server originally launched by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos and now hosted at Cornell. The system was first called xxx, and the domain was high-energy physics. Later on, the subject focus was broadened to include most of the rest of physics, math, statistics and quantitative biology. Physicists post their drafts on arXiv to have the community review them and suggest improvements.  There was some fear at first that physics journals were headed for the bone yard, but that does not seem to have happened, since many authors go on to work up their preprints for publication in the accustomed style.   arXiv has become a very interesting and important  example of how internet publication can work, since physicists worldwide use it constantly. Maybe some of them use it a little too much, since Nature reported an outbreak of plagiarism based in four Turkish universities.  A couple of degree candidates had some impressive publication lists, in a rather outre area of Relativity theory, but they seemed to be having some trouble with Newtonian mechanics. Somebody smelled a rat, and did some digging on arXiv. It turns out that there had been quite a bit of “creative recycling”from one author to another. There was an investigation and in all some 70 publications by 15 authors were removed from the system.

I wonder if it is still approriate to describe arXiv as a “preprint” server, since a number of authors just post their work there and let it go at that. It’s as much publication as the paper gets. I shouldn’t post without checking my facts, but didn’t the man who won (and turned down) the Fields medal post his proof of the Poincare conjecture on arXiv, and say: “That’s it; if you want to check it, look there”

The current issue of Nature has an article on efforts at the National Institutes of Health to revise the current system for reviewing grant applications, and deciding which ones are to be funded. The NIH Director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, has been leading efforts to reform the fifty-year old system now used,  and to streamline the process. Comments were invited from research and scientific organizations outside the government, and response has apparently been enthusiastic. Many people have a lot to say about the current system. Shorter application cycles, mandatory service on review committees by senior scientists, a limit on one grant application in the system per investigator at any one time are all suggestions that have been made and been greeted with considerable warmth.  Final versions of suggested reforms are due this winter, with the launch of some pilot programs slated for March. Today, 18,000 reviewers handle submissions to the NIH. Twenty years ago, one tenth that number handled the load.  NIH has asked for unusual and even radical suggestions to help meet the goal of getting the best science done with the least administrative complications.
NIH

If:book just reported on a new video site for scientists that has very impressive functionality, and it’s only in alpha: “SciVee.” I visited the site and found the faq to be quite helpful. You can tell the site is reaching out to people who are not already converts to the great digital way or to open access. This very nicely illustrates the quality and kinds of services that can be built on a corpus of freely available materials, whether already reported research results, or as if:book suggests, teaching materials and pre-publication manuscripts ready for peer input. Worth a visit!

A short article in Walt Crawford’s, “Cites & Insights 7:9 - On the Literature” explores the contribution of blogs to scholar’s communication today. Crawford’s field is Information Science.  The analysis would be different for different fields, but the overall point he makes is an important one: whether official or not, we are all in the midst of examining and assessing the value to us as scholars of publications that are not reviewed by our peers *before* they are published, but only afterwards in the exchange of comments and discussion that follows a blog post, for example. We assess this value as we decide what to read and how much time to spend on what we read. We assess this value when we cite to sources like blogs and wikis. We assess this value when we decide how best to convey important information, ask questions including research questions and disseminate the results of our research, to our peers. The article is worth reading as it sheds light on a process that is well underway, in many fields, but that still is not acknowledged in tenure and review processes. There we still seem to believe that only one process adequately assures us of the quality of our scholarship. Is that belief still justified?