The Scholar’s Space

The latest edition of Peter Suber’s Open Access Newsletter includes a roundup of great news from 2008. There’s so much good news to report that he must say up front that he’s been selective, left out some things, and organized what he has into nine categories. And it is a lot to read. But it is so inspiring! It’s just what I needed to feel hopeful for 2009, that the momentum will carry forward.

Several of the items that were news to me were really surprising as well. Top among the surprises was this paragraph under heading 8, Books:

There were new OA textbook publishing initiatives from Flat World Knowledge, the Open University of Israel, and the Community College Open Textbook Project.  Florida became the first state in the US to approve an OA textbook program for use in its public schools.  The MakeTextbooksAffordable campaign released the Open Textbooks Statement to Make Textbooks Affordable, with signatures of 1,000+ professors from 300+ colleges in all 50 states.  StudentPIRGs launched a sign-on “Statement of Intent” for faculty to show their support for OA textbooks.  It also published a report recommending OA textbooks and criticizing TA digital textbooks for high prices, hobbling DRM, printing restrictions, and automatic expiration.

Having been a graduate student for the last 2 1/2 years and having used quite a few analog and digital textbooks, I see this industry as *way, way behind the curve* unable to take serious advantage of the digital networked environment. And I’ve heard that the negotiations with publishers to offer their texts in more innovative and more useful ways often fall flat if the publisher can’t be assured of making more money from the new model than he already makes from his existing strategy. Talk about innovator’s dilemma. This sets the stage perfectly for the upstarts who are willing to try new things because they don’t already have preconceived ideas about what they *ought* to be making right now from their existing customers. Have none of these folks read Christensen’s book, Innovator’s Dilemma? Their industry is positioned classically as the losing trajectory in the chart to the left. It shows how new technologies at first fail miserably to meet the needs of a firm’s current customers. Though their performance qualities fall so far below what current customers expect even at the low end of the market, they eventually improve through the process of sustaining innovation until they “break through” into the up-scale markets, directly competing with established firms for the same customers. Christensen documents this pattern in industry after industry. Publishing in general is following the pattern — like a puppy dog. Sad to see, but it’s frustrating as well.

Making your work openly and freely available is such a good start, and no small accomplishment when you consider all a scholar has to go through to assure the simple advantage of free availability. But it’s still just a start.

We tend to think of orphan works as those books, images, recordings and films made long ago, still protected by copyrights, but whose creators or copyright owners are *now* dead or unable to be determined or located. What about the billions and billions of works being created every day and placed online right now that are destined to be the orphans of tomorrow? Does your own online, freely available scholarship fit that description? Have you made it available, but failed to limit the damage from a copyright term and an extensive set of exclusive rights that will ensure your work’s uselessness in the future? Pity.

It’s so easy to limit the damage by incorporating into whatever you put online a Creative Commons license. A CC license would mean that those who want to use your work in the future will not run into the problem of not being able to find you or your heirs, or your heirs’ heirs, or their heirs (copyrights being destined to become all but perpetual if the content industries have their way). Think about it. Your work is online. You are long gone. Your copyright is not. The same kinds of questions we face daily now as we dig down into our massive physical literary, image, sound and film archives (who owns this? can we find him/her/it? how likely is he/she/it to care? what are the risks of going forward without permission? what is the cost to the public of not going forward? can we manage the risk?) are going to crop up several orders of magnitude more often for those in the future who have to deal with our billions of digital creations, the works spun out by scholars in the early 21st century before everyone finally got it that interminable terms have interminable costs.

Lessig’s commentary about YouTube and Creative Commons got me thinking about this. How many videos are there on YouTube? Give up? I have no idea, but there are way too many to have to figure out what’s too risky to preserve and provide access to 100 years from now. Especially when it’s SOOOOO EASY to incorporate a CC license into your online work, letting everyone know exactly what you want them to be able to do without further inquiry. No one has to figure it out then. You’ve spelled it out. OK, OK. It’s not that CC licenses are perfect, without critics or ambiguities (what is non-commercial? is it really a good idea to “share-alike?”). But compared to doing nothing or doing something much more ambiguous (ideosyncratic interpretations of sets of rights to provide to the public), it’s way, way better. Do it. Visit Creative Commons. License your work. License your site if you publish to a particular site regularly. Help future scholars and others to make use of your work when you’re gone. They’ll thank you for it.

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.

Peter Suber and Robin Peek announced the debut of a special Wiki service called Open Access Directory (OAD),  listing research questions in  the field of Open Access publishing. They propose a number of topics which have not been adequately investigated thus far, and so constitute a set of very interesting themes for research by LIS  types.  A second and parallel list will describe research efforts already in progress, as a guide to avoiding duplication and wasted effort. Just glancing at the list, the reader can see that the first draft of OAD has some goodies. My favorite so far is the concept of measuring “ullage”…the gap between what an institution can offer its investigators and what is actually available in their fields. (”Ullage” is a Suberism drawn from the gap in a wine bottle between what’s left and was there before the first glass was poured). It’s a very handy moniker for a notion we all have dealt with but may have had trouble explaining to  others. So, let’s offer a hearty welcome to OAD and tell other people about it. 
OAD

With just under a month to go before we hit the April 7 NIH OA deadline, I hope your campus is scrambling to figure out what, if anything, it needs to do to be on board when the new law goes into effect. The big surprise for me at University of Texas at Austin, was that what had, for seems like forever, been a library OA evangelist’s job, suddenly, overnight, became a matter of institutional “compliance.” OMG. Compliance is not a nice word in libraryland these days (we’ve totally lost whatever control we ever thought we had over information, patrons, etc.). So we went into collaboration with our Office of Sponsored Projects, the folks who handle grant funding processes for all NIH grantees, and thankfully they were interested and capable of responding quickly. We’re on our way towards the deadline without too much trepidation. But still, we don’t exactly have time to celebrate the incredible step forward for open access that this represents. I think I’ll feel more like celebrating when we’ve seen how this works after a year or so.

Here’s what we’ve done:

1. Read the new policy
2. Read Michael Carroll’s excellent summary of institutional options
3. Figure out which one makes the most sense for your institution (we’re going with his number 3)
4. Dot the policy i’s and cross the policy t’s, if any (we are still working on this part, but this is a compliance issue — we don’t have the luxury of 36 months to get everyone on the campus to “buy in” to the idea this is a good thing)
5. Plan an informative briefing session for NIH grantees with materials that can be posted to OSP and Library websites
6. Email the grantees to tell them about the deadline (luckily, we actually have all their names because OSP is able to run neat reports about them)
7. Hope for the best.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten something. Oh, I’m writing a short article for the Center for Intellectual Property’s Newsletter about what I call the “do nothing” option, and why I think it’s not as attractive as it might appear at first blush. Look for it around first of April.

What’s your story? What are you doing to keep your institution out of NIH hot water?

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!!

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman was a best-selling exploration of the opening weeks of WWI.  Since then various authors have rendered hommage to the work and to the author by appropriating the title for their own creations. Among these is Prof. Peter Suber who writes The SPARC Open Access Newsletter  or SOAN. In the issue for Feb. 2, Prof. Suber explores, in The Mandates of January, the numerous policy releases and recommendations for OA publishing  issued by various governmental agencies or other groups during the month of January. Among them of course was the NIH policy. He is very, very thorough on the NIH document and I  have recommended his analyis to inquirers at our campus. He includes the necessary links to primary documents and web sites.  I think we are very fortunate to have an able and articulate expositor for OA concerns, and one who comes from a background in philosophy and law. These are fields in which you have to pay attention to texts and read them closely, to see both what is and isn’t there.  I hope  you can take a moment to visit SOAN and read his summary.

SOAN

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.

Here’s our plan!

Those of us who are proponents of open access (OA) are celebrating the passage of the bill that makes the NIH mandate the law of the land now, but as I mentioned earlier this week, it’s time to start thinking about how to take advantage of this opportunity to offer services to our library patrons who have NIH-funded research to post. Here at the UT Libraries, we’ve been working on a little initiative to enable our School of Nursing faculty to get their research papers posted, in anticipation of the mandate. So far we have an outline of a training module (based on my own experiences with posting faculty papers to PubMed Central (PMC)), and the School of Nursing is willing to work with us to test out this module and institute a service for the faculty. We want it to be as easy for the faculty as possible, to encourage posting, but we did learn that there are several little hurdles you have to help faculty jump over.

For example, there’s the problem of which form of research paper the publisher permits you to post. The easiest thing would be to post a pdf of the published paper. Most faculty have these handy. But so far, more of the publishers I have needed to research want researchers to post the post-peer-reviewed manuscript, with a link to the original published article, if it’s available publicly. That will work fine going forward because we can design a process that obtains these from faculty as they are submitted to publishers, but for articles that were published more than a few years ago, faculty might not have those versions anymore.

Another hurdle is finding the OA policy of publishers who are not yet listed with Sherpa’s RoMEO site, and contacting them, and getting a response, and documenting the response, and being sure that it’s specific enough (indicating the version that can be posted, any embargo period, etc.). Of course, part of the idea with offering this as a service is that someone who is doing this for a group of faculty will develop expertise after a while, will see the same publishers come up again and again, will know what the policies are, will know what to ask faculty to supply. Expecting every faculty member to figure it out for themselves for 1 or 2 papers a year (you forget anything you do that infrequently, at least I do) is not the most efficient way to achieve a high posting rate. And a high posting rate is what we should be aiming for.

Here’s our training module, as it exists in its rough form. We’re still tweaking it and we have yet to try it out at the School of Nursing. Once we do that, I’m sure it will need further refining. I’ll keep you posted.

Steps for submitting a faculty author’s published article to PubMed Central

1. Assumptions: manuscripts or requests to post manuscripts come to the person responsible for submitting them without effort on that person’s part (i.e., it should be part of the process that faculty submit manuscripts to administrative PMC processing at the same time they submit them to their publishers).

2. Obtaining the correct form of document; format modifications; adding required publisher statements:

a. From an initial request by faculty to submit one or more documents (all instructions will assume a single document from this point), identify the journal name.

b. Search the Sherpa RoMEO database to determine the journal and/or publisher’s policy regarding posting of articles to public repositories, including but not limited to form of acceptable submission, required statements that must be added to articles, possible specification of where author may archive document.

Possible sub-modules: on the use of Sherpa RoMEO; interpretation of results; other resources of information on the journal or publisher is not available in Sherpa RoMEO; instructions for those who ask for and obtain permission from publisher directly (document the scope of the permission; specify form of submission)

c. Inform the faculty author about the form of submission that the publisher will accept and obtain a conforming document. At the same time, request that faculty author identify the grant that supported the research reported in the article, by grant number (you will need this later).

The most common forms of acceptable submission are the peer-reviewed manuscript or publisher’s pdf. Most articles include information about the grants that supported the research at the end of the article.

d. Review the document to identify possible formatting problems.

Poster must check with author about whether observed problems actually are items needing to be changed, or perhaps unusual formatting conventions in a particular field; let faculty author decide who should make changes, poster or faculty author.

e. After conferring with author, secure correction of formatting problems; add any statements required by the publisher (such as links to the original published document if available online) and save revised document as version 2; use a name that is descriptive, including primary author’s name.

Many publishers require a statement that the open access archival copy is or is not the final form of the publication; often they want a link to the published online version. Sherpa RoMEO typically links to the publisher’s website where these statements are located.

f. If changes were made or publisher required statements added, send revised submission to faculty author for review, identifying in the email transmittal message exactly what changes were made and where. Alternatively, make the changes using “track changes,” save that copy as “redlined version” and make a clean copy, accepting all changes, as clean version; send both versions back to faculty member for review and approval of changes.

g. Continue with the review/make changes/review process until faculty member approves the form of the submission.

3. Submit the document to PubMed Central. Check out the online tutorial that covers all steps in the submission process.

4. Changes after submitting the document: If the faculty author requests additional changes to the document after it has been submitted to PubMed Central, based on his/her review of the PMC-generated pdf: PMC sends the author an email telling author that the pdf is ready for review. If the author wants to make any changes, he or she indicates that to PMC by responding to the email message that PMC sends author alerting author that the pdf is available for review. Responding to that email will tell PMC that it needs to give the poster the ability to make the requested changes to the submitted manuscript and re-create the pdf.

5. PubMed Central creates html version and posts final documents:

a. Upon final approval of the pdf by author, PMC will create an html version, and seek author approval by email once more.

b. Upon final approval of the html by author, PMC will post the documents (pdf and html) and notify the author when the documents are publicly posted.

Here is an example of a manuscript Dr. Sharon Brown worked with me to submit to PMC: Dosage Effects of Diabetes Self-Management Education for Mexican-Americans: The Starr County Border Health Initiative.

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.