The Scholar’s Space

Lessig’s latest, Remix, has been out for a couple of months now. I guess I didn’t rush to grab a copy because I follow his lectures closely (he posts videos) so I thought I probably knew what he was going to say in the book — and it was not available immediately in a CC licensed version. Had it been CC’d up front, I would have read it immediately. This actually was the biggest news about his book for me: 6 months before the CC version would be released. I’m sure there’s a reason why he agreed to this, but I can’t imagine what it is. Wait a minute, yes I can. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think maybe his publisher was taking a little baby-step towards a remixed business model, a step Lessig’s in a position to encourage, and so he did.

In fact, this particular kind of remix is precisely what I found to be new about the book now that I’ve relented, gone to BookPeople, my local “keep Austin Weird” (that is, buy local) endangered species of bookstore, and bought a copy (for $9.60 more than I would have paid at Amazon…) off of the wooden shelf to bring home, read, and put on my wooden shelf, which shelves I am running short of, and would just as soon not keep adding more shelves, but that’s none of the book publishing industry’s concern, is it? The book was offered for Kindle at Amazon, but I don’t want a Kindle. But back to remix, er, Remix.

The part of the book that’s new-to-me describes remixed businesses. He calls them hybrids (oh, I want one so bad but I’m determined to wait until the all-electric comes out in 2010), but they are really just examples of the mashups he lectures about, the creative combinations of video, voice, images and text that he celebrates so as the harbingers of new creativity. These mashup businesses combine aspects of traditional commercial economies (I do this because I want to make money) with aspects or expressions of traditional sharing economies (I may do this for a million reasons but expressly *not* to make money) to take advantage of aspects of the Web that the analog world alone can’t take advantage of, thus competing better, in a Clayton Christensen kind of “innovator’s dilemma” way. They are the hybrid upstarts that Lessig predicts will upend not only bricks-and-mortar competitors like BookPeople, but even Web competitors who are not taking advantage of what can be done in Web 2.0 that couldn’t be done in Web 1.0.

Lessig gives plenty of examples of these hybrid business models that combine commercial aspects with sharing aspects, but he goes much further. He analyzes the elements that make them better competitors, their aspects that actually define what it means to make the combination, sort of an entry-level criteria recipe:

1. taking advantage of the Long Tail
2. taking advantage of the information that people freely leave about what they like, what they do and what they want, all over the place online
3. allowing others to innovate on your platform (i.e., letting others turn what you create into a building block for their own businesses).

In the world of book publishing, who is doing this? Right now?

So, it’s not that pairing a CC licensed version with a physical copy option is a hybrid. Look at the list above and ask yourself whether any of the criteria are met. It’s just that at the stage of experimentation the publishing industry is at right now, CC/buy at the same time represents a step in the right direction, and CC later/buy now is sort of sizing up that step. It takes a little bit of advantage of what people who love to share can do for the publisher — increase sales. But it leaves a lot of innovation on the table, it still leaves the industry quite vulnerable to the upstart that figures out how to compete better online, how to take better advantage of what networking (hybridizing commercial and sharing economies) can do that not-networking can’t.

Well, I haven’t finished the book. From what I understand, the best part is at the end where he suggests how copyright law ought to be changed to facilitate this advance. So, more later.

Or at least that’s what they say in the blurb for BioMedExperts, a product launched recently by a parent group consisting of Collectis Holdings, Inc and Dell Computer. The point of it all is to serve as a kind of clearinghouse for information on the research interests and contributions of life sciences investigators all over the world. A searcher can look for potential collaborators and partners in a particular area of research, or by geographical region. Collaboration is all the rage, and the moreso since bad news on the science budget in the UK and in the USA (at least as proposed by the President) could mean some leaner times. The company’s announcement makes explicit comparison to social networking programs such as FACEBOOK, but the goal is to get  some real biological discovery going as a result of putting the right people with the right skills together.  I’ve heard worse ideas.
BioMedExperts

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.

I am beginning a research project on the effect of blogs on scholarly communication, so I’m reading everything I can get my hands on that even remotely touches on the subject. I would gratefully welcome any suggestions!

Among my finds today is this post by the CogSci Librarian about a panel discussion on science blogging: CogSci Librarian: Science Blogging: Translating Scientese into English. The post contains links to ScienceBlogs (over 60, covering 8 subject areas, including the humanities and social sciences), a presentation by Jean-Claude Bradley on Open Source/Open Notebook Science (doing science with blogs and wikis), and the Scientific Activist blog (trying to affect policy), among many others. This was a gold mine of information for me. Up until this find, I was beginning to think that most academic blogging was going on in law. Well, actually, most writing *about* scholarly blogging seems to be about legal blogging, but I can see that maybe I just haven’t dug deep enough yet.

My research project involves my blogging a legal research paper on the subject of the effect of mass digitization projects on copyright law and policy. The blog is just next door, on the TDL’s blog site. Please come and visit. I post one section of the paper each week and hope to get comments and suggestions in the CommentPress blog theme for WordPress. I’ll write up the results of this experience and use what I learn as a basis for formulating a survey to go out to blogging scholars. So far I’ve learned that it’s very difficult to get people to comment! Considering how many blogs I read and how few I comment on, this should come as no surprise to me…

Now you can post articles from BioMed Central to Citeulike, Connotea, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Facebook. See a sample article here.

Another cool new feature is that, in partnership with WebCite, BMC will keep an archive web pages linked to in BMC articles, so that some access is preserved if the original host has let the page lapse.