The Scholar’s Space

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!

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 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…

John Ober has just announced that The Office of Scholarly Communication: Activities and Publications is hosting the survey findings from UC’s research on
Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication. I haven’t read the entire survey yet, but he posted a few snippets to a listserv I’m a member of:

The report provides summary and detailed evidence of a UC community of scholars that:
* Is strongly interested in scholarly communication issues;
* Conforms to conventional behavior in scholarly publication,
albeit with significant beachheads on a number of fronts;
* Feels strongly that promotion and tenure processes impede the
potential for change;
* Is concerned about maintaining quality in the face of
innovation;
* Is aware of alternative forms of dissemination but concerned
about preserving their current publishing outlet;
* Displays a gap between attitudes toward copyright management and
actual behavior;
* May find the Arts and Humanities disciplines as the most fertile
for University-sponsored initiatives in scholarly communication.

Earlier this year, a similar report appeared in D-Lib exploring faculty attitudes towards archiving in DSpace at Cornell. Conclusions there were pretty dismal, but quite likely representative of the bigger picture at other institutions.

We certainly need to come to terms with the lack of perceived value, of perceived conflict with other institutional objectives, and with the confusion over what we mean when we advocate use of our Institutional Repositories. We’re working on it.

Today, for the first time, I got the feeling that the future of scholarly communication is here. I read a blog post this morning, Bob Stein at Institute for the Future of the Book asking whether academia will accept the blog, and I tried to respond that academia was actually accepting the blog right now, one academic at a time (me, for example). He seems to have pulled the post.

In the process of creating that comment, I cited to several other recent posts on the same issue. I’m going to have to create a tag on the subject for my del.icio.us bookmarks (blogs as scholarship). It’s already a tag on this blog. But the more I thought about it, the more clearly it seemed to me that scholars are actively embracing new ways of communicating their research in every stage of the process. This isn’t to say that you can get tenure with blog posts. But we don’t have to be *there* right now to recognize that things have changed. Early adopters are just that, early adopters. Others follow.

It happens that I’m revamping the Copyright Crash Course and one of the pages I worked on today was the Scholarly Communication page. That was an interesting experience. The original page was called Scholarly Publishing, created between 12 and 13 years ago. Fairly downbeat, even depressing. Not a single link on the page still worked (shame on me). But every single page that I had linked to was still out there — they had all moved, but they had been preserved. And I rewrote the text almost entirely because there is so much of a positive nature to say today that I couldn’t say 10 years ago. Now, I’d be the first to admit that progress has been slow, painfully slow, but news about innovations in scholarly communication comes in daily now.

Here’s a snippet from the Crash Course page:

In summer 2007, Ithaka published its report, University Publishing in a Digital Age, and soon after, the Institute for the Future of the Book (that wasn’t around, at least not by that name, in 1997) made the report available for comment through its new platform, CommentPress. Speaking of CommentPress, check it out. And ScienceCommons. And MediaCommons. Public Library of Science. PubMed Central. See, things are happening.

Add to that SciVee (Peter Suber has an amplified post about SciVee at Open Access News) and nanoHub (just learned about nanoHub today). There’s enough here to write a dissertation…

I had made a note to myself to write something about if:book’s release of Commentpress, and now, here’s two for the price of one: if:book: ithaka university publishing report in commentpress. The recently published report from Ithaka, “University Publishing in a Digital Age,” which came out late July and which we noted here, is available within the Commentpress platform, which means all of us who would like to join a discussion around the report’s findings can do so either generally, or as fine-grained as commenting on a paragraph. This will be a great opportunity to try out Commentpress, review or read for the first time the Ithaka report, and join a discussion with other scholars around this critical issue for us and for universities, presses and libraries. I’m there.

Open Access News is just spilling over with interesting things today. Take this tantalizing tidbit: Peter Suber, Open Access News about the citation advantage of open access publishing. Ironically, the article is published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIS&T) and is apparently not itself open access, at least not at this time. Peter provides snippets that point to the advantage for researchers in the medical and health sciences being among the highest, and chemists and physicists being the lowest, for different reasons. We’ll have to check our library subscriptions to read this one, once the databases are updated with August publications…