The Scholar’s Space

Lessig’s got a post up this morning urging all of us to take CC’s 15-25 minute survey about what we think noncommercial means. As you may know, CC licenses come in several varieties, depending on how you choose to combine the basic features (attribution, commercial/noncommercial use, derivative uses and share-alike). And, as you may also know, there is much concern that the commercial/noncommercial distinction is not clear to many people, or put more practically speaking, what I think I mean by noncommercial may not be what you mean when you use my work. But even more problematically, I worry that *I myself* don’t really know what I mean by that distinction! If presented with a set of, say, 20 or 30 different uses, each subtly different, which am I comfortable with and which am I not comfortable with? Commercial/noncommercial may not get at the dividing line for me.

Even more disturbing, do I really want for all eternity to make this distinction, whatever it is? A gazillion years is a long time. What exactly do I care whether my photo of fall color in Austin in fall 2008 ends up in some way or another making someone some money some day? Really, do I care about that? Especially if there’s collateral uses I am disallowing by that distinction that I really don’t mind at all (some of the commercial uses that one can think of that one might not mind at all, but that one excludes categorically with the selection of a noncommercial license)?

Very confusing.

Well, CC is undertaking to try to sort it out: what do people think the distinction means? What do they want it to mean? Can it be clearer? The survey will help CC to do this. I urge you to go take it too, whether you’ve done a lot with CC licenses or not. It was a very good exercise for me to help me clarify my own thinking about what I want people to be able to do with my works that they find online now, or that they find in an archive of what was online in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, 100 years from now!

Go check it out! The Public Domain — Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. You can read it online at Yale University Press’ website, or download the pdf, or (and) buy a copy if you prefer or desire.

Boyle  includes on the download page two explanations for why it makes sense to offer his book in its entirety online for free at the same time it’s for sale in physical copies, one explanation for authors and one for publishers. The reasons, and the motivations, of these two groups are not the same, but they overlap sufficiently  in the open access business model to make it work. And that is worth celebrating.

The book, well, I just got started on it today, and it will be awhile before I finish it with school in its last week and papers due and homework due and all that. I’ll report more later. In the meantime, since you can, go ahead and download it and get started reading it yourself! From what I’ve read so far, it’s incredibly fluid, easy to get into, filled with clever legal references to all the most important cases without mentioning them by name, and not the least bit wordy, legalistic or esoteric. I have to say though, Boyle *apologizes* upfront for committing to make this a readable story and I find that just a little sad. I wish he didn’t feel he had to apologize for trying to avoid creating barriers to a wide readership. It’s the scholar thing. Thank goodness he took the plunge. I for one am very, very grateful that his book has half a chance of being more widely read than most scholarly works will be read. It deserves and needs a wider audience. Most of us just don’t realize what’s happening to America’s legal infrastructure that supports creativity and innovation. Boyle is making it clear as a bell, and clear that it makes a difference and affects us all. Go have a look!

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.

There is another contender in the “we can beat Google” line up. Cuil is the name, and it’s pronounced ‘cool’ or maybe ‘coo-il’ (2 syllables).  Claiming to be bigger than Google,  and saying that they have some nifty new methods for digging deeper into recovered pages to provide more information, Cuil people have certainly staked out some big territory. The founders are ex-Google employees who left the Mother Church for various  reasons, so they  have a more than ordinary acquaintance with what goes on inside.  I’m all for competition, and I think the newcomers should have their shot. But, judging from some of the comments on library discussion lists, the advantages of Cuil are not obvious and the company has some tweaking to do.  Cuil also displays its results in a different fashion, and that novelty may be worth something to somebody.  The desert floor is littered with the bones of Google wannabees, so it’s better not to excite oneself needlessly, and just await the outcome.

Newspapers are facing tough times. It’s  not just a phenomenon here in North America, it’s something found in, oh say, France as well. In Monday’s New York Times there was an article about an experiment underway in which a small number of readers were given an device which allows them to download a digital version of, I think, four newspapers.  The readers can use a stylus to tap for their paper of choice, and then tap their way through the various stories, columns, features or whatever items they please. France Telecom is the nation’s telecommunications agency, and it is supporting the product to see whether users take to it and what features about it they like and don’t like. The effort goes under the English name of “Read and Go”.  The reader is about laptop size, and of course you can’t use it for all the marvelous secondary purposes we have assigned to old newspapers: swatting flies,  wrapping nasty, smelly stuff,  using them to wash windows and so on. But, theorists have been saying that a “re-usable” newspaper, based on a re-chargeable (literally) digital paper-like substrate was the way forward. Now, somebody will put this to the test.  In the end, it’s what people…customers…want and do that counts.  In the same issue of the Times, the CEO of Esquire states his view that print is about to go into a period of glorious innovation. The magazine will soon appear with a specially designed mini-battery inserted into the front cover, to make  possible various dynamic effects. It’s an interesting concept, and of particular relevance to publishers of scientific and technical materials, in that it opens the possibility of supplementing journal articles with supplementary graphics of different kinds.  Think of the cover art of Science or  Cell or Nature being used to support and extend one of the major articles in that issue with slick visualizations.

If newspapers are going under because people are lazy and stupid and don’t want to read, no amount of digital fiddling will save them.  If people are abandoning them for other media, then there’s a chance to lure the readers back.  We shall see.

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.

There is a new, or newish, blog on scholarly publication. It’s called The Scholarly Kitchen; what’s hot and cooking in scholarly publishing. It originates in the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and  has been going for some months now.  I just learned about it, and after a quick look, decided to add it to my regulars.  Going back and examining some of the earlier posts seems to be a good idea too, because I noted some grabbers as I was flying through prior messages.  Another blog on scholarly publication seems to produce the same reaction as the announcement of another Mexican restaurant:  what are they going to serve that isn’t on offer someplace else, better and cheaper? But, in both cases, the only answer is to try it. So, I will. Here is the link:
Kitchen

An updated FAQ on the manuscript deposit policy has been released by the NIH. The new document answers some questions that arose since the announcement of the policy, and includes some new material, such as a screen shot detailing where in the PubMed record the manuscript ID number can be found.
FAQ

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