Open@VT

I recently became a member of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and today was dismayed to see Jeffrey Beall’s article What the Open-Access Movement Doesn’t Want You to Know in the latest issue of its journal, Academe. (I joined because as a member of Virginia Tech’s Faculty Senate, AAUP has been helpful in advising us on increasing the role of Faculty Senate in university governance.)

For those who may not know, Jeffrey Beall is a librarian at the University of Colorado-Denver, and through his blog Scholarly Open Access exposes academic “predatory publishers” (pay-to-publish scams that perform little to no peer review) and other sketchy doings in academic publishing. While this is a tremendous service to the scholarly community, he has unfairly blamed these problems on open access as a whole. It became apparent just how off the rails Beall had gone when he published The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access in the journal TripleC (in the non-peer reviewed section; also see Michael Eisen’s response, Beall’s Litter). If you enjoy right-wing nuttiness (yes, George Soros is involved) you really should read it.

Beall’s critiques of open access are not always as factual as they could be, so as an open access advocate I am concerned when his polemics are presented to an academic audience that may not know all the facts. So below is my response to selections from his article:

The open-access movement has been around for more than a dozen years

Actually it has been around longer than that- Stevan Harnad made his “subversive proposal” in 1994 on a Virginia Tech email list.

The open-access movement is a coalition that aims to bring down the traditional scholarly publishing industry and replace it with voluntarism and server space subsidized by academic libraries and other nonprofits. It is concerned more with the destruction of existing institutions than with the construction of new and better ones.

This is quite an evidence-free paragraph. Where is the coalition, and where is the goal stated of bringing down the traditional scholarly publishing industry? Who has said all we need is voluntarism and server space? No one I know of.

The movement uses argumentum ad populum, stating only the advantages of providing free access to research and failing to point out the drawbacks (predatory publishers, fees charged to authors, and low-quality articles).

There is frequent discussion of these problems. Credit Beall for bringing attention to predatory publishers, but it’s less of a problem than he makes it out to be (and one seemingly devoid of data- Beall would strengthen his claims if he could document the number of authors victimized and/or the amount of money lost). A majority of open access journals do not charge authors, and those that do usually have waivers. There are also plenty of high-quality open access journals like PLOS Biology, generally considered tops in its field. And we know that “low-quality articles” could never appear in a subscription journal.

It’s hard to argue against “free”—and free access is the chief selling point of open-access publishing…

Actually open access is not just about “free.” OA means free as in cost (to the reader) but also free as in freedom (open licensing). As a librarian, Beall should know the barriers that copyright presents in the use of scholarship by libraries and researchers. OA advocates know that scholarly publishing does cost something, and are actively working on alternatives to the broken subscription model.

In the so-called gold open-access model, authors are charged a fee, called the “article processing charge,” upon acceptance of a manuscript.

This is simply wrong. Gold open access describes OA journals that publish peer-reviewed articles. A majority of them do not have an article processing charge (APC). APCs are just one model of providing open access. It’s true that predatory publishing is based on this model as a money-making scam. This is why authors need to know something about the journals where they submit articles.

Some publishers and journals do not charge fees to researchers and still make their content freely accessible and free to read. These publishers practice platinum open access, which is free to the authors and free to the readers.

“Platinum” open access must be Beall’s invention, because no one else uses this term. Open access journals (“gold” open access) includes journals with fees and those without fees.

A third variety of open-access publishing, often labeled as green open access, is based in academic libraries…

Lots of libraries do have repositories, but it’s not accurate to say that all (or even most) archiving is based there. There are plenty of disciplinary repositories, and for-profit ones like Academia.edu.

…the green open-access movement is seeking to convert these repositories into scholarly publishing operations. The long-term goal of green open access is to accustom authors to uploading postprints to repositories in the hope that one day authors will skip scholarly publishers altogether.

Maybe some think this, but I wouldn’t call it widespread. Most scholarly publishing in libraries (that is, journal or monograph publishing) is a separate operation from article archiving. And no one thinks peer review can be skipped, which seems to be an implication here.

Despite sometimes onerous mandates, however, many authors are reluctant to submit their postprints to repositories.

This is unfortunately true, but Beall doesn’t mention that many of the “onerous mandates” were passed unanimously by the same faculty members who must observe them, because they became convinced of the benefits of open access to research.

Moreover, the green open-access model mostly eliminates all the value added that scholarly publishers provide, such as copyediting and long-term digital preservation.

Most OA advocates agree that scholarly publishers provide value- after all, some of them publish OA journals. But the choice of examples is odd. I’m one of many authors who has had the experience of copy editing actually introducing errors into my carefully composed article. And in some cases repositories are a better bet for long-term digital preservation than journals, which can stop publishing without a preservation plan. In short, the value added that is claimed by many publishers is coming under question, and rightfully so in my view.

The low quality of the work often published under the gold and green open-access models provides startling evidence of the value of high-quality scholarly publishing.

This makes little sense. An archived (“green”) article can be of the highest quality and may have been published in one of the prestigious journals Beall venerates. And again, there are many well regarded open access journals.

When authors become the customers in scholarly communication, those with the least funds are effectively prevented from participating; there is a bias against the underfunded.

Many OA advocates have identified the same problem with APCs, especially for authors from the developing world. But many of these journals have waivers, most OA journals don’t have charges, and new models are being developed that subsidize journals without charge to either author or reader. It’s not accurate to portray fee-based publishing as the only open access model.

Subscription journals have never discriminated on the basis of an author’s ability to pay an article-processing charge.

No, they just discriminate against libraries.

Gold open access devalues the role of the consumer in scholarly research… Open access is making readers secondary players in the scholarly communication process.

This is just laughable. Yes, we should feel sorry for all those readers who can freely access all the peer-reviewed research that their tax dollars likely paid for.

In the next section of his article, “Questioning Peer Review and Impact Factors” Beall mostly critiques the doings of predatory publishers, which no one really disputes. But in criticizing predatory publishers (again unfairly extending his critique to all open access publishing) he gives subscription publishing a free pass. If you don’t think bad information has appeared in prestigious peer-reviewed subscription journals, try searching “autism and immunization” or “arsenic life.” Beall’s reverence for the journal impact factor isn’t supported by any facts (see my post Removing the Journal Impact Factor from Faculty Evaluation). So predatory publishers using fake journal impact factors shouldn’t be a concern- it’s a bogus metric to start with. Moreover, Beall fails to acknowledge that open peer review, in whatever form, would largely solve the problem of predatory publishing. If a journal claims to do peer review, then let’s see it!

If you’re an author from a Western country, the novelty and significance of your research findings are secondary to your ability to pay an article-processing charge and get your article in print.

Again- waivers are available and the majority of OA journals don’t have fees. It’s interesting that Beall uses words like “novelty” and “significance” here, as if unaware of real problems in peer review caused by these assessments (which are not attributable to predatory publishing).

Open-access advocates like to invoke the supposed lack of access to research in underdeveloped countries. But these same advocates fail to mention that numerous programs exist that provide free access to research, such as Research4Life and the World Health Organization’s Health Internetwork Access to Research Initiative. Open access actually silences researchers in developing and middle-income countries, who often cannot afford the author fees required to publish in gold open-access journals.

Once again, OA is not all about fees. It’s also odd that so many people from the developing world are huge open access advocates. Beall fails to mention that the large publishing companies have a lot of control over which countries get access and which do not. If they decide that India, for example, can afford to pay, then they don’t provide access. Wider open access would make these programs unnecessary. The main thing silencing researchers in developing countries is basic access to research, which inhibits their own research efforts.

…the top open-access journals will be the ones that are able to command the highest article-processing charges from authors. The more prestigious the journal, the more you’ll have to pay.

There may be some truth to this, and it’s a concern I share. However, APCs may be subject to price competition (an odd omission from someone who is so market-oriented). Beall has identified the biggest problem to my mind, which is journal prestige. Prestige means that mostly we are paying for lots of articles to be rejected, which are then published elsewhere. Academia needs to determine whether continuing to do this is very smart, and whether other sources of research quality or impact might be available.

The era of merit in scholarly publishing is ending; the era of money has begun.

Another laugher. Beall must be unaware of his own library’s collections budget, or the 30-40% annual profit made by Elsevier, Wiley, Informa, etc. If he is concerned about merit (and especially predatory publishing), he ought to be advocating for some form of open peer review.

Most open-access journals compel authors to sign away intellectual property rights upon publication, requiring that their content be released under the terms of a very loose Creative Commons license.

As opposed to subscription journals, most of which which compel authors to transfer their copyright? Many open access journals allow authors to retain copyright.

Under this license, others can republish your work—even for profit—without asking for permission. They can create translations and adaptations, and they can reprint your work wherever they want, including in places that might offend you.

Wouldn’t it be awful to have your work translated or reprinted? I mean, no one actually wants to disseminate their work, do they? This is mostly scare-mongering about things that might happen .001% of the time. And because of the ever-so-slight chance someone might make money from your work, or it might be posted to a site you don’t agree with, we shouldn’t share research? This blog is licensed CC BY, and I don’t care if either of those things happen. What’s not logical is for these largely unfounded fears to lead us back to paywalls and all-rights-reserved copyright.

Scholarly open-access publishing has made many tens of thousands of scholarly articles freely available, but more information is not necessarily better information.

I don’t think anyone has ever claimed this. Even if there were only subscription journals, there would be new journals and more articles published.

Predatory journals threaten to bring down the whole cumulative system of scholarly communication…

I think there may be some exaggeration here.

In the long term, the open-access movement will be seen as an ephemeral social cause that tried and failed to topple an industry.

Open access is not looking very ephemeral at the moment. The “industry” seems to be trying to find ways to accommodate it so they don’t go out of business. Open access advocates are not necessarily against the “industry,” just the broken subscription/paywall model they use. Indeed, traditional publishers like Elsevier and Wiley are profiting handsomely from hybrid open access, and starting OA journals or converting existing ones to open access.

Be wary of predatory publishers…

Finally, something we can agree on!

Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Martin Eve’s new book is a welcome examination of the unique challenges that the humanities face in open access publishing. Appropriately enough, it is published open access by Cambridge University Press (as separate PDFs, or download the full PDF from the Internet Archive) under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Dr. Eve is a Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, co-directs the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH), and frequently speaks and blogs about open access.

Some of the challenges for the humanities in open access publishing become apparent in Peter Suber’s preface. In addition to a general lack of funding in these fields, humanities journals tend to have high rejection rates, so article processing charges (APCs) become a non-starter.  The fee-based model works best in well-funded fields with relatively low rejection rates.  In addition, it is books, not journal articles, that are of greatest importance.

Therefore it is no surprise that Eve’s chapters on economics and monographs (Chapters 2 and 4) serve as the heart of the book. Eve hypothesizes three economic models (p. 57) in which authors are paid for their work, publishers are paid for their services, and libraries provide cooperative funding. Those familiar with the OLH’s funding model won’t be surprised to find the first two models dismissed in short order, and the cooperative model examined at length. Indeed, the cooperative model has already been used to support arXiv, SCOAP3, and most recently Knowledge Unlatched, albeit in a pilot effort. In considering this model, Eve begins by stating that there is already enough money in academic publishing to cover the current production of articles and monographs. Problems of transition funding are addressed, though to me the most interesting problem is how to handle free riders in cooperative efforts (p.75):

The first of these difficulties, the so-called ‘free-rider’ problem, relates to the economic understanding that rationally self-interested actors do not wish to pay for commodities from which others benefit for free. In other words, except in philanthropic modes or systems of taxation for public good, most people usually resist paying for goods for which only they pay, but from which non-purchasers also derive benefit. This results, for gold open access publishing, in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. If all library entities behave in a purely self-interested way and disallow free riders, these collectively underwritten, non-APC models cannot emerge. Admittedly, the increasing enclosure of universities within market logics doubtless makes it harder for acquisition librarians to justify expenditure on projects where there are free riders to senior managers.

I think there may be additional problems for libraries here (enough for a separate blog post), and I hoped for a fuller examination of this voluntary contribution model, though recent efforts, as Eve notes, have been successful.

Chapter 3 on open licensing helpfully outlines the three current types of copyright and licensing agreements authors will encounter: full copyright transfer, an exclusive license to publish, and a non-exclusive license to publish (p. 88). This chapter also does a good job of describing how copyright restricts the uses of research, and discusses some common objections to CC licenses, such as concerns about derivatives, undesirable re-use, and commercial use.

Eve explains the economic problems of monograph publishing in chapter 4 and offers an overview of four current models of providing open access to them (p. 130-135): print subsidy, institutional subsidy, freemium, and collective funding. I was unaware that publishers pay for peer review of monographs, which contributes to their higher production costs and resulting book processing charges (BPCs) that are largely unaffordable for humanities authors. I was glad to see two issues addressed in this chapter. The first is the role of commercial presses in determining what is published (and therefore who is hired or receives tenure) based on evaluations of potential sales. The second is the role of scholarly societies (p. 128):

…calls to protect society revenue models are often inextricable from calls to protect publisher profits; the two are interwoven. This rhetoric of economy and sustainability, it must also not be forgotten, will always make one group’s sustainability possible only at the expense of another: usually the library.

There are interesting discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of archiving (“green” open access) in the humanities, though it seems that there are more of the latter. Archiving is often not permitted for monographs, pagination is lost, and the strain on library budgets goes unaddressed. Strangely, Eve omits the biggest problem, which is that a majority of authors have permission to archive journal articles, yet so few actually take advantage of it. Additionally, in proposing an archiving workflow for authors, Eve suggests checking SHERPA/RoMEO for permissions. While that is an invaluable resource, I think it is more important that authors read (or at least quickly review) their publishing contract for archiving rights.

Eve’s final chapter concerns innovations, and mostly addresses peer review. While emphasizing that open access does not require changes in peer review, he argues that the opportunity to reconsider other publishing practices should not be missed, and in particular to address the false perception that open access means lower quality. Critiques of “filter-first” peer review are echoed. Two explorations in this chapter are especially interesting: first, how the PLOS One type of review for technical correctness rather than importance might be translated to humanities fields; and second, how assumptions that speed and precedence are necessary only for the sciences might be mistaken.

Eve’s writing style is clear, though over-use of comma phrases tended to bog this reader down at times, and there is the occasional odd construction (“greenly depositing,” p. 11). The book ends somewhat abruptly and might have benefited from a concluding chapter to help synthesize the many aspects of open access publishing for the humanities. The glossary (p. 179-181), while helpful in itself, defines some terms so minimally as to lead to further questions. In addition to the glossary and Suber’s preface, the book contains notes, a bibliography, and an index (which can be supplemented by searching the PDF version).

Despite these minor criticisms, Open Access and the Humanities is thought-provoking and remarkably balanced, perhaps due to Eve’s dual role as open access advocate and publisher. Eve approaches all of these complex issues in a spirit of philosophical investigation, and does not avoid examination of related issues such as academic freedom and research assessment. A broad audience of humanists, publishers, and librarians will find value in this exploration of open access for humanities disciplines, and many of them will no doubt be cheering for the success of the new publishing models it describes, such as the Open Library of the Humanities.

As part of Open Access Week, the University Libraries and the Graduate School offered two travel scholarships to OpenCon 2014, a conference for early career researchers on open access, open data, and open educational resources. From a pool of many strong essay applications, we chose Jessie Gunter, a master’s student in public health, and Mohammed Seyam, a Ph.D. student in computer science. Jessie and Mohammed attended the conference in Washington, D.C. November 15-17, and sent the reports below. Be sure to check out the OpenCon 2014 presentation videos and slides.

Jessie and Mohammed at Senator Tim Kaine’s office

Jessie Gunter writes:

OpenCon 2014 surpassed all expectations I could have had for a conference about Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data. The enthusiasm from all of the conference attendees was contagious and empowering, and I gained a much more nuanced understanding of all things “Open” thanks to a variety of incredible speakers, panels, workshops, and coffee break conversations. A part of the conference that I found particularly useful as an early career researcher and student was a workshop with Erin McKiernan called “How to make your research open.” The major takeaways from this, for me, were:

• Check out peer-reviewed Open Access journals and publishers. PeerJ, PLOS, and eLife are examples of innovative OA publishing models with strong peer review. Also check DOAJ, the Thomson Reuters Open Access Journal List, and the Cofactor Journal Selector Tool to find journals that you might want to publish in.
• If you don’t or can’t publish Open Access, check Sherpa/Romeo to see each publisher’s copyright policies on pre-prints, post-prints, and self-archiving. If the journal in which you are publishing allows pre-prints, for example, get your work out there to advance knowledge!
• Consider using GitHub for code and data archiving and collaborative research tools such as writeLaTeX, shareLaTeX, or Authorea for writing, figshare for all kinds of self-archiving.
• Explore your licensing options at creativecommons.org/choose (*Be mindful that choosing an option that prevents commercial entities from reusing your work would prevent your research from being used in university courses, Wikipedia…).
• Consider using WordPress or another blogging platform to explain your work to non-experts.
• Track your impact! with Altmetric and showcase your work and citations.

Mohammed Seyam writes:

Day 0
On my way to Washington DC to attend OpenCon 2014 I was ready to attend a “regular” conference, where speakers have pre-planned speeches and where audience keep wishing for 1-2 exciting speeches per day! Now, after the 3-day conference is over, I can say that OpenCon 2014 was the conference that every single session of its rich program was a real value added besides being exciting enough to keep us all fully engaged with every speaker. Moreover, the conference wasn’t only about speakers and sessions, it was also about people getting to know each other and learning from the diverse international experiences of the participants. This fine mix of sessions and social activities resulted in one of the most remarkable events I ever attended.

The “different” atmosphere began with the welcome social on the day we arrived at the hotel. The organizers decided to gather participants in an open space to get introduced to each other and provide some sort of background before delving into the actual program events. On that 2-hour social, I got to know people from at least 8 different countries, as well as students from several universities in the USA. For me, that was an indicator that a very special event was to come.

Day 1
The first day of the conference – which was held at the Washington College of Law at American University – started with Michael Carroll, who gave a brief introduction to the conference. However, one of his quotes got me into the conference mood, which was: “You can’t just think open access is a good idea – you have to believe it.” From that talk on, the belief in open access began to grow stronger in all the conference participants. After Carroll, it was Patrick Brown‘s turn to talk on founding PLOS (Public Library of Science), and how to raise awareness and increase public interest in open access issues. Petitions, advocacy sessions, and direct talks are all ways to support open access, even if with no or minor instant outcomes. His most inspirational quote on that topic was: “If you don’t believe you’ll succeed, nobody else will!”

After Brown’s keynote, there was a panel on “The state of Open” where speakers presented the current state of open data, open education, and open access in and out of the USA. The first speaker was Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). She talked about SPARC’s goal: Set the default to open. She also presented the state of open in the USA. During her talk, Joseph stressed that open access doesn’t mean only to be able to access the material, but also to be able to fully reuse it. In the USA, there are 50 institutions that have financial support for those who want to publish in open access journals (Virginia Tech is one of them!). As for the legal issues, Joseph showed that California became the first state to mandate open access to taxpayer funded research.

Iryna Kuchma then presented the state of open with an international view. Kuchma is the open access programme manager at EIFL (Electronic Information For Libraries). Besides the many numbers she showed and the different approaches she followed in advising for open access, it was important to announce that open access is now required by law in Mexico, Argentina, and Peru.

Ross Mounce then had an interesting presentation on the state of open data in research. Since Mounce is a postdoctoral researcher, he had deep insights regarding the open data issues. He simply believes that if a researcher doesn’t share his data, his research can’t be trusted (or believed!). The large size of data shouldn’t be a barrier, as some MRI scans with a total of 39 Gigabytes were just shared openly online. Mounce is against PDF and other closed source formats, and he advises to go with open formats such as csv.

The interesting panel ended with Nicole Allen, the Director of Open Education at SPARC. Allen’s main point involved open textbooks, and that was so important as the costs of textbooks are rising at almost three times the rate of inflation! Simply put, students can’t learn from materials they can’t afford. Therefore, with the explosion of openly licensed content during the last few years, it’s clear that open textbooks will be the next big step towards open education.

The second keynote speaker of the day was Victoria Stodden, the associate professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her talk was about the importance of reproducibility of research, as well as the current trials of several USA organizations to create methods to organize the copyright issues related to open access. She sees that reproducibility and open access are sister issues. She then demonstrated Mertonian norms, which are communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, originality, and scepticism. These norms were also discussed by Brian Nosek in his open access week keynote at Virginia Tech. Stodden showed that skepticism requires transparency in the communication of the research process. She also talked about the importance of having senior researchers helping to move forward on the open access road, as the young researchers may not be able to do it all on their own. Stodden finally shared some facts regarding the steps that the Obama administration had taken to support open access in some government organizations.

After lunch, Uvania Naidoo from the University of Cape Town (South Africa) led a workshop on open access on the context of developing countries. It was important to highlight the case of open access in countries that already have problems with “access” itself. In my sub-group, we heard from a Mexican lawyer about his story on making open access mandatory for publicly-funded research in Mexico. Since many of the conference attendees were not from the USA, this session was full of personal stories on how the world sees open access, and it was full of different experiences that add a lot to the overall conference theme.

The second panel of the day was about “innovative publishing models”, and it was moderated by Meredith Niles, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University. The first speaker was Arianna Becerril from Redalyc, who talked about her organization that provides an open access from Latin America, which is non-commercial and regional platform. For her, science that’s not seen, doesn’t exist! After Becerril, Peter Binfield, the cofounder of PeerJ presented his thoughts on open publishing, emphasizing the PeerJ history and future. He discussed the debate on open peer review, and provided some arguments that encourage reviewers and researchers to consider open peer review to be the default reviewing system. He also demonstrated some alternatives to the impact factor system, and presented the PeerJ reputation system that provides incentives for researchers to openly share more of their work. Then Martin Paul Eve from University of Lincoln in the UK and the cofounder of the Open Library of Humanities presented what he believes to be the three main problems of open access, which are: researcher access, public access, and reusability. Since most of work in humanities is not funded, the article processing charges are unaffordable for humanities researchers. That was the reason that led Eve and cofounders to work on the Open Library of Humanities to overcome such problem. Finally on that panel, Mark Patterson, the Executive Director of eLife, presented his view on how funders can take action to support open access. He also shared his thoughts on the traditional way of research assessment based on impact factors, seeing that as the real barrier to overcome, and providing some alternate initiatives led by eLife publishing system.

The last panel of the day was on “Impact of Open”, moderated by Erin McKiernan, a postdoctoral fellow at Wilfrid Laurier University. The first speaker on this panel was Daniel DeMarte, the VP for Academic Affairs at Tidewater Community College. He presented his college’s impressive experience of adopting Open Educational Resources (OERs), which led to saving its students around $250,000 a year! The question that came to the minds of almost all the attendees was: how many millions could be saved if OER were used in many institutions?!

The second speaker was Jack Andraka, the winner of Intel’s 2012 International Science and Engineering Fair for his pancreatic cancer research and testing tool. He told the story of his breakthrough cancer diagnostic which I already knew, but it was new for me to know the importance of one open paper published on PLOS for his research. Therefore, Andraka was a very good example on how open research can affect human lives, and the cancer diagnostic test is a clear proof of this.

Peter Murray-Rust from the University of Cambridge then presented an expert view of how open is important for life. He hopes for a revolution in the world of publishing, as he believes that closed access means people die. He also sees that some laws can be broadly interpreted to help save more lives. Murray’s talk was a real inspiration for many of the attendees, and I believe he affected the minds of how youth should deal with the open access current and future state.

The last keynote of the day was by John Wilbanks, who discussed his view on “Open as a platform”. He emphasized the role of reusable data over open data, and that’s when he asked a simple question: “which is more valuable: Google or Google Scholar?” He also believe that a winning strategy for designing for open access would be “let’s create more value for the user”, not the “let’s build an open ecosystem” one. He concluded his talk with the legal issues, and the steps that should be taken to push policy makers to consider the open access bills and mandates to better serve people and communities.
This wonderful first day of OpenCon 2014 ended with a nice reception at Old Ebbitt Grill in downtown Washington DC, were we get to know more about those who we didn’t have the chance to talk with during the day. During that evening reception, most of the conversations were views, feedback, ideas, and questions about the day’s sessions. I think that social was more of a bonus session for the day, rather than a final break!

Day 2
Based on the great first day, the expectations of the second day were very high, and the excitement was clear on the faces of attendees during the breakfast. Frankly, the second day didn’t disappoint us, and it was as rich as the first day, thanks so the excellent organizing team.

The first key note was for Audrey Watters of Hack Education, who were concerned about moving from “open” to “justice”. She began the talk with a definition of “Openwashing”, which she defines as: having an appearance of open-source and open-licensing for marketing purposes, while continuing proprietary practices. Then she continued presenting her ideas on how data is not neutral and that injustices can be embedded within data. She believes that it’s not enough to have open access, because political engagement and social justice are still needed to get the full benefits of being open.

The second keynote was by Erin McKiernan, a postdoctoral fellow at Wilfrid Laurier University. As an early career researcher, she provided how young researchers can support and work for open access while maintaining their jobs and future. She provided some tips for researchers on how to avoid the dilemma of “worshipping” the impact factor, as she believes that impact factors have nothing to do with academic quality. She showed her open pledge, concluding it with a quote to remember: “If I’m going to make it in science, it has to be on terms I can live with”. McKiernan also provided some tips to use when a young researcher introduces open access to his/her advisor, examples are: be concise, include data, explain the benefits, list the different options and talk to the advisor early.

The R2RC (Right to Research Coalition) then honoured Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Foundation for being a foundation of the open access movement on the first awards given by R2RC. I believe this is a good first step towards recognizing those who provided much of their time and effort to advocate for open access for human wellbeing.

Following the awards ceremony was a panel were students and early career researchers have presented their success stories in working for open access. Stories from USA, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, and Australia have been presented and showed how great students can achieve because of their enthusiasm and belief in the open access idea. It was also noticeable that open access worked well even in developing countries that lack “access” in many cases. However, it’s all about how people work together and not accepting “No” as an answer until they achieve their goals.

The third keynote of the day was by Phil Bourne, the first Associate Director for Data Science at the NIH (National Institutes of Health). Bourne was concerned about how crazy and broken the system is, and how open access is important to human health. He showed the top-down and bottom-up approaches that can be used to facilitate data sharing. He, as more than one of the previous speakers, thinks that money is important but it won’t solve all the problems when it comes to being open. He emphasised the roles of government as well as promotion and hiring committees in encouraging researchers to openly share their data and research.

After lunch, there was a workshop by Erin McKiernan and Ross Mounce on how to make a research open. They provided a roadmap and several tools that can help any researcher to go open with his research. The main steps they presented were: find a journal that allows preprints (like arXiv, figshare and PeerJ), choose a journal to publish in (using DOAJ for example), explore licensing options (on Creative Commons), self-archive the research (on PeerJ, figshare, university repository, or a personal website!), and write blogs to explain the research (on WordPress for example). Many tools and links were given on this workshop that I believe was of a great value for many of the attendees.

Peter Binfield had a second appearance but as a keynote speaker this time; where he talked about megajournals. He showed how important to fight for “impact neutral” journals. He also thinks that the rejected papers, rejection letters, and paper reviews are all valuable to be shared publicly online. Coming from the PeerJ, Binfield had some deep insights on how the publishing system works, and how it can benefit from open access movement.

Two panels were then held back-to-back where some of the participants presented their projects that support open access. Again, it was amazing and very inspirational to see how researchers and students can achieve based mainly on their own beliefs.

The final keynote for the day was given by Carolina Botero, who was supposed to talk about open access in Latin America. However, her talk covered many aspects related to open access in general, especially the legal issues and how to deal with governments to create laws that mandate open access. She also talked about the Colombian grad student who faces jail time for sharing a thesis online. She concluded her talk by emphasizing the role of young researchers and activists in raising public awareness on the importance of open access and how it affects people lives.

That day was concluded by an “unconference” session, where informal meetings were held at the hotel so that subgroups can discuss whatever topics they feel interested in. One of active tables was the one that discussed “Open access in humanities”, where the participants showed their concerns about sharing preprints because in the humanities it’s like sharing their own thinking process. They also discussed the review process and how open reviews would help their research field.

Day 3
The third – and last – day began early at the Hart Senate Office Building, where we were assigned to certain groups for specific tasks. That day was called the “Advocacy day”; as we were supposed to meet with legislators to let them know more about open access and encourage them to move forward on the process of mandating openness. We had a short – yet entertaining – talk that was full of information by Amy Rosenbaum (Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States for Legislative Affairs). She talked about her past relationship with SPARC, and then she gave some quick tips on how to deal with legislators for such advocacy meetings. We also had some tips from the organizers that helped us on our advocacy meeting. Our group was supposed to meet with Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) at the Russell Senate Office Building, but since he wasn’t available we met with his legislative aide. With three of our group coming from universities in Virginia (Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia), Senator Kaine was quite familiar for us and his interest in education topics encouraged us to discuss the open education policies with his legislative aide. It was a very productive meeting as everyone in the group presented personal experience with the topic, and the aide was eager to know more, promising that she’ll move all our thoughts to Senator Kaine when he’s back in the office. One of her interesting questions was about if there were any state that had some bills related to that issue, and our answer was California. So she asked us to provide her with some details and we promised to send her such details on her email.

After lunch, we moved to the US Department of State, where we met with members working on the Open Government Partnership. All of us were international students, so the members began to talk about their efforts in working with several countries on open access issues, and they wanted to listen to our experiences and how they can work with our governments to support open access. They showed that Obama’s administration is determined to work on open access issues as part of its mission, but things move so slowly when it comes to legislation. However, they have achieved success related to the Open Government Initiative, and they were optimistic about the future of open access in the USA and some other countries that they are working with.

That great day ended with a dinner at the University Club, where it was clear how “unique” that conference was. Although it was the same friendly atmosphere of the very first social, one could easily see that many real friendships have been created during the 3-day period. Some very inspiring talks were given by the organizers, followed by quality time for participants sharing their final small talks with each other. Some of the next steps were introduced based on the momentum of the event, and many online communication mediums were put to use.

Final Thoughts
On many of the breaks and subgroup talks, I’ve always been proud to talk about Virginia Tech’s initiatives to encourage open access. VT libraries open repository, VTechWorks, was always appreciated by the audience, as well as the VT initiative to fund researchers who want to publish in open journals. Open textbooks were introduced to me just a few weeks before attending OpenCon 2014, and I was proud to demonstrate how VT is already taking steps towards open textbooks while they were presenting that topic during the conference. Moreover, VT activities during Open Access Week helped me to easily get involved in some topics that needed deep understanding, and that was a very good example of how universities can advocate for open access through such activities and sessions. Since many other universities in the USA didn’t have any policies or even ideas for open access, I was glad that VT (and VT libraries) considered working on open access early, which shows the vision that our administration has. This vision, I believe, was the reason that made VT libraries decide – together with VT Graduate School – to support two students to attend this conference. I was glad when I got accepted for such scholarship, and I was excited to participate, but now I’m inspired and enthusiastic to work with VT libraries to find ways to advocate and encourage VT staff members and researchers to openly publish their work. I’m also very interested to work on the legislative level, especially in Virginia, to draw the legislators’ attention to the importance of open data and open education for the community as a whole, not only for university and researchers. I believe that the experience I got from OpenCon 2014, together with the connections I’ve made with other open access activists, will help me a lot to work on this during the rest of my time at VT.

OpenCon 2014 by Aloysius Wilfred Raj, CC-BY 2.0

Graduate and undergraduate students at Virginia Tech are encouraged to apply for one of two available travel scholarships to OpenCon 2014, the student and early career researcher conference on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data to be held on November 15-17, 2014 in Washington, DC.

The scholarships cover travel expenses, lodging, and some meals. One scholarship will be awarded to a graduate student, and the other will be awarded to a graduate or undergraduate student. Virginia Tech students must use the following URL to apply by Friday, September 26:

http://opencon2014.org/virginiatech

To find out more about the conference, see the conference program and the participant FAQ. This international conference offers an unparalleled opportunity to learn about the growing culture of openness in academia and how to become a participant in it. The travel scholarships are sponsored by the Graduate School and the University Libraries’ Open Access Week committee. For questions, please contact Philip Young, pyoung1@vt.edu.

Winners will be selected on the basis of their answers to the application questions, and announced on October 3. Please spread this opportunity to VT students far and wide, and good luck!

The Virtues of Openness: Education, Science, and Scholarship in the Digital Age by Michael A. Peters and Peter Roberts (2012) will appeal to anyone interested in open movements in respect to academia. The book includes eight chapters (three of which were previously published), an introduction, postscript, and extensive references. The authors are both professors of education in New Zealand (Peters at the University of Waikato; Roberts at the University of Canterbury).

In addition to exploring the many aspects of openness (which makes defining it so difficult), the authors make an important point that bears remembering when we are tempted by binary conceptions such as open or not (Introduction, p.6):

All open systems have limits, and there are limits to openness– limits to “open” markets, to open societies, to open code.

It’s a theme the authors return to repeatedly, particularly in the context of the philosophy of education, also noting that these limits can serve positive functions.

Chapter 4, “Open Education and Open Knowledge Production” (p. 55-76) covers the serials crisis and open access with the greatest depth, but I learned the most from Chapter 2, “The Philosophy of Open Science” (p. 30-42), and Chapter 3, “Openness as an Educational Virtue” (p. 43-54). Chapter 2 begins by emphasizing the narratives of openness in the West and their relation to Enlightenment thought, in particular the ways in which openness is freedom. The bulk of the chapter goes on to consider philosophies of openness from various thinkers. Of particular interest are the connections between thinkers leading up to the concept of open access for scholarly literature. Karl Popper (author of The Open Society And Its Enemies) was a strong influence on George Soros, whose Open Society Institute (now the Open Society Foundations) was the driving force behind the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Here the political conception of an open society contains both the market and science as primary institutions based on shared values of freedom and truth, though it’s worth noting how often these institutions are in conflict today. Indeed, the authors make this clear in their summary of Chapter 4 (p. 76):

In essence, the open knowledge economy provides a completely different model to the neoliberal knowledge economy and also challenges the underlying neoliberal ideas of ownership, authorship, human capital, and intellectual property rights as well as principles of the access, distribution, and creation of knowledge.

In chapter 3 (“Openness as an Educational Virtue”), a philosophy of openness in pedagogy focuses on the work of Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire. Openness, the authors contend, includes but is not limited to open-mindedness, and is contrasted with forms of closure such as “dogmatism, excessive certainty, and an unreflective rejection of either the old or the new” (p. 44). Throughout his career, Freire identified human characteristics of value in teaching and learning situations, such as “humility, the ability to listen, showing care and respect for those with whom we work in educational settings, tolerance, an inquiring and investigative frame of mind, and a willingness to take risks” (p. 49). For Freire, openness is a permanent orientation to life itself, recognizing that we are always unfinished beings.

The authors view the university emphasis on performance as a form of closure in Chapter 5 (“Scholarly Publishing and the Politics of Openness: Knowledge Production in Contemporary Universities”), stating that “it is performance, not knowledge, that counts” (p. 82, 83):

Performance, as measured by lists of “outputs,” becomes the accepted substitute for knowledge and is seen as translatable across individuals, departmental groupings, disciplines, and institutions.

And these outputs must be quantified (p. 84):

…research activity counts only insofar as it is measurable. Behind this trend lies a quest for certainty, a discomfort with that which is complex or messy, and an inability to deal with the immeasurable.

Although the ongoing revolution in scholarly communication also relies in part on measurables such as review and altmetric scores, it shows a willingness to deal with uncertainty and the immeasurable through open peer review and post-publication peer review. The authors identify an interesting casualty of the culture of performativity, which is time, or the lack of it (p. 87). One problem not addressed here is that being open is more time-consuming in the current publishing environment. Those who want to be open must make additional effort, whether it is seeking out an open access journal, archiving their manuscript, or organizing, describing, and providing access to their data. Clearly norms must change so that closure is not the easy, time-saving alternative. Time pressures also drive quantification in academic evaluation, since it is faster to look at scores than to read someone’s scholarship.

At times The Virtues of Openness shows considerable overlap in chapter topics; at other times the transitions between chapters are jarring, perhaps because some were previously published. As such, the book feels like a collection of chapters rather than a connected narrative. Also, a few of the figures and tables are either not particularly enlightening (“Applications of openness” on p. 67) or outdated (2001 scientific publishing market players, p. 58).

However, this volume is a solid resource for those interested in exploring the thinkers who have contributed to the philosophy of openness in a variety of disciplines. The authors do an admirable, mostly jargon-free job of introducing and clarifying different aspects of openness, and of emphasizing its limits.

The Virtues of Openness is available in Newman Library and from the publisher.