Open@VT

Over the weekend I got around to watching The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz which saw wide release a couple of weeks ago (see the viewing options on the distributor’s site or watch on the Internet Archive– it’s CC-licensed).

Aaron Swartz
(by Sage Ross,
Wikimedia Commons
CC-BY-SA 2.0)

It’s a fascinating documentary that should be required viewing for anyone interested in access to information. Swartz’s immense intelligence and idealism shine through, as does his love of libraries and the information contained in them. His precocity and deep understanding of the Internet resulted in numerous successes, some of which I wasn’t previously aware of.

Ultimately it was his willingness to put his name on the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, followed by action to presumably realize it (though his intent is unknown), that made him a target of prosecution. Watching this part of the documentary, the harshness of the law becomes clear, and one wonders what part of the law legitimizes prosecution for the purpose of making an example of someone.

While I don’t agree with the manifesto’s method, or even much of its language, Swartz was certainly right about open access, just as he was right about public access to court records and the potential harm of SOPA/PIPA. Even if all new peer-reviewed literature is openly available tomorrow, we are still left with the intractable fact that we have allowed centuries of scholarship to be enclosed, and libraries will be paying rent (for the fortunate few) for decades to come.

When this CC-licensed documentary can be taken off of YouTube, and when lawyers are preparing for the return of SOPA/PIPA, the contest between advocates of openness and the forces of enclosure is hardly over. Despite his tragic end, we have a model of courage when we insist that our practices follow our ideals– in particular, that public knowledge should never be enclosed. In that sense, Aaron Swartz is still with us.

There has been extensive commentary on the American Historical Association’s statement on 6-year dissertation embargoes and I’ve only read a little of it.

But I really liked Dr. Jason Kelly’s essay Open Access and the Historical Profession, which spurred further thoughts which may or may not have been mentioned in this debate (as well as enlightened me on the copyright perspectives of Leo Tolstoy and Woody Guthrie).

I doubt it is a new issue for the profession, but if one must publish a book to be a historian, and publishers will only publish books that will sell, why is saleability allowed to determine what history is written? Surely there is history worth writing that wouldn’t necessarily sell many books. In this sense, the market as a driver seems analogous to basic vs. applied research in the sciences.

For publishers, distributing knowledge is still a financial decision, and this means that the information contained in them is a commodity.

It doesn’t seem advantageous to a discipline to hide its research, or to limit it to topics with popular appeal.

Second, publishers of history books seem to be unaware of the increasingly prevalent “freemium” model. While this isn’t an exact analogy, because a dissertation isn’t the same as a book, it seems entirely possible that an openly available dissertation would drive book sales, not weaken them.

Finally, the difficulty in publishing a book today might have been ameliorated if the profession had engaged with open access earlier (or at least taken more interest in the serials crisis). It’s now generally accepted that the reason libraries buy fewer books, thereby putting university presses in difficulty, is that serials costs (particularly in the “big deals”) have eaten up an increasing percentage of library budgets. Libraries could afford a lot more history books from university presses if STEM journals transitioned to open access.

…a deeper intervention into the ecology of knowledge production and exchange is necessary.

Indeed!

Atul Gawande’s recent essay in the New Yorker, “Slow Ideas,” begins with this sentence:

Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly?

It’s a fascinating exploration of the profoundly different takeup speed of anesthesia (fast) versus antiseptic practices (slow), and moves into recent experiences with the latter in improving birth outcomes in the developing world.

Open access, it seems to me, is also a slow idea. These excerpts from the article sound familiar:

This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. …remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere.

…people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.

Simple “awareness” isn’t going to solve anything. We need our sales force and our seven easy-to-remember messages. And in many places around the world the concerted, person-by-person effort of changing norms is under way.

Open access is invisible to many faculty, because the library subscribes to enough journals that encountering paywalls is relatively rare. It’s also invisible in the sense that faculty aren’t responsible for journal costs or ILL costs, and don’t see the connection to signing away copyright. It’s hard to see the benefits of OA if everything you’re doing now seems to be working fine.

Though open access now has significant momentum, it’s taken more than 20 years just to start having an impact. That qualifies as a slow idea. Open access requires individual sacrifice, at least for now, either in the form of examining one’s publishing contract for archiving permissions and then archiving, or in the form of paying article processing fees or perhaps publishing in a less prestigious journal.

This article also brings into question the open access outreach activities of libraries. If it’s lots of one on one conversations that are needed, then this library isn’t being as effective as it could be. I don’t think it’s necessary for everyone. No one introduced me to open access; I just did a lot of reading and became convinced it was the way to go. And some of the advocacy can happen in departmental meetings, for example (this report is really helpful and I wish there were more accounts of how open access successes were achieved on campuses).

I haven’t been very effective in convincing my fellow librarians, which is a prerequisite to implementing Gawande’s conclusions. I assumed that people learned the way I do, by reading, but those are probably in the minority. I’ve had very few one-on-one conversations, but I should have spoken to each of our 40 or so faculty. For campus-wide advocacy, we don’t need reports, keynotes, panels, and classes so much as we need a year-round sales force. And for that we need librarians who are fully on board.

(On an intellectual property note, regarding anesthesia: “Morton would not divulge the composition of the gas, which he called Letheon, because he had applied for a patent.” Fortunate for many that patent didn’t work out.)

In my last post, I mentioned that I archive my journal articles in VTechWorks because I really dislike encountering paywalls for scholarship, and I don’t want anyone looking for my work to encounter one. Two new projects could make the scope of the access problem much more apparent.

The first, the OA Button, will use a map to show instances where people from around the world are hitting paywalls, but it will also help users find an open access version of an article. The button, in prototype with a beta version coming soon, is a bookmarklet that you drag to your toolbar and click when you are denied access to an article. If you allow your location to appear, it will be included on a world map.

You can also say why you need access, which could result in compelling advocacy for article archiving. Check out the blog, an interview with the creators, and a hack day project page.

The second project involves Wikipedia, which encourages those who create or edit entries on the site to document their claims through the use of references. However, when a Wikipedia user clicks one of these links, there is no way of knowing whether it will be accessible or not. The WikiProject Open Access/Signaling OA-ness aims to add an icon next to these links to show users which are open and which aren’t. This will be a convenience since you will know about paywalls before you click, and it will show at a glance what portion of research isn’t accessible by everyone. It would also be interesting to build on this and show how many references across all of Wikipedia aren’t accessible.

What is out of sight is out of mind. These projects will help make the openness of research obvious to all.

It’s striking to consider the dissonance between faculty as readers and faculty as authors described in a recent article by Rachel Bruce and David Prosser, Keeping research in step with policy. While the article’s context is the UK, where the most animated open access discussions are currently taking place, there are few differences from our situation in the US.

The article says a recent survey of UK academics found that, as authors, there was little interest in free web accessibility, yet

… the survey showed that, when researchers are themselves in the position of a reader, there is a strong desire for openly-available resources on the web.

When I hit a paywall, I do a search and feel grateful when an author has taken the trouble to archive an article that I need in a repository like VTechWorks. So I archive when I publish an article.

One US difference that the authors note is our use of interlibrary loan. While I use this service occasionally, I would much rather find an article myself on the web. ILL is more time-consuming and the article still costs money- it’s just that I’m not paying for it. But personally, I find a $50 charge for an article objectionable whether I’m paying for it or the university is. Those barriers of time and money disappear for readers when we archive our work.

The authors conclude that this reader/author dissonance can be overcome with time and explicit incentives. Traditional measures such as the impact factor will be replaced with altmetrics, making the advantages of openness clear. Universities can put more emphasis on open dissemination when they evaluate faculty.

This is partly a matter of reciprocity — we benefit from the open availability of articles on the web, so let’s ensure that our articles are openly available for others. But it’s also a matter of self-interest, since we benefit in the form of views, downloads, and citations. When we publish, let’s remember that we are readers as well, and no one has access to everything.