Open@VT

Our first event of Open Access Week 2013 provided plenty of interesting discussion yesterday. “ETDs and Open Access” (ETDs are electronic theses and dissertations) was led by Gail McMillan (Director, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship Services, University Libraries), Jordan Hill (ASPECT Ph.D. candidate), and Karen DePauw (Vice President and Dean for Graduate Education).

ETDs and Open Access (from left, Gail McMillan, Jordan Hill, Karen DePauw)

Gail McMillan began the session with her ETD survey data presentation. One survey queried universities about their ETD policies, and the other surveyed publishers on their willingness to consider revised work based on an openly available dissertation or thesis. About 95% of U.S. institutions have embargoed some ETDs. An interesting finding from the publisher survey was that on the whole, publishers in the humanities and social sciences are actually more willing to consider revised work based on an openly available ETD than science publishers.

Jordan Hill gave a brief overview of his own research (an oral history of memorials for mass murders) and the American Historical Association’s statement on ETD embargoes. Given the unique (and less-revisable) nature of his research, he is understandably concerned that its open availability could affect the chances of publication as a book, and therefore his job/tenure prospects. Rather than the 6-year embargo in the AHA statement, Jordan suggested the possibility of a 3 or 4 year embargo.

Karen DePauw gave an overview of ETDs at Virginia Tech. The university was the first to require them in 1997, prior to her arrival. A one-year embargo is available to students with renewal possible by request. One exception is a 5-year embargo for those in a Master of Fine Arts program (for creative work such as poetry and stories that would not normally be revised for publication). For those doing classified research, the graduate school requires that the research be publicly defended and some part of the research be made available.

These brief presentations by the panelists were followed by an open discussion. I was interested in knowing if any details beyond “case by case” publisher considerations were available (it primarily means a judgement of quality) and the distinction between “published” and “unpublished” (it signifies editorial review). The discussion was pretty wide-ranging, but to me the heart of it is that many early career academics like Jordan support open access but but recognize that it is not rewarded in the criteria for hiring, tenure, and promotion. It is not surprising that despite their approval of openness, they must be conservative and pragmatic in their approach because academic evaluation is not changing as fast as scholarly publishing.

Academic success in the humanities and social sciences is currently dependent on monograph publishing (another criticism of the AHA statement), which is in turn dependent on publishers who evaluate manuscripts based on how many books they think will sell. In particular, publishing an academic monograph is dependent on university presses, who in turn are (mostly) dependent on academic libraries to buy books. But libraries are buying fewer books due to the serials crisis (primarily in STEM fields), which puts stress on university presses, who in turn are less receptive to manuscripts from early career academics. In my view, universities and their libraries need to devote more resources to publishing monographs (such as using Open Monograph Press and implementing an external review process) so that academic work can be evaluated on its quality rather than its saleability. In addition, there’s no reason why this can’t work on the freemium model, with the full text available online but print versions for sale, with royalties going back to the author.

A big thank you is due to Jordan, Karen, and Gail for this thought-provoking session.

Thanks to the University Libraries’ Event Capture Service for the video below [Edit 2/28/14].

Later in the day, Gail and I presented Introduction to Open Access and Copyright. Lots of links inside that presentation for those who want to do some exploration. Interestingly, a graduate student raised similar concerns as Jordan Hill earlier in the day: young scholars are faced with a dilemma between open access and prestige. I pointed out that it’s not always an either-or choice since there are increasingly prestigious open access journals, and self-archiving is a valid option that is often overlooked. But when it comes to getting or keeping a job, it’s hard to fault young academics for publishing behind a paywall when promotion and tenure guidelines reward it.

Open Access Week is here, and we have a full schedule of events. Today at 11:00 a.m. we have an ETD and Open Access Panel (Torgersen 3080) and at 4:00 p.m. Gail McMillan and I will give an Introduction to Open Access and Copyright (Torgersen 3080).

There are some last-minute updates and additions to our schedule. The webinar with Peter Suber originally scheduled for Wednesday at 2 p.m. has been cancelled. We’ve decided to offer another webinar on Wednesday at 11 a.m., Open Access in Engineering (Library Boardroom, 6th floor).

We’ve been a little late getting the Faculty and Grad Student Panels information out. Our faculty panelists will be Dr. Debby Good (HNFE), Dr. Zach Dresser (Religion & Culture), and Dr. Joe Merola (Chemistry). Our graduate student panelists will be Stefanie Georgakis and Jennifer Lawrence (co-editors of the Public Knowledge Journal) and Joshua Nicholson (co-founder of The Winnower). This was a great session last year and I’m sure it will be again. Please join us Wednesday evening at 5:30 in Torgersen Museum (1100).

We also want to spread the word about an event Friday at 2:30 p.m., “Digital Muscle: Alt-Metrics and Open Access” that will be held in the SCALE-UP classroom (Library 1st floor). This event is part of the Digital Discussions in the Humanities and Social Sciences series, sponsored by the Center for Applied Technologies in the Humanities and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.

Throughout the week I’ll attempt to blog some summaries of the events, hopefully with some photographs.

John Willinsky’s The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (2006) was the first book published on open access (that I am aware of, anyway). I remember reading it sometime around 2008 and it’s certainly had a profound influence on my thinking about the dissemination of research.

Willinsky states the principle in his introduction (p. xxi):

A commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit from it.

Willinsky’s deep understanding of the history and philosophy of openness is apparent throughout, from Aristotle (“All humankind by nature desires to know”) to economist Fritz Machlup’s concept of knowledge as a near-perfect public good. As with his published articles, a few of which I sketched in the previous post, The Access Principle is remarkable for its multifaceted approach. Each chapter covers a different aspect of open access, including copyright, scholarly societies, economics, development, and indexing, to name a few. In addition, there are six short appendices on such topics as the varieties of open access, journal management economics, and journal metadata.

In Chapter 8 (“Public”) Willinsky responds to those who question the public’s interest in published research (p. 125):

… proving that the public has sufficient interest in, or capacity to understand, the results of scholarly research is not the issue. The public’s right of access to this knowledge is not something people have to earn. It is grounded in a basic right to know.

Willinsky has repeatedly asserted this right to know in his writings, and devotes a chapter to it in The Access Principle (“Rights,” pp. 143-154). In the first paragraph he states (p. 143):

The right to know that is inherent in the access principle has a claim on our humanity that stands with other basic rights, whether to life, liberty, justice, or respect. More than that, access to knowledge is a human right that is closely associated with the ability to defend, as well as to advocate for, other rights.

Willinsky proceeds by examining the political scientist Richard Pierre Claude’s work on science and human rights, as well as Jacques Derrida on the right to philosophy and its importance to the humanities. The right to know “is about having fair and equitable access to a public good” and it is the responsibility of researchers to “ensure that there are no unwarranted impediments” to information. Willinsky cites Derrida’s independent questioning of everything and adds that it doesn’t make any sense that this independent questioning would be closed off to those outside academia (p. 148, 153):

If the independent university is to profess an “unlimited commitment to the truth,” as Derrida puts it, it must at some point be concerned with an unimpeded right of access to that truth.

…..

How are we to ensure the university’s contribution to a fairer world, if access to the research it produces about the world is itself a source of inequality… ?

While Peter Suber’s excellent and more recent Open Access focuses on the details of how open access works (or should work) today, The Access Principle provides a broader rationale for open access. While the open access numbers have changed in the seven years since its publication, this book conveys ideas that have not lost any power.

The Access Principle is available online and can also be found in Newman Library.

By now you know that this year’s Open Access Week at Virginia Tech features a keynote address by John Willinsky, one of the world’s best-known advocates for open access. In addition, in his role as Distinguished Innovator in Residence, he will be visiting many classes and groups on campus for informal conversations. In preparation for his visit, and also to offer a session for the Library Reading Group (this Wednesday at noon in the Boardroom), I’ve been reading (or re-reading) some of his articles on open access, as well as his 2006 book The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (more on that in Part 2).

John Willinsky (photo credit Peter Searle)

His numerous writings on open access are only a part of his extensive publications list, as you can see from Stanford’s repository, his ORCID profile, and his Google Scholar profile. His articles on open access are impressively wide-ranging, addressing aspects such as ethics, economics, reputation, the developing world, the concept of intellectual property, and technical limitations in the online environment, among others. For our discussion Wednesday in the Reading Group, I’ve chosen The Unacknowledged Convergence of Open Source, Open Access, and Open Science from way back in 2005. Outlined below are a few of his other articles that I’ve read recently.

In The Academic Ethics of Open Access to Research and Scholarship (2011), he and Juan Pablo Alperin consider ethics from the perspective of positive action:

…in which, for example, one goes out of one’s way to help someone- rather than an arena of moral failings… We believe that with the coming of the digital era, the university faces an unprecedented ethical opportunity to act in a positive fashion by reaching out to help others.

Willinsky and Alperin suggest that the rapidly changing publication models prompted by online distribution may present a “limited-time opportunity for ethical action” in which authors could make the extra effort to ensure that research is disseminated widely. In the case of article archiving, authors have the opportunity to greatly reduce the time between completing a paper and making it available to readers.

In Open Access and Academic Reputation (2010) he identifies the paradox that journals remain “indispensable for institutional reputation-setting” while their importance in knowledge exchange is declining, at least in some disciplines, with attention directed to disciplinary repositories such as arXiv.org, for example. Open access journals are improving in reputation through such measures as the impact factor, and authors who publish openly or archive their work stand to benefit from increased readership and citations as well as build reputation more easily on a global scale. Greater access may improve the reputation of research as a whole, as already seen by the “evidence-based” and open data movements. We all need to remember that “the intellectual property at issue in this reputation economy is a sponsored public good.”

Willinsky addresses the problem of access to research in the developing world in his chapter Development and Open Access (PDF) (2013, chapter 26 of Critical Perspectives on International Education, pages 363-378). It’s a long litany of access nightmares that have become worse since the 1970s, caused by “subscription price increases, currency fluctuations, and local economic troubles.”

At the Agricultural Sciences University in Bangalore, which I visited in 2003, nearly half the journal subscriptions had been canceled during the preceding decade…

In addition to his own experiences, the chapter refers to the literature of global access problems, which are somewhat mitigated by efforts such as INASP and HINARI. Often overlooked is the ability of scholars in the developing world to get published, made more difficult because it is so hard to keep up with current literature. 

What this means is that scholars everywhere need to question their assumptions about what constitutes an adequate circulation of their and others’ work.

In addition to his advocacy for open access, Willinsky has worked to create open source software for open access journals. In 1998 he founded the Public Knowledge Project to do just that (the University Libraries uses PKP’s Open Journal Systems and Open Conference Systems software). PKP also created software for book publishing, and in his 2009 article Toward the Design of an Open Monograph Press, Willinsky described the software, the workflows it enables, and how it can help address the difficulties of publishing a scholarly monograph.

In a similar vein, he and two co-authors describe potential improvements to the most common article format in Refurbishing the Camelot of Scholarship: How to Improve the Digital Contribution of the PDF Research Article. Among the suggestions are improvements in legibility, linkable references, annotation, and metadata, with numerous opportunities for contribution by repositories.

Hopefully I’ve provided a decent overview of John Willinsky’s writings on open access, and perhaps it can serve as a source of conversation during his visit. In Part 2 I’ll discuss The Access Principle.

The Winnower, an upcoming open access journal created by Virginia Tech Ph.D. student Joshua Nicholson, now has a blog. Check out the first post, Science Publishing is Systematically Broken and It’s Time to Fix It. Also, stay tuned for an interview with Josh that I’ll be posting in the coming weeks.

Brian McGill has a fantastic (but long) post on journals in ecology, Follow the Money- What Really Matters When Choosing a Journal (be sure to click through to the Google spreadsheet he’s put together). It’s a pretty comprehensive treatment of the topic, and the comments are worth reading too. TL;DR choose a non-profit journal!

Tyler Walters, dean of the University Libraries, will be co-chairing an effort to incorporate repositories into federal open access mandates. The library effort, known as SHARE, offers a low-cost solution that puts the public interest first. Conversely, the publisher’s effort, CHORUS, offers further enclosure that ensures that the profits continue. Tough choice, huh?

The Golden Goose Awards (PDF) have gotten some popular press, and it points out yet another aspect of scholarly communication that’s broken- judging the importance of research. The awards are an admirable project, making it clear that research sometimes mocked by the public can have profound impact. While the public isn’t good at judging the importance of research at the time it’s published, expert reviewers aren’t that great at it either. The focus on “importance” leads to the prestige journals, called “glam mags” by some, or just “CNS” for Cell, Nature, and Science. The glam mags lead to exorbitant costs, and pressures on tenure track faculty to publish in them. Yet the glam mags have little evidence of quality, and higher retraction rates. Let’s quit the addiction to assigning “importance” to research articles, and let citations, open peer review, and altmetrics sort things out.