Open@VT

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.

It’s a simple question with a not so simple answer, and I’ll probably need a follow-up post to cover all the complexities. Publishers do their best to obfuscate prices through journal bundling (making it difficult to determine the price of a specific journal and also making it difficult to cancel specific journals) and through the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). These practices further warp what is a badly dysfunctional “market” in which publishers have profit margins comparable to Google or Apple (30%+), all by taking free content from faculty members and selling it back to us.

The annual costs below are list price, not actual price. Through what seems to be a combination of NDAs preventing price sharing, and lack of a good internal price querying method, I’m not able to provide the actual (i.e. “negotiated”) amount that Virginia Tech is paying for these journals. So this list doesn’t include all journals Virginia Tech subscribes to (I’m told one or more of the AIP journals might make this top ten list) or accurate prices (either because we can’t tell you or can’t get them out of our system).

With all those caveats in mind, here are the ten most expensive journals that Virginia Tech subscribes to:

Open Access Week is coming up October 21-25, and Virginia Tech has a full schedule of events. This will be our second observance of the international event.

We are especially excited about the keynote address by John Willinsky, author of The Access Principle (2006) and director of the Public Knowledge Project, creator of open source software for scholarly publishing.

Other highlights are the faculty and graduate student panels (great discussions last year; this year’s participants still in the works) and our most recent addition, a panel on ETDs and open access, where the AHA controversy is sure to take center stage.

I’ll be posting more about the week as it approaches, but just wanted to get a quick notice out. I am co-chair of the event and one of the website editors, so please leave a comment or contact me directly if you have suggestions for the event or the information that we provide online. Hope to see you at as many events as possible!

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!