Open@VT

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!

On August 1 the Library Faculty Association at Virginia Tech adopted an article archiving mandate. Ballot choices also included a voluntary policy and no policy. The mandatory policy received 14 votes, the voluntary policy 10 votes, and no policy 3 votes.

The policy language originally followed the Harvard model, but the opt-out conditions were changed as a result of discussion. Some objected to sending opt-out waiver requests to the Dean’s office (or Dean’s designate), so someone suggested that faculty control access during the deposit process. Access choices are immediate open access (the default), delayed open access, or restricted (with metadata and a request button displayed). This aspect of the policy is similar to the immediate deposit/optional access policy advocated by Stevan Harnad (though deposit is not required immediately but by the time of publication). So the policy is a hybrid.

On a personal note, this was a long and frustrating process. The discussion lasted a year and a half (though that time spans most of two summers, when we did not meet). It’s hard to feel too celebratory when the debate is divisive and 13 faculty members are not on board. I never thought it would be so difficult to convince librarians that access to information is important, or that support for open access needs to be embodied, not just talked about. I’ve posted my 5-minute pitch preceding the vote.

The policy will be posted soon. Thanks to all of my colleagues who voted in favor of the policy. And though the policy is not strictly the one he recommends, thanks to Peter Suber for feedback that improved the policy and its associated FAQ.