Open@VT

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.

Peter Suber’s essential book Open Access is now, well, open access, one year after publication. It’s available in a variety of digital formats (scroll down to view), including HTML, PDF, ePUB, and Mobi. I also recommend the Internet Archive’s excellent streaming version, which I was unaware of until recently. Suber is also providing updates and supplements to the book. If you read only one book about open access, let it be this one!

Richard Poynder offers two new interviews on the current state of open access with Mike Taylor and Stevan Harnad. I tend to follow Taylor more than Harnad, and particularly like the former’s interview references to dispensing with journal prestige and the cost savings that will come with OA. I’m skeptical that Harnad’s vision of universal green (archived) OA will come to pass, though I think article archiving is an immensely valuable stopgap effort until more OA journals are up and running.

Congratulations to Oregon State University for adopting an open access policy. The Faculty Senate did so unanimously. OSU has been one of the leaders among public universities on open access- the Faculty Senate endorsed OA a few years ago, they had the first library faculty OA policy, and their repository already hosts 58% of faculty papers. Let’s hope Virginia Tech won’t be too far behind.

Abuse of the term “open” is the subject of the most recent post from John Wilbanks:

So let’s get this clear. Just because you’re making something available that wasn’t previously available doesn’t qualify as open. Just because you’re reducing the transaction costs of access to something doesn’t qualify as open. Just because you’re involving more people than before doesn’t qualify as open.

Since there seems to be so much confusion about what “open” means (or intentional misuse for PR purposes), advocates of openness can provide a more precise meaning by calling out uses that don’t follow the Open Definition:

A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.

(Update May 14, 2018: This book is now available in an open access edition with additional material.)

John Palfrey’s Intellectual Property Strategy (MIT Press, 2012) is the first book I’ve read on the subject. Having read one of his previous books, Born Digital, and because it is in the same book series as Peter Suber’s Open Access, I suspected openness would be a theme, and I wasn’t disappointed. This review is mostly about that theme, rather than all aspects of the book, so keep that in mind. Palfrey is a well qualified writer on this subject, having taught law at Harvard, practiced intellectual property (IP) law, cofounded several tech startups, and is a venture executive. The book is aimed at CEOs and senior managers, and is short enough that it might be finished on a cross-country flight.

The four areas of IP are patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret. Palfrey first addresses the prevailing “sword and shield” IP strategy by pointing out that it benefits lawyers more than organizations. He urges readers to “give special consideration to strategies of openness rather than exclusion, especially in the information context” (p. 3).

IP is a nonrival good- more than one party can use it simultaneously. The author points out that IP often gains in value the more that it is used, which is a flaw in the “full exclusion” approach. Palfrey is quite familiar with universities and libraries, and interestingly uses MIT’s OpenCourseWare as an example of using openness to increase assets. However, it’s important to establish ownership rights in order to give IP away (p. 56):

It may seem counterintuitive, but even the strategies of openness that I urge you to consider need to be grounded first in the system of rights in order to work smoothly.

Palfrey spends some time talking about open innovation, that is, using openly available or customer-generated information. For example, Zillow as well as legal publishers Lexis and Westlaw thrive in this environment. He cites a study (PDF) showing that the fair use economy in the U.S. supports hundreds of billions in exports, employs millions, and is growing by 5% annually. Palfrey warns that zealous protectionism can backfire, such as demanding royalties for using the song “Happy Birthday” (a demand that now appears fraudulent rather than protectionist).

Nonprofits as a special case are examined in Chapter 7. The differing missions of for-profits and nonprofits “opens up new possibilities” and can make IP strategy more important. Using libraries as an example, Palfrey suggests digitization in collaboration with for-profit partners, with a limited term of exclusivity during which the library receives royalties. Summarizing, he says (p. 120):

If the default in the for-profit world is to generate maximum revenues from the licensing of intellectual property, the default in the non-profit setting is probably to make intellectual property as broadly available as possible.

There are a few stumbles along the way- Palfrey occasionally uses the term “open access” in a confusingly loose way (p. 89, 105) despite discussing it accurately elsewhere (p. 118), and offers Google Wave (p. 68) as an example of open innovation (oops!). And he suggests that universities license IP in a nonexclusive way (p. 119), lowering fees for greater societal benefit (perhaps I’m too cynical, but I don’t see this happening).

I recommend this book as an introduction to IP in general- it’s a quick and informative read. Intellectual Property Strategy is available in Newman Library, and Palfrey’s book talk is below (beginning at 7:00).

The participation of a Virginia Tech faculty member in a recently completed MOOC has been well documented in the Virginia Tech news, a Roanoke Times article, and in a blog about the course.

Tom Sanchez co-taught the TechniCity course with Jennifer Evans-Cowley of Ohio State, which has an agreement with Coursera. Thinking of Kevin Smith’s recent post in which article archiving saved the day for a Duke professor’s MOOC, I e-mailed Tom about the availability of course materials and he was kind enough to respond.

Naturally, materials (like journal articles) that might have cost the students money were avoided. Negotiating for copyright permissions or digging up previous versions were both deemed too time-consuming. The course did use some archived articles (the suggested readings on the course page links to two articles by Evans-Cowley from SSRN). Tom also noted that “we have a Mendeley group set up for the course topic(s), which is also a source of the content.”

While MOOCs are currently dependent on open content (and therefore provide an incentive to archive articles), that may be changing soon. Around the time the course was taking place, Coursera entered an agreement with publishers to provide licensed content to students (with many caveats, as the article notes).

I also asked Tom about the issue of course ownership. University ownership of MOOC content is viewed as a threat by the American Association of University Professors, as recently reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. Tom replied, “from what I’m told by the Ohio State people, we are free to use all of the course materials however we’d like. We used several ‘guest’ presentations and Coursera didn’t ask for copyright releases for these. I can imagine this will change over time.”

Thanks again to Tom Sanchez for sharing some of the behind-the-scenes details of the course.

[Update: see my interview with Tom Sanchez in August 2014 that goes into more depth about the course.]