[Air-L] open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academicjournals

Thu Feb 7 15:36:30 PST 2008

I have worked in the media business (commercial, government, non-profit,
and industrials) for twenty years, and as a recent PhD who researched
publishing as part of my dissertation on Edutainment & Convergence I
know that open access models can work, and are working successfully
already. As a person that has to work with the media conglomerates who
own most of what we see, read, hear and yes think it is imperative that
we switch to an open access model if we really want to educate citizenry
and not avoid propaganda and cyber dictatorships. The Pentagon freely
admits that the Internet has to be treated as an enemy technology (a
recent Washington Post article I believe). Now let's mention some of the
successful publishing models that can easily be adapted to academia that
most of us are familiar with presently: Google, iTunes, YouTube, Amazon,
Microsoft (pick several), Learn Out Loud and Audible which is now owned
by Amazon. 

The over-reliance on the printed materials is the issue. I don' have
read anymore studies on this (because I've read too many) because I
actually cost out print, video, audio, and web costs as part of my job
as Producer/Director and now Internet/Emerging Tech Exp because of
convergence. I am not necessarily in favor of totally killing the
printed book. I think folks who are digital immigrants by nature should
have that option; however, I think that like others with expensive
tastes like fine wine: they will have to pay for it. Here is the bottom
line: with some very notable exceptions most people do not make money in
the publishing business as it is presently constructed by the media
companies. The media conglomerates either outright own or have large
interests in many if not most academic publishing (Bagdikian, 2000,
2005). The current system is just like Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, or
Atlantic City: the house almost always wins because they set the rules.
However, when new rules take hold, a whole new set of winners emerge. If
you read Lessig (2001,2002, 2004) and others like Bagdikian (2000, 2005)
companies and institutions generally fight innovation that is
threatening to the established order even it will help everyone. The VCR
is a great of this, and it set up the DRM fight that began with Betamax
vcr

Every university should set up a digital publishing operation, and
utilize student, faculty, and alumni experts to assist them. You will
need some graphic artists to layout everything (even though templates
exist) and everything can be shared via free wikis of the type that
Google offers for free through gmail. The students need the real time
experience; the faculty members desperately need real world time to keep
their skills up to speed (trust me on that one), the administration is
utilizing dollars that it is already putting out to assist in its
institutional mission of spreading knowledge and its creating a viable
publishing program for students who will have experience, a portfolio
and alumni and industry contacts. Oh, did I mention that the university
can also use this a fundraising tool for the endowment.  At the end of
the day digital publishing has already begun the democratization of
knowledge where little known people with great research can publish
their results worldwide instantly without being impeded or scorned by
the highly traditional and cliquish academic community (Willinsky,
2006). The free and advertiser-based model is clearly the most
successful model for digital publishing (Apple, 2008;Disney, 2008;
Facebook, 2008;Google, 2008; Microsoft, 2008; MySpace, 2008;NBC
Universal, 2008;NewsCorp, 2008;Viacom, 2007;Yahoo, 2008; YouTube, 2008)
and each of the companies cited also has a serious research and/or
publishing entity. The open-access model actually is heralding the
return of museums and libraries to their rightful places as the holders
of digital information, digital knowledge, and meaningful discussion on
such matters in the digital age. I guarantee you that there will be some
smaller and elite universities that will become renown for adopting this
approach and then everyone else when adopt digital publishing. The key
will be matching ads that do have a conflict of interest, but match the
research. This looks like a job for Google.

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Ingbert Floyd
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 12:05 PM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-L] open-access is the future: boycott locked-down
academicjournals

In general, I completely agree with danah boyd on this one, but
convincing scholars to adopt open access models is but one of the
challenges in moving to an open-access model of publishing. Thus, I
thought I'd bring up some of the complications, given that I'm from
library and information science. If we, as academics who care, are going
to solve this, I think it would be productive to consider the barriers
that currently exist. I wish I could write more, but I have some
deadlines I need to meet today.

1) Journals are as much a service as a product. Thus, publishers
advertise, distribute, index, abstract, pay for the costs of reviewing,
etc. I'm not from the publishing world, but I've seen some statistics on
the costs. How will these costs be paid for? (I know Carole Palmer
http://people.lis.uiuc.edu/~clpalmer/ has done some research on this,
but I can't quickly find a representative
publication.)

2) One of the biggest problems facing the open access movement is
finding economic models which work. After a bit of web research, my
impression is that all open-access publishers which are free for both
authors and readers, are supported by foundations, or in rare cases, by
universities. Thus, their economic models are *not* self-sustaining. If
everybody who wants to start a journal needs to depend on a foundation
to get started, it will be very difficult to start a journal, as
competition for foundation funding will be very tight (and likely biased
in the same direction that grant money is currently biased).
Furthermore, there are individuals who are wary of this model, because
they do not want foundations to be the gatekeepers of academic research.
They feel that academics should be the gatekeepers of academic research,
like they are now. The one good thing is that under the reader-pays
models, a group of scientists can start their own journal, even their
own publishing company, and thus short-circuit any price, content, or
other controls that they are being subject to by their current
publisher. There are in fact examples of this in the academic publishing
world.

3) Remember that a common alternative to the reader-pays model, is the
author pays model. This is a very common "open access" model. But do we
really want to force researchers to have grants, so that they can afford
to pay for their articles to be published? There have been several
attempts at creating fully automatic journals, where, theoretically, the
only costs would be to pay for the bandwidth, the hosting, and some
maintenance of the code. But these have all failed.
Why? I don't know. Issues of indexing and browsing might be relevant.

4) There is a *huge* difference between for-profit and non-profit
publishers. Research indicates that the costs of journal publishing are
about the same, but the access fees for-profit publishers charge are
often many times more expensive than the fees of non-profits.
(Check out Cristina Lopez's link for some stats on journal costs:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/scholcomm/journalcosts.htm )

5) The Institutional Repositories movement is in no small measure an
attempt by libraries to reduce journal costs, by providing faculty with
an alternative means of publication. The problem, is that no faculty
member makes the time to submit their publications, so the adoption
rates of the repositories are dismal, thus limiting the funds libraries
can secure for their operation. People who are leading the movement, are
trying to figure out ways of providing alternative publication venues.
But, of course, that means that such venues are often limited to members
of the university, due to university policy.
Academics who do not work in universities, or academics from poor
universities are at a disadvantage if this model is the major publishing
model.

6) People these days often hype the digital born journal, as addressing
some of these concerns. The truth is, that the fixed costs of digital
journals and print journals are about the same. And, if things are
digital born-and-bred, what are the preservation mechanisms in place to
make sure these articles exist 10-100 years from now?
Currently, libraries, not publishers, take on this role by physically
storing and maintaining print runs of journals. But if print runs
disappear, what then? Libraries often *cannot* store digital versions
(publisher rules, formats that are not preservation-friendly, etc.),
unless they have control over the format of the document--another reason
for the Institutional Repository movement. And publishers don't seem to
be actively (or at least intentionally) taking on this role.

So, any ideas for addressing these problems? In particular, I would love
to see a self-sustainable economic model, that is not directly subject
to foundation whims or University budget cuts.

Until solutions to this and other problems are found, however, I like
the ACM model, where access to the ACM digital library is pay-only, and
thus libraries, companies, and some individuals subscribe (and keep it
alive), but all authors are free to publish their own work either on
their website, or on an institutional website (such as an Institutional
Repository), as long as they establish clearly that the article was
originally published in the ACM. Thus, if you, the author, is motivated,
you can make your work free to access by everybody, drop it in an
institutional repository so that it gets preserved even if you can't
preserve it yourself. And doing so boosts citation rates too! This
solution is not systematic enough for preserving our academic heritage
over the long-term, but it is a start.

Ingbert

On Feb 7, 2008 9:15 AM, Casey O'Donnell <odonnc at rpi.edu> wrote:
> Yes, replying to my own post, but I should have checked my RSS feed 
> this morning:
>
> http://savageminds.org/2008/02/07/anthropology-news-special-safety-val
> ve-edition/ http://dev.aaanet.org/publications/articles.cfm
>
> Best.
> Casey
>
> On Feb 7, 2008 10:13 AM, Casey O'Donnell <odonnc at rpi.edu> wrote:
> > There has been a fair amount of talk related to this by 
> > anthropologists. I think your article also falls into what Chris 
> > Kelty wrote about as "Recursive Public Irony," about access to 
> > articles about access can be quite limited:
> >
> > http://savageminds.org/2005/05/24/recursive-public-irony/
> > http://blog.openaccessanthropology.org/?p=43
> >
>
>
> --
> Casey O'Donnell
> RPI STS Department - PhD Candidate
>
> http://homepage.mac.com/codonnell/
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--
==========================================
Ingbert Floyd
PhD Student
Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of
Illinois at Urbana Champaign
http://ingbert.org/     ||     skype: spacesoon

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