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Cutting carbon doesn’t have to be hard

Dec 14th, 2009
by Gavin Baker.
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Generally, I try to keep this blog focused on information policy, but I can’t help myself. I’ve had climate on the brain thanks to Copenhagen, but the confluence of news items that crossed my desk today is striking.

Much of the American media coverage of climate change is of the political back-and-forth about the costs of addressing climate change. It goes something like this: “Democrats today called for action to stop global warming, but Republicans said we can’t afford the cost to the economy. In other news, [insert celebrity sex scandal] …” There’s rarely a discussion of what those costs might actually be, just an intimation that they must be high.

Certainly there are costs (although there are also benefits — and there are staggering costs to inaction, too). But the three items I spotted this morning highlight the argument that much can be done, today, with existing technology, at relatively little cost and with relatively impact on the much-ballyhooed “American lifestyle”:

  1. A mocking piece in today’s Guardian pokes fun at U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s fascination with old-hat technologies. Those of us who’ve seen Secretary Chu’s efficiency roadshow before, though, know that he’s not excited because he thinks these technologies are new and cutting-edge — he’s excited because they’re old, easy and cheap. The Guardian column only reinforces Chu’s point: in Europe, these approaches to energy efficiency are passé. So we don’t have to wait for cutting-edge, expensive, untested strategies to cut greenhouse gas emissions: even an advanced economy like the U.S. can make a big dent just by adopting some of the many cost-effective, tried-and-true tools already at our disposal.
  2. ScienceInsider points to a new National Research Council report that estimates just how much could be saved. According to the report, adoption of existing or imminent technologies could reduce U.S. energy use by one-fifth in ten years. In other words: despite population and economic growth, energy use could decrease (in absolute terms) rather than increase, simply by adopting technologies that already exist or are expected to enter commercial availability in the next ten years.

    Just to spell it out, there’s a lot of economic good news in that scenario. Despite upfront costs, consumers save money on long-term energy costs. Meanwhile, a lot of people make a lot of money: namely, the manufacturers of those devices and their supply chains, through to the retailers who sell them and the contractors who install them. Basically, it’s good for everybody except energy companies — which brings me to the final item…

  3. Avaaz and Oil Change launched petitions to end the U.S.’s staggering $10 billion annual taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuel companies. (There seems to be some debate about the exact number, but at any rate, it’s huge.) Why we should subsidize these companies at all is difficult to fathom. If we simply eliminated the subsidies, fossil fuels would be less competitive. If we re-directed the funding to clean energy or efficiency, the gains would be even greater.

I doubt that these simple fixes alone would get us to 350. But it’s clear that there is much low-hanging fruit, perilously ripe for the picking — a fact all too often missing from the narrative around climate change.

Posted in: Conservation.

OA + POD + competition?

Dec 10th, 2009
by Gavin Baker.
1 comment

Here’s a question I thought of recently. I’ve asked a few smart people and none of them were sure of the answer, either, so:

There’s a bit of buzz about OA + POD (open access + print-on-demand) as a model for books, particularly for small scholarly publishers like university presses. Consider the following: a book published gratis OA + POD, with no copyright license, all rights reserved (ARR).

  • If I legally acquire a digital copy of the book (downloaded with rightsholders’ permission), under copyright, am I permitted to print a copy of the book for personal use?
  • If not: would fair use or another exception apply?
  • Is the fair use analysis affected by the offering of print-on-demand?
  • If I am permitted to print a copy for personal use: am I allowed to pay someone else to do the printing for me, e.g. by bringing the file to a commercial copyshop?
  • If so: Do ARR publishers know that?
  • What if the copyshop advertises that they will download and print the file for the customer?

Now consider a book published OA + POD, with a Creative Commons NonCommercial (NC) license.

  • Presumably I am now unambiguously permitted to print a copy of the book for personal use.
  • Am I allowed to pay someone else to do the printing for me, e.g. by bringing the file to a commercial copyshop?
  • If so: Do NC publishers know that?
  • What if the copyshop advertises that they will download and print the file for the customer?

Similar questions apply to related scenarios, e.g. paying an intermediary to download the file for you and deliver it on physical media, or to format and deliver it for an e-reader.

Posted in: Copyright, Creative Commons, Open access.

Google Books Settlement: Now featuring me

Dec 3rd, 2009
by Gavin Baker.
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I’ve blogged twice about the Google Books Settlement (here and here), in addition to following it at considerable length on Open Access News. Now, I’m part of it!

A footnote in Pamela Samuelson’s objection tipped me off:

Most other signatories [to the brief] … are members of the Author Subclass by virtue of the book-bound copies of their Ph.D. dissertations filed in research libraries of the universities from which they received their degrees.

I hadn’t realized that dissertations were eligible “works” under the terms of the settlement. That means my late mother’s dissertation, for which I now exercise copyright, would be subject to the settlement terms. An email to the class counsel confirmed it.

I’ve claimed the work on the settlement site. It’s not listed as having been digitized. I’ve set the options as permissive as possible, including a zero price for consumer purchase. (The promised option to apply a Creative Commons license isn’t yet offered.)

I don’t intend to opt out of the settlement: I support the further availability of the work (which, on balance, I think the settlement would increase). If participation brings any financial benefits, well, I’ll take them.

However, I’m entertaining the thought of joining an objection to some terms of the settlement. Since I missed the deadline to object to the original proposed settlement, I’ll only be able to object to terms revised in the amended settlement, but there’s still plenty to be wary of. My concerns are primarily competition, users’ rights (open formats, DRM, privacy), and facilitating rightsholder choices more permissive than the settlement defaults (including open access). If you know of an objection which addresses these points and is accepting additional signatories, please let me know, in the comments or by email.

Posted in: Copyright, Personal, Publishing.

Nitpicking the Google Books Settlement 2.0

Nov 18th, 2009
by Gavin Baker.
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I previously posted on the Google Books Settlement, avoiding the well-trod ground and focusing on points that were salient but hadn’t received much discussion. Now that there’s a new draft of the proposed settlement, I’ll do the same:

  • The revised settlement cuts out a huge swath of international works. There’s no legal reason for this, since the settlement is based in U.S. law, which treats works equally regardless of where they were published. (Moreover, the settlement only provides access to users in the U.S.) Yet I haven’t seen one public interest advocate criticize the loss to access that will be the result of this change.
  • The discussion of this change has mostly been summarized as “foreign language works are now excluded”. But that’s a misleading oversimplification. The new settlement includes works published in the U.S., UK, Canada, or Australia, or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. That will certainly include many non-English works (remember Canada is bilingual?). It will also exclude many English works: consider New Zealand, Jamaica, India, or many other English-speaking countries.

  • Much criticism has focused on the question of orphan works. This is a bit baffling to me. The settlement would provide an unprecedented access to orphan works. Indeed, to me this is the biggest benefit of the settlement.

    The main criticism of this is that Google would be the only provider of access to these orphan works. Monopoly access is certainly undesirable (particularly given the other flaws of the settlement: the privacy weaknesses, the DRM, the single interface, the overall market position of Google, etc.). But isn’t monopoly access (with antitrust scrutiny) better than no access?

    The only way the answer is “no” is if the settlement holds back progress toward non-monopoly access. For instance, a settlement clause that guaranteed Google competitors the same terms (even if they had to do the scanning themselves) would open competition. Obviously, Google is not interested in such an approach, and since the settlement is a negotiation between Google and the plaintiffs (who I would guess to be agnostic on that question), we shouldn’t expect to see those terms unless the judge or the Department of Justice forces them.

    A legislative solution, such as proposed by the Copyright Office, would be an improvement as well. But orphan works reform has so far stalled in Congress, and I haven’t seen any indication it will be a priority for the current Judiciary Committee. For its part, Google says it will still support orphan works reform if the settlement is approved.

    I’m not sure how to predict what the effect of the settlement would be on the prospects for legislative action. One the one hand, Congress might say, “It looks like Google has solved that problem, so we don’t have to do anything.” Alternatively, Congress might say, “That Google settlement seems to have riled a lot of people up; I’d rather not put my stick in that antpile.” On the other hand, the settlement might give greater impetus to Google’s competitors to tell Congress, “We’re on unequal terms now; we need you to pass orphan works reform to level the playing field.” No matter what happens, I don’t expect this Congress to pass orphan works reform. How long are we willing to wait?

  • Speaking of orphan works, the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary is a trustee with one hand tied. As I reported for OAN, the UWF — an independent agent entrusted to manage the works of rightsholders who haven’t claimed their works under the settlement — doesn’t have all the powers of an actual rightsholder. Whereas a rightsholder is guaranteed under the settlement the options to, e.g., set a zero price for her work, to apply a Creative Commons license, or to remove DRM, the UWF isn’t guaranteed those same options. In fact, the UWF can only exercise those options with the approval of the Book Rights Registry, which is run by publisher and author representatives. So if the UWF came to the conclusion that the best fiduciary interest of its absentee rightsholders was represented by making their works freely available, it would not necessarily be able to do so. Given the growing suggestions that making a book freely available often has no discernible negative consequence on sales revenues for that book, and in some cases may even increase sales, the settlement should not exclude that option.

Posted in: Copyright, Creative Commons, DRM, Privacy, Publishing.

Happy Open Access Week

Oct 20th, 2009
by Gavin Baker.
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Open Access Week

In late 2006 or early 2007, I was looking for ways to get students interested in open access. I had started to become versed in the topic myself a few months earlier, after my library announced it planned to cut subscriptions around the same time the Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced for the first time. At the time, there were no resources for students and no student organizations meaningfully engaged with the issue. I helped the Alliance for Taxpayer Access scrape together some basic information for and about students, but no one paid much attention.

At some point, I had the idea of picking a day to try to focus student attention on open access. We’d choose a date and ask our few student allies to organize some activities to speak out on the issue. This became the National Day of Action for Open Access.

We didn’t have much lead time to plan, and few resources. Not a lot of people participated — but a few did. There wasn’t much attention, but we did get an article in the Washington Post, where I went completely off-message. (Coincidentally, the reporter was Rick Weiss, who later edited Science Next, which included an essay by me about open access.) It was a start.

By the next year, I was consulting for SPARC. We decided to revive the concept, but shifted the schedule and the focus: not just students, we wanted everybody to make noise about open access. For Open Access Day 2008, we had more time and more resources. In organizing it, I dropped the ball too many times, but thankfully someone was always there to pick it up. The response was much bigger; we made a splash.

After 2008, the organizers made two strategic decisions which I disagreed with at the time but were absolutely right. One was to expand the day to a week to make scheduling easier. The other was not to organize a central event, but instead to rely more on the partners and hosts to take more initiative. I was afraid we’d have insufficient focus and momentum. Instead, we let a hundred flowers blossom. The more flexible schedule, along with an increased role for partnerships — and our experience and increased visibility from the first time around — combined to make Open Access Week the most vibrant outing yet. The breath and depth of activities worldwide, along with a number of high-profile announcements timed for the week, are truly remarkable. I haven’t been very involved since the early strategic planning, so I can’t claim much credit. But I am thrilled and impressed with the outcome.

Most personally touching for me are the events in Cuba. Growing up in Florida, Cuba was only 90 miles across the strait but impossibly far culturally. There is no direct fiber optic link, nor even direct postal service, between Cuba and the U.S.; as an American, I need special permission from my government to travel there. Reportedly, only 2% of Cubans have Internet access. So it was a revelation to realize that our message of open access to scholarship had resonated in Cuba. For me, it’s a symbol of what open access is all about: the free exchange of knowledge and ideas worldwide.

Happy Open Access Week. May it be the first of many.

Posted in: Creative Commons, Florida, Open access, Personal, Politics, Science.

Scholarly publishers shake down a copy shop

Oct 19th, 2009
by Gavin Baker.
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A group of scholarly publishers — Blackwell, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Sage, and Wiley — last week won a judgment against a Michigan copy shop for assisting students in copying course packs. The students were copying articles from scholarly journals and chapters from scholarly books for assigned readings in their college classes.

A student wanting a coursepack comes to Excel’s [the copy shop] premises and fills out a form on which the student writes the course the student is enrolled in and for which the student needs the material. The form contains a statement to the effect that: “I am a student in this class and am making a copy for educational purposes.” The student signs and dates the form. The student hands the form over to an Excel staff member who retrieves the “master,” hands it to the student, who then makes a copy using Excel’s copy machines. [...]

Excel does not pay copyright fees to the publishers, which it admits enables it to charge a lower fee than if the students obtained the materials at a traditional “copyshop” [...]

Excel’s position that this is a case of protected student copying is sophistry. [...] Simply put, copyright law should not turn on who presses the start button on a copier. Excel’s actions violate the publishers’ copyrights.

My purpose is not to argue the legal merits of the decision. Rather, I want to highlight this case as an example of the social impacts of closed-access scholarly publishing. I particularly want to address researchers here.

Scholars: You conducted your research for the advancement of knowledge. In many cases, your research was supported by taxpayer dollars, whether in the form of a research grant or a university salary. You entrusted your research to the publisher, for the purpose of disseminating it. In many cases (for scholarly journals, not necessarily for books) you did so for no remuneration from the publisher. The publisher sells access to your work to universities and reaps massive profits: Elsevier alone reported more than $800 million in profits in 2008. When a small business tries to help students get access at a reduced price, the publisher sues to shut it down.

If that’s scholarship, then I want no part of it.

The publisher is wielding the copyright in your work as a legal bludgeon and supposing to act on your behalf. If you know this and you sign a copyright transfer with a publisher, then you are responsible.

There is an alternative.

For reference, the list of infringed works is here. Some are more than 20 years old.

Posted in: Copyright, Education, Open access, Publishing.

AcaWiki launches: free summaries of academic papers

Oct 8th, 2009
by Gavin Baker.
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As I reported at Open Access News, AcaWiki launched yesterday. The idea is free (gratis, libre), editable (wiki) summaries of academic papers. These summaries might be useful to scan during a literature review or when studying for a class, or they might help make an article comprehensible to a non-specialist (a researcher in another discipline, an interested member of the public).

So what’s the point of AcaWiki when almost all articles have abstracts, which are summaries and usually available gratis? Well, AcaWiki summaries are also libre (CC Attribution license), so they invite reuse: mashup, translation, and so on. They’re also editable, so they can evolve and be improved.

Abstracts vary widely, usually shaped by the journal’s format: sometimes they’re several paragraphs, something just a few sentences. They might outline the methodology or they might not. They are usually written at the level of specialists in that field, so they may or may not be much use to other readers.

There’s room for improvement and innovation in the world of summary, in other words. For instance, Emerald launched a program asking authors to provide a summary highlighting potential applications. RNA Biology requires its authors to write up their findings on Wikipedia. BMJ publishes only one-page abridgments in its print edition, with the full article available online.

For a more direct comparison, see WikiSummary, which predates AcaWiki but covers only political science.

Two other points of comparison: journalism / press releases and Wikipedia.

Press releases are gratis; science journalism may or may not be gratis; both are rarely libre. They only cover new studies: good luck finding coverage of an article from 1989. They rarely provide a full citation to the original article. They often discuss only the findings, with little consideration of methodology. They frequently focus on studies with controversies or practical applications, rather than new theories or research methodologies. In reporting the most interesting (a.k.a. most titillating) of the findings, journalism sometimes distorts the impression of the overall study. Meanwhile, press releases try to paint the most positive picture. Since they’re written for a general audience, and often not written by someone with a background in the field, they may be too general.

If we consider research blogging in this category, conversely, the writing may be too technical. It may be more commentary or critique than summary.

Wikipedia is gratis and libre. It’s written for non-specialists (in theory), but can also go into more detail. The main difference from AcaWiki is that most academic papers will not be “notable” enough to merit their own Wikipedia page; even if someone wrote them, they would probably get deleted. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia provides a higher-level overview. There could be some other conflicts with Wikipedia policies, such as those against publishing original research or authors writing about themselves or their work.

All of the aforementioned resources have their uses, but as we can see, AcaWiki has its niche. I hope it thrives there.

In disclosure, I did some paid work for AcaWiki some months ago, but am not actively involved in the project.

Posted in: Academia, Creative Commons, Education, Open access, Open education, Politics, Publishing, Science.

Funding a transition to OA

Sep 16th, 2009
by Gavin Baker.
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As I mentioned in my last post, a group of American universities has signed an agreement to finance open access journals. The previous post alluded to my criticisms of the compact and I’ll flesh them out here.

It’s a big step forward and Harvard has already followed up on its commitment. I hope to see the other universities do likewise in short order, and to see other schools sign on as well.

Stevan Harnad is right that, without also ensuring OA to their research output by adopting a “green” OA policy, funding “gold” OA journals is well-intentioned but ineffectual. Harvard’s fund lines up perfectly (and hopefully the policies will spread to the rest of Harvard’s schools soon); of the others, only MIT currently has a self-archiving mandate. While more support for OA publishing is needed and valuable, universities could do more in the short term by adopting OA mandates.

My main gripe with the compact itself is that it only covers funding for publication charges, to the exclusion of other financing models. I don’t have a problem with publication charges when done right and have even suggested more experimentation with submission fees. (Interestingly, the new Harvard fund explicitly includes submission fees as eligible.) But fewer than one-third of OA journals currently use publication charges: 70%+ rely on other revenue sources (or have no budget at all).

Stuart Shieber, the architect of the OA compact, knows this — he’s the one who did that calculation — but he’s convinced it’s a fluke. In the PLoS Biology article where he introduced the compact concept, Shieber wrote, “processing fees are the only revenue source that inherently scales directly with the publishing services provided by a journal”. In other words: Some weirdos here and there might get their money from somewhere else, but the only way to take OA publishing big time is with processing fees. But I’m not convinced that that’s the case.

First of all, academic publishing has traditionally been a constellation of weirdos and edge cases. Academic publishers include giant publishing conglomerates and boutique commercial publishers, massive scholarly societies and much more esoteric ones, government agencies and think tanks, universities and some guy publishing out of his department office. Some turn a profit, some break even, some lose money, and some have no budget at all. Some are subsidized by members or university departments, and some subsidize the organization’s other activities. It’s a motley bunch and, now that information is divorced from its paper container, I think predictions that any one revenue model will dominate are perilous at best.

Never mind the fact that even many OA publishers who charge processing fees also draw revenue from other streams: reprints, institutional and individual memberships, print subscriptions, philanthropic or public underwriting, subsidy by the host organization, in-kind support, and so on. Even the practitioners of processing fees see fit to diversify their revenue base.

The compact acknowledges this, but doesn’t do anything about it:

Many, indeed most, open-access journals do not charge processing fees. Such journals are no less deserving of support, and universities are urged to support them as well (as many already do), through direct subvention, support for personnel, equipment, and other facilities. However, the compact was not seen as the right method for institutionalizing this support.

So kudos to the compact’s designers and signatories for committing to put some much-needed money into “gold” OA. The quicker we can flip journals — or build new quality journals and let any dinosaurs that refuse to evolve eventually die off — the better; cash is a very good incentive for publishers to make that happen. But I don’t see why the compact couldn’t have been a commitment to fund OA journals in general rather than to fund publication charges at OA journals.

Posted in: Open access.

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