Benchmarking institutonal participation in open access

Posted on 25 August 2008
Filed under Academia, Open access
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Benchmarks and peer comparison are handy motivators. So I’m interested in the new tool released by open access journal publisher Hindawi as part of its new institutional membership program. The new tool allows anyone to see at a glance the entirety of an institution’s affiliates’ participation with Hindawi journals.

See, e.g., the page for the University of Florida. We see that 73 articles in Hindawi journals were authored by UF researchers, by 91 individual authors; that 21 UF researchers are editors of a Hindawi journal, and that 59 UF researchers have reviewed articles for a Hindawi journal.

That’s neat to know — but how does it compare to peer institutions?

Currently, the information only appears to be available through the page for each institution (in the format http://www.hindawi.com/institutions/institution’s domain/). I hope Hindawi will provide an open API for this data to facilitate tools for making comparisons, finding connections, etc. And I hope other OA publishers will follow Hindawi’s lead by providing a similar service — along with OA archives and services such as the DOAJ.

I’m not an expert on the metadata formats currently in use, but clearly author information should be available in a standardized format, making it easy to extract, aggregate, and analyze.

Who knows what we might reveal about the anthropology of participation in OA, if only we had the data in a malleable format?

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Podcast of my talk at Simmons library school

Posted on 16 August 2008
Filed under Academia, Libraries, Open access, Open government
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Simmons College’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science has posted a podcast of my presentation there in May on students and open access. (Thanks to Peter for noticing it, even when the Google Alert on my name didn’t.)

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Author’s rights: let’s be clear on the problem

Posted on 2 August 2008
Filed under Academia, Copyright, Creative Commons, Licenses, Open access, Publishing
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There are a number of available remedies (e.g. 1, 2, 3) to the problems posed by authors signing away their copyright to academic journals. But the thicket of solutions and the surrounding rhetoric can sometimes muddy up what the real problem is. So let’s be clear:

Researchers want to publish their research in academic journals.
As author, the researcher owns the copyright inherent in her article. (This doesn’t apply to works produces by government employees, such as intramural NIH researchers, which are not subject to copyright and are in the public domain. Different considerations apply when the author is an employee or contractor and agrees contractually that the employer or client will own the copyright in the work. But this is the situation for most academic researchers.)
These journals often ask researchers to transfer exclusive copyright to the journal as a condition of publication. This “request” is usually in the form of a boilerplate template license (which is not presented as negotiable).
If the author signs away her copyright, then (absent any other agreement, such as a journal policy or an accepted addendum to the copyright transfer agreement) the author will not have sufficient rights to self-archive a copy of her article in an open access repository (aside from any rights which may exist under fair use or other copyright exceptions) or to make it available under an open license (such as a Creative Commons license compatible with the BBB definition of open access).

The existing journal policies and author addenda vary in their specifics: not all of them offer as much flexibility for the author as is desirable for open access. (For instance, they may specify that only certain versions of the article manuscript may be self-archived, or only in certain locations — e.g., on the author’s personal Web site but not in a disciplinary repository — or may not allow the author to apply a CC license to the article.) It’s also important to note that not all journals ask for exclusive copyright: some ask only for the rights necessary to publish the article; others (particularly open access journals) require the author to agree to a CC license.

But for journals that do ask for exclusive copyright, the problem isn’t that the author is giving the journal too many rights (as is sometimes portrayed in the rhetoric around this subject). Rather, the problem is that the author isn’t keeping enough rights. If we were discussing a tangible object, then the preceding two sentences would be semantically identical, but copyright is an intangible: the author can give away rights and keep them at the same time. This point isn’t always made clear.

The ideal approach, then, gives the broadest rights to both the journal and the author. Most important here is the author: as I’ve mentioned, some of the existing addenda and journal policies are too narrow in their “grant” (return) of rights to the author. Ideally, the author should end up with a set of rights as broad as copyright itself: either copyright itself, or a non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable license to do anything with the work (including to sub-license it).

But there’s also little harm in giving a broad grant of rights to the journal. In fact, we can imagine a harm in giving too narrow a grant of rights: for instance, a well-meaning journal that wishes to reproduce the article in a way that will improve access or usefulness, but which was only granted (say) a right of first publication and of reproduction in the original medium — combined with an unlocatable author (or her heirs), the article is effectively an orphan work.

We can imagine few objectionable uses of a scientific article — or at least, few objectionable uses to which we think the author should actually be able to object: this is one the premises of open access. So there’s not much harm in giving the publisher, as well as the author, wide leeway in permission to use and re-use the article.

(As always, I’m not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc. …)

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Scientometrics and OA

Posted on 21 June 2008
Filed under Academia, Open access, Publishing, Science
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Three mathematics societies have issued a report on scientometrics, cautioning against overreliance on the impact factor.

Scientometrics is a very relevant topic to open access: the potential impacts on tenure, funding, and the like seem never to be far from an author’s mind when considering publishing activities. As long as these factors are perceived to be in favor of traditional, closed journals and against OA, we’re at a disadvantage. I won’t go so far as to say that more accurate and reliable criteria would always benefit OA, but it would certainly help make the issues clearer in researchers’ minds (and, based on experience, there is a great deal of misinformation and confusion about these issues — not helped by the perceived opacity of review processes and the high stakes involved; this confusion tends to make authors less, not more, receptive to OA).

In particular, the decoupling of journal from author/article rankings should benefit OA, both gold and green:

Because most gold journals are young, and therefore have less-established reputations and impact factors, a groundbreaking paper published in a young OA journal may expect to be significantly more influential than the journal as a whole (whereas a groundbreaking paper published in an established, high-impact journal is unlikely to be significantly more influential than the journal as a whole, which has routinely published groundbreaking papers for decades). This characteristic is not unique to OA journals — the weakness of the impact factor as an average is highlighted in the report — but it is exacerbated by their relative youth, and assuaged by their relative accessibility.
Because green self-archiving may provide an additional boost of readers/citations beyond that attributable to the distribution of the journal, a self-archived paper published in a closed journal may also expect to be more influential than similar papers published in the same journal but not self-archived, although the same impact factor will be imputed to both. (In fact, self-archiving would help boost the journal’s impact factor, with a non-excludable benefit even to authors who don’t self-archive — although the higher the rate of self-archiving by a journal’s authors, relative to other journals in the same field, the greater the overall benefit to the journal.)

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A completely open high school

Posted on 13 May 2008
Filed under Academia, Open education
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David Wiley announced yesterday that the Utah Board of Education approved a new charter school, the Open High School of Utah. It’ll be a publicly-funded virtual school which uses exclusively open educational resources.

There are a few reasons this is particularly exciting. This school will have a strong concentrated interest in supporting OERs — you can expect the administration to be vocal advocates for favorable policies, funding, etc. The staff will develop deep experience with OERs, which can be shared with colleagues at traditional schools — and carried with them to future jobs. The school’s existence will establish a precedent, encouraging other educators to consider how to use OERs.

In other words, this could be the acorn that starts a forest.

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Re-discovering Florida’s literary legacy — or not

Posted on 15 March 2008
Filed under Academia, Florida, Libraries, Open access, Publishing
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Out of curiosity, I went Googling for literary magazines published at my alma mater, the University of Florida. What I found:

Subtropics, published by the English department, in print since 2006. In current publication. A few items from the current issue are available online; no items from past issues are available online. The poems online are only available as an image, not as text.
Mangrove Review (no Web site; record in UF library catalog), published by the English department(?), in print since 1985(?) (since 1982 according to Worldcat). Soliciting submissions as recently as October 2007; described there as “UF’s official literary magazine.” Alternate titles: Mangrove, Mangrove Literary Review. Web site formerly at this address; see past versions in the Internet Archive. Not to be confused with the Mangrove Review published at Florida Gulf Coast University or Mangrove at the University of Miami (popular name, eh?).
Tea (no Web site; record in UF library catalog), published the English Society (student-run), in print since (when?). Soliciting submissions as recently as February 2008. Web site formerly at this address; see past versions in the Internet Archive.

As far as I can tell, none of these are available in UF’s Digital Collections; although the library does have their back issues, it hasn’t digitized them (at least not yet; probably for permissions issues or lack of resources).

So, of at least 3 literary magazines published at UF (who knows how many others there have been over the years?), none of them are available online. It’s not just that they’re not open access: you couldn’t pay for access if you wanted to. Two of the three appear not to even have Web sites.

It must be said that this is a terrible strategy for sharing the magazines’ contents with the public.

If any readers have information about these or other literary magazines, or any plans to digitize them, please add them in the comments.

Rumors of other literary magazines from UF’s past:

The Florida Pennant, published by the Dixie Literary Society beginning in 1907
The Swamp Angel, published by the Quill Club beginning in 1923
The Silver Bow, published beginning in 1925
Florida Quarterly, published 1967-1976, “Official student-edited literary magazine of the University of Florida”
Departure: GNV, published from 1989 or earlier until 2002 or 2003. Web site formerly at this address; see past versions in the Internet Archive.

In the process, I turned up all sorts of other stuff… Read more

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Harvard faculty say yes to OA

Posted on 13 February 2008
Filed under Academia, Open content, Publishing
3 comments

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences yesterday adopted a mandate for open access to the college’s peer-reviewed research publications.

Already, there’s quibbling from others about whether the details of the policy are good or bad. But I want to focus on the fact that the faculty, through their own governance process, themselves approved this mandate. Despite earlier evidence of the willingness of faculty to comply with OA mandates, and the support of researchers for public access legislation, this is the strongest indication yet: Yes, Virginia, scientists do want open access.

So when Allan Adler of the AAP says

Publishers don’t oppose open-access plans per se, Adler said. It is mandates they take issue with … With Harvard’s opt-out provision, he said, there’s still “some degree of choice.”

– then he will be well-served to remember what dastardly external force imposed such an onerous requirement on the researchers. Oh, right: it was the researchers themselves.

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Speaking @ UCF Knowledge Rights conference

Posted on 29 January 2008
Filed under Academia, Orlando, Personal
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“Knowledge Rights and Information Sharing in the 21st Century” is the theme of the Information Fluency 2008 conference at the University of Central Florida in Orlando on Jan. 30 - Feb. 1. I’m speaking on Thursday, Jan. 31 at 2:15 pm, on “Free Culture and the University: Innovation, Information Sharing, and the Future of the Academy.” I’ll post my abstract and slides/text in the next day or two.

P.S. If anyone at the conference wants to meet up with me, drop me a line at gavin@gavinbaker.com.

Update: Slides are here.

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