Open access myths – on both sides of the fence

Michael Geist points to a Globe and Mail article about the open access movement. I would have liked more from the interview with University of Toronto’s head librarian – the two words about subscription costs (“It’s alarming”) probably distill a 20 minute conversation –  but it is good to see this in the popular press. It is also nice to see the humanities get a mention in a conversation about open access.

Yes, academe is in my blood…

That’s why I will take issue with two statements that appear in the piece. They come from both sides of the open access debate: the academics and the publishers. Let’s start with the academic perspective:

Prof. Guédon [professor of comparative literature at the University of Montreal ] predicts that attitude will change over the next five years as academics see the benefits of getting their work to a wider audience. “We don’t want to be in an ivory tower. We want to be relevant,” he says.

True. But open access is not a solution to the old problem of academic elitism and disengagement. Open access could improve academics’ work visibility beyond the ivory tower, but it probably won’t. People outside universities just aren’t interested in scholarship, and won’t be perusing SSRN, PLoS or PubMed Central on their lunch break.

The lesson: Access has nothing to do with relevance. Unless you write something The Public want to read, you stay in the ivory tower.

Even so, I can see some ways open access will encourage non-academics to use journals.

1. Scholarship will transmute into culture. Journalists and authors will have increased access to subjects of interest to them and their audiences. Whether or not academic work will receive shoddy interpretation in the popular press is another question entirely.
2. Education will drive interest. As more and more people attend universities where professors introduce students to open access resources, the ease of research will encourage graduates to consult topics of interest to them.
3. Open access gives authors incentive to write on topics of wider interest. Public access to journals is an open door. Invite people inside. Do this by framing research within controversies, because conflict is inherently interesting. Do it by writing approachable prose. Do it by connecting your esoteric subject to a genuinely important question. Communicating why you love your subject can’t hurt.

Now it’s the publisher’s turn:

Mr. Velterop [director of open access for Springer] insists that open access will never have the clout of traditional houses. It’s like the difference between a Marks & Spencer suit and an Armani, he argues – journals cost a lot because the peer-review process is expensive, time-consuming and complicated.

The dinosaur publishers are right to be worried. They have a losing business model relying on the clout and prestige of brand names – a losing strategy when an academic can get their stamp of approval from a recognized alternative of similar quality. Reputations change as traditions wither and are replaced. How appropriate, then, that the publisher would turn to the fashion world for an analogy.

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Reluctant academic bloggers

For her first post to the new University of Alberta law blog, Barbara Billingsley expresses skepticism about academic blogging. I’d like to change her mind.

Here’s her worry:

I have concerns about the notion that blogging will soon become the choice method of academic communication, or, worse yet, the notion that blogging ought to replace traditional forms of academic publishing.

No one is suggesting blogs will or should replace traditional academic discourse. Journals are still alive and well – which is one reason the open access movement is gaining steam, even in legal scholarship.

If anything, blogs bolster the abilities of scholars to do good work in traditional forums – journals, conferences and classrooms – because blogs are conversations with peers, students and (scariest of all) the general public.

This exposure isn’t trivial. If readers like what you say on a blog, they are more likely to read your longer pieces – articles that might otherwise remain obscure and unread even by specialists in the discipline.

It’s also false that blog writing is inherently inferior to journal articles:

If blogging replaces more traditional forms of academic discourse, we lose the ‘sober second thought’ and in depth analysis that comes with researching and writing a peer reviewed paper.

Blogging can’t have in-depth analysis? Not so. That’s up the the author.

It is true that most blogs – even those by academics – are not composed of 50 page treatises where a few original ideas are buried by dozens of footnotes. That’s just as well. Shorter commentaries and serialized essays have value. They can improve writing skills, muse aloud, gather feedback from other scholars, and create communities of academics. As an example, see Brian Leiter’s new legal philosophy blog.

Even better, blog posts can seed larger projects. They offer a form of peer review – something many critics, disillusioned authors and judges say is lacking in legal scholarship, despite the best efforts of 2L student editors who valiantly fix professors’ footnotes.

All this, and on a more timely basis than offered by traditional journals’ publication schedules.

Which leads me to my next point: We need more Michael Geists.

Blogging allows experts to give sage commentary on the news of the day in something more than a sound-bite on the evening news. In blogs, law professors have the opportunity to educate the public about the law, especially in areas of controversy (as with the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the Leo Teskey case). Insofar as blogs have political clout and the attention of media outlets, they also give law professors the opportunity to raise alarms, create awareness about developing legal issues, and spur legal reform.

Try doing all that in a law review article.

For further reading about the pros and cons of academic blogging, here’s a quick round-up:

• Blogging and Academic Research, by Christopher D. Sessums
• The academic contributions of blogging?, by Eszter
• Blogging: Academia’s Digital Divide?, by Fred Stutzman
• The future of Legal Scholarship, a collection of essays at the Pocket Part, an online companion to the Yale Law Journal
• Blogging as Scholarship: The Debate Continues by Ian Best at Law Blog Metrics. See also his excellent bibliography of discussions about academic blogging.
• Smith, D. Gordon, “A Case Study in Bloggership”. Berkman Center for Internet & Society – Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship (Conference Paper). http://ssrn.com/abstract=898178
• (Update: via Slashdot, we have Jakob Neilson’s timely, Write articles, not blog postings.)

Those who disagree with Prof. Billingsley can take a look at one of my first posts to Thought Capital: How to Write an Academic Blog. Law professors, your audience awaits…

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CBC.ca redesign redux: Now (almost) with CBC Aboriginal!

Responding to my post, How to hack the new CBC website, Netvibes sent me an email indicating they’ve created a page full of CBC feed content. Subscribers can personalize it as they wish.

• www.netvibes.com/cbc

You can do much the same thing with iGoogle.

Reaction to the redesign in the blogosphere has been tepid but illuminating. So far, there is broad consensus about getting rid of promotional blocks on the site. Here’s the roundup:

• Peter Rukavena’s thoughtful explanation why CBC’s cross-promotions won’t work.
• Peter Chng gives a good critique of the website.
• Tod Maffin Inside the CBC blogs about the changes, and a CBC web designer responds in the comments.
• Neil Sanderson points out improvements to the Radio portal.
• Shawn hates scrolling to find tiny news headlines.
• Steve Fagstein dislikes the page structure.
• Blake Crosby’s post to Inside the CBC explains skinning the CBC.ca using CSS stylesheets within Firefox.
• In an older post, Ian Ketcheson gives timeless advice about how the site might be improved.

It hurts, but I’ll mention another failure of CBC.ca that is particularly wounding:

Even though the CBC today launched its new web portal, CBC Aboriginal, it has failed to link to it from either its main page or the news page. You have to drill down via into an In Depth feature on Aboriginal Canadians to find a link to it buried in a sidebar, or discover it (as I did) though an independent media advisory.

Why is this important? Today is National Aboriginal Day in Canada. It’s an obscure official holiday, and most Canadians are probably unaware of it. CBC.ca isn’t helping to change that, and appears to be unaware of its own initiatives.

Bravo.

To end on a happier note, I’ll direct you to the CBC Blogwatch, which links news items to blogger reactions.

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Finding stuff in open access repositories

In an earlier post, I said that centralized, national repositories like PubMed Central perform the important service of making scholarship easier to find. I neglected to mention and recommend two resources that allow researchers to search sets of open access repositories. Both of these use the Google Custom Search Engine, which limits the scope of a Google search to specific websites.

Here they are, with deep-links to pages where you can search for articles:

• OpenDOAR (Open Directory of Open Access Repositories)
  
• ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories)
  

You’ve not heard of them but know about PubMed Central? You’ve just made my point.

Visiting either of these, it will quickly become clear that these sites are mostly concerned with the nuts and bolts of the open access movement. Helping researchers find open access materials isn’t the first priority, and that is unfortunate. These directories, if they hope to recruit a wide following, should put more focus on serving up archived papers.

The same goes for you, Directory of Open Access Journals – although of these open access directories you’re the site with the cleanest design.

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What’s wrong with PubMed Central?

There is some modest political debate behind the scenes about whether or not Canada should have the equivalent of PubMed Central, an open access repository for peer-reviewed biomedical science publications. The UK has already done so with UK PubMed Central.

Enter Steven Harnard, whose post to American Scientist Open Access Forum was picked up by the excellent Open Medicine Blog.

Harnard’s essay is less an argument than it is an injunction: Those who fund or host research should require scientists to deposit results in their institutions’ open assess archives. Centralized archiving should be avoided because it confuses researchers and therefore hurts the open access movement.

While I’m on board with the first point, his other claim doesn’t make sense. If there are psychological and administrative barriers to open access archiving, they surely apply to both types of repositories.

More to the point, aside from discouraging researchers to self-archive – a claim for which I can find no supporting evidence – what’s wrong with PubMed Central and similar national repositories? Don’t they do a good job at promoting open access? It is my experience that, at least among younger researchers, resources like PubMed Central create expectations that articles be easily found and openly accessible.

The reason for this is simple. Scientists like PubMed Central because it is the WalMart of medical science. It’s an easy-to-search portal linking to easy-to-access content. Better still, its collection is so comprehensive that it provides a measure of assurance something important hasn’t been missed.

Until there’s an easy way to topically search across distributed depositories, centralization is a good idea. Open access isn’t useful if you can’t easily find the information you want – hence the popularity of Google (which isn’t always the best search tool).

It makes sense that open access should not be voluntary. While researchers love using easily searched and openly accessible archives to fill their bibliographies, they are slower to deposit their work in an open access forum once it is published. If those funding and hosting the research care about its visibility, open access should be a condition of funding.

To make things easier, institutions and academic societies should provide administrative support to make open access publication easier for their researchers. They should also require their researchers to archive their research in the open, wherever an audience might be expected to look for it. This includes:

1. researchers’ own websites
2. universities’ faculty, institute and library websites
3. grant funders’ own repositories
4. government’s central archives and national libraries (e.g. PubMed Central, Library of Congress)
5. topical archives (arXive)
6. academic associations websites

Loading them with RSS feeds would be a bonus.

It is easy to see that the proliferation of repositories has the potential to make things more confusing, and it may especially threaten interdisciplinary ventures when researchers might not be aware of one another. That’s why in Canada and elsewhere, government has a role to play in the creation of centralized archives and indexes which make it easier for information to be found.

While I hope that open access spreads from the medical sciences to other areas of knowledge – including the humanities – I doubt Canada will now take up the challenge. The nation seems to be against access to knowledge both inside and outside its borders.

Postscript:

I received an e-mail asking to clarify some terminology.

PubMed is a web-based search interface allowing open access to citations and abstracts in the MEDLINE database (among others). It is searched using the Entrez search engine.

PubMed Central, on the other hand, is an open access repository of peer-reviewed articles.

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