Tag: Creative Commons

CORE and the Commons: Digital Scholarship, Collaboration, and Open Access in the Humanities

This week it was reported that Berlin-based ResearchGate, a social networking site designed for scientists to share research, received $52.6m in investment funds from a variety of sources, including BIll Gates (previous investor), Goldman Sachs, and The Wellcome Trust. This news is another development in a continuing saga and conversation surrounding commercial services (i.e., ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley) and the companies that own them, managing the scholarly profiles and content of researchers. While ResearchGate promotes a mission of connecting “the world of science and make research open to all,” open access advocates and those working in scholarly communications are quick to point out that these platforms are not open access repositories.

In a blog post from 2015, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association (MLA), pointed out academia.edu, for example, is in no way affiliated with an academic institution despite the .edu domain (they obtained the address prior to the 2001 restrictions). “This does not imply anything necessarily negative about the network’s model or intent,” Fitzpatrick said,  “but it does make clear that there are a limited number of options for the network’s future: at some point, it will be required to turn a profit, or it will be sold for parts, or it will shut down.”

Much like we shouldn’t rely on Instagram to serve as our personal digital photo repository, researchers and academics shouldn’t rely on these commercial platforms for long term preservation of and access to their content. Hence, the work of open access institutional and disciplinary repositories takes on a certain imperative in the scholarly sphere. Those at Humanities Commons recognized this need, and in 2015 launched CORE, the Commons Open Repository Exchange, originally a digital repository for MLA members to share and archive “all forms of scholarly communication, from conference papers to syllabi, published articles to data sets,” now open to anyone who joins Humanities Commons. I spoke with Nicky Agate, Head of Digital Initiatives in the Office of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association to discuss CORE, in light of national attention garnered in a recent Forbes article about the monetization of scholarly writing.

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Are Books Next? About Time!

Jennifer Howard of The Chronicle reports on two heartening developments for academic publishing. One is that a company is providing easy-to-use software for managing digital content for university presses. It has been hard for UPs, which are in most cases very small enterprises with extremely tight budgets, to have the time and resources to develop electronic platforms. Tizra just signed a deal with the Association of American University Presses to host content for participating presses. (And while I’m talking about the AAUP – have you signed up for Books for Understanding? What a great collection development tool!)

Even more exciting, Bloomsbury has launched an academic imprint that will make all of its books available online immediately through a CC license, with print supplied through POD, more expensive per unit than traditional printing, but better suited to titles with small print runs and a small but persistent backlist. They hope to have as many as 50 titles in the humanities and social sciences by the end of 2009. This is a terrific experiment.

“What I believe—and this is what we’re putting to the test—is that as you’re putting something online free of charge, you may lose a few sales, but you’ll gain other sales because more people will know about it,” said Frances Pinter, Bloomsbury Academic’s publisher.

Ms. Pinter, the former publishing director of the Soros Foundation, approached Bloomsbury with the idea. Some research organizations have tried out similar hybrid models, she said, and found them sustainable, even profitable. She cited the example of HSRC Press, the publishing arm of the Human Sciences Research Council, in South Africa. “They have been doing this for a couple of years, and they have seen their sales increase by 240 percent,” Ms. Pinter told The Chronicle. . . .

“I’m tired of the divide between open-access people who have nothing but disdain for publishers, and publishers who don’t really know how to take a few risks and try some new models,” she said. She would like Bloomsbury Academic to demonstrate that publishers can add editorial value to scholarship without having to choose between locking it down or giving it all away.

The National Academies Press has long since proven that online full-text access to books can help sales. OA evangelists in the trade market like Cory Doctorow are convinced it works, even when downloads are free, and it certainly has for him. It’s great to see a publisher bring out books in the humanities and social sciences that are truly OA – because if it works, it could ease some of the anxiety that academic publishers justifiably feel. Too many of them are having to publish large lists of popular titles to subsidize academic books, and it’s stretching them dangerously thin. My feeling is that UPs have a higher purpose not being filled by trade publishers, and asking UPs to be trade publishers as well is a huge mistake when there are plenty of small regional publishers and larger trade houses for that popular material. How ironic that a trade publisher is now picking up the academic role that UPs are struggling to fill.

An advantage that book publishers have over journal publishers is that there still is value added in the printed book. Long form texts are still pleasanter to read on paper, and printing out a 300-page book is a different proposition than a 12-page article. Those truly interested in reading an entire book may well pay the price for the pleasures of print. Bloomsbury is making a wise move, and I’m hoping this development, as well as Tizra’s platform that will nudge AAUP members into the digital age, will bring academic books to a wider audience and strengthen an essential piece of the book trade.

Now: a question for you – are you involved in a library / university press collaboration? How do you feel about the Tizra development? Any thoughts on what Bloomsbury is doing? We’d love to hear news from the trenches.