Open Access

Experiencing the Shift

I spent a few days last week at a fascinating conference called MobilityShifts held at The New School in NYC (full disclosure: I was also a presenter). The tagline for the conference is An International Future of Learning Summit, which I definitely found true: attendees from all over the world ranged from faculty and administrators to publishers, students, activists, and librarians, and were interested in education at all levels. It would be impossible for me to do justice to all of the great talks and panels I experienced at the conference, but here are some notes on a few that piqued my interest that seemed especially relevant to academic librarians.

John Willinsky (founder of the Public Knowledge Project which created Open Journal Systems for publishing open access journals) gave a wonderful talk about open access publishing. He made the distinction between two kinds of intellectual property: content produced by scholars and researchers, and content produced by commercial and entertainment entities (with frequent use of Lady Gaga as an example of the latter). Willinsky asked us to consider why copyright for these two types of intellectual property is treated identically. He suggested that there is a strong historical and legal basis for open access in scholarly journals: information produced by universities is a public good, as demonstrated by the tax-exempt status of academic institutions. Further, the information that researchers produce only increases in value when it circulates and is critically reviewed, and open access increases the circulation of scholarly information. With Open Access Week practically around the corner, I’m looking forward to sharing what I learned at Willinsky’s talk during the faculty workshops we’re planning at my library.

I was very pleased to have the opportunity to hear Michael Wesch speak — I’ve been a big fan since seeing the video he made in 2007 with his undergraduate anthropology students at Kansas State University, A Vision of Students Today. Wesch focused his talk on student engagement, beginning by juxtaposing a photo of 400 bored-looking students in a lecture course with one of excited young people at auditions for American Idol. College students are seeking ways to create their own identities and find recognition, which the mainstream media are all too happy to provide. He noted that in the past media critics like Neil Postman criticized television for being a one-way medium, but now we have the ability to both create content and to talk back — it’s no longer just a top-down information stream. Wesch suggested that we encourage students to ask questions and talk back (both critical aspects of information literacy), and show them that these actions are relevant to creating their own identity and making meaning in their lives.

Like most conferences, the overwhelming majority of the speakers were faculty, administrators, and other professionals — that is, adults. So I was delighted to have the opportunity to attend a panel titled Open Education: A Student Perspective, and listen to the voices of four articulate students from The New School. Open access publishing was one dominant theme in this session. One student spoke passionately about the frustration that accompanied his inability to access scholarly information in databases when he had taken time off from his studies. Another wondered about the oxymoron of students who depend on piracy and copyright infringement to get materials that they need (or want), at the same time as the university has to take steps against it. The high prices charged by textbook publishers were also questioned, especially for materials for K-12 education. These students were an interesting counterpoint to the students Wesch discussed; they’re highly engaged in their own education, and curious about why educational policies and practices so often default to closed when arguably one of the purposes of higher education is to open and broaden knowledge and worldview.

The conference also featured “short talks,” 10 minute presentations grouped by theme. Among the many I heard, one from Xtine Burrough, Communication professor at Cal State Fullerton, stands out as particularly information literacy-friendly. She asks her students to remix and respond to the copyright infringement case Lenz v. Universal. In 2008 Stephanie Lenz was served with a takedown notice by Universal for posting a video to YouTube in which her then-toddler is shown dancing to a brief snippet of the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy,” and decided to fight back (she’s being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation). Burrough’s students create videos using the same 29 seconds of the song and upload them to YouTube as a response to Lenz’s original post. And of course even this assignment has gone viral, and there are many video responses from people who aren’t students in Burrough’s classes.

There are so many moving parts to the education ecosystem that it’s easy to stick to just the topics we know best or spend the most time thinking about. This was the first non-library conference I’ve been to in ages, and it was fascinating to step outside of my library bubble and listen to/learn from the other presenters and attendees. It’s going to take a while for me to digest everything I’ve taken in over the past few days, but I’m finding myself with lots to think on about the place of libraries in education.

Why I’m Not In The Mood To Celebrate Open Access Week

It’s Open Access Week, a time to “present the individual and collective benefits of free online access to research”. It’s a time to celebrate the many accomplishments and progress made on the scholarly communications front. And some of those accomplishments are indeed significant: SPARC; OA resolutions at a growing number of institutions; NIH policy requiring the public sharing of taxpayer-paid research; the possibilities for FRPPA; expanding numbers of open access journals; a growing number of fringe faculty who are speaking up about the inequities and failures of the current journal publishing system. There is some cause for optimism. There’s a lot going on this week based on my visit to the OA Week site. You can even buy an OA t-shirt.

So excuse me if I’m not in the mood to celebrate. I’m feeling frustrated. What else can you feel when the system is broken, you know that system must change, but there is little incentive for those perpetuating the system to change it for the better. This might be the first time I’ve posted about scholarly publishing (I have shared thoughts about the textbook publishing system here). Scholarly communications is in my current work portfolio and I take it seriously. But it is one small part of a much larger set of responsibilities for projects and initiatives across the spectrum of public, research and instruction services. So I’m hardly an expert, and compared to others I haven’t the time to dive deeply into all the issues and conversation. At best, I’m simply on the front lines trying to promote new possibilities in scholarly communications.

A few months ago I visited colleagues at another ARL library. At some point the conversation got around to scholarly communications and open access. I asked what they were working on, and how they were trying to create change on their campus. The response was something along the lines of “We tried all that a few years ago, and quite honestly none of our faculty showed any interest in changing their scholarly publishing behaviors. So now we’re just putting our energy elsewhere. When they are ready to change we’ll be here waiting to support them”. I wonder how many others have reached the same point.

To better understand our academic departments and their needs, I have an ongoing project of visiting department chairs (a few each semester). We simply have a discussion about their department, the library and how we might better serve their faculty and students. Our head of reference and instruction attends as well as the librarian who is the liaison to the department. Sometimes the chair invites other faculty or possibly a student to attend and participate. It is always a good conversation, and we learn quite a bit from each other. But when the conversation invariably turns to scholarly communications, I tend to feel more like a traveling salesmen speaking to a potential customer who really wants to get away from me. I wouldn’t even dare show my faculty colleagues something like this – as helpful as it may be – for fear of never being taken seriously again.

The good news is that most of the chairs and faculty I encounter are aware of the open access movement. Most aren’t really paying it much attention. I bring up the benefits, talk up the importance of public access – and remind them about our own walled garden. No one is opposed to open access publishing, they just don’t want to be the ones doing it. As I’ve now heard more than once, “I’m all for providing public access to my research, but what matters most – more than the possibility of thousands of hits on Google – is knowing that the 200 people that matter the most in my discipline read my article in our most prestigious journal – and that’s not going to happen if I publish in an open access journal in my field.” They also remind me that our institution’s tenure and merit process are quite clear about the importance of publishing in top tier, high attention-attracting journals.

I know there are some interesting new ideas about open access floating around out there, and Barbara mentions some of them here. Dorothea Salo shares some as well in an informative podcast interview with Roy Tennant. For much of the conversation Salo expresses her frustration with our lack of progress in creating change. Some things are beyond our control, but in other ways we can do better. For example, she says that we are at fault for poor communication that fails to make faculty aware of “the very real inequities and difficulties that their own behaviors cause.” Well, when I try do that I hit the brick wall of having faculty point at the current system, and acknowledging that it may be broken but they don’t want to be the ones to change it because it will potentially cost them their chance at tenure, a thousand dollar merit increase or a promotion to a more prestigious university. The Tennant-Salo interview ends on a more hopeful note with Salo seeing some signs that higher education (faculty bloggers, the occasional essay in IHE or the Chronicle) is starting to question the current system. I am feeling less optimistic.

These ideas are worth reading and thinking about, but any new ideas for fixing the broken publishing system must take into account the disciplinary prestige factor. If it fails to provide an adequate substitute for it, then the majority of faculty will not buy into that new system. My hope now is that the best prospects for widespread change in the scholarly publishing world will have to wait until the current crop of millennial students are the dominant faculty. I have to believe the current generation of college students, with their better grasp of a social Internet, will refuse to support our current closed system. The other scenario for change is something we recently had a glimpse of in this article that discussed the impact of shrinking library budgets on scientists’ access to the journal literature. When our academic libraries no longer have the funding to sustain the current system, except perhaps for the few elite institutions that could afford it, faculty may then take notice that the current system is broken. They may then be motivated to accept that an open access journal could meet their need for prestige and merit.

I find all this particularly frustrating because I am a believer in the power of design thinking to help us come up with solutions to what is referred to as a wicked problem – something with no obvious or possible solution because the problem is ambiguous and shifting in nature. In an essay I wrote about design thinking I used the scholarly communications crisis as my example of the wicked problem and how we needed to turn option A and option B – neither of which solves the problem – into the more workable option C (a process referred to Roger Martin as “integrative thinking“). But I fail to see how even a design thinking approach can get us out of the scholarly publishing mess if the players in the system, as currently structured, mostly fail to acknowledge that we’ve got a wicked problem. In order for a design thinking approach to work we need to agree that there is a problem, and then we can begin to go through the process to identify a solution. I continue to get the old “it is what it is” response, as if this is the way it has to be and there are no possible solutions worth exploring.

Despite my current frustrations over the difficulty in getting faculty excited about the possibilities for change in scholarly publishing I’m not about to give up on it entirely. That’s not just because it’s part of my job, but I inherently believe it’s the right position to take on the issues. I hope that when I next post about scholarly communications I’ll have more reason to get in the spirit of Open Access Week.

Accountability and Open Access

Hey, have you heard there’s a recession on? (Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.) It’s nearly impossible to avoid news from all sectors–including higher education–about the continued economic challenges facing the country. Stories about funding difficulties for both public and private institutions, rising tuition, and declining endowments fill news outlets daily. And of course academic libraries (like libraries of all types) are feeling the budget pinch, too.

Often we focus on the economics of our libraries (i.e., fallout from the serials crisis) when we discuss open access publishing with other faculty and administrators at our institutions. Last week in the class I’m teaching my students and I discussed scholarly communication. I’m a strong supporter of open access publishing, and it was great to have the opportunity to see these issues through the eyes of my students. They were genuinely surprised to find that the results of scholarly research are often so difficult to access for those outside of academe.

After my class discussion I was particularly struck by one aspect of the economics of open access: accountability. It’s likely that as the effects of the recession continue to be felt over the next few years, the calls for accountability in higher education budgets will grow more insistent. Open access advocates can use this situation to highlight the advantages of OA scholarly journals. Broad access to and wide dissemination of the research and scholarship happening at colleges and universities can provide visible proof of the relevance of higher education.

Increased access to research can also bring positive publicity to our institutions. The importance of research is growing even at institutions that have traditionally focused on teaching, and recruiting and retaining talented faculty is crucial. Widespread good publicity can also help attract students, and especially highlighting increasing opportunities for student research. Many institutions run ads in the local media promoting their scholars and programs. Wouldn’t it be great if prospective students could easily find and read about some of the research going on in those programs?

While it’s hard to say whether discussions of accountability will, in and of themselves, win the open access movement many new converts, I think accountability is a valuable addition to the growing list of arguments in favor of open access publishing.

Gone Camping

It’s summertime, so last week I packed my bag and headed off to camp: LibCampNYC, a library unconference held at Brooklyn College, CUNY.

This was the first unconference I’d ever attended, having narrowly missed out on signing up for Library Camp NYC in 2007. One of the defining features of an unconference is its loose structure. I have to admit that I came into the day somewhat skeptical that the model would actually work, that 100+ people would be able to plan the day’s events on the fly first thing in the morning. While the organizers had done some pre-planning, arranging the topics proposed by participants on the preconference wiki into clusters of similar themes, the 4-5 sessions that ran in each timeslot were determined by the entire group. It was amazing to watch the schedule coalesce right before our eyes.

I went to four sessions over the course of the day, opting to stay in each one rather than move around. Lots of interesting things were discussed:

In the How should we handle the dinosaur known as the reference desk? session, the point was made that at academic libraries students may not feel comfortable approaching the reference desk when it’s not crowded because the librarian on duty looks busy, and students don’t want to interrupt. On the Twitter backchannel, bentleywg shared that his library places signs in front of the librarians’ computers on the ref desk that read “Please Interrupt Me.” Such a great idea!

I co-facilitated Information literacy instruction and strategies, and I was especially pleased that so many public librarians came to that session. It was so interesting to learn about the variety of opportunities that public librarians have to teach their patrons, from kids through adults, aspects of information literacy. I’ve often wondered about how my library could partner with the public library, since we only have our students for four years and public libraries have them for the rest of their lives (but that’s probably a topic for another post).

The Open access session was fairly free-form, with discussion on the topic ranging far and wide. Advocacy was a recurring thread, especially how academic librarians can educate faculty about open access on their campuses. One of the most interesting suggestions was to engage students in advocacy, as discussed at the SPARC session on this topic at ALA’s Midwinter meeting in 2008. For example, Students for Free Culture, a multi-campus organization, seems like a great partner for librarians working on OA issues.

The final session I attended was Critical pedagogy/critical information literacy, a topic I’m very interested in though just starting to read and learn about. A big theme in this discussion was the “tyranny of the one-shot,” with many librarians chewing over how to bring critical pedagogies to a library session that may be restricted to as little as 45 minutes.

The day went by in a flash and was great fun. My only small frustration was that the sessions seemed too short. By the time the participants said a few words introducing ourselves and expressing our interest in the topic and the conversation really got going, the session time was nearly half gone. But it’s also true that longer sessions = fewer sessions, and I wouldn’t have wanted to drop any of the four that I attended.

Longer sessions would also have allowed for more space to accommodate the variety of experience with and interest in a topic that everyone brought to the sessions. And while I do think that this diversity of perspective added depth to our discussions, sometimes a conversational thread that was interesting to me was snipped short and I wished we had more time to for it. But of course that’s the spirit of an unconference, that the program evolves continuously. And that made the event one of the most exciting and learning-filled professional events that I’ve ever attended.

But I think that what I valued most about LibCampNYC was the ability to connect with librarians from across the profession. I spend most of my time with academic librarians, and it was great to have the opportunity to learn from my colleagues in public, special, medical, and other libraries. I also appreciated the diversity in experience — the mix of both newer and more seasoned librarians in addendance. And of course this was much more participatory than a typical conference, because the program and topics were determined by all of us, together.

If you’re interested in reading the session notes, you can find them on the LibCampNYC wiki. I can’t wait to go library camping again!

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 believeâ€”and this is what we’re putting to the testâ€”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.