SansBlogue: Nichthus and Open AccessScholarship

Friday, April 11, 2008

Nichthus was kind enough to reply to my post, replying to his post, with a post. So, at long last because a refugee camp was not the ideal place to formulate a good reply, here is my reply to his reply to my reply.

His concern, reflected in the title "Can we have the cake, and eat it too?" basically seems to be that "open" scholarship does not generate income, and so leaches on the work of others.

I have dealt with some of these broader questions in earlier posts like:

Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Gatekeepers, Open Courseware and the future of the University
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Here's a revelation. Duh!
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
What) does the Web change (in) education?

But my post was concerned not with the whole Education 2.0/Open Scholarship field (or in view of the ill defined, and indeed unbounded, nature of these expressions perhaps "worlds") but with the particular case of scholarly publishing. And even perhaps within that of the scholarly journal. There Nichthus' examples, like big budget movies, are simply not appropriate.

Nick Montfort on Grand Text Auto recently made several of the points that I'd make in reply to Nichthus:

Scholarly and scientific journals differ from many other sorts of publications. Authors are not paid - in some cases, they pay in the form of per-article fees or fees for color illustrations and extra content. Articles are reviewed by other academics who determine if they should be published; these reviewers are also not paid. The work that people do as researchers, writers, and reviewers is effectively subsidized by whatever institution supports these people as faculty, staff, or students. In the case of pay-for-access journals, the same institutions that indirectly pay for important labor on a journal also must pay the for-profit company that runs the journal in order to gain exclusive access (that is, access not available to the public) to the final outcome. This access doesn’t typically come in the form of a print journal these days, of course.

This process is one that I characterize as anti-publication.

I like it! Traditional "for profit" scholarly articles and books are not "publications", but "anti-publications" since they artificially limit their readership.

Labels: open.access.scholarship, publish

¶ 4:04 PM

[to Del.icio.us]

Hi Tim,

This is invaluable - we're exploring perspectives. Thanks so much for your reflections here. As I weakly raise a white flag (out of chronological necessity rather than conviction), let me offer some things that I feel rather more strongly about.

1) Let's not lose the power of peer review, and a means of somehow continuing the status of peer-reviewed conversation.
2) Let's somehow look to reimbursing those whose efforts generate collections of peer-reviewed work.

Just two further observations:

1) At the moment scholars are reimbursed for their scholarly work - by their institutions. If Web 2.0 does succeed in its Web 2.0-based notions of education, this mode of reimbursement will change... and so will means of distribution. Somewhere in my mind grand notions of openness are caught up in this Web 2.0-based education (as opposed to informal learning) nonsense. I am, perhaps, guilty of taking McLuhan's final question (What would the result of this in its extreme be?) too seriously. I do wonder, though, how long it will be before the freedom of the Web 2.0 'economy' is revealed to be smoke and mirrors and we find ourselves as having been exploited in the name of freedom.
2) I still wonder about the extent to which something free is perceived as being of no value. Illich touched on this in "De-schooling society".

Finally, I would like to humbly point out that much of my own scholarly work is, in fact, freely available - including a peer-reviewed set of monographs available from www.flinz.ac.nz and linked to from my blog.

Best regards Tim - and thanks again for the exchange! It's what open scholarship is all about.

Mark.

By Nichthus, at April 11, 2008 5:31 PM

"1) Let's not lose the power of peer review, and a means of somehow continuing the status of peer-reviewed conversation.
2) Let's somehow look to reimbursing those whose efforts generate collections of peer-reviewed work."
Amen and amen! (But how does open publication diminish the likelihood of peer review?)

I wonder a bit when "Web 2.0" is used as if it were a movement with goals and an agenda: "If Web 2.0 does succeed in its Web 2.0-based notions of education, this mode of reimbursement will change... and so will means of distribution."

On taking ideas to their extreme, I guess my difficulty is that I am more practically focused (oddly for someone who likes "big ideas"). How can what we currently have be tweaked to be better? Is the question I have in mind first, and on this issue it seems to me that Open Access Journals are the tweak that can make the system better...

Likewise I think that some of the tools that people attach the label "Web 2.0" too can make collaboration easier/better, and so make part of the educational system better...

By Tim, at April 14, 2008 12:01 PM