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?
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.I like it! Traditional "for profit" scholarly articles and books are not "publications", but "anti-publications" since they artificially limit their readership.
This process is one that I characterize as anti-publication.
Labels: open.access.scholarship, publish
¶ 4:04 PM
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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
like this one Cornelius Reid — “That’s what kept him going.” It's a lovely, thought-provoking, post, but the short clip of Cornelius makes it come alive. Definitely a blog I'll subscribe to, who knows, one day I may comment, and one of my comments may help Ashton tweak some aspect of her ideas and so her book. Now that's a fine project: a worthwhile, valuable, interesting blog; where the comments and email correspondences that a blog attracts will assist the writer with her project, not only that but as the author explained to Ben in an email, it could even make commercial sense:
I also think i'll end up with a valuable platform for leveraging and disseminating my work over the long run — one that could radically revise conventional notions of shelf life. Cutting Loose, my book about women and divorce (HarperCollins, 1997) is still in print; imagine what sales would look like if it were at the hub of an ongoing social network, and what a rich site that would be?The early adopter in me, however, wonders - just a little - what the point of the print edition will be... especially in the light of all the rave reviews of Amazon's proprietary (lock you in to us as your supplier), pay as you go (even for "converting" your own PDFs), expensive (and not even available) Kindle over at Lifehacker ;)
Labels: age, audio, media, publish
¶ 5:43 PM
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Like so many in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I thought the Web wouldSo, the one time author of a manifesto "Piracy Is Your Friend" now admits "I was wrong. We were all wrong." He also writes:
increase business opportunities for writers and artists. Instead they
have decreased. Most of the big names in the industry — Google,
Facebook, MySpace and increasingly even Apple and Microsoft — are
now in the business of assembling content from unpaid Internet users to
sell advertising to other Internet users....
There’s an almost religious belief in the Valley that charging
for content is bad. The only business plan in sight is ever more
advertising. One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone
is aggregated.
To help writers and artists earn a living online, software engineersIt is an exaggeration, there are other factors at work (as I have argued in "Back to the Future: Virtual Theologising as Recapitulation" Colloquium, 2005, 37,2, 115-130.), but it is an exaggeration that points towards truth. If the digerati agreed, and convinced the big holders of "content" the movie distributors, TV companies, music labels, "timeless" magazine publishers (things like National Geographic and others whose content does not date fast)... we could have a system that allows a very small charge to access, widespread acceptance, and the new age of digital creativity could begin.
and Internet evangelists need to exercise the power they hold as
designers. Information is free on the Internet because we created the
system to be that way.
In the mean time we are stuck with more and more intrusive advertising or with producing "labours of love" in our "spare time" :(
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Hi Tim,
I've got to admit that I am starting to feel some discomfort about 'free' on the Web. It is an unsustainable future, particularly if we value quality of content and the efforts of those who need to be reimbursed in order to contribute their work. How long before we see the Web 2.0 crash? How long until adopting various free Web 2.0 technologies becomes too risky to justify for institutions such as ours, because the server could be pulled offline at any time?
I'm continuing to wonder... Revenue streams from *free* services is likely to become a major issue in the years ahead.
By Nichthus, at
November 30, 2007 9:20 AM
Hi, Mark,
Web 0.95 in the Dot Com bust demonstrated that "free" is not a viable business model. Up to now the only real alternative though is advertising. This (it seems from where I sit) could go two very different ways:
(i) people become inured to ubiquitous adverts, which therefore get more subtle (in order to be "seen") and we cease to be able to distinguish ad from editorial (to use old media terms)
(ii) people continue to hate them and move from trying to ignore them to doing like my son and installing effective ad-blockers - in which case the "model" fails
Both have already begun... but micro-payments are still not on the horizon...
By Tim, at
November 30, 2007 9:54 AM
PS, there is no necessary connection between Web 2.0 and "free" one could have user-generated content, etc. in a subscription system IF ONLY people/we could learn to pay for services online ;-)
By Tim, at
November 30, 2007 9:56 AM
I have only begun to digest it, so intend here simply to quote some of the phrases and ideas that seem to me to be most interesting and important (initially drawn from the "Executive Summary" as representing a distillation of the full content), and sometimes to comment on them. My goal is that those of my readers with an interest Which mainly means academics and students, or others with an interest in the future of academic publishing - which probably ought to mean most of my readers! either are stimulated to read the report for themselves and comment directly, or make comments here. The essential is that this report gets discussed!
Let's start at the beginning:
My take on the first point is that Universities (on the whole with a few, largely historic exceptions) have found presses to be good money-losing opportunities, and have failed to notice that "scaling back" their activity risks stultifying the whole academic scene through the commercialisation of academic publishing. I think my second point comments closely on their final careful phrase![u]niversities do not treat the publishing function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. Publishing generally receives little attention from senior leadership at universities and the result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.
They note that academics "publish" in two ways, formally and through what they term "grey literature" (an odd phrase since the examples they give are far less grey than the average peer-reviewed monograph! But let's notice with the report what this means:
In other words "take your heads out of the sand people, academic publishing is going through a revolution - whether you like it or not", and that for me is the key point, the revolution WILL happen, the only question is who will be left standing afterwards!
What will this revolution look like:
That was the good news. Now for the sting in the tail:
Yes, people, this brave new world may be digital and electronic and cool, but lets make sure that scholars do not get their inky hands on the levers of power or horror of horrors learn to take control of their own work. We administrators, along with senior librarians who have learned across the years to "speak our language" are better able to decide the future of academic publishing, so we must make sure scholars do not worry their pointy heads about it. They might rock the boat.... At least I think that's what this sentence means:
Noticed how relevancy and institutional commitment amount to much the same thing?
Oh! Important: yes. Revolutionary: certainly. But really deep down possibly counter-revolutionary... I intend to read more closely over the next few days (marking permitting) so watch this space!
Labels: education, open.access.scholarship, publish
¶ 9:11 PM
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AKMA's post "Rice Univ. Press Has A Clue" points to an Inside Higher Ed article "New Model for University Presses". That succinctly outlines the problem from an academic's perspective:
The article refers to the Ithaca report “University Publishing in a Digital Age,” which has been sitting on my desktop for a few days gathering...press editors freely admit that they routinely review submissions that deserve to be books, but that can’t be, for financial reasons.
Basically Rice University Press is trying a "new model" Long Tail Press which will publish (electronically with print on demand for tyhose who demand it!) works that have passed the required peer review processes but cannot be "published" for economic reasons.
Now, why is this NEWS? I suppose because no one else had the courage to try it.
And, how will a Long Tail book, once PODed, be different from a "proper" monograph? Ah, yes money, real scholarship makes a profit, only second rate scholarship is true, clever, accurate, new but fails to make a profit!
Labels: not.funny, not.satire, peer-review, publish
¶ 9:20 AM
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No one else has had the courage to try it??? You're kidding, right? I've been railing about EXACTLY this for several years now and just the other day mentioned the fact that the University of Goettingen is doing precisely what you say Rice is now considering (not to mention that the school with which I am affiliated as an Adjunct has been using electronic and print on demand for three years!).
It is decidedly incorrect to laud Rice for doing what others have been doing as though they have just come up with it out of the blue. Rubbish.
By 
Jim, at
August 1, 2007 10:08 AM
Thanks, Jim, it's good to be corrected when one risks a small exaggeration! You are right, one or two people have begun to try such a model.
The points my hyperbole intended to make were that:
the "system" of academic publishing is in crisis,
the mix of electronic publication and PoD offers a simple, neat, easy and cheap solution.
So, why is someone trying it "news"?
By Tim, at
August 2, 2007 9:53 AM
Tim be sure to check out the latest sbl forum. they barely touch on the topic. but maybe, just maybe it's a start.
By Jim, at
August 4, 2007 2:44 AM
