Caveat Lector

SPARC and the usual suspects (now there’s a band name for you) are sponsoring an Open Access Day on October 14. There will be videos, local events (MPOW has already said it will be involved), plenty of useful gankable marketing materials, swag, and a blog contest which I tell you right this identical minute I intend to enter (if they’ll let me) and win.

Seriously. Beat me. I double-dawg-dare every single last one of you. (No, of course this post isn’t my entry, stop it!)

In the tradition of the Hi-Fi Sci-Fi Library, I am more than mildly tempted to record my Desultory E-Scholarship Philippic, but I don’t know that Paul Simon would approve, so we’ll let it go.

Anyway, I earnestly hope my academic-libraryland and faculty readers will decide to participate in this. Lend a hand to your local repo-rat!

There’s been a lot of discussion lately of the Davis et al. paper purporting to demonstrate no open-access citation advantage. For the most part, my reaction to it dovetails with Stevan Harnad’s, and I therefore need not opine.

What I find interesting is the chosen scope of study: gold open access. Partly, to be sure, this picks up on Eysenbach’s PNAS paper; if you’re out to disprove somebody (and Davis is a notable OA skeptic), you’d better run a roughly-similar experiment. I do think something else is at work, though, and I’m confident enough about my hunch to predict studies we’ll see in the next five years or so.

It’s simple, really. Toll-access publishers are nervous about gold open access, seeing it as a direct competitor. Heretofore they have not been nervous about green, probably because of green’s low uptake (yes, yes, outside a few disciplines, granted). Ergo we get studies aimed at discrediting a gold-OA citation advantage. I’m certainly not implying that Davis is bought or insincere or anything of that nature, but I am willing to guess that Davis is hearing things from publishers, and has chosen to act on what he hears. I’ll even venture a mild suspicion that the arguably-premature publication of this article might be owed to publisher pressure.

The problem for publishers is that the next front they’ll have to fight on is indeed green open access, from the NIH Public Access Policy to the trickle of campus mandates. (I predict, by the way, that that trickle will remain a trickle for at least three years, and probably five to seven. If the California system had managed to tip the balance, that might have started a flood, but they’ve had to circle around for another go. Dear me, it’s mixed-metaphor day at Caveat Lector, isn’t it?) Probably the most effective way to go after the NIH policy is to exploit faculty fears about variant versions; rather than systematic studies on that front, I expect individual scare-stories about errors in PubMed Central article versions.

It’s when campus mandates start to make inroads that publishers will find themselves in real trouble from a public-relations and spin perspective, precisely because they have ignored, scorned, and winked at green open access so long. Any claim that self-archiving harms them, or harms faculty, will have to make headway against a fair bit of history demonstrating otherwise. I do expect some studies trying to debunk a green-OA citation advantage… but, honestly? They’re going to be hard to design to create the publisherly-correct outcome, if the trajectory of Roach Motel is any indication.

Should be an interesting few years.

Something is changing. Not to get mystical on all y’all, but I do smell something in the air, and for once it’s not cow leavings. (What? I live in Wisconsin.)

I heard through the grapevine that open access in general and institutional repositories in particular got quite a bit of exposure at ALA. I saw a librarian or two at MPOW regarding me with a little more than “what is that person doing here?” afterwards.

As I recounted, I made another librarian convert last week. This week, I’m meeting with a librarian from engineering to discuss some working papers. This morning, I answered a cataloguer’s email about green and gold open access.

Librarianship takes a while to assimilate new ideas. Academic librarianship tends to be slower still, and academic librarianship at large institutions, positively snail-paced. I have been known to utter the sentence “I love librarians except when I hate them.” This is why.

Still, open access seems to be water-cooler talk at MPOW. That’s optimistic.

Last week’s brief annoyed expostulation gave me to think about the kinds of things it is possible to say in academic research vis-a-vis the kinds of things I need to say when I write for the profession.

Take Roach Motel. It’s not research. I would be laughed out of the room, and rightly so, if I tried to present it as such. It’s not based on experimental methodology, qualitative or quantitative; it doesn’t ask a question and try to answer it. Roach Motel is a polemic, supported by an odd assortment of anecdote, observation, ad-hoc systems analysis, and other people’s research. Why? Because that’s what I needed to write, and what I thought other people needed to read. I’ll take my lumps when I’ve been sloppy—in fact, I already have. But I’m not sorry for what Roach Motel is; even before publication, it has been reshaping the conversation around institutional repositories in ways that I think are healthy and necessary. It’s not research, but it’s useful writing nonetheless.

In other words, not all human progress cometh from the research enterprise. Problem is, “research” is the only thing the academy respects. I’m a pretty good polemicist, if I do say so myself. I could train myself to be an adequate researcher, but in the process I’d lose what little claim I have to being an effective writer, an effective actor in the professional world.

Frankly, the research straitjacket constrains too many researchers into asking completely uninteresting and unimportant questions, because those are the only questions that proper “research” can answer. There are a lot of examples of this in repository-related research. If we sat around waiting for the researchers to tell us how to run repositories, we’d be waiting for one hell of a long time… and the answers we’d get would be tangential at best and useless at worst. To answer this question, we need a community of practice communicating honestly within itself, and the occasional polemicist to cut through accreted layers of conventional wisdom and kick-start discussions.

So, you know, I am what I am. I answer the questions I can answer. I write what seems useful to me to write. I don’t do research; that’s just not my idiom (in the Pythonesque sense). This means that I really just don’t belong in the academy.

Because this came up elseweb…

The medieval torture device arm-massage gizmo called the Armaid is back in active production. Based on my own experience, I can endorse this thing, odd though it does look. It gets at a lot of the muscles whose tightness tickles up my nerves in bad ways. It’s better with the lower arm than the upper, but it can do some upper-arm work.

It’s not a substitute for a real physical therapist or trigger-point massage expert. If you’re in serious pain, find one of these folks to straighten you out. For keeping yourself in good trim afterwards, though, it’s a decent investment. I keep mine at work, for the occasional bad day.

Once upon a time there was a graduate student. No, there really was: a deluded and foolish graduate student with strange notions about academia, such as the unaccountable belief that academia was a just and fair place that did well by its disciples. No, I don’t know where these people pick that nonsense up. If I did, it would be a different world.

Anyway, one of the things this graduate student learned to do in graduate school was transcribe manuscripts and incunabula in a halfway-diplomatic fashion, because the institution she attended published microfilmed and computerized versions of same. In the course of a project she did for that institution, she had occasion to use one of those computerized texts to investigate questions of historical linguistics… and the penny dropped. My, this computerized-text business was useful. One can do concordances on the fly, do investigations that would take years if one had only the printed word to go by. Computers! Text! The possibilities are endless!

And then she crashed and burned. Because academia is a hellpit, at least in the humanities, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

So the ex-graduate student, after a few months’ temping and trying to work out for herself what the hell had just happened, landed a job at a local publishing-services bureau, a little place that did editing and typesetting and project management for scholarly presses. Because of her experience doing manuscript transcription, the management decided to throw her into the deep end of the SGML pool and see whether she sank or swam.

She swam. SGML relit all the endless possibilities of computerized text that she’d dimly sensed in graduate school. Elegance! OHCOs! TEI! MathML—okay, that wasn’t elegant, but you can’t win them all. (We shall speak not of ISO 12083, which had all the elegance of a bucket-seeking walrus.) She converted whole dictionaries with regular-expression-fu. She wrote DTDs. She slowly and fumblingly learned to write a few lines of Python. And she had a grand old time, and felt wonderful about what she was learning and doing, and healed some of the raw and painful wounds left by academia.

Two technologies burst upon the scene then: XML and ebooks. With her unerring gift for backing the wrong horse, the ex-graduate-student, now a conversion peasant, became (somehow; the “how” is a bit vague even in hindsight) a leading expert in ebook content standards and creation. This did her good when a neurotic ex-boss forced her to a parting of the ways with her workplace; she quickly landed another position with an ebook company. Alas, that was not to be either. A scant year later, she dropped a resignation on the appropriate desk and ran like a rabbit.

Right, she said to herself. This is ridiculous. Serendipity is all very well and I’m very grateful to it, but how about a little intentional progress here? So the ex-conversion-peasant ensconced herself as a data-entry drudge, pride never having been a besetting sin of hers, and did some thinking about what came next. She had, still, a love for computers and text, and an abiding belief that the combination of the two would be world-changing. She did not have a love for publishers, because they certainly didn’t share her love, for all they proclaimed aloud to be devoted to the written word.

And the rest? Is in the blog archives.

I had an oddly productive week at work this week. I’m not complaining, seeing as how most weeks I walk home thinking “what am I doing here, why can’t I get anything done, and what bloody use am I to anybody anyway?”

(Yeah. It’s just about that bad, most weeks. Have I mentioned that being a repository-rat is an uncommonly demoralizing job? I have? Oh, good.)

This week was not like that. This week I was included on a lunch with not one but two associate deans, and I managed to say reasonably intelligent things and plug not just the repository, not just my colleagues’ work on the scholarly-communication committee, but also a nascent ETD effort that I’m (miraculously) quite hopeful about.

This week the repo passed 7000 items. And yeah, I got a shrug and a mumble about that from a high-level library administrator, and yeah, that’s uncommonly demoralizing, but still—I did it, it’s done, and now I can work on the next thousand. (Eight hundred and fifty-some, actually.) What’s better is that even by the Les Carr metric, I am improving. More stuff is trickling in from more people at more campuses. Holy hell, it has been a slow process, but something is happening.

This week I introduced the repo to a colleague in the library. Here I am actually going to praise DSpace: starting from nothing, I had a new community and collection up, a new eperson added and assigned submitter rights, and the first item ingested with her watching, within about twenty minutes. She now (in her own words) “gets what the repository is about” and will be an advocate. I couldn’t be happier about that.

And this week I finally made enough noise to make a dent in the DSpace development process. Having been more or less dared to put my effort where my kvetches are, I started an ad-hoc, informal “hey, DSpace repo managers; let’s get together and talk about stuff” process—and what the hell do you know, people got together and talked about stuff. Not a huge wave of people, but given the disaffection toward the DSpace development process I’ve seen, twenty people giving up an hour for an online chat is pretty damn decent. With a little bit of luck, the numbers will grow over time, a coherent user constituency will arise that devs will have no choice but to listen to, and DSpace and its long-suffering userbase will be better for it. I’ll drink to that.

My other hat at the moment is my teaching hat, and that has kicked into high gear this week too, seeing as how they’ve GONE AND FILLED UP MY CLASS OMGWTFBBQ. Yeah. Um, sorry. Slightly nervous about this. More than slightly. For one thing, I think the buzz for my class has probably outstripped my ability to deliver. For another, what worked with eleven students is going to be a struggle for forty. (FORTY. OMGWTFBBQ.) I think I have a syllabus that will work, and thanks to Jason Griffey, the final project is much, much better than last year’s… but we’ll see. I hope people don’t think I walk on water, because sploosh.

There’s a whole ’nother can of worms about teaching, involving rules intended to prevent the exploitation of adjuncts which actually prevent anything like “clinical faculty” from existing, but bah, I’m tired and ambivalent about the whole thing anyway and not going to explain it right now. Suffice to say this may be the last time I get to teach the class… but it may not be, either. Gears are grinding, wheels are turning, and all I can do is teach the best I can and await the outcome.

On the whole, though? A good week.

I expect Open Access News will pick this up shortly, but until they do…

This is a puzzlement, and a worrisome one. An outfit calling itself Scientific Journals International (no linklove from me) is winding up for a punch at Richard Poynder, among others.

I’ve had my differences with Poynder, but that doesn’t stop me respecting him and his excellent work as open-access chronicler. My take on this is that SJI is not a legitimate operation (however much they might like to be, something on which the jury may still be out) and is resorting to bullying tactics in response to Poynder’s transparently-conducted and legitimate attempts to figure out what’s up with SJI.

And if saying so makes me the target of an SJI lawsuit, well, so be it. If there’s something I can do to help Poynder resist this grandstanding and see that the truth comes out, I’ll be happy to.

The JISC-funded Repository Support Project just put up a list of repository-related weblogs, organized by type of authorship.

I’m embarrassed to say how many of these I didn’t know about (I’m on a mass-subscription kick this very moment!), and very grateful to JISC for undertaking this. Such things as this foster the community of practice repositories and their staff need so very badly.

I don’t often do quote-and-link posts. (Quote-and-argue posts, yes.) Sometimes, though, it’s just necessary, because some words need to get out, and my audience wouldn’t necessarily normally read them.

We all know that I love anthropologists. They have an uncanny ability to come along and do something brilliant just when I’m ready to throw in the towel on open access. They have done it again, with this offprint of an article in Cultural Anthropology. For your delectation, some quotes:

Christopher Kelty: My point is only that publishers and scholarly societies have become large, bureaucratic organizations sedimented in their modes of doing things, sometimes for good reasons (stability, reliability), sometimes for bad (tradition, fear, self-interest). Free Software… (and the Open Access movements as well) force us to ask once more, and in detailed ways, what are scholarly societies for? Why did we create them? What do they do for us as scholars and as citizens, and what reasons do they have for existing?

Yes, well, welcome to libraryland and its discontents. Why should scholarly societies be immune? It does warm the cockles of my sad little heart to know that I’m not the only person asking her professional society to justify its continued existence.

Jason Baird Jackson: Open Access has special moral relevance for anthropology and related disciplines because we have “source communities” that we are responsible to… The AAA’s provision of access to tribal and historically black colleges is a worthy gesture, but it does almost nothing to actually make our work accessible to the incredible diversity of source communities that anthropologists work with. A gold Open Access journal or a robust repository effort would get much closer to solving the “obligation to those we study” problem.

This is a variant on the “taxpayers contribute, so they deserve access” argument that deserves wider consideration in my not-terribly-humble opinion. The relevance in human clinical trials is obvious, but it goes in my little neck of the woods too. I’ve done a hella lot of surveys and interviews in my time as a librarian. I still haven’t read some of those papers.

Tom Boellstorff: In terms of value creation (and thus where money should be paid), Open Access can take the emphasis off the “product” (completed journal articles) and put it on the “process”—it shows that the real value of journals lies in the work contributed by peer reviewers and editors, not the printers who make the physical copies.

Or the pixel-based copies. I have a quibble with this, and its name is “text artisanry,” but in the main, I’m behind it. Editors and peer reviewers do contribute more than printers, and even (loath though I am to admit it) text artisans.

Christopher Kelty: And these are primarily issues of governance and sustainability to which the AAA always asks “where will the revenue come from?” To me, however, this is a problem of carts and horses: you can’t ask the question about revenue and sustainability until you can clearly tell your members—or foundations, or granting agencies, or citizens—what it is you do, and why you should be paid to do it. No one owes scholarly societies anything; no one owes the AAA anything; no one owes the AAA sections anything…

That one had me cheering loudly. Libraries are doing a lot of painful navel-gazing, and sure, sometimes it gets a bit self-obsessed and shrill, but it’s necessary. I still hear publisher after publisher, society after society, thinking they have a $DEITY-given right to exist and to plunder library serials budgets. Well, they don’t. Sorry.

Jason Baird Jackson: I’d like my efforts to help sustain the AAA, but the association’s interests are now more congruent with those of the publishing industry, not my library or the university presses. As a result the interests of my ethnographic consultants, my university library, my students, and my colleagues are increasingly in conflict with those of my professional society.

The problem is that our beloved, established journals have become deeply embedded in the structures of for-profit, toll access publishing. Charting a path for the main AAA journals program is daunting, because the financial future of the association, including of its paid staff, are at stake above and beyond the hegemony of industry interests.

Yes. The stubborn tendency of scholarly societies to offer tacit and sometimes not-so-tacit support to Elseviley Verlag, when it’s Elseviley Verlag cutting off their air supply too, would baffle me except that I understand it’s a matter of perceived congruence in business model. Faculty (writ large) have thus far allied with their scholarly societies on this, which is a problem for both green and gold open access.

Christopher Kelty: All of the editors that I have worked with have been very level headed about going open access, it hasn’t been hard to convince any of them (the hard part is convincing the lawyers and the accountants). If libraries paid to publish research, rather than paying subscription fees to buy it back from journals, then the editors would be freed up to innovate in new ways… On the other hand, such editors have to spend all their time convincing their management, their accounting, their trustees, and most of all their legal departments that this intangible value will translate into a revenue stream. Change the definition of the value stream and there may well be money to be made in university presses, if editors could go back to innovating, rather than defending a broken business model.

Yes, yes, a million times yes… but try to get a library administrator or university press editor to understand this. (Also key is that we’d be paying this to our own, not to Elseviley Verlag which, frankly, no longer deserves our trust.)

Read the whole thing. Seriously. There’s gold in there I didn’t mine.

I’m also reading and enjoying Christopher Kelty’s new book on free software, its cultural significance, and its descendants. Give it a whirl too.