Caveat Lector

A friend of mine, wholly unconnected with academia or libraries or scholarly publishing, IMed me last night about Harvard’s bold faculty-governance move. “This will make waves, won’t it?” he asked.

I hope so. I surely do hope so. This could change the Great Game in repository managers’ favor. I am in complete agreement with T. Scott Plutchak that this could turn out bigger than the NIH public-access policy. Peter Suber has good commentary as usual. I want to reproduce the text, because I know I have readers who don’t read Peter. (I have no idea why this is and it makes no sense to me, but there you are.)

On behalf of the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing, Professor S. Shieber will move:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.

(As I was working on the above, Johnette Napolitano’s “You’re Amazing” came over the radio. I can dig it. Harvard is pretty amazing!)

I do see one small linguistic loophole, which perhaps Harvard could amend. The policy does not specify by whom “articles… sold for a profit” and therefore exempt from the policy need be sold. As I read that, theoretically a faculty member could claim exemption on behalf of the publisher selling the articles! I doubt that will happen, but the policy really ought to read “sold for a profit by the Faculty member.” (My misreading. The point here is that Harvard can’t turn around and sell the articles, which is perfectly fair and reasonable.)

Let me pretend for a moment that Achaea U followed Harvard’s example, so that I can work through some of the implications using Ulysses Acqua and the Basketology department.

Ulysses is dancing in his cubicle! He no longer need fret about approaching Dr. Troia or anyone else in Basketology for licensing. He can now canvass Basketology’s website for CVs, or ask for the results of yearly Basketology activity reviews, and just fetch-and-deposit from this day forward. No muss, no fuss, no hassle from Dr. Troia or anyone else. He need not try to teach Menelaus Fox to approach faculty about open access, nor play futile marketing games with his nonexistent budget. He need not pester unresponsive developers to fix the licensing process in his IR software; all he has to do is make the default license refer to the Harvard policy.

He may not be entirely out of the licensing woods. One use for Achaea’s IR is the archival of papers from small conferences held on campus. These conferences involve faculty from outside Achaea U, of course. Still, a simple Memorandum of Understanding with the conference organizers should suffice; that puts the onus on the conference to confer with its presenters.

All is not gravy for Ulysses; he’s a bit like Tom Thumb in the cow’s stomach. Achaea U produces vastly more output than Ulysses can possibly collect manually. Even should he enlist Menelaus and his colleagues to help, they will all drown in the flood of articles if the deposit process is not semi-automated. Fortunately, Achaea’s announcement has enough high-level weight behind it that Ulysses can point out this problem and land some IT time to deal with it. There are ways… the BibApp, RSS search feeds from various article aggregators, a SWORD-based deposit process, a front-end discovery-and-download environment based on RefWorks or Zotero for out-of-the-way disciplines like Basketology.

On the whole, though, Ulysses can only be thrilled at this turn of events. His relationship with Achaea faculty has been transformed; he had been little more than a nag and a pest, but now he is providing a service in clear alignment with expressed faculty wishes. He has new stature inside his library—everybody knows what he does and why he does it now, and library administrators are getting him student help to deal with the flood. He can even help Cassandra by bringing her situation to the IT folks working on his deposit processes; they readily agree to write him some output filters and Javascript includes, since they’re working on the repository anyway.

Ulysses is also aware that the balance of power between him, faculty, and publishers has undergone a subtle but significant shift. Previous to Achaea’s declaration, it was Ulysses who had to interrupt Dr. Troia’s day to ask her to license her work to the repository and perform keystroke labor. Dr. Troia is perfectly pleasant, but she isn’t fond of interruptions, much less extra work. Publishers, on the other hand, were a normal part of Dr. Troia’s work life. They didn’t have to bother her to acquire her work; she went to them.

Achaea’s blanket license changes the game. Ulysses can do his work without once bothering Dr. Troia. A publisher who objects to Achaea’s policy, however, has to interrupt Dr. Troia’s day to ask her to exempt her article from deposit, which involves extra work for Dr. Troia. (The extra work tidbit was very clever of Harvard. Well done!) Dr. Troia will not be pleased—and as I have noted before, publishers have consistently shied away from displeasing faculty.

I am suddenly bullish on IRs, for the first time in quite some time. Mind you, I will turn bearish again if Harvard turns out to stand alone, as is quite possible—I don’t see a mad rush to copy MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative. However, the policy spadework done by SPARC and John Ober’s crew and others has specifically been in a research rather than teaching context, so perhaps Harvard’s example will prove easier to follow than MIT’s. If I were influential in the CIC (which I am emphatically not), I’d be pushing for this as a followup to the author-addendum work.

Interesting times. Interesting times. IRs are back in the game! Thanks to Harvard for making waves.

Completely coincidentally, I received reviewers’ comments back on Roach Motel today. What with those (which were, ahem, rather substantive; further proof that I am not the library world’s next Walt Crawford) and today’s big news out of Harvard, I’m going to have to rewrite the whole enchilada.

I tell you what, though, that’s going to be a much more cheerful and enjoyable task than writing it in the first place was. It’s going to be a completely different article when I’m done… because there’s been a sea change. There’s hope. There’s a pathway to point to. There’s a whole new class of interesting technical problems to suggest solutions to!

People who think I’m a grumpy old bat on the basis of the Roach Motel preprint may be surprised at just how enthusiastic I can be when there’s reason to be…

When the first NIH public-access policy was watered down to meaninglessness, I pointed out that while the publishers could count that a victory, it was a rather Pyrrhic one, because it proved that relying on voluntary action by researchers does not achieve open access in any measurable degree.

The NIH victory turns out to have been Pyrrhic in another way, too. While the AAP and certain of its members spent gobs of money in Washington futilely trying to stop the NIH policy from sprouting teeth, Harvard quietly flanked them. I didn’t know the Harvard permissions policy was even on the table until a few days before it passed. Judging from the lack of concerted response from scholarly publishing, they didn’t see it coming either.

I would be afraid, very afraid, right now if I were a journal publisher who believed my profits depended on preventing widespread self-archiving or playing dog-in-the-manger with copyright. The Harvard policy puts publishers in an extraordinarily weak position. They can’t denounce it; that’s tantamount to denouncing faculty, which would be utterly suicidal. (Publishers can and do slag librarians. They can and do slag government. They can’t slag faculty, and they know it.) I don’t think they can sue; even if they could win in court (which I rather doubt, though standard not-a-lawyer disclaimers apply), the hideous publicity from suing Harvard would stick like tar. They can’t prevent eager librarians at Harvard from setting up and filling a repository. Even their standard lines of FUD won’t work—they can’t seriously spin this as “a vote against peer review,” because really, is Harvard going to do anything that damages peer review? Of course not! All the publishers can realistically do is plead poverty, and a look at their lobbying budgets and profit margins scotches that argument.

At Harvard itself, publishers are impotent. The sly cleverness of Harvard’s strategy has me in awe. Since we know that arguments based on increased impact and altruism make no headway with faculty, Harvard went straight for the jugular: faculty’s sense of ownership over their work. As the trajectory of the CIC Addendum proves, that argument works. Another viciously clever move was the per-article, in-writing petition requirement for opting out. Suddenly a publisher who wants its articles out of the Harvard IR has to contact each and every Harvard faculty member who publishes with them, for every single article published. Can you imagine the backlash from faculty? And what can a big-pig publisher actually say to convince faculty to put in the effort? Society publishers, with their privileged position in faculty hearts and minds, may indeed be able to convince a few authors… for a time, until the incessant dunning becomes an annoyance.

If Harvard is smart, it will automate as much article-gathering as possible. The less faculty have to do, the less they even notice that this policy is in place, the more it will be able to accomplish. I look forward to finding out what the Harvard provost’s office has up its sleeve.

Stopping other institutions from following in Harvard’s footsteps is a completely different game from stopping legislation in Washington. There are no words for the fiasco that attempting to bribe faculty would create, as faculty are not lobbyists or legislators; the opprobrium the AAP faced over PRISM would be a wet firecracker by comparison. Whereas Washington is a single big fat noisy target, faculty governance bodies are legion, and they tend to do their work quietly and in private. Publishers would have to find one or more individuals at every research institution powerful enough to block policies in faculty senates and gung-ho enough about publishers to do so. It’s just not possible, not without advance warning of which institutions have policies on the table, and Harvard’s under-the-radar action proves that’s a tall order.

Exacerbating the problem are consortia such as the CIC, and state university systems with a unified voice on these matters such as California. Not only need publishers keep their eye on individual institutions, they need to block policy and advocacy efforts coming from collections of institutions. I’m sorry, they just can’t, not with the worst will in the world.

No, I have a feeling the deafening silence coming from publishers right now is deliberate. Their only realistic hope is that the Harvard policy sinks like a stone in a vast sea of institutional indifference, and the best way for them to create that outcome is to keep their mouths shut so that the initial flurry of coverage and interest fades quicker.

The ball is in our court now, we open-access advocates. We can’t let Harvard’s fusillade go quiet. Come on, Cornell. Come on, California. Come on, MIT and Yale and (dare I say it?) Wisconsin. Let’s do this thing.

It would seem to be hawk season in Madison. David IMed me at work the other day to tell me excitedly about a redtail he’d seen chowing down on something vaguely rodentish at the West Transfer Point bus station. The very same day, I spotted what I think was a broad-shouldered hawk (striped tail) near the bay on my walk home.

(Yes, I still walk to work and back. Yes, there was a weird and still-unsolved murder in the neighborhood a few weeks back; I had to detour around the house in question that afternoon, as the police had it cordoned off, and I walk past that same house every day. Yes, there have been various other break-ins at businesses on Park Street. Yes, the park just north of the bay has a population of homeless people; I see them often. This is my neighborhood, damn it, and I won’t stop walking in it. Call it my small gesture toward sanity.)

Unfortunately, the weather has conspired to spoil what I had planned for David’s birthday. We were going to rent a car and go driving this weekend, but the ice and snow starts in earnest tonight and will last all the way through tomorrow, and I’m not nearly north-north-westerly enough to drive in that garbage when I don’t have to.

So I took him out for sushi yesterday, and I’ve wrapped his presents, including the one his mother sent, and we’ll just have to stay home and eat cake instead. Hmph.

Been a while since I participated in blogosphere conversations. That’s bad of me. I also miss it. So here goes.

Rochelle starts a meme about one’s TechNOTs. Steve picks it up (among others), and quietly notes a dichotomy in the responses that I find very interesting: “a list of technologies or technology skills,” he says. (He sees another dichotomy that he addresses very well, but that’s tangential to mine; go read his post.)

That is interesting, because if I divide my own list that way, a pattern emerges. “Technologies” tends to equate to “gizmos” in my mind, and get bypassed in large part because I’m a frugal soul who doesn’t usually burn money on stuff I’m not dead sure I’ll get my money’s worth from. I don’t experiment with expensive gizmos. I don’t lust after them, even when everyone around me swears they’re the bees’ knees. I just don’t.

So the entire mobile revolution has plain old passed me by; I never had a Palm, never bought an ebook gizmo despite my close involvement with the industry, don’t have a Blackberry or an iPhone or any other kind of cell phone, don’t foresee acquiring them. Ditto gaming. I own no console, no DDR pad, no library of PC games. I do have a (smallish, as these things go) library of tabletop roleplaying games… but go figure, all my gaming these days is online, most of it journal gaming. I did read books from Microsoft Reader on the old Silver Surfer. I suppose you might say that I’m a general-purpose, networked kind of gal. My tabletop RPG library has to do with face-to-face gaming opportunities. My other gaming is an offshoot of general-purpose technologies I already use.

The online analogue tends to be subscription services and social networking. I don’t do Second Life; I don’t have that kind of computing horsepower and bandwidth, and I don’t want my money sucked up into the SL vacuum. I don’t do MMORPGs. I killed my Facebook account after Beacon. (Tip for those killing Facebook accounts: Facebook doesn’t actually kill your account; they retain your info. My advice is to zero out your info by putting in a bunch of fake stuff, and then retire the account.) I have a LinkedIn account, but it’s basic-level and I don’t do much but accept link requests. I do have a paid LiveJournal account; I bought it after it became clear that LJ filled a real niche for me—semi-private ranting, essentially, and no, you really needn’t rehearse the “nothing on the Internet is private” argument with me, kthx—and before LJ wigged out in various annoying ways. I also have a paid account on the service where I do my online journal gaming, because it’s a small service that deserves the support.

But by and large, I’m okay with my decisions in the gizmo realm. I don’t feel I’m missing anything I’d value greatly. It’s all good.

Tech skills, now, that’s another story. I’m perpetually greedy for these, I feel perpetually behind, and I don’t feel good about that at all. The thing is, that’s just the normal state of uncertainty for techie-types. I don’t know anyone with a highly technogeeky job who feels they know it all. Maybe back in the ENIAC days techies could feel like that, but not now.

My list: Ruby (because I want to hack on the BibApp), PHP, all sorts of sysadminly stuff that makes my brain hurt on a regular basis (Tomcat wrangling especially), Fedora (the digital repository, not the Linux distro), more complex SQL (joins and HAVING clauses and whatnot), better Java (so I can do Aspect programming in Manakin).

My problem here is that I don’t learn new stuff until I have a project to work on—and sometimes not even then. I can’t sit down with an O’Reilly book and learn something until I have a context to apply it in. My pattern would be sad if it weren’t so funny: I start something, get stuck, swear a lot, and then go find the book and have six epiphanies in the first ten pages. (Or not. I still don’t entirely understand how multiple bracketed expressions in XSLT work, and none of my XSLT books has yet managed to enlighten me.)

So that’s my technofaux list, for your delectation. Onward.

The latest Cites and Insights (PDF) spends a fair bit of space on this “slow library” thing, analogous to “slow food” et cetera. Frankly, the slow movements annoy me—not because I don’t do some of the things they advocate, but because they’re so incredibly self-righteous and condemnatory about other things I do. I’d be much happier with them if their practitioners demonstrated joy in their own practices rather than scorn and distaste for mine.

Take reading. I read books. I read articles. I read them both in print and onscreen. Ooooh, watch the fur fly. I’m not supposed to read serious prose onscreen. Screens are too fast, don’t you know. I’m supposed to print that stuff out, or buy it in print, because otherwise (apparently) I’ll get distracted by the Next Shiny Thing (because it’s all about the continuous partial attention, don’t you know) and I won’t understand it as well as the Slow Person.

The Slow Person can bite me. Good and hard. I read a lot onscreen, and frankly, I prefer it. For whatever reason, I’m much more susceptible to distractions when reading in print. It’s positively easier to follow an argument or backtrack for proper understanding when I’m looking at a (well-designed) web page or (yes, even) PDF. It may have something to do with ergonomics—I read print in all kinds of contorted postures, whereas in front of my work desk, I’m properly seated and prepared to pay concentrated attention. Whatever it is, it’s a fact for me, and it’s not a fact the Slow People are prepared to accept.

You know, now that I think about it, I think it’s partly because onscreen reading is active for me in a way that print reading isn’t. I was brought up never ever EVER to write in books; some people have annotation and marginalia habits, but I never have had. I don’t even talk back to print books; they’re just kinda dead, dead words sitting on dead pages between dead covers. Reading onscreen is different. If I’m reading something I like, I can del.icio.us it or blog it or Twitter it, do something with it. Because I am a producer as well as a consumer of onscreen text, I feel closer to other producers of onscreen texts, and I feel a certain license to talk (and sometimes yell) at the screen, treat the words as living things with a living mind behind them.

That’s me. I’m not you, and unlike the Slow People, I’m not claiming you should be me. I am claiming that my pattern of interaction with text is just as valid and useful as the Slow Person’s. Prove otherwise, Slow People.

This leads me to take a brief crack at the “continuous partial attention” meme. CPA is supposed to be bad for you. You don’t get stuff done. You don’t do it as well. Et cetera. My question is this: doesn’t this depend on where we set the goalposts? If the goal is “read and understand the latest Cites and Insights,” then I fail miserably, because I’ve been popping between that, this post, and a few other things… and I rarely read all of a C&I to begin with (sorry, Walt) because not all of it resonates. (Walt’s much more of a stereophile and gizmo hound than I am.) If the goal is “integrate what I find useful about C&I into my mental landscape,” well then, that changes things, doesn’t it? Blogging things is part of how I assimilate them, how I think them through. It’s possible to consider my peripatetic read-blog-read process CPA—but that isn’t how I experience it in my head.

I’m willing to entertain the possibility that CPA damages me worse than I know. I’ve been CPAing since high school at least; it’s all that’s ever gotten me through some lectures and presentations, because if they’re boring (for whatever reason; some are boring for reasons of content, others for reasons of presentation style) and I can’t CPA, I zone out completely, which is worse. On the whole, though, I can live with my personal attention style. Somebody’s gonna have to show me it hurts me.

The last meme on the slate today is the “So, why’d you become a librarian?” meme. Er, it seemed a good idea at the time? The more interesting question is how I became the kind of librarian I became. Part of that was lucking into the right job, and things could assuredly have been different—but it was the right job partly because of intense personal interest.

What I usually explain to people is that I have an overdeveloped social-relevance organ. This is true, and it fuels my interest in open access and always has, but it’s not the whole story. The rest of the story is that there’s more Don Quixote in me than I’ve frankly been able to make my peace with. I’m a questin’ beast, I am, despite the manifold frustrations and irritations of questin’. I do have limits, though; I won’t run my lance into brick walls. I need some kind of accomplishment or potential to keep me going, or I just—stop.

Anyone who troubles to read between the lines here has no doubt figured out that I have come damn close to throwing in the towel on institutional repositories. (Not open access. There’s a difference.) No real accomplishments in three years of trying, and potential was fading fast—but Harvard just changed the game, and I’m seeing possibilities again. Rosinante’s got a new saddle, I’ve got a new lance—time to see what I can do with them.

Getting ready to go outside is a rather involved process these days. Make sure to put on long underwear or tights underneath pants. On with the hiking shoes (because they’re warmer than my workhorse Munros, and in Wisconsin, nobody minds if you wear hiking shoes to work). On with the YakTrax, one at a time, tug-tug-TUG-tug-tug and slap the Velcro on and it’s done. On with the heavy down coat; the poor old thing’s zipper is shot, so I have to use the snaps. On with the goofy hat, snap it under the chin. On with the gloves. Up with the coat hood. Now I’m ready.

It’s funny to do all that, walk outside, and hear a cardinal’s whistle piercing the neighborhood. This morning, I distinctly heard a couple of finches going on with their tripping, uneven song, and caught a glimpse of one sitting at the very tip-top of a tall, snow-laden spruce. Obviously they know something that my civilization-dulled instincts don’t: spring is coming. Slowly, but it’s coming.

These days my walk to work is timed such that the sun is just heaving over the southeast horizon, tinting all the buildings across the bay rose-gold. Cold or no cold (and it wasn’t bad today), wind or no wind (and there wasn’t any today), that’s just beautiful.

It’s a rough winter. I’ve spent a full third of my winters in this place, and I don’t ever remember one this bad, either for cold or snow. It’s as though Wisconsin is pitching its most vicious curveball, standing back afterwards with a sly, lazy smile that asks, “Are you sure you want to live here? Really sure? Positive?”

Yes. Yes, I’m sure.

Horror movies tell me I should have been somewhat alarmed when my husband came in from out back with this:

Eh, but what do horror movies know?

Locals, the next time you’re in Memorial Library, do yourselves a favor and stop inside the gate for a look at “Wind Chill Factor,” the latest display.

This has been the snowiest winter in Madison’s history, and as I think I said, it’s also been the worst I remember for sheer cold. So what the libraries did to commemorate the occasion was canvass a number of international students for their written reactions to the winter.

The results are funny, touching, familiar and defamiliarizing at once in the way of the best short writings, beautifully written in several languages (four of which I can read well enough to make this observation, though “four” is less than half the languages on view), competently translated into English, and attractively arranged (make sure to walk all the way around!). Don’t miss the back case, either, which has some cold-related rare-book and music gems.

Really, you owe it to yourself to stop for a moment and read. I guarantee you will walk away with a smile. In spite of the winter—or perhaps even because of it.