• We have a new Open Access Directory wiki, with real institutional backing (doesn’t surprise me that it’s Simmons, either; they’re good people there) and real wiki gardeners. I’m mildly worried about the edit-access policies being a tad restrictive, but we’ll see. This is a good and valuable thing, and when I get out from under this summer’s over-busyness, I’ll set aside some time to contribute.
• Harvard Law followed in the footsteps of Harvard FAS, unanimously approving a permissions mandate. Good for them, of course. If this keeps up, though, I may end up buying the drinks. I’m not sure it’s fair to count Harvard and Harvard Law as separate institutions, and thank goodness I thought to restrict myself to the United States or I’d have lost this bet already. I think I still have a fair chance of coming out financially unscathed—but the University of California system could sink me in a stroke. I’d love to see ’em do it. And I probably owe Willinsky an apology; I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew what was cooking at Harvard when he wrote that.
• Mike Rossner of Rockefeller UP continues his astounding streak of win and awesome, returning copyright on journal articles to authors on condition they make the content OA, and putting CC licenses on published articles going forward. Do we have an award we can give him? He deserves a big shiny meter-tall trophy or something of that nature.

Cheers all ’round!

One small onion to the NIH, which is refusing to budge from its somebody-else’s-problem stance on recalcitrant publishers. I still think this one’s going to bite them, and it may turn out to bite us, too. We’ll see. Nobody will be happier if I’m wrong than I.

Fewer than ten librarians attended.

Just a datapoint. If I say any more I’ll dunk myself in the soup.

One told me (paraphrased), “I wouldn’t know anything much about open access if not for you.”

Y’know, I said academic librarians were largely ignorant of OA in Roach Motel, and I got some pushback on that. I’d like the pushers-back to kindly buy me a drink now. Yeah, yeah, you’re not ignorant, sure. I challenge you to find five others at YPOW not directly working with an institutional repository or OA publishing program who aren’t. Just five. I’m guessing that if you can even do it, it’ll take work.

Trailblazing. Bah. It is for the birds.

This is the real deal, folks. Real repository-rats running real repositories dealing with real problems and achieving real successes, speaking in their own voices unmediated by discourses of fear or open-access dogma. Stop hanging on every word from the Big Thinkers. This is where the action is. These are the people I was trying (in my stumbling fashion) to speak for when I wrote Roach Motel.

Themes I saw:

• The library running the repository deposits most of the content, be it content from faculty/researchers or library-generated content. Unmediated faculty/researcher deposit is a pipe dream.
• Faculty and researchers haven’t heard of the repository qua repository, even the ones who use it. (This is identical to their behavior faced with library-purchased electronic resources. That the library is involved, that there’s a service involved, with people behind it, just doesn’t register with them.)
• Running open-source repository software is a hassle.

None of this should surprise anyone… and yet it will, I’m sure.

My personal thanks to all the people who wrote case studies. Keep writing, please! Write, and speak, and represent. We can’t progress until we have a fair, truthful sense of where we are, and to get there we have to hack through a right jungle of obfuscatory rhetoric and unjustifiable happytalk.

Also, I owe Les Carr an apology; he offered me a sneak peek at these in return for my reactions, and I never did get back to him. I couldn’t be happier that these have a good home.

I haven’t heard any worry over the fate of publishers. If I were a toll-access publisher, I would be worried by this. As I’m not, I’m not.

Without undue tooting of my own horn, let me say that my concerns about recalcitrant publishers have proven to occupy a lot of faculty brainspace. I don’t live in the medical-research realm, so I don’t know how much of this worry is futile handwringing and how much identifies a genuine problem. I only know that deans are worried particularly about protecting their junior faculty, who already find publishing an uphill climb. The sooner we all address this, the easier we will all find the compliance process.

I have heard a lot of worry over the versioning problem, from faculty spanning quite a few disciplines (with the understanding that “NIH grantee” implies a fairly narrow range to begin with). “What happens when copyediting catches real errors, or changes the thrust of an argument?” runs the basic version of this question. “The version in PMC will simply be wrong.”

This is not a silly or uninformed objection. I used to work for a publishing-services bureau; I know full well what “final” peer-reviewed manuscripts look like before and after copyediting. Let me tell you, a good copyeditor is worth his or her weight in diamonds, and it warms my text-artisanly heart that faculty realize this as well. Final manuscripts can be disasters; research faculty can be terrible writers and terrible writing teachers.

I saw a suggestion that copyediting happen before the journal-submission process. I’m sorry, but no, that won’t work. Part of the copyediting process involves bashing the manuscript (citations especially) into journal style, which obviously can’t be done until the journal has been chosen. Another part is marking it for typesetting, which is intimately connected with each journal’s particular typesetting practices. You can’t just pick copyediting up and dump it in front of manuscript submission; you’d only add a step, slowing the whole publication process down and increasing its cost.

At present, the only workaround for this (as I understand matters) is working with a publisher cooperative enough to replace PMC’s manuscript version with the published version. These publishers exist, but they are not exactly numerous. For PR purposes if for no other reason (and “accuracy” is a plenty good enough reason all by itself), I think it would be wise for PMC to work out a way for PIs and other authors to fix errors in their manuscripts. I have heard the versioning problem called “a flaw in the policy” and “suicidal” by people in very high places.

Another difficulty has to do with the principal investigator’s responsibility under the policy, given that the PI is likely not an author (much less the first or corresponding author) on every single article coming from a given NIH grant. This is a tough one to resolve, given that the buck has to stop somewhere, but I would suggest at the least that first/corresponding authors as well as PIs be able to approve manuscripts and offer corrections.

Reading the NIH’s comment stream, I see that the too-much-work backlash has begun. In my cynical way, I tend to ignore this particular objection (trusting in Swan’s research on mandates to back me), but if we open-access advocates want to be smart about this, we will sort out how to help libraries offer third-party PMC submission services. (Disclaimer: MPOW does this. It was not my decision, though I support it wholeheartedly.) PMC could help us all by providing a deposit API (preferably based on SWORD) that those of us with institutional repositories could program against. Not only will that allow people like me to get in on the repositing action, it will help institutions monitor compliance and provide useful services (such as local PMCID/NIHMSID databases) to faculty. As mandates become more numerous, local services become even more important, as they allow faculty to become accustomed to one deposit interface, not a dozen. Please, PMC, set the example here!

Confusion about the policy is rampant, though MPOW is doing its level best to calm the waters. I do worry about institutions that are letting this slide—which is most of them! I suggest that the NIH target marketing efforts at libraries as well as researchers. MPOW and other institutions like it prove that we can help. The problem is that not all of us know we should. If the NIH isn’t working with SPARC to clue in the larger research-library community, it should be.

Happy Open Access Week!

On, Addendum, on, Addendum,
Cut through that red tape!
Make that research free to all, boys,
OA sure is great! (U-rah-rah!)
On, Addendum, on, Addendum,
Fight for scholars’ fame!
Fight, campus, fight fight fight!
We’ll win this game!

Somebody want to do the second verse?

As the post title says: watch and learn.

There’s going to be a debate on institutional repositories, you see. Between a scholarly-communication czar and a library-school professor. Each of whom comes from a school that does not even HAVE an institutional repository, much less, y’know, a repo-rat or anything.

Am I the only person in existence who thinks this faintly ludicrous? I mean, sure, debate scholarly communication or open access, that’s fine, you don’t have to be a repo-rat to do that, you might not even want to be.

But as much as I respect both Smith (whose blog is good stuff) and Tibbo, I’m sorry, they have no business debating IRs without a repo-rat at the table. This is the same Big-Thinker-no-experience nonsense that got all of us into the IR mess in the first place. (And no, Dr. Tibbo, “helping to plan” doesn’t count, because I have yet to see an IR plan that didn’t crumble soon after contact with reality. IR plans never include repo-rats. They’re written before the repo-rat is hired.)

C’mon, everybody. It’s time to demand repo-rat representation in IR discourse. We can’t leave this to all the Big Thinkers, not to mention the research types who for some unfathomable reason now think that IRs are a sexy research topic. They do not help us. Time we helped ourselves.

Edited to add: Just for fun, I decided to see what kind of self-archiving cred Smith and Tibbo might have. Neither E-LIS nor DLIST turned up anything for Smith. Tibbo has two papers in one and three in the other. When I searched LISTA, I found 18 results for Tibbo, and five for Smith (but I don’t think all of them are actually his). Draw your own conclusions.

By the way, I think folks in the area should emphatically go to this—if only to ask why there aren’t any repo-rats at the table!

I don’t have any friends at Iowa and so I don’t know what happened behind closed doors, let me just say that much up-front. I seriously doubt, however, that the library had as big a role in this as is being portrayed. I’m sorry, I just cannot credit that Iowa librarians (librarians!?) would have done that little homework on that major a policy shift. I went to a whole ETD conference and did a whacking lot of searching in the literature (plus consulting with one of the top names in ETDs) before anybody trusted me to help with MfPOW’s ETD policy!

I can credit without an iota of difficulty that the Graduate School walked into ETDs completely unprepared and then blamed it on the library, because I’ve seen more than one graduate administration that didn’t give a flying flip about its students, and plenty of clueless, blame-shifting faculty who pick any handy target when they’re caught out.

I could admittedly be wrong about this. I don’t think I am. And if I’m not, I think the library should be apoplectic at the way the Graduate School shoved it into the line of fire. “I want a new building in the next capital budget or I blow your lame-o coverup to the skies” apoplectic.

Anyway. ETD policies. It’s stupid and irresponsible not to offer an embargo period. One to two years is the norm last I checked, and I believe it sufficient; a few places offer indefinite embargo, but I honestly don’t think it necessary to pander to egos quite that far. (If you haven’t sold it, contracted to publish it, or patented it in two years, it ain’t gonna happen.)

Of course the institution doesn’t take over the student’s copyright. (I hear weird, vague, and unconfirmed reports that the University of Michigan actually does this. If it does, it shouldn’t.) A non-exclusive license to hold, preserve, and make available is all that’s necessary.

Iowa screwed up big-time. Do not do likewise. That’s pretty much all I can find to say.

Without opining as to the veracity, insight, or other value of my blogging, it might be worthwhile to think for a moment about how a one-horse blog by an otherwise undistinguished repository-rat (think about that, think hard; in what way have I distinguished myself in my profession other than CavLec?) became one of the open web’s top voices on institutional repositories. I don’t think it’s as simple as “Walt and I are friends,” though I won’t deny that plays a role.

Point one, mine is just about the only voice like mine out here. Stevan Harnad does not count, as he is not running one of these things. Ditto Peter Suber. Ditto Jan Velterop, who comes at open access from a different angle entirely. There’s Les Carr, but that only happened recently. There was almost Leslie Johnston, but bless her, she got out of this field while the getting was good.

We’re not talking. We’re not organizing. (The OA publishers are, but we’re not.) Even those of us who are talking are talking hardly more than happytalk. I don’t know how much more clear I can possibly make it: green open access as she is practiced (rather than merely opined about) has a severe morale problem. When I asked NISO to make me proud of what I do, I wasn’t kidding.

A talk I had with a SLIS professor and a doctoral candidate the other week brought home even more strongly something I point out in Roach Motel: repository labor is invisible. Just ten minutes or less per article, chortle the archievangelists; the software is free and easy to set up and Just Runs, and that’s all there is to it!

Yeah. What am I here for, again? But at least it helps explain the dearth of ratly voices. Why would we think anyone would listen?

There’s obvious rhetorical use to making these claims about institutional repositories. They just happen to be claims that devalue me and all my analogues at other institutions. This doesn’t seem to bother the archievangelists and other Big Thinkers much; in fact, some of them are perfectly happy to do explicit devaluing themselves (see Roach Motel for a couple of examples), which has led to certain plaints of mine. Yet another explanation for the dearth of ratly voices. Why do I want to talk to people who despise me? Cui bono?

Certain types of labor in this field are even more invisible than deposit labor. Systems administration (”it just runs!”) and design labor, certainly. Rights-clearance labor, which is picky, demanding work notable for its total lack of clarity. Consider also that there are two or three types of it: clearing rights from faculty members for mediated deposit, clearing rights from publishers, and explaining the whole Creative Commons thing. I have yet to meet a faculty member who intuitively understands that the license is an agreement between faculty member and repository/institution, while Creative Commons is an agreement offered by the faculty member to the general public. “Why do I have to sign the license if I put a CC license on it?” I get that a lot.

Labor theorists should be having a field day with this. We, the open-access movement, demanded free labor from faculty, on the weak excuse that it wasn’t much free labor. They didn’t pony up. When they didn’t, we lashed together some rationalizations for why they should, ranging from “citation impact” to various variations on “productivity measurement.” They were unimpressed. At that point, our reactions diverged. Some of us, the Ohio States and Oregons of the world, decided we’d have to put in the work ourselves: mediated deposit. The rest of us figured that the labor could stay invisible if it became forced instead of voluntary labor: mandates. The whole bit about mandates being forced labor, and not a repo-rat in existence in a position to force labor out of faculty, never seemed to occur to anyone. (Except me. But I was trained by Greg Downey.)

The Harvard decision, looked at in this light, leaves a troubling question open: What’s going to happen when Harvard arts and sciences faculty realize they’ve imposed a labor requirement on themselves? I’m not at all sure they have realized that, and some of the “permission mandate” talk being thrown around muddies the waters further. For the record, the Harvard policy is not just a permission mandate; it requires that faculty get their articles to the Provost’s office. Somehow. We don’t know anything about the “how” yet… but to my mind, that may be the key factor in the policy’s success or failure. If faculty think they’re putting too much work into this—worse, if they’re right—I wouldn’t give the policy survival odds past two years.

Do I need to say that slapping up a DSpace install and requiring faculty to use it would be the death-knell for this policy? I hope not. I expect I do need to say it, though. Harvard faculty didn’t sign on to do five screens of metadata, an upload, and a click-through license per publication, folks. That’s work, that is. The simple fact is that DSpace has heretofore been extraordinarily disrespectful of its users’ time: browsers, searchers, depositors, community and collection maintainers, all the way up to system administrators. I plan to defend this assertion in a later posting, but for now, take my word for it, and understand that it becomes a serious backlash-inducer in a forced-labor context.

Verily I say unto you: Harvard’s Provost’s office, library, and IT division had better be hard at work on citation-retrieval automation, automation that involves as little faculty labor as possible. And verily I say unto anyone who wants a mandate like Harvard’s that they’d better do likewise. And verily I say unto everyone that we (as a field) are so far from being adequately automated as to scare me.

Labor. Follow the labor, and you see the cracks in the green-open-access system. Follow the silence, the lack of voice, and you see how those cracks have been allowed to happen—and grow.