Caveat Lector

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.

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.

Call me an unabashed Stuart Shieber fan. His video on this page shows him at his droll, persuasive best. I can see how he won over Harvard faculty. Can we clone him?

(The other vids are good too; Kevin L. Smith’s doesn’t really need slides, so it’s easy to run as the soundtrack to your other work.)

The Edinburgh experience left me with a complex observation that I tried unsuccessfully to get across to one person who was pressing me really hard to identify “successful” repositories in the United States. (No, it wasn’t “define success,” though that was a tempting question. The reality is that success for institutional repositories is defined—by the people who matter, anyway—in terms of items deposited.) It’s an important enough point, and I made it inarticulately enough at the time, that I think it deserves a piece of a blog post.

Videlicet and to wit: There’s an understandable tendency to look to “successful” repositories for examples the rest of us should follow. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself. Problems arise, however, when one assumes first, that unsuccessful repositories have nothing to teach; second, that the successful repository experience is the norm; and third, that the locus of success lies within the repository and its staff.

Because it doesn’t. (Okay, yes, a lousy repository manager can sink you. A good one is necessary but not sufficient, is what I’m saying.)

Successful repositories have sufficient backing from their libraries and their university administrations to make something work. I can’t make it any simpler than that. Without that support, the best repository-rat in the world will not succeed. With it, you don’t need an Einstein.

Exactly what successful repositories make work varies quite a bit, according to the talents and creativity of the staff involved and the nature of the support provided. This is why it’s impossible to write the “winning recipe” for a successful IR. At Minho they instituted bribes. At Rochester back in the day, they hacked up some researcher pages. At Ohio State they have a well-established mediated-workflow system. At Harvard they’ve got a mandate.

(Oh, and a word about the Shieber presentation. Shieber expresses considerable embarrassment that Harvard doesn’t yet have an IR. Dude. It’s okay. Really. Harvard did things the right way ’round. I opine that if Harvard had had the standard unsuccessful IR, it would have faced considerably more hassle instituting those mandates, because too many faculty—namely, any at all—would have had negative interactions with the repository. What this means for institutions who want a mandate but already have a less-than-illustrious IR will be left as an exercise for the student.)

The other thing that successful repositories have is leave and resources to experiment. They have to. The standard repository software package, as I have argued ad nauseam, is wholly inadequate to fuel a successful repository program. This means that the well-dressed repository manager has some combination of elbow room in her job description, developer time, student help, librarian alliances, and administrative weight to work with. Again, the exact combination will differ from institution to institution—but a manager without any of this might want to rewrite her résumé before her current job tarnishes it.

So much for the successful repository. Let’s talk for a moment about the typical repository. If either of my two(-plus, if you count my contribution to a consortial IR) repo-rat positions is any example, the typical repository is running on a wing and a prayer and the dedicated efforts of one FTE or less. I say “dedicated” for a reason, because it’s next-door to impossible to garner impressive results from the voluntary efforts of scattered librarians who don’t have any kind of imprimatur from above for their repository efforts.

This is no way to run a program, folks—and yet as best I can tell (pace Les Carr) it’s the typical way it’s done. These repositories cannot be successful… yet they are the majority case! What does that say for the repository movement?

The thing is, just telling repository managers “You need developer time, student help, willing librarians, and administrative support” is a useless way to behave. This message doesn’t need to go out to repository managers; we know already, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Again, we don’t have the administrative support to garner all that other stuff. The message needs to go to research-library administrators, many of whom have yet to hear it. We have sufficient reasonably successful examples now that we can say this with authority. So let’s.

SPARC, CNI, JISC, even ACRL, this is your job. Please to be doing it. Thank you.

(What? I did my bit. I wrote Roach Motel. What do you want from me, blood? If I have to write Roach Motel again, you might get your wish, at that.)

Another note on success reporting. I admit that I have tended to roll my eyes at “x000 items archived in the IR!” PR puff pieces. I mean, if I archive x000 things, that’s just me doing my ruddy job, right? Reference librarians don’t write PR puff-pieces about x000 questions answered. Instruction librarians don’t write PR puff-pieces about x000 classes taught. So what is this about?

I’m afraid it’s about visibility, and I’ve given up sneering at it. We have to make the plays we can. Just today I sent a routine email letting an administrator at MPOW know that I’d followed up on a repo contact, and that they’d signed on. Lo and behold, said email was forwarded to a library-managers’ listserv, which sincerely gives me to think about how often I don’t send out success stories.

So what the hell. If I can’t beat ’em, I’ll join ’em. We’re thirty-odd away from 7000 items.

I met Les Carr (and he doesn’t remember this, though I do) at the evening poster session at Open Repositories 2007: a big, genial man with lashings of personal presence and the most eye-searing pair of reflective silver lamé pants that I will ever see.

I say this because it was a goal of mine to wear something to the second day of Repo Fringe that would be louder than Les’s trousers, and I am proud to say that I succeeded. Of course, Les was a bit off-form, wearing mere black-and-white zebra stripes, but my Biblical coat-of-many-colors vaulted me to victory.

Les, because he is Les, met me at the Playfair Library with a sincere compliment on my coat. I had ado not to laugh.

I can rib Les like this because I like him a lot and he likes me at least a little and he is his own man with his own way of being in the world, with which he is obviously very comfortable. (His blog only occasionally hints at what he’s like in person; this seems to be a common thing among bloggers of English extraction. The tongue-in-cheek slogan “EPrints: Sucks Less Than Hotmail” gives you some of the flavor of the man, though.)

And I remark on all this at all because I seem to have built a similar niche for myself in professional circles: mildly, not altogether unpleasantly eccentric, and generally worth talking and listening to. In my way, especially on a speaker’s podium, I’m even more flamboyant than Les, to the point that some people find me overwhelming. (It’s a false impression; I’m quite a bit less thorny during one-on-one interaction than I give the sense I will be.)

I’ve been pondering whether I need to soften up and polish my approach. In some ways… yes, I think I do. But you know what? There’s a place for me even now, just as I am, and I can’t help finding that rather gratifying.

So for me it was a remarkable two days. My keynote didn’t go over quite the way I planned, mostly because I did not manage my time well, such that the much more upbeat second half of the talk got rather short shrift. I’m considerably irritated with myself about that. However, everyone who spoke to me was incredibly gracious and complimentary, so despite my irritation, I’m chalking this one up a moderate success.

The title, for those of you who haven’t clicked over to the Repo Fringe site, was “Le IR, c’est mort—vive le IR!” Since I had to rush through the vivats, what people mostly came away with was the first part.

This led to presenter Niamh Brennan of Trinity College, Dublin proceeding slowly down the aisle of the Playfair Library the next day with a laptop shrouded in a white “toga,” laying it on the floor with a “look! the body in the library” quip, and delivering Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar over it, words altered to suit, in her lovely graceful Irish-accented voice.

You had to be there, I guess. But I laughed until I cried. It was a beautiful, beautiful piece of spur-of-the-moment performance art, and I am justly proud to have inspired it. (Also, Niamh has issued me a standing invitation to Trinity College, and I want to get that down in pixels so she can’t back out! She says that Dublin is fond of eccentrics and I will do well there.)

Niamh and I and Christopher Gutteridge (who is an ubergeek after my own heart) and Patrick McSweeney (who is clearly destined for greatness) caught a show called “Sword of Maximum Damage” at the Edinburgh Fringe that night. You might have to be a tabletop RPGer to appreciate it fully, but Chris and I loved it and laughed heartily—great riffs on gamer intensity and what can become war between in-game and out-of-game relationships, plenty of suspenseful dice-rolling, and a mandolin. (Hey, Damon? I bet this one would play in Madison…)

I also mended some fences with Richard Jones and Graham Triggs, which is all to the good. There is, however, a record to be set straight: Graham let me know rather vehemently that contrary to my offhand slap a while ago, BioMed Central has in fact chucked quite a lot of code over the fence at DSpace. I’m happy to correct myself on that point. I’m also quite chuffed at Richard’s new “Foresite” OAI-ORE project, and I’m hopeful that I can use it to solve some real-world problems I have, and that the code I generate in doing so will be useful to others.

Going to a conference in Scotland about repositories is a depressing proposition for an American repository manager, honestly, because we are so far behind, so under-resourced, so powerless, so isolated compared to our English and Irish and Scottish counterparts. I did, however, make the point loudly and clearly in my keynote that the global repository community needs to do a much better job spreading successful innovation more widely, and from what was said afterward, that bit was heard. So chalk that one up in the credit side of the ledger as well.

I’m not depressed, though. (Just tired, whew! More on that in a bit.) I met so very many lovely people (and I haven’t even mentioned half of them by name), and I was privileged to speak in just the loveliest and most imposing setting imaginable to a substantial gathering of my peers and (mostly) my betters, and I couldn’t feel any luckier if I tried.

The APA has pulled down the notification I posted about yesterday and is apparently rethinking things.

Veddy veddy interesting. I hear through the grapevine that librarians were going to faculty who edit APA journals and asking whether they liked what they saw. If that worked, which is admittedly still to be determined, it suggests that such outreach should be standard procedure in cases like this. Find the editors on your campus, lay out what’s going on, ask whether it’s all right by them.

Which I like. It’s the same grassroots impulse that makes campus permissions mandates impossible to stop. It’s not coercive, not even propagandist; it’s merely informative. What faculty do with the information is their business.

I think I’ll settle back with some popcorn and watch the show…

Edited to add: And a lovely idea for an editorial cartoon by my esteemed colleague, who giveth me to hack on XSLT.

I’ve talked about recalcitrant publishers before, but only theoretically. There had been grumbling and pushback among the publisher ranks, but little more.

Now there’s more.

The American Psychological Association has declared the following:

Authors publishing in APA or EPF journals should NOT deposit, personally and directly, Word documents of APA-accepted manuscripts or APA-published articles in PubMed Central (PMC) or any other depository. As the copyright holder, APA will make necessary deposits after formal acceptance by the journal editor and APA.

(snip…)

In compliance with NOT-OD-08-033, APA will deposit the final peer-reviewed manuscript of NIH-funded research to PMC upon acceptance for publication. The deposit fee of $2,500 per manuscript for 2008 will be billed to the author’s university per NIH policy. Deposit fees are an authorized grant expense. The article will also be available via PsycARTICLES.

That’s pretty clear, but I’ll summarize: If you want to comply with the law demanding deposit in PubMed Central for an article we’re publishing, you pay us $2500. Do not complain, do not pass go, do not deposit the article yourself (which is free).

Well now. I didn’t see this particular flavor of recalcitrance coming, I must say. I suppose I ought to have done, because it’s logical and brilliant. The slumbering behemoth doesn’t actually care about publishing until its funding ox is gored. That’s the whole point of the NIH policy in the first place: threaten their funding, they fall into line. To hit back, quoth the APA, we shall simply threaten their funding another way.

(They are not the only ones playing this game. I have it on pretty good authority that the APS is considering a similar scheme.)

This is the acid test, NIH. This is where the loophole you left in your policy gets tested. If you don’t come down on the APA like a ton of bricks, let me tell you, they’re all going to do this. There’s no risk in it for them until you create one.

Good luck. You’ll need it.

With allies like Dr. Stevan Harnad, do institutional repositories really need enemies?

(Repository Fringe wants me to be controversial. I’m practicing—er, practising. Hush.)

Nature Publishing Group just announced that since it’s building infrastructure to deposit postprints into PubMed Central on behalf of NIH-funded authors anyway, it’ll good-Naturedly throw open the doors to institutional repositories as well on campuses with institutional mandates.

This repository-rat was very happy to see that announcement. It doesn’t directly help me one bit at this juncture, because IR software is such a silo-by-design that until SWORD came about, none of it had decent remote-deposit APIs. However, thinking strategically, this announcement can only ratchet up the momentum behind the SWORD API and OAI-ORE, never mind institutional permission mandates, and that will be good for IRs, powerfully good, in the medium-to-long term. We have to de-silo-ize, and we should be pushing mandates. Anything that dangles a carrot at us for doing so (and NPG content is a big juicy carrot) is useful.

And of course once I have DSpace 1.5 running in production and can spare a few cycles to figure out how its SWORD implementation works, I’ll hop right in line at NPG, hat in hand. Please, sir, may I have some content? It’d be dumb not to. No, MPOW doesn’t have a mandate, and I don’t see one happening for three to five years at least (pace the murkiness of my personal crystal ball), but somehow I think NPG would work with me, if only to guinea-pig their setup.

Dr. Harnad, however, he is not happy. “If Nature really wants to help OA, then dropping its access embargo would be a lot more helpful than saving authors from having to do a few keystrokes.”

Wait a second. I thought keystrokes were the big limiting factor in reaching green-OA’s holy grail. A lot of keystrokes were just eliminated, and very likely more will be as other publishers (who watch NPG like hawks, because NPG is amazing) follow suit. Surely this is a good thing? Guess not.

Truthfully, though, it’s not the count-your-blessings aspect of this silly little kerfuffle that gets under my skin. It’s the pattern, the pattern of OA advocates thoughtlessly backstabbing their allies, with IRs being a favorite whipping-boy, and it’s of long standing. And yes, before you ask, I’m as guilty as anyone when my annoyance with DSpace boils over.

Dr. Harnad pillorying NPG for helping IRs stabs me and my fellow repo-rats in the back, because we need cooperative publishers and impetus toward interoperability. Noisy proclamations about how everybody wants open access likewise backstab repo-rats, because if library administrators believe this bushwa, they inevitably blame their local repo-rat for still-pathetic adoption and content-capture rates. Tarring all librarians, repo-rats included, with broadstroke brushes about nitpickiness and get-with-the-program-already—well, I need say no more. Ignoring librarian contributions to OA, particularly green OA, is worse. All of this harms IRs. If IRs are still important to OA (which is, I grant, arguable), it harms OA.

So could we all stop it, please? Myself included. We’re allies; let’s act like it. At the least, we could start considering the impact of our careless words on our allies.

My memory is hazy, but I think I owe Walt Crawford a(nother) drink. I said I’d never be a keynoter. He, or somebody, bet me a drink I would.

Whoever it was was right, it turns out. Chris Rusbridge scooped me, so I can pull this post out of draft with a clear conscience.

Barring something going boom, I will be giving the keynote at Repository Fringe 2008. I couldn’t be any more thrilled and excited about this if I tried! I am completely in charity with the design and aims of the event; Repository Fringe is exactly the kind of thing I mean when I talk about the “community of practice” that repository managers need. A BarCamp-style participatory event fosters that kind of dense network in a way that even the best conference-style conference has difficulty doing.

I’m also excited that I can honestly put together a happy talk, for once. Not happytalk, which as we all know I dearly loathe—a happy talk, one that acknowledges that despite their rocky start and continued difficulties, institutional repositories are rethinking their mission and their service design in profitable ways in order to fit themselves into their institutions’ (and ultimately open access’s and the academy’s) larger goals. No spin, no nonsense, that’s really what I believe. There is hope. There’s also a lot of work to do yet—but hope makes it easier.

On a personal note, this came at just the right time for me. A little professional validation goes a long way! Plus, Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Fringe, what an incredible stroke of good fortune! If I’m not careful I’ll run out of exclamation points…

… nah.

If you’re going, I look forward to seeing you there. Come up and say hello!