As Techdirt has reported, open access (OA) is scoring more and more major wins currently. But the battle to gain free access to academic research has been a long one. One of the key moments was the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) ten years ago, which saw the term "open access" being defined for the first time:
It's now widely recognized that the extreme demands of SOPA/PIPA catalyzed a new activism within the Net world, epitomized by the blackout effected by sites like Wikipedia on January 18. But as Techdirt has reported, SOPA and PIPA are not the only attacks by the copyright industries on the digital commons: another is the Research Works Act (RWA), which attempts to remove the public's right to read the articles written by tax-funded researchers in open accessjournalsform.
Before Peter Suber became Mr Open Access, he was a philosopher by trade. This is evident in the long, thoughtful essays he writes for the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, which help console us for his absence these days from the world of blogging.
Here's the latest of them, entitled "Open access, markets, and missions". It asks some deep questions about what kind of scholarly publishing we should strive for: market oriented or mission oriented? As he observes:Profit maximizing limits access to knowledge, by limiting it to paying customers. If anyone thinks this is just a side-effect of today's market incentives, then we can put the situation differently: Profit maximizing doesn't always limit access to knowledge, but is always ready to do so if it pays better. This proposition has a darker corollary: Profit maximizing doesn't always favor untruth, but is always ready to do so if it would pay better. It's hard to find another explanation for the fake journals Elsevier made for Merck and the dishonest lobbying campaigns against OA policies. (Remember "Public access equals government censorship"? "If the other side is on the defensive, it doesn't matter if they can discredit your statements"?)
He concludes:Instead of hypnotically granting the primacy of markets in all sectors, as if there were no exceptions, we should remember that many organizations compromise profits or relinquish revenues in order to foster their missions, and that we all benefit from their dedication. Which institutions and sectors ought to do so, and how should we protect and support them to pursue their missions? Instead of smothering these questions for offending the religion of markets, we should open them for wider discussion. Should scholarly publishing, with all of its mixed incentives and hard choices, migrate closer to market-oriented end of the spectrum or to the mission-oriented end of the spectrum? For me the answer depends on a prior question. Do we want scholarly publishing to serve a certain function in the community?
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As Peter Suber rightly points out, this paper offers a reversal of the usual argument, where open access is justified by analogy with open source:
Astronomical software is now a fact of daily life for all hands-on members of our community. Purpose-built software for data reduction and modeling tasks becomes ever more critical as we handle larger amounts of data and simulations. However, the writing of astronomical software is unglamorous, the rewards are not always clear, and there are structural disincentives to releasing software publicly and to embedding it in the scientific literature, which can lead to significant duplication of effort and an incomplete scientific record. We identify some of these structural disincentives and suggest a variety of approaches to address them, with the goals of raising the quality of astronomical software, improving the lot of scientist-authors, and providing benefits to the entire community, analogous to the benefits provided by open access to large survey and simulation datasets. Our aim is to open a conversation on how to move forward.
The central argument is important: that you can't do science with closed source software, because you can't examine its assumptions or logic (that "incomplete scientific record"). Open science demands open source.
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Peter Suber's indispensable SPARC Open Access Newsletter, whose latest issue has just appeared, contains some interesting thoughts of relevance to the open source world.
For example, here are Suber's thoughts on the important NIH open access policy, which, though amazingly mild in OA terms, is being fiercely resisted by publishers:
The NIH policy covers so much literature in biomedicine (80,000 peer reviewed articles per year), and the compliance rate is climbing so quickly, that its opponents have little time left before even they will have to accommodate it. Its success is moving up the dinosaur moment when TA publishers must adapt or refuse to publish NIH-funded research. Most have already adapted, of course, a fact that tends to be lost in the protests of the publishing lobby. But the clock is ticking for those who hate the idea of adapting. This matters. While publishers have the money to lobby against government OA policies forever, the question is becoming moot as the policy's friends grow in number and power and as its opponents revise their own policies to live with it.
The lesson here is that it's very hard to argue against something that is manifestly successful. This makes projects like Firefox critical showcases for free software, to say nothing of GNU/Linux.Even before the crisis, library budgets were growing more slowly than inflation and much more slowly than journal prices. Now they will slow further or shrink. Libraries will cancel larger percentages of their serials subscriptions than they have in decades. That will reduce access to the TA literature, which will strengthen the case for OA among researchers, librarians, and administrators.
At the same time, it will reduce revenues for TA publishers and strengthen the case for OA on their side as well. It may not cause many TA journals to convert to OA, in 2009, but it will add pressure. The more library budgets are constrained, the more it looks like a losing game to compete for shrinking library dollars, especially to society journals excluded from the nearly impervious big deals. If TA publishers found OA journal business models unattractive a few years ago, one reason was that subscription models still looked better. But the balance of attraction has to change as the odds of survival under a subscription model decline, roughly the way clean and renewable sources of energy become more attractive as oil becomes more expensive. Moreover, a few years ago OA publishers were too new to be profitable, and today at least three are reporting profits, including BMC (even before the Springer acquisition), which is based in expensive London. When contemplating their options in the face of declining subscriptions, publishers can no longer dismiss the OA alternative as untested or insufficient.
Replace "libraries" by "companies", and "publishers" by "software companies", and the parallels with the world of enterprise open source are clear. Again, the lesson is that once there are established successes in the world of open source companies, the hypothetical problems raised begin to look pointlessly theoretical.
Overall, then, the message is that in the world of openness, it gets better as things get better. Heartening stuff.
Open Access is a movement that works for the free online availability of research materials. As one of the best short introductions to the subject explains....
On Open Enterprise blog.
I hate Richard Poynder. Well, not exactly "hate". I'm just continually miffed that he not only keeps interviewing the very people in the open access world that I vaguely had in mind to talk to, he has the temerity to do it better than I would have done.
Unfortunately, it seems that there are some benighted individuals that are *really* less than well inclined towards Richard. The situation is so serious that the grown-ups of OA have been forced to step in to sort things out:Trying to suppress Richard Poynder's investigations through threats of legal action is contemptible. We hope that the friends of open access in the legal community will attest to the lawfulness of his inquiries and that all friends of open access will attest to the value and legitimacy of his investigative journalism.
Oh, OK: I attest, I attest.
Peter Suber has the relevant quotations - and the full rebuttals of the misinformation therein.
No "surrender"....
The young field of open education is gaining momentum and energy. As additional projects, foundations, universities, and other participants join the movement, the need increases for a single source to gather, sort, analyze, synthesize, and disseminate news related to open education. As a field, open education is now where the field of open access was a few years ago. Peter Suber’s wonderful Open Access News provides an invaluable service to the OA community, and we intend to replicate this service with Open Education News.
Sounds good to me. (Via Open Access News.)
Peter Suber is widely acknowledged as the linch-pin of the open access movement, but an ironic consequence of this is that his own writings on the subject can be overshadowed by the torrent of info he provides on Open Access News. So, in an attempt to do justice in this respect, here are a couple of noteworthy - maybe Suberb is the word - contributions.
The first is a stonker:Here's an epistemological argument for OA. It's not particularly new or novel. In fact, I trace it back to some arguments by John Stuart Mill in 1859. Nor is it very subtle or complicated. But it's important in its own right and it's importantly different from the moral and pragmatic arguments for OA we see more often.
The thesis in a nutshell is that OA facilitates the testing and validation of knowledge claims. OA enhances the process by which science is self-correcting. OA improves the reliability of inquiry.
After that you might prefer some lighter fare, ending on this upbeat note:The short-term outlook is turbulent. But long-term, there are good reasons to think that OA will become the default for new peer-reviewed research literature. Support for OA is growing among scholars, universities, libraries, learned societies, funding agencies, and governments. Even non-OA publishers are increasingly willing to experiment with it. We can implement OA today, without reforming or violating copyright law. OA publishing costs less than conventional publishing and even these costs don’t require new money; long-term, they can be covered by redirecting money now spent on non-OA journals. The economics of prestige temporarily favors older journals, and therefore non-OA journals, but high-quality OA journals are inexorably acquiring prestige to match their quality, and new OA journals launch every week. While non-OA publishers can still influence author decisions, they are powerless to stop the rise of lawful OA from those who are determined to seize rather than spurn the opportunities created by the internet.
A few months ago, I had the temerity to suggest the following:Definitions matter. If you want to see why, compare the worlds of open source and open access. The very specific definition of what is open source - having an OSI-approved licence - means that it is relatively easy to police. Open access, by contrast, does not have anything like a tight, "official" definition, with the result that less scrupulous publishers try to pass off their wares as open access if it's vaguely open or vaguely accessible.
This brought down upon me the wrath of Mr Open Access himself, as the comments to the above post bear witness. Happily, I survived the thunderbolts, and therefore lived to see the following declaration from the same presiding OA oracle:The term "open access" is now widely used in at least two senses. For some, "OA" literature is digital, online, and free of charge. It removes price barriers but not permission barriers. For others, "OA" literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. It removes both price barriers and permission barriers. It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use.
There are two good reasons why our central term became ambiguous. Most of our success stories deliver OA in the first sense, while the major public statements from Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin (together, the BBB definition of OA) describe OA in the second sense.
As you know, Stevan Harnad and I have differed about which sense of the term to prefer --he favoring the first and I the second. What you may not know is that he and I agree on nearly all questions of substance and strategy, and that these differences were mostly about the label. While it may seem that we were at an impasse about the label, we have in fact agreed on a solution which may please everyone. At least it pleases us.
We have agreed to use the term "weak OA" for the removal of price barriers alone and "strong OA" for the removal of both price and permission barriers. To me, the new terms are a distinct improvement upon the previous state of ambiguity because they label one of those species weak and the other strong. To Stevan, the new terms are an improvement because they make clear that weak OA is still a kind of OA.
On this new terminology, the BBB definition describes one kind of strong OA. A typical funder or university mandate provides weak OA. Many OA journals provide strong OA, but many others provide weak OA.
This was partly what I was trying to get across, in my own, 'umble and clearly not very successful way: the fact that "open access" was being used for quite different things - now named "strong" and "weak" open access - which confused matters no end, not least for people who were coming to the concept for the first time.
As a result of this new nomenclature, we now have precisely the "tight" definitions I was looking for:"Weak OA" literature is digital, online, and free of charge. It removes price barriers but not permission barriers. "Strong OA" literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. It removes both price barriers and permission barriers. It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use.
There, that wasn't too hard, was it?
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is the nearest thing to an official definition of open access that we have. Today is apparently its sixth birthday. If you want to find out more about BOAI and what's happened in those six years, where better to go than the man who helped draw up that definition, Peter Suber?
And what better birthday present could open access have have than this announcement that Harvard, or at least The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will be adopting it as standard policy?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.
Definitions matter. If you want to see why, compare the worlds of open source and open access. The very specific definition of what is open source - having an OSI-approved licence - means that it is relatively easy to police. Open access, by contrast, does not have anything like a tight, "official" definition, with the result that less scrupulous publishers try to pass off their wares as open access if it's vaguely open or vaguely accessible. (That, BTW, seems to me a very strong argument for something to be set up along the lines of the OSI, to give its stamp of approval to open access resources. Are you listening, Peter?)
For this reason, trying to define open media is an excellent move:With the change in the media climate and distribution experiments such as Radiohead’s In Rainbows (in music), and Four Eyed Monsters (in film) which have open qualities (temporarily available to watch or listen/download for free, for example) but are not truly open content, it is getting harder to tell what you can and cannot officially do with your media.
These are three proposed states for open media, each building on the next:
Open (O-):
The baseline, concerned with freely consuming and sharing the content (1-3)
Open source (O):
Being able to view and remix the source files (1-5).
Open Plus (O+):
The ability to participate in a transparent, documented process (1-8).
* 1. Freely accessible
Available to stream, or download without a fee. Should be available via direct download and P2P media, so it is not behind a gateway.
* 2. Freely available.
Permanently available without DRM, or release windows. The end user able to share the work without restriction.
* 3. Freely viewable
Available in multiple formats, and to be converted freely (in the case of video works, for example, as dvd, xvid/divx, mp4, and HD formats).
The above qualities are essential for open content. Open source content adds to the cultural commons by making creation of new content from the work.
* 4. Giving source files
Source media, such as rushes and raw graphics files should be archived and available for other creators to work with.
* 5. Allowing remixing
Materials should be licensed explicitly to allow derivative work (eg. other works based on the script, or video mashups, and remix edits) for at least non-commercial/artistic purposes. Creative Commons and other licenses are available for flexible copyrighting.
Open Plus adds more opportunities for participation and involvement in the work whether as a creator, or as part of what used to be called ‘the audience’.
* 6. Reveal the process
Allowing access to not only the final source media, but work-in-progress material and software files, adding another layer of transparency and documentation.
* 7. Open contribution
Adding ways to influence and participate in the creation of the original work through various types of community/audience involvement (opportunities such as open crewing, direct feedback or contribution mechanisms).
I think this is really important work: let's hope it can be built on. Open Media Initiative, anyone? (Via P2P Foundation.)
Now here's a nice way to end the year - and to start the next:The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
That's just been signed into law in the US, and even though the choice of 12 rather than six months is slightly pusillanimous, it's still a huge win for open access in the US. It will also have a knock-on effect around the world, as open access to publicly-funded research starts to become the norm.
For more details see Peter Suber's post, with links to more details and background.
There is some long-living FUD abroad in the open access world: that the only way OA journals work is by charging authors - the "author-side fees" model. It exists, to be sure, but is far less widespread than many believe. And the reason for the longevity of that FUD is not hard to find: it serves the purposes of the traditional science publishers well, by frightening people with the prospect of paying to publish, rather than paying to read.
But the time has come to slay this particular dragon:Now, can we please put to rest the myth/FUD/whatever that there is only one OA model, the author-side fees/PLoS model? While we're at it, let's have a few more closely related ideas go the way of the dodo: that OA journals discriminate against indigent authors (because they charge publication fees -- except that most of them don't); that OA journals will compromise on quality (in order to collect payment for manuscripts -- except that most of them don't); that if most journals went OA, universities would have to pay more in author-side fees (which, remember, most OA journals don't, but most non-OA journals do, charge) than they do now in subscription fees.
See also Peter Suber's earlier commentary on the same issue.
There can be little doubt that the principal voice in the open access conversation is that of Peter Suber, who tirelessly gathers every crumb of information in this area, and then garnishes it with insightful comment on his Open Access News blog.
So it's rather paradoxical that the literal sound of that voice is something that is rarely heard. Good, then, to have this chance to encounter the man himself in this extensive interview, which also provides a handy primer on what exactly all this open access lark is about.
This is something I've been waiting for: an in-depth interview with Peter Suber, the person who has done more than anyone to drive the open access movement forward. Or as the interview puts it:Philosopher, jurist, and one-time stand-up comic, Peter Suber is widely viewed as the de factor leader of the open access (OA) movement.
Even better, the interviewer is Richard Poynder, whose praises I have sung on several occasions. Just read the intro to the interview and you'll see what I mean.
Alas, the intro is all that I *can* read. Stuck rather sadly in an earlier and not very successful business model, Richard insists on asking readers of the full interview to make a donation, with $8 the suggested sum. Not unreasonable, given the quality of the interview - at least, I imagine, since I've not read it. But I won't pay it (nor will I cheat and read the interview without paying).
As a fellow freelance journalist, I appreciate Richard needs to make a living, but it's as a struggling freelance journalist (all freelance journalists are struggling by definition, since we never know where tomorrow's commission will come from) that I can't pay out $8 for the pleasure of reading it, much as I'd like to. And I imagine I'm not the only one in this situation (there are doubtless even a few non-journalists who are struggling...)
So here we have the ironic situation that what is probably the best interview with the most important person in open access is not readily accessible. Richard: do change that model, please.
Ho-ho, things are hotting up among the opponents of open access:The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM) was established to protect the quality of scientific research, an issue of vital concern to:
* scientific, medical and other scholarly researchers who advance the cause of knowledge;
* the institutions that encourage and support them;
* the publishers who disseminate, archive and ensure the quality control of this research; and
* the physicians, clinicians, engineers and other intellectual pioneers who put knowledge into action.
Implying, of course, that open access has has no research integrity, does not advance the cause of knowledge, and is somewhow opposed to intellectual pioneers.
This is a really important development, because it is the clearest demonstration yet that the traditional publishers see open access as a real threat, and that it is succeeding - you don't take these kind of measures against something that is flailing. For the best rebuttal of the misleading issues and non-issues raised and obfuscated on this site, see Peter Suber's comments.
A little while back I wrote about the idea of using wikis for open government. Peter Suber - about whom Bill Hooker commented recently "not a sparrow falls in the OA world but PS knows about it!" - emailed me with some interesting news about an earlier project of his called Nomic:Nomic is a game I invented in 1982. It's a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process. While most of its initial rules are procedural in this sense, it does have one substantive rule (on how to earn points toward winning); but this rule is deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to please themselves. The Initial Set of rules, some commentary by me, and some reflections by Douglas Hofstadter, were published in Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" column in Scientific American in June of 1982. It was quickly translated into many European and Asian languages. Games were regularly played, and kicked off, the ARPANET, the Defense Department network which sired the Internet. Nomic has been used to stimulate artistic creativity, simulate the circulation of money, structure group therapy sessions, train managers, and to teach public speaking, legal reasoning, and legislative drafting. Nomic games have sent ambassadors to other Nomic games, formed federations, and played Meta-Nomic. Nomic games have experienced revolution, oppressive coups, and the restoration of popular sovereignty. Above all, Nomic has been fun for thousands of players around the world. For me, it was intended to illustrate and embody the thesis of my book, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, that a legal "rule of change" such as a constitutional amendment clause may apply to itself and authorize its own amendment. (Nomic is the third appendix of the book.)
The connection with open governance is clear. Peter passed on the news that people are trying to apply a Nomic-based approach to open source:Just last week, by chance, a total stranger proposed a Nomic-variant as a serious system of "Open-Source Self-Governance" (his words).
Here's what that site has to say about the project, which is called Efficasync:Efficasync is a method of open-source self-governance, where all the members of a group have the ability to examine, discuss and modify their group’s set of operational goals, reasonings, constraints, procedures and arrangements. In computer lingo, each member of such a group has both ‘read’ and ‘write(2)’ permissions to this set of governing statements. As demonstrated by the previous two lines, this document occasionally recasts a few traditional views of governance into a computer programmer’s frame of reference. The programmer’s paradigm holds a new, and potentially valuable, perspective for democratic governance. This document’s purpose is to describe a specific way, based on this new perspective, that a directly-democratic group’s governing infrastructure could be arranged. In doing this, the three main components which constitute Efficasync are explained: a Nomic, a particular graphical interface, and a starting set of ‘rules.’ This document was written with the intention of presenting a prototype for emulation and extension by groups wishing to operate as open-source selfgoverning entities.
Fascinating stuff.
Peter Suber has long been recognised as the official chronicler of the open access movement; now, with the publication of this paean, it seems he's become its bard as well:I've heard physicists refer to the prospect of room-temperature superconductivity as a "gift of nature". Unfortunately, it's not quite within reach. But the non-rivalrous property of digital information is a gift of nature that we've already grasped and put to work. We only have to stand back a moment to appreciate it. To our ancestors, the prospect of recording knowledge in precise language, symbols, sounds, or images without reducing the record to a rivalrous object would have been magical or miraculous. But we do it every day now and it's losing its magic.
The danger is not that we already take it for granted but that might stop short and fail to take full advantage of it. The point is not to marvel at its potential but to seize the opportunities it creates. It can transform knowledge-sharing if we let it.
We take advantage of this gift when we post information online and permit free access and unrestricted use for every user with an internet connection. But if we charge for access, enforce exclusion, create artificial scarcity, or prohibit essential uses, then we treat the non-rivalrous digital file like a rivalrous physical object, dismiss the opportunity, and spurn the gift.
More, Peter, more.
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