Have I Got News for *Them*

This is just incredible:

Major media companies are increasingly lobbying Google to elevate their expensive professional content within the search engine's undifferentiated slush of results.

Many publishers resent the criteria Google uses to pick top results, starting with the original PageRank formula that depended on how many links a page got. But crumbling ad revenue is lending their push more urgency; this is no time to show up on the third page of Google search results. And as publishers renew efforts to sell some content online, moreover, they're newly upset that Google's algorithm penalizes paid content.

Let's just get this right. The publishers resent the fact that the stuff other than "professional content" is rising to the top of Google searches, because of the PageRank algorithm. But wait, doesn't the algorithm pick out the stuff that has most links - that is, those sources that people for some reason find, you know, more relevant?

So doesn't this mean that the "professional content" isn't, well, so relevant? Which means that the publisher are essentially getting what they deserve because their "professional content" isn't actually good enough to attract people's attention and link love?

And the idea that Google's PageRank is somehow "penalising" paid content by not ignoring the fact that people are reading it less than other stuff, is just priceless. Maybe publishers might want to consider *why* their "professional content" is sinking like a stone, and why people aren't linking to it? You know, little things like the fact it tends to regard itself as above the law - or the algorithm, in this case? (Via MicroPersuasion.)

End of a (Print) Era

Wow:

Another storied print magazine is coming to an end in print, and the focus is shifting to online and events: InfoWorld, the weekly magazine owned by IDG, is closing down, and the announcement will come Monday morning, paidContent.org has confirmed.

When I was a cub computing reporter (or thereabouts) on a long-forgotten title called Practical Computing in the 1980s, reading the thick pages of Infoworld was a weekly ritual for me. And now its been blown to bits - literally.

DRM Causes Piracy

So far from being an impediment to so-called "online piracy," it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward.

Yup. (Via Slashdot.)

I Urge You to Urge EU Urgency on OA

Open access is important, but for most of us, it's hard to do much about it. So I urge you to vote for the following EU petition, whether you're in the EU or not:

I urge decision-makers at all levels in Europe to endorse the recommendations made in the Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe in full, in particular to adopt the first recommendation A1 as a matter of urgency.

(Via Open Access News.)

Solveiging a Publishing Problem

What do you do if your publisher never actually publishes the book you have written about OpenOffice.org for them? Easy: buy back the rights and self-publish:

I had it done in May, but there was much dithering at Prentice Hall. It's not just them -- lots of publishers are facing the fact the publishing is different now, and book contracts have been getting cancelled all over the place. I had the opportunity to get the publication rights back, so I jumped at the chance and ha've self-published the Guidebook.

The author, Solveig Haugland, probably knows more about using OpenOffice.org than anyone, so the book is highly recommended. She's even made available some sample chapters so you can try before you buy.

Towards a Post-Copyright World

One of the heartening things about fighting the inequities of the current system of intellectual monopolies is that there are a growing number of like-minded people and sites doing it. One, for example, is Moving to Freedom, and from here I learned about another, called Questioncopyright.org.

I can particularly recommend the essay there entitled "The promise of a post-copyright world". As well as a thorough, and unusually illuminating history of copyright (yes, it's all the fault of us Brits again), it closes with this important insight:

As the stream of freely available material gets bigger, its stigma will slowly vanish. It used to be that the difference between a published author and an unpublished one was that you could obtain the former's books, but not the latter's. Being published meant something. It had an aura of respectability; it implied that someone had judged your work and given it an institutional stamp of approval. But now the difference between published and unpublished is narrowing. Soon, being published will mean nothing more than that an editor somewhere found your work worthy of a large-scale print run, and possibly a marketing campaign.

CERN Re-invents Publishing - Again

The Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while he was working at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. Now the boys and girls at CERN are at it again, with a radical proposal that will re-invent scientific publishing in their field.

Essentially, they suggest that enough of the big particle physics establishments get together to sponsor the publication of most of the main titles in their field for the next few years as part of a transition to an open access approach, funded in part by savings on subscriptions. At a stroke this solves the biggest problem with OA - getting there.

Major laboratories such as CERN will have to take a lead initially in steering the community through the OA transition – both politically and financially – but ultimately the particle physics funding agencies will have to provide the lion’s share of the financial support. This accounts in particular for the fact that about 80% of the original research articles in particle physics are theory papers.

Tentatively, the task force envisages a transition period of five years to establish a ‘fair share’ scenario between funding agencies and other partners, to allow time for funding agencies to redirect budgets from journal subscriptions to OA sponsoring, and to allow time for more publishers to convert journals to OA. At the end of this period, the vast majority of particle physics literature should be available under an OA scheme.

The sums involved are big for publishing, but puny compared to the cost of your average accelerator, so it's a good mix. And they're thinking strategically too:

With about 10,000 practising scientists worldwide, particle physicists represent a medium-sized community that is small enough for publishers and funding agencies not to take incalculable risks, yet big enough to provide a representative test bed and to set a visible precedent for other fields of science and humanities.

In other words, if this works, the hope is everything else will come tumbling down too. This is one experiment I'll follow with interest. (Via Open Access News.)

The Semantic Newspaper

Here's a typically thoughtful meditation from Techdirt that considers ways in which newspapers could usefully embrace not just the Internet, but its more advanced technologies like the Semantic Web. It's an interesting idea, but I fear we may have to wait a while to see it implemented by any of the big names, even the savvy ones (yup, that's you, Guardian.)

Open Peer Review

Open access does not aim to subvert the peer review process that lies at the heart of academic publishing: it just wants to open things up a little. But you know how it is: once you start this subversive stuff, it's really hard to stop.

So what did I come across recently, but this fascinating hint of what opening up peer review might achieve (as for the how, think blogs or wikis). Maybe an idea whose time has (almost) come.

Open Access Opens the Throttle

It's striking that, so far, open access has had a relatively difficult time making the breakthrough into the mainstream - despite the high-profile example of open source to help pave the way. Whether this says something about institutional inertia, or the stubbornness of the forces ranged against open access, is hard to say.

Against this background, a post (via Open Access News) on the splendidly-named "The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics" blog (now why couldn't I have thought of something like that?) is good news.

Figures from that post speak for themselves:
In the last quarter, over 780,000 records have been added to OAIster, suggesting that those open access archives are beginning to fill! There are 170 more titles in DOAJ, likely an understated increase due to a weeding project. 78 titles have been added to DOAJ in the past 30 days, a growth rate of more than 2 new titles per day.

OAIster refers to a handy central search site for "freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources", while DOAJ is a similarly-indispensable directory of open access journals. The swelling holdings of both augur well for open access, and offer the hope that the breakthrough may be close.

Update: An EU study on the scientific publishing market comes down squarely in favour of open access. As Peter Suber rightly notes, "this is big", and is likely to give the movement a considerable boost.

Blogging Newspapers

One of the interesting questions raised by the ascent of blogs is: What will the newspapers do? Even though traditional printed titles are unlikely to disappear, they are bound to change. This post, from the mysteriously-named "Blue Plate Special" blog (via C|Net's Esoteric blog) may not answer that question, but it does provide some nutritious food for thought.

It offers its views on which of the major US dailies blog best, quantified through a voting system. Although interesting - and rich fodder for those in need of a new displacement activity - the results probably aren't so important as the criteria used for obtaining them. They were as follows:

Ease-of-use and clear navigation
Currency
Quality of writing, thinking and linking
Voice
Comments and reader participation
Range and originality
Explain what blogging is on your blogs page
Show commitment

The blog posting gives more details on each, but what's worth noting is that most of these could be applied to any blog - not just those in newspapers. Having recently put together my own preliminary thoughts on the Art of the Blog, I find that these form a fascinating alternative view, and with several areas of commonality. I strongly recommend all bloggers to read the full article - whether or not you care about blogging newspapers.

Open Access, Open Source, Open Dialogue

One of the most important facets of the blog world is the rapid and intelligent dialogue it allows. A case in point is the interview that appeared on Richard Poynder's blog "Open and Shut?". As you might guess from its title, this is a kindred spirit to the present site, and is highly recommended for anyone interested in following the latest developments in the open access and circumjacent domains.

The interview is a fairly specialist one, and concerns the some open access nitty-gritty. But what caught my attention was the response to points made there by Stevan Harnad in his own blog, which has the rather lumbering title "Publishing Reform, University Self-Publishing and Open Access" but the wonderful sub-title "Open Access Archivangelism". This is rather appropriate since if anyone has the right to be called the Archivangelist of Open Access, it is Harnad, who is probably the nearest thing that the movement has to Richard Stallman (also known as Saint IGNUcius).

In his response to the interview, Harnad comments on a point made in the Poynder interview about moving from the Eprints to a hosted system called bepress. Eprints is open access archiving software that not only proudly sports GNU in its name, but runs principally on GNU/Linux (with the odd bit of Solaris and MacOS X thrown in for good measure), but notes "There are no plans for a version to run under Microsoft Windows." Defiantly open access and open source: how right-on can you get?

Wellcome Moves

The news that the Wellcome Trust has reached an agreement with three publishers of scientific journals to allow Wellcome-funded research published in their journals to be immediately available online and without charge to the reader is good news indeed.

Good because it will make large quantities of high-quality research immediately available, rather than after the tiresome six-month wait that some journals impose when providing a kind of pseudo-open access. Good, because it shows that the Wellcome Trust is willing to put its money where its mouth is, and to pay to get open access. Good, because by making this agreement with Blackwell, OUP and Springer, the Wellcome Trust puts pressure on the the top science publisher, Elsevier, to follow suit.

In fact, thinking about it, I was probably unkind to describe Nature as the Microsoft of the science world: that honour clearly belongs to Elsevier, both in terms of its power and resistance to opening up. Moreover, Nature, to its credit, now gets it about Wikipedia - it even made subscriber-only content freely available. And the conceptual distance between wikis and open access is surprisingly small; so maybe we're seeing the start of a historic shift at Nature.