Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety 

ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety January 21, 2010

Posted by Kevin Smith in : Authors' Rights, Copyright in the Classroom, Open Access and Institutional Repositories , trackback

I attended parts of the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, held here in the Research Triangle this weekend.  There was a fascinating array of topics discussed and an interesting crowd of 270+ that included many working scientists, librarians and even journalists.  It was a great opportunity to listen to scientists talk about how they want to communicate with one another and with the general public.

There are some excellent discussions of what went on at this year’s conference, especially here and here on Dorothea Salo’s blog.  Those with a real passion for more information can check out this growing list of blog posts about the conference.  I won’t try to compete with these comprehensive recaps, especially because my selection of events to attend was rather idiosyncratic, and perhaps even ill-advised.  But I do want to make three quick observations about what I personally learned from the conference.

First, I discovered one more argument for open science that had not occurred to me before, but has the potential to be very compelling for scientists on our faculties.  One reason academic research should be online is that “junk” science is already there.  If the general public — including the proportion thereof who vote or require health care — do not make good decisions in regard to matters involving scientific knowledge, we can only blame ourselves when the best research is not available to them, hidden behind pay walls.

Second, I was fascinated to discover that health science bloggers have developed a code of ethics to try and account for the many issues that arise when scientists put important and potentially life-altering information onto the open web.  The benefits of this openness are indisputable, but so are some of the risks.  This code of ethics represents an attempt to address some of those risks and minimize them (there is a somewhat different discussion of a similar issue from the conference here).  The criteria applied to evaluate health care blogs (see the text of the code itself) — clear representation of perspective, confidentiality, commercial disclosure, reliability of information and courtesy — encapsulate standards that all of us who try to share information and opinion online need to be aware of.

Third, I was amazed at how important, and problematic, copyright issues were to this group.  I attended seven sessions at the conference, and five of them dealt with copyright as a major (although often unannounced) topic of discussion.  Even recognizing my tendency to gravitate toward such sessions, this is a high percentage.  I asked a fellow attendee why so many sessions raised copyright and was told, albeit with tongue in cheek, that it is “ruining our lives.”  More seriously, one scientist described trying to put his classroom lecture slides online and being told by his university’s counsel that all material that he did not create had to be removed first.  Apparently there was no discussion of the applicability of fair use and how to decide what was and was not allowable; just a wholesale rule that would discourage most scientists interested in sharing.  This suggested to me that it really is very important to improve the quality of copyright education on campus — for faculty, librarians (who are often the ones asked for advice) and even legal counsel.  We cannot reasonably advocate more online open access unless we also give our scholars the resources to accomplish that goal.  In many ways the technological infrastructure is becoming trivial and it is the policy and legal questions that must be addressed directly if we really want encourage openness.

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

 Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan

By MOTOKO RICH

Associated Press John Steinbeck

The families of the author John Steinbeck and the musician Woody Guthrie, which previously opposed the proposed Google Book settlement that would create a vast digital library of books, say that they now support it.

In a statement released Thursday by the Authors Guild, one of the parties to the settlement, Gail Steinbeck, the wife of Thomas Steinbeck, the author’s son, said “the majority of the problems that we found to be troubling have been addressed.”

The settlement of a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google after the company began scanning books from university libraries, was originally announced in October 2008. Since then, a widespread group of authors, academics, librarians, public interest groups, as well as the Justice Department, have raised an array of objections based on antitrust, copyright and class-action issues.

Ms. Steinbeck, who had received notice of the settlement shortly before a May deadline for authors to opt out of it, sent a letter back then to several influential authors outlining her concerns. Responding to her urging to “stop it in its tracks right now,” a group of authors that included the musician Arlo Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s son, asked the court for a four-month extension on the opt-out date. It was granted.

In September, the Justice Department laid out its concerns in a memorandum and in October, Google and its partners pledged to revise the settlement. The revised agreement was submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in November, making it easier for other companies to license Google’s digital collection of copyrighted but out-of-print books and established the position of an independent fiduciary, or trustee, who would be solely responsible for decisions regarding so-called orphan works, the millions of books whose rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

In an e-mail message to fellow authors cited in Thursday’s statement from the Author’s Guild, Ms. Steinbeck wrote that the revision “meets our standards of control over the intellectual properties that would otherwise remain at risk were we to stay out of the settlement.” She added that neither the Steinbeck nor Guthrie families would “initiate a separate lawsuit against Google.”

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository 

Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

The Cornell University Library has established a collaborative business model for the arXiv repository.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

arXiv will remain free for readers and submitters, but the Library has established a voluntary, collaborative business model to engage institutions that benefit most from arXiv.

"Keeping an open-access resource like arXiv sustainable means not only covering its costs, but also continuing to enhance its value, and that kind of financial commitment is beyond a single institution's resources," said Oya Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "If a case can be made for any repository being community-supported, arXiv has to be at the top of the list."

The 200 institutions that use arXiv most heavily account for more than 75 percent of institutional downloads. Cornell is asking these institutions for financial support in the form of annual contributions, and most of the top 25 have already committed to helping arXiv.

Institutions that have already pledged support include:

• California Institute of Technology
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Cambridge (UK)
• CERN – European Organization for Nuclear Research (Switzerland)
• CNRS – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)
• Columbia University
• DESY – Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (Germany)
• Durham University (UK)
• ETH Zurich – Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (Switzerland)
• Fermilab
• Harvard University
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Imperial College London (UK)
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Max Planck Society (Germany)
• University of Michigan
• University of Oxford (UK)
• University of Pennsylvania
• Princeton University
• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
• Texas A&M University . . .

The proposed funding model is viewed as a short-term strategy, and the Library is actively seeking input on a long-term solution. Currently, Cornell University Library supports the operating costs of arXiv, which are comparable to the costs of the university's collection budget for physics and astronomy. As one of the most influential innovations in scholarly communications since the advent of the Internet, arXiv's original dissemination model represented the first significant means to provide expedited access to scientific research well ahead of formal publication.

DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

archy

archy 

Open access isn't the same as free access (#scio10)

There is one point from the discussion following our ScienceOnline2010 presentation that I want to elaborate on. This is the way in which credentialism excludes amateurs. This is a problem that I face.

The internet has made accessible vast amounts of literature for much wider audiences than ever before. Many of the original sources that I have been able to use in my research would not have been available to me just ten years ago. Many early journals existed for only a few years, in very small numbers. To read them, I would have had to travel to major libraries in Europe and the Eastern states, which would have been prohibitively expensive. Once at those libraries, I would have needed to get access to their rare book collections, which would have been very difficult since I lack an institutional affiliation. Because of Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and the efforts of many libraries I can now read these works online and, in may cases, view scans of the actual pages without traveling.

My point about lacking an institutional affiliation is very important. Most of the people at ScienceOnline2010 were associated with some kind of university or research institution. It was so taken for granted that they put it on the name tags, as if the affiliation was part of their name. I'm sure that it is standard practice at all professional conferences to assume the attendees are all in that profession. However, this was not a scientists' conference; it was a science communicators conference and communicators were defined as including bloggers who just happen to like science. Many attendees commented that it would have been useful to put peoples' blog aliases or online avatars on their tags along with their names. However, I didn't hear anyone suggest that these identities should have been put on the tags in place of their affiliations. Lacking an institutional affiliation, I put down Clever Wife's soap business, just to have something to fill in the blank.


The wonderful era of online access, which I mentioned above, is already facing counter-pressures to close it back up. The attendees were all familiar with the problems of modern scientific journals. They are ungodly expensive to purchase and many libraries don't have all of the relevant titles to their research. Many journals are beginning to address these problems by putting their content online, allowing institutions to purchase subscriptions that give access to the members of that institution wherever they are. That's great for them, but a barrier to everyone else. As an alumnus of the University of Washington, I'm supposed to have the same access privileges to library resources as do current students. The catch is that those privileges do not extend to internet access. To read journals, I have to go to the library. That's not a problem for people who work at the University, but, to someone who does not work there, it means making a special trip to read any given article. In those who do not work on or near a university library, the internet revolution has changed nothing.

Many of the journals who have put their content online do allow laypersons to access their articles, but we have to pay by the article. The prices range from ten to forty dollars per article with no consideration for length. Scientific research articles are usually quite short; one article I want is three pages long and will cost me forty dollars to view. For current research articles, I need to determine if it is relevant to my work without actually seeing it first.

The pay-per-view firewalls deprive an historical researcher of important context. The Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society are a perfect example of this. A few years ago they began posting online scanned images of the pages of their entire run. These were treasure to me. Whenever I went looking for an article, I browsed the entire issue to get an idea of the intellectual context of that one paper. This was not only useful, it was a lot of fun. In my presentation, I mentioned letters from landowners about natural oddities discovered on their land. As recently as the late 1700s, the Proceedings printed letters as trivial as someone finding a turnip in the shape of the Prime Minister's head. Priceless!

Last spring, with the scanning complete, the Society turned management of the digital archives over to JSTOR, a for-profit institution. Most of the attendees at our presentation were not even aware of the change. Because of their institutional affiliations, nothing had changed for them; they simply go online and read whatever they want. For me and people like me, it costs ten dollars for each article and letter unless we make a special trip to the University library.

As I mentioned in the presentation, the professionalization of the scientific world was a great thing in many ways, but, along with breaking down some barriers to the free exchange of ideas, it created new barriers. It divided the scientific world into two classes, active practitioners and passive spectators. Threats and barriers to the free and open access of ideas are not limited to censorship and social pressures; sometimes they are as simple as cost and distance.

archy

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

 Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review

The time to send messages to the White House ended January 21

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010

Go back to the
Academic Newswire
for more stories

 

Have you told the White House what you think about open access to publicly funded research? The Office of Science and Technology Policy has been accepting comments for weeks now, but the window of opportunity to add your thoughts closes today.

You haven’t commented yet? Do it now. Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you.

Okay, now that you’re back, I want to confess that there’s a lot involved that I don’t personally understand: the technical requirements, the need for uniformity, the way the deposits should work—I don’t have opinions on the fine points. What I do believe, though, is that the research funded by our tax dollars is important because it’s a public good. We wouldn’t be funding it with public dollars otherwise. It’s good for academic science, but it’s good for industry, too. (See also what ALA/ACRL and ARL have to say.)

Sharing science
My son is a physics postdoc at the Argonne National Laboratory. He does things with our tax dollars that I couldn’t begin to explain, but I do get that what he does may end up improving batteries that will be sold in products that we’ll be using—laptops, cars, you name it. It’s good for consumers. It’s good for business. And it’s especially good for pushing forward the frontiers of what we know about materials at a very fundamental level. (I mean, he fires photons at stuff to see what happens. That’s pretty basic.)

What if students or faculty at my college need to read up on the latest research published by the people whose synchrotron is funded by our taxes? Well, they’re probably in luck. Physicists are big on sharing. They’ve been doing it for years, through arXiv and by making their own society publications open access friendly. Not everything is available, of course, but quite a lot is. They still publish massive amounts of research, but somehow they feel their interest in supporting a quality publishing operation is not incompatible with fast and free dissemination of results. 

Not on the same page
Other science disciplines taught at my campus aren’t quite as open. In biology, there are myriad worthy societies that rely on earnings from library subscriptions, and there are even more commercially-published journals that rank high in importance. Neuroscience is an exciting concentration that is attracting a lot of students but, oy, it’s expensive. Like physics, chemistry has a major society that represents many branches of the field, but its journals are pricey and the logic of open access is not wired into the discipline as it is in physics.

We also pay a lot just to find out what we don’t have. Our most expensive specialized databases are those covering chemistry and mathematics literature. The vast majority of what these tools index is published in journals we can’t afford, but, if we expect our faculty to be active scholars (and we do), there’s really no alternative. We have to hope that the land grant university up the road whose library we depend on will have enough tax-supported funding to provide access to the fair-use articles we can obtain, and that we’ll be able to afford copyright fees for the rest. For this to work, somebody, somewhere, has to buy a subscription.

Many small colleges like mine are going straight to paying commercial publishers for articles at point of need, and they’re saving a lot of money on subscriptions. But this means that, by design, there is no public asset to explore, even on a licensed, temporary basis. Scientific research is thus a disposable unit purchased for individuals, a solution that still costs libraries thousands of dollars per year. That’s a savings that comes at a steep cost.

Whose crisis?
This situation, of course, is often mistakenly called “the serials crisis.” It might be more accurate to call it the humanities crisis, because both my library and the research university we count on have less money for books, which are the lifeblood of many humanities disciplines. We know we have to pay fees for journal articles, because the only way we share them is by copying. Thanks to the first sale doctrine, we can share a book until it falls apart—and it’s politically a lot easier to not buy a book than it is to cancel a journal or database subscription.

Here’s another thing: it has always seemed peculiar to me that the “5/5 rule” CONTU guideline for the interlibrary loan (ILL) of articles is a flat rate of five articles, published within the most recent five years, regardless of the size of a journal. We can get five articles from a science journal that publishes 1000 short articles a year—and five articles from a humanities journal that publishes 20 long articles a year. That doesn’t seem right, but such are the peculiar metrics of copyright compromises. It’s considered fair use to request by ILL some 20 percent of the humanities journal before paying copyright fees (which tend to be very affordable, anyway) but only one half of one percent of the big science journal, for which copyright fees typically cost the price of a scholarly trade paperback in the humanities. No wonder we’re buying fewer books.

Science in the public interest
We have a long way to go before we sort out the economics of publishing in a digital world. Book publishers are sweating over when to release ebooks, and the newspaper of record is poised to start charging frequent flyers.

But this one is a no-brainer. We believe science is valuable enough that we pour public funding into it. We need to make sure that the results of that funding helps advance our knowledge of the physical and natural world, and that won’t happen if libraries can no longer afford it. Let’s make sure our investment pays off—for the public good.

The White House wants to hear from us. Add your comments to the open forum today.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books this year.

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal 

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010

Academic Newswire
for more stories

• Unprecedented dissemination opportunities, but difficulty for business models
• "Average" OA humanities monograph runs at a deficit
• Experiments under way to see what works

Open access (OA) publishing models, pricing concerns, and the cannibalization of print sales were the headline topics at the SPARC-ACRL forum session on Saturday at the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting in Boston, titled "The Ebook Transition: Collaboration and Innovations Behind Open Access Monographs."
The conclusion? Open access monographs are an unprecedented boon to the scholarly mission of dissemination, yet challenge the financial sustainability of an academic press.

Introducing the panelists, David Carlson, incoming chair of the SPARC steering committee and dean of library affairs at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, said that the scholarly market demands ebooks, regardless of the difficulties they pose for publishers and libraries. The three panelists then described their attempts to meet that demand.

Bearish outlook for OA monographs
Michael Jensen, director of strategic web communications for the National Academies Press (NAP), was the first to suggest the bad news/good news proposition: the press’s sales have actually declined, but NAP has fulfilled more of its mission of achieving maximal dissemination.

"There's an awful lot of reading going on," Jensen said of NAP's open content, which draws on average ten page views for each distinct visitor. However, only 0.3% of visitors purchase anything. The press has experimented with making the best non-optimal version (HTML page access) free, while offering the optimal version (PDF download) for a fee. The content is openly available, he said, but you can't easily read the free version on an airplane, for example, since pages must be requested individually online. This encourages users to buy the text as an ebook.

Aside from not worrying about royalties for the content it publishes on behalf of the National Academies, Jensen said NAP faces slightly less pressure since its support is guaranteed by the Academies. Similarly, the press functions under the umbrella of scientific funding rather than under a humanities mindset, where requests as small as staff computers can pose budget anxiety.

"I've never been more bearish on the future," Jensen concluded, adding that the near-term holds serious risks for monograph publishers, and that specialty markets for OA monographs likely won't function without explicit institutional support.

Taking stock of the "average" OA monograph
Patrick Alexander, director of the Penn State University Press, similarly cited tension between OA and “the practical goal of sustainability," then analyzed the press's open access Romance [language] Studies collection.

A 256 page "average monograph" has a list price of $57.88 for a cloth edition and $30.50 for paper (though many sales are at a significant discount). Meanwhile, it’s also made available at no cost to the end user in PDF sections. This press sells an average of just 95 copies in cloth and 279 copies in paper.
Thus, the "visible" first copy costs total about $5223, including editing and materials, as well as Cataloging in Publication filing and copyright registration. Beyond that are “invisible costs” for processes like validating metadata and software training for staff. Other overhead costs such as university support, facilities, personnel, and equipment add up to another $5,188, he said, bringing the total cost for the first digital and print copy to about $10,411.

In the end, each title runs a deficit of $9,898, Alexander said, with the obvious conclusion that the current model doesn't demonstrate financial sustainability. Still, the press has reached  most of its dissemination goals, with some titles still getting significant traffic online two years after publication, an unusual sign of interest for this specialized field.

Value of experimentation
Finally, Maria Bonn, newly appointed associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan, described her institution's similar experiments with "calculated risk-taking" in the service of scholarly access.

She described three open access efforts, including an imprint called digitalculturebooks, the inclusion of retrospective press titles in the HathiTrust, and a partnership with the Open Humanities Press. As with the other OA efforts described at the panel, Bonn said that making the digitalculturebooks materials available online represented purely additive costs on top of regular cost of producing a print title.

The response to the imprint—which covers topics particularly suited to an online audience—has been generally good in terms of both sales and online visibility, but Bonn said it’s unclear whether this and other efforts would be viable over the long term.

Weak sales or not, "we think it's the right thing to do," she said. "It's the purpose of the press to support scholarly access."
For now, it seems, publishers support such experiments to generate valuable data about open publishing models, but it is also clear they can't continue forever.

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

UBC This Week « UBC Public Affairs

UBC This Week « UBC Public Affairs

"interesting idea -- will it be sustainable?"  HSM

UBC Library gives inaugural award for communicating research The UBC Library will be inaugurating the UBC Library Innovative Dissemination of Research Award, which will honour students, faculty and staff whose creative use of new tools and technologies are expanding the boundaries of research and enhancing the impact of research findings. Faculty, staff and students are eligible to apply to win the certificate of recognition and a $2,000 cash prize. The first winner will be selected by the University Librarian and members of the Librarys Scholarly Communications Committee, and announced during Celebrate Research Week in early March. Deadline for applications is Feb. 1, 2010. For information on submission criteria and procedures, visit http://scholcomm.ubc.ca/award or contact Joy Kirchner at 604-827-3644 or joy.kirchner@ubc.ca.

UBC This Week « UBC Public Affairs