My section of Bergren Forum Presentation: (R)evolutions in Scholarship Rethinking (my shot at a narrative)
Scholarship in the Digital Age – April 30, 2009
Presented by: Ellen Bahr, Mark Smith  & Chad Harriss

I am grateful for this chance to discuss a few ideas and issues in scholarship that occupy much of my thinking and work these days.  I am also grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Ellen and Chad on this presentation.  It has been quite rewarding.  We’ve learned a great deal from each other.

Ya .. know .. I almost wish we would have recorded a few of our fruitful conversations and just played them back for you all.  I think you would be very impressed.

Now that I think of it .. perhaps we could have taken some recorded excerpts from those meetings and …. maybe add some video of scholars in action .. creating or using new scholarly formats …And then.. we could have recorded a few screen shots of  some of that scholarship, and laid a running audio commentary of the top of it describing the process.

Of course.. then .. we should put it all up on a wiki and group edit the work by adding some text to give it some structure.  When we finished that, perhaps we could put it up on Chad’s blog for commentary from colleagues .. who knows maybe we’ll want to incorporate some of those peer reactions in a later version.

And, oh wait.. Ellen found that article in the online “Journal of Electronic Publishing” and that website with the animated simulation.  We could link to those as references or perhaps fit them in the body of the work.  Oh ..and then there’s Chad … you know Chad ..  he’ll want to include a “vodcast” of his hero .. MIT Professor Henry Jenkins giving that talk at that forum in Bali.  I would just add an RSS newsfeed from Jenkins blog “Confessions of an Aca-fan” ..   But nooooo, he’d want to capture the oration and the reactions of the audience.  So, we’d add that in there somewhere.  After all, the guy is a dynamic speaker and his comments are a perfect compliment to the high res graphics from van Orsdel’s PowerPoint “Anatomy of a Crisis: Dysfunction in the Scholarly Communications System”  We’ll add it ..It’ll make Chad happy .. And, ya know .. collaboration, its a good thing…

Speaking of good things.. It’s a good thing we have Ellen on our team to keep us organized and clearly focused.  She has such a way with the written word .. and a keen awareness of the power of the visuals.  If we released such a work for free in an AU institutional repository, future scholars would have an easy time finding and re-using our work.  However, our respective promotion and tenure committees may be baffled by it .. but sometimes that’s how innovation works.

Yikes .. P&T .. hmmm ..maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t do it after all.  Maybe we PowerPoint presentation is the better idea …. and everyone will be more comfortable.  Yes …. it is will better for us politically, it looks better on our CV and will conform nicely to our P&T scholarship guidelines.

You know, I do wonder when new scholarship will find its place beyond our legacy, paper-based systems.  I wonder when they’ll come a time when we can wholeheartedly encourage innovation, and value new powers of digital scholarship.  I also wonder how we will organize it, present it, evaluate it, share it and adapt policies to recognize new formats .. hmmmmmm .. perhaps we should take a closer look.  Mr. DeMille … I’m ready for my PowerPoint.

This is an extremely broad topic to discuss in a very few minutes.

Many of points we address here would benefit from their very own Bergren forum.  Indeed, several of our discussions are found as themes for entire conferences, and the discussion in the literature is overwhelming.

Out of necessity we confined our discussion to new scholarship whose content is presented electronically and is available on the Internet.  And, on that we will still only be able to scratch the surface.

We’ve had to exclude any discussion of “electronic monographs” or new formats presented in other electronic environments.

Lets see… Beyond paper .. what are some of the actual benefits electronic publication?  Why should we consider it?

What we know we can do is:

• annotate by linking within and outside our electronic documents
• make it available 24/7/365 from anywhere
• full-text search
• enlarge and enhance graphics
• link to and from citations and the scholars other works
• use formatting contexts.. so that the content is parsed and presented non-linear fashion
• solicit comments and have a dialogue with our readers
• incorporate Web 2.0 functions such as newsfeeds to blogs and websites
• appeal to multiple learning modalities, with sound and video
• create simulations
• store and archive the raw data of our research
• offer pre and post publication versions of our work for comment and discourse
• retain our rights, share our work and self publish on a blog or website
• deposit our work in an institutional repository when we can care for it and manage it and perhaps re-use it over time
• we can broadcast it over channels like iTunes or YouTubeU

We also know that ..

Scholars who have never met each other can build collaborative works like they’ve done with the : Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The list goes on. There are significant opportunities to enhance our scholarship when we are not confined by paper.

Those opportunities are fairly obvious.  But there are several other benefits of publishing online … that are Not So Obvious.  Here are a few …

When your work is online …

• It is more likely to be discovered
• and cited (and reused)
• we can also capture metrics of usage. Which is a nice measure to have
• and .. finally … online content can extend the traditional  paper bibliography into a “knowledge network” (linking content, citations, scholars & readers and truly become a scholarly exchange)

There is a lot to love about the scholarly potential of new media…

Here Clay Shirky .. Professor of Interactive Telecommunications at NYU … captures this thought quite succinctly in his book “Here Comes Everybody” 

We’re living through—in our historical generation—the largest increase in human
expressive capability in history.”

This is so well said .. However .. many of us might wish to append this statements with a slight addendum..

• First by discussing the evolving economics of scholarship, and

• Then take a look at ONE NEW, perhaps controversial, Digital publication model that is turning the process of scholarly publishing on its head.

Back in the early 90’s .. when we began to see the Internet take hold for both researchers and the common man….  The new construct of publishing scholarly texts online .. sort of crept up on us.  One day its paper journals, next day your librarian is telling you that you can get a copy of the article online in an electronic format.  Simple as that.

We were happy for the conveniences it offered .. but we likely printed them out … and it merely saved us a trip to the library.  In this context, our paper systems of scholarly publishing were not threatened by the new technology, we all saw it as a potential service enhancement.  One enterprise was particularly happy for this development…  the for-profit publisher.

So, essentially, what we saw is the “Same Old Wine in a Brand New Bottle”

Our systems didn’t change… we:

• Retained traditional distribution/economic model .. thru subscriptions, memberships, pay per article.
• The Scholar wrote, the publisher “printed” & the user paid
• The system worked without disruption & was familiar
• And … our friends the “for profit publisher” saw an opportunity to use “online copy” as a “value-added” product or “new” pay service for electronic versions

So in those early days ..we found ourselves lulled into using online text as “electronic copy” and had little reason to consider its additional potential

It was almost as though .. we had a solution, with out a problem .. or so we thought

What many of us failed to recognize at that time .. was, that when text moved from paper to electronic forms …  the whole game changed.  Working in online environments meant that our creations no longer needed to be locked away where only scholars and students with great libraries could access it and use it.

The old publishing paradigm was no longer essential … in fact, it works against encouraging innovation for scholarship in electronic forms

Here is how it goes:

• You donate your Intellectual Property to publishers in return for peer review and dissemination.
• You also donate service as reviewers and editors
• You’ve surrendered your rights to share it .. even though it has become very simple and cost effective to do so
• and you .. your colleagues .. and your institutions … are increasingly unable to buy it back!  We simply can’t afford it

Coincidentally, at this very moment in time we began to find ourselves tied to a publication model that would become unsustainable.

Just as we began to harness technology to create, publish and access in the online environment, an ongoing crisis was reaching a fever pitch.   The issue, of course, was, and remains, then skyrocketing costs of scholarly journals.

What was once regarded as the “libraries serials crisis” is now recognized by stakeholders in the academic arena  as “everybody’s serials crisis.”  To this day, Libraries worldwide continue to struggle with journal costs that have compounded at 4 times the rate of inflation since the mid-1980s.

I was watching a “vodcast” recently (yes a vodcast) … and Professor Stuart Scheiber of Harvard University recounted his institution’s attempt to keep up with these rising costs by hyper-inflating the library budget to keep pace.

In this graphic published by the Association of Research Libraries … the top dark blue line represents the average cost of journals from 1986 to 2006.   The light blue line just below it reflects the average journal expenditure in ARL libraries at that same time.  Following the parallel trajectory, it is easy to see how libraries valiantly attempted to keep up with costs.  Professor Scheiber goes on to share with his audience that the point at which the lower curve turns down, has , he says, a technical term… he tells that his technical term is called … “giving up.”  He laments that even Harvard, with its magnificent resources, found that keeping pace was simply unsustainable.

And so ….  At this time we find the convergence of new technology and failing economic model is further complicated by the growing awareness that scholars are finding other significant uses for advances in technology to enhance their work.

At the same time many of us are painfully aware that legacy institutional policies afford little or no recognition or reward for pursuing and leveraging the power of new technology for scholarship.

The primary and justifiable condition remains today…

• We need an accredited Scholarly publishing model
• We must retain and value peer review
• AND .. we need a system that supports and assures integrity.

Many institutions and scholars feel we have arrived at a breaking point.  In some scholarly circles, this tension between, cost, function, and process is becoming… something akin to “We’re Mad as Hell and We’re Not gonna take it any more!! “

As a result it has spurred some radical thinking in the scholarly community and here is one result….

[Graphic]  Open Access Movement

Yes .. parallel to many of the new services we see on the Internet… scholars and institutions are helping to create a new model where there is no cost to the end user.

This convergence of crisis and opportunity is leading to development of a robust “Open Access publication model.”

“Open-Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.   What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder”

Some advantages of OA are that it ….

• Removes barriers to access
• Re-establishes author rights
• Has Cost efficiencies & less time to ”press”
• Facilitates broad pre & post pub review
• Encourages collaboration and data sharing
• Greatly increases the visibility of a scholars work

Unfortunately .. in its infancy .. OA has suffered from some misconceptions that hampers and delays its adoption .. these include:

• The false impression that Open Access is incompatible with Peer Review
  - This is simply not true.  There are several functioning models that replicate the paper process.  Quality … and oversight … are quite separate from the “technologies” of publication.
  
• The other mistaken perception is that .. Retaining Authorship Rights is a reflection of lack of quality.
  - Again.. not true  ….  simply because an author chooses to exercise his/her rights to determine how and where their work is used .. is clearly unrelated to quality … there is no real logical connection there

Very quickly I want to tell you a little more about Open Access Models:

• They generally come in 2 flavors:  OA Jourals & Digital Repositories
• The OA Journals are Peer Reviewed or Refereed publications made freely available.
• The Number of Open Access Journal titles is growing by leaps and bounds .
• The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists 4067 OA titles & rising
• As with paper, OA Journals are produced and delivered by independent publishers, societies, and discipline-centric online communities.

As I mentioned, the unique attribute of OA publishing is that the costs of publication are borne upfront .. often by the author,  professional society, scholar’s home institution or research sponsor

This has some scholars concerned that we are merely transferring one cost model for another.

However:

• After startup costs OA journals are significantly cheaper to produce and nearly free to distribute.
• Many OA journals that charge processing fees will waive fees in some circumstances.
• OA journals with institutional subsidies tend NOT to charge processing fees.
• Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts.
• Some OA publisher waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership

The Second flavor of Open Access content is found in Open Repositories or Digital Archives

These systems:

• Deliver & archive OA scholarship which may or may not be peer reviewed
• Often house pre-prints, post-prints, theses, images, or simply raw data
• Are hosted by universities, laboratories, or discipline-centric organizations.  (such as PLoS, BioMed, etc.)
• Repository Content conforms to the metadata standards that allow the works to be interoperable with other systems, and so enable “harvesting” and sharing between compliant archives.
• In addition, There is robust free open access software such as DSPACE, the system used by SUNY where the Scholes library has contributed selected Eng. Theses and MFA Thesis Images

As an aside:

It was recently reported in the Chronicle that nearly two-thirds of pay-access journals allow the author an archival copy for posting Institutional repositories upon request  (Suber, in Chronicle February 12, 2008)

Tipping Point:

Many consider that Open Access publishing has reached a tipping point toward broad acceptance:

Some Indicators are:

• Valid, systematic, publishing and review practices have emerged
• Strong supporting advocacy and research leadership organizations are working closely with universities & publishers (i.e. SPARC, Open Access Initiative, Public Knowledge Project, EDUCAUSE, etc.)
• And as Chad mentioned ..Influential scholarly publishing industry affiliates like “Nature Publications” are working with.. rather than against ..this movement.. and delivering a variety of content for free

We are also starting to see Academic & Government agencies jumping on the bandwagon by requiring (or strongly encouraging) faculty and researchers to retain non-exclusive rights to their work and deposit a copy of their publications in repositories for free, open distribution.

Perhaps, the most well known government policy is the recent National Institute of Health mandate that requires authors of publicly funded research to deposit a copy of their resulting publications in the BioMed Central Repository for access by all taxpayers.

And. recently several college faculties within include those at MIT, Harvard, and Stanford have adopted Open Access publication mandates requiring faculty to assign non-exclusive rights where possible and to contribute a copy of their scholarship to their own institutional repository.

In addition, international economic and public policy communities are on board with multinational agreements and declarations on Access to Research Data from Public Funding

- from Timeline of the Open Access Movement – Peter Suber
Last revised, February 9, 2009.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm

Conclusion:

The Open Access Movement has become a cause .. but no doubt a controversial one

However, those parties who have signed on

• demonstrate a philosophical commitment to removing barriers to access
• are committed to raising the level of understanding and conversation regarding scholarly communication
• encourage authors, to determine how their work will be used and distributed
• inspire action on policy and practice
• celebrate the value of scholarship to a home institution

By the way .. those of you who like the idea of exercising your rights to freely distributed your work for the common good may be interested in “Creative Commons Licensing”

This popular free service allows you to selectively release your exclusive rights to reuse, duplicate and distribute your work according to your wishes and without requiring permission.

I will close by restating..

• We’re heading into new territory here.
• We are in the midst of a cultural transformation whose impact on communication will be as significant as the invention of the printing press.
• We are now in a moment where we can and must reconsider and re-calibrate our work with new purpose.

Now I’ll turn the discussion over to Ellen and she will have a look under the hood and talk about how new models actually work and what we as scholars (and as an institution) can do to adapt to the new landscape.