I have worked in the media business (commercial, government, non-profit, and industrials) for twenty years, and as a recent PhD who researched publishing as part of my dissertation on Edutainment & Convergence I know that open access models can work, and are working successfully already. As a person that has to work with the media conglomerates who own most of what we see, read, hear and yes think it is imperative that we switch to an open access model if we really want to educate citizenry and not avoid propaganda and cyber dictatorships. The Pentagon freely admits that the Internet has to be treated as an enemy technology (a recent Washington Post article I believe). Now let's mention some of the successful publishing models that can easily be adapted to academia that most of us are familiar with presently: Google, iTunes, YouTube, Amazon, Microsoft (pick several), Learn Out Loud and Audible which is now owned by Amazon. The over-reliance on the printed materials is the issue. I don' have read anymore studies on this (because I've read too many) because I actually cost out print, video, audio, and web costs as part of my job as Producer/Director and now Internet/Emerging Tech Exp because of convergence. I am not necessarily in favor of totally killing the printed book. I think folks who are digital immigrants by nature should have that option; however, I think that like others with expensive tastes like fine wine: they will have to pay for it. Here is the bottom line: with some very notable exceptions most people do not make money in the publishing business as it is presently constructed by the media companies. The media conglomerates either outright own or have large interests in many if not most academic publishing (Bagdikian, 2000, 2005). The current system is just like Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, or Atlantic City: the house almost always wins because they set the rules. However, when new rules take hold, a whole new set of winners emerge. If you read Lessig (2001,2002, 2004) and others like Bagdikian (2000, 2005) companies and institutions generally fight innovation that is threatening to the established order even it will help everyone. The VCR is a great of this, and it set up the DRM fight that began with Betamax vcr Every university should set up a digital publishing operation, and utilize student, faculty, and alumni experts to assist them. You will need some graphic artists to layout everything (even though templates exist) and everything can be shared via free wikis of the type that Google offers for free through gmail. The students need the real time experience; the faculty members desperately need real world time to keep their skills up to speed (trust me on that one), the administration is utilizing dollars that it is already putting out to assist in its institutional mission of spreading knowledge and its creating a viable publishing program for students who will have experience, a portfolio and alumni and industry contacts. Oh, did I mention that the university can also use this a fundraising tool for the endowment. At the end of the day digital publishing has already begun the democratization of knowledge where little known people with great research can publish their results worldwide instantly without being impeded or scorned by the highly traditional and cliquish academic community (Willinsky, 2006). The free and advertiser-based model is clearly the most successful model for digital publishing (Apple, 2008;Disney, 2008; Facebook, 2008;Google, 2008; Microsoft, 2008; MySpace, 2008;NBC Universal, 2008;NewsCorp, 2008;Viacom, 2007;Yahoo, 2008; YouTube, 2008) and each of the companies cited also has a serious research and/or publishing entity. The open-access model actually is heralding the return of museums and libraries to their rightful places as the holders of digital information, digital knowledge, and meaningful discussion on such matters in the digital age. I guarantee you that there will be some smaller and elite universities that will become renown for adopting this approach and then everyone else when adopt digital publishing. The key will be matching ads that do have a conflict of interest, but match the research. This looks like a job for Google. -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Ingbert Floyd Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 12:05 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academicjournals In general, I completely agree with danah boyd on this one, but convincing scholars to adopt open access models is but one of the challenges in moving to an open-access model of publishing. Thus, I thought I'd bring up some of the complications, given that I'm from library and information science. If we, as academics who care, are going to solve this, I think it would be productive to consider the barriers that currently exist. I wish I could write more, but I have some deadlines I need to meet today. 1) Journals are as much a service as a product. Thus, publishers advertise, distribute, index, abstract, pay for the costs of reviewing, etc. I'm not from the publishing world, but I've seen some statistics on the costs. How will these costs be paid for? (I know Carole Palmer http://people.lis.uiuc.edu/~clpalmer/ has done some research on this, but I can't quickly find a representative publication.) 2) One of the biggest problems facing the open access movement is finding economic models which work. After a bit of web research, my impression is that all open-access publishers which are free for both authors and readers, are supported by foundations, or in rare cases, by universities. Thus, their economic models are *not* self-sustaining. If everybody who wants to start a journal needs to depend on a foundation to get started, it will be very difficult to start a journal, as competition for foundation funding will be very tight (and likely biased in the same direction that grant money is currently biased). Furthermore, there are individuals who are wary of this model, because they do not want foundations to be the gatekeepers of academic research. They feel that academics should be the gatekeepers of academic research, like they are now. The one good thing is that under the reader-pays models, a group of scientists can start their own journal, even their own publishing company, and thus short-circuit any price, content, or other controls that they are being subject to by their current publisher. There are in fact examples of this in the academic publishing world. 3) Remember that a common alternative to the reader-pays model, is the author pays model. This is a very common "open access" model. But do we really want to force researchers to have grants, so that they can afford to pay for their articles to be published? There have been several attempts at creating fully automatic journals, where, theoretically, the only costs would be to pay for the bandwidth, the hosting, and some maintenance of the code. But these have all failed. Why? I don't know. Issues of indexing and browsing might be relevant. 4) There is a *huge* difference between for-profit and non-profit publishers. Research indicates that the costs of journal publishing are about the same, but the access fees for-profit publishers charge are often many times more expensive than the fees of non-profits. (Check out Cristina Lopez's link for some stats on journal costs: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/scholcomm/journalcosts.htm ) 5) The Institutional Repositories movement is in no small measure an attempt by libraries to reduce journal costs, by providing faculty with an alternative means of publication. The problem, is that no faculty member makes the time to submit their publications, so the adoption rates of the repositories are dismal, thus limiting the funds libraries can secure for their operation. People who are leading the movement, are trying to figure out ways of providing alternative publication venues. But, of course, that means that such venues are often limited to members of the university, due to university policy. Academics who do not work in universities, or academics from poor universities are at a disadvantage if this model is the major publishing model. 6) People these days often hype the digital born journal, as addressing some of these concerns. The truth is, that the fixed costs of digital journals and print journals are about the same. And, if things are digital born-and-bred, what are the preservation mechanisms in place to make sure these articles exist 10-100 years from now? Currently, libraries, not publishers, take on this role by physically storing and maintaining print runs of journals. But if print runs disappear, what then? Libraries often *cannot* store digital versions (publisher rules, formats that are not preservation-friendly, etc.), unless they have control over the format of the document--another reason for the Institutional Repository movement. And publishers don't seem to be actively (or at least intentionally) taking on this role. So, any ideas for addressing these problems? In particular, I would love to see a self-sustainable economic model, that is not directly subject to foundation whims or University budget cuts. Until solutions to this and other problems are found, however, I like the ACM model, where access to the ACM digital library is pay-only, and thus libraries, companies, and some individuals subscribe (and keep it alive), but all authors are free to publish their own work either on their website, or on an institutional website (such as an Institutional Repository), as long as they establish clearly that the article was originally published in the ACM. Thus, if you, the author, is motivated, you can make your work free to access by everybody, drop it in an institutional repository so that it gets preserved even if you can't preserve it yourself. And doing so boosts citation rates too! This solution is not systematic enough for preserving our academic heritage over the long-term, but it is a start. Ingbert On Feb 7, 2008 9:15 AM, Casey O'Donnell <odonnc@rpi.edu> wrote:
Yes, replying to my own post, but I should have checked my RSS feed this morning:
http://savageminds.org/2008/02/07/anthropology-news-special-safety-val ve-edition/ http://dev.aaanet.org/publications/articles.cfm
Best. Casey
On Feb 7, 2008 10:13 AM, Casey O'Donnell <odonnc@rpi.edu> wrote:
There has been a fair amount of talk related to this by anthropologists. I think your article also falls into what Chris Kelty wrote about as "Recursive Public Irony," about access to articles about access can be quite limited:
http://savageminds.org/2005/05/24/recursive-public-irony/ http://blog.openaccessanthropology.org/?p=43
-- Casey O'Donnell RPI STS Department - PhD Candidate
http://homepage.mac.com/codonnell/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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-- ========================================== Ingbert Floyd PhD Student Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign http://ingbert.org/ || skype: spacesoon Check out the unofficial GSLIS Wiki: http://www.gslis.org/ "Dream in a pragmatic way." -Aldous Huxley _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/