My $0.02 on the future of Students for Free Culture
Posted on 26 December 2007
Filed under Personal, Students for Free Culture
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As I announced some months ago, my term on the board of Students for Free Culture will expire with the upcoming election (scheduled for Jan. 14 - Feb. 3), and I’m not running for re-election. Instead, I’ll be (as I called myself in September) “an alumnus who’s willing to lend a hand if asked”. As I wrote then:
The extent of my future involvement will be: I am willing to continue serving the organization in an advisory role. I am interested in establishing an alumni network of others who have graduated. I may be willing to volunteer on specific projects.
In light of the pending elections, I want to invoke my prerogative to offer some unsolicited advice. I’m not running for re-election, and I’m not endorsing candidates, but here’s my take on what voters should consider when it’s time to cast their ballots. (For what it’s worth, I haven’t reviewed the candidates’ platforms, nor the debates [1 and 2], so this is not a comment on anything the candidates themselves have said.) I hope this will also be useful to the new board members when the election is over.
Let me state first that all of the candidates are leaders. Everyone involved with SFC has far more in common than in difference, and everyone involved should remember that — never let the differences stand in the way of our common objectives. Our goals are too important to become paralyzed squabbling about our methods: the future of our culture, and our liberties, hangs in the balance. With that said, there are real differences in opinion about the best means to our ends. Here’s what I think is most important (after the jump.)
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CopyNight Orlando sneak preview, Dec. 18
Posted on 13 December 2007
Filed under Copyright, Florida, Orlando, Personal
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CopyNight Orlando will have a “sneak preview” meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 18 at 7 pm at Stardust Video & Coffee (1842 E. Winter Park Rd., Orlando). You’re invited!
We’ll have regular meetings monthly, starting in January.
For more information about CopyNight Orlando, go here. You can also subscribe to the CopyNight Orlando mailing list for meeting announcements, or go here to learn about CopyNight.
Gavin recognized as SPARC Innovator
Posted on 12 December 2007
Filed under Open access, Personal
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SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, yesterday recognized me with their Innovator award for leadership on open access. My co-honorees are four other young people: Benjamin Mako Hill, Nick Shockey, Elizabeth Stark, and Nelson Pavlosky. You can read the profiles here.
I’m honored by the recognition and glad to contribute on this important issue.
Anti-spam update: Akismet active
Posted on 6 December 2007
Filed under Administrative
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After a pointless and frustrating false positive by Bad Behavior locked me out of my own blog, I’ve disabled Bad Behavior and activated Akismet. For what it’s worth, Bad Behavior had slowed comment spam to a trickle, but it’s too annoying to overcome false positives. We’ll see how Akismet does.
If you have problems accessing the site, or a legitimate comment doesn’t appear on the site after a day or two, drop me a line so I can try to address it.
Florida explores open government and the Internet
Posted on 1 December 2007
Filed under Florida, Internet, Open government
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This is old news, but I didn’t hear of it until last week. (Actually, the first I heard was from a column in El Sentinel. It pays to read the Spanish-language press!)
Florida’s governor Charlie Crist has espoused support for open government since he took office. His first executive order was to create an Office of Open Government in the Governor’s Office. In June, he created a Commission on Open Government Reform to “review, evaluate, and issue recommendations regarding Florida’s public records and public meetings laws”.
Of particular interest to me is the committee’s charge to investigate the following issues:
3. The collection, storage, retrieval, dissemination, and accessibility of public records through advanced technologies, including internet access.
The Commission is charged with holding at least three public hearings during its term (through the end of 2008). It’s already held two, with a third scheduled for February in Sarasota.
The documents from the first meeting are currently available online, and there are a few that pertain to the Internet:
- A presentation by Jere Moore, suggesting that “all communications within Florida government and especially between government and the public be posted on the Internet daily”
- A statement by Americans for Tax Reform and a companion document summarizing fiscal transparency initiatives, many involving making information available online
- A variety of presentations and publications by Dave Gowan on electronic access to government records and data, as well as copyright and related topics
In the meeting transcript, Mr. Moore’s testimony begins on page 173, and Richard Watson’s (representing Americans for Tax Reform) begins on 189. (Warning: the PDF is 20 mb.)
I hope they’ll check out the cool work from the Sunlight Foundation.
Author-owned scholarly journal cooperatives: a win-win situation?
Posted on 1 December 2007
Filed under Academia, Open access, Publishing
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Abstract: Rewarding authors and referees with ownership stakes in the journal could provide attractive incentives for individuals and rein in abusive publisher practices.
Since becoming a freelancer, I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking for publications that might want to publish my writing. One criterion I look for is: Do they pay? I’ve been surprised by how many publications are sustained without paying their contributors — and not just academic journals.
Non-academic publications have a fierce competition for the best authors, and those who offer no payment may suffer challenges in obtaining their preferred supply of contributions, in terms of both quantity and quality. (I know they lost me!) Scholarly journals, of course, have a ready supply of free labor in otherwise-employed academics who are nonetheless required to publish, in a culture where payment is not expected.
In theory, the authors could publish anywhere — potentially earning author fees — but the academy rewards the prestige of a publication within a specific and relatively fixed hierarchy. Scholars want a promotion, that fat grant, and their peers’ attention, so they publish without honorarium — even though the journal turns a healthy profit from the publication. In some journals, the author even pays the publisher, on top of the free labor. Academics also serve as reviewers for no remuneration.
The free labor aspect of academic journal publishing is frequently noted in a variety of contexts, such as:
- “If academics write and review for free, why are some subscription journals so expensive? I don’t understand where the money goes.” (To which I say: profit! — for commercial journals, at least.)
- “Since academics write and review for free, journal subscriptions should be more affordable. We deserve a better quid pro quo.”
- “Because academics write and review for free in the journal system, that makes it easier to convert the system to open access — authors will be less concerned with loss of royalties from the change in business model.”
- “The problems in the peer-review system — the delays, the sometimes arbitrary decisions — stem from the fact that reviewers are busy people and don’t have much incentive to do a good job.”
I’m sure it would be interesting to learn about the development of the system where authors and referees are not paid, but it’s not necessarily relevant. That facet of academic publishing is rightly treated as a historical artifact — it may or may not be beneficial. It should be judged on its merits rather than taken for granted. But despite the upheaval in so many other aspects of scientific publishing, revisiting the topic of free labor doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s discussion agenda.
There’s a strong incentive for publishers to keep it that way. After all, why pay for what you can get for free? Particularly for non-profit and open access publishers, the feat of paying authors anything would be daunting on a tight budget. Moreover, any change risks blowback for rocking the boat — or the risk of offending your authors for paying too little.
For the most part, there seems to be an abundant supply of authors, effectively driving the price down. In fact, there’s such a supply that there is routinely a several-month delay from submission to publication, even in journals with frequent editions. In addition, authors often complain about the delay from submission through peer review. If anything, it’s prompt referees that are in demand.
Thus it is that, while publishers are mum on the subject of paying authors, there’s some discussion about better incentives for referees. For instance, a recent PLoS Biology letter proposing that late reviewers be punished by having their future submissions as authors held in limbo before consideration. On the side of rewards, BioMed Central offers timely reviewers a discount on publication charges for their future submissions as authors. There’s clearly a move for experimentation in this area.
What if journals — in lieu or in addition to other payments or incentives — offered authors and reviewers a stake in ownership? There are a number of forms this could take:
- A workers’ cooperative, where a given number of articles authored or refereed qualifies the individual for membership
- A consumers’ cooperative, run by subscribers/members, where authors or referees are rewarded with a free membership
- A corporation where authors or referees are rewarded with equity shares of stock
The latter scenario, while not meeting the cooperative principle of “one member, one vote”, could still result in a coop-like situation, in that the journals could be controlled by the people whose labor is central to their production. Because of the dual nature of academics in the publishing system — as both producers and consumers — these ownership models could help (self-)regulate publishers on pricing and other business practices (which, as I have previously written, is notoriously difficult under the subscription model).
At the same time, as suggested by my lead-in, these ownership shares could prove helpful incentives to attract and retain authors and referees, and to encourage prompt reviewing. And unlike honoraria, these ownership stakes don’t require payment up front — the author only earns a dividend if the journal makes money.
In addition to the financial incentive of dividends, the publishing function of the organization could be combined with other activities, such as those typical of scholarly or professional societies or advocacy organizations. Membership might entitle the individual to discounts at conferences or access to members-only discussion forums, and membership itself could be a “badge of pride” affiliation for listing on one’s CV or bumper sticker.
I’ll close with some links to related reading, but first mention another (seemingly) unique aspect of my proposal. While there’s been a fair amount of previous discussion of cooperative academic publishing, most of it seems to posit the institution (university, scholarly society, etc.) rather than the individual as the actor-unit. Although we use the same word, the implementation and implications would be quite different due to the difference in the scale. Nevertheless, I’ll link them here.
Related reading
- Kim Braun, “The German Academic Publishers Project — GAP,” From information to knowledge: Proceedings of the 7th ICCC/IFIP International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB 2003), ed. Costa et al., 2003.
- Raym Crow, “Publishing cooperatives: An alternative for non–profit publishers,” First Monday 11(9), September 2006.
- Heather Joseph, “BioOne: building a sustainable alternative publishing model for non-profit publishers,” Learned Publishing 16(2): 134-138, April 2003.
- Robert Schroeder and Gretta E. Siegel, “A Cooperative Publishing Model for Sustainable Scholarship,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 37(2): 86-98, January 2006.
- “SciELO - a model for cooperative electronic publishing in developing countries”.
- John Willinsky, “An Open Access Cooperative,” The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship, pp. 227-232, 2006.
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