GFDL revision: Is there hope for CC interoperability?

Posted on 23 November 2007
Filed under Creative Commons, Licenses
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I was reminded by the recent release of the new Affero GPL (very welcome news!) of the ongoing revision of another Free Software Foundation license, the GNU Free Documentation License (and its derivative, the Simpler FDL).

The GFDL is the license used by Wikipedia, resulting in a wealth of free content available under that license. Unfortunately, its copyleft clause only allows combinations with GFDL-licensed works — there’s no compatibility with functionally equivalent Creative Commons licenses, i.e. BY-SA.

For years, there’s been talk from all sides on working toward interoperability. But it hasn’t happened yet. I’m holding out hope for a breakthrough in the GFDL revision process.

If you want to participate, you can comment on the GFDL draft. Asheesh Laroia has posted a comment encouraging work toward a solution. After logging in, you can “agree” with the comment (here) or add your own comments in reply.

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Short downtime now resolved

Posted on 23 November 2007
Filed under Administrative
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The site briefly went down due to my forgetful failure to pay for hosting. Sorry about that. Everything should be back to normal now.

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“Open Access for Dummies”: Count me in

Posted on 20 November 2007
Filed under Open access, Personal
1 comment

An article in Newsweek this week closes with this suggestion:

… Wiley ought to commission “Open Access for Dummies.” Published under a Creative Commons license, naturally.

Oddly enough, I’d been thinking of the same idea. So consider this my offer. If Wiley (or any other publisher) is interested in such a book, give me a call!

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Presentation on Net neutrality in Gainesville, Fla. (late)

Posted on 15 November 2007
Filed under Florida, Gainesville, Internet, Net neutrality, Personal, Telecom
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I failed to post an announcement in advance, but better late than never:

I gave a presentation on Net neutrality on 13 November to the Association of Information Technology Professionals, North Central Florida Chapter in Gainesville, Fla. The slides are available here, largely derived from my earlier presentation at the Florida Media Reform Conference.

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Anti-spam tools now in effect: Bad Behavior active

Posted on 13 November 2007
Filed under Administrative
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The comment spammers recently have started hitting this site hard. This wastes my time on moderating comments and wastes my bandwidth with my host. I’ve installed Bad Behavior to address the problem; hopefully it will help.

This shouldn’t inconvenience any legitimate readers. If there is a false positive, you should receive a notification page with information on how to contact me. The Bad Behavior FAQ also has information on what to do if you’ve suffered the business end of a false positive.

I’ve also installed reCAPTCHA, but have it turned off for now. I don’t want to force captchas on my commenters, as much as I support digitizing public domain books. (If you want to volunteer to help digitize free books, you can fill out reCAPTCHA for fun here, or simply join Distributed Proofreaders.) I may turn it on if things get really hairy.

I’m also considering installing Akismet, but I’ll wait until I see the effect Bad Behavior has. (I prefer not to use Spam Karma because it’s not free software.)

Commenters are still required to register a (free) account on the site. If Bad Behavior keeps down the noise, I may lift that requirement, maybe replacing it with reCAPTCHA and/or Akismet.

My goal is to make it as easy as possible for legitimate users to comment here, imposing the fewest barriers necessary to keep the site spam-free. I apologize for the inconvenience and do appreciate when visitors comment.

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The Radiohead experiment: factors to consider in pricing

Posted on 8 November 2007
Filed under Copyright, E-commerce, Music
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Via Truth Happens, I saw this morning that the average price paid to download Radiohead’s “choose your own price” album, In Rainbows, was about £2.90, or about $6 U.S. In fact, only 40% of downloaders paid anything at all.

The Guardian story frames this as basically a loss for the band or the industry — perhaps understandable in British terms, where Virgin Megastore carries Radiohead’s CDs for £9.99 - £13.00. But purchasing power is considerably different in U.S. dollars, let alone rupees or reais. The commentary in comScore’s press release, and on their blog, provides a more useful perspective.

But I found this news interesting for another reason: that’s about what I paid. Here’s why:

I knew I was looking at £0.45 (about $1) just in processing charges already, plus a foreign transaction fee from my credit card. The band sees none of that, but I still have to pay it — comparable maybe to the cost of driving to a store. (The prices in the study exclude these fees.)
I was downloading an album I hadn’t heard one bar of, solely on the basis of b(r)and recognition. I had very little assurance I would like even a single song on the album. In fact, I don’t recall being able to find any pre-release reviews, either.
The download was 160 kbps. I would have paid more for a higher bitrate or lossless compression. To me, 160 kbps is less than the full product.
The download was only available in patented MP3 format, rather than an open format like OGG or FLAC.
On the plus side, the download was not crippled with DRM — a sine qua non for my purchase.
The album is still under full copyright: I can’t remix it or share it with my friends, etc. Now, I don’t realistically expect Radiohead or bands similarly situated to release their latest album under a Creative Commons license or into the public domain, but I would have been willing to pay a premium
The download didn’t come with any album art, track information, or lyrics.
The download carries low overhead and near-zero marginal cost of distribution, so the additional costs of physical manufacturing and distribution can be factored out of the price.
Minus the aforementioned overhead, 100% of the download revenue went directly to the artist: nothing to the label, retailer, iTunes, or anyone else. If overhead amounted to as much as 20%, the artist still gets $4 from my purchase. That’s a lot more than most musicians will take home from sales of a physical CD on a major label.

In other words, $5 actually seemed like a relatively generous price, rather than stingy as the Guardian thinks. As it happens, my fellow Americans paid even more, on average: about $8.05.

If I was a band with an established fan base, I’d have to take this as a very encouraging business model. I’m not suggesting this will work well for everyone: not everyone has thousands of fans willing to spring for an album they’ve never heard, and not everyone has the resources to self-finance professional-quality production. But the myth, until now, has been that the Internet helps the artists in the long tail, not the superstars. This is an encouraging anecdote for established acts.

I think I’d put a minimum price on the download, such that each download at least covered the cost of overhead — maybe $1. I think a lot of the 60% of unpaid downloads would convert at that price point, and few would instead turn to p2p. The biggest obstacle here is probably people without a credit card (teenagers).

I think this model could succeed with a minimum as high as $5 (though I think that the higher the minimum, the less “extra” some buyers may be willing to shell out — at some point, “minimum price” simply looks like “the price”).

A reasonable “suggested price” might not hurt, either. If the checkout box listed $8 by default, rather than being blank, some people would still adjust the price up or down, but I think the average price would end up higher than with no suggestion.

I’m sure that advocates for the status quo in the music industry will spin these numbers as arguments for maintaining the status quo. But a deeper analysis shows a big win for both artists and consumers. This is an important experiment, and I hope the lessons — autonomy and a decent take-home for the artist — will be communicated well in the public discourse.

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My C&RL News column on student open access activism

Posted on 6 November 2007
Filed under Open access, Personal
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My column for College & Research Libraries News on student activism for open access has just been released.

Faculty aren’t the only users of the scholarly communication system. Students also depend on it for their education, research, and to disseminate their own ideas. And students, like faculty, have taken action to broaden access to the academic literature and maximize the value of this important resource. Libraries should seek to engage students as change makers in the scholarly communication system.

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Scholarly societies and open access publishing

Posted on 2 November 2007
Filed under Creative Commons, Licenses, Open access
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In the latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter, Peter Suber posts the results of research with Caroline Sutton on scholarly society publishers with open access journals. At its core is a list of open access journals affiliated with scholarly societies and various characteristics associated; the post contains some analysis. The list and analysis also considers society journals with hybrid open access options.

The information is quite interesting, and practical (for decision-makers and OA advocates). The authors note that they’d like to explore the topic in greater depth. Here, then, are my comments — hopefully useful for Phase Two.

The number of societies involved, and the number of journals published, is large, accounting for 16% of the Directory of Open Access Journals (450 out of 2900). The number of open access journals is considerably larger than the number of journals with hybrid OA options (450 vs. 73).

The geographic base of OA-publishing societies is broad — 57 countries/regions — compared to just 5 countries/regions with hybrid journals (93% of which is composed of the US and UK). (Note: I’m not clear whether the “geographic location” listing in the chart is based on the society’s location or the journal’s. For example, European Physical Journal is published by Societá Italiana di Fisica; the location is listed as “Europe”. I’d appreciate if the authors could clarify this.)

Similarly, the publisher:journal ratio for open access journals is much lower than that of hybrid journals. “Most societies publishing OA journals publish just one. […] Only five societies publish just one hybrid journal.” To suggest some possible causes for this, it might be that societies publishing multiple journals do so because publishing is a profitable endeavor for them, and therefore they’re more concerned about loss of revenue. Or perhaps societies with more emphasis on publishing are simply more hesitant to make rash decisions with their journals. Maybe it’s because their executives receive bonuses based on the financial performance of the publishing division. These might be avenues for the authors to explore in Phase Two.

Might there be a link between the geography and the prevalence of open access? I’d expect there might be some network effect or peer pressure, but that’s not what I mean. I frequently hear that journal profits often subsidize other society activities — at least in the U.S. Perhaps this isn’t the case in other countries, where perhaps journals are more likely to themselves be subsidized. I’d like to hear thoughts from anyone who has them.

The hybrid journals seem to pay more attention to copyright issues. This seems consistent with the self-selecting nature of hybrid OA: I can imagine some authors in no-fee OA journals having no opinion about, or even ignorant of the fact that, the journal is OA; clearly that’s not the case for hybrid journals. I’d be curious to see a comparison of the fee-based OA journals (only 17% of the list) with the hybrids (all fee-based); I suspect the difference might be insignificant.

Unfortunately, the study found that only 15 of the 450 OA journals state that they use Creative Commons licenses. The exact number might be a bit fuzzy, but it looks clearly as though most OA society journals don’t comply with the BBB definition of open access. (Which means, in my view, that we shouldn’t be calling them “open access”, but rather “toll-free” or some comparable appellation.)

There is a seeming underrepresentation of social sciences, arts and humanities among OA journals: 79% of the list are from science, technology, and medicine. The accepted wisdom is that this mirrors the divide among OA journals in general, regardless of publisher. I can posit several potential explanations for this, but regardless of cause, it only increases the importance of OA for scholarly monographs; more on this in a later post.

I hope, concurrent with the Phase Two research, the authors refine this for publication in a journal. That’ll make a more powerful citation and get it seen by more readers. It’ll also force the authors to iron out some of the niggling methodological issues, including those noted here and in the original post itself.

One note about the reliability of the data: The DOAJ is known as the definitive source for information about open access journals, but I’m not sure their data about hybrid journals is as comprehensive. I’d be keen to hear from anyone who knows about this, but until I do, I’m hesitant to draw many conclusions about hybrid journals. If many simply aren’t listed in DOAJ, that could account for wide variances in results.

Some information I’d like to see in Phase Two, in addition to the topics already noted in the original post and those noted above:

information about society publishers with policies that permit self-archiving (from SHERPA/RoMEO)
information about society publishers whose journals are delayed OA (though I’m not sure where one would find this information)
when these journals became OA
whether these journals were born OA or converted from pre-existing toll-access journals
whether these societies also publish toll-access journals or have converted entirely to OA
a more complete listing of impact factors / Eigenfactors for these journals
a definitive listing per journal on whether the publication meets the BBB definition of OA
more clarity on the definition of “scholarly society” (e.g. the World Health Organization is listed as a publisher here; it seems a stretch to say the WHO is primarily a scholarly society; same with the American Federation of Teachers, primarily a labor union)

A final note: The authors mention that their list of scholarly societies that publish OA journals is significantly longer than recent lists of societies opposed to OA government policies (specifically, the US National Institutes of Health self-archiving mandate). The authors do caution against a direct comparison, but they leave out the fact that their list of scholarly societies is worldwide, while presumably only societies based (or with substantial members / activities) in the US would speak out about policies of the US government. I count 82 unique OA-publishing societies based in the US, plus 8 unique US societies with a hybrid-option journal; adding the 12 unique international OA-publishing societies, there are perhaps 102 OA-publishing or -offering societies who might reasonably be interested in US policy, significantly less than the 425 the authors were using in their comparison.

Coincidentally, of the 9^* US societies with a hybrid-option journal, four signed the Association of American Publishers letter opposing an NIH mandate:

Someone with more time on their hands can do the cross-check of the 82 OA-publishing US societies.

* Yes, I said 8 in the preceding paragraph: the American Physical Society publishes both a hybrid and an open access journal, so it was counted in the OA list and therefore not “unique” for that tally.

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keep looking »