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Notes from:
Waltham, Mary. 2009. “The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations”,
Report on a study funded by a Planning Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
http://www.nhalliance.org/bm~doc/hssreport.pdf
This is an interesting report that reveals how large scholarly associations popular in the U.S. are adapting to new publishing environments. Unfortunately the article is perhaps too focused on the journals from these associations and it makes some rather bold conclusions based on these findings, that I think would look different if the study included more open access journals inside and outside the U.S. This is mostly related to costs to publish a page, and how peer review fits in. But the report is about scholarly publishing within these big scholarly associations, and it shows the logic behind their publishing strategies even if I find the numbers a bit murky.
Publications from the American Anthropological Association generated revenue largely from print subscriptions. The report points out that print costs are high, but that if print publications were dropped, net income would drop. From this it infers that online publications are undervalued, being that they are subsidized by their print subscriptions.
It also points out that while an author pays OA model has been incorporated into most of the journals, very few authors used it.
While Science, Technical and Medical (STM) journals keep track of authors geographical distribution, Humanities and Social Science (HSS) journals do not pay much attention to it according to this comment in the report:
“v) STM publishers regularly record and report on the country of the corresponding author of articles
published. Such data is further reviewed and discussed by agencies such as the National Science
Foundation in the “Science and Engineering Indicators” series of reports published alternate years
(See: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/).
- This group of association publishers had collected relatively little data on the topic. Several commented that they believed that most of the authors of articles were from the US and this was borne out by a random review of the country of corresponding author for 25 articles published in 2007 by each journal and shown in Table 1.1.”
This ties into the previous post of notes discussing the distribution of Open Access journals (from Max Forte’s post) in relation to Wallerstein’s comments on the historical foundations of social science.
Peer review is also shown to be pretty restrictive:
“The ratio of article submission to publication is also distinctly different and since these journals publish fewer peer-reviewed articles they are often highly selective. Selectivity through peer-review takes in-house staff time (included in the study) and external reviewers’ time (not included in the study), and drives costs up.
- Taking three consecutive years of submission and publication data together, five of the eight journals published less than 10% of the articles submitted to them.”
Although in one interview I had, a paper was rejected not based on peer review but rather editorial control. Is it selectivity through peer review, or by editor? How often is it the peer reviewers who decide a work shouldn’t be published? And too bad they didn’t include external reviewer costs too, because from the few interviews I’ve done no one had been paid to peer review.
Specific to Open Access, the report states that while many of the associations adopted an author pays open access model, very few academics went for it:
“Open Access: There has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of publishers offering optional open access to authors, from only 9% in 2005 to 30% in 2008. This applies to a total of 1,871 titles. 53% of these publishers have enabled an open access option for all of their titles. However, the takeup of the open access option is low; of those publishers which have offered this option for two or more years under an author-pays model, 52.9% had a take-up rate of 1% or less, 73.5% had a take-up rate of 5% or less, and 91.2% had a take-up rate of 10% or less. The author fees set by these publishers range from under $500 to over $3000, but the majority (69%) charge between $1,000 and
$3,000. Bjork et al. calculated that of the estimated 1,350,000 journals articles published in 2006, 19.4% are freely accessible (4.6% OA immediately on publication, 3.5% freely accessible after an embargo, usually at least one year; and 11.3% through self-archiving).”
Of course, the AAA supports self archiving too, not that a quick look at the website would let you know. I wonder how many of these authors were aware of the option. I’m not necessarily in favor of an author pays model either, and other solutions are necessary, which seems to be the conclusion of the scholarly associations and the report.
Also, publishing contracts are changing:
“Copyright: In 2003, 83% of publishers required copyright transfer, in 2005, the figure stood at 61%. In 2008 this has dropped to 53%, and those which only require a license to publish have increased from 17% to 20.8%.”
The report also found that the number of academic journals has been steadily increasing, along with the amount of peer reviewed research. While the climate is changing, it is still growing.
Why are researchers publishing in these big reputable journals not taking the OA option? For one, the report shows that average prices to publish are extremely high:
“If print costs are removed the publishing costs per page for these journals now average $360 or at an average article length of 19pp, author fees of $7,000. For the journal with the lowest publishing cost per page ($90) and an average article length of 25 pages, author fees could be set at $2,500 to provide full cost recovery on the peer-reviewed articles published. Since just 59% of this particular journal’s pages are peer-reviewed Open Access payments would still not sustain the journal.”
This is also perhaps why many OA advocates are promoting mandates at the institutional level. Getting the people funding research to mandate OA is a great strategy to making research accessible online.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Conservative party ethics, government accountability, human rights
“The Conservatives will appeal a federal court ruling that orders the government to repatriate Canadian-born terrorism suspect Omar Khadr from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, the CBC is reporting.
According to the report, the government has filed a stay pending appeal of a Federal Court of Appeal ruling earlier this month forcing the government to seek Khadr’s return, meaning the Supreme Court of Canada will now decide whether to review the case.”
Let’s not forget Stephen Harper already appealed, and lost the appeal. I wonder what the Supreme Court can do at this point? It’s too damn late. Regardless of what the Supreme Court does, it shows how the court system can be manipulated by the governing party in such a way laws really don’t mean shit [unless you are "just" a Canadian citizen].
Meanwhile, over in the U.S. we are finding out that torture techniques included threatening peoples family and children, and faking executions.
When will the madness end?
[arguing with a classmate about this brought up another position: that if Khadr was brought here he'd have to be tried, whereas in the U.S. that might happen sooner or be thrown out... I figure it would get thrown out here too. He thought my position was partison bullshit. I'm looking forward to hearing the supreme court decision.]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: knowledge broker, knowledge mobilization, sharing knowledge, the business of university, yaffle search engine, yetman conference
Last month I had the pleasure of attending a talk by David Yetman, discussing a program developed at Memorial University that works to “mobilize knowledge” between the university and outside interests. The program acts as a liaison of sorts, between interested community members and interested researchers. It’s an open door for communities to invite researchers to participate in questions relevant to them.
The program is interdisciplinary and completely voluntary. Yetman admitted that collaboration between faculty members and administration is a tricky thing, and that for this reason the program members actively sought out responsive members in the faculty, and worked with them, rather than trying to change the minds of those uninterested in collaborative research projects.
The project staff, “knowledge mobilization officers” work as a kind of knowledge broker – in many ways facilitating the business side of research, helping find funding, but also facilitate ways to disseminate research in ways appropriate to the project (perhaps pointing to the need for multiple styles of research publication, in that the standard journal publication may not be what is needed).
They have also been developing a search engine/database for research projects community members are interested in. The database provides researchers and community members a way to connect. The database would allow researchers to look for relevant research questions, and link them to members of the community that would help with it. He mentioned the need for “finding audiences” for academic research, and that “80% of what we do is building relationships”.
Pushing the business angle did cause my anthropological ears to ring a little. The “benefit to society” thing has been done to death in my readings for this project, and while increased collaboration was argued to benefit society, Yetman also said that knowledge mobilization officers “do not pass judgment on the type of project”, but that an ethics guideline was in the works.
I asked if knowledge mobilization officers, being interested in “finding audiences”, advocated Open Access publication of research – and I was disappointed to learn the program had not yet explored Open Access Publishing (and even though the program is small, and just starting, I still choke swallowing this one…). I promised myself I’d check back with them down the road to see if information on Open Access Publishing couldn’t be provided by the knowledge mobilization officers as standard practice. [just editing this, and again, how do you talk about mobilizing knowledge, and ignore Open Access? uggh!] [thinking more on it, I think Yetman comes from a medical research background, and I have no idea how well received open access publishing is in that area]
Looking at the relationship between academia and surrounding communities, and having this opportunity to see it more generally through multiple disciplines, I appreciate ethnography more. Not so much the value of ethnography as a “scientific method”, but the lessons one can learn looking at anthropology’s often brutal relationship with people/communities/states [things that make you go "hmm..."]. I asked Yetman how disputes would be settled between researchers and community members inviting research – what happens when the research doesn’t go as planned? Yetman admitted this was a challenge, but he felt that the knowledge mobilization officer, while not responsible for such a situation, would still be able to lend a hand. He said in no way would the knowledge mobilization officer, nor the community member inviting the research, have any control over the research output.
I also asked about Minerva style funding, and how interests could be balanced out – if at all. He said that many researchers would be interested in military funding, and admitted that large-scale funding could be an issue if it were let to dominate research agendas. Here exists the problem of promoting collaboration without judging “good or bad”. Ie: in the article linked at the bottom of this post, it discusses knowledge mobilization as coming from technology transfer, which involves patents, and making profit. So maybe this program will end up promoting the “closed” side of the intellectual property debate.)
Even if it ignores ethical issues, steps around research responsibility, and hasn’t yet figured out how important open access publishing is, it does do one thing that I like – it opens a door for people to approach the university with their questions and concerns.
While a liaison can help on the community side, I still think anthropologists have the right idea building collaboration into the research methods, and to facilitating the collaboration themselves. Ie: do we need a special database to find relevant research questions, when we have the internet, or live in a local community? Are these issues not constantly being discussed in the news, on blogs, and on youtube? Yes, at least with online ethnography. A knowledge mobilization office could help researchers get their feet into the community however, and help local organizations advertise their issues and interests.
I would have kept the questions pouring, but few others were participating so I shut up and talked to him when the talk finished. I explained my interest in “sharing knowledge” and Open Access, and when I told him I was in the anthropology program he told me he always got a great response from anthropologists, who he said expressed more interested in community collaboration. During the talk he also mentioned how the program was new, but tried to incorporate what it could from participatory research methods that have been developing in anthropology and other disciplines. [he mentioned proactive and reactive strategies, community workshops hosted in different areas in the region]
One audience member inquired about measuring and quantifying the success of such collaborations – Yetman replied that was a challenge, but that qualitative assessments seemed to work pretty well.
Here is an article discussing some of the projects successes and strategies:
“Putting Knowledge Into Practice”
http://www.universityaffairs.ca/putting-knowledge-into-practice.aspx
[on the first round writing this, I used the word "interested" about 20 times. ]
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A few weeks ago a peculiar piece of email spam came to my attention. The email was a rather sophisticated scam, that involved posing as a soldier in the U.S. army, offering “sensitive” documents, which required that you visit a website, signup for “secure” access, etc…
I did a search on Google for parts of the message, and found that the email had been flagged on numerous spam databases.
Today I came across another such attack being discussed, the “Lambert Academic Publishing” scam. In this one, researchers are told that the publisher is interested in their work, dissertation, etc… They are sent to a website which is a replica of an actual publishers website. It appears very real. At some point they ask for ones bank information so that they can pay you the proper royalties.
Funny that they are targetting academics so directly. Are we more gullible? I figure they aren’t the richest bank accounts!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: open anthropology, Open Anthropology Cooperative
I’m a bit late (ignoring this blog to write a thesis of course), but if you haven’t heard yet, anthropologists have come together to form the “open anthropology cooperative”. The project has received a lot of enthusiastic support, and couldn’t have started off better! I’m looking forward to taking part, especially once I kick this flu… (did you hear its bloody 10 degrees in June? If only global warming was given a more descriptive name – like “montreal ice age, here we come”.
Sign up and participate at openanthcoop.ning.com.
I’m excited to see Enkerli’s latest project, which he was “pondering” only a few weeks back, has already materialized. Check out the latest anthropology-related podcast, focusing on ethnography. Also take note of Enkerli’s new blog, “Informal Ethnographer”, and twitter accounts, which were created to develop and clarify professional and personal roles.
He writes:
“Here it is! The first episode of Rapport: The Informal Ethnographer Podcast.
As I was editing it, I noticed a number of flaws. For instance, there are several things I mispronounced there are some things I might have wanted to take out of it. But I maintain my RERO principle and I’m posting it as-is.
As this is the “enhanced podcast” version, with chapter markers, you can skip around as you please, between different sections. I should post MP3 files for the different sections but the official release will always be with the enhanced podcast.”
I’m heading home now to grab some headphones…
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Strolling through various journal articles I’ve tagged, I noticed Concordia Library has placed an “Open Access” resources link on its list of databases page. It links to the OAIster search engine.
After helping a teacher archive their work on the Mana’o Anthropology Archive, I thought I would test out how well self-archiving in a repository works for an anthropologist. Unfortunately OAIster cannot find the article hosted on Mana’o…
This is not to say Mana’o is doing something wrong, just that we obviously need to do a lot more to make this stuff accessible!
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Just capturing a little quote from a discussion over at Savage Minds, which I might include in the thesis section on reader interaction.
“I am reluctant to post on a blog which, although raising central issues, so often then distorts and obscures them…”
http://savageminds.org/2009/05/08/melanesian-vengeance-western-vengeance-and-natural-vengeance/#comment-602189
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Over the course of the research I tried, and perhaps failed, to get many teachers to self-archive their work. One teacher decided he prefered to archive the work on his website (we succeeded in posting around 15 of his articles to it), while another went along with my recommendation to use the Mana’o repository. Others (and here I have to admit I didn’t push it enough), showed interest in the upcoming Concordia branded repository.
Over the period, the teachers personal website was a constant challenge to keep up with. It contained too much disorganized material, and needed a serious revamp. The Mana’o experiment worked well after a few failed email attempts. And the upcoming Concordia repository? Well, it’s not ready yet.
Revamping websites, keeping repositories up to date, and general disorganization. What do they all have in common? They all demand time.
So why, if there is never enough time, is everyone reinventing the wheel? I think there is a need for a more collaborative archive, one that is run by an interest community – ala open source software projects. It would need funding and help from various academic institutions, but not depend on only one. It would also index all the repositories available to make searching easier. (eg, indexing on Mana’o hasn’t helped in terms of finding the paper through google or other search engines).
why didn’t the AAA setup a self-archiving repository again? A number of my teachers still worry about the “credibility” of self-archiving their work, (no matter how hard I try to explain that the material has already been peer-reviewed… so what’s the worry…)…
Anyways, this is a rather empty post, since I don’t have time either – but once i finish this thesis I will, and maybe a cross-institution repository could be setup with enough funds to really push anthropologists to archive their work? Or can we get more funds to Mana’o – I’d love to see a developer hired for a year to really get it going!
Or are self-archiving repositories intentionally keeping a low profile, to avoid fist fights with publishers?
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Running alongside the open access debate, are debates as to what kinds of information should be shared and how to go about doing it. As I mentioned in the previous post, “open access” is not synonymous with “universal access”, as was stressed by Peter Suber on his “open access overview” page that I linked to.
Thanks to conversations with Max Forte, I realize that the discussion is actually about good old DRM – digital rights management.
Little did I know, that anthropologists and the recording industry have so much in common!
Both are fighting against the “information wants to be free” slogan (who’s author I can’t track down.. someone help please). Both are arguing for some kind of control over how the information will be used. The recording industry has spent millions working on technologies to do this – they want to know who is using what, and they want to control how it is used. Unfortunately for some, their efforts have pretty much failed, and regardless of how many lawsuits they have laid or DRM schemes they created, copyright (read controlled) music finds a way to escape any locks placed on it.
This reality probably spawned the slogan “information wants to be free” since no matter how hard people try to lock it down, it finds a way out – as if it was never meant to be locked down in the first place.
But what about anthropologists? They are taking a different perspective than the artist who depends on copyright to earn a living. For the anthropologist DRM would not be about earning a living, or ensuring payment. It would be about making sure the right people are given access and the wrong people are kept out.
As Max points out, there is a problem with the open access philosophy of “share it with everyone interested” since by making it available to those people, it becomes far too easy for the information to make its way into the wrong places. Here we find the need to establish “degrees of access” as opposed to simply looking at it as “universal” or “closed”. We also need ways of changing such controls as political contexts change. What Max is arguing is that information we consider safe today may not be tomorrow and in this case perhaps it is foolish to share ideas openly, if one also has the option to limit access and therefore limit collateral damage.
It is a debate about control, but perhaps it should be about content. I believe information wants to be free, in that you cannot control how it will be used. DRM will not protect it. The only answer is to establish a chain of responsibility among owners – asking that they do not share it with the wrong people. This is perhaps possible. But if someone really wants it, they will either invent it independently, or find a way to gain access.
So does “Open Access” refer to removing price-barriers to academic research, or simply to making anything accessible on the internet? Ie: I never considered blogging to fit into the Open Access label, but perhaps it does?
