ICTA2K4D - Communications for Development blog

This is a post to Budapest Open Access Initiative.

the nice thing about Twitter is the forcible concision of the medium. Here is my Tweet today.

The 21ce Journal-OpenAccess360(no author fee+transparent P/R);magazine bizmodel-journal collection+glossy- socialmedia+web2-3.0;+mobileweb

And now BOAI gives me a platform for the opposite, a lengthy explanation, I’m afraid. I wanted to share my vision for the 21st century Journal. My goal is to form a successful publishing company for journals. In light of the discussion about green vs. gold etc. I can completely agree with Stephan Harnad that mandating Green remains a top priority today for the research community, for the OA movement.

But, if I am thinking like a new publisher, I think the worst thing to do would use the outmoded model of charging subscriptions. For one, it’s just way too much work. Second, it is in conflict with the Access Principle (Williinsky). Third, it predicts legal and political confllict (and its downright mean).

Here I post a longer explanation. I also want to use this post as a way to invite Graduate Students (or undergrads for that matter) who are doing or interested in doing research (either a project, MA, or doctoral) on Open Access and Open Educational Resources (OER) to contact me. I would like to develop a global network for the graduate students to ensure that the next generation of researchers and profs don’t replicate the errors of our mentors, and by that I don’t mean the OA movement, but the majority of academics who don’t bother even to retain copyright, and deposit unless they are mandated, and those who seem to think academia is a training ground for the status quo. I also invite anyone interested in this venture of Open Access 360 as a new media journal publishing company to get in touch with me. I’m not in a big hurry, and want to discuss ideas at this stage.

This is a long post with some bold thoughts. I might expect it to be dissected and critiqued, but one of the reasons I prefer ‘top-posting’ rather ‘interleaving’ (replying throughout wherever the replier finds convenient) is that it is less disruptive. Interleaving is an example of how etiquette becomes convention becomes tradition, and one of the reasons I think peer-review needs to be transparent is that conventions regarding both style and substance undergo no scrutiny for their validity to research communication. It’s the who will police the police problem, and the answer is the larger peer community and the public at large. But I ask that replies be top-posted, thank you. These disclaimers have become necessary because of OA debates have become overly pedantic (interleaving is very bad for this) in recent years, IMHO.

I expect some people might not understand each detail here, and the comment will be that this or that is unclear. Keep in mind that what is unclear or confusing to one, may not be to others, and to try a little harder before prejudicing the text for the rest.

Now to the 21st Century Journal.

In looking at how I would publish journals, I can only say that 1) charging for content would be second-best to open access 2) charging author fees would be second-best to no fees. I’m not interested in the hassle of either; the transaction costs are too high, and I’m not interesting in second-best.

Therefore, I am looking at a model I call Open Access 360 (no fees for authors or users), and within that wheel I also add transparency of peer-review (open access to comments and rejected papers) should be added since all of science and scholarship ought to be publicly observable.

The Communications Generation
I believe the future of journals does have a generational aspect that hasn’t been sufficiently addressed, since today’s student is a child of the digital world, and since human beings tend to retire and die off before all the work is complete, all the more reason to pay some attention to students today. Unfortunately, most of my peers and students in the classes I TA have almost no awareness of these issues that strike so close to what they do day to day. But they are all accustomed to free content on the internet, except, peculiarly, when it comes to non-commercial academic works.

Transparent peer-review and the participatory web (with opportunity for public to comment) would fit very well with kids who grew up with a medium that allows all the extras (that you can hide and unhide at your will) and the participation. Transparent peer-review would be the best teacher of research writing for the lowest cost, something we need badly. What you’re looking at is a future where didactic and dialectic forms come together. Journal websites today, unfortunately, are by and large underutlizing the medium of the internet, and attention must be paid also to the internet’s generationality – IPv6, web 2.0 (user-generated) and web 3.0 (semantic) to make the most out of the potential. The worst journal websites, I have to say are those of the for-profit closed-access publishers which is natural because content control is inherently at odds with the medium. In fact, Google’s human evaluation typically will not rank a page as useful even if it is on-topic if that page requires a pay-per-view log-in. I can’t understand for the life of me what value-added services closed access publishers offer when they are so disastrously and poorly designed. I have in mind something far more advanced, a combination of wiki and journal, something I call a matrix essay. This is a project where you commission a review paper on a general topic and create a mindmap. Say the topic is HIV/AIDS Medicine in Africa. You have one textbook like paper, and for each tangent you get another paper (say on Nutrition, health systems, drugs, patents, and so on), and maybe you have layers. Each paper is stand-alone and peer-reviewed, but they are all linked by keyword. This is in fact, a kind of semantic knowledge design and can be accomplished by research networks. None of this can happen in a closed-access journal.

The Black Route to OA
I also call Open Access 360, the black route. Black stands for static efficiency (Stiglitz), and it is also about time the colour Black stands for the best practise of something. From an African perspective, I call subscription access Red route because it is almost always a stop sign to content. So, we end up from an African point of view with Pan-African colours, Green, Gold, Black and Red routes to literature. Now, we also have to add the Blue route, for the UN’s HINARI, AGORA and OARE programs, and to add to that INASP-Perii, eIFL and publisher-specific concessions that give free content to African IP addresses. For the West, there is just Red, Green and Gold, no charity concessions that you can lose if the income of your country goes up. Things are much too complicated for Africa and the developing countries, the impact of all the concessions and OA are being lost because it is not so simple as point and click, but point and click is within our grasp. The Black route is important to Africa and other developing regions because no matter what kind of waiver policy a journal can have, author fees are a disincentive to publishing OA for these authors, and for anyone doing research without a grant or salary. It is possible, my friends, to do publisheable research without money and very important that we have a platform for that lest we be ultimately beholden to our patrons.

Copyright Deregulation
I want to mention briefly another idea, and what I think will bring OA’s vision full circle as has been best article by Steven Harnad – a vision of an open, global information system of knowledge with no toll-barriers. I need to write a full article on this, that will be suggesting a bold move forward as follows. This is that global OA/scholarly community advocate copyright deregulation in the law on works classed as academic, where the work and review are donated, there are no royalties and the bottom-line is impact. Copyright deregulation would mean essentially, that all rights remain the same (attribution, permissions etc.) except that all copying would be legal (no ‘unauthorized access’ in the law). This class of works would essentially become legal to copy, but such a legal change would have to come with a Settlement with the publishers (the Journal Publishers Settlement if you will!).

In fact, no matter how successful green and gold OA is in the future, only copyright deregulation can build on Green OA to pave the way for this vision of (‘every article, on every researcher’s desktop, for free, for all, forever) if it is to happen in my lifetim. Going forward we had 19% of current global literature OA in 2006 (Bjork et al), and with mandates that is increasing and if someone can replicate the Bjork et al study of 2006 we can know where it is now.

But going backwards we have the vast majority of works published in the pre-mandate 20th century where rights and therefore market power rests with the owners of the copyright, often third-party publishers. The problem with the market of course, is that the demand from the researcher is essentially to have unobstructed access to the literature they need, therefore even if the quantity of literature that can be charged for to libraries becomes smaller, the price of getting it need not change very much.

Copyright deregulation is suggested by Green OA already. In fact, when an author retains copyright and deposits the published version in an OA repository, this is de facto copyright deregulation because now the article can be freely copied. Copyright deregulation would do this to all articles classed scholarly and not be dependent on institutions or indviduals good intentions to mandate or self-deposit. I have written a paper that is in press at the moment, that extrapolates from existing knowledge to estimate that there now exists 50 million articles in the world since the form of journal publishing began in 1665. Most of the 19th ce articles and everything before that is in the public domain. Most of the 20th ce articles is under copyright transferred to a third party, alternatively vested with the author, or orphan works. Copyright is typically 70 or so years after the death of the author, before it is in the public domain. The only mandate that can unlock that literature in a reliable way would be a change in the law that basically makes unauthoized copying and access impossible. Of course every human being should have the right to access and make copies of this class of work. It’s an almost unimaginable black market, but it does exist in developing countries where medical doctors purchase copies of medical articles from people illegally accessing subscriptions. I’m sure the people those doctors are serving would agree that it is not only a victimless crime, but a victim-preventing crime.

We know the high level of compliance of journals today with OA mandates, and we know the much lower level of author participation and the long road ahead to universally mandated OA. Universally mandated OA still cannot, as far as I know, do anything except encourage pre-mandate copyright holders to make their work available for free, whether it is a publisher, or an author who simply doesn’t take the time or recognize the value in it. I know enough people to know that you cannot put faith in individuals good intentions, reasonability etc. So what happens to all works already published before mandates came into effect and that are not already OA?

The Tipping Point
The reason for legal copyright deregulation is this problem of the tipping point, and the fact that taxpayers, libraries and institutions are no longer paying twice for research, they are paying three or four times. Funding the research, funding the libraries for subscriptions, funding OA journals, funding author-fees, building repositories, and trying to index and create search utitiles for a spaghetti soup of content routes. In such a system, there is little logic. Do a lit search without a subscription. One article is inaccessible because the author didn’t bother to deposit, another is embargoed, another is available on an author’s website, another in a repository, one is pre-publication another is the publisher’s pdf, one university can afford 18,000 online titles, in another part of the world the national university can afford 0 to 6, one journal is OA but only posts PDF so all of the low-bandwith world cannot access it. And Google Scholar remains one’s best hope of not missing anything. Of course if the article isn’t OA, you have to waste 10 minutes logging back into your library where unfortunately all of the DRMs and fancy (value-draining, not value-added) tools of the publishers often fail to work and you get what amounts to a busy signal. That’s if you are lucky and have a subscription. So you waste valuable research hours, when you could just click on a simple website like every other content provider from newspapers to youtube.

Content is Free, Products and Services are the Business
As I look at internet business models of similar forms of content, from online newspapers to magazines news, I see a shift where there is now a separation of production and content. Content and production, once packaged together in print format sought cost recovery and profit through sales and subscription. The internet is pushing towards a model where content is free and acts as cross-promotion for related production and services. Recently, Michael Geist and others have been experimenting with the releas of online books with free chapters under creative commons while selling the print copy, and in fact seeing more print copies sold as a result. I believe there was even a case where a Hollywood movie was released as a bootleg before it came out in theatre, and the presence of a lower quality version resulted in higher than expected box office sales.

Therefore, I believe there is a potential business model for a journal to present content free of charge and free of author fees, without need of grants and to provide journal related products for commercial use. One possibility is to create a communications hub arond a general topic, provide a collection of journals and provide a platform for adverstising/sponsorship of conferences, scholarly societies, lectures, blog space, discussion space, space for professional network database, cv’s etc. Such a communications hub would use all open source web 2.0 software and social media (youtube (lectures etc), facebook, twitter etc) and thereby increase article impact through existing ‘viral’ communities. The product is web/communication services, the sell is a high traffic website, and the revenue is from advertising (related to academia), and also sponsorship and donation.

The journals themselves would be independent, perhaps subscribers at a nominal fee, and completely separate from the business side thus maintaining editorial independence (though if the idea of transparent peer-review is understood, that would be a policy of the publisher). The revenue would pay the needed human resource hours, and of course P/R and content is donated time. For us kids of the 21st century, honestly, we know how to do this on a shoestring budget and outperform expensive corporate web development at the same time. If you have an exciting enough website, then you also have a brand that can translate into glossy print magazine and earn more revenue, turning on the head the trend of the 1990s where print magazines saw the need to go online. Everyone likes to hold a magazine, and if you take the best articles from a collection and write them at accessible Scientific American standard (considered by many to be the gold standard), then you have a popular science magazine reaching millions.

So here again is my 140 character Twitter proposal

The 21ce Journal-OpenAccess360(no author fee+transparent P/R);magazine bizmodel-journal collection+glossy- socialmedia+web2-3.0;+mobileweb

I forgot to mention something about the mobile web, and that it is an ermerging field in development. Everyone is going to be abel to have emaill access by phone before everyone has a good bandwith connection with a personal computer. If journals provide txt versions of articles, they can be dumped into the body of an email and transmitted at very low bandwith on mobile web. And the future is very interesting in general for applications like audio lectures on your phone and other types of knowledge content and applications, for Mobile Web for Development – MW4D.

Thank you for listening,

Arif Jinha
34 years of age
trying to keep up with the digital age

Here are the lyrics to the Times They Are a Changing, provided on the Bob Dylan Official Website Free of Charge

The Times They Are A-Changin’
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

Copyright ©1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music