Emerging Technologies Consulting

The two week gap in this blog was due in part to my participation in Faculty Academy at University of Mary Washington.  Webcasts of many of the presentations are slowly but surely going online.  I love when conferences do this, put videos of the presentations online after the fact.  Conferecnes are expensive ventures these days (though this one isn’t!), and with tight budgets, many people can’t attend, so it’s great to be able to see some of the material.  I’ve been able to do this for a number of conferences, including ELI, and it’s so important to me to be able to keep up with the latest discussions in the field. I highly recommend watching both of the webcasts that are up on the FA site.  James Boyle’s talk was about how the University needs to be more open, and the debate between Jim Groom and John St. Clair is about open web tools for courses vs. closed systems like Blackboard.  It’s entertaining and informative.

Open Access publishing is one way to solve the problem of access to academic research.  Open Access publishing is the publication of materials so that they’re freely available to anyone, no need to go through a library or other insititutional affiliation to gain access to this material.  There are a couple of ways to achieve open access. One is for the publisher to provide the material via an open model.  Journals that provide such access can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals.  Another option is for the author to get permission to archive the material him or herself, publishing it to their personal or school website or to a blog.  Several schools have actually made the move to require their faculty to publish their work under an open access agreement and are providing services and infrastructure to make that possible. Harvard, Stanford and MIT (the latest) have all made such agreements.  The NIH also required researchers who received funding from them to make their work publicly accessible, in theory because the public should be able to read about what they’re already paying for.  In all of these agreements, there is usually some delay, 6 months or a year so that the original publishers, i.e. the journals can make a buck from those who need access to material most immediately (usually those who have insitutional support for the cost of these journals).

The NIH policy is under fire from Rep. John Conyers (who has also supported the RIAA in its efforts to sue customers), through a bill trying to make its way through the house to allow publishers to charge people for access to research.  I don’t have a problem with a nominal fee for access to material, but most of the fees for a single journal article are exhorbitant.  I was looking through Web of Science the other day and the articles cost $35 a piece.  Given that a single article I write might include at a minimum of 10 other articles, that’s gonna cost me $350 to write a single article.  What might make sense is a dollar or two per article, but still, the cost to access material in order to produce your own, or even just to stay informed shouldn’t be much, if anything.  Should knowledge really have a price tag?

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out and what affect initiatives at MIT, Harvard and Stanford have on other institutions.  One issue that Open Access doesn’t resolve is the findability one.  How do you find this research?  Currently, you have to know where to look.  If you’re searching through your library databases or through Google Scholar, it’s unlikely these pieces are going to pop up alongside others.  Which is too bad since that means knowledge disseminated through certain avenues is more finable and thus more privileged than others.  Federated search anyone?

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• John Conyers and Open Access (lessig.org)
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• More on Conyers and scientific publishing (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• Framing the Open Access Debate (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)
• Bypass expensive resources: Go directly to free (anne.teachesme.com)