digital publishing

[calimac]

In response to the Aaron Swartz case, Timothy Burke argues that scholars should just get off their butts and create open-source journals. Then scholarship would be free, as it should be, and we wouldn't be at the mercy of print or online publishers charging extortionate prices for us to access our own and each others' work. Burke is exasperated at his colleagues who defend the ancien regime.

OK, then: he's a scholar; why doesn't he do something, then? Instead of just complaining about it?

I have some concern and some obligation to speak here, because, unusually, I have some agency in this matter, or Burke writes as if I do. I'm the co-editor of an accredited scholarly journal. I'm not an academic myself, but my co-editors are. We're published by an established academic press, and our print volumes cost a pretty penny. We're available on an online database called Project MUSE, for which institutions have to buy subscriptions.

So why don't we just abandon this system and go open-source? It'd make the scholarship we publish more freely available.

Well, we've thought about it. But there's two overwhelming reasons why we don't do any such thing.

We don't have the expertise. We don't have the time.

Also, we don't have the money.

Since joining the editorial team, I've been impressed at the amount of time-consuming work involved in the intellectual and scholarly evaluation of the scholarship we receive. I am writing this post when what I ought to be doing is evaluating the four new or revised papers that have just come in this week (and revised ones are tougher to judge than new ones, because you have to compare what it says now to your evaluation of what it said before, while avoiding the trap of judging it by its improvement and not by its absolute quality). Could we also format the journal, host it online, and communicate its presence to the academic community? No. There is no time. And we wouldn't be particularly good at it, whereas there is hope that we are good at what we are trained and expert at.

What about our university press? That sounds impressive, but it's actually a tiny outfit, basically two overworked people in a small office, under obligations to be an income-producing source for the underfunded public university they work for. They can and do perform some tasks we cannot. But they couldn't host the journal online, assuming they were permitted by the university to do it, and they'd be one small entity out in the wilderness if they did.

So here's an idea. A bunch of universities should get together and establish a consortium. Yes, that's the ticket. Pool their resources, hire some people with both academic background and expertise in the technical and marketing sides, split the costs, and have a large online database that everyone would know was the place to go for access.

But ... but that's what Project MUSE is. And JSTOR, the entity that Aaron Swartz performed his guerrilla warfare against. This isn't Pergamon Press or Elsevier, folks, for-profit divisions of rapacious corporations out to squeeze the last penny from your pockets. Project MUSE and JSTOR are both non-profit entities, funded largely by foundation grants. Project MUSE is the creation of a university press that was large enough, and had the forward-looking support, to create such an endeavor. JSTOR is the brainchild of an economics professor who decided that improving electronic access to journals would be sufficient of a worthwhile mitzvah to leave academia for.

So why do they charge so much money to access their resources? I don't know. Are their costs really that high that they must be recouped in this manner? But if so, then guerrilla open-source actions like Aaron Swartz's are ultimately self-defeating. In Kathryn Cramer's immortal formulation, "Information wants to be free, but writers need to be paid." So do the people who put writers' work online, and the companies from which they contract hosting services. Aaron Swartz shouted "Be free! Be free!" but, if this is correct, it can't survive and flourish and keep itself renewed without an income. All he'd do is destroy what he's trying to save. (Did you ever see a movie called Bless the Beasts & Children?)

Or is it that economic greed is so deeply built into the human soul that even non-profit entities are driven to charge as much as they can get away with, sometimes more? In that case, in the revolution is the seed of its own destruction. Let's say Aaron Swartz had been successful at liberating the contents of JSTOR and set up his own open-source database. Soon enough he'd find that he needed money to operate it (see previous paragraph). And then - if this paragraph's thesis is correct - either he, or his successors, would soon enough find that they started charging, and charging, more, and more, and we'd be back where we started, and another Aaron Swartz would come along and tear down the Bastille again, and then another Emperor Napoleon would arise, and then ...

I'm not defending the regime. I simply think we're stuck with it.

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

He is also starry-eyed utopian about the long-term robustness of digital content:

Digitized scholarship can’t be lost or stolen the way that print can be, it doesn’t have to be mailed, it doesn’t have to have physical storage, it can’t be eaten by termites, it can’t get mold on it.

As an archivist who has increasingly had to deal with digitally-born materials created in obsolete systems, and the belief of record-creators that it must surely be best practice to scan the originals rather than make sure they're retained and properly housed -

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

See Domesday Book vs the Domesday Project.

There's a place for digitisation. It's great for access, it can be good for preservation if it means physical artefacts are less handled. But it's not a Magic Bullet for preservation for posterity.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely, yes. I myself am a librarian with archival training, and the difference between access and preservation is a basic one in the field. Thank you for bringing it up. I overlooked it here because I had another point to make, and because I was willing to accept for purposes of argument the essential given in using computer access as a preservation tool, a large organization willing to dedicate resources to the continual monitoring of its data. I am not worried, for the here and now at least, about JSTOR or Project MUSE crashing.

But in the long term, absolutely. I pointed this out in an article I wrote nearly 15 years ago at the behest of a small-town public library, here.

Computer formats change constantly, and old files become unreadable by new systems. The electronic data on disks decay slowly over time. The plastic in CD-ROMs will become brittle and yellow, and the metal will rust, within 50 years. The computer is a useful tool, but it's not a long-term storage medium. ... There is no surer way to preserve words than by printing them out on acid-free paper, binding them between sturdy covers, and storing them in a building with a constant temperature. In other words, a book in a library.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I wish I could convince my university library of this. They have pretty much stopped ordering hard copies of journals altogether, and even books are looked on askance where they're also available in e-format. I can see why they do it (money, space), but talk about putting yourself at the mercy of the publishers!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It's an understandable desperate cost-cutting plan, so long as they have a backup whereby the books will be available in print should the online copies go blooey, like an ILL agreement with libraries that actually own the books.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I saw something recently that pinpointed exactly why JSTOR charges so much for admission; JSTOR itself is nonprofit, but there are for-profit entities that format the content and make it available. The big bucks fund them. I wish I could remember where, exactly, I saw this. I will look around for the source.

It seems as though there ought to be some workable solution to this problem, but it would take time and money to come up with one.

Oursin's comments about the robustness of digital content are right on. This is a huge problem in so many ways. The guy who thinks digitized scholarship can't be stolen: uh, the way digitized music can't be stolen? It doesn't have physical storage: he's never heard the words "hard drive failure"?

I will link to a discussion I got into on New Music Box (http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/Finding-a-Home-for-the-Longest-Opera-Ever-Written/) a few years ago about digital archiving of composer archives. There's someone there who also doesn't understand the magnitude of the problems.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

An analog of this set of imperatives, for me, is my experience as an author of rpg supplements. I've been fairly successful in my work for Steve Jackson Games, both in sales and in critical reception. In theory, I could self-publish, if I came up with a system of my own. But in point of fact, that would require me to do all sorts of things that I'm not skilled at: identifying a suitable target market for a book, doing page layout, selecting and buying art, possibly contracting for printing and binding, negotiating distribution, and the general overhead of business management and raising capital. At best doing all this would sharply cut into the time I could spend writing; at worst I would fail at it and deplete my financial resources. It's well worth it to me to freelance for an established publisher that can do all of the heavy lifting. I probably make substantially more than I would if I did that stuff myself, and I certainly have less uncongenial work and less anxiety.

In the old-fashioned academic publishing world, which I have worked in for decades now, copy editing is a skilled task that is paid at a moderately high hourly rate. Any entity, profit or nonprofit, that offers copy editing on a scale more massive than can be handled by a journal managing editor in their spare time is going to have to pay for someone like me. The substitutes are not impressive: non-native English speaking "copy editors," spell checkers, authors using their own judgment. I expect that similar issues arise for indexing, abstracting, page layout, Web design, and the like. Donald Knuth tried to eliminate all this in mathematics and computer science by writing TeX, which was meant to enable every author to do their own page layout without having nasty publishers get involved . . . but he wasn't able to write software to give mathematicians the ability to write a coherent sentence, or use fonts intelligently, or create a printed page that was easy and comfortable to read (though some can, as Dr. Knuth illustrates). As a result, my computer now has software designed for editing TeX articles for a journal that gets most of its submissions in this form; it brings me in added income. Someone has to pay for my services.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Another issue that occurred to me on this is that there's the long-term business of building up the reputation of an academic journal - people understandably want to publish in journals that have credibility in the field. This doesn't exist from the get-go. It's all very well to say 'let's do the show right here!' but there is a wider issue of establishing the name as being one that is more than just one of those fly-by-night dubious 'open access' enterprises who are constantly spamming me to contribute in areas which are, at best and being really, really, charitable, somewhat peripheral to my scholarly concerns.

You'd need to get a really impressive editorial board, a strongly targeted mission statement, and some exceedingly strong contributions for the opening issues, just to lay down some kind of marker to get in the game.