Live-blogging the 2009 Vancouver PKP Conference

Presenters:

• Heidi Drasbek Martinussen, System Librarian, Technical University of Denmark
• Helle Damgaard Andersen, Webmaster, IT Department for Library and Web, Copenhagen Business School
• Kirsten Suhr Jacobsen, Conference Consultant, Copenhagen Business School Library

(From left to right: Helle Damgaard Andersen, Heidi Drasbek Martinussen, Kirsten Suhr Jacobsen)

Time: 2:30-3:30 pm, July 9th, 2009

Place: SFU Harbour Centre, Earl & Jennie Lohn Room 7000

Abstract

2008 Paper (.pdf, in Danish)

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Session Overview

Beginnings

Denmark’s Electronic Research Library (DEFF) began a project in 2008 to review twenty open source and proprietary conference management systems and to test out the three that were best suited for research libraries (i.e. includes functionalities such as registration/payment, review process, etc.) This project was carried out collaboratively by the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Aalborg University, and Copenhagen Business School (CBS); each institution was to test out seven systems, respectively.

The following diagram represents the various characteristics of the systems, such as those that only support review or registration/payment functionalities, as well as pricing – red denotes that the system was VERY EXPENSIVE.

(source)

Following the preliminary testing stages, the three institutions each chose one of their seven conference management systems, and carried out pilot projects on the selected system:

1) Proceedings Central tested by Aalborg University

Proceedings Central (now ScholarOne Proceedings) was a proprietary system developed by Thomson Reuters. While it had many benefits, its major downfall was that it was expensive and only supported review functionalities, much more like the Open Journal Systems (OJS) publication system. In addition, it was frustrating to use outside of North America because the system was configured to follow US time only.

2) Indico tested by the Technical University of Denmark

The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has been using the Indico system for several years now. It is an open source system that was originally developed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and supported by the European Union. Its greatest advantage is that it makes registration very easy– setting up registration forms can take as little as half an hour. The major challenge with Indico is that the system is not aesthetically pleasing, but they are currently working on developing a better looking version that is expected to be available in the fall. The presenters likened Indico to the ‘little brother’ of Open Conference Systems (OCS) as its functions are very comparable to the latter.

3) Open Conference System (OCS) tested by the Copenhagen Business School

The Open Conference System (OCS) was developed from OJS system and thus has inherited characteristics that are not always best suited for the needs of a conference management system. An example of this is that it is difficult to set up individual conferences– they must be set up as annual conferences.

Conclusions

While there are still many items on the presenters’ wish-list for OCS, the system seems to be the best so far in terms of designs, the building of the conference site, and multilingual support. It also has a large community of users behind it, and includes a wiki, as well as a support and user discussion forum.

Future Directions – a further look into the systems

The goal for the current project is to have DTU run fourteen conferences with Indico in 2009, and CBS run seven conferences with OCS to further develop and examine the respective systems. DTU and CBS also hope to collaboratively develop a ‘light’ version of OCS, that has fewer functions to better:

• provide for a quick set up for registration,
• support a conference that already has its own webpage, but requires payment and review functions,

The Role of the Library

The presenters also highlighted the role of the library in relation to the use of conference management systems. The library can serve as technical/user support, act as a central solution and housing for conferences, as well as provide payment system integration so that users are not limited to using PayPal.

Questions

Comment: Fantastic work. It is exciting to see someone to push forward OCS. Major problem with both OJS is that everyone is going in different directions. The more institutions pick up OCS, the more polish and fine-tuning it is going to get. Good to get feedback. This is the advantage to open source– this is how the software improves! And an obvious sign that the community works effectively.

Question: What is the volume for abstracts, attendees, etc. (that is provided by OCS)? Answer: Very wide range.

Question: How did you come down to deciding on Indico and OCS? Did you use a checklist for all the technical requirements for the 20 systems? Answer: Yes.

Question: Is there any proprietary system that has similar functional abilities of OCS and at reasonable price range? Answer: It is very difficult to get prices out of proprietary systems and functionality is usually very unclear-“this system does it all” seems to be the standard response.

References

Martinussen, H., Damgaard, H., Jacobsen, K., & Pedersen, J. (2008). Nye veje for forskningsbibliotekerne? conference management systems. DF Revy, 31(8), 21-23.

Related Links

• Denmark’s Electronic Research Library (DEFF)
• Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
• Aalborg University
• Copenhagen Business School (CBS)
• Open Conference System (OCS)
• Open Journal Systems (OJS)
• European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)

Session: Implementing open access in agricultural research: the experience of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation

Presenter: Patricia Rocha Bello Bertin

Background: The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation‘s (Embrapa) mission is to provide feasible solutions for the sustainable development of Brazilian agribusiness through knowledge and technology generation and transfer. Read more here.

Overview

Embrapa is a governmental organization that is 36 years old, has 38 research units, 3 service units, 13 central divisions and works in every Brazilian state. Their mission is to provide feasible solutions for the sustainable development of Brazilian agribusiness through knowledge and technology generation and transfer.

As background context, agricultural science is one of the most important Brazilian contributions to global scientific production (4% of global production). Research outputs are dispersed worldwide and there is poor research assessment tools, resulting in low visibility. Embrapa is a prolific publisher, producing 67,916 articles in total from 2000-2007.

Embrapa has an open access project, whose objective is “to propose and implement a model for scientific information management based on open access statements and policies”. They make available both their internal data providers (e.g. institutional repository, institutional electronic journals) and external data to the public. Embrapa’s five scientific journals have never followed the business model of large publishers so were well suited to the open access model. The Brazilian Journal of Agricultural Research’s first electronic version was created in 1997. Recently, the OJS has been asked to solve other institutional needs and is focusing on that.

Institutional Repository: They have developed a number of systems for scientific information organization and retrieval. They had identified a need to integrate processes and technological platforms. A system was developed for capturing all scientific production available in the 39 homepages of Embrapa’s Research Units and automatically adds them into the institutional repository (6,400+ items).

An example of one of their systems is Ainfo, a system for librarians’ management used to monitor the Research Units’ scientific production and the researchers’ progress in improving their scientific production. The Ainfo integration into the respository was found to be strategic for the success of the Open Access implementation, since the obligation of evidencing the scientific production already has a policy of compulsory deposit. Another example is an experimental installation of DSpace (1.5.2 version) wth access restricted to internal user. 

The Open Access mandate policy benefits form instituional policies which obligate the researcher to communicate and proove scientific production, and simultaneously benefits the organization to be sharing this knowledge.

The Tech Side

Service provider building: Open source metadata harvesting tools’ evaluation (PKP Metadata Harvester, MOD AI, OAI Harvester, OAI Arc, JOAI Harvester, and OAI Harvester OCKC. Aspects considered include update and availability of new versions, the web interface fo rdata collection, the users interface for searching, the documentation support offered for setting and installating the metadta collection tool. To date, they have identified 261 data providers of interest to Embrapa. 

Analysis / Issues / Reactions

The focus of the presentation seemed to be on the establishment of the system and what it offers, rather than on how it is used by those outside of Embrapa. I was curious to know, as a way of judging the utility of these efforts and what they might offer as a model for other similar specialist research institutions, what the take-up has been from the public and specifically, from a non-academic audience (e.g. is there anything that farmers access and use? extension workers? NGO staff?)

In terms of an international dissemination that could make the research coming from a specialist, innovative research organization accessible to other development countries, language access is an issue. The public site is in English, Spanish and Portuguese and it appears that the English site is slightly more limited than the Portuguese versions. 

Despite these issues, the profiling of this initiative offers a potential model of how a large governmental body can innovate integrated platforms by which to share its knowledge and tools with a broader audience in a more equitable fashion.

(source)

Presenter: Marin Dacos

July 9, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. SFU Harbour Centre. Rm. 7000*

*Important Note: As this was a remote session, the presenter’s voice was inaudible most of the time due to technical difficulties and constant breaks in the live audio streaming. Therefore, it was difficult to capture parts of the presentation.

Marian Dacos (Source)

Background

Session Overview

Mr. Martin Dacos initiated the session by providing a background summary on Revues.org. He indicated there are currently 187 members, with 42000 online humanities and social sciences full-text, open-access documents (Session Abstract). He mentioned that approximately ten years ago, systems were centralized and focused on sciences. And since the beginning of Revues.org,  only PDF documents were processed for publishing by converting to extensible markup language (XML).  Later, Lodel (electronic publishing software)  was developed as a central management system (CMS) where the web service could convert word documents to XML. This is around the time when the Public Knowledge Project (PKP)  started up and its focus was to decentralize and provide a more international access point for the publishing of journals and management of conferences through the Open Journal System (OJS). During this time, the two projects, Lodel and PKP, started to converge with two distinct parts and four kinds of services.

(1) The Project Details

The first part of the project, as Mr. Dacos described it consists of using PKP  to develop a manuscript management tool to monitor the workflow through OJS. There is a need to create a new interface for users and make it more human-friendly for interaction in order to allow for the dissemination of documents. This portion of the project also investigates the possibility of connecting Lodel and OJS so both systems can use the system jointly. Next, Mr. Dacos explained the second part of the project which deals with document conversion called OTX – which will convert for example RTF to XML. This parallels PKPs development and there is the possibility of sharing information on this creation.

(2) Services

Revues.org offers various kinds of services to allow for the dissemination and communication of scholarly material and other information such as upcoming events. One of the services presented by Revues is Calenda which is claimed to be the largest French calendar system for the social sciences and humanities. This calender service is important because it disseminates information such as upcoming scientific events to the rest of it’s audience. This communication tool is crucial in bringing members of various online communities together to participate in ‘study days,’ lectures, workshops, seminars, symposiums, and share their papers. Another valuable service offered by Revues.org is Hypotheses which is a platform for research documents. This is a free service which allows researchers, scientists, engineers and other professionals to post their experiences on a particular topic or phenomenon for sharing with a wider audience. One can upload a blog, field notes, newsletters, diary inserts, reviews on certain topics, or even a book for publishing. A third service offered by Revues.org is a monthly newsletter called La Lettre de Revues.org. This newsletter connects the Revues.org community together by showcasing various pieces of information. For instance, new members who have recently joined are profiled and new online documents are highlighted for it’s subscribers to read.

The remainder of Mr. Marin Dacos’ talk focused on Lemon8 and OTX which was difficult to interpret due to technical issues.

Questions from the audience asked at Mr. Dacos’ session:

It was difficult to get an audio connection with Mr. Dacos due to technical difficulties, therefore questions were not asked.

Related Links

• Lodel – electronic publishing software system
• The Centre of Open Electronic Publishing
• The National Centre for Scientific Research
• “The CNRS reinforces its policy of access to digital documents in the human and social sciences” (Article)
• Lift France 09 – Conference attended in France

References

Dacos, M. (2009). Revues.org and the public knowledge project: propositions to collaborate. PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2009. Retrieved 2009-07-09, from http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009/paper/view/208

Taken at the Open Medicine benefit fund-raiser; November 21, 2007 (Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c4/John_Willinsky.jpg)

Presenter: Dr. John Willinsky – Director, Public Knowledge Project. Professor, Stanford University and the University of British Columbia. Bio

July 8, 2009, 7:30-pm. Morris J Wosk Centre for Dialogue

Session Overview

Dr. Willinsky  set  the context for his address by using adoption of  Open Journal System to illustrate the expansion of open access. He noted that at the 2007 PKP conference, 1000 journals used OJS. Now, at  the 2009 conference, there are approximately 3000 OJS journals. Of these, he noted that 29% spend $0 on expenses and 24% reported no revenue at all. Dr. Willinsky noted that these figures indicate the emergence of a new, third kind of independent journal that can run on a zero budget economic model.

However, Dr. Willinsky asks us not to focus on this knowledge being free (as in beer). After all, scholarly work is not free: it is very labour intensive. Through the entire domain of research, curriculum development,  writing, editing, reviewing, and publishing in journals, scholarly work is expensive. Consequently, he argues for expanding the conversation about open access to scholarly publishing beyond the question of it being free. Instead, he asks us to reach back in time and recall how learning has long been treated as a type of (intellectual) property that is distinct from other (economic) properties.  “There is a distinction between the type of intellectual property we produce in education and that produced by Michael Jackson or Justin Timberlake, so why should it be treated the same?”

Using a number of examples to illustrate the point, Dr. Willinsky recounted the historical consistency of the university being recognized as something outside of the regular economy. He pointed out that by the 12th century there was already such recognition in that university members had many special rights including some rights of the clergy, the right of safe conduct, and the right to bring manuscripts across borders without paying tax. He also spoke about how scholarly contributions were recognized through acts of patronism from royalty and how rent controls were used in Oxford to protect students from being exploited by greedy landlords.

In particular, Dr. Willinsky notes that this different view of the property of education is rooted in John Locke’s  work on property. Locke spoke about property in two different ways: that we are given the work in common, and  that every man has property in his own body.  To Locke, because we labour (work), we have some claim to property based on the notion of  the right to exclude (enclosure). The intellectual property of learning is founded in these basic Lockean principles (e.g. labour invested and held in common), but it is somewhat different because it’s  value is not realized in the principle of exclusion. Instead, if we enclose intellectual property,  we reduce it’s value.  So the value of intellectual property is realized when it is shared and that value increases the less restrictive it is. Dr. Willinsky summarized this Lockean  argument about the intellectual property of learning as follows: we hold all this knowledge in common and we realize it’s value in the unrestricted circulation of this intellectual property.

Turning to some of the relevant legal aspects of the argument, Dr. Willinsky began by recounting the  fight over the licensing of books. In the 17th century, there was such excessive piracy that it removed the financial incentives for produce and publish books. Consequently, in 1710 the first copyright act (Statute of Anne) was passed to specifically recognize the rights of authors. Significantly, this statue was noted as an   “act for the encouragement of learning”.  Additionally, the act also recognized the right of universities to publish what ever they wanted and required publishers to provide to university libraries with 9 copies, on the best paper, of each book they published.

Moving to modern times, Dr. Willinsky  illustrated this special place that intellectual properties of learning have been given  with a number of examples:

• Fair dealing (fair use in US) exceptions to copyright law. These include the  right to quote for non-commercial, critical and parody use and provides protection under the law for students and scholars.
• The academic exception to intellectual property rights. Scholars have the natural ownership rights to all the  works they produce, unlike  other non-educational industries where workers don’t have those rights.
• Patent law allows us to use patented material for learning without paying a fee.
• Tax exemptions for university endowments in the US.

In closing, Dr. Willinsky asked the audience to take up the challenge as follows:

• In our work he asks us to focus not on  making things free, but to promote the notion that the value of the work we do in education is realized in it’s sharing.
• He asks us to look for opportunities to defend and experiment, to take advantages of opportunities to share our work, to expand our own policies moving toward open access, and to demonstrate the ways that intellectual properties of learning are different.

Related Links

• Stanford University School of Education
• UBC Department of Language and Literacy Education
• Public Knowledge Project
• Open Journal System (OJS)
• John Locke
• Statute of Anne, 1710

Presenter: Martin Boucher

July 9, 2009 at 9:30 a.m. SFU Harbour Centre. Rm 7000

Martin Boucher (picture taken by Pam Gill)

Background

Mr. Martin Boucher is the Assistant Director for the Centre d’édition numérique/ Digital Publishing Centre located at the University of Montreal, located in Montreal, Quebec. This centre along with the library at the University of Laval are the sites of the Erudit publishing locations which serve as a bridge to the Open Journal Systems (OJS). Erudit focuses on the promotion and dissemination of research similar to the Open Access Press (part of the PKP 2009 conference).

Session Overview

Mr. Martin Boucher highlighted the features and implications of a new publishing platform called Erudit (Session Abstract). He focused on sharing the capabilities of the Erudit publishing platform by first providing a brief historical overview of the organization, describing the publishing process, then introducing Erudit, and concluding with the benefits of such a platform.

(1) Historical Overview

Mr. Boucher started the session by pointing out that Erudit is a non-profit, multi-institutional publishing platform founded in 1998.  This platform, based in Quebec, provides an independent research publication service which consists of access to various types of documents in the humanities and social sciences fields to the universities. Erudit also encouraged the development of Synergies which is a similar platform but targets a more mainstream audience since it is published in English. Some facts about Erudit:

• International standards are followed
• Publishes over 50000 current and back-dated articles
• Offers management services, publishing, and subscriptions
• 90% of the downloads are free
• Have over 1 million visits per month

(2) Publishing Process

The description of the publishing process constituted at least a third of the presentation time. Mr. Boucher felt it necessary to take the time to describe to the audience the details involved so it would be easier to compare the similarities and differences between the new and old versions of the system. To begin, Mr. Boucher indicated the publishing process accepted only journals based on extensible markup language (XML), and various input sources (In Design, QuarkXPress, Open Office, Word, RTF). Also, he pointed out that there are no peer-reviews, in fact: only the final documents are considered to be a part of the collection. It should be pointed out that these documents meet high quality standards as they are expected to be peer-reviewed before submitting to the publishing platform. As of yet, Erudit does not have the software to assist in a peer-review type of process. The belief of the Erudit community is to provide quick digital dissemination of the articles. This complicated, lengthy process is made possible by a team of three to four qualified technicians, one coordinator, and one analyst, all of whom ensure a smooth transition of the documents into the virtual domain. The publishing process consists of five key steps as outlined in Figure 1. Mr. Boucher elaborated on the importance of the analysis step. He went on to outline the three steps of the manual semantic analysis. The first consists of manual and automated tagging where detailed XML tagging is only for XHTML, and less tagging is done on PDF files. The second step consists of the automated production of XML files for dissemination. And lastly, a rigorous quality assurance by the technicians prior to dissemination sums up the analysis step of the publishing process.

Figure 1: The publishing process (image created by Pam Gill)

(3) New Erudit Platform

Once the publishing process was described, an illustration of the new Erudit platform was revealed. Mr. Boucher indicated there is now increased support for journal articles through the Erudit Article 3.0 XML schema (see Figure 2). Further, there is support for additional scholarly genres such as books, proceedings, and even online courses (a recent request). It should be mentioned here that some of these other forms of documents are still in the experimental stages such as digitizing books. In addition, there is continued support for other XML input/output formats to ensure preservation and interoperability such as with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), Google Scholar, and indexing databases.

Figure 2: The new Erudit support system (image created by Pam Gill)

(4) Benefits

To conclude his presentation on Erudit, Mr. Boucher explained the advantages of incorporating such a system by mentioning particular benefits of interest:

• Purely Java-based
• User-friendly because they have a universal set of tools inside the applications which makes it easier for the support technicians to troubleshoot and work with
• Supports plug-ins and extensions
• All scholarly genres are supported
• The process is simpler to follow
• An increase in the quality of data is noted
• The decrease in production time is evident
• There is less software involved

Mr. Martin Boucher hinted that the beta version of Erudit was to release in Fall 2009.

Questions from the audience asked at Mr. Boucher’s session:

1. Question: For the open access subscription of readership which consists of a vast collection, are statistics being collected? Answer: Not sure.
2. Question: Will the beta version of the publishing platform be released to everyone for bug reporting, testing, or move internally? Answer: Not sure if there will be public access. But it is a good idea to try the beta platform.
3. Question: Are you considering using the manuscript coverage for the Synergies launch? Answer: The new platform is creatively tight to what we are doing, and it is really close, with Synergies in mind.
4. Question: In a production crisis, are journal editors with you until the end of the process? Answer: They are there at the beginning of the process. They give material, but we do our own quality assurance process and then we release to the journal, however it is our own control. Also, the editors cannot see the work in the process such as the metadata, thought we do exchange information by emails.
5. Question: Has the provincial government been generous in funding? Answer: The journals had to publish in other platforms. There is a special grant for that. It is easier for us with that granting repository for pre-prints, documents or data section of the platforms which serve as an agent for them. Yet, Erudit is not considered by the government, although we are trying to get grants from the government. Currently to maintain the platform we only have money for basic management. In order to continue developing platforms (such as Synergy), to get support from the government is difficult.
6. Question: How do the sales work for the two platforms? Answer: If you buy it, you will have all the content and access increases.
7. Question: How is it passed to the publisher? Answer: The money goes to the journals, keep only a small amount for internal management since we are a non-profit society.
8. Question: Could you describe the current workflow and time required to publish one article? Answer: It depends on the article. If we are publishing an article that has no fine grain XML tagging or it is text from a PDF, then it requires less time for us to get it out. It depends on the quality of the article and the associated graphics, tables, size etc. We publish an issue at a time. It takes say two days to get an article published.

Related Links

University of Montreal receives $14M  for innovation (news article)

Contact the University of Montreal or the University of Laval libraries for more information on Erudit.

References

Boucher, M. (2009). The new erudit publishing platform. PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2009. Retrieved 2009-07-09, from http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009/paper/view/182

Freire Project

(Source)

Presenters:

• Dr. Shirley Steinberg – McGill University. Director, The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. Bio
• David Smith  – Technical Manager, The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. Bio

July 9, 2009, 4:00-pm-4:30 pm. SFU Harbour Centre. Rm 7000

Session Overview

Through McGIll University’s Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy, Dr. Steinberg and Mr. Smith have worked to help other centres with similar interests publish  open access scholarly work as well as create communication networks to take advantage of social networking and other less formal publishing opportunities.

Dr. Steinberg spoke about the creative aspects of going from a journal in one’s mind to actually creating an open access journal. She noted that when working with associations, if they already had a print journal then it was a relatively easy transition to an open access online journal. However,  the challenge is much greater for groups that don’t have previous experience creating a journal.

Dr. Steinberg illustrated her talk with the example helping Australian educators with the creation of a new journal: antipodes: a journal of critical southern education. Similar to Canada, the Australian educators face considerable challenges based on the difficulty in physically getting people together to communicate. Additionally, their government insists on a strict hierarchically tiered referred journal system. In this case, Dr. Steinberg noted that they focused first on creating a network of critical educators before they  concentrated on creating the journal. As a result of , in addition to the community having a focus on critical pedagogy, they also had the common goal of discussing new models for peer refereed journals.

Mr. Smith continued the talk with some of the more technical as well as social networking aspects of their project. He started by commenting on a number of inspiring aspect from John Willinsky’s keynote address. Mr Smith noted that the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy (IJCP)  uses the Open Journal System (OJS).  But he pointed out that the journal is difficult to find from the Centre’s website since they are struggling with the best way to present the link (conceptually) between them.

Furthermore, Mr. Smith commented that the centre’s site is still being developed and they are trying to make it a better tool to connect people. Mr. Smith commented that they would like the site to be more than just a repository for formal scholarly work (e.g. referred journal) and that they are interested in promoting less formal  but still very valuable modes of communication as well (e.g. blogs, wikis, forums). As an example of the benefit of these social networking possibilities, Mr. Smith provided an anecdote about an educator from St. Lucia whom he has become familiar with through the Centre’s website.

Discussion and audience questions

• Dr. Steinberg responded to an audience question saying that if the local scholars were not already grounded in possible economic models for open access journals that she would help them work through various options.
• One audience member asked about the possibility of integrating Drupal with the OJS, and Mr. Smith answered that he is very enthusiastic about the possibilities of connecting the two.
• Dr. John Willinsky commented that these presentations reminded him that the importance is far greater than the journals only being free. He sees these examples as highlighting  the importance of the networking and criticism opportunities that help to contribute to to creating a critical culture.
• Another audience member commented that that there appears to be a relationship between more people submitting to the open access journals and more them doing more reviewing. That is, they are reviewing more work than they were before.

Related Links

• The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy
• About Paulo Freire
• Critical Pedagogy
• The Public Knowledge Project Open Journal System (OJS)
• Drupal – Open Source Content Management Software

Photo by C Gratham at PKP 2009

Presenters:

• Dr. Frits Pannekoek – President, Athabasca University, Bio
• Walter Hildebrandt, Director, AU Press, Bio
• Kathy Killoh – Journals and Digital Coordinator, AU Press, Bio
• Shubhash Wasti – IT Systems Coordinator, AU Press, Bio

July 9, 2009, 11:30-am-12:30 pm. SFU Harbour Centre. Rm 1900

Background

Athabasca University’s scholarly press, AU Press,  focusses on the dissemination of knowledge and research through open access digital journals and monographs and  through new electronic media.

Session Overview

The presenters illustrated Athabasca University’s journey over the past two years since the creation of their open access scholarly press: AU Press.

Part I – Views from above (Dr. Frits Pannekoek)

Dr. Pannekoek opened the presentation by reminding the audience that AU is fundamentally dedicated to removing all the barriers to learning and that they support the range of “open” initiatives in education including open educational resources, open data, open source software, as well as the  open access to scholarly work that is the primary work of AU Press.

1) International and National Context for Open Access

Dr. Pannekoek cautioned the audience that while they are advocates of open access, this view was not uniformly shared by all, as he was recently reminded while attending  the World Conference on Higher Education  in his role as president of the International Council on Open and Distance Education (ICDE).  Consequently, Dr Pannekoek believes that “we’ve got a big fight on our hands”, and  he listed the following issues  as significant barriers to further support for open access:

• Support – the prevailing notion that  digitized materials never have adequate level of support
• Quality –  the common assumption that the best model for learning lies in the traditional craft model (one-on-one relationship between professor and student)
• Fraud – the fear of being plagiarised
• Imperialism – the view in some quarters that the open access movement is another form of imperialism because it is largely controlled by the North

Dr. Pannekoek also summarized how people are reacting to the open access movement. In particular, he noted that we will face increasing regulation of the flows of knowledge (e.g. through funding structures) as well as commercial publishers who change their economic models to include more services that have traditionally been regarded as the domain of the universities themselves.

2) Philosophy behind starting up an open access university press

Dr. Pannekoek says it comes down to the basic question of “What can we do with the resources we have?”  Athabasca University spends upwards of 70% of their budget on academic salaries so they decided to use their resources to value what those people do and produce.

3) Open access business model

Athabasca introduced the “1% solution”. Here they  identified 1% of the budget in each area and dedicated it to scholarly communication and publishing. While they do solicit support from other areas, Dr. Pannekoek stressed the importance of looking within our own institutions for funding structures.

Part II – Not Either Or (Walter Hildebrandt)

Mr. Hildebrandt focused on six of issues important to the AU Press. First, he brought up the ideological issues related to open access publishing. These include considering the commoditization, privatization, and corporate control of knowledge in light of the public right to access publicly funded research. Next, he recapped the barriers and issues upon starting the AU Press. Here he recapped creating a charter, mandate, vision statement and goals and reviewed their funding arrangement. He also spoke of the initial skepticism at Athabasca University about expected revenue and of  potential  negative impacts of royalties of print publications.

Mr. Hildebrandt reminded the audience that AU Press publishes not just print or digitally, but both, and that they focus on certain areas of specialization. Thus far, their publications include twenty books, six journals, one website, and numerous author interviews, and  he very proudly pointed out AU Press’s four award winning books.

Next, Mr. Hildebrandt  reviewed some of their authors’ responses to open access monograph publishing. The concerns focused on issues around royalties and copyright control. On the positive side, authors reported increased citations and were encouraged that SSHRC encourages open access dissemination. But ultimately, as Dr. Hildebrandt says, people would “rather be read than not read”.

Mr. Hildebrandt concluded his part of the presentation  by touching on the future plans for the AU Press. By the year 2011 they plan to publish 30-35 books per year, more websites, more podcasts and videos , and to partner with other similar minded institutions.

Digital Publishing (Kathy Killoh)

Ms. Killoh focused on some of the details of AU Press publishing. First, she differentiated AU Press’s mandate of open access publishing from cutting edge e-publishing. For AU Press, open access publishing doesn’t mean all the  “bells and whistles”. Instead, they focus on placing publications online, for free, in PDF format.  They do see value added e-publishing (xml, epub, etc) as potential revenue opportunities in the future.

Ms Killoh also asked, “Is selling open access e-books an oxymoron?” For AU Press, apparently not.  She reported that, even though all this material is available for free on the web, they still sell many books (e.g. to libraries) that are made available through searchable databases by vendors.

Ms. Killoh also described some details of the author contracts and copyright at AU Press. Upon legal advice that the term is to vague, AU Press contracts avoid the term “open access”. Instead, they use the creative commons licences and refer to the specific terms within those licenses. The copyright  remains with the author, but the sign over licensing rights to AU Press. Royalties are negotiated individually for all contracts.

Finally, to conclude her portion of the presentation, Ms. Killoh took the audience on a tour of the AU Press website.

Part III – Hits and Sales – (Shubhash Wasti)

Mr. Wasti raised areas of further information that the AU Press needs  to more thoroughly evaluate the success of their open access publishing. They would like to know details of the number of visits they are getting for each publication. Preliminary data shows that their does seem to be some correlation between the number of downloads and the number of sales, but that the ratio is not constant. In the sample presented, the ratio of downloads to sales varies from a low of 3:1 up as high as 65:1. Additionally, AU Press would like to track the sales of printed books and investigate the relationship between the number of downloads and the number of sales. While the print sales seem “reasonable”, they would like to the relationship to a number of factors (e.g. subject area, demographics, accessibility from type of device, etc)

Discussion and audience questions

• Terry Anderson’s book, The Theory and Practice of Online Learning , has become very well known in China, and  this could account for very high downloads of that book.
• Question: How does the pricing of their print books compare to those of commercial publishers? Answer: They try to break even and to cover the cost of print because the cost of open access publishing is covered by the institutional support.
• Question: What are the financial issues around keeping content online for a long time? Answer: They appear to be the same as the IT infrastructure issues that all institutions face. They need both an increase in capital and in operating budgets.

Related Links

• Athabasca University
• Athabasca University Press
• International Council on Open and Distance Education

Presenter: Sioux Cumming, Session Abstract

July 9, 2009 at 4:00 p.m.

Background

Sioux Cumming, originally from Zimbabwe, works with the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). Sioux works on the INASP Journals Online project (JOLs) where there are now five JOLs (BanglaJOL in Bangladesh, NepJOL in Nepal, PhilJOL in Philippine, SLJOL in Sri Lanka and VJOL in Vietnam). Sioux identifies new journals to be included, works with the editors of the journals to load new issues and keeps the websites up to date. She records the statistics relating to the usage of the sites and produces newsletters for each of them. Sioux is also involved in training editors in the publishing workshops and she assists in the AuthorAID project.

Session Overview

INASP isn’t well known in the Western world. INASP’s mission is to increase worldwide access to academic information. PERii is INASP’s main programme. INASP negotiates deeply discounted licenses with journal publishers for developing countries. Less well known is INASP’s work to make local research well known to the rest of the world. So INASP is both trying to make western journals accessible to developing countries and getting developing countries journals accessible to the whole world. INASP is funded by Department for International Development (UK) and Swedish Cedar.

Africa Journals Online (AJOL) was established in 1998 and the experiences with that have led to improvements and led to the subsequent migration to Open Journal Systems (OJS). AJOL has now been transferred to a local host and managed by them, as INASP’s mandate is to always to pass on to local resources.

AJOL was a continent wide site with 26 countries represented (now with 350 journals), but in Asia, each country wanted its own site, so Nepal and Vietnam JOLs were followed by Bangladesh JOL and PhilJol and lastly SLJOL in 2008. So 5 country based JOLs have been created in the last couple years, to finally be followed by a continent wide journal – AsiaJOL.

Workshops are the primary tool for launching a journal online (JOL). Online tutorials, CDs or remote training are just not effective. Many of these editors have little prior experience with a website, so a series of 3-4 day workshops are needed. So first they bring editors together and discuss online issues (open access movement, being online, the need for a strategic plan), then another after we’ve established a JOL (more strategic issues, improving quality of the JOL, increasing visibility of the JOL and how to load content) and then a 3rd workshop is editorial (working with editors, working with reviews, how roles related and how to use peer review system online).

A lot of monitoring of JOLs is done. In summary, across the 5 Asian JOLs there are 133 journals of which 76% of the articles are full text (open access full text). This is different from AJOL, there is more buy-in to open access in these Asian countries. There are 6500 articles all together and there have been 1.3 million views of all these articles and 800000 visits since these 5 Asian JOLs started. These figures are small, but these are journals, which had not previously had wide circulation. More encouraging is that data is showing that people are coming from the US and UK to look at these JOLs, from 200 countries in total to view these journals.

INASP encourages editors to monitor their own views i.e. which articles are viewed most, which least and then to determine what course of action to take with this data. Testimonials are also collected and are important to funders.

INASP has provided a web presence to journals which had none before or were buried deep in university web sites. Now if you search for any of these journals on Google Scholar, they come up. This is a cheap and simple program for getting journals accessible. INASP pays the hosting charges. All journals become part of a community as editors and teams meet other from other disciplines in workshops. This develops a network of production teams. The workshops have been very successful, face to face contact is important. JOL newsletters are produced every 6 months and subscribing to them is an easy way to understand what is happening with a JOL.

Session Questions

Question: We need to collect research about the work of these journals, to see how increase in submissions is related to viewing and how this relates to numbers of reviewers. All this builds a research culture and community. We need to start showing the growth of this community.  How big is the submission plus review community, when you start to add these together we start to measure a research network, a research network enabled by this open access journal.
Answer: Yes, I agree. We do need to do this.

Question: Where did additional submissions come from?
Answer: Some journals are not yet accepting online submissions. For those that are, they are getting a lot from Nigeria, Turkey, Iran and India. Bangladesh journal of Botany has a lot of submissions from Turkey. So a lot of south – south communication is occurring.

References and Related Links

AuthorAID

AuthorAID@INASP

International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP)

Journals OnLine (JOL) Projects (INASP)

Bangladesh Journals Online (BanglaJOL)

Nepal Journals Online (NepJOL)

PERii

Philippine Journals Online (PhilJOL)

Sri Lanka Journals Online (SLJOL)

Vietnam Journals Online (VJOL)

Presenter: Gunther Eysenbach

July 9, 2009 at 3:00 p.m.

Gunther Eysenbach

Background

Gunther Eysenbach is editor/publisher of the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), which has presently been established as the top peer-reviewed journal in the field of ehealth.

Eysenbach is also an associate professor with the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (HPME) at the University of Toronto.  In addition, he is a senior scientist for the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation.  The JMIR boasts an impact factor of 3.0 which is highly ranked within other journals of health and sciences (Eysenbach2009).

Session Overview

Eysenbach have a condensed version during his session discussion due to time constraints but he managed to give the audience the key elements of where JMIR began to its present developments.  He referred to the main concepts of JMIR being described as triple ‘o’ (open access, open source, open peer-reviewed).  The basis of his talk was to explain the evolution and modifications that JMIR uses to continue to develop and publish online medical journals.

JMIR has developed a system that allows many facets of the publishing of journals to interface with online Web based technologies.  JMIR’s structure uses the concept of OJS but also has adapted the business model to keep up with the ever changing structures of the Web.  For example, JMIR has developed a system that re-bundles the topics of the journal collections called eCollections to place common topic journals together.

There are three levels of membership/subscription.  Individual membership, institutional membership and institutional membership B (Gold).  The online business model supports complex innovations such as the generating of electronic invoices for members, automatic word check for plagiarism of author submissions and fast track editing options.

JMIR also experimented with open peer-review systems and found that approximately 20% of the authors want open peer-review but JMIR continues to look at this issue and currently has a section on the submission form for authors to be self assigned or editor assigned.  The editors can view what is called the Submissions Dashboard to get a visual charting of the various submissions and the status whether it me a fast track edit or not and the editor can track the submissions status.

JMIR’s system also integrates XML into OJS with conversion scripts and the system can edit XML files online.  Also, there is WebCite which is an on-demand archiving system used so that readers and authors can have the same version of file.

Audience Input

Questions arose around copyright issues which Eysenbach addressed that JMIR uses “fair use” policies and that submission forms invite authors to inform the journal if they want their work archived or not.

Costs of membership for developing countries was also a question from the floor and Eysenbach responded to inform the audience that various models are currently being looked at – possibly increasing membership fees to subsidize developing country authors but the issue around subsidizing criteria has yet to be worked out.  This was recognized as a dilemma.

References

Eysenbach, G. (2009). Open Access journal JMIR rises to top of its discipline. Retrieved July 7, 2009, from http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/2009/06/open-access-journal-jmir-rises-to-top.html

Related Links

Research at University Health Network

PubMed

July 9th,  2009 at 2:30pm

Abstract

Presenter: Johanne Provençal

(Source)

Background

Johanne Provençal is a doctoral candidate in the Curriculum Theory and Implementation Program in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Provençal also has ten years of professional and academic experience in publishing, most recently working as a substantive and stylistic editor of scholarly writing. Johanne’s research interests include social theory and education; philosophy of education; scholarly discourse and scholarly publishing; communication and genre theory; and rhetorical theory and analysis. Provençal has published work on media literacy, the classroom as a public sphere, representation in educational research, and scholarly publishing. Provençal’s doctoral research examines SSHRC’s “knowledge mobilization” discourse and the implications and possibilities it has for the social sciences and humanities research community in Canada.

Session Overview

Provençal outlined four main parts to the session: SSHRC beginnings, the transformation from ‘grant council to ‘knowledge council’ in 2004/2005, SSHRC in 2009, and opportunities & challenges.

SSHRC was established in 1979. Provençal used examples of strategic plans from 1979, 1989 and 1996 to illustrate ‘early traces’ of knowledge mobilization. In 1979 mention was made to make social sciences research more visible. In 1989 the term knowledge transfer was used in the summary: “a more general point is the repeated emphasis on dissemination, communication, diffusion of research results: to spread results and achieve knowledge transfer to increase understanding and build constituencies to package results of fundamental research for political use to increase access to databases” (p. 2). In 1996 knowledge transfer is again stressed. Johanne’s rhetorical analysis shows that the scene is changing. Knowledge mobilization succeeds as agency within the collaboration.

In 2004/2005 there was a degree of tension as a result of the transformation from grant council to knowledge council. The first volume of a three volume report in 2004 reports that social sciences  research is caught in a “paradox of ubiquity and invisibility: present everywhere, but for all intents and purposes, visible almost nowhere” (p.12). The 2005 strategic plan calls for a systematic interaction between the general public and the research community.

The issue of visibility continues to predominate in 2009. Provençal mentioned that researchers need to tell their stories to the public. Yet it’s also the reception of those stories that is necessary for knowledge mobilization. This is a challenge area. Three examples were given of continuing opportunities: the  Knowledge Impact in Society pilot study, the Community-University Research Alliance program, and the funding of open access journals, started in 2008.

Questions

Heather Morrison asked about the raised visibility of knowledge mobilization by SSHRC. Provençal responded that the funding for open access journals only came in 2008. There is still some resistance from publishers about the business model. There is some ambiguity as funding is for research as well as open access journals. Generally journals philosophically support open access, but economics may dictate otherwise. A question was asked from the audience about whether SSHRC had consulted with researchers. Provençal responded that the culture for this to occur is not yet in place.

Resources

Canadian Association of Learned Journals

Ghosts in Machines and a Snapshot of Scholarly Journal Publishing in Canada

SSHRC