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

July 9, 9:30AM – Fletcher Challenge Room 1900

Presenters

Barbara Cohen, Director of Humanitech, University of California, Irvine.  Steering Group, The Open Humanities Press.

Gary Hall, Professor, Media and Performing Arts, Coventry University, UK.  Co-founder of The Open Humanities Press.

Session Abstract

Archived video stream of session

Background

Launched in May, 2008, The Open Humanities Press (OHP) is a scholar -led open access publishing initiative that currently publishes 10 journals.  Central to OHP’s vision are goals articulated by the Budapest Open Access declaration (2002) to remove barriers to scholarly literature, accelerate research, enrich education and share the learning of the rich world with the poor.

Session Overview

Photo: J. Miller - PKP Conference

Barbara Cohen started the session with what she called “Open Access 101”, a quick survey of some basic principles and recent initiatives focused on ideas of giving free and open access to peer-reviewed scholarly literature on the Internet.   This background is important context to consider in relation to the principles and goals driving The Open Humanities Press (OHP), an open access publishing house that launched in 2008 with 7 journals (now 10).  Central to OHP’s vision are goals articulated by the Budapest Open Access declaration (2002) to remove barriers to scholarly literature, accelerate research, enrich education and share the learning of the rich world with the poor.  Cohen went on to note that despite the fact that most scholars prefer to read electronic copies of articles, the Internet is still perceived by many Humanties scholars as being an unsuitable publishing medium for serious humanities research.  In a 2008 talk at Irvine, Sigi Jӧttkandt, one of the co-founders of the OHP, characterized this perception where the Internet was seen as “a sort of open free-for-all of publishing” medium in stark contrast to trusted, peer-reviewed paper-based scholarly journals.  The OHP was envisioned as a means to overcome this perception by bringing high-quality editorial standards and design processes to the field of Humanities scholarly publishing on the Internet.  It was essential for the founders of the OHP that scholars felt that its journals would be good places to publish.  The founders of the OHP feel that their stragegy of developing an open access publishing house has been a good way to gain the trust of the scholarly community in the humanities.

Cohen described OHP’s key goals as: advocating Open Access in the Humanities; fostering a community of prestigious Humanities scholars; promoting intellectual diversity, and exploring new forms of scholarly collaboration.  A strong peer review model was seen to be key to the success of the OHP in developing a level of creditability and trust amongst Humanist scholars, and to that end, the OHP has gathered a prestigious, rotating editorial board, as well as a strong steering group, all without any operating budget.  The OHP also has worked to bring  open access content to its readers in journals that share high production values and effective leveraging of new technologies such as PKP’s Open Journals System and, in the future PKP’s Open Manuscript Press software.

Gary Hall

Photo: J. Miller - PKP Conference

The second speaker, Gary Hall, picked up the importance of open access initiatives with books and monographs.  Such initiatives were particularly significant in the Humanities because scholars in these disciplines place such emphasis on books over journal articles.   Hall discussed several book projects that are underway with The OHP, describing these efforts as focused upon a new cultural studies project, liquid books with a fluid structure up to the challenge of exploring the potential shape of the book to come.  The first of these books has been published as New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader.  Hall was particularly interested in the potential of experimental projects that would allow scholars to challenge traditional concepts of the codex by expanding to include the range of materials/media found within printed books: excerpts, snippets of media, clips from multimodal texts.  Such an exploration is an important response to the emerging landscape for digital texts, a landscape influenced by the proliferation of books scanned by Google and reading devices from ipods to Kindles.

Hall also indicated his interest in creative ways to employ open access and open editing strategies in liquid books that were free for anyone to read, write, remix, and reinvent to produce alternate parallel versions of books.  Such acts of distributed writing and editing within liquid texts would, Hall hoped, raise critical challenges to traditional notions of authorship, intellectual property, authority, etc.  This potential dismantling of the authority of the text was a particular challenge for open access initiatives, as they ran the risk of reinscribing and reproducing traditional approaches and limits of current knowledge production, this time in an electronic space. Drawing upon Derrida, Foucault and Barthes, Hall offered that open access could bring interrogations of academic authorship so as to loosen up these notions, making them less fixed and rigid (more jello-like).  By recognizing some wobbles in the smooth surface of academic publishing, scholars would be in a good position to delineate and respond to shifts in power and authority increasingly evident in decentralized forms of writing such as MyTimes (a cross between the associated press and an RSS reader), Wikipedia (a networked, distributed and very liquid work), and other such fluid sites for knowledge production.   Such a redistribution and decentring of traditional authority could help scholars to avoid replicating the current centre/periphery dynamics of knowledge production and dissemination, an imbalance that sees 90% of the world’s scientific research being published by just 15 countries.

Question Period

During the question period, one member of the audience identified a contradictory tension that seemed evident in the presentations offered in the session.  On the one hand, the speakers stressed a need to establish the credibility of academic publishing.  On the other hand, it was clear that there was also a keen interest in exploring the boundaries of new media (and traditional academic practice) so as to destabilize the model of academic publishing alongside the decentring of other concepts like authority (authorship), and the very form of scholarly writing be it journal articles or monographs.  Keeping these things in balance is quite a challenge, especially when many scholars are as intent on building credibility in these new forms of academic scholarship at the same time as others are intent on destabilizing the very units and processes that have long characterized academic discourse.  This somewhat anxious tension seems to describe aptly the stance of Humanist scholars exploring new cultural studies.

Related Links

The Open Humanities Press – Website for The Open Humanities Press, with links to their current journals: Cosmos and History, Culture Machine, Fast Capitalism, Fibreculture, Film-Philosophy, Image and Narrative, International Journal of Žižek Studies, Parrhesia, Postcolonial Text, Vectors.

Hall, G. (2008). Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press).

Jӧttkandt, S. (2008). Free Libre Scholarship: The Open Humanities Press. Irvine, 3 April, 2008.

Jӧttkandt, S. and Hall, G. (2007).  Beyond Impact: OA in the Humanities.  Brussels, 13 February, 2007.

King, J., Lynch, C, Willinsky, J. (2009) Open Access in the Humanities. Podcast.  University of California, Irvine.

Thursday, July 9, 2009 @ 11:30
SFU Harbour Centre (Earl & Jennie Lohn Rm 7000)

Presenter:

(Source)

Marc Couture (Science & Technology professor at Tele-université: Université du Quebec à Montréal’s distance education component)

Session Overview

Session Abstract

Marc Couture presents his research findings about the availability of copyright policies on open access journals. He addresses the assumptions about copyright, the statistics related to his study and recommends a framework for publishers to use with respect to making copyright decisions that take into account the best interests of both the author and publisher.

Commentary

Couture urges authors to become aware of the copyright policies associated with the journals they are interested being published in. He establishes some basic assumptions he operates on about copyright prior to his research including: copyright is important to authors, the deal between the author and publisher involved in publishing an article must be legally and ethically fair and that the interests of the journal, the author and the end-user (the reader of the article) must be equally taken into account.

Research

The guiding question for Couture’s research was “where can information on copyright be found on open access journals websites?” Specifically, Couture was looking to see if a prospective author can infer from the website who will keep copyright, what rights the author will retain and what permissions will be given to end-users. 300 journals (representing 251 publishers) from the DOAJ list were randomly selected and scoured for any form of copyright that could include statements, Creative Commons (“CC”) licenses, transfer/license forms etc. Key results indicate that copyright information was not easy to find – 9% of journals did not have copyright information and 63% of journals had copyright information buried on an “other page” (ie. not a home page or specific copyright page). Additionally, copyright policy was not consistent across journals; something that prospective authors need to be acutely aware of.

Couture points to the relevant issue of semantics in relation to copyright statements. He identifies key words found in copyright statements ranging from ambiguous terms, such as “make available” and “copy” to more precise terms, such as “photocopy” and “display publicly”. “Use” is the umbrella term that envelops all terms and copyright statements that rely on “use” to direct the reader are clearly poorly defined. An example from a copyright statement is given:

“the full text of articles can only be used for personal or educational purposes?”

The uncertainty that lies within the statement is demonstrated in attempting to answer two questions

–    Can a teacher post the article on his website?
–    Can an engineer working in a company distribute printed copies of the article to her team member?

In addition to the ambiguity of specific words, Couture points out that too many words is no better than too few words.  Another factor that requires clarification is whether or not everything that is not explicitly forbidden is permitted. Couture poses this question as an example to publishers that if their exact intentions are not stated, prospective authors and end users might derive incorrect assumptions about copyright.

Proposal

As a result of his research, Couture wanted to create a proposal that would define the outline of a software tool which could help a journal by generating, through a series of inputs, a clear and unambiguous statement indicating copyright policy that could be add to a website.  The key, he says, is generating simple text that is aimed at authors and end users. This is a work in progress and Couture would like to see the publisher approach the grid from the viewpoint of “what do I want as a publisher?” rather than “what do I want to forbid the author from doing?”.

The exact content of copyright policies are investigated and Couture notes that about half of the journals require a transfer of ownership from the author to the publisher. This leads to Couture’s secondary motive – establishing the divide that exists between the desires of authors with regards to copyright and the reality of publishing. Couture would like to see what he refers to as “fair practices” whereby there is no transfer of copyright, no more rights than required are granted to the publisher and broad end user permissions are in place (in the form of CC licenses).

Couture’s presentation makes it clear that the copyright policies of open access journals lack a common sense of purpose or consistency and that publishers should make copyright clarification a priority.

Related Links

Article – “The facts about Open Access”

Directory of open access journals

Related Reading

Hoorn, E., & van der Graaf, M. (2005). Towards good practices of copyright in Open Access Journals. A study among authors of articles in Open Access journals. Pleiade Management & Consultancy.

Presenter: Alberto Apollaro

July 9, 2009 at 4:00 pm

Session Abstract

Background

Alberto Apollaro is a member of the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) Argentina group and is a specialist in webspace development and applications.  Mr. Apollaro joined CAICYT-CONICET in 1998 as a systems website administrator, including serving as the webmaster for CONICET’s specific website for academic publication.

Session Overview

The SciELO project’s directive is based on “the development of a model methodology for the preparation, storage, sharing and evaluation of scientific publications as an electronic support.”(1)  As an alternative to print, the library facilitates international distribution of Latin American scholarship with regional impact in an organized, accessible format.  This regional project stems from National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) policy, which in turn is administered by the independent, Argentinian Centre for Scientific and Technological Information (CAICyT).

Comisión Asesora de Investigación Científica y Técnica / Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas Y Técnicas

The CAICyT has charged the production a website which will allow Argentina systematically catalogue digitalized data that is editorialized and peer-reviewed as per the academic standards previously described by CONICET.  Also, in part of CAICyt’s directive to push Argentinean scholarly publication into the open-access era, CONICET draws upon 15 university repositories to fuel 32 open-access e-journals.  This initiative is facilitated by the use of the open-source Open Journal System (OJS) Software which allows online management of the process from submission through to publication.

The process began with journal selection from the Latindex, which contains over 2,800 titles.  Editors were then invited as the website was constructed.  CAICyT would provide the editors’ platform for discussion and consultation, while also providing publishers with guidelines for quality improvement .  OJS allows the website to self-archive authors’ submissions and facilitate peer-reviewing and copy-editing quickly and efficiently.

The expectation is that the CONICET website will provide a repository and portal for local Argentinean scholarship, and allow publication not just limited to text but multimedia also.  The streamlined editorial model allowed by OJS will hopefully encourage submission of regional scholarship and see it through to immediate publication, while operating under a more economically attractive model in comparison to traditional publication.

During the following discussion, Mr. Apollaro described the OJS is a very attractive mechanism to facilitate publication in Latin America (for the aforementioned reasons), but the problem lies in the current unfamiliarity shared amongst Argentinean scholars with OJS.  This is essentially holding back the website’s growth, and progress of the Latin American open-access movement in general.  Certainly, one of CONICET’s future efforts should be focusing on increasing open-access awareness in the Latin American scholarly community.

References

1) http://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?script=sci_home&lng=en&nrm=iso