The Occasional Pamphlet

Moderating principles

2022-07-25T12:00:00+00:00

Some time around April 1994, I founded the Computation and Language E-Print Archive, the first preprint repository for a subfield of computer science. It was hosted on Paul Ginsparg’s arXiv platform, which at the time had been hosting only physics papers, built out from the original arXiv repository for high-energy physics theory, hep-th. The repository, cmp-lg (as it was then called), was superseded in 1999 by an open-access preprint repository for all of computer science, the Computing Research Repository (CoRR), which covered a broad range of subject areas, including computation and language. The CoRR organizing committee also decided to host CoRR on arXiv. I switched over to moderating for the CoRR repository from cmp-lg, and have continued to do so for the last – oh my god – 22 years.¹

Articles in the arXiv are classified with a single primary subject class, and may have other subject classes as secondary. The switchover folded cmp-lg into the arXiv as articles tagged with the cs.CL (computation and language) subject class. I thus became the moderator for cs.CL.

A preprint repository like the arXiv is not a journal. There is no peer review applied to articles. There is essentially no quality control. That is not the role of a preprint repository. The role of a preprint repository is open distribution, not vetting. Nonetheless, some kind of control is needed in making sure that, at the very least, the documents being submitted are in fact scholarly articles and are appropriately tagged as to subfield, and that need has expanded with the dramatic increase in submissions to CoRR over the years. The primary duty of a moderator is to perform this vetting and triage: verifying that a submission possesses the minimum standards for being characterized as a scholarly article, and that it falls within the purview of, say, cs.CL, as a primary or secondary subject class.

I am (along with the other arXiv moderators) thus regularly in the position of having to make decisions as to whether a document is a scholarly article or not. To a large extent, Justice Potter Stewart’s approach works reasonably well for scholarly articles: you know them when you see them. But over time, as more marginal cases come up, I’ve felt that tracking my thinking on the matter would be useful for maintaining consistency in my own practice. And now that I’ve done that for a while, I thought it might be useful to share my approach more broadly. That is the goal of this post.

The following thus constitutes (some of) the de facto policies that I use in making decisions as the moderator for the cs.CL collection in the CoRR part of the arXiv repository. I emphasize that these are my policies, not those of CoRR or the moderators of other CoRR subjects. (The arXiv folks themselves provide a more general guide for arXiv moderators.)

What’s a scholarly article?

To qualify for inclusion, a submission must constitute a scholarly article. For this purpose, scholarly articles fall into three classes:

Analytic

The submission presents a specific question that it then answers. This might take the form of presenting a proposition and then proving it, or presenting an alternative method for a task and then demonstrating that it does or does not improve over some other method, or defining a new task and presenting a method for carrying it out. It ought to present enough of a clue about the methods such that at least the beginning of an attempt at replication could be made. On the other hand, the reported result need not be novel, or interesting, or even correct. Determining whether a result is novel, interesting, or correct is the point of reviewing, which, remember, we are not in the business of.

Synthetic

The submission synthesizes in a systematic manner other scholarly articles. (Yes, this definition is intentionally recursive, with analytic articles forming the base case.) Review articles fall within this class. The article should make at least an attempt at both systematicity (providing and using a well-formed taxonomy, for instance) and exhaustiveness.

Dataset

Occasionally, we get papers that describe a new publicly available language-related dataset of interest, with perhaps only rudimentary analysis of the data. These can be appropriate if the data is made openly available, and the availability is clearly featured in the article.

Papers that don’t arguably fall into one of these three classes I will typically reject for inclusion in cs.CL. In particular, I frequently see articles whose putative thesis is (as far as I can tell) “I did a thing”. Typically, the paper reports that “I built a piece of software that does X.” A report of that sort does not suffice as constituting a scholarly article. A special case of this is the putative dataset paper that reports “I built a corpus” but provides no access to that corpus.

What’s a CL (computation and language) article?

Computational linguistics (CL) is the scholarly field studying human (natural) language using the tools and techniques of computer science, and is allied with the engineering field of natural-language processing (NLP), the building or improving of useful artifacts that manipulate natural language. Articles appropriate for a cs.CL tag, then, should have something to do with natural language. Articles about sound processing of speech may be appropriate if the techniques rely on the fact that the acoustic signal is spoken language. Similarly for image processing.

I tend to apply an extremely broad interpretation of “having something to do with language”, especially for cross-listing as a cs.CL secondary subject class, on the theory that errors of omission are worse than errors of commission for subscribers to the cs.CL notifications.

In addition, articles need to involve some computer science. CoRR is, after all, a computer science repository. Formal analysis of language that merely uses computers for the analysis does not by itself qualify a paper as involving computer science. After all, these days, all scientific research involves computers. I’ve rejected some excellent papers in what is essentially formal linguistics because they involved no nontrivial involvement of computer science ideas. Similarly, we get papers that apply well-known and standard NLP methods to standard NLP problems in some application area, such as analyzing health records or student writing, where the (potential) contribution is to health or education. Absent some involvement with computer science, these articles are best thought of as falling within the application field. Such articles deserve distribution in a preprint repository, just not CoRR. Health application papers might use medRxiv, education papers EdArXiv. Sadly, there are many fields of scholarship without good, long-term, well-maintained repositories, but CoRR can’t be the solution to that problem. (The open-field Zenodo repository should serve for most such papers.)

Special cases

There are tricky cases that arise with sufficient frequency that they are worth considering explicitly.

Research proposals

We often see articles (typically very short ones, two or three pages) sketching an idea for dealing with some problem or other, but without presenting any results. These may even be published in a workshop or conference proceedings, and perhaps the ideas may be novel and worth following up on. Nonetheless, without substantive results they don’t qualify as scholarly articles. The authors could of course perform the follow-up and then submit an article describing the results (whether positive or negative). Of course, more fully worked out proposals with useful details might be acceptable.

Course projects

Submissions describing course projects or other schoolwork (undergraduate or master’s theses, for example) may be allowable for inclusion if they are otherwise structured as scholarly articles and meet the criteria above. However, they may require extra scrutiny to verify the criteria described above.

Predatory journals

Publication in a predatory journal (a faux journal charging for article processing while providing no or only perfunctory reviewing and other publishing services) is, by arXiv policy, not grounds for rejecting an article. However, such submissions often carry copyright notices, which arXiv disallows, and the submissions also often fail the criteria for being a scholarly article above.

Hyper-interdisciplinary articles

We sometimes get articles that are what might be charitably referred to as “hyper-interdisciplinary”, in bringing together a CL topic with some other distant topic, a theory of language meaning based on a cylindrical algebraic reconstruction of quantum gravity, say. Such an article is difficult if not impossible to determine the status of: is it a scholarly article or a crankish manifesto? These articles are typically rejected. I simply do not have the time or inclination to attempt to reconstruct an understanding of the article to determine whether it is appropriate for cs.CL.

Perhaps in doing so, I am eliminating from the repository the one true breakthrough in cracking the nut of the hardest intellectual problem of human cognition – how language works. Perhaps, but the author might have managed to express it in terms that a computer scientist specializing in natural language can understand. In any case, nothing prevents the author from submitting the article to a journal for peer review and making his² case.

Thanks to Yonatan Belinkov, Karina Halevy, and Joe Halpern for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this post. ↩
These submissions are always solo authored by men. ↩

WWHD?

2017-04-21T19:26:41+00:00

…personal role model…
Image of Harry Lewis courtesy of Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

This past Wednesday, April 19, was a celebration of computer science at Harvard, in honor of the 70th birthday of my undergraduate adviser, faculty colleague, former Dean of Harvard College, baseball aficionado, and personal role model Harry Lewis. The session lasted all day, with talks and reminiscences from many of Harry’s past students, myself included. For those interested, my brief remarks on the topic of “WWHD?” (What Would Harry Do?) can be found in the video of the event.

By the way, the "Slow Down" memo that I quoted from is available from Harry's website. I recommend it for every future college first-year student.

Upcoming in Tromsø

2015-11-11T21:18:32+00:00

Northern lights over Tromsø

I'll be visiting Tromsø, Norway to attend the Tenth Annual Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing, which is being held November 30 to December 1. I'm looking forward to the talks, including keynotes from Randy Schekman and Sabine Hossenfelder and an interview by Caroline Sutton of my colleague Peter Suber, director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication. My own keynote will be on "The role of higher education institutions in scholarly publishing and communication". Here's the abstract:

Institutions of higher education are in a double bind with respect to scholarly communication: On the one hand, they need to support the research needs of their students and researchers by providing access to the journals that comprise the archival record of scholarship. Doing so requires payment of substantial subscription fees. On the other hand, they need to provide the widest possible dissemination of works by those same researchers -- the fruits of that very research -- which itself incurs costs. I address how these two goals, each of which demands outlays of substantial funds, can best be honored. In the course of the discussion, I provide a first look at some new results on predicting journal usage, which allows for optimizing subscriptions.

Update: The video of my talk at the Munin conference is now available.

Whence function notation?

2015-09-28T18:28:20+00:00

I begin – in continental style, unmotivated and, frankly, gratuitously – by defining Ackerman's function $A$ over two integers:

\[ A(m, n) = \left\{ \begin{array}{l}
n + 1 & \mbox{ if $m=0$ } \\
A(m-1, 1) & \mbox{ if $m > 0$ and $n = 0$ } \\
A(m-1, A(m, n-1)) & \mbox{ if $m > 0$ and $n > 0$ }
\end{array} \right. \]

…drawing their equations evanescently in dust and sand…
Image of “Death of Archimedes” from Charles F. Horne, editor, Great Men and Famous Women, Volume 3, 1894. Reproduced by Project Gutenberg. Used by permission.

You'll have appreciated (unconsciously no doubt) that this definition makes repeated use of a notation in which a symbol precedes a parenthesized list of expressions, as for example $f(a, b, c)$. This configuration represents the application of a function to its arguments. But you knew that. And why? Because everyone who has ever gotten through eighth grade math has been taught this notation. It is inescapable in high school algebra textbooks. It is a standard notation in the most widely used programming languages. It is the very archetype of common mathematical knowledge. It is, for God's sake, in the Common Core. It is to mathematicians as water is to fish – so encompassing as to be invisible.

Something so widespread, so familiar – it's hard to imagine how it could be otherwise. It's difficult to un-see it as anything but function application. But it was not always thus. Someone must have invented this notation, some time in the deep past. Perhaps it came into being when mathematicians were still drawing their equations evanescently in dust and sand. Perhaps all record has been lost of that ur-application that engendered all later function application expressions. Nonetheless, someone must have come up with the idea.

…that ur-application…

Surprisingly, the origins of the notation are not shrouded in mystery. The careful and exhaustive scholarship of mathematical historian Florian Cajori (1929, page 267) argues for a particular instance as originating the use of this now ubiquitous notation. Leonhard Euler, the legendary mathematician and perhaps the greatest innovator in successful mathematical notations, proposed the notation first in 1734, in Section 7 of his paper "Additamentum ad Dissertationem de Infinitis Curvis Eiusdem Generis" ["An Addition to the Dissertation Concerning an Infinite Number of Curves of the Same Kind"].

The paper was published in 1740 in Commentarii Academiae Scientarium Imperialis Petropolitanae [Memoirs of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg], Volume VII, covering the years 1734-35. A visit to the Widener Library stacks produced a copy of the volume, letterpress printed on crisp rag paper, from which I took the image shown above of the notational innovation.

Here is the pertinent sentence (with translation by Ian Bruce.):

Quocirca, si $f\left(\frac{x}{a} +c\right)$ denotet functionem quamcunque ipsius $\frac{x}{a} +c$ fiet quoque $dx − \frac{x\, da}{a}$ integrabile, si multiplicetur per $\frac{1}{a} f\left(\frac{x}{a} + c\right)$.
[On account of which, if $f\left(\frac{x}{a} +c\right)$ denotes some function of $\frac{x}{a} +c$, it also makes $dx − \frac{x\, da}{a}$ integrable, if it is multiplied by $\frac{1}{a} f\left(\frac{x}{a} + c\right)$.]

There is the function symbol – the archetypal $f$, even then, to evoke the concept of function – followed by its argument corralled within simple curves to make clear its extent.

It's seductive to think that there is an inevitability to the notation, but this is an illusion, following from habit. There are alternatives. Leibniz for instance used a boxy square-root-like diacritic over the arguments, with numbers to pick out the function being applied: $ \overline{a; b; c\,} \! | \! \lower .25ex {\underline{\,{}^1\,}} \! | $, and even Euler, in other later work, experimented with interposing a colon between the function and its arguments: $f : (a, b, c)$. In the computing world, "reverse Polish" notation, found on HP calculators and the programming languages Forth and Postscript, has the function symbol following its arguments: $a\,b\,c\,f$, whereas the quintessential functional programming language Lisp parenthesizes the function and its arguments: $(f\ a\ b\ c)$.

Finally, ML and its dialects follow Church’s lambda calculus in merely concatenating the function and its (single) argument – $f \, a$ – using parentheses only to disambiguate structure. But even here, Euler's notation stands its ground, for the single argument of a function might itself have components, a 'tuple' of items $a$, $b$, and $c$ perhaps. The tuples might be indicated using an infix comma operator, thus $a,b,c$. Application of a function to a single tuple argument can then mimic functions of multiple arguments, for instance, $f (a, b, c)$ – the parentheses required by the low precedence of the tuple forming operator – and we are back once again to Euler's notation. Clever, no? Do you see the lengths to which people will go to adhere to Euler's invention? As much as we might try new notational ideas, this one has staying power.

References

Florian Cajori. 1929. A History of Mathematical Notations, Volume II. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company.

Leonhard Euler. 1734. Additamentum ad Dissertationem de Infinitis Curvis Eiusdem Generis. In Commentarii Academiae Scientarium Imperialis Petropolitanae, Volume VII (173435), pages 184202, 1740.

Binary search in the Old Testament

2015-08-10T14:00:02+00:00

The lot is cast into the lap,
but its every decision is from the Lord.
(NIV Proverbs 16:33)

…“Lux et Veritas”…
Seal of Yale University image from Wikimedia Commons.

The seal of Yale University shows a book with the Hebrew אורים ותמים (urim v’thummim), a reference to the Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament. The Urim and Thummim were tools of divination. They show up first in Exodus:

Also put the Urim and the Thummim in the breastpiece, so they may be over Aaron’s heart whenever he enters the presence of the Lord. Thus Aaron will always bear the means of making decisions for the Israelites over his heart before the Lord. (NIV Exodus 28:30; emphasis added)

Apparently, the Urim and Thummim worked like flipping a coin, providing one bit of information, a single binary choice communicated from God.¹ Translations of Urim as “guilty” and Thummim as “innocent” indicate that the divination was used to determine guilt: “Thummim you win; Urim you lose.” An alternate translation has Urim “light” and Thummim “truth”, hence “Lux et Veritas” in the Yale seal’s banner.

Saul, King of Israel and father-in-law of King David, uses the binary choice provided by Urim and Thummim divination in 1 Samuel to unmask the party who violated the king's oath:

Then Saul prayed to the Lord, the God of Israel, “Why have you not answered your servant today? If the fault is in me or my son Jonathan, respond with Urim, but if the men of Israel are at fault, respond with Thummim.” Jonathan and Saul were taken by lot, and the men were cleared. Saul said, “Cast the lot between me and Jonathan my son.” And Jonathan was taken. (NIV² 1 Samuel 14:41-42)

Saul executes a small (and highly unbalanced) binary search. He first divides the population into two parts. He and his son Jonathan are assigned Urim and all the rest get Thummim. God responds with Urim. Then to decide between Saul and Jonathan, the process is repeated, and Jonathan is fingered as the guilty party. (The method apparently works; the preceding verses of 1 Samuel give the story of Jonathan’s transgression.)

The universality of binary as an information conveying method has a longer history than one might have thought.

The Old Testament Urim and Thummim should not be confused with the “higher bandwidth” device of the same name that Joseph Smith claimed to use to receive the translation of a now lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon. This device purportedly resembled a pair of spectacles with transparent rocks for lenses, a kind of “oraculus rift”. For the extant Book of Mormon, Smith changed his method to scrying with a “seer stone” placed in his hat. A photograph of the stone, coincidentally, has just recently been released by the LDS church.↩
The use of a Septuagint-based version of the Bible, here the New International Version, is important, as this verse is considerably shortened in versions such as the King James based on the Masoretic text, leaving out the use of Urim and Thummim to make a binary decision.↩

Becoming tin men

2015-08-03T19:42:24+00:00

From the 2015 introduction to the 1965 novel The Tin Men by Michael Frayn:

"I hadn't in those days heard of the Turing Test—Alan Turing's proposal that a computer could be said to think if its conversational powers were shown to be indistinguishable from a human being's—so I didn't realise that what I was suggesting was a kind of converse of it: a demotion of human beings to the status of machines if their intellectual performance was indistinguishable from a computer's, and they become tin men in their turn. The William Morris Institute is about to be visited by the Queen for the opening of a new wing, and I realise with hindsight that I've used a similar idea quite often since: the grand event that goes wrong, and deposits the protagonists into the humiliating gulf that so often in life opens between intention and achievement. My characters at the Institute could have written a story programme for me and saved me a lot of work. I've become a bit of a tin man myself."

Plain meaning

2015-06-26T14:23:19+00:00

In its reporting on yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in King v. Burwell, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias makes the important point that Justice Scalia’s dissent is based on a profound misunderstanding of how language works. Justice Scalia would have it that “words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the state.’” The Justice is implicitly appealing to a “plain meaning” view of legislation: courts should just take the plain meaning of a law and not interpret it.

If only that were possible. If you think there’s such a thing as acquiring the “plain meaning” of a text without performing any interpretive inference, you don’t understand how language works. It’s the same mistake that fundamentalists make when they talk about looking to the plain meaning of the Bible. (And which Bible would that be anyway? The King James Version? Translation requires the same kind of inferential process – arguably the same actual process – as extracting meaning through reading.)

Yglesias describes “What Justice Scalia’s King v. Burwell dissent gets wrong about words and meaning” this way:

Individual stringz of letterz r efforts to express meaningful propositions in an intelligible way. To succeed at this mission does not require the youse of any particular rite series of words and, in fact, a sntnce fll of gibberish cn B prfctly comprehensible and meaningful 2 an intelligent reader. To understand a phrse or paragraf or an entire txt rekwires the use of human understanding and contextual infrmation not just a dctionry.

The jokey orthography aside, this observation that understanding the meaning of linguistic utterances requires the application of knowledge and inference is completely uncontroversial to your average linguist. Too bad Supreme Court justices don’t defer to linguists on how language works.

Let’s take a simple example, the original “Winograd sentences” from back in 1973:

The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they feared violence.
The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence.

To understand these sentences, to recover their “plain meaning”, requires resolving to whom the pronoun ‘they’ refers. Is it the city councilmen or the demonstrators? Clearly, it is the former in sentence (1) and the latter in sentence (2). How do you know, given that the two sentences differ only in the single word alternation ‘feared’/‘advocated’? The recovery of this single aspect of the “plain meaning” of the sentence requires an understanding of how governmental organizations work, how activists pursue their goals, likely public reactions to various contingent behaviors, and the like, along with application of all that knowledge through plausible inference. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) has by my (computer-aided) count some 479 occurrences of pronouns in nominative, accusative, or possessive. Each one of these requires the identification of its antecedent, with all the reasoning that implies, to get its “plain meaning”.

Examining the actual textual subject of controversy in the PPACA demonstrates the same issue. The phrase in question is “established by the state”. The American Heritage Dictionary provides six senses and nine subsenses for the transitive verb ‘establish’, of which (by my lights) sense 1a is appropriate for interpreting the PPACA: “To cause (an institution, for example) to come into existence or begin operating.” An alternative reading might, however, be sense 4: “To introduce and put (a law, for example) into force.” The choice of which sense is appropriate requires some reasoning of course about the context in which it was used, the denotata of the subject and object of the verb for instance. If one concludes that sense 1a was intended, then the Supreme Court’s decision is presumably correct, since a state’s formal relegation to the federal government the role of running the exchange is an act of “causing to come into existence”, although perhaps not an act of “introducing and putting into force”. (Or further explication of the notions of “causing” or “introducing” might be necessary to decide the matter.) If the latter sense 4 were intended, then perhaps the Supreme Court was wrong in its recent decision. The important point is this: There is no possibility of deferring to the “plain meaning” on the issue; one must reason about the intentions of the authors to acquire even the literal meaning of the text. This process is exactly what Chief Justice Roberts undertakes in his opinion. Justice Scalia’s view, that plain meaning is somehow available without recourse to the use of knowledge and reasoning, is unfounded even in the simplest of cases.

Abbrev.

2015-05-07T23:35:47+00:00

A zoo of Latinistic abbreviations have crept into academic English: ‘e.g.’, ‘i.e.’, ‘cf.’, ‘viz.’, ‘ibid.’, ‘op. cit.’, ‘n.b.’, ‘et al.’

They are frequently mispunctuated. Most commonly sighted are ‘eg.’, ‘ibid’, ‘et. al.’, even ‘et. al’. They are frequently misused: ‘cf.’ to mean ‘see’; ‘e.g.’ to mean ‘i.e.’ But none of that matters, as they should all be generally avoided.

Several have English equivalents that are everywhere superior: ‘for example’ or ‘for instance’ for ‘e.g.’; ‘that is’ for ‘i.e.’; ‘compare’ for ‘cf.’; ‘note that’ for ‘n.b.’; ‘namely’ for ‘viz.’ The specialized abbreviation ‘et al.’ should be restricted to the technical use in shortening lists of authors in a reference. ‘N.b.’ can be dropped, since you typically want your reader to “note” pretty much everything in your paper. Those used for back-reference to citations, ‘ibid.’ and ‘op. cit.’, ought to die an unapologetic death given the use of a reasonable citation style, viz., author-date.

I have an inordinate fondness for ‘viz.’ Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.

In support of behavioral tests of intelligence

2015-05-07T15:11:51+00:00

…“blockhead” argument…
"Blockhead by Paul McCarthy @ Tate Modern" image from flickr user Matt Hobbs. Used by permission.

Alan Turing proposed what is the best known criterion for attributing intelligence, the capacity for thinking, to a computer. We call it the Turing Test, and it involves comparing the computer’s verbal behavior to that of people. If the two are indistinguishable, the computer passes the test. This might be cause for attributing intelligence to the computer.

Or not. The best argument against a behavioral test of intelligence (like the Turing Test) is that maybe the exhibited behaviors were just memorized. This is Ned Block’s “blockhead” argument in a nutshell. If the computer just had all its answers literally encoded in memory, then parroting those memorized answers is no sign of intelligence. And how are we to know from a behavioral test like the Turing Test that the computer isn’t just such a “memorizing machine”?

In my new(ish) paper, “There can be no Turing-Test–passing memorizing machines”, I address this argument directly. My conclusion can be found in the title of the article. By careful calculation of the information and communication capacity of space-time, I show that any memorizing machine could pass a Turing Test of no more than a few seconds, which is no Turing Test at all. Crucially, I make no assumptions beyond the brute laws of physics. (One distinction of the article is that it is one of the few philosophy articles in which a derivative is taken.)

The article is published in the open access journal Philosophers’ Imprint, and is available here along with code to computer-verify the calculations.

The two Guildford mathematicians

2015-02-18T16:56:31+00:00

…the huge ledger…

The charming town of Guildford, 40 minutes southwest of London on South West Trains, is associated with two famous British logician-mathematicians. Alan Turing (on whom I seem to perseverate) spent time there after 1927, when his parents purchased a home at 22 Ennismore Avenue just outside the Guildford town center. Although away at his boarding school, the Sherborne School in Dorset, which he attended from 1926 to 1931, Turing spent school holidays at the family home in Guildford. The house bears a blue plaque commemorating the connection with Turing, the “founder of computer science” as it aptly describes him, which you can see in the photo at right, taken on a pilgrimage I took this past June.

…the family home…

And this brings us to the second famous Guildford mathematician, who it turns out Turing was reading while at Sherborne. In the Turing docudrama Codebreaker, one of Turing’s biographers David Leavitt visits Sherborne and displays the huge ledger used for the handwritten circulation records of the Sherborne School library. There (Leavitt remarks), in an entry dated 11 April 1930, Turing has checked out three books, including Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. (We’ll come back to the third book shortly.) The books were, of course, written by the Oxford mathematics don Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under his better known pen name Lewis Carroll. Between the 1865 and 1871 publications of these his two most famous works, Carroll leased “The Chestnuts” in Guildford in 1868 to serve as a home for his sisters. The house sits at the end of Castle Hill Road adjacent to the Guildford Castle, which is as good a landmark as any to serve as the center of town. Carroll visited The Chestnuts on many occasions over the rest of his life; it was his home away from Christ Church home. He died there 30 years later and was buried at the Guildford Mount Cemetery.

…through the looking glass…

Guildford plays up its connection to Carroll much more than its Turing link. In the park surrounding Guildford Castle sits a statue of Alice passing through the looking glass, and the adjacent museum devotes considerable space to the Dodgson family. A statue depicting the first paragraphs of Alice’s adventures (Alice, her sister reading next to her, noticing a strange rabbit) sits along the bank of the River Wey. The Chestnuts itself, however, bears no blue plaque nor any marker of its link to Carroll. (A plaque formerly marking the brick gatepost has been removed, evidenced only by the damage to the brick where it had been.)

…The Chestnuts…

Who knows whether Turing was aware that Carroll, whose two Alice books he was reading, had had a home a mere mile from where his parents were living. The Sherborne library entry provides yet another convergence between the two British-born, Oxbridge-educated, permanent bachelors with sui generis demeanors, questioned sexualities, and occasional stammers, interested in logic and mathematics.

But there's more. What of the third book that Turing checked out of the Sherborne library at the same time? Leavitt finds the third book remarkable because the title, The Game of Logic, presages Turing’s later work in logic and the foundations of computer science. What Leavitt doesn’t seem to be aware of is that it is no surprise that this book would accompany the Alice books; it has the same author. Carroll published The Game of Logic in 1886. It serves to make what I believe to be the deepest connection between the two mathematicians, one that has to my knowledge never been noted before.

…Carroll’s own copy…
Title page of Lewis Carroll, The Game of Logic, 1886. EC85.D6645.886g, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

After watching Codebreaker and noting the Game of Logic connection, I decided to refresh my memory about the book. I visited Harvard’s Houghton Library, which happens to have Carroll’s own copy of the book. The title page is shown at right, with the facing page visible showing a sample card to be used in the game. The book was sold together with a copy of the card made of pasteboard and counters of two colors (red and grey) to be used to mark the squares on the card.

The Houghton visit and the handling of the game pieces jogged my memory as to the point of Carroll’s book. Carroll’s goal in The Game of Logic was to describe a system for carrying out syllogistic reasoning that even a child could master. Towards that goal, the system was intended to be completely mechanical. It involved the card marked off in squares and the two types of counters placed on the card in various configurations. Any of a large class of syllogisms over arbitrary properties can be characterized in this way, given a large enough card and enough counters, though it becomes unwieldy quite quickly after just a few.

(The photo at right shows the card and counters that came with the book. I've placed the counters in such a way as to depict the syllogism:

No red apples are unripe.
Some wholesome apples are red.
∴ Some ripe apples are red.

… marked off in squares…

To computer scientists, this ought to sound familiar. Just six years after checking out The Game of Logic from his school library, Turing would publish his groundbreaking paper “On computable numbers”, in which he describes a system for carrying out computations in a way that is completely mechanical. It involves a paper tape marked off in squares, and markings of at least two types placed on the tape in various configurations. Any of a large class of computations over arbitrary values can be characterized in this way, given a large enough tape and enough markings, though it becomes unwieldy quite quickly. We now call this mechanical device with tape and markings a Turing machine, and recognize it as the first universal model of computation. Turing’s paper serves as the premier work in the then nascent field of computer science.

Of course, there are differences both superficial and fundamental between Carroll’s game and Turing’s machine. Carroll’s card is two-dimensional with squares marked off in a lattice pattern, and counters are placed both within the squares and on the edges between squares. Turing’s tape is one-dimensional (though two-dimensional Turing machines have been defined and analyzed) and the markings are placed only within the squares. Most importantly, nothing even approaching the ramifications that Turing developed on the basis of his model came from Carroll’s simple game. (As a mathematician, Carroll was no Turing.) Nonetheless, in a sense the book that Turing read at 17 attempts to do for logic what Turing achieved six years later for computation.

I have no idea whether Lewis Carroll’s The Game of Logic influenced Alan Turing’s thinking about computability. But it serves as perhaps the strongest conceptual bond between Guildford’s two great mathematicians.

Update February 25, 2015: Thanks to Houghton Library Blog for reblogging this post.

The Turing moment

2014-11-30T13:46:01+00:00

…less histrionic…

We seem to be at the “Turing moment”, what with Benedict Cumberbatch, erstwhile Sherlock Holmes, now starring as a Hollywood Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. The release culminates a series of Turing-related events over the last few years. The centennial of Turing’s 1912 birth was celebrated actively in the computer science community as a kind of jubilee, the occasion of numerous conferences, retrospectives, and presentations. Bracketing that celebration, PM Gordon Brown publicly apologized for Britain’s horrific treatment of Turing in 2009, and HRH Queen Elizabeth II, who was crowned a couple of years before Alan Turing took his own life as his escape from her government’s abuse, finally got around to pardoning him in 2013 for the crime of being gay.

I went to see a preview of The Imitation Game at the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s “Science on Screen” series. I had low expectations, and I was not disappointed. The film is introduced as being “based on a true story”, and so it is – in the sense that My Fair Lady was based on the myth of Pygmalion (rather than the Shaw play). Yes, there was a real place called Bletchley Park, and real people named Alan Turing and Joan Clark, but no, they weren’t really like that. Turing didn’t break the Enigma code singlehandedly despite the efforts of his colleagues to stop him. Turing didn’t take it upon himself to control the resulting intelligence to limit the odds of their break being leaked to the enemy. And so on, and so forth. Most importantly, Turing did not attempt to hide his homosexuality from the authorities, and promoting the idea that he did for dramatic effect is, frankly, an injustice to his memory.

Reviewers seem generally to appreciate the movie’s cleaving from reality, though with varying opprobrium. “The truth of history is respected just enough to make room for tidy and engrossing drama,” says A. O. Scott in the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern ascribes to the film “a marvelous story about science and humanity, plus a great performance by Benedict Cumberbatch, plus first-rate filmmaking and cinematography, minus a script that muddles its source material to the point of betraying it.” At Slate, Dana Stevens notes that “The true life story of Alan Turing is much stranger, sadder and more troubling than the version of it on view in The Imitation Game, Morton Tyldum’s handsome but overlaundered biopic.”

Of course, they didn’t make the movie for people like me, that is, people who had heard of Alan Turing before. And to the extent that the film contributes to this Turing moment — leading viewers to look further into this most idiosyncratic and important person — it will be a good thing. The Coolidge Corner Theatre event was followed by commentary from Silvio Micali and Seth Lloyd, both professors at MIT. (The former is a recipient of the highest honor in computer science, the Turing Award. Yes, that Turing.) Their comments brought out the many scientific contributions of Turing that were given short shrift in the film. If only they could duplicate their performance at every showing.

Those who become intrigued by the story of Alan Turing could do worse than follow up their viewing of the Cumberbatch vehicle with one of the 2012 docudrama Codebreaker, a less histrionic but far more accurate (and surprisingly, more sweeping) presentation of Turing’s contributions to science and society, and his societal treatment. I had the pleasure of introducing the film and its executive producer Patrick Sammon in a screening at Harvard a couple of weeks ago. The event was another indicator of the Turing moment. (My colleague Harry Lewis has more to say about the film.)

To all of you who are aware of the far-reaching impact of Alan Turing on science, on history, and on society, and the tragedy of his premature death, I hope you will take advantage of the present Turing moment to spread the word about computer science’s central personage.

Inaccessible writing, in both senses of the term

2014-09-29T14:00:02+00:00

My colleague Steven Pinker has a nice piece up at the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Why Academics Stink at Writing”, accompanying the recent release of his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, which I’m awaiting my pre-ordered copy of. The last sentence of the Chronicle piece summarizes well:

In writing badly, we are wasting each other’s time, sowing confusion and error, and turning our profession into a laughingstock.

The essay provides a diagnosis of many of the common symptoms of fetid academic writing. He lists metadiscourse, professional narcissism, apologizing, shudder quotes, hedging, metaconcepts and nominalizations. It’s not breaking new ground, but these problems well deserve review.

I fall afoul of these myself, of course. (Nasty truth: I’ve used “inter alia” all too often, inter alia.) But one issue I disagree with Pinker on is the particular style of metadiscourse he condemns that provides a roadmap of a paper. Here’s an example from a recent paper of mine.

After some preliminaries (Section 2), we present a set of known results relating context-free languages, tree homomorphisms, tree automata, and tree transducers to extend them for the tree-adjoining languages (Section 3), presenting these in terms of restricted kinds of functional programs over trees, using a simple grammatical notation for describing the programs. We review the definition of tree-substitution and tree-adjoining grammars (Section 4) and synchronous versions thereof (Section 5). We prove the equivalence between STSG and a variety of bimorphism (Section 6).

This certainly smacks of the first metadiscourse example Pinker provides:

“The preceding discussion introduced the problem of academese, summarized the principle theories, and suggested a new analysis based on a theory of Turner and Thomas. The rest of this article is organized as follows. The first section consists of a review of the major shortcomings of academic prose. …”

Who needs that sort of signposting in a 6,000-word essay? But in the context of a 50-page article, giving a kind of table of contents such as this doesn’t seem out of line. Much of the metadiscourse that Pinker excoriates is unneeded, but appropriate advance signposting can ease the job of the reader considerably. Sometimes, as in the other examples Pinker gives, “metadiscourse is there to help the writer, not the reader, since she has to put more work into understanding the signposts than she saves in seeing what they point to.” But anything that helps the reader to understand the high-level structure of an object as complex as a long article seems like a good thing to me.

The penultimate sentence of Pinker's piece places poor academic writing in context:

Our indifference to how we share the fruits of our intellectual labors is a betrayal of our calling to enhance the spread of knowledge.

That sentiment applies equally well – arguably more so – to the venues where we publish. By placing our articles in journals that lock up access tightly we are also betraying our calling. And it doesn’t matter how good the writing is if it can’t be read in the first place.

Switching to Markdown for scholarly article production

2014-08-29T18:10:28+00:00

With few exceptions, scholars would be better off writing their papers in a lightweight markup format called Markdown, rather than using a word-processing program like Microsoft Word. This post explains why, and reveals a hidden agenda as well.¹

Microsoft Word is not appropriate for scholarly article production

…lightweight…
“Old two pan balance” image from Nikodem Nijaki at Wikimedia Commons. Used by permission.

Before turning to lightweight markup, I review the problems with Microsoft Word as the lingua franca for producing scholarly articles. This ground has been heavily covered. (Here’s a recent example.) The problems include:

Substantial learning curve: Microsoft Word is a complicated program that is difficult to use well.
Appearance versus structure: Word-processing programs like Word conflate composition with typesetting. They work by having you specify how a document should look, not how it is structured. A classic example is section headings. In a typical markup language, you specify that something is a heading by marking it as a heading. In a word-processing program you might specify that something is a heading by increasing the font size and making it bold. Yes, Word has “paragraph styles”, and some people sometimes use them more or less properly, if you can figure out how. But most people don’t, or don’t do so consistently, and the resultant chaos has been well documented. It has led to a whole industry of people who specialize in massaging Word files into some semblance of consistency.
Backwards compatibility: Word-processing program file formats have a tendency to change. Word itself has gone through multiple incompatible file formats in the last decades, one every couple of years. Over time, you have to keep up with the latest version of the software to do anything at all with a new document, but updating your software may well mean that old documents are no longer identically rendered. With Markdown, no software is necessary to read documents. They are just plain text files with relatively intuitive markings, and the underlying file format (UTF-8 née ASCII) is backward compatible to 1963. Further, typesetting documents in Markdown to get the “nice” version is based on free and open-source software (markdown, pandoc) and built on other longstanding open source standards (LaTeX, BibTeX).
Poor typesetting: Microsoft Word does a generally poor job of typesetting, as exemplified by hyphenation, kerning, mathematical typesetting. This shouldn’t be surprising, since the whole premise of a word-processing program means that the same interface must handle both the specification and typesetting in real-time, a recipe for having to make compromises.
Lock-in: Because Microsoft Word’s file format is effectively proprietary, users are locked in to a single software provider for any and all functionality. The file formats are so complicated that alternative implementations are effectively impossible.

Lightweight markup is the solution

The solution is to use a markup format that allows specification of the document (providing its logical structure) separate from the typesetting of that document. Your document is specified – that is, generated and stored – as straight text. Any formatting issues are handled not by changing the formatting directly via a graphical user interface but by specifying the formatting textually using a specific textual notation. For instance, in the HTML markup language, a word or phrase that should be emphasized is textually indicated by surrounding it with <em>…</em>. HTML and other powerful markup formats like LaTeX and various XML formats carry relatively large overheads. They are complex to learn and difficult to read. (Typing raw XML is nobody’s idea of fun.) Ideally, we would want a markup format to be lightweight, that is, simple, portable, and human-readable even in its raw state.

Markdown is just such a lightweight markup language. In Markdown, emphasis is textually indicated by surrounding the phrase with asterisks, as is familiar from email conventions, for example, *lightweight*. See, that wasn’t so hard. Here’s another example: A bulleted list is indicated by prepending each item on a separate line with an asterisk, like this:

 * First item
 * Second item

which specifies the list

First item
Second item

Because specification and typesetting are separated, software is needed to convert from one to the other, to typeset the specified document. For reasons that will become clear later, I recommend the open-source software pandoc. Generally, scholars will want to convert their documents to PDF (though pandoc can convert to a huge variety of other formats). To convert file.md (the Markdown-format specification file) to PDF, the command

 pandoc file.md -o file.pdf

suffices. Alternatively, there are many editing programs that allow entering, editing, and typesetting Markdown. I sometimes use Byword. In fact, I’m using it now.

Markup languages range from the simple to the complex. I argue for Markdown for four reasons:

Basic Markdown, sufficient for the vast majority of non-mathematical scholarly writing, is dead simple to learn and remember, because the markup notations were designed to mimic the kinds of textual conventions that people are used to – asterisks for emphasis and for indicating bulleted items, for instance. The coverage of this basic part of Markdown includes: emphasis, section structure, block quotes, bulleted and numbered lists, simple tables, and footnotes.
Markdown is designed to be readable and the specified format understandable even in its plain text form, unlike heavier weight markup languages such as HTML.
Markdown is well supported by a large ecology of software systems for entering, previewing, converting, typesetting, and collaboratively editing documents.
Simple things are simple. More complicated things are more complicated, but not impossible. The extensions to Markdown provided by pandoc cover more or less the rest of what anyone might need for scholarly documents, including links, cross-references, figures, citations and bibliographies (via BibTeX), mathematical typesetting (via LaTeX), and much more.For instance, this equation (the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality) will typeset well in generated PDF files, and even in HTML pages using the wonderful MathJax library.\[ \left( \sum_{k=1}^n a_k b_k \right)^2 \leq \left( \sum_{k=1}^n a_k^2 \right) \left( \sum_{k=1}^n b_k^2 \right) \](Pandoc also provides some extensions that simplify and extend the basic Markdown in quite nice ways, for instance, definition lists, strikeout text, a simpler notation for tables.)

Above, I claimed that scholars should use Markdown “with few exceptions”. The exceptions are:

The document requires nontrivial mathematical typesetting. In that case, you’re probably better off using LaTeX. Anyone writing a lot of mathematics has given up word processors long ago and ought to know LaTeX anyway. Still, I’ll often do a first draft in Markdown with LaTeX for the math-y bits. Pandoc allows LaTeX to be included within a Markdown file (as I’ve done above), and preserves the LaTeX markup when converting the Markdown to LaTeX. From there, it can be typeset with LaTeX. Microsoft Word would certainly not be appropriate for this case.
The document requires typesetting with highly refined or specialized aspects. I’d probably go with LaTeX here too, though desktop publishing software (InDesign) is also appropriate if there’s little or no mathematical typesetting required. Microsoft Word would not be appropriate for this case either.

Some have proposed that we need a special lightweight markup language for scholars. But Markdown is sufficiently close, and has such a strong community of support and software infrastructure, that it is more than sufficient for the time being. Further development would of course be helpful, so long as the urge to add “features” doesn’t overwhelm its core simplicity.

The hidden agenda

I have a hidden agenda. Markdown is sufficient for the bulk of cases of composing scholarly articles, and simple enough to learn that academics might actually use it. Markdown documents are also typesettable according to a separate specification of document style, and retargetable to multiple output formats (PDF, HTML, etc.).² Thus, Markdown could be used as the production file format for scholarly journals, which would eliminate the need for converting between the authors’ manuscript version and the publishers internal format, with all the concomitant errors that process is prone to produce.

In computer science, we have by now moved almost completely to a system in which authors provide articles in LaTeX so that no retyping or recomposition of the articles needs to be done for the publisher’s typesetting system. Publishers just apply their LaTeX style files to our articles. The result has been a dramatic improvement in correctness and efficiency. (It is in part due to such an efficient production process that the cost of running a high-end computer science journal can be so astoundingly low.)

Even better, there is a new breed of collaborative web-based document editing tools being developed that use Markdown as their core file format, tools like Draft and Authorea. They provide multi-author editing, versioning, version comparison, and merging. These tools could constitute the system by which scholarly articles are written, collaborated on, revised, copyedited, and moved to the journal production process, generating efficiencies for a huge range of journals, efficiencies that we’ve enjoyed in computer science and mathematics for years.

As Rob Walsh of ScholasticaHQ says, “One of the biggest bottlenecks in Open Access publishing is typesetting. It shouldn’t be.” A production ecology built around Markdown could be the solution.

Many of the ideas in this post are not new. Complaints about WYSIWYG word-processing programs have a long history. Here’s a particularly trenchant diatribe pointing out the superiority of disentangling composition from typesetting. The idea of “scholarly Markdown” as the solution is also not new. See this post or this one for similar proposals. I go further in viewing certain current versions of Markdown (as implemented in Pandoc) as practical already for scholarly article production purposes, though I support coordinated efforts that could lead to improved lightweight markup formats for scholarly applications. Update September 22, 2014: I've just noticed a post by Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff at The Programming Historian on "Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown" giving a tutorial on using these tools for writing scholarly history articles.↩

As an example, I’ve used this very blog post. Starting with the Markdown source file (which I’ve attached to this post), I first generated HTML output for copying into the blog using the command

pandoc -S --mathjax --base-header-level=3 markdownpost.md -o markdownpost.html

A nicely typeset version using the American Mathematical Society’s journal article document style can be generated with

pandoc markdownpost.md -V documentclass:amsart -o markdownpost-amsart.pdf

To target the style of ACM transactions instead, the following command suffices:

pandoc markdownpost.md -V documentclass:acmsmall -o markdownpost-acmsmall.pdf

Both PDF versions are also attached to this post.↩

Attachments

mardownpost.md: The source file for this post in Markdown format
markdownpost-amsart.pdf: The post rendered using pandoc according to AMS journal style
markdownpost-acmsmall.pdf: The post rendered using pandoc according to ACM journal style

No, the Turing Test has not been passed.

2014-06-10T15:26:52+00:00

…that's not Turing's Test…
“Turing Test” image from xkcd. Used by permission.

There has been a flurry of interest in the Turing Test in the last few days, precipitated by a claim that (at last!) a program has passed the Test. The program in question is called "Eugene Goostman" and the claim is promulgated by Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading and organizer of a recent chatbot competition there.

The Turing Test is a topic that I have a deep interest in (see this, and this, and this, and this, and, most recently, this), so I thought to give my view on Professor Warwick's claim "We are therefore proud to declare that Alan Turing's Test was passed for the first time on Saturday." The main points are these. The Turing Test was not passed on Saturday, and "Eugene Goostman" seems to perform qualitatively about as poorly as many other chatbots in emulating human verbal behavior. In summary: There's nothing new here; move along.

First, the Turing Test that Turing had in mind was a criterion of indistinguishability in verbal performance between human and computer in an open-ended wide-ranging interaction. In order for the Test to be passed, judges had to perform no better than chance in unmasking the computer. But in the recent event, the interactions were quite time-limited (only five minutes) and in any case, the purported Turing-Test-passing program was identified correctly more often than not by the judges (almost 70% of the time in fact). That's not Turing's test.

Update June 17, 2014: The time limitation was even worse than I thought. According to my colleague Luke Hunsberger, computer science professor at Vassar College, who was a judge in this event, the five minute time limit was for two simultaneous interactions. Further, there were often substantial response delays in the system. In total, he estimated that a judge might average only four or five rounds of chat with each interlocutor. I’ve argued before that a grossly time-limited Turing Test is no Turing Test at all.

Sometimes, people trot out the prediction from Turing's seminal 1950 Mind article that "I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about $10^9$, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent. chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning." As I explain in my book on the Test:

The first thing to note about the prediction is that it is not a prediction about the Test per se: Turing expects 70 percent prediction accuracy, not the more difficult 50 percent expected by chance, and this after only a limited conversation of five minutes. He is therefore predicting passage of a test much simpler than the Test.

Not only does the prediction not presuppose a full Turing Test, but it could well be argued that it had already come to pass with the advent of Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza some thirty-five years early. Weizenbaum developed a simple computer program that attempted to imitate the parroting conversational style of a Rogerian psychotherapist.... Although the methods used were quite simple – repeating the user’s question after adjusting some pronouns, throwing in a stock phrase every now and then – the result was, in its own way, extremely convincing.

Second, "Eugene Goostman" uses the very techniques that began with Weizenbaum's "Eliza" program from the 1960's. We see the same tricks – repeating the judge's statements with simple substitutions, keyword-triggered responses, falling back on vague or unresponsive replies, and the like. Those tricks are no more successful than they have been in the two decades of runnings of the Loebner Prize Competition, another ill-conceived attempt at running a Turing-like test. And there too, entrants used the trick of having their programs emulate humans with built in excuses. "Eugene Goostman" purports to be a non-English-fluent child, rather than a fluent adult.¹

In fact, anyone with the slightest familiarity with chatbots, the modern incarnations of "Eliza", could unmask "Eugene Goostman" quickly. (The judges at the recent competition were apparently not so familiar.) Scott Aaronson has provided a transcript of his own interaction with "Eugene Goostman", which shows the telltale signs as soon as the computer's first reply, which blatantly ignores an utterly trivial question and tries to change the subject:

Scott: Which is bigger, a shoebox or Mount Everest?

Eugene: I can’t make a choice right now. I should think it out later. And I forgot to ask you where you are from…

Here's an appeal to cute, vague language:

Scott: How many legs does a camel have?

Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three? :-))) By the way, I still don’t know your specialty – or, possibly, I’ve missed it?

And here's the repetition of a canned response:

Scott: No, I need to know that you’re not a chatbot. Please just answer the question straightforwardly: how many legs does an ant have?

Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three? :-))) Oh, what a fruitful conversation;-)

Here's a canned keyword-triggered response, nonresponsive as usual:

Scott: In your opinion, does your existence demonstrate any idea or principle that wasn’t demonstrated just as convincingly by ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum’s chatbot from the 1960s?

Eugene: Eliza was a break-thru. All the bots after it were nothing but weak parodies, claiming to have “revolutionary improvements”.

And here's "Eliza"'s trick of rewriting the judge's utterance after pronoun replacement and (poorly executed) synonym substitution:

Scott: OK, I’ll count that as the second sensible thing you’ve said (grading generously). Don’t you think that a more convincing chatbot could be created, by using Google to trawl the entire web for plausible-sounding answers (analogous to what IBM’s Watson did)?

Eugene: Yes, I do think that a more convincing chatbot can be built by using google to trawl the all web for plausible – sounding – I hope I have right to have my own opinion. Maybe, let’s talk about something else? What would you like to discuss?

Literally every one of "Eugene"'s responses reflects its "Eliza"-like programming. It would be amusing, if it weren't so predictable.

In summary, "Eugene Goostman" is not qualitatively superior to other chatbots, and certainly has not passed a true Turing Test. It isn't even close.

In a parody of this approach, the late John McCarthy, professor of computer science at Stanford University and inventor of the term "artifical intelligence", wrote a letter to the editor responding to a publication about an "Eliza"-like program that claimed to emulate a paranoid psychiatric patient. He presented his own experiments that I described in my Turing Test book: "He had designed an even better program, which passed the same test. His also had the virtue of being a very inexpensive program, in these times of tight money. In fact you didn’t even need a computer for it. All you needed was an electric typewriter. His program modeled infantile autism. And the transcripts – you type in your questions, and the thing just sits there and hums – cannot be distinguished by experts from transcripts of real conversations with infantile autistic patients."↩

How universities can support open-access journal publishing

2014-06-04T13:00:24+00:00

To university administrators and librarians:

...enablement becomes transformation...
"Shelf of journals" image from Flickr user University of Illinois Library. Used by permission.

As a university administrator or librarian, you may see the future in open-access journal publishing and may be motivated to help bring that future about.¹ I would urge you to establish or maintain an open-access fund to underwrite publication fees for open-access journals, but to do so in a way that follows the principles that underlie the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE). Those principles are two:

Principle 1: Our goal should be to establish an environment in which publishers are enabled² to change their business model from the unsustainable closed access model based on reader-side fees to a sustainable open access model based on author-side fees.

If publishers could and did switch to the open-access business model, in the long term the moneys saved in reader-side fees would more than cover the author-side fees, with open access added to boot.

But until a large proportion of the funded research comes with appropriately structured funds usable to pay author-side fees, publishers will find themselves in an environment that disincentivizes the move to the preferred business model. Only when the bulk of research comes with funds to pay author-side fees underwriting dissemination will publishers feel comfortable moving to that model. Principle 1 argues for a system where author-side fees for open-access journals should be largely underwritten on behalf of authors, just as the research libraries of the world currently underwrite reader-side fees on behalf of readers.³ But who should be on the hook to pay the author-side fees on behalf of the authors? That brings us to Principle 2.

Principle 2: Dissemination is an intrinsic part of the research process. Those that fund the research should be responsible for funding its dissemination.

Research funding agencies, not universities, should be funding author-side fees for research funded by their grants. There's no reason for universities to take on that burden on their behalf.⁴ But universities should fund open-access publication fees for research that they fund themselves.

We don't usually think of universities as research funders, but they are. They hire faculty to engage in certain core activities – teaching, service, and research – and their job performance and career advancement typically depends on all three. Sometimes researchers obtain outside funding for the research aspect of their professional lives, but where research is not funded from outside, it is still a central part of faculty members' responsibilities. In those cases, where research is not funded by extramural funds, it is therefore being implicitly funded by the university itself. In some fields, the sciences in particular, outside funding is the norm; in others, the humanities and most social sciences, it is the exception. Regardless of the field, faculty research that is not funded from outside is university-funded research, and the university ought to be responsible for funding its dissemination as well.

The university can and should place conditions on funding that dissemination. In particular, it ought to require that if it is funding the dissemination, then that dissemination be open – free for others to read and build on – and that it be published in a venue that provides openness sustainably – a fully open-access journal rather than a hybrid subscription journal.

Organizing a university open-access fund consistent with these principles means that the university will, at present, fund few articles, for reasons detailed elsewhere. Don't confuse slow uptake with low impact. The import of the fund is not to be measured by how many articles it makes open, but by how it contributes to the establishment of the enabling environment for the open-access business model. The enabling environment will have to grow substantially before enablement becomes transformation. It is no less important in the interim.

What about the opportunity cost of open-access funds? Couldn't those funds be better used in our efforts to move to a more open scholarly communication system? Alternative uses of the funds are sometimes proposed, such as university libraries establishing and operating new open-access journals or paying membership fees to open-access publishers to reduce the author-side fees for their journals. But establishing new journals does nothing to reduce the need to subscribe to the old journals. It adds costs with no anticipation, even in the long term, of corresponding savings elsewhere. And paying membership fees to certain open-access publishers puts a finger on the scale so as to preemptively favor certain such publishers over others and to let funding agencies off the hook for their funding responsibilities. Such efforts should at best be funded after open-access funds are established to make good on universities' responsibility to underwrite the dissemination of the research they've funded.

It should go without saying that efforts to foster open-access journal publishing are completely consistent with, in fact aided by, fostering open access through self-deposit in open repositories (so-called "green open access"). I am a long and ardent supporter of such efforts myself, and urge you as university administrators and librarians to promote green open access as well. [Since it should go without saying, comments recapitulating that point will be deemed tangential and attended to accordingly.]↩
I am indebted to Bernard Schutz of Max Planck Gesellschaft for his elegant phrasing of the issue in terms of the "enabling environment".↩
Furthermore, as I've argued elsewhere, disenfranchising readers through subscription fees is a more fundamental problem than disenfranchising authors through publication fees.↩
In fact, by being willing to fund author-side fees for grant-funded articles, universities merely delay the day that funding agencies do their part by reducing the pressure from their fundees.↩

Public underwriting of research and open access

2014-04-04T17:55:24+00:00

…a social contract…

Title page of the first octavo edition of Rousseau's Social Contract

[This post is based loosely on my comments on a panel on 2 April 2014 for Terry Fisher's CopyrightX course. Thanks to Terry for inviting me to participate and provoking this piece, and to my Berkman colleagues for their wonderful contributions to the panel session.]

Copyright is part of a social contract: You the author get a monopoly to exploit rights for a while in return for us the public gaining “the progress of Science and the Useful Arts”. The idea is that the direct financial benefit of exploiting those rights provides incentive for the author to create.

But this foundation for copyright ignores the fact that there are certain areas of creative expression in which direct financial benefit is not an incentive to create: in particular, academia. It’s not that academics who create and publish their research don’t need incentives, even financial incentives, to do so. Rather, the financial incentives are indirect. They receive no direct payment for the articles that they publish describing their research. They benefit instead from the personal uplift of contributing to human knowledge and seeing that knowledge advance science and the useful arts. Plus, their careers depend on the impact of their research, which is a result of its being widely read; it’s not all altruism.

In such cases, a different social contract can be in force without reducing creative expression. When the public underwrites the research that academics do – through direct research grants for instance – they can require in return that the research results must be made available to the public, without allowing for the limited period of exclusive exploitation. This is one of the arguments for the idea of open access to the scholarly literature. You see it in the Alliance for Taxpayer Access slogan “barrier-free access to taxpayer-funded research” and the White House statement that “The Obama Administration agrees that citizens deserve easy access to the results of research their tax dollars have paid for.” It is implemented in the NIH public access policy, requiring all articles funded by NIH grants to be made openly available through the PubMed Central website, where millions of visitors access millions of articles each week.

But here’s my point, one that is underappreciated even among open access supporters. The penetration of the notion of “taxpayer-funded research”, of “research their tax dollars have paid for”, is far greater than you might think. Yes, it includes research paid for by the $30 billion invested by the NIH each year, and the $7 billion research funded by the NSF, and the $150 million funded by the NEH. But all university research benefits from the social contract with taxpayers that makes universities tax-exempt.¹

The Association of American Universities makes clear this social contract:

The educational purposes of universities and colleges – teaching, research, and public service – have been recognized in federal law as critical to the well-being of our democratic society. Higher education institutions are in turn exempted from income tax so they can make the most of their revenues…. Because of their tax exemption, universities and colleges are able to use more resources than would otherwise be available to fund: academic programs, student financial aid, research, public extension activities, and their overall operations.

It’s difficult to estimate the size of this form of support to universities. The best estimate I’ve seen puts it at something like $50 billion per year for the income tax exemption. That’s more than the NIH, NSF, and (hardly worth mentioning) the NEH put together. It’s on par with the total non-defense federal R&D funding.

And it’s not just exemption from income tax that universities benefit from. They also are exempt from property taxes for their campuses. Their contributors are exempt from tax for their charitable contributions to the university, which results ceteris paribus in larger donations. Their students are exempt from taxes on educational expenses. They receive government funding for scholarships, freeing up funds for research. Constructing an estimate of the total benefit to universities from all these sources is daunting. One study places the total value of all direct tax exemptions, federal, state, and local, for a single university, Northeastern University, at $97 million, accounting for well over half of all government support to the university. (Even this doesn’t count several of the items noted above.)

All university research, not just the grant-funded research, benefits from the taxpayer underwriting implicit in the tax exemption social contract. It would make sense then, in return, for taxpayers to require open access to all university research in return for continued tax-exempt status. Copyright is the citizenry paying authors with a monopoly in return for social benefit. But where the citizenry pays authors through some other mechanism, like $50 billion worth of tax exemption, it’s not a foregone conclusion that we should pay with the monopoly too.

Some people point out that just because the government funds something doesn’t mean that the public gets a free right of access. Indeed, the government funds various things that the public doesn’t get access to, or at least, not free access. The American Publisher’s Association points out, for instance, that although taxpayers pay for the national park system “they still have to pay a fee if they want to go in, and certainly if they want to camp.” On the other hand, you don’t pay when the fire department puts out a fire in your house, or to access the National Weather Service forecasts. It seems that the social contract is up for negotiation.

And that’s just the point. The social contract needs to be designed, and designed keeping in mind the properties of the goods being provided and the sustainability of the arrangement. In particular, funding of the contract can come from taxpayers or users or a combination of both. In the case of national parks, access to real estate is an inherently limited resource, and the benefit of access redounds primarily to the user (the visitor), so getting some of the income from visitors puts in place a reasonable market-based constraint.

Information goods are different. First, the benefits of access to information redound widely. Information begets information: researchers build on it, journalists report on it, products are based on it. The openness of NWS data means that farms can generate greater yields to benefit everyone (one part of the fourth of six goals in the NWS Strategic Plan). The openness of MBTA transit data means that a company can provide me with an iPhone app to tell me when my bus will arrive at my stop. Second, access to information is not an inherently limited resource. As Jefferson said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine.” If access is to be restricted, it must be done artificially, through legal strictures or technological measures. The marginal cost of providing access to an academic article is, for all intents and purposes, zero. Thus, it makes more sense for the social contract around distributing research results to be funded exclusively from the taxpayer side rather than the user side, that is, funding agencies requiring completely free and open access for the articles they fund, and paying to underwrite the manifest costs of that access. (I’ve written in the past about the best way for funding agencies to organize that payment.)

It turns out that we, the public, are underwriting directly and indirectly every research article that our universities generate. Let’s think about what the social contract should provide us in return. Blind application of the copyright social contract would not be the likely outcome.

Underappreciated by many, but as usual, not by Peter Suber, who anticipated this argument, for instance, in his seminal book Open Access:

All scholarly journals (toll access and OA) benefit from public subsidies. Most scientific research is funded by public agencies using public money, conducted and written up by researchers working at public institutions and paid with public money, and then peer-reviewed by faculty at public institutions and paid with public money. Even when researchers and peer reviewers work at private universities, their institutions are subsidized by publicly funded tax exemptions and tax-deductible donations. Most toll-access journal subscriptions are purchased by public institutions and paid with taxpayer money. [Emphasis added.]

↩

A true transitional open-access business model

2014-03-28T14:53:32+00:00

…provide a transition path…

"The Temple of Transition, Burning Man 2011" photo by flickr user Michael Holden, used by permission

David Willetts, the UK Minister for Universities and Research, has written a letter to Janet Finch responding to her committee’s “A Review of Progress in Implementing the Recommendations of the Finch Report”. Notable in Minister Willetts response is this excerpt:

Government wants [higher education institutions] to fully participate in the take up of Gold OA and create a better functioning market. Hence, Government looks to the publishing industry to develop innovative and sustainable solutions to address the ‘double-dipping’ issue perceived by institutions. Publishers have an opportunity to incentivise early adoption of Gold OA by moderating the total cost of publication for individual institutions. This would remove the final obstacle to greater take up of Gold OA, enabling universal acceptance of ‘hybrid’ journals.

It is important for two reasons: in its recognition, first, that the hybrid journal model has inherent obstacles as currently implemented (consistent with a previous post of mine), and second, that the solution is to make sure that individual institutions (as emphasized in the original) be properly incentivized for underwriting hybrid fees.

This development led me to dust off a pending post that has been sitting in my virtual filing cabinet for several years now, being updated every once in a while as developments motivated. It addresses exactly this issue in some detail.

A transitional scholarly journal business model

By way of background, recall that there are the toll-access scholarly journals and the open-access journals. The former comprise the bulk (about two-thirds) of peer-reviewed journals, the latter a growing minority. There is great interest in how a transition from the former to the latter might occur. The most common proposal is the hybrid model, in which a toll-access journal will accept an optional publication fee to make individual articles open access.

I’ve previously argued that the hybrid model does not, despite intentions, provide a transition path. I argue here that an alternative approach addresses many of the failings of the hybrid model.

What do we want of a transitional process? First and foremost, a transitional process should allow for a smooth transition path from toll-access to open-access that is, in the short term at least, revenue-neutral. Intrinsically revenue-reducing transitions will find little support among publishers and revenue-increasing transitions will be appropriately rejected by scholarly institutions. Note that just because a transitional process is revenue-neutral in the short term does not mean that no moneys will be saved in the longer term as the result of the transition; a move to author-side fees from reader-side fees has the potential to be a much more transparent, competitive, and efficient market, which may well lead to overall cost reductions. Secondly, a transitional process should embed incentives for movement along the path. This second issue has rarely been taken into account.

Flaws in the hybrid model

A quick rehearsal of the problems with the hybrid model shows flaws with respect to both aspects.

The hybrid model is revenue-neutral in the short run just in case (i) a journal’s hybrid publication fee is set to be the average revenue per article for the journal under the toll-access model and (ii) the publisher reduces the subscription fee in exact proportion to the percentage of articles for which the hybrid fee is paid. In that case, a publisher receives the same revenue whether no one pays the hybrid fees or everyone pays the hybrid fees (in which case the subscription fee becomes zero). For comparison with later models, we can capture this with some simple arithmetic. Suppose there are $t$ institutions of which $s$ are subscribers. For simplicity, assume that there is no price discrimination, so all subscribers pay subscription fee $f$. Then total revenue is $s \cdot f$. (I assume here that all revenue of the journal is subscription revenue. If there is other revenue, for instance, advertising revenue, that shouldn’t play a role in setting publication fees, since it doesn’t get displaced by those fees.) Suppose further that there are $n$ articles published each year. Average revenue per article is thus $\frac{s \cdot f}{n}$, which we choose for the hybrid fee. Finally, assume $h$ percent of articles have the hybrid fee paid. Then the total revenue from hybrid fees is $n \cdot h \cdot \left(\frac{s \cdot f}{n}\right) = h \cdot s \cdot f$ and total revenue from subscriptions is $ s \cdot f \cdot (1 - h) $. Total revenue is therefore $s \cdot f \cdot (1 - h) + h \cdot s \cdot f = s \cdot f$, independently of $h$. This is the sense in which the hybrid system is (or at least can be) revenue neutral. In a previous post, I referred to a hybrid model that had these revenue-neutrality properties as a true hybrid.

Of course, there is a serious problem that it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to determine if the revenue-neutrality conditions are met. It requires knowledge of the average revenue per article, as well as transparency of subscription prices to verify that subscription fees are reduced to $f \cdot (1-h)$. But let us assume that these issues are surmountable, because there are bigger problems even with true hybrid journals.

Since the price reduction for each hybrid fee paid is distributed over all subscribing institutions, the net effect on each institution of paying a hybrid fee is a large increase in fees paid. The institution pays $\frac{s \cdot f}{n}$ but recovers just $\frac{s \cdot f}{n \cdot s} = \frac{f}{n}$ subscription fee reduction; it recoups just $1/s$ of each hybrid fee paid. That is, for every hybrid fee it pays, it recoups a share inversely proportional to the number of subscribers to the journal. The reduction is minimal even for journals that are poorly subscribed. If the journal has 100 subscribers, the author institution recoups just 1% of each hybrid fee it pays. Institutions would be unlikely to pay hybrid fees under these conditions. Indeed, this is what we see empirically. The setup induces a coordination problem: If all institutions paid the hybrid fees, all would be better off – collectively paying the same amount but achieving open access to all articles. But no institution has an incentive to be the “first mover”.

A preferable alternative

To solve this prisoner’s dilemma, a better method would allocate all subscription fee benefit of a hybrid payment to the author’s institution. Rather than each subscribing institution seeing a reduction of $f/n$, the author’s institution would see a reduction of $f$. I call this business model the transitional model, to distinguish it from the hybrid model and also the pure models – the subscription model and the publication fee model. To the journal, there is no difference in revenue in the short run between these two approaches, hybrid and transitional. Instead of reducing the subscription fee of $n$ institutions by $f/n$ as in the hybrid model, the transitional model reduces the subscription fee of 1 institution by $f$, in either case for a total reduction of $f$, thereby exactly recouping the publication fee and retaining revenue neutrality. To the author’s institution, however, there is a big difference. Under the transitional model, it pays $f$ in publication fees but recoups $f$ in subscription fees; it’s a wash, so any institution should happily underwrite such a fee. It costs no more than the institution is already paying, and provides open access to the article.¹ All of the institutions other than the author’s no longer receive a lower subscription fee, but the marginal reduction to them was trivial anyway, so their behavior wouldn’t be expected to change. I’ll refer to articles where the publication fee leads to a commensurate reduction in subscription to the institution as a fully recovered article.

Parenthetically: What happens once an institution has paid so many publication fees that it has fully covered the entire subscription price? After an institution has published $s/n$ fully covered articles, it has paid $s$ in hybrid fees and its subscription fee is reduced to zero. At that point, there are several approaches that can be taken. Here’s one: Since there’s no more subscription fee to reduce, to preserve revenue neutrality, the publisher could then reduce the subscription fee of all other institutions by $f/n$ (or a bit more actually, to account for the subscribers who have bottomed out on their subscription fee). Articles from that point on are partially recovered articles; they work like hybrid journals currently do.

There needs to be a way to complete the transition from a transitional subscription journal (with this kind of publication fee) to a fully open-access journal. The natural approach is a commitment on the part of the journal to switch models once a sufficiently high fraction of articles are paying hybrid fees. This transition threshold should be determined by where the publication fee model becomes independently viable. I don’t know where this threshold should be, but presumably quite high, perhaps 75% or more. One interesting point to examine is the percentage of articles published that would fall under the full recovery limit. If the percentage of fully recovered articles is greater than the transition threshold, the journal is quite likely to complete the transition.

I would appreciate suggestions as to how to estimate these quantities: the transition threshold and especially the fully recovered percentage. The latter is dependent on how skewed the publication behavior of institutions is. The more skewed, the lower the fully recovered percentage.

One way of thinking about the transitional model is that subscription fees are merely reenvisioned as prepaid publication fees. In that sense, the transitional proposal looks a bit like the SCOAP3 model, except that crucially unlike SCOAP3 (but like the hybrid model), there is no free-rider problem. Institutions can’t immediately drop their subscriptions and free ride on the availability of all articles. Rather they would gain access only to the open-access subset of the articles, and once the transition to fully open access occurred their authors would have to pony up publication fees (perhaps subsidized by the institution, and of course waivable in case of exigency so as not to disenfranchise necessitous authors).

In fact, since I first began thinking about this issue, a journal publisher has actually implemented just such a system. The Royal Society of Chemistry has developed what they call the RSC Gold program, in which institutional subscribers to their journals receive vouchers that they can use to cover a certain number of OA fees. To the extent that the value of the vouchers is identical to the subscription cost of the set of subscribed journals (which is not made clear in their literature), this would constitute an instance of the transitional model. Unfortunately, the RSC Gold program is limited to subscribers that take the entire bundle of RSC journals, furthering the market problems of bundling.

Implementing the transitional model

The transitional model relies on reduction of the subscription fee in lock-step with payment of publication fees. There are several ways this could be achieved. Let’s assume subscription fees are paid in advance annually, for simplicity on a calendar year basis. One way is to perform the accounting of subscription fees and publication fees on a same-year basis. The institution pays the subscription fee for a given year and then pays no publication fees for articles published in that year until the subscription fee is fully recovered. Thereafter, the institution (or its authors or authors’ funders) can pay further publication fees, which will be only partially recovered.

Another possibility is to recover in arrears. The institution pays the subscription fee for a given year and then during that year whatever publication fees it chooses to. The publication fees paid in that year get recovered in the following year by a reduction in (or rebate of) the subscription fee for that year. This method has some important advantages. In particular, it is easier for the institution to decide on an article by article basis whether or not to actually pay the publication fee or to have a funder pay it instead or even to refuse to pay it based on whatever criteria it uses. I’ve argued elsewhere that the ability to control which publication fees get underwritten by an institution is an important check on the publication fee market; it allows the construction of a market not subject to the moral hazards of the subscription model. On the other hand, the arrears approach has the disadvantage that the institution is always floating the future reimbursement. This means that it will incur a big increase in cost, perhaps a doubling or more, in the first year, after which time things will settle back to roughly the status quo ante. Institutions can at their control spread that increase over several years by covering an increasing percentage of articles over time.

A third method solves this problem. Publication fees are recovered immediately, not in arrears, but a “fee” needs to be sent for every article, whether recovered or not. (The fee for a fully recovered article would be 0, so really this amounts to just a notification to the publisher that this article is one for which recovery is being claimed.) This allows the institution to refrain from paying (and hence recovering) an article’s publication fee if that would violate whatever constraints it puts on underwriting fees. This is, in essence, the approach taken by the Royal Society of Chemistry’s RSC Gold voucher program.

Update January 9, 2015: JISC and Wiley have entered into an experimental agreement along these lines, as announced December 19,2014. Thanks to Thomas Munro for the pointer.

There are still problems with this transitional model. It only works for what I called true hybrids, that is, the OA fee must be set at no more than the true average revenue of the journal. There are still all the problems of knowing what that true average revenue is and of monitoring subscription decreases in the face of price discrimination and for the partially recovered articles. And finally, there is a greater complexity to the system. This final problem might be mitigated by a clever reimagining of the transitional model, just as eBay managed to get across the idea of second-price auctions to its customers by reimagining them as a traditional (first price) auction with proxy bidding. The RSC voucher approach may be a good first step in that direction.

Would publishers approve?

A few months ago, I spoke to a group from a major commercial publisher about this business model. (The topic came up in a question about why Harvard’s open-access fund doesn’t cover hybrid fees.) The reaction to this kind of proposal – which was not news to them because of the RSC program – reveals a deep problem in how this publisher thinks about the OA transition. The problem with this approach, I was told, was that as a larger percentage of articles became available open access, libraries may start to cancel their subscriptions, reducing revenues to the publisher in a way that is not made up for by the OA fees.

This is, of course, true. (It would hold also for the hybrid approach, except for the fact that uptake is so low that there is essentially no incentive to cancel subscriptions merely because of hybrid OA articles, and there is unlikely ever to be.) It is because of this possibility — that over time as the transition happens that subscriptions may be cancelled — that I refer to revenue neutrality in the short term. Examining revenues related to the marginal article, the scheme I described is revenue neutral, but overall as the larger-scale transition starts to occur, aggregate phenomena can change the revenue neutrality.

In the face of these changes, publishers have choices. If a publisher wants to achieve revenue neutrality in the face of subscription cancellations, it could raise its OA fee accordingly. The higher fee might have the effect of reducing the attractiveness of the journal to authors as they compare the fee against that of other journals, but that must be traded off against the attempt to maintain revenue. Setting prices is a business decision, a decision that should be made by the publisher to maximize its revenue. The fact that that’s harder to do in the transitional model as the anticompetitive features of the subscription market are reduced is an advantage of the model, not a flaw.

This publisher claimed that their concern was that the transitional model could substantively affect their bottom line. But what they were really admitting is that open access could substantively affect their bottom line. If uptake on the transitional model could induce cancellations that could not be recouped by increases in article fees, then the same is true for the hybrid model. Why is this publisher (like many others) an enthusiastic supporter of the hybrid model? I’m guessing it’s because they know that the hybrid model will never have substantial uptake. Since the transitional model might, they oppose it.

The point of the open-access journal model is not to maintain publishers’ revenues at the current levels made possible by the dysfunctional journal market. It is to provide publishing services without using access limitation to fund them. If doing so also introduces a competitive free market mechanism that saves money – as this publisher implicitly corroborates – so much the better.

Perhaps many current publishers, seeing the likelihood that any realistic approach to an OA transition would harm their revenues in the long term, would avoid a model like the one discussed here that has a real possibility of navigating the transition. But there may well be forward-thinking publishers (society publishers perhaps), who would honestly like to make the transition if it could be done in an appropriately gradual manner. For them, this transitional open-access model may be just the thing. If so, they should be supported in taking it up.

Peter Suber describes an interesting proposal of Mark Rowse that is a kind of high-level version of this idea, and similar in being revenue-neutral in the short term. Journals would merely reinterpret the subscription fees that they’ve been receiving as publication fees for the authors at the subscribing institution. He explores Rowse’s idea in detail, in particular, under what conditions this approach would make sense to publishers and to subscribers.↩

A document scanning smartphone handle

2014-03-13T12:46:37+00:00

…my solution to the problem…

(Demonstrating the Scan-dle to my colleagues from the OSC over a beer in a local pub. Photo: Reinhard Engels)

They are at the end of the gallery; retired to their tea and scandal, according to their ancient custom.

— William Congreve

For a project that I am working on, I needed to scan some documents in one of the Harvard libraries. Smartphones are a boon for this kind of thing, since they are highly portable and now come with quite high-quality cameras. The iPhone 5 camera, for instance, has a resolution of 3,264 x 2,448, which comes to about 300 dpi scanning a letter-size sheet of paper, and a brightness depth of 8 bits per pixel provides an effective resolution much higher.

The downside of a smartphone, and any handheld camera, is the blurring that inevitably arises from camera shake when holding the camera and pressing the shutter release. True document scanners have a big advantage here. You could use a tripod, but dragging a tripod into the library is none too convenient, and staff may even disallow it, not to mention the expense of a tripod and smartphone tripod mount.

My solution to the problem of stabilizing my smartphone for document scanning purposes is a kind of document scanning smartphone handle that I’ve dubbed the Scan-dle. The stabilization that a Scan-dle provides dramatically improves the scanning ability of a smartphone, yet it’s cheap, portable, and unobtrusive.

The Scan-dle is essentially a triangular cross-section monopod made from foam board with a smartphone platform at the top. The angled base tilts the monopod so that the smartphone’s camera sees an empty area for the documents.[1] Judicious use of hook-and-loop fasteners allows the Scan-dle to fold small and flat in a couple of seconds.

The plans at right show how the device is constructed. Cut from a sheet of foam board the shape indicated by the solid lines. (You can start by cutting out a 6" x 13.5" rectangle of board, then cutting out the bits at the four corners.) Then, along the dotted lines, carefully cut through the top paper and foam but not the bottom layer of paper. This allows the board to fold along these lines. (I recommend adding a layer of clear packaging tape along these lines on the uncut side for reinforcement.) Place four small binder clips along the bottom where indicated; these provide a flatter, more stable base. Stick on six 3/4" hook-and-loop squares where indicated, and cut two 2.5" pieces of 3/4" hook-and-loop tape.

When the board is folded along the “fold for storage” line (see image at left), you can use the tape pieces to hold it closed and flat for storage. When the board is folded along the two “fold for use” lines (see image at right), the same tape serves to hold the board together into its triangular cross section. Hook-and-loop squares applied to a smartphone case hold the phone to the platform.

To use the Scan-dle, hold the base to a desk with one hand and operate the camera’s shutter release with the other, as shown in the video below. An additional trick for iPhone users is to use the volume buttons on a set of earbuds as a shutter release for the iPhone camera, further reducing camera shake.

The Scan-dle has several nice properties:

It is made from readily available and inexpensive materials. I estimate that the cost of the materials used in a single Scan-dle is less than $10, of which about half is the iPhone case. In my case, I had everything I needed at home, so my incremental cost was $0.
It is extremely portable. It folds flat to 6" x 7" x .5", and easily fits in a backpack or handbag.
It sets up and breaks down quickly. It switches between its flat state and ready-to-go in about five seconds.
It is quite sufficient for stabilizing the smartphone.

The scanning area covered by a Scan-dle is about 8" x 11", just shy of a letter-size sheet. Of course, you can easily change the device’s height in the plans to increase that area. But I prefer to leave it short, which improves the resolution in scanning smaller pages. When a larger area is needed you can simply set the base of the Scan-dle on a book or two. Adding just 1.5" to the height of the Scan-dle gives you coverage of about 10" x 14". By the way, after you’ve offloaded the photos onto your computer, programs like the freely available Scantailor can do a wonderful job of splitting, deskewing, and cropping the pages if you’d like.

Let me know in the comments section if you build a Scan-dle and how it works for you, especially if you come up with any use tips or design improvements.

Materials:

(Links are for reference only; no need to buy in these quantities.)

The design bears a resemblance to a 2011 Kickstarter-funded document scanner attachment called the Scandy, though there are several differences. The Scandy was a telescoping tube that attached with a vise mount to a desk; the Scan-dle simplifies by using the operator’s hand as the mount. The Scandy’s telescoping tube allowed the scan area to be sized to the document; the Scan-dle must be rested on some books to increase the scan area. Because of its solid construction, the Scandy was undoubtedly slightly heavier and bulkier than the Scan-dle. The Scandy cost some €40 ($55); the Scan-dle comes in at a fraction of that. Finally, the Scandy seems no longer to be available; the open-source Scan-dle never varies in its availability. ↩

A model OA journal publication agreement

2014-02-19T16:03:34+00:00

…decided to write my own…

In a previous post, I proposed that open-access journals use the CC-BY license for their scholar-contributed articles:

As long as you’re founding a new journal, its contents should be as open as possible consistent with appropriate attribution. That exactly characterizes the CC-BY license. It’s also a tremendously simple approach. Once the author grants a CC-BY license, no further rights need be granted to the publisher. There’s no need for talk about granting the publisher a nonexclusive license to publish the article, etc., etc. The CC-BY license already allows the publisher to do so. There’s no need to talk about what rights the author retains, since the author retains all rights subject to the nonexclusive CC-BY license. I’ve made the case for a CC-BY license at length elsewhere.

Recently, a journal asked me how to go about doing just that. What should their publication agreement look like? It was a fair question, and one I didn't have a ready answer for. The "Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing" provides a template agreement that is refreshingly minimalist, but by my lights misses some important aspects. I looked around at various journals to see what they did, but didn't find any agreements that seemed ideal either. So I decided to write my own. Herewith is my proposal for a model OA publication agreement.

I had various goals for the agreement to achieve (enumerated here with the paragraph number that achieves each goal). First and foremost, the agreement should lead to a CC-BY license in the article being granted (¶2), so that the journal and the general public as well get broad use and reuse rights to the text -- though all other rights in the work should stay with the authors (¶4). The attribution aspect of the CC-BY license makes sure that the authors get credit for their work, but the journal should get some credit as well for having provided the services culminating in the article's publication (¶3). Those services may include editorial revision of the article. Of course, authors should have say in any changes made to the article, and the license should unambiguously cover not only the submitted manuscript, but the final published version of the article as well, even in the (unlikely) case where the publisher's changes could be construed as constituting a separately copyrightable derivative work (¶5). The authors have a responsibility in this contract as well, to act in good faith: the article should be original, proprietary, and legal (¶6); if there are, in fact, multiple authors, a single one should be able to act as corresponding author on behalf of all (¶1). Finally, the agreement should only have force if the publisher actually publishes the article in a timely fashion (¶7).

Some of the provisions of the agreement cover issues that are apposite at the time of submission — especially the requirements in ¶6 of originality and single submission — other provisions upon acceptance — in particular, the license provisions. The agreement is intended for use at the time that an article is accepted for publication. In a sense, the authors' warrants of ¶6 are thus a bit late in coming. But I expect there's little problem in this. It's unlikely that authors will go through the entire process of submitting an article that violates ¶6 merely because they were not aware that journal submissions were required to be original, proprietary, and legal, especially if the journal posts those requirements in its submissions policy on its web site along with a copy of the publication agreement that authors will eventually be required to sign. The alternative is to rephrase the agreement with much of it moved to a kind of conditional language ("If the article is accepted for publication, you will...") and have it signed upon submission rather than acceptance. Personally, I prefer the simplicity of the approach taken here.

The signature block at the end is formatted as if the agreement will be signed by the corresponding author and countersigned by the publisher. These days, such signature is likely to be handled through a clickthrough web form. The signature block can be updated accordingly for that context, for instance, by placing a radio button in front of the statement "I HAVE READ AND AGREE FULLY WITH THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT" and a Submit button at the end.

Journals should feel free to make use of this model agreement in any way they see fit; it is, after all, itself provided under a CC-BY license. (I myself benefited from language in the JMLR publication agreement.) If you do make use of the agreement, please let me know; I'd love to track if and where it gets used. And of course I'd be interested in any suggestions that people have for its improvement.

(Thanks to Michael Carroll, Jonathan Hulbert, Sue Kriegsman, Peter Suber, and Caroline Sutton for their advice on earlier drafts of the agreement and post. However, the wording of the agreement and opinions expressed in the post are my own; they bear no responsibility for the result.)

Update June 27, 2015: I've noted a couple of journals that are using the model agreement: Journal of Applied Education Research, and Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative. In addition, I've been informed that Sociological Science will be moving to this agreement shortly.

Update September 4, 2017: I've been informed that the journal Global Health Innovation uses this agreement.

Update July 28, 2020: TU Delft’s open access publishing program TU Delft OPEN is using the model agreement for their book publishing program.

Publication Agreement

[This is version 1.2 of 8 January 2014. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. The license's attribution requirement can be satisfied by including language conveying at least the following: “The language of this publication agreement is based on Stuart Shieber’s model open-access journal publication agreement, version 1.2, available at http://bit.ly/1m9UsNt.” If you intend to use this agreement, I request as a courtesy that you notify me so that I can track usage.]

This is a publication agreement (“this agreement”) regarding a written manuscript currently entitled […] (manuscript title) (“the article”) to be published in […] (“the journal”). The parties to this Agreement are: […] (the corresponding author on behalf of any other authors, collectively “you”) and […], (“the publisher”).

By signing this form, you warrant that you are signing on behalf of all authors of the article, and that you have the authority to act as their agent for the purpose of entering into this agreement.
You hereby grant a Creative Commons copyright license in the article to the general public, in particular a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which is incorporated herein by reference and is further specified at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode (human readable summary at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).
You agree to require that a citation to the original publication of the article in the journal be included in any attribution statement satisfying the attribution requirement of the Creative Commons license of paragraph 2.
You retain ownership of all rights under copyright in all versions of the article, and all rights not expressly granted in this agreement.
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3. The article does not libel anyone, invade anyone’s copyright or otherwise violate any statutory or common law right of anyone, and that you have made all reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of any factual information contained in the article. You agree to indemnify the publisher against any claim or action alleging facts which, if true, constitute a breach of any of the foregoing warranties or other provisions of this agreement, as well as against any related damages, losses, liabilities, and expenses incurred by the publisher.
This is the entire agreement between you and the publisher, and it may be modified only in writing. It will be governed by the laws of […the Commonwealth of Massachusetts…]. It will bind and benefit our respective assigns and successors in interest, including your heirs. It will terminate if the publisher does not publish, in any medium, the article within one year of the date of your signature.

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Thoughts on founding open-access journals

2013-11-21T15:00:04+00:00

… altogether too much concern with the contents of the journal’s spine text…
“reference” image by flickr user Sara S. used by permission.

Precipitated by a recent request to review some proposals for new open-access journals, I spent some time gathering my own admittedly idiosyncratic thoughts on some of the issues that should be considered when founding new open-access journals. I make them available here. Good sources for more comprehensive information on launching and operating open-access journals are SPARC’s open-access journal publishing resource index and the Open Access Directories guides for OA journal publishers.

Unlike most of my posts, I may augment this post over time, and will do so without explicit marking of the changes. Your thoughts on additions to the topics below—via comments or email—are appreciated. A version number (currently version 1.0) will track the changes for reference.

It is better to flip a journal than to found one

The world has enough journals. Adding new open-access journals as alternatives to existing ones may be useful if there are significant numbers of high quality articles being generated in a field for which there is no reasonable open-access venue for publication. Such cases are quite rare, especially given the rise of open-access “megajournals” covering the sciences (PLoS ONE, Scientific Reports, AIP Advances, SpringerPlus, etc.), and the social sciences and humanities (SAGE Open). Where there are already adequate open-access venues (even if no one journal is “perfect” for the field), scarce resources are probably better spent elsewhere, especially on flipping journals from closed to open access.

Admittedly, the world does not have enough open-access journals (at least high-quality ones). So if it is not possible to flip a journal, founding a new one may be a reasonable fallback position, but it is definitely the inferior alternative.

Licensing should be by CC-BY

It’s all about the editorial board

The main product that a journal is selling is its reputation. A new journal with no track record needs high quality submissions to bootstrap that reputation, and at the start, nothing is more convincing to authors to submit high quality work to the journal than its editorial board. Getting high-profile names somewhere on the masthead at the time of the official launch is the most important thing for the journal to do. (“We can add more people later” is a risky proposition. You may not get a second chance to make a first impression.)

Getting high-profile names on your board may occur naturally if you use the expedient of flipping an existing closed-access journal, thereby stealing the board, which also has the benefit of acquiring the journal’s previous reputation and eliminating one more subscription journal.

Another good idea for jumpstarting a journal’s reputation is to prime the article pipeline by inviting leaders in the field to submit their best articles to the journal before its official launch, so that the journal announcement can provide information on forthcoming articles by luminaries.

Follow ethical standards

Adherence to the codes of conduct of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) should be fundamental. Membership in the organizations is recommended; the fees are extremely reasonable.

You can outsource the process

There is a lot of interest among certain institutions to found new open-access journals, institutions that may have no particular special expertise in operating journals. A good solution is to outsource the operation of the journal to an organization that does have special expertise, namely, a journal publisher. There are several such publishers who have experience running open-access journals effectively and efficiently. Some are exclusively open-access publishers, for example, Co-Action Publishing, Hindawi Publishing, Ubiquity Press. Others handle both open- and closed-access journals: HighWire Press, Oxford University Press, ScholasticaHQ, Springer/BioMed Central, Wiley. This is not intended as a complete listing (the Open Access Directory has a complementary offering), nor in any sense an endorsement of any of these organizations, just a comment that shopping the journal around to a publishing partner may be a good idea. Especially given the economies of scale that exist in journal publishing, an open-access publishing partner may allow the journal to operate much more economically than having to establish a whole organization in-house.

Certain functionality should be considered a baseline

Geoffrey Pullum, in his immensely satisfying essays “Stalking the Perfect Journal” and “Seven Deadly Sins in Journal Publishing”, lists his personal criteria in journal design. They are a good starting point, but need updating for the era of online distribution. (There is altogether too much concern with the contents of the journal’s spine text for instance.)

Reviewing should be anonymous (with regard to the reviewers) and blind (with regard to the authors), except where a commanding argument can be given for experimenting with alternatives.
Every article should be preserved in one (or better, more than one) preservation system. CLOCKSS, Portico¹, a university or institutional archival digital repository are good options.
Every article should have complete bibliographic metadata on the first page, including license information (a simple reference to CC-BY; see above), and (as per Pullum) first and last page numbers.
The journal should provide DOIs for its articles. OASPA membership is an inexpensive way to acquire the ability to assign DOIs. An article’s DOI should be included in the bibliographic metadata on the first page.

There’s additional functionality beyond this baseline that would be ideal, though the tradeoff against the additional effort required would have to be evaluated.

Provide article-level metrics, especially download statistics, though other “altmetrics” may be helpful.
Provide access to the articles in multiple formats in addition to PDF: HTML, XML with the NLM DTD.
Provide the option for readers to receive alerts of new content through emails and RSS feeds.
Encourage authors to provide the underlying data to be distributed openly as well, and provide the infrastructure for them to do so.

Take advantage of the networked digital era

Many journal publishing conventions of long standing are no longer well motivated in the modern era. Here are a few examples. They are not meant to be exhaustive. You can probably think of others. The point is that certain standard ideas can and should be rethought.

There is no longer any need for “issues” of journals. Each article should be published as soon as it is finished, no later and no sooner. If you’d like, an “issue” number can be assigned that is incremented for each article. (Volumes, incremented annually, are still necessary because many aspects of the scholarly publishing and library infrastructure make use of them. They are also useful for the purpose of characterizing a bolus of content for storage and preservation purposes.)
Endnotes, a relic of the day when typesetting was a complicated and fraught process that was eased by a human being not having to determine how much space to leave at the bottom of a page for footnotes, should be permanently retired. Footnotes are far easier for readers (which is the whole point really), and computers do the drudgery of calculating the space for them.
Page limits are silly. In the old physical journal days, page limits had two purposes. They were necessary because journal issues came in quanta of page signatures, and therefore had fundamental physical limits to the number of pages that could be included. A network-distributed journal no longer has this problem. Page limits also serve the purpose of constraining the author to write relatively succinctly, easing the burden on reviewer and (eventually) reader. But for this purpose the page is not a robust unit of measurement of the constrained resource, the reviewers’ and the readers’ attention. One page can hold anything from a few hundred to a thousand or more words. If limits are to be required, they should be stated in appropriate units such as the number of words. The word count should not include figures, tables, or bibliography, as they impinge on readers’ attention in a qualitatively different way.
Author-date citation is far superior to numeric citation in every way except for the amount of space and ink required. Now that digital documents use no physical space or ink, there is no longer an excuse for numeric citations. Similarly, ibid. and op. cit. should be permanently retired. I appreciate that different fields have different conventions on these matters. That doesn’t change the fact that those fields that have settled on numeric citations or ibidded footnotes are on the wrong side of technological history.
Extensive worry about and investment in fancy navigation within and among the journal’s articles is likely to be a waste of time, effort, and resources. To first approximation, all accesses to articles in the journal will come from sites higher up in the web food chain—the Google’s and Bing’s, the BASE’s and OAIster’s of the world. Functionality that simplifies navigation among articles across the whole scholarly literature (cross-linked DOIs in bibliographies, for instance, or linked open metadata of various sorts) is a different matter.

Think twice

In the end, think long and hard about whether founding a new open-access journal is the best use of your time and your institution’s resources in furthering the goals of open scholarly communication. Operating a journal is not free, in cash and in time. Perhaps a better use of resources is making sure that the academic institutions and funders are set up to underwrite the existing open-access journals in the optimal way. But if it's the right thing to do, do it right.

A caveat on Portico’s journal preservation service: The service is designed to release its stored articles when a “trigger event” occurs, for instance, if the publisher ceases operations. Unfortunately, Portico doesn’t release the journal contents openly, but only to its library participants, even for OA journals. However, if the articles were licensed under CC-BY, any participating library could presumably reissue them openly.↩

The Affordable Care Act's contradictory free market stance

2013-10-30T21:43:33+00:00

…in the upper 90's…
apparently from Health Care for America Now! via logarchism.com.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) limits the “medical loss ratio” (MLR) that an insurer can have — the percentage of collected medical premiums that must go to medical services for the insured. The minimum MLR mandated by the law is 80-85% depending on the particular market. (For simplicity, let’s call it 80%.)

On its face, this seems like a good idea. If an insurer’s MLR is really low, say 50%, they’re keeping an awful lot of money for administration and profit, and it looks like the premium-payers are getting a raw deal. By limiting MLR to at least 80%, premium-payers are guaranteed that at most 20% of their money will go to those costs that benefit them not at all. But there may be unintended consequences of the MLR limit, and alternatives to achieving its goal.

Because of the MLR limit, an insurance company that spends $1,000,000 on medical services can generate at most $250,000 in profit. They’d reach this limit by charging premiums totalling $1,250,000, yielding an MLR of 1,000,000/1,250,000 = .80. (Of course, they’d generate even less profit than this, since they have other costs than medical services, but $250,000 is an upper bound on their profit.) They can’t increase their profit by charging higher premiums alone, since this would just blow the MLR limit. The only way to increase the profits (governed by the denominator in the MLR calculation) is to increase medical services (the numerator) as well — pay for more doctor visits, longer stays, more tests, just the kinds of things we’re already spending too much on with our moral-hazard–infested medical care system. The MLR limit embeds an incentive for insurance companies to push for more medical services, whether needed or not.

And why 80%? Medicare has had an MLR in the upper 90%'s for a couple of decades, and private insurers used to make a go of it in that range as well in the early 1990's. (See graph.) Other countries have MLR's in the mid-90's as well. An MLR limit of 80% means that once an insurer reaches 80% MLR, the regulation drops any incentive to improve further.

Wasn’t this moral hazard and inefficiency just the sort of thing the ACA was supposed to resolve by using market forces? When people buy insurance premiums on a transparently priced exchange, if one insurer is less efficient or egregious in profit-taking (therefore with a low MLR), it should end up outcompeted by more efficient and leaner insurers. No need to mandate a limit; the market will solve the problem.

If you think that the market forces in the health care exchanges won’t compete down adminstrative overheads and profits (that is, raise MLR) on their own and that regulation is necessary to prevent abuse, then you’re pretty much conceding that the market doesn’t work under the ACA, and that we should move to a single-payer system. MLR limits are not a way of achieving a more efficient insurance system but rather an admission that our insurance system is inherently broken. The MLR limit looks to me like a crisis of faith in the free market. What am I missing?

Can gerrymandering be solved with cut-and-choose?

2013-10-28T14:45:45+00:00

Update March 25, 2019: Wesley Pegden, Ariel D. Procaccia, and Dingli Yu have an elegant working out of the proposal below that they call "I cut, you freeze." Pegden and Procaccia describe it in a Washington Post opinion piece.

…how to split a cupcake…
“Halves” image by flickr user Julie Remizova.

Why is gerrymandering even possible in a country with a constitutional right to equal protection?:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

By reshaping districts to eliminate the voting power of particular individuals, as modern district mapping software allows, some persons are being denied equal protection, I’d have thought. And so have certain Supreme Court justices.

It’s hard to know what to do about the problem. Appeals to fairness aren’t particularly helpful, since who decides what’s fair? It would be nice to think that requirements of “compact districts of contiguous territory” (as Chief Justice Harlan put it) would be sufficient. But this reduces the problem of districting to a mathematical optimization problem; James Case proposes something like minimum isoperimetric quotient tessellation of a polygon. But such purely mathematical approaches may yield results that violate our intuitions about what is fair. They ignore other criteria, such as “natural or historical boundary lines”, determined for instance by geographical features like rivers and mountains or shared community interests. These boundaries may not coincide with the mathematical optima, so any mathematical formulation would need to be defeasible to take into account such features. This leads us right back to how to decide in which cases the mathematical formulation should be adjusted: who should decide what is fair?

A comment at a ProPublica article about gerrymandering from “damien” caught my attention as a nice way out of this quandary. In essence, he proposes that the parties themselves choose what’s fair.

The first solution to gerrymandering is to have a fitness measure for a proposed districting (e.g. the sum of the perimeters), and then to allow any individual or organisation to propose a districting, with the winner having the best fitness value.

What "damien" is proposing, I take it, is the application of an algorithm somewhat like one familiar from computer science (especially cryptography) and grade school cafeterias known as “cut and choose”. How do you decide how to split a cupcake between two kids? One cuts; the other chooses. The elegance of cut-and-choose is that it harmonizes the incentives of the two parties. The cutter is incentivized to split equally, since the chooser can punish inequity.

Cut-and-choose is asymmetrical; the two participants have different roles. A symmetrical variant has each participant propose a cut and an objective third party selecting whichever is better according to the pertinent objective measure. This variant shares the benefit that each participant has an incentive to be more nearly equal than the other. If Alice proposes a cut that gives her 60% of the cupcake and Bob 40%, she risks Bob proposing a better split that gives her only 45% with him taking the remaining 55%. To avoid getting taken advantage of, her best bet is to propose a split as nearly equal as possible.

In the anti-gerrymandering application of the idea, the two parties propose districtings, which they could gerrymander however they wanted. Whichever of the two proposals has the lower objective function (lower isoperimetric quotient, say) is chosen. Thus, if one party gerrymanders too much, their districting will be dropped in favor of the other party’s proposal. Each party has an incentive to hew relatively close to a compact partition, while being allowed to deviate in appropriate cases.

A nice property of this approach is that the optimization problem doesn’t ever need to be solved. All that is required is the evaluation of the objective function for the two proposed districtings, which is computationally far simpler. (In fact, I’d guess the minimum isoperimetric quotient optimization problem might well be NP-hard.)

There are problems of course. The procedure is subject to gaming when the proposal-generating process is not private to the parties. It is unclear how to extend the method to more than two parties. Of course, the obvious generalization works once the eligible parties are determined. The hard part is deciding what parties are eligible to propose a redistricting. Most critically, the method is subject to collusion, especially in cases where both parties benefit from gerrymandering. In particular, both parties benefit from a districting that protects incumbencies for both parties. The parties could agree, for instance, not to disturb each other's safe districts, and would benefit from observing the agreement.

Nonetheless, once districting is thought of in terms of mechanism design, the full range of previous algorithms can be explored. Somewhere in the previous literature there might be a useful solution. (Indeed, the proposal here is essentially the first step in Brams, Jones, and Klamler's surplus procedure for cake-cutting.)

Of course, as with many current political problems (campaign financing being the clearest example), the big question is how such new mechanisms would be instituted, given that it is not in the incumbent majority party's interest to do so. Until that’s sorted out, I’m not holding out much hope.

Why the serial comma helps, and why it's not sufficient

2013-10-15T19:41:17+00:00

I came across the following perfect example of the importance of the serial comma, in a ProPublica article describing a problematic data leak:

The story prompted a leak investigation. The FBI sought to obtain my phone records and those of Jane Perlez, the Times bureau chief in Indonesia and my wife.

Under the serial comma convention, the phrase "Jane Perlez, the Times bureau chief in Indonesia and my wife" describes a single person under three descriptions — a proper name, a professional post, and a personal connection. With the extra comma, "Jane Perlez, the Times bureau chief in Indonesia, and my wife" would describe three distinct people.

Unfortunately, since it's not clear whether ProPublica always follows the serial comma convention, the version without the extra comma is ambiguous. (I even looked for a ProPublica style guide that might clarify their house style on the matter.) For that reason, when I first read the sentence, I actually could not easily determine whether the one referent or three referent interpretation was intended. The solution for the careful writer: Always use the Harvard comma where appropriate, and in cases such as the above, rephrase the sentence to disambiguate:

The FBI sought to obtain my phone records and those of Jane Perlez, who is the Times bureau chief in Indonesia and my wife.

Lessons from the faux journal investigation

2013-10-15T13:01:24+00:00

…what 419 scams are to banking… …what 419 scams are to banking…
“scams upon scammers” image by flickr user Daniel Mogford used by permission.

Investigative science journalist John Bohannon[1] has a news piece in Science earlier this month about the scourge of faux open-access journals. I call them faux journals (rather than predatory journals), since they are not real journals at all. They display the trappings of a journal, promising peer-review and other services, but do not deliver; they perform no peer review, and provide no services, beyond posting papers and cashing checks for the publication fees. They are to scholarly journal publishing what 419 scams are to banking.

We’ve known about this practice for a long time, and Jeffrey Beall has done yeoman’s work codifying it informally. He has noted a recent dramatic increase in the number of publishers that appear to be engaged in the practice, growing by an order of magnitude in 2012 alone.

In the past, I’ve argued that the faux journal problem, while unfortunate, is oversold. My argument was that the existence of these faux journals costs clued-in researchers, research institutions, and the general public nothing. The journals don’t charge subscription fees, and we don’t submit articles to them so don’t pay their publication fees. Caveat emptor ought to handle the problem, I would have thought.

But I’ve come to understand over the past few years that the faux journal problem is important to address. The number of faux journals has exploded, and despite the fact that the faux journals tend to publish few articles, their existence crowds out attention to the many high-quality open-access journals. Their proliferation provides a convenient excuse to dismiss open-access journals as a viable model for scholarly publishing. It is therefore important to get a deeper and more articulated view of the problem.

My views on Bohannon’s piece, which has seen a lot of interest, may therefore be a bit contrarian among OA aficionados, who are quick to dismiss the effort as a stunt or to attribute hidden agendas. Despite some flaws (which have been widely noted and are discussed in part below), the study well characterizes and provides a far richer understanding of the faux OA journal problem. Bohannon provides tremendous texture to our understanding of the problem, far better than the anecdotal and unsystematic approaches that have been taken in the past.

His study shows that even in these early days of open-access publishing, many OA journals are doing an at least plausible job of peer review. In total, 98 of the 255 journals that came to a decision on the bogus paper (about 38%) rejected it. It makes clear that the problem of faux journal identification may not be as simple as looking at superficial properties of journal web sites. About 18% of the journals from Beall’s list of predatory publishers actually performed sufficient peer review to reject the bogus articles outright.

Just as clearly, the large and growing problem of faux journals — so easy to set up and so inexpensive to run — requires all scholars to pay careful attention to the services that journals provide. This holds especially for open-access journals, which are generally newer, with shorter track records, and for which the faux journal fraud has proliferated in a short time much faster than appropriate countermeasures can be deployed. The experiment provides copious data on where the faux journals tend to operate from, where they bank, where their editors are.

Bohannon should also be commended for providing his underlying data open access, which will allow others to do even more detailed analysis.

As with all studies, there are some aspects that require careful interpretation.

First, the experiment did not test subscription journals. All experimenters, Bohannon included, must decide how to deploy scarce resources; his concentrating on OA journals, where the faux journal problem is well known to be severe, is reasonable for certain purposes. However, as many commentators have noted, it does prevent drawing specific conclusions comparing OA with subscription journals. Common sense might indicate that OA journals, whose revenues rely more directly on the number of articles published, have more incentive to fraudulently accept articles without review, but the study unfortunately can’t directly corroborate this, and as in so many areas, common sense may be wrong. We know, for instance, that many OA journals seem to operate without the rapacity to accept every article that comes over the transom, and that there are countervailing economic incentives for OA journals to maintain high quality. Journals from 98 publishers — including the “big three” OA publishers Public Library of Science, Hindawi, and BioMed Central — all rejected the bogus paper, and more importantly, a slew of high-quality journals throughout many fields of scholarship are conducting exemplary peer review on every paper they receive. (Good examples are the several OA journals in my own research area of artificial intelligence — JMLR, JAIR, CL — which are all at the top of the prestige ladder in their fields.) Conversely, subscription publishers also may have perverse incentives to accept papers: Management typically establish goals for the number of articles to be published per year; they use article count statistics in marketing efforts; their regular founding of new journals engenders a need for a supply of articles so as to establish their contribution to the publisher’s stable of bundled journals; and many subscription journals especially in the life sciences charge author-side fees as well. Nonetheless, it would be unsurprising if the acceptance rate for the bogus articles would have been lower for subscription journal publishers given what we know about the state of faux journals. (Since there are many times more subscription journals than OA journals, it’s unclear how the problem would have compared in terms of absolute numbers of articles.) Hopefully, future work can clear up this problem with controls.

Second, the experiment did not test journals charging no author-side fees, which is currently the norm among OA journals. That eliminates about 70% of the OA journals, none of which have any incentive whatsoever to accept articles for acceptance’s sake. Ditto for journals that gain their revenue through submission fees instead of publication fees, a practice that I have long been fond of.

Third, his result holds only for journal publishing in the life sciences. (Some people in the life sciences need occasional reminding that science research is not coextensive with life sciences research, and that scholarly research is not coextensive with science research.) I suspect the faux journal problem is considerably lower outside of the life sciences. It is really only in the life sciences where there is long precedent for author-side charges and deep pockets to pay those charges in much of the world, so that legitimate OA publishers can rely on being paid for their services. This characteristic of legitimate life sciences OA journals provides the cover for the faux journals to pretend to operate in the same way. In many other areas of scholarship, OA journals do not tend to charge publication fees as the researcher community does not have the same precedent.

Finally, and most importantly, since the study reports percentages by publisher, rather than by journal or by published article, the results may overrepresent the problem from the reader’s point of view. Just because 62% of the tested publishers[2] accepted the bogus paper doesn’t mean the problem covers that percentage of OA publishing or even of life sciences APC-charging OA publishing. The faux publishers may publish a smaller percentage of the journals (though the faux publishers’ tactic of listing large numbers of unstaffed journals may lead to the opposite conclusion). More importantly, those publishers may cover a much smaller fraction of OA-journal-published papers. (Anyone who has spent any time surfing the web sites of faux journal publishers knows their tendency to list many journals with very few articles. Even fewer if you eliminate the plagiarized articles that faux publishers like to use to pad their journals.) So the vast majority of OA-published articles are likely to be from the 38% “good” journals. This should be determinable from Bohannon’s data — again thanks to his openness — and it would be useful to carry out the calculation, to show that the total number of OA-journal articles published by the faux publishers account for a small fraction of the OA articles published in all of the OA journals of all of the publishers in the study. I expect that’s highly likely.[3]

Bohannon has provided a valuable service, and his article is an important reminder, like the previous case of the faux Australasian Journals, that journal publishers do not always operate under selfless motivations. It behooves authors to take this into account, and it behooves the larger scientific community to establish infrastructure for helping researchers by systematically and fairly tracking and publicizing information about journals that can help its members with their due diligence.

In the interest of full disclosure, I mention that I am John Bohannon’s sponsor in his role as an Associate (visiting researcher) of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. He conceived, controlled, and carried out his study independently, and was in no sense under my direction. Though I did have discussions with him about his project, including on some of the topics discussed below, the study and its presentation were his alone. ↩
It is also worth noting that by actively searching out lists of faux journals (Beall’s list) to add to a more comprehensive list (DOAJ), Bohannon may have introduced skew into the data collection. The attempt to be even more comprehensive than DOAJ is laudable, but the method chosen means that even more care must be taken in interpreting the results. If we look only at the DOAJ-listed journals that were tested, the acceptance rate drops from 62% to 45%. If we look only at OASPA members subject to the test, who commit to a code of conduct, then by my count the acceptance rate drops to 17%. That’s still too high of course, but it does show that the cohort counts, and adding in Beall’s list but not OASPA membership (for instance) could have an effect. ↩
In a videotaped live chat, Michael Eisen has claimed that this is exactly the case. ↩

Ecumenical open access and the Finch Report principles

2013-07-10T15:20:54+00:00

...myopic...
"myopic" image by flickr user haglundc used by permission.

I was invited by the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences to write a piece on last year's report "Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications" by the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings (the "Finch Report"). The paper is part of a collection on "Debating Open Access".

The Finch Report has been broadly criticized by open access advocates for several reasons, especially its preferring gold to green OA, and doing so to such an extent that its proposals actually incentivize publishers to make their publication agreements less OA-friendly. In fact, there's evidence that publishers are already acting on those incentives.

I took the opportunity to concentrate my remarks on one of the underemphasized problems with the Finch Report recommendations, their conflation of two quite different notions of gold open access: open-access journals and hybrid journals. The two models work quite differently from a market perspective, and ignoring the distinctions leads to incredibly bad incentives in the resulting recommendations.

The published version of the paper has been made available by the British Academy under a CC-by-nc-nd license. I've duplicated it below, under a CC-by license as with all Occasional Pamphlet postings.

The Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings first convened in 2011 at the behest of David Willetts, the UK Minister for Universities and Science, to “examine how most effectively to expand access to the quality-assured published outputs of research; and to propose a programme of action to that end.” The group consisted of representatives of various of the stakeholder communities related to scholarly publishing, and was chaired by Janet Finch. Their final report (Finch 2012) makes concrete policy recommendations for UK research funders to implement, and has been the basis for the policies being set by the Research Councils UK (RCUK).

There is much to like in the Finch Report on open access. The primary recommendations have to do with directly providing for open access to scholarly articles funded by UK research agencies.¹ The report appropriately outlines four desiderata that need to be optimised to this end (Finch 2012, 17):

Access: The report takes as given the importance and desirability of open access to the scholarly literature.
Usability: It highlights the importance of a broad range of use rights, not just the ability for researchers to read the articles, but all other kinds of reuse rights as well.
Quality: The scholarly publishing system must, in the eyes of the Finch committee, continue to provide the vetting and filtering for quality that is the hallmark of the peer review system.
Cost and sustainability: It recognises that there are costs in publishing the literature, that the funders of research should take on those costs for the research they fund, and that the mechanisms for doing so must be sustainable.

Based on these principles, the report adduces certain conclusions. The access principle militates for articles being provided openly, so that the pure subscription revenue model, where revenue is based solely on limiting access to those willing and able to pay, is deprecated. The quality principle is taken to argue for journals that themselves provide open access to their articles, rather than relying on authors or institutions to merely provide supplementary access through article repositories. The cost and sustainability principle leads to the idea that funders might pay directly for the costs involved in journals’ processing of articles, these payments substituting for the deprecated subscription revenues. The usability principle entails that when articles are paid for in this way, they ought by rights to be usable as broadly as possible, for instance, through Creative Commons attribution licences.

Now for the bad. The concrete recommendations that the Finch Report outlines do not present a prescription for optimising these principles in the long term. Rather, they pursue short-term prescriptions that will likely provide merely incremental access gains at a very high cost. The primary problem in the Finch Report that leads to this unfortunate consequence is the conflation of two quite different market models as one: full open access and hybrid.

Three market structures

To understand why this is so, we must look to the underlying economics of article publishing, which governs the incentives of the participants in the market. There are three revenue models for journals that are at play in the Finch Report: subscription journals, open-access journals, and hybrid journals.

The subscription journal market

The current predominant market structure of the scholarly journal industry is based on reader-side payments, limiting access to those willing and able to pay subscription fees for the journals. This market structure is manifestly dysfunctional. The reader-side market has led to a well-attested decades-long spiral of hyperinflation of journal prices,² causing libraries to have to cancel subscriptions, causing publishers to further raise prices to retain revenues. This vicious cycle has two bad effects: the costs to research libraries (and the funding agencies that provide their underwriting through overhead fees) have grown substantially and unsustainably in real terms, while cancellations mean less access to the articles themselves. It is this access problem that the Finch Report strives to address, subject to the cost and sustainability problem as well.

The reasons for the market dysfunction are, by now, well understood. First, the good being sold — access to articles — is a monopolistic good, based on the monopoly right of copyright, and as such is subject to monopoly rents. Second, subscription journals are not (in the economists’ parlance) substitutive goods; access to one journal does not decrease the value of access to another, and in fact may well increase the value (as journals cite each other), making them complementary goods. Complementary goods do not compete against each other like substitutive goods do. Third, journals are sold under conditions of moral hazard; the consumers (readers) are not the purchasers (libraries), and hence are insulated from the costs. As with all moral hazards, this leads to inelasticity of demand and overconsumption. Finally, consolidation of multiple journals under a few large publishers insulates these publishers from economic pressure from cancellations, since they can adjust prices on the remaining journals to compensate for lost revenue.

The subscription market structure thus violates both the access and cost and sustainability desiderata of the Finch Report. Clearly, any long-term strategy for broadening access to articles must move away from this market structure, rather than providing it further support.

In the shorter term, the access problems with the subscription market (though not the sustainability problems) can be greatly alleviated by providing supplementary access to the articles — so-called green open access — by posting copies of article manuscripts in subject-based or institutional repositories. Funding agencies have managed to generate tremendous access gains to their funded research by mandating such supplementary access, beginning with the “public access policy” of the US National Institutes of Health, which requires posting of author manuscripts in NIH’s PubMed Central repository no later than 12 months after publication. Although there is no evidence that immediate green open access has detrimental effect on publisher sustainability or even revenues (Maxwell 2012), embargoes such as those allowed for in the NIH policy (or the more widely used six-month embargoes found in essentially every other funder policy) further reduce any pressure on subscription revenue at the cost of delaying the access. But even if green open access did have an effect on market demand for subscriptions, this would be no argument against mandating it, so long as there were a viable alternative market structure for those journals to use.³

The open-access journal market

And indeed, there is an alternative market structure, one that is in fact highly preferable in that it does not have the same frailties as the reader-side subscription market structure, namely, an author-side market structure. In this system, the good being sold is not access for readers but publishing services for authors — the management of peer review (generating valuable feedback to the author); production services (such as copy-editing, typesetting, graphic design); and most importantly to academic authors, imprimatur of the journal. This market is seen most directly in open-access journals⁴ that charge a flat article-processing charge (APC), paid by or on behalf of authors. The APC spreads the costs of operating the journal plus a reasonable profit over the articles it publishes.

This market structure doesn’t have the same market dysfunction exhibited by the subscription market, both in theory and in practice. First, publisher services are not a monopolistic good; any publisher can provide them to authors. Second, from the point of view of an article author, journals are substitutive goods, not complementary goods, since submission to one journal does not increase the value of submitting to another journal. In fact, because an article can only be submitted to one journal, journals are perfect substitutes in the author-side market. Third, if authors pay APCs, there is no moral hazard, and if funders or employers pay on their behalf, moral hazard can be mitigated by introducing limits or copayments. (Shieber 2009) Finally, bundling doesn’t apply to the good sold in the open-access journal market as it does in the subscription market.⁵

For these reasons, one would expect strong market competition and price control in the open-access journal market in theory, and in practice, that is exactly what we see. Not only is there no evidence of hyperinflation, there are signs of strong price competition, with new models arising that can deliver publishing services at a fraction of the cost of subscription journals.

The hybrid journal market

A third market structure, the hybrid journal, plays a frequent role in discussions of open access and in the Finch Report in particular. Hybrid journals are subscription journals that also allow authors to pay an APC to make individual articles available open access. This model has been around for over a decade, and has been taken up by essentially all of the major subscription journal publishers. It has been touted as a transitional mechanism to allow journals to transition from the reader-side payments to writer-side payments. The theory goes that as more and more authors pay the APCs, the subscription fees will be reduced accordingly, so that eventually, once a sufficient fraction of the articles are covered by APCs, the subscription fees can be dropped altogether and the journal converted to full open access. Confusingly, both open-access journals and hybrid journals are sometimes included under the term gold open access, despite the fact that from an economic point of view they are quite distinct.

In particular, the hybrid model is not an appropriate transitional model to true open access. First, hybrid journals have not seen a major uptake in voluntary payment of hybrid APCs in practice. This is not surprising. There’s very little in it for authors, since they typically have a far less expensive alternative method for achieving open-access to their articles through green open access. (In this way, the hybrid model disincentivises publishers from allowing green open access, another perverse effect of the model.) There’s very little in it for universities too, who are unlikely to underwrite these hybrid fees on behalf of authors. Although paying the hybrid fees is supposed to lead to a concomitant reduction in subscription fees, it is extremely difficult to guarantee that this is occurring, and in any case any such reduction is spread among all of the subscribers, so provides little direct benefit to the payer. Of course, payment of hybrid fees could be mandated by a funder. (Getting ahead of ourselves a bit, this is essentially what the Finch Report promotes.) But even if this practice were widespread and most articles had their hybrid fees paid, journals would still have no incentive to switch to the full open-access APC-only model. Why would they voluntarily give up one of their two types of revenue? Finally, hybrid APCs are not subject to the competitive pressures of open-access APCs and would be predicted therefore to be higher. This is exactly what we see in practice, with open-access APCs shaking out in the $750–2000 range and hybrid fees in the $3000–4000 range.

Comparing Recommendations

Put together, these three facts — that the subscription market is inherently dysfunctional, that the open-access market is preferable and sustainable, and that the hybrid model entrenches the former to the exclusion of the latter — it becomes clear what the ideal recommendations should be for funders to provide open access in the short term while promoting a long-term transition to the preferable open-access market structure:

Require that funded research articles be made openly accessible, either through publication in an open-access or hybrid journal or through green open access supplementary to publication in a subscription journal.⁶
Support the open-access journal market by providing underwriting of reasonable APCs, so long as they allow for full reuse rights.
Do not support entrenchment of the subscription model by underwriting hybrid APCs.

In terms of the four Finch Report desiderata, this approach provides essentially universal open access to UK-funded research (as the NIH policy has in the US for NIH-funded research); preserves quality by allowing authors to publish in subscription, open-access, and hybrid journals alike; works towards broader usability by guaranteeing that APCs provide for full reuse rights; and provides sustainability by supporting a competitive market mechanism and avoiding the high costs and counterproductive nature of paying to entrench the current dysfunctional mechanism. By avoiding payment of hybrid APCs, it forces journals to choose between (i) charging on the reader side and retaining the ability to limit access and (ii) charging on the writer side and allowing full use and reuse rights. Journals would not be able to retain their subscription revenues and pick up additional APCs as well, at least at the public’s expense.

Crucially, these recommendations recognise the difference between the two quite different market structures that are inappropriately lumped together under the rubric ‘gold open access’. Willingness to pay APCs for open-access journals is consonant with the idea that publishers ought to be compensated for their work and recognises that open-access journals cannot be compensated by virtue of their limiting access to those willing and able to pay, nor would we want to do so. Willingness to pay APCs for hybrid journals provides open access to that single article, but disincentivises publishers from moving journals from the subscription market to the open-access market; it is myopic.

By contrast, the pertinent Finch Report recommendations are different.

Require that funded research articles be made openly accessible through publication in an open-access or hybrid journal.
Pay for the costs of that open access through underwriting of APCs, whether at open-access journals or hybrid journals.

The change seems small. Instead of underwriting only open-access journals, it underwrites hybrid journals as well. And once both are underwritten, it is not necessary to allow for the admittedly less desirable green open access option.⁷

Again, we evaluate the recommendations in terms of the four desiderata. By its silence on the matter (outside of mention of “providing access to research data and to grey literature”), the report implies that green open access is to be eschewed even in the short term. However, the requirement to publish in journals providing for payment for open access is likely to lead to broader access, at least for those articles for which funds are available to pay the APCs, and its concentration on publication in open-access or hybrid journals recognises their ability to provide quality control that repositories alone do not. With regard to usability, the report is a bit equivocal in requiring broad licensing in return for APCs, but does say that “support for open access publication should be accompanied by policies to minimise restrictions on the rights of use and re-use, especially for non-commercial purposes”.

The policy fails primarily, however, in the area of cost and sustainability. It provides no mechanism for controlling the dramatic cost increase in covering both subscription fees and high hybrid APCs. (By definition, open-access journals don’t receive both kinds of fees, and their APCs are subject to market competition in a way that hybrid APCs are not, as discussed above.)

Similarly, in the short term, APCs will predominantly be paid to hybrid journals rather than open-access journals, as the hybrids constitute far more of the journal market. Journals will have no incentive to switch to the open-access model, and in fact, will be incentivised not to. Research libraries would still have to maintain their subscriptions in order to cover the substantial body of articles in hybrid journals that are not covered by APCs (because, for instance, they are not UK-funded). The total costs would be greatly increased, while still not solving the underlying market dysfunction.

In fact, the RCUK implementation plans for the Finch Report admit as much. It has become clear that there will be insufficient funds to cover all of the hybrid APCs, so that universities will be taken to be in compliance even if only a fraction of their articles are made available open access by the journals themselves, so long as the remaining fraction are available through green open access. In fact, the RCUK implementation of the Finch Report proposal even allows for longer embargo periods in case the green route is used because of insufficient APC funding (UK 2013). The Finch recommendations thus embed their own negation: they envision having to use green open access to implement a system that denies the utility of green open access.

The alternative, requiring open access ecumenically — through open-access journals, hybrid journals, or green supplementary access — while being willing to underwrite fees for a market structure that work sustainably in the long term — true open access journals — is simultaneously effective in providing access as well as in providing an impetus to a future of the kind of accessible and sustainable journal publishing system that the Finch Report aspires to.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Peter Suber and Sue Kriegsman for comments on an earlier version of this article.

References

Bosch, Stephen, and Kittie Henderson. 2013. “The Winds of Change: Periodicals Price Survey 2013.” Library Journal (25 April). http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/04/publishing/the-winds-of-change-periodicals-price-survey-2013/.

Finch, Janet. 2012. “Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications.” http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/.

Maxwell, Elliot. 2012. “The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results?.” http://www.emaxwell.net/linked/DCCReport_Final_Feb2012.pdf.

Shieber, Stuart M. 2009. “Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing.” PLoS Biology 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000165.

———. 2013. “Why Open Access Is Better for Scholarly Societies.” The Occasional Pamphlet (29 January). http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2013/01/29/why-open-access-is-better-for-scholarly-societies/.

Suber, Peter. 2012. “Tectonic Movements toward OA in the UK and Europe.” SPARC Open Access Newsletter (2 September). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9723075.

UK, Research Councils. 2013. “RCUK Policy on Open Access and Supporting Guidance.” http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUKOpenAccessPolicy.pdf.

Notes

The report also provides a series of recommendations for increasing access within public libraries, strengthening the operations of institutional article repositories, gathering and analyzing pertinent data, reviewing how learned societies might be better supported, adjusting tax policy for journal publishers, and so forth. Many of these recommendations are reasonable and appropriate, but my main concern is the primary recommendations that relate to the market structure of journal publishing.↩
For instance, Library Journal’s annual Periodicals Price Survey (Bosch and Henderson 2013) reported a 6% average price increase for 2013 during a period in which inflation increased at 1.7%, continuing their tracking of a multiple-decades-long trend of serials price increases at several times the rate of inflation.↩
See the discussion by Peter Suber arguing that we should “weigh the demonstrable degree of harm to publishers against the demonstrable degree of benefit to research, researchers, research institutions, and taxpayers…. In short, we needn’t let fear of harm serve as evidence of harm, and we needn’t assume without discussion that even evidence of harm to subscription publishers would justify compromising the public interest in public access to publicly-funded research.” (Suber 2012)↩
The term ‘open-access journal’ covers any journal that makes its scholarly article content freely and openly available online. However, we use the term here (as in the Finch Report) to refer to journals using a revenue model based on APCs. Although at present only a minority of OA journals charge any APCs, for the purpose of discussion of revenue models, the APC approach is the most plausible one for sustaining open-access journals in the long run. Already, it is used nearly universally by the major open-access journal providers.↩
I have previously provided a fuller discussion of these issues of the difference between the subscription market and the open-access market, especially in the context of scholarly society publishing programs. (Shieber 2013)↩
The treatment of hybrid journals we propose is appropriately subtle. Though authors are free to provide for the required open access by publishing in a hybrid journal (1), the funders would not underwrite the associated fee (3) as they would for a fully open-access journal (2).↩
Although there are subscription journals that are not hybrid journals, the major publishers are uniformly moving in the direction of providing for hybrid fees, and smaller publishers are likely to follow suit over time. The Finch Report is silent on what to do about articles published in non-hybrid subscription journals. In the RCUK implementation documents, they allow green open access just in that case.↩

Policies, publishers, and plagiarism prosecution

2013-05-15T16:33:15+00:00

...going after plagiarists on legal grounds...
"Judge Coco Declares Ang Out of Line!" image by flickr user Coco Mault used by permission.

One of the services that journal publishers claim to provide on behalf of authors is legal support in the case that their work has been plagiarized, and they sometimes cite this as one of the reasons that they require a transfer of rights for publication of articles.

Here’s a recent example of the claim, forwarded to me by a Harvard author of a paper accepted for publication in a Wiley journal.[1] The article falls under Harvard’s FAS open-access policy, by virtue of which the university held a nonexclusive license in the article. The author chose to inform the journal of this license by attaching the Harvard addendum to Wiley’s publication agreement. Wiley’s emailed response to her included this explanation:

You recently had a paper accepted for publication in [journal name] and signed an exclusive license form to which you attached an addendum from Harvard University. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept this addendum, as it conflicts with the rights of the copyright holder (in this case, the [society on whose behalf Wiley publishes the journal]). They guarantee the same rights that our copyright forms guarantee, but Harvard University, unlike Wiley, offers no support if your article is plagiarized or otherwise reused illegally.

(It then went on to list various rights that Wiley grants back to authors of articles in this journal, such as posting manuscripts in repositories, all of which are laudable, though they remained silent on their required 12-month distribution embargo.)

I have no problem with publishers requiring waivers of the Harvard open-access policy as a condition of publishing in their journals. They are their journals after all. And in the event, only a small proportion of articles, in the low single digits, end up needing waivers. But I bristle at the transparently disingenuous argumentation for their requirement. They make two separate arguments.

The addendum “conflicts with the rights of the copyright holder”, the society on whose behalf Wiley publishes the journal.

Wait, what? How is the society the copyright holder? Until the author signs a publication agreement, the author is the copyright holder. And the publication agreement itself doesn’t involve a transfer of copyright, but rather, an exclusive license to Wiley on behalf of the society. And anyway, whether it’s an exclusive license or a wholesale transfer of copyright, that doesn’t conflict with the addendum by virtue of the plain words in the addendum: “Notwithstanding any terms in the Publication Agreement to the contrary, Author and Publisher agree as follows:…”.
If the addendum were allowed, “Harvard University, unlike Wiley, offers no support if your article is plagiarized or otherwise reused illegally.”

Suppose that were true. (Though how would Wiley know what support Harvard gives its faculty when their work is plagiarized or used illegally?) Why would that be an issue? Nothing stops Wiley from providing that support on behalf of its authors, with or without the addendum. Either way it still receives an exclusive license from the author. Others illegally using the work are still violating that exclusive license.

Unless of course the violator received a license by virtue of the prior nonexclusive license to the University mentioned in the addendum. Could that happen? Nope. The university uses its license only to authorize a particular set of uses. You can read them at the DASH Terms of Use page (see the “Open Access Policy Articles” section). They do not include plagiarism as a permitted use, or any illegal uses. (Is it even necessary to point that out?) The university also grants the authors themselves the ability to exercise rights in their article. But if someone explicitly received and exercised rights from a rights-holding author, it’s hard to see how that’s an illegal use.

More fundamentally, however, there’s a basic premise that underlies this talk of publishers requiring exclusive rights in order to weed out and prosecute plagiarism, namely, that publishers would not be able to do so if they didn’t acquire exhaustive exclusive rights. But there’s no legal basis to such a premise that I can imagine.

Plagiarism per se is not a rights matter at all, but a violation of the professional conduct expected of scholars. Pursuing plagiarists is a matter of calling their behavior out for what it is, with the concomitant professional opprobrium and dishonor that such behavior deserves. Publishers should feel free to help with that social process; they don’t need any rights to do so.

Being “otherwise used illegally” gets more to the heart of the matter, as rights violations are presumably what the publisher has in mind. But it’s hard to see how publishers would need any rights themselves just to help an author out in prosecuting a rights violation. Suppose a publisher, rather than acquiring exclusive rights in an article, instead had authors license their articles under a CC-BY license. The publisher could still weed out and prosecute illegal uses of the article. There would be fewer opportunities for illegal use, since CC-BY allows lots of salutary kinds of use and reuse, subject only to proper attribution to the author and journal. But illegal uses might still arise from violating the attribution requirement of the CC-BY declaration. Nothing stops the publisher from looking for such gross plagiarisms of the articles they publish that rise to the level of rights violation, and from prosecuting the plagiarists on behalf of the authors. They could even write that into their agreements: “The Author grants the Publisher permission to prosecute violations of this license on the Author’s behalf, etc.”[2]

(As an aside, the offer to prosecute plagiarists and rights violators isn’t much of a benefit in practice. How many instances of publishers going after plagiarists on legal grounds based on the publisher’s holding of rights have there ever been? As Jake said, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”)

What’s really going on here is not a mystery. The publisher doesn’t like the idea of the author distributing copies of her work. The primary difference between the rights the publisher wants to grant the author and the rights specified in the open-access policy is that the former stipulates that the author not distribute copies of her article for twelve months after publication. The publisher is objecting so as to force a waiver of the open-access policy license to preserve their ability to limit access to the article. Of course, saying “we won’t accept the addendum because we want to limit people reading your article” doesn’t sound nearly as good as “otherwise we couldn’t go after plagiarists”.

Publishers are welcome to require waivers of Harvard’s open-access policies and the similar policies at other institutions, but hiding behind faux arguments in their explanations to authors isn’t attractive. They should come clean on the reasoning: They think it harms their business model.

There’s a long history of this kind of thing. For instance, Peter Suber addressed the issue as raised by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers way back in 2007. ↩
Not to mention the fact that open accessability of articles makes plagiarism easier to detect, and therefore provides a disincentive to plagiarize in the first place. For example, researcher at arXiv have reported on experiments for automatically finding cases of plagiarism in its open-access collection. Services like the Open Access Plagiarism Search project sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) are working to make good on this potential. ↩

Open letter on the White House public access directive

2013-02-28T18:19:54+00:00

...White House...
"White House" image by flickr user Trevor McGoldrick.

As has been widely reported, this past Friday the White House directed essentially all federal funding agencies to develop open access policies over the next few months. I wrote the letter below to be forwarded to faculty at the Harvard schools with open-access policies, to inform them of this important new directive and its relation to the existing Harvard policies.

To: Harvard faculty at schools with open-access policies^[1]
From: Stuart Shieber, faculty director, Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication

I write to you with three pieces of good news.

First, the White House on Friday released a new policy memorandum expanding public access to the results of federally funded research. This new policy follows on from two broad-based national policy forums in 2010 and 2012 organized by the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy. It also serves as the response to over 65,000 petitioners to the White House “We the People” site supporting open access. The policy directs essentially all federal funding agencies to develop policies along the lines of the successful public access policy already in place at the National Institutes of Health, guaranteeing that articles based on federally funded research are made freely available to the public within one year of publication. The first piece of good news is that research results will now be much more broadly available and have greater impact.

Public access policies like the NIH’s, which will soon be in place in all major federal funding agencies, come with a responsibility: Researchers must retain sufficient rights to comply with the public access requirement. The second piece of good news is that because your school has an open-access policy voted by the faculty, you already are automatically retaining sufficient rights to comply with the government’s public access requirements. Unless you opt out of rights retention by expressly directing that a waiver of the open-access policy license be granted, the school’s open-access policy has the effect that you retain broad rights in your articles, sufficient to distribute them in compliance with the NIH policy, as well as any new policies that arise from the White House directive or from the bipartisan Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act that was just introduced in both houses of Congress. Faculty at most Harvard schools are thus exceptionally well placed to take the broadest advantage of the new White House and Congressional initiatives in making our scholarship openly accessible.

The third piece of good news is that there is no need to wait for the White House policy to effect change in funding agency policies. By virtue of Harvard’s open-access policies, you can already provide for open distribution of your articles. Indeed, part of your school’s open access policy is a commitment by all faculty to do just that: provide copies of your final manuscripts to be placed into the DASH repository. The Office for Scholarly Communication stands ready to help with the process. All you need to do is forward us your articles through our “quick submit” form. Your articles can then join the over 9,000 other articles in the repository that have been distributed well over a million times to grateful readers from every continent on earth.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if we can help in any way in broadening access to your scholarship.

The eight Harvard schools with open-access policies (with the date of policy enactment) are: ↩
- Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (2/12/2008)
- Harvard Law School (5/1/2008)
- Harvard Kennedy School of Government (3/10/2009)
- Harvard Graduate School of Education (6/1/2009)
- Harvard Business School (2/12/2010)
- Harvard Divinity School (11/15/2010)
- Harvard Graduate School of Design (3/30/2011)
- Harvard School of Public Health (11/26/2012)

Why open access is better for scholarly societies

2013-01-29T21:02:51+00:00

[This is a heavily edited transcript of a talk that I gave on January 3, 2013, at a panel on open access at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA, the main scholarly society for linguistics, and publisher of the journal Language), co-sponsored by the Modern Language Association (MLA).]

Thank you for this opportunity to join the others on this panel in talking about open access. I will concentrate in particular on the relationship between open access and the future of scholarly societies. I’m thinking in particular of small to medium scholarly societies, which have small publishing programs that are often central to the solvency of the societies and to their ability to do the important work that they do. In one sense it should be obvious, and I think it’s been made obvious by the previous speakers, that open access meshes well with the missions of scholarly societies. LSA’s mission, for instance, is “to advance the scientific study of language. LSA plays a critical role in supporting and disseminating linguistic scholarship both to professional linguists and to the general public.” [Emphasis added.] So I’ll just assume the societal benefit of open access to researchers and to the general public alike. For the purpose of conversation let’s just take that as given.

Nonetheless, many scholarly societies, and the faculty that support them, are worried that open access – at least as they understand the concept – could exacerbate the serious financial distress that many of those societies are already under, and even undermine their very existence and thereby their ability to carry out this mission. I’ve heard faculty worry that even “green” open access (self-archiving of articles in open-access repositories) could undermine the economics of journal publishing in such a way that their scholarly societies could be endangered.

I want to argue that there is a real threat that many scholarly societies accurately perceive in their publishing programs, but that we must be careful not to misdiagnose this problem. In fact, a general move to open access would be the best outcome for scholarly society publishers. If the entirety of journal publishing magically metamorphosed somehow to an open-access system, scholarly society publishers would be much better off. From a strategic point of view then, the best course of action for scholarly societies and for the faculty and researchers who support them would be to promote a shift to open access as widely and as quickly as possible. Now, the threat that societies perceive is an economic threat, so my remarks will be almost entirely economic in nature; I’m just warning you. My talk certainly will have no linguistic import at all.

Economic properties of the subscription market

Let me turn first to some basic truths about the subscription journal market that I’ve come to realize are important in understanding what the underlying economic issues are.

Journal access is a complementary good

The first is that different journals — viewed as products, as goods being sold — are in economists’ terms complements, not substitutes. Substitute goods are products like Coke and Pepsi. If you have one it decreases the value of the other to you, as they fulfill similar functions. Complements are products like a left shoe and a right shoe – that’s the most extreme case. If you have one it increases the value to you of the other. There are less extreme cases of economic complements – printers and toner cartridges, peanut butter and jelly, pencils and erasers.

What about scholarly journals? Suppose you’re a patron of a library that subscribes to a bundle of, let’s say, Elsevier journals, including the journal Lingua. Does the library subscription to that journal make you more or less interested in reading, say, Language? (We’re holding cost aside. When thinking about complements or substitutes, it’s just about the value to the consumer, not the cost.) Of course, you’re not less inclined to read Language just because the library subscribes to Lingua. In fact you may be more inclined, because some Lingua articles will cite Language articles. You read the Lingua article, you want to to read the Language article it cites. So that would lead you to track down those articles and read them if the library had a subscription. And vice versa: a subscription to Language can increase the value of a subscription to Lingua. So journals are economic complements, not substitutes.

Inefficiency in the subscription market

This has important ramifications. Non-substitutive goods don’t compete against each other and complementary goods in fact support each other in the market. If consumers suddenly buy a lot more Coke, Pepsi is worried. But if peanut butter sales skyrocket, the jelly manufacturers are elated. So the complementary subscription of individual journals means that there’s limited market competition between journals, and limited competition leads to inefficiency in the journal market. (That’s not to say that there isn’t competition between publishers. But as we’ll see, the primary form of that competition is in competing to acquire journals.)

Figure 1: Average journal prices in a range of fields, differentiated by commercial and non-profit publishers. Left is based on prices as dollars per page. Right is based on dollars per citation, to normalize for quality. Data are from Bergstrom and Bergstrom, Journal pricing across disciplines, 2002.

We can see ample evidence of this kind of inefficiency. One clear form of evidence for inefficiency is wide price disparities. The graph in Figure 1 shows average journal prices in a whole range of fields. The data is from a study by Bergstrom and Bergstrom, and they differentiated the cost of the journals by whether the publisher is commercial or non-profit. The dark blue represents the commercial publishers, the light blue the nonprofit publishers. Notice that the commercial publishers on average charge about five times more for their journals than non-profit publishers, as measured by price per page. Now you might think there is a good explanation for this disparity: perhaps these aren’t comparable products. Perhaps the commercial publishers are selling a much better product, higher quality journals, and it’s therefore more expensive to develop them, and that’s what accounts for the price differential. So we can normalize for that by using a proxy for quality. One widely used proxy for quality, admittedly not a great one but at least widely touted by journals themselves through the ubiquitous “Impact Factor”, is the number of citations the journal receives. The second graph in Figure 1 thus shows price per citation. Measured this way, commercial journals are fifteen times more expensive than non-profit journals from the same field. Now, linguistics was not one of the fields examined in this study. But the same holds true here as well. For example, the subscription rate for LSA’s journal Language, published by a non-profit of course, is $3.31 per citation, whereas Elsevier’s Lingua is $32.30 per citation – almost exactly ten times more expensive.

This kind of price differential is a clear sign of market failure, especially as it has been sustained over decades. You just do not get this kind of price disparity preserved over long periods of time in well functioning markets. Go to the various grocery stores in your neighborhood and see if you can find apples at different grocery stores at a price differential of a factor of ten. It does not happen. Such price disparities are a clear sign of inefficiency.

Journal access is a monopolistic good

Figure 2: Elsevier revenues, profit, and profit margin, 2002–2011. Data are from Mike Taylor, The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers, 2012.

The second basic truth is that the good being sold in the subscription market is access, and access is a monopolistic good. The monopoly is enabled by copyright, founded in the government’s ability as codified in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution to provide an exclusive right to the creator of a work for a limited period of time. Subscription publishers acquire exclusive rights to the articles they publish — typically by acquiring copyright, sometimes by acquiring an exclusive license, which is a distinction without a difference — and this allows publishers in theory and in many cases in practice to extract monopoly rents in selling access to the articles. We see evidence of this as well. For example, in Figure 2, I show a graph of the revenues, profits, and most importantly the profit margin, for the publisher Elsevier over the last decade. It’s quite a good business with annual revenues of over $2 billion, but that’s not the big point. The big point is the extraordinary 35–40% profit margins. It’s not just Elsevier. Many large commercial publishers have maintained these kinds of profit margins over a long period of time. An interesting thing to look at is the steady increase in the margins even during the financial crisis starting in 2009 when, for instance, many university endowments and library budgets dropped precipitously. Harvard’s endowment went down by 30% but Elsevier did just fine, and the other large publishers as well. So maintaining those kinds of profit margins again is a sign of the ability to extract monopoly rents.

Journal access is a bundled good

The third basic truth is that pricing is controlled not at the level of the individual journal but at the level of a bundle of journals. The large publishers have portfolios of hundreds to thousands of journals. They can therefore apply prices to a bundle of journals, not a single journal. They can show vastly different prices to different buyers and use the bundles to incentivize buyers, the libraries, to pay larger fees. The upshot of this point, that pricing happens at the bundle level and not the journal level, is that a library can find it extremely difficult to control its expenditures by canceling individual journals because the publisher can just price the smaller bundle at essentially the same cost as the larger bundle.

I’ll tell you a personal story. Some years ago, Harvard was one of the first universities to cancel the “big deal” with Elsevier. I don’t want to pick on Elsevier. They’re not bad people. They’re a wonderful group of folks. Lots of the large publishers of journals work this way and it’s not because they’re evil or anything like that. I just mention the Elsevier case as a convenient story. Harvard was one of the first universities to cancel its “big deal” and went a la carte on the journals. In the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, my own school, we had been subscribing to around 130 Elsevier journals in engineering and applied sciences as I recall. We took the opportunity to cancel about 100 of these journals, leaving something like 30 journals, hoping to recoup some costs. And we did. The first year we recouped about 20%. The following year the total cost was back where it had been before the cancellations, and it has increased steadily from there. From the library’s point of view, you can’t win by canceling journals, because the product is not the journal, it’s the bundle.

Edlin and Rubinfeld, in a Law Review article about possible anti-trust implications of this bundling, say “The immediate effect of [bundled pricing] has been to move competition from individual journals to large bundles of journals. … Creating a large bundle of journals to compete with Elsevier or Kluwer seems almost insurmountable. … There are indications that [bundled pricing] is hindering entry. Librarians … say that they would spend more money for journals from smaller and alternative publishers if they could achieve proportionate savings from reductions. By selling electronic bundles, publishers have erected a strategic barrier to entry at just the time that the electronic publishing possibility has made it increasingly possible for alternative publishers to overcome the existing structural barriers.” The fact that competition is at the level of bundles, not at the level of journals, is very important.

The result: market dysfunction

Figure 3: Scholarly journal expenditures percentage increase 1986–2010 compared to consumer price index. Data from Association for Research Libraries.

When we put all these properties of the journal market together, the end result is market dysfunction and a steady long-term hyperinflation in journal expenditures by libraries. Figure 3 shows a graph of serials expenditures over the last couple of decades, the dark blue line. The light blue line is the consumer price index, a proxy for the ambient rate of inflation. You can see that serials expenditures in research libraries have been going up at something like three times the rate of inflation for decades. Exponential real growth in the cost of journals is an unsustainable state of affairs.

I return to the issue of inefficiency. Why is it that the non-profit publishers are so much more efficient than the commercial publishers? Not in every case of course but on average the difference is really striking. There are a couple of possible reasons. One is that the non-profits tend to be scholarly societies who may be motivated not by profit maximization but by service to the field. I think that’s true to a certain extent. But also the non-profits tend to be small publishers with few journals – maybe one, two, three, five, ten journals. Since bundle size governs market power, non-profits have less ability to grow margins. And scholarly societies rightly complain that they’re being squeezed. From the point of view of libraries, if you have to cancel something you can recoup revenue if you cancel the journals from a small publisher. You can’t recoup revenue if you cancel journals from the large commercial publishers. As a library, what are you going to do? Cancel scholarly society journals, just as the societies have been rightly complaining about.

But notice that the problem that scholarly societies face, a problem that will only increase in a status quo future, is based not on open access but on inherent properties of the subscription market that they participate in. For scholarly societies, the status quo is not a good alternative. Doing nothing is a failing strategy.

Open-access journals as a preferable system

The idea of open-access journals is that they provide access to the articles for free. How can this be a better system for scholarly societies, given that much of the societies’ revenues may come from the publishing program?

Open-access journals don’t charge for access, but that doesn’t mean they eschew revenue entirely. Open-access journals are just selling a different good, and therefore participating in a different market. Instead of selling access to readers (or the readers’ proxy, the libraries), they sell publisher services to the authors (or to the authors’ proxy, their research funders).

In fact there are now over 8,500 open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Some of them have been mentioned already on this panel: Linguistic Discovery, Semantics and Pragmatics. The majority of existing open-access journals, like those journals, don’t charge author-side article-processing charges (APCs). But in the end APCs seems to me the most reasonable, reliable, scalable, and efficient revenue mechanism for open-access journals. This move from reader-side subscription fees to author-side APCs has dramatic ramifications for the structure of the market that the publisher participates in.

Economic properties of the open-access journal market

The open-access APC market has quite different properties from the subscription market. Recall the basic truths about the subscription market. Journals are complements, not substitutes. There’s limited market competition. The product being sold is a monopolistic good. Pricing is controlled at the bundle level. What are the corresponding properties of the publisher services market, the market that open-access journals participate in? In that market, the purchaser of the good is the author or the author’s proxy, not the reader or reader's proxy. And from the point of view of an author, two journals are not complements but substitutes. You can publish your article in the Journal of Linguistics or Lingua or better yet in Language. But having published it in one, you have no incentive to publish it in the other. In fact, you’re not allowed to publish in both, making journals perfect substitutes. There is no value to the second journal once you’ve published the article in the first journal, from the point of view of the author trying to get a publication.

So journals compete for authors in a way they don’t for readers, and this competition leads to much greater efficiency. Open-access publishers are highly motivated to provide better services at lower price to compete for authors’ article submissions. We actually see evidence of this competition on both price and quality happening in the market. I won’t go through examples but have written about it previously.

Second, publisher services on the author side are not a monopolistic good. Anyone can provide those services. In fact because the service is a knowledge good, there are exceptionally low barriers to entry. Kai von Fintel and David Beaver can just unilaterally set up Semantics and Pragmatics; maybe they’ll be successful and maybe they won’t. In this case, it turned out pretty well. The low barrier to entry further enhances competition and improves the efficiency of the market.

Finally, pricing is controlled not at the level of the bundle of journals. You don’t care about the bundle of the publisher when you’re an author submitting to a journal. You care about the journal. Actually, pricing is not even at the journal level, but at the level of the individual article. So price competition happens at that level as well, with journals competing for individual articles on price as well as quality.

In summary, the open-access APC market is a more efficient market than the closed-access subscription market for reasons of basic economics. That’s not just my opinion. Claudio Aspesi, senior analyst at Sanford Bernstein studying the finances of publishing companies, has estimated that a transition to open access would lead to Elsevier cutting its margins by 41–89%.

Comparative cost of open-access journals

Let me say something about the overall cost for the two kinds of models. The APCs that open-access journals charge range from $0 to around $3,000. The median turns out to be zero. But for those open-access journals that do charge a fee, the mean is around $1,200, and reasonable sustainable fees seem to be shaking out in the $1,000 to $1,500 range. Let’s call it $1,500. Since article processing fees are essentially the totality of revenue that open-access journals receive, the APC is a reasonable figure for average revenue per article. There are open-access publishers who are profitable in that range, including commercial open-access journals.

What’s the corresponding number for subscription journals? What is their average revenue per article? The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable reported total 2008 revenue for scholarly publishing at $8 billion on 1.5 million articles, the vast bulk of that revenue coming from subscription fees. Average revenue per article for subscription journals is, by that measure, over $5,000 an article. Remember that this averages over all of the journals — the high quality and the low alike.

So what’s happening is that authors one way or another are paying. Either you’re paying an APC to an open-access journal or you’re paying with your copyright to a subscription journal, which the publisher then monetizes, turning it into about $5,000 per article. It turns out that if we moved from a subscription journal world to an open-access world, the institutions of the world would go from paying, on average, $5,000 an article to about $1,500. Let’s suppose the $1,500 estimate is unreasonably low. Let’s suppose that really the average APC would be what the most high-end open-access journal, PLoS Biology, now charges – that’s $2,900; call it $3,000. If every article moved from the subscription model to an open-access APC model at the high end of cost – we would still be saving 40%. And more importantly, we would be better executing the scholarly society mission by providing the broadest possible dissemination.

Scholarly societies as open-access publishers

Who wins in this kind of market – a non-monopolistic, competitive market of substitutes where the processing fees are considerably less than the current cost per article for subscription journals? The publisher who wins in that market is the publisher who can provide the best services, including imprimatur, at the lowest price to the author, that is, the publisher who is most efficient. Scholarly society publishers would have a huge lead in this market, because they are manifestly more efficient than commercial publishers by a large factor. If the scholarly journal market were structured as the open-access journal market rather than the subscription journal market, scholarly society publishers would be the big winners. And scholarly societies are beginning to realize that open access could be a boon not only to their mission – that much should be uncontroversial – but also to their solvency. Perhaps for this reason, some 600 scholarly societies, including the LSA, are already publishing open-access journals.

At the root, the reason that scholarly societies benefit from playing in the open-access APC market rather than the closed-access subscription fee market is the difference in the goods being sold. When the good is a journal bundle, the companies with the biggest bundles, the large commercial publishers, win. When the good is publisher services for an individual article, the publishers that can deliver those services for an individual article most efficiently, the non-profit publishers, win. Sure, there are economies of scale, but empirical evidence shows that the scholarly societies are already far better able to efficiently deliver services despite any scale disadvantage.

The problem for open access: the transition

Now, all that sounds great, but I don’t want to be too positive. As I said at the outset, there is a real worry that society publishers should have about the open-access APC market. But it’s not that they’d be at a competitive disadvantage in that market; I think that they’d have a huge advantage. And it’s important to remember that they’re already at a huge disadvantage in the subscription journal market; status quo is a failing strategy. Rather the problem is this. Open-access journals are at a disadvantage in their competition for authors against subscription journals. That is, the problem arises across the two markets. When the only kind of journals are open-access journals, scholarly societies have the upper hand. When there are both kinds of journals in the market, both subscription journals and open-access journals, the open-access journals are at a competitive disadvantage because (from the author’s point of view) publishing is free in a subscription journal. (Of course, it’s not really free; it’s just that the research libraries of the world are underwriting the very high $5,000 cost per article.) By contrast, in an open-access APC journal, the author personally could be out let’s say $1,200 or $1,500 or whatever. This is a problem not just for scholarly societies but for all publishers exploring the possibility of going fee-based open access.

To make a transition possible, what we, as supporters of scholarly societies, should be working on is placing open-access journals on a level playing field with subscription journals. There’s a principle at stake here, and the principle is this: Dissemination of research results is an inherent part of the research process. This is something that publishers themselves are frequently pointing out — that they are part of the research process. Consequently, the funders of that research should underwrite dissemination of the results. Who are the funders of the research? In science, technology, and medicine, public and private funding agencies are the primary research funders. By this principle then, the funding agencies giving the grants in those areas would be on the hook to pay the $1,000 or $1,200 or $1,500 or $2,900 publication fees. Most funding agencies already will pay for publication costs for open-access journals (though not in an ideal way, which I’ve written about in the past). What about fields where there aren’t funding agencies handing out large grants? In the humanities and social sciences, universities are the de facto primary research funders. Faculty members in universities are doing research in those fields as part of their employment as researchers. As the primary research funders in the humanities and social sciences, in linguistics in particular, the universities that employ us should be on the hook to disseminate the research results that their researchers generate.

This is the principle behind an effort called the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. It was set up by a group of five universities initially — Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley — to place the open-access revenue model on a more level playing field with the subscription model. Since then another dozen or so institutions have signed on. The Compact says that these universities commit to providing a mechanism for underwriting reasonable publication fees for articles written by their faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals. From the point of view of these signatory institutions, and the many other institutions that don’t happen to be signatories but have similar funding policies, if you structure your journal as an open-access journal charging a publication fee, you don’t need to worry that the authors will be personally out of pocket to pay those fees; the university will pay on their behalf.

Next steps

Given that the open-access publication fee market would be preferable from the point of view of scholarly societies and their members, what should scholarly societies be doing from the strategic point of view? What is in the best interest of us as supporters of scholarly societies? Happily the best interest of scholarly society publishers is the best interest of the scholars themselves, namely as rapid a transition to open access as possible. So scholarly societies should be doing what they can to speed that transition, and I’m glad to say that the LSA and the MLA are working in that direction. I wish all scholarly societies would do so as well.

Of course, the ideal action for a scholarly society is to convert all of its journals to open access. By doing so, they help set expectations among authors that we don’t restrict access to articles, thereby hastening the day that closed-access journals find it impossible to compete for authors.

But some scholarly societies may still find it too worrisome to take such a bold move, not because they disagree with my conclusion that they fare better in an open access world, but because they fear not making it through the transition to that world. I’m sympathetic to that worry. Still, there are important actions that societies can take short of converting all of their journals to open access, actions that will still greatly contribute to changing the expectations of scholars that research results should be and are being made accessible. Scholarly societies can:

Experiment with open access for at least some of their journals (as LSA is doing with Semantics and Pragmatics), thereby gaining exactly the experience with open-access publishing that will be invaluable in the future.
Along the same lines, commit to open access for any new journals.
For the legacy non-open-access journals, provide delayed open-access to articles, making them available with a broad license after, say, six months or one year. The LSA has already taken this important step. Once conditions are right, the delay can simply be dropped.
Explicitly allow self-archiving of articles published in their journals, the green open access that I alluded to at the start of the talk. Doing so sends a strong signal that the society supports open access. At the same time, there is “no persuasive evidence that increased access threatens the sustainability of traditional subscription-supported journals, or their ability to fund rigorous peer review.” TheLSA does this, and the MLA recently announced that they are modifying their publication agreement along these lines, and even allowing distribution of the final published version after one year.
Recognize, accommodate, and promote university and funder open-access policies. Accommodation requires only the addition of a single sentence to a publisher’s publication agreement. The pertinent sentence taken from the Science Commons addenda is this:

Where applicable, Publisher acknowledges that Author’s assignment of copyright or Author’s grant of exclusive rights in the Publication Agreement is subject to Author’s prior grant of a non-exclusive copyright license to Author’s employing institution and/or to a funding entity that financially supported the research reflected in the Article as part of an agreement between Author or Author’s employing institution and such funding entity, such as an agency of the United States government.

(My guess is that it should be possible to generate an English version of such a sentence as well.)
Support pro-open-access legislation such as the Federal Research Public Access Act. At the least, scholarly societies should disavow anti-open-access statements made on their behalf by publishing consortia, as the MLA did in its statement opposing the Research Works Act.
Leverage the society’s membership to push for open-access underwriting by funding agencies and by universities such as envisioned by the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity.

To the extent that we can get a transition to a primarily open-access publishing system to happen, scholarly societies, their members, and the general public will all be much better off, which is a happy confluence of interest. Thank you very much.

Guest Post: On Lance Armstrong

2013-01-22T19:42:12+00:00

[I am pleased to present a guest post from my friend Ann Velenchik, professor of economics at Wellesley College, director of their writing program, and expert monologist. This post is reproduced from her private blog, which I am privileged to have access to, in which she has chronicled her experience with her leukemia diagnosis and treatment over the last three years.]

...one of my idols...
"Oprah Winfrey speaks at the launch of the Born This Way Foundation" image by flickr user HarvardEducation.

January 18, 2013 — Despite living with Bicycle Boy, I take no interest in competitive cycling. We were in Paris for the end of the Tour de France in 2008, and while Tom, Becca and Nate all stood on benches to see the riders circle the Arc de Triomphe, I was happily drinking an orangina at a table far from the crowds. Tom has assured me, for years, that Armstrong has clearly been doping, and I frankly didn't think much more about it.

But I obviously couldn't escape the news that Oprah would be interviewing Armstrong on TV last night and, because Oprah is one of my idols, I did a little web surfing this morning to find out what was said. And I found something that made me so angry that I had to respond.

In a part of the conversation about why he had started doping, and how he justified it to himself, Armstrong lay some of the blame on the "fighting spirit" he developed during his "battle" with testicular cancer from October 1996 to February 1997.

“That process turned me into a person — it was truly win at all costs,” Armstrong said. “When I was diagnosed, I said, ‘I will do anything I need to do to survive,’ and that’s good. And I took that attitude, that ruthless and relentless and win-at-all-costs attitude into cycling, and that’s bad.”

Let's leave aside the fact that there's evidence that he started doping before he got cancer, and that it's possible that taking a lot of testosterone might have made that cancer worse. Let's just talk about the idea that the attitude that helped him "win" the cancer battle justifies, or even explains, what the evidence indicates he has done since.

I think it is highly possible that cancer diagnosis and treatment in the prime of his life was a deep and abiding trauma that warped his moral compass. As I have said before, I don't think cancer is a blessing in disguise, and I don't think all the lessons we learn there are good ones, let alone worth the price. So I am not even pissed off that he has the audacity to use his status as a cancer patient to explain the appalling way he has treated people.

What pisses me off is his description of the attitude he brought to treatment itself. When he says "I will do anything I need to do to survive...ruthless and relentless and win-at-all-costs...," as though lying and cheating and doing terrible things to other people were part of the cancer process, that's when my head starts to explode.

Because, here's the thing. There isn't much in cancer treatment that requires lying or cheating, that requires you to sue for libel the people who are actually telling the truth, or that allows you to threaten and bully and defame other people. Yes, there's a lot of win-at-all costs to be found there, but those aren't costs you get to impose on other people.

Lance Armstrong misspoke. Cancer treatment isn't about being willing to do anything to anyone in order to win. It's about being willing to endure anything onesself. Here's my guess. Lance Armstrong is a very bad guy who was a bad guy before he got cancer and perhaps a worse one afterward. He doped because he was getting away with it and getting richer and more famous every minute. He lied and intimidated and threatened and bullied because, as I heard one person say, when he got cornered his strategy was to double down. And maybe his experience as a cancer patient was part of the list of things that made him so broken. But that's about him, not about cancer.

Aaron Swartz's legacy

2013-01-13T19:35:53+00:00

Government zealotry in prosecuting brilliant people is a repeating theme. It gave rise to one of the great intellectual tragedies of the 20th century, the death of Alan Turing after his appalling treatment by the British government. Sadly, we have just been presented with another case. Aaron Swartz committed suicide at his apartment in New York this week in the face of an overreaching prosecution of his JSTOR download action. I never met him, but I understand from those who knew him well that he was a brilliant, committed person who only acted intending to do good in the world. I'm on the record disagreeing with the particulars of the open access tactic for which he was being prosecuted, on the basis that it was counterproductive. But I empathize with the gut instinct that led to his effort. I hope that it will inspire us all to redouble our efforts to eliminate the needless restraints on the distribution and use of scholarship as Swartz himself was trying to achieve.

When practice and logic conflict, change the practice

2013-01-03T20:14:21+00:00

...our little tiff in the late 18th century... "NYC - Metropolitan Museum of Art: Washington Crossing the Delaware" image by flickr user wallyg. Used by permission.

I'm shortly off to give a talk at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (on why open access is better for scholarly societies, which I'll be blogging about soon), but in the meantime, a linguistically related post about punctuation.

Careful readers of this blog (are there any careful readers of this blog? are there any readers at all?) will note that I generally eschew the peculiarly American convention of moving punctuation within a closing quotation mark. Examples from The Occasional Pamphlet abound: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And that's just from 2012. It's surprising how often this punctuation convention comes into play.

Instead, I use the convention that only the stuff being quoted is put within the quotation marks. This is sometimes called the "British" convention, despite the fact that other nationalities use it as well, presumably to emphasize the American/British dualism extant from our little tiff in the late 18th century. I use the "British" convention because the "American" convention is, in technical terms, stupid.

The story goes that punctuation appearing within the quotation mark is more aesthetically pleasing than punctuation outside the quotation mark. But even if that were true, clarity trumps beauty. Moving the punctuation means that when you see a quoted string with some final punctuation, you don't know if that punctuation is or is not intended to be part of the thing being quoted; it is systematically ambiguous.

Apparently, my view is highly controversial. For example, when working with MIT Press on my book on the Turing test, my copy editor (who, by the way, was wonderful, and amazingly patient) moved all my punctuation around to satisfy the American convention. I moved them all back. She moved them again. We got into a long discussion of the matter; it seems she had never confronted an author who felt strongly about punctuation before. (I presume she had never copy-edited Geoff Pullum, from whom more later.) As a compromise, we left the punctuation the way I liked it---mostly---but she made me add the following prefatory editorial note:

Throughout the text, the American convention of moving punctuation within closing quotation marks (whether or not the punctuation is part of what is being referred to) is dropped in favor of the more logical and consistent convention of placing only the quoted material within the marks.

I would now go on to explain why the "British" convention is better than the "stupid" convention, except that Geoff Pullum has done so much better a job, far better than I ever could. Here is an excerpt from his essay "Punctuation and human freedom" published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and reproduced in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. I recommend the entire essay to you.

I want you to first consider the string 'the string' and the string 'the string.', noting that it takes ten keystrokes to type the string in the first set of quotes, and eleven to type the string in the second pair. Imagine you wanted to quote me on the latter point. You might want to say (1).

(1) Pullum notes that it takes eleven keystrokes to type the string 'the string.'

No problem there; (1) is true (and grammatical if we add a final period). But now suppose you want to say this:

(2) Pullum notes that it takes ten keystrokes to type the string 'the string'.

You won't be able to publish it. Your copy-editor will change it before the first proof stage to (3), which is false (though regarded by copy-editors as grammatical):

(3) Pullum notes that it takes ten keystrokes to type the string 'the string.'

Why? Because the copy-editor will insist that when a sentence ends with a quotation, the closing quotation mark must follow the punctuation mark.

I say this must stop. Linguists have a duty to the public to use their expertise in arguing for changes to the fabric of society when its interests are threatened. And we have such a situation here.

What say we all switch over to the logical quotation punctuation approach and save the fabric of society, shall we?

How not to entice an author

2012-11-06T20:03:34+00:00

...There's a "tree" in it...
"Fall New England" image by flickr user BrtinBoston. Used by permission.

I received the attached email, inviting a contribution to a journal called Advances in Forestry Letter. Yes, that's "Letter" in the singular, which is even still optimistic given the number of papers they've published so far, viz., none. For a week or so after I received the email, the journal's web site was down. It's back up now, and we can glean some further information about this "journal". It is claimed to be published by "World Academic Publishers" (already listed in Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory publishers), though the publisher's site does not list the journal as of this writing. The listing of covered topics from their "Focus and Scope" page seems to have been plagiarized from the corresponding listing for the MDPI journal Forests.

Why am I, a computer scientist, being invited to submit an article on forestry? On the basis of being the author of an article entitled "Optimal k-arization of synchronous tree-adjoining grammar". (Actually, they got that wrong too. I'm a co-author, along with Rebecca Nesson and Giorgio Satta.) See? There's a "tree" in it. It must be about forestry.

I have half a mind to submit the article to them (after making it "80% different") and see what happens.

Dear Shieber Stuart M.

This is from the Editorial Board Office of Journal of Advances in Forestry Letter (AFL). It is my honor to contact you.

Your paper
Title: Optimal k-arization of synchronous tree-adjoining grammar
Author(s):Shieber Stuart M.

has drawn our attention. We found the paper in the subject coverage of AFL. To promote the development and communication of Forestry Engineering, we sincerely invite you to make it 80% different from the original one and submit to AFL. The new papers in this area are extremely warmly welcome.

If you are interested, please submit your manuscript online before Nov. 15, 2012. Your paper will be published with no charge if accepted.

PAPER SUBMISSION WEBSITE:
[removed so as not to improve their page rank]

Best regards,

Editorial Board Office
Advances in Forestry Letter (AFL)
Website: [removed so as not to improve their page rank]
Email: afl@seipub.org

Guide released on good practices for university open-access policies

2012-10-17T21:25:56+00:00

I'm pleased to forward on the announcement that the Harvard Open Access Project has just released an initial version of a guide on "good practices for university open-access policies". It was put together by Peter Suber and myself with help from many, including Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Ada Emmett, Heather Joseph, Iryna Kuchma, and Alma Swan. It has already received endorsements from the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI), Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS), Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS), Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and SPARC Europe.

The official announcement is provided below, replicated from the Berkman Center announcement.

Good practices for university open-access policies

October 17, 2012

In anticipation of worldwide Open Access Week, the Harvard Open Access Project is pleased to release version 1.0 of a guide to good practices for university open-access policies.

Gathering together recommendations on drafting, adopting, and implementing OA policies, the guide is based on policies adopted at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and a couple of dozen other institutions around the world. But it's not limited to policies of this type and includes recommendations that should be useful to institutions taking other approaches.

The guide is designed to evolve. As co-authors, we plan to revise and enlarge it over time, building on our own experience and the experience of colleagues elsewhere. We welcome suggestions.

The guide deliberately refers to "good practices" rather than "best practices". On many points, there are multiple, divergent good practices. Good practices are easier to identify than best practices. And there can be wider agreement on which practices are good than on which practices are best.

The current version of the guide has the benefit of the advice of expert colleagues, and the endorsement of projects and organizations devoted to the spread of effective university OA policies. It has been written in consultation with Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Ada Emmett, Heather Joseph, Iryna Kuchma, and Alma Swan, and has already been endorsed by the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI), Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS), Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS), Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and SPARC Europe.

Over time we hope to name more consulting experts and endorsing organizations. Please contact us if you or your organization may be interested. We do not assume that consulting experts or endorsing organizations support every recommendation in the guide.

The guide should be useful to institutions considering an OA policy, and to faculty and librarians who would like their institution to start considering one. We hope that institutions with working policies will share their experience and recommendations, and that organizers of Open Access Week events will link to the guide and bring it to the attention of their participants.

Good practices for university open-access policies
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Good_practices_for_university_open-access_policies

Stuart Shieber
Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication, Harvard University
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/~shieber

Peter Suber
Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, Special Advisor to the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
psuber@cyber.law.harvard.edu

Harvard Open Access Project
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap

For Ada Lovelace Day 2012: Karen Spärck Jones

2012-10-16T12:05:27+00:00

Karen Spärck Jones, 1935-2007

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day 2012, I write about the only female winner of the Lovelace Medal awarded by the British Computer Society for "individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the understanding or advancement of Computing". Karen Spärck Jones was the 2007 winner of the medal, awarded shortly before her death. She also happened to be a leader in my own field of computational linguistics, a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Because we shared a research field, I had the honor of knowing Karen and the pleasure of meeting her on many occasions at ACL meetings.

One of her most notable contributions to the field of information retrieval was the idea of inverse document frequency. Well before search engines were a "thing", Karen was among the leaders in figuring out how such systems should work. Already in the 1960's there had arisen the idea of keyword searching within sets of documents, and the notion that the more "hits" a document receives, the higher ranked it should be. Karen noted in her seminal 1972 paper "A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval" that not all hits should be weighted equally. For terms that are broadly distributed throughout the corpus, their occurrence in a particular document is less telling than occurrence of terms that occur in few documents. She proposed weighting each term by its "inverse document frequency" (IDF), which she defined as log(N/(n + 1)) where N is the number of documents and n the number of documents containing the keyword under consideration. When the keyword occurs in all documents, IDF approaches 1 for large N, but as the keyword occurs in fewer and fewer documents (making it a more specific and presumably more important keyword), IDF rises. The two notions of weighting (frequency of occurrence of the keyword together with its specificity as measured by inverse document frequency) are combined multiplicatively in the by now standard tf*idf metric; tf*idf or its successors underlie essentially all information retrieval systems in use today.

In Karen's interview for the Lovelace Medal, she opined that "Computing is too important to be left to men." Ada Lovelace would have agreed.

Open Access Week 2012 at Harvard

2012-10-09T00:46:01+00:00

...set the default...

Here's what's on deck at Harvard for Open Access Week 2012 (reproduced from the OSC announcement).

From October 22 through October 28, Harvard University is joining hundreds of other institutions of higher learning to celebrate Open Access Week, a global event for the promotion of free, immediate online access to scholarly research.

Harvard will participate in OA Week locally by offering two public events that engage this year’s theme, “Set the default to open access.”

On October 23rd at 12:30 p.m., the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Office for Scholarly Communication will host a forum entitled “How to Make Your Research Open Access (Whether You’re at Harvard or Not).” OA advocates Peter Suber and Stuart Shieber will headline the session, answering questions on any aspect of open access and recommending concrete steps for making your work open access. The event will be held at the Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, 2nd Floor. The Berkman Center will also stream the discussion live online. See the Berkman Center website for more information and to RSVP.

On October 24, a panel of experts will consider efforts by the National Institutes of Health to ensure public access to the published results of federally funded research. “Open Access to Health Research: Future Directions for the NIH Public Access Policy” will feature a discussion of the challenges and opportunities for increasing compliance with the NIH policy. The event, co-sponsored by the Office for Scholarly Communication, Right to Research Coalition, and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, will be held at the Harvard Law School in Hauser Hall, room 104. More information is available at the Petrie-Flom Center website.

Is the Harvard open-access policy legally sound?

2012-09-17T13:28:35+00:00

...evidenced by a written instrument...
"To Sign a Contract 3" image by shho. Used by permission.

The idea behind rights-retention open-access policies is, as this year’s OA Week slogan goes, to “set the default to open access”. Traditionally, authors retained rights to their scholarly articles only if they expressly negotiated with their publishers to do so. Rights-retention OA policies—like those at Harvard and many other universities, and as exemplified by our Model Policy—change the default so that authors retain open-access rights unless they expressly opt out.

The technique the policies use is a kind of “rights loop”:

The policy has the effect of granting a transferable nonexclusive license to the university as soon as copyright vests in the article. This license precedes and survives any later transfer to a publisher.
The university can grant the licensed rights back to the author (as well as making use of them itself, primarily through distribution of the article from a repository).

The author retains rights by using the university as a kind of holding area for those rights. The waiver provision, under sole control of the author, means that this rights retention is a default, but defeasible.

This at least was the theory, but what are the legalities of the matter? In designing Harvard’s OA policy, we spent a lot of time trying to make sure that the reality would match the theory. Now, Eric Priest, a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, has done a detailed analysis of the policy (forthcoming in the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property and available open access from SSRN) to determine if the legal premise of the policy is sound. The bottom line: It is. Those charged with writing such policies will want to read the article in detail. I’ll only give a summary of the conclusions here, and mention how at Harvard we have been optimizing our own implementation of the policy to further strengthen its legal basis.

Priest’s conclusion is well summarized in the following quote:

The principal aim of this Article has been to analyze the legal effect of “Harvard-style” open access permission mandates. This required first analyzing whether scholars are the legal authors (and therefore initial owners) of their scholarly articles under the Copyright Act’s work made for hire rules. It then required determining whether a permission mandate in fact vests, as its terms suggest, nonexclusive licenses in the university for all scholarly articles created by its faculty. Lastly, this analysis required determining whether those licenses survive after the faculty member who writes the article transfers copyright ownership to a publisher. As the foregoing analysis shows, in the Author’s opinion the answer to all three of these questions is “yes”: scholars should be deemed the authors of their works, and permission mandates create in universities effective, durable nonexclusive licenses to archive and distribute faculty scholarship and permit the university to license others to do the same.

Although Priest’s analysis agrees with our own that the policies work in and of themselves (at least those using the wording that we have promulgated in our own policies at Harvard and in our Model Policy), he notes various ways in which the arguments for the various legal aspects can be even further strengthened, revolving around Section 205(e) of the Copyright Act, which holds that “a nonexclusive license, whether recorded or not, prevails over a conflicting transfer of copyright ownership if the license is evidenced by a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed”.

Priest argues at length and in detail that no individual written instrument is required for the survival of the nonexclusive license. But obtaining such an individual written instrument certainly can’t hurt. In fact, at Harvard we do obtain such a written instrument. There are two paths by which articles enter the DASH repository for distribution pursuant to an OA policy: Authors can deposit them themselves, or someone (a faculty assistant or a member of the Office for Scholarly Communication staff) can deposit them on behalf of the authors. In the first case, the author assents (via a click-through statement) to an affirmation of the nonexclusive license:

I confirm my grant to Harvard of a non-exclusive license with respect to my scholarly articles, including the Work, as set forth in the open access policy found at http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/ that was adopted by the Harvard Faculty or School of which I am a member.

In the second case, our workflow requires that authors have provided us with an “Assistance Authorization Form”, available either as a click-through web form or print version to be signed. This form gives the OSC and any named assistants the right to act on the faculty member's behalf as depositor, and also provides assent to the statement

In addition, if I am a member of a Harvard Faculty or School that has adopted an open access policy found at http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/, this confirms my grant to Harvard of a non-exclusive license with respect to my scholarly articles as set forth in that policy.

Authors need only provide this form once; thereafter, we can act on their behalf in depositing articles.

Thus, no matter how an article enters the DASH repository, we have an express affirmation of the OA policy’s nonexclusive license, providing yet a further satisfaction of the Section 205(e) “written instrument” clause.

Priest mentions another way of strengthening the argument of survival of the nonexclusive license, namely, incorporating the license into faculty employment agreements, either directly or by reference. This provides further backup that the license is individually affirmed through the employment agreement. We take additional steps along these lines at Harvard as well.

One of the most attractive aspects of the default rights retention approach to open-access policies is that the author retains rights automatically, without having to negotiate individually with publishers and regardless of the particularities and exigencies of any later publication agreement, while maintaining complete author choice in the matter through the open license waiver option. It is good to know that a thorough independent legal review of our approach has ratified that understanding.

The inevitability of open access

2012-06-28T18:31:29+00:00

...wave of the future...
"Nonantum Wave" photo by flickr user mjsawyer. Used by permission (CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0).

I get the sense that we've moved into a new phase in discussions of open access. There seems to be a consensus that open access is an inevitability. We're hearing this not only from the usual suspects in academia but from publishers, policy-makers, and other interested parties. I've started collecting pertinent quotes. The voices remarking on the inevitability of open access range from congressional representatives sponsoring the pro-OA FRPAA bill (Representative Lofgren) to the sponsors of the anti-OA RWA bill (Representatives Issa and Maloney), from open-access publishers (Sutton of Co-Action) to the oldest of guard subscription publishers (Campbell of Nature). Herewith, a selection. Pointers to other examples would be greatly appreciated.

"I agree which is why I am a cosponsor of the bill [FRPAA, HR4004], but I think even if the bill does not pass, this [subscription journal] model is dead. It is just a question of how long the patient is going to be on life support."

— Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), March 29, 2012

"As the costs of publishing continue to be driven down by new technology, we will continue to see a growth in open access publishers. This new and innovative model appears to be the wave of the future."

— Darryl Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), co-sponsors of H.R. 3699 (“The Research Works Act”), February 27, 2012

"I realise this move to open access presents a challenge and opportunity for your industry, as you have historically received funding by charging for access to a publication. Nevertheless that funding model is surely going to have to change even beyond the welcome transition to open access and hybrid journals that’s already underway. To try to preserve the old model is the wrong battle to fight."

— David Willetts (MP, Minister of State for Universities and Science), May 2, 2012

"[A] change in the delivery of scientific content and in the business models for delivering scholarly communication was inevitable from the moment journals moved online, even if much of this change is yet to come."

— Caroline Sutton (Publisher, Co-Action Publishing), December 2011

"My personal belief is that that's what's going to happen in the long run."

— Philip Campbell (Editor-in-chief, Nature), June 8, 2012

"In the longer term, the future lies with open access publishing," said Finch at the launch of her report on Monday. "The UK should recognise this change, should embrace it and should find ways of managing it in a measured way."

— Janet Finch (Professor of Sociology, University of Manchester; Chair, Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings), June 18, 2012

"Open access is here to stay, and has the support of our key partners."

— Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, July 25, 2011

(Hat tip to Peter Suber for pointers to a couple of these quotes.)

Talmud and the Turing Test

2012-06-16T19:19:35+00:00

...the Golem...
Image of the statue of the Golem of Prague at the entrance to the Jewish Quarter of Prague by flickr user D_P_R. Used by permission (CC-BY 2.0).

Alan Turing, the patron saint of computer science, was born 100 years ago this week (June 23). I’ll be attending the Turing Centenary Conference at University of Cambridge this week, and am honored to be giving an invited talk on “The Utility of the Turing Test”. The Turing Test was Alan Turing’s proposal for an appropriate criterion to attribute intelligence (that is, capacity for thinking) to a machine: you verify through blinded interactions that the machine has verbal behavior indistinguishable from a person.

In preparation for the talk, I’ve been looking at the early history of the premise behind the Turing Test, that language plays a special role in distinguishing thinking from nonthinking beings. I had thought it was an Enlightenment idea, that until the technological advances of the 16th and 17th centuries, especially clockwork mechanisms, the whole question of thinking machines would never have entertained substantive discussion. As I wrote earlier,

Clockwork automata provided a foundation on which one could imagine a living machine, perhaps even a thinking one. In the midst of the seventeenth-century explosion in mechanical engineering, the issue of the mechanical nature of life and thought is found in the philosophy of Descartes; the existence of sophisticated automata made credible Descartes’s doctrine of the (beast-machine), that animals were machines. His argument for the doctrine incorporated the first indistinguishability test between human and machine, the first Turing test, so to speak.

But I’ve seen occasional claims here and there that there is in fact a Talmudic basis to the Turing Test. Could this be true? Was the Turing Test presaged, not by centuries, but by millennia?

Uniformly, the evidence for Talmudic discussion of the Turing Test is a single quote from Sanhedrin 65b.

Rava said: If the righteous wished, they could create a world, for it is written, “Your iniquities have been a barrier between you and your God.” For Rava created a man and sent him to R. Zeira. The Rabbi spoke to him but he did not answer. Then he said: “You are [coming] from the pietists: Return to your dust.”

Rava creates a Golem, an artificial man, but Rabbi Zeira recognizes it as nonhuman by its lack of language and returns it to the dust from which it was created.

This story certainly describes the use of language to unmask an artificial human. But is it a Turing Test precursor?

It depends on what one thinks are the defining aspects of the Turing Test. I take the central point of the Turing Test to be a criterion for attributing intelligence. The title of Turing's seminal Mind article is "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", wherein he addresses the question "Can machines think?". Crucially, the question is whether the “test” being administered by Rabbi Zeira is testing the Golem for thinking, or for something else.

There is no question that verbal behavior can be used to test for many things that are irrelevant to the issues of the Turing Test. We can go much earlier than the Mishnah to find examples. In Judges 12:5–6 (King James Version)

⁵ And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;

⁶ Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

The Gileadites use verbal indistinguishability (of the pronounciation of the original shibboleth) to unmask the Ephraimites. But they aren’t executing a Turing Test. They aren’t testing for thinking but rather for membership in a warring group.

What is Rabbi Zeira testing for? I’m no Talmudic scholar, so I defer to the experts. My understanding is that the Golem’s lack of language indicated not its own deficiency per se, but the deficiency of its creators. The Golem is imperfect in not using language, a sure sign that it was created by pietistic kabbalists who themselves are without sufficient purity.

Talmudic scholars note that the deficiency the Golem exhibits is intrinsically tied to the method by which the Golem is created: language. The kabbalistic incantations that ostensibly vivify the Golem were generated by mathematical combinations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Contemporaneous understanding of the Golem's lack of speech was connected to this completely formal method of kabbalistic letter magic: “The silent Golem is, prima facie, a foil to the recitations involved in the process of his creation.” (Idel, 1990, pages 264–5) The imperfection demonstrated by the Golem’s lack of language is not its inability to think, but its inability to wield the powers of language manifest in Torah, in prayer, in the creative power of the kabbalist incantations that gave rise to the Golem itself.

Only much later does interpretation start connecting language use in the Golem to soul, that is, to an internal flaw: “However, in the medieval period, the absence of speech is related to what was conceived then to be the highest human faculty: reason according to some writers, or the highest spirit, Neshamah, according to others.” (Idel, 1990, page 266, emphasis added)

By the 17th century, the time was ripe for consideration of whether nonhumans had a rational soul, and how one could tell. Descartes’s observations on the special role of language then serve as the true precursor to the Turing Test. Unlike the sole Talmudic reference, Descartes discusses the connection between language and thinking in detail and in several places — the Discourse on the Method, the Letter to the Marquess of Newcastle — and his followers — Cordemoy, La Mettrie — pick up on it as well. By Turing’s time, it is a natural notion, and one that Turing operationalizes for the first time in his Test.

The test of the Golem in the Sanhedrin story differs from the Turing Test in several ways. There is no discussion that the quality of language use was important (merely its existence), no mention of indistinguishability of language use (but Descartes didn't either), and certainly no consideration of Turing's idea of blinded controls. But the real point is that at heart the Golem test was not originally a test for the intelligence of the Golem at all, but of the purity of its creators.

References

Idel, Moshe. 1990. Golem: Jewish magical and mystical traditions on the artificial anthropoid, Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

More reason to outlaw Impact Factors from personnel discussions

2012-06-14T13:24:59+00:00

Pity the poor, beleaguered “Impact Factor™” (IF), a secret mathematistic formula originally intended to serve as a proxy for journal quality. No one seems to like it much. The manifold problems with IF have been rehearsed to death:

The calculation isn't a proper average.
The calculation is statistically inappropriate.
The calculation ignores most of the citation data.
The calculated values aren't reproducible.
Citation rates, and hence Impact Factors, vary considerably across fields making cross-discipline comparison meaningless.
Citation rates vary across languages. Ditto.
IF varies over time, and varies differentially for different types of journals.
IF is manipulable by publishers.

The study by the International Mathematical Union is especially trenchant on these matters, as is Bjorn Brembs' take. I don't want to pile on, just look at some new data that shows that IF has been getting even more problematic over time.

One of the most egregious uses of IF is in promotion and tenure discussions. It's been understood for a long time that the Impact Factor, given its manifest problems as a method for ranking journals, is completely inappropriate for ranking articles. As the European Association of Science Editors has said

Therefore the European Association of Science Editors recommends that journal impact factors are used only – and cautiously – for measuring and comparing the influence of entire journals, but not for the assessment of single papers, and certainly not for the assessment of researchers or research programmes either directly or as a surrogate.

Even Thomson Reuters says

The impact factor should be used with informed peer review. In the case of academic evaluation for tenure it is sometimes inappropriate to use the impact of the source journal to estimate the expected frequency of a recently published article.

"Sometimes inappropriate." Snort.

...the money chart...

Check out the money chart from the recent paper "The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers’ citations in the digital age" by George A. Lozano, Vincent Lariviere, and Yves Gingras.

They address the issue of whether the most highly cited papers tend to appear in the highest Impact Factor journals, and how that has changed over time. One of their analyses looked at the papers that fall in the top 5% for number of citations over a two-year period following publication, and depicts what percentage of these do not appear in the top 5% of journals as ranked by Impact Factor. If Impact Factor were a perfect reflection of the future citation rate of the articles in the journal, this number should be zero.

As it turns out, the percentage has been extremely high over the years. The majority of top papers fall into this group, indicating that restricting attention to top Impact Factor journals doesn't nearly cover the best papers. This by itself is not too surprising, though it doesn't bode well for IF.

More interesting is the trajectory of the numbers. At one point, roughly up through World War II, the numbers were in the 70s and 80s. Three quarters of the top-cited papers were not in the top IF journals. After the war, a steady consolidation of journal brands, along with the invention of the formal Impact Factor in the 60s and its increased use, led to a steady decline in the percentage of top articles in non-top journals. Basically, a journal's imprimatur — and its IF along with it — became a better and better indicator of the quality of the articles it published. (Better, but still not particularly good.)

This process ended around 1990. As electronic distribution of individual articles took over for distribution of articles bundled within printed journal issues, it became less important which journal an article appeared in. Articles more and more lived and died by their own inherent quality rather than by the quality signal inherited from their publishing journal. The pattern in the graph is striking.

The important ramification is that the Impact Factor of a journal is an increasingly poor metric of quality, especially at the top end. And it is likely to get even worse. Electronic distribution of individual articles is only increasing, and as the Impact Factor signal decreases, there is less motivation to publish the best work in high IF journals, compounding the change.

Meanwhile, computer and network technology has brought us to the point where we can develop and use metrics that serve as proxies for quality at the individual article level. We don't need to rely on journal-level metrics to evaluate articles.

Given all this, promotion and tenure committees should proscribe consideration of journal-level metrics — including Impact Factor — in their deliberations. Instead, if they must use metrics, they should use article-level metrics only, or better yet, read the articles themselves.

Editorial board members: What to ask of your journal

2012-06-11T14:48:43+00:00

...good behavior...

Harvard made a big splash recently when my colleagues on the Faculty Advisory Council to the Harvard Library distributed a Memorandum on Journal Pricing. One of the main problems with the memo, however, is the relatively imprecise recommendations that it makes. It exhorts faculty to work with journals and scholarly societies on their publishing and pricing practices, but provides no concrete advice on exactly what to request. What is good behavior?

I just met with a colleague here at Harvard who raised the issue with me directly. He's a member of the editorial board of a journal and wants to do the right thing and make sure that the journal's policies make them a good actor. But he doesn't want to (and shouldn't be expected to) learn all the ins and outs of the scholarly publishing business, the legalisms of publication agreements and copyright, and the interactions of all that with the policies of the particular journal. He's not alone; there are many others in the same boat. Maybe you are too. Is there some pithy request you can make of the journal that encapsulates good publishing practices?

(I'm assuming here that converting the journal to open access is off the table. Of course, that would be preferable, but it's unlikely to get you very far, especially given that the most plausible revenue model for open-access journal publishing, namely, publication fees, is not well supported by the scholarly publishing ecology as of yet.)

There are two kinds of practices that the Harvard memo moots: it explicitly mentions pricing practices of journals, and implicitly brings up author rights issues in its recommendations. Scholar participants in journals (editors editorial board members, reviewers) may want to discuss both kinds of practices with their publishers. I have recommendations for both.

Rights practices

Here's my candidate recommendation for ensuring a subscription journal has good rights practice. You (and, ideally, your fellow editorial board members) hand the publisher a copy of the Science Commons Delayed Access (SCDA) addendum. (Here's a sample.) You request that they adjust their standard article publication agreement so as to make the addendum redundant. This request has several nice effects.

It's simple, concrete, and unambiguous.
It describes the desired result in terms of functionality — what the publication agreement should achieve — not how it should be worded.
It guarantees that the journal exhibits best practices for a subscription journal. Any journal that can satisfy the criterion that the SCDA addendum is redundant:
- Let's authors retain rights to use and reuse the article in further research and scholarly activities,
- Allows green OA self-archiving without embargo,
- Allows compliance with any funder policies (such as the NIH Public Access Policy),
- Allows compliance with employer policies (such as university open-access policies) without having to get a waiver, and
- Allows distribution of the publisher's version of the article after a short embargo period.
It applies to journals of all types. (Just because the addendum comes from Science Commons doesn't mean it's not appropriate for non-science journals.)
It doesn't require the journal to give up exclusivity to its published content (though it makes that content available with a moving six-month wall).

The most controversial aspect of an SCDA-compliant agreement from the publisher's point of view is likely the ability to distribute the publisher's version of the article after a six-month embargo. I wouldn't be wed to that six month figure. This provision would be the first thing to negotiate, by increasing the embargo length — to one year, two years, even five years. But sticking to some finite embargo period for distributing the publisher's version is a good idea, if only to serve as precedent for the idea. Once the journal is committed to allowing distribution of the publisher's version after some period, the particular embargo length might be reduced over time.

Pricing practices

The previous proposal does a good job, to my mind, of encapsulating a criterion of best publication agreement practice, but it doesn't address the important issue of pricing practice. Indeed, with respect to pricing practices, it's tricky to define good value. Looking at the brute price of a journal is useless, since journals publish wildly different numbers of articles, from the single digits to the four digits per year, so three orders of magnitude variations in price per journal is expected. Price per article and price per page are more plausible metrics of value, but even there, because journals differ in the quality of articles they tend to publish, hence their likely utility to readers, variation in these metrics should be expected as well. For this reason, some analyses of value look to citation rate as a proxy for quality, leading to a calculation of price per citation.

Another problem is getting appropriate measures of the numerator in these metrics. When calculating price per article or per page or per citation, what price should one use? Institutional list price is a good start. List price for individual subscriptions is more or less irrelevant, given that individual subscriptions account for a small fraction of revenue. But publishers, especially major commercial publishers with large journal portfolios, practice bundling and price discrimination that make it hard to get a sense of the actual price that libraries pay. On the other hand, list price is certainly an upper bound on the actual price, so not an unreasonable proxy.

Finally, any of these metrics may vary systematically across research fields, so the metrics ought to be relativized within a field.

Ted and Carl Bergstrom have collected just this kind of data for a large range of journals at their journalprices.com site, calculating price per article and price per citation along with a composite index calculated as the geometric mean of the two. To handle the problem of field differences, they provide a relative price index (RPI) that compares the composite to the median for non-profit journals within the field, and propose that a journal be considered "good value" if RPI is less than 1.25, "medium value" if its RPI is less than 2, and "bad value" otherwise.

As a good first cut at a simple message to a journal publisher then, you could request that the price of a journal be reduced to bring its RPI below 1.25 (that is, good value), or at least 2 (medium value). Since lots of journals run in the black with composite price indexes below median, that is, with RPI below 1, achieving an RPI of 2 should be achievable for an efficient publisher. (My colleague's journal, the one that precipitated this post, has an RPI of 2.85. Plenty of room for improvement.)

In summary, you ask the journal to change its publication agreement to be SCDA-compliant and its price to have RPI less than 2. That's specific, pragmatic, and actionable. If the journal won't comply, you at least know where they stand. If you don't like the answers you're getting, you can work to find a new publisher willing to play ball, or at least, don't lend your free labor to the current one.

Processing special collections: An archivist's workstation

2012-05-29T18:00:07+00:00

...Harvard's special collections... John Tenniel, c. 1864. Study for illustration to Alice's adventures in wonderland. Harcourt Amory collection of Lewis Carroll, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

We've just completed spring semester during which I taught a system design course jointly in Engineering Sciences and Computer Science. The aim of ES96/CS96 is to help the students learn about the process of solving complex, real-world problems — applying engineering and computational design skills — by undertaking an extended, focused effort directed toward an open-ended problem defined by an interested "client".

The students work independently as a self-directed team. The instructional staff provides coaching, but the students do all of the organization and carrying out of the work, from fact-finding to design to development to presentation of their findings.

This term the problem to be addressed concerned the Harvard Library's exceptional special collections, vast holdings of rare books, archives, manuscripts, personal documents, and other materials that the library stewards. Harvard's special collections are unique and invaluable, but are useful only insofar as potential users of the material can find and gain access to them. Despite herculean efforts of an outstanding staff of archivists, the scope of the collections means that large portions are not catalogued, or catalogued in insufficient detail, making materials essentially unavailable for research. And this problem is growing as the cataloging backlog mounts. The students were asked to address core questions about this valuable resource: What accounts for this problem at its core? Can tools from computer science and technology help address the problems? Can they even qualitatively improve the utility of the special collections?

The clients were the leadership of Harvard's premier Houghton and Schlesinger libraries. The students received briefings from William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library, and Marilyn Dunn, Executive Director of the Schlesinger Library and Librarian of the Radcliffe Institute; toured both libraries; and met with a wide range of archivists and librarians, who were incredibly generous with their time and expertise. I'd like to express my deep appreciation and thanks to all of the library staff who helped out with the course. Their participation was vital.

The students' recommendations centered around the design, development, and prototyping of an "archivist's workstation" and the unconventional "flipped" collections processing that the workstation enabled. Their process involves exhaustive but lightweight digitization of a collection as a precursor to highly efficient metadata acquisition on top of the digitized images, rather than the conventional approach of digitizing selectively only after all processing of the collection is performed. The "digitize first" approach means that documents need only be touched once, with all of the sorting, arrangement, and metadata application being performed virtually using optimized user interfaces that they designed for these purposes. The output is a dynamic finding aid with images of all documents, complete with search and faceted browsing of the collection, to supplement the static finding aid of traditional archival processing. The students estimate that processing in this way would be faster than current methods, while delivering a superior result. Their demo video (below) gives a nice overview of the idea.

The deliverables for the course are now available at the course web site, including the final report and a videotape of their final presentation before dozens of Harvard archivists, librarians, and other members of the community.

I hope others find the ideas that the students developed as provocative and exciting as I do. I'm continuing to work with some of them over the summer and perhaps beyond, so comments are greatly appreciated.

Archivist%20Video.mov

Open letter on the Access2Research White House petition

2012-05-21T15:45:10+00:00

I just sent the email below to my friends and family. Feel free to send a similar letter to yours.

You know me. I don't send around chain letters, much less start them. So you know that if I'm sending you an email and asking you to tell your friends, it must be important.

This is important.

As taxpayers, we deserve access to the research that we fund. It's in everyone's interest: citizens, researchers, government, everyone. I've been working on this issue for years. I recently testified before a House committee about it.

Now we have an opportunity to tell the White House that they need to take action. There is a petition at the White House petition site calling for "President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research." If we get 25,000 signatures by June 19, 2012, the petition will be placed in the Executive Office of the President for a policy response.

Please sign the petition. I did. I was signatory number 442. Only 24,558 more to go.

Signing the petition is easy. You register at the White House web site verifying your email address, and then click a button. It'll take five minutes tops. (If you're already registered, you're down to ten seconds.)

Please sign the petition, and then tell those of your friends and family who might be interested to do so as well. You can inform people by tweeting them this URL <http://bit.ly/MAbTHG> or posting on your Facebook page or sending them an email or forwarding them this one. If you want, you can point them to a copy of this email that I've put up on the web at <http://bit.ly/J8EmyD>.

Since I've just requested that you send other people this email (and that they do so as well), I want to make sure that there's a chain letter disclaimer here: Do not merely spam every email address you can find. Please forward only to those people who you know well enough that it will be appreciated. Do not forward this email after June 19, 2012. The petition drive will be over by then. By all means before forwarding the email check the White House web link showing the petition at whitehouse.gov to verify that this isn't a hoax. Feel free to modify this letter when you forward it, but please don't drop the substance of this disclaimer paragraph.

You can find out more about the petition from the wonderful people at Access2Research who initiated it, and you can read more about my own views on open access to the scholarly literature at my blog, the Occasional Pamphlet.

Thank you for your help.

Stuart M. Shieber
Welch Professor of Computer Science
Director, Office for Scholarly Communication
Harvard University

The new Harvard Library open metadata policy

2012-04-27T19:09:24+00:00

“Old Books”

photo by flickr user Iguana Joe, used by permission (CC-by-nc)

Earlier this week, the Harvard Library announced its new open metadata policy, which was approved by the Library Board earlier this year, along with an initial two metadata releases. The policy is straightforward:

The Harvard Library provides open access to library metadata, subject to legal and privacy factors. In particular, the Library makes available its own catalog metadata under appropriate broad use licenses. The Library Board is responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and modifying it as necessary.

The first releases under the policy include the metadata in the DASH repository. Though this metadata has been available through open APIs since early in the repository's history, the open metadata policy makes clear the open licensing terms that the data is provided under.

The release of a huge percentage of the Harvard Library's bibliographic metadata for its holdings is likely to have much bigger impact. We've provided 12 million records — the vast majority of Harvard's bibliographic data — describing Harvard's library holdings in MARC format under a CC0 license that requests adherence to a set of community norms that I think are quite reasonable, primarily calling for attribution to Harvard and our major partners in the release, OCLC and the Library of Congress.

OCLC in particular has praised the effort, saying it “furthers [Harvard's] mandate from their Library Board and Faculty to make as much of their metadata as possible available through open access in order to support learning and research, to disseminate knowledge and to foster innovation and aligns with the very public and established commitment that Harvard has made to open access for scholarly communication. I’m pleased to say that they worked with OCLC as they thought about the terms under which the release would be made.” We've gotten nice coverage from the New York Times, Library Journal, and Boing Boing as well.

Many people have asked what we expect people to do with the data. Personally, I have no idea, and that's the point. I've seen over and over that when data is made openly available with the fewest impediments — legal and technical — people are incredibly creative about finding innovative uses for the data that we never could have predicted. Already, we're seeing people picking up the data, exploring it, and building on it.

The Digital Public Library of America is making the data available through an API that provides data in a much nicer way than the pure MARC record dump that Harvard is making available.
Within hours of release, Benjamin Bergstein had already set up his own search interface to the Harvard data using the DPLA API.
Carlos Bueno has developed code for the Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset to parse its "wonky" MARC21 format, and has open-sourced the code.
Alf Eaton has documented his own efforts to work with the bibliographic dataset, providing instructions for downloading and extracting the records and putting up all of the code he developed to massage and render the data. He outlines his plans for further extensions as well.

(I'm sure I've missed some of the ways people are using the data. Let me know if you've heard of others, and I'll update this list.)

As I've said before, “This data serves to link things together in ways that are difficult to predict. The more information you release, the more you see people doing innovative things.” These examples are the first evidence of that potential.

John Palfrey, who was really the instigator of the open metadata project, has been especially interested in getting other institutions to make their own collection metadata publicly available, and the DPLA stands ready to help. They're running a wiki with instructions on how to add your own institution's metadata to the DPLA service.

It's hard to list all the people who make initiatives like this possible, since there are so many, but I'd like to mention a few major participants (in addition to John): Jonathan Hulbert, Tracey Robinson, David Weinberger, and Robin Wendler. Thanks to them and the many others that have helped in various ways.

Statement before the House Science Committee

2012-03-30T12:18:27+00:00

“Majesty of Law”
Statue in front of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., photo by flickr user NCinDC, used by permission (CC-by-nd)

Here is my written testimony filed in association with my appearance yesterday at the hearing on "Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests" before the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. My thanks to Chairman Broun, ranking member Tonko, and the committee for allowing me the opportunity to speak with them today.

[Update 3/30/12: Coverage from Chronicle of Higher Education. Update 4/2/12: Video of the session is available from the House Science Committee as well.]

Statement of Stuart M. Shieber before the
Committee on Science, Space and Technology
Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight
U.S. House of Representatives

March 29, 2012

Chairman Broun and Members of the Subcommittee:

My name is Stuart Shieber. I am the James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. My primary field of research is computational linguistics, the study of human language from a computer science perspective, often with application to the engineering of useful computer systems that manipulate language. As a faculty member, I led the development and enactment of Harvard’s open-access policies. Since October of 2008, I have served in the additional role as the faculty director of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today about some of the actions that we have taken at Harvard to provide the broadest possible access to the results of our research.

The potential for open access

The mission of the university is to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge to the benefit of all. In Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), where I hold my faculty post, we codify this in the FAS Grey Book, which states that research policy “should encourage the notion that ideas or creative works produced at the University should be used for the greatest possible public benefit. This would normally mean the widest possible dissemination and use of such ideas or materials.”

At one time, the widest possible dissemination was achieved by distributing the scholarly articles describing the fruits of research in the form of printed issues of peer-reviewed journals, sent to the research libraries of the world for reading by their patrons, and paid for by subscription fees. These fees covered the various services provided to the authors of the articles — management of the peer review process, copy-editing, typesetting, and other production processes — as well as the printing, binding, and shipping of the physical objects.

Thanks to the forward thinking of federal science funding agencies, including NSF, DARPA, NASA, and DOE, we now have available computing and networking technologies that hold the promise of transforming the mechanisms for disseminating and using knowledge in ways not imaginable even a few decades ago. The internet allows nearly instantaneous distribution of content for essentially zero marginal cost to a large and rapidly increasing proportion of humanity. Ideally, this would ramify in a universality of access to research results, thereby truly achieving the widest possible dissemination.

The benefits of such so-called open access are manifold. The signatories of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative state that

The public good [open access] make[s] possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

From a more pragmatic point of view, a large body of research has shown that public research has a large positive impact on economic growth, and that access to the scholarly literature is central to that impact. Martin and Tang’s recent review of the literature concludes that “there have been numerous attempts to measure the economic impact of publicly funded research and development (R&D), all of which show a large positive contribution to economic growth.”^[1] It is therefore not surprising that Houghton’s modeling of the effect of broader public access to federally funded research shows that the benefits to the US economy come to the billions of dollars and are eight times the costs.^[2]

Opening access to the literature makes it available not only to human readers, but to computer processing as well. There are some million and a half scholarly articles published each year.^[3] No human can read them all or even the tiny fraction in a particular subfield, but computers can, and computer analysis of the text, known as text mining, has the potential not only to extract high-quality structured data from article databases but even to generate new research hypotheses. My own field of research, computational linguistics, includes text mining. I have collaborated with colleagues in the East Asian Languages and Civilization department on text mining of tens of thousands of classical Chinese biographies and with colleagues in the History department on computational analysis of pre-modern Latin texts. Performing similar analyses on the current research literature, however, is encumbered by proscriptions of copyright and contract because the dominant publishing mechanisms are not open.

In Harvard’s response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s request for information on public access,^[4] Provost Alan Garber highlighted the economic potential for the kinds of reuse enabled by open access.

Public access not only facilitates innovation in research-driven industries such as medicine and manufacturing. It stimulates the growth of a new industry adding value to the newly accessible research itself. This new industry includes search, current awareness, impact measurement, data integration, citation linking, text and data mining, translation, indexing, organizing, recommending, and summarizing. These new services not only create new jobs and pay taxes, but they make the underlying research itself more useful. Research funding agencies needn’t take on the job of provide all these services themselves. As long as they ensure that the funded research is digital, online, free of charge, and free for reuse, they can rely on an after-market of motivated developers and entrepreneurs to bring it to users in the forms in which it will be most useful. Indeed, scholarly publishers are themselves in a good position to provide many of these value-added services, which could provide an additional revenue source for the industry.

Finally, free and open access to the scholarly literature is an intrinsic good. It is in the interest of the researchers generating the research and those who might build upon it, the public who take interest in the research, the press who help interpret the results, and the government who funds these efforts. All things being equal, open access to the research literature ought to be the standard.

Systemic problems in the journal publishing system

Unfortunately, over the last several years, it has become increasingly clear to many that this goal of the “widest possible dissemination” was in jeopardy because of systemic problems in the current mechanisms of scholarly communication, which are not able to take full advantage of the new technologies to maximize the access to research and therefore its potential for social good.

By way of background, I should review the standard process for disseminating research results. Scholars and researchers — often with government funding — perform research and write up their results in the form of articles, which are submitted to journals that are under the editorial control of the editor-in-chief and editorial boards made up of other scholars. These editors find appropriate reviewers, also scholars, to read and provide detailed reviews of the articles, which authors use to improve the quality of the articles. Reviewers also provide advice to the editors on whether the articles are appropriate for publication in the journal, the final decisions being made by the editors. Participants in these aspects of the publishing process are overwhelmingly volunteers, scholars who provide their time freely as a necessary part of their engagement in the research enterprise. The management of this process, handling the logistics, is typically performed by the journal’s publisher, who receives the copyright in the article from the author for its services. The publisher also handles any further production process such as copy-editing and typesetting of accepted articles and their distribution to subscribers through print issue or more commonly these days through online access. This access is provided to researchers by their institutional libraries, which pay for annual subscriptions to the journals.

Libraries have observed with alarm a long-term dramatic rise in subscription costs of journals. The Association of Research Libraries, whose members represent the leading research libraries of the United States and Canada, have tracked serials expenditures for over three decades. From 1986 through 2010 (the most recent year with available data), expenditures in ARL libraries have increased by a factor of almost 5. Even discounting for inflation, the increase is almost 2.5 times. These increases correspond to an annualized rate of almost 7% per year, during a period in which inflation has averaged less than 3%.^[5]

Another diagnostic of the market dysfunction in the journal publishing system is the huge disparity in subscription costs between different journals. Bergstrom and Bergstrom showed that even within a single field of research, commercial journals are on average five times more expensive per page than non-profit journals.^[6] When compared by cost per citation, which controls better for journal quality, the disparity becomes even greater, a factor of 10 times. Odylzko notes that “The great disparity in costs among journals is a sign of an industry that has not had to worry about efficiency.”^[7] Finally, the extraordinary profit margins, increasing even over the last few years while research libraries’ budgets were under tremendous pressure, provide yet another signal of the absence of a functioning competitive market.

The Harvard library system is the largest academic library in the world, and the fifth largest library of any sort. In attempting to provide access to research results to our faculty and students, the university subscribes to tens of thousands of serials at a cost of about 9 million dollars per year. Nonetheless, we too have been buffeted by the tremendous growth in journal costs over the last decades, with Harvard’s serials expenditures growing by a factor of 3 between 1986 and 2004.^[8] Such geometric increases in expenditures could not be sustained indefinitely. Over the years since 2004 our journal expenditure increases have been curtailed through an aggressive effort at deduplication, elimination of print subscriptions, and a painful series of journal cancellations. As a researcher, I know that Harvard does not subscribe to all of the journals that I would like access to for my own research, and if Harvard, with its scale, cannot provide optimal subscription access, other universities without our resources are in an even more restricted position.

Correspondingly, the articles that we ourselves generate as authors are not able to be accessed as broadly as we would like. We write articles not for direct financial gain — we are not paid for the articles and receive no royalties — but rather so that others can read them and make use of the discoveries they describe. To the extent that access is limited, those goals are thwarted.

The economic causes of these observed phenomena are quite understandable. Journal access is a monopolistic good. Libraries can buy access to a journal’s articles only from the publisher of that journal, by virtue of the monopoly character of copyright. In addition, the high prices of journals are hidden from the “consumers” of the journals, the researchers reading the articles, because an intermediary, the library, pays the subscriptions on their behalf. The market therefore embeds a moral hazard. Under such conditions, market failure is not surprising; one would expect inelasticity of demand, hyperinflation, and inefficiency in the market, and that is what we observe. Prices inflate, leading to some libraries canceling journals, leading to further price increases to recoup revenue — a spiral that ends in higher and higher prices paid by fewer and fewer libraries. The market is structured to provide institutions a Hobson’s choice between unsustainable expenditures or reduced access.

The unfortunate side effect of this market dysfunction has been that as fewer libraries can afford the journals, access to the research results they contain is diminished. In 2005, then Provost of Harvard Steven Hyman appointed an ad hoc committee, which I chaired, to examine these issues and make recommendations as to what measures Harvard might pursue to mitigate this problem of access to our writings. Since then, we have been pursuing a variety of approaches to maximize access to the writings of Harvard researchers.

Addressing insufficient access through an open-access policy

One of these approaches involves the self-imposition by faculty of an open-access policy according to which faculty grant a license to the university to distribute our scholarly articles and commit to providing copies of our manuscript articles for such distribution. By virtue of this kind of policy, the problem of access limitation is mitigated by providing a supplemental venue for access to the articles. Four years ago, in February of 2008, the members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard became the first school to enact such a policy,^[9] by unanimous vote as it turned out.

In order to guarantee the freedom of faculty authors to choose the rights situation for their articles, the license is waivable at the sole discretion of the author, so faculty retain control over whether the university is granted this license. But the policy has the effect that by default, the university holds a license to our articles, which can therefore be distributed from a repository that we have set up for that purpose. Since the FAS vote, six other schools at Harvard — Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Business School, Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard Graduate School of Design — have passed this same kind of policy, and similar policies have been voted by faculty bodies at many other universities as well, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, and Duke. Notably, the policies have seen broad faculty support, with faculty imposing these policies on themselves typically by unanimous or near unanimous votes.

Because of these policies in the seven Harvard schools, Harvard’s article repository, called DASH (for Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard),^[10] now provides access to over 7,000 articles representing 4,000 Harvard-affiliated authors. Articles in DASH have been downloaded almost three-quarters of a million times.^[11] The number of waivers of the license has been very small; we estimate the waiver rate at about 5%. Because of the policy, as faculty authors we are retaining rights to openly distribute the vast majority of the articles that we write.

The process of consultation in preparation for the faculty vote was a long one. I started speaking with faculty committees, departments, and individuals about two years before the actual vote. During that time and since, I have not met a single faculty member or researcher who objected to the principle underlying the open-access policies at Harvard, to obtain the widest possible dissemination for our scholarly results, and have been struck by the broad support for the kind of open dissemination of articles that the policy and the repository allow.

This approach to the access limitation problem, the provision of supplemental access venues, is also seen in the extraordinarily successful public access policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which Congress mandated effective April, 2008. By virtue of that policy, researchers funded by NIH provide copies of their articles for distribution from NIH’s PubMed Central (PMC) repository. Today, PMC provides free online access to 2.4 million articles downloaded a million times per day by half a million users.^[12] NIH’s own analysis has shown that a quarter of the users are researchers. The hundreds of thousands of articles they are accessing per day demonstrates the large latent demand for articles not being satisfied by the journals’ subscription base. Companies account for another 17%, showing that the policy benefits small businesses and corporations, who need access to scientific advances to spur innovation. Finally, the general public accounts for 40% of the users, some quarter of a million people per day, demonstrating that these articles are of tremendous interest to the taxpayers who fund the research in the first place and who deserve access to the results that they have underwritten.

The standard objection to open-access policies

The standard objection to these open-access policies is that supplemental access to scholarly articles, such as that provided by institutional repositories like Harvard’s DASH or subject-based repositories like NIH’s PubMed Central, could supplant subscription access to such an extent that subscriptions would come under substantial price pressure. Sufficient price pressure, in this scenario, could harm the publishing industry, the viability of journals, and the peer review and journal production processes.

There is no question that the services provided by journals are valuable to the research enterprise, so such concerns must be taken seriously. By now, however, these arguments have been aired and addressed in great detail. I recommend the report “The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results?” by my co-panelist Elliott Maxwell,^[13] which provides detailed support for the report’s conclusion that “There is no persuasive evidence that increased access threatens the sustainability of traditional subscription-supported journals, or their ability to fund rigorous peer review.” The reasons are manifold, including the fact that supplemental access covers only a fraction of the articles in any given journal, is often delayed relative to publication, and typically provides a manuscript version of the article rather than the version of record. Consistent with this reasoning, the empirical evidence shows no such discernible effect. After four years of the NIH policy, for instance, subscription prices have continued to increase, as have publisher margins. The NIH states that “while the U.S. economy has suffered a downturn during the time period 2007 to 2011, scientific publishing has grown: The number of journals dedicated to publishing biological sciences/agriculture articles and medicine/health articles increased 15% and 19%, respectively. The average subscription prices of biology journals and health sciences journals increased 26% and 23%, respectively. Publishers forecast increases to the rate of growth of the medical journal market, from 4.5% in 2011 to 6.3% in 2014.”^[14]

Open-access journal publishing as an alternative to subscription journal publishing

Nonetheless, it does not violate the laws of economics that increased supplemental access (even if delayed) to a sufficiently high proportion of articles (even if to a deprecated version) could put price pressure on subscription journals, perhaps even so much so that journals would not be able to recoup their costs. In this hypothetical case, would that be the end of journals? No, because even if publishers (again, merely by hypothesis and counterfactually) add no value for the readers (beyond what the readers are already getting in the [again hypothetical] universal open access), the author and the author’s institution gain much value: vetting, copyediting, typesetting, and most importantly, imprimatur of the journal. This is value that authors and their institutions should be, would be, and are willing to pay for. The upshot is that journals will merely switch to a different business model, in which the journal charges a one-time publication fee to cover the costs of publishing the article.

I state this as though this publication-fee revenue model is itself hypothetical, but it is not. Open-access journals already exist in the thousands. They operate in exactly the same way as traditional subscription journals — providing management of peer review, production services, and distribution — with the sole exception that they do not charge for online access, so that access is free and open to anyone. The publication-fee revenue model for open-access journals is a proven mechanism. The prestigious non-profit open-access publisher Public Library of Science is generating surplus revenue and is on track to publish some 3% of the world biomedical literature through its journal PLoS ONE alone. The BioMed Central division of the commercial publisher Springer is generating profits for its parent company using the same revenue model. Indeed, the growth of open-access journals over the past few years has been meteoric. There are now over 7,000 open-access journals,^[15] many using the publication-fee model, and many of the largest, most established commercial journal publishers — Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, SAGE — now operate open-access journals using the publication-fee revenue model. Were supplemental access to cause sufficient price pressure to put the subscription model in danger, the result would merely be further uptake of this already burgeoning alternative revenue model.

In this scenario, the cost of journal publishing would be borne not by the libraries on behalf of their readers, but by funding agencies and research institutions on behalf of their authors. Already, funding agencies such as Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute underwrite open access author charges, and in fact mandate open access. Federal granting agencies such as NSF and NIH allow grant funds to be used for open-access publication fees as well (though grantees must prebudget for these unpredictable charges). Not all fields have the sort of grant funding opportunities that could underwrite these fees. For those fields, the researcher’s employing institution, as de facto funder of the research, should underwrite charges for publication in open-access journals. Here again, Harvard has taken an early stand as one of the initial signatories — along with Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, and University of California, Berkeley — of the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity,^[16] which commits these universities and the dozen or so additional signatories to establishing mechanisms for underwriting reasonable open-access publication fees. The Compact acknowledges the fact that the services that journal publishers provide are important, cost money, and deserve to be funded, and commits the universities to doing so, albeit with a revenue model that avoids the market dysfunction of the subscription journal system.

Advantages of the open-access publishing system

The primary advantage of the open-access journal publishing system is the open access that it provides. Since revenue does not depend on limiting access to those willing to pay, journals have no incentive to limit access, and in fact have incentive to provide as broad access as possible to increase the value of their brand. In fact, open-access journals can provide access not only in the traditional sense, allowing anyone to access the articles for the purpose of reading them, but can provide the articles unencumbered by any use restrictions, thereby allowing the articles to be used, re-used, analyzed, and data-mined in ways we are not even able to predict.

A perhaps less obvious advantage of the publication-fee revenue model for open-access journals is that the factors leading to the subscription market failure do not inhere in the publication-fee model. Bergstrom and Bergstrom^[17] explain why:

Journal articles differ [from conventional goods such as cars] in that they are not substitutes for each other in the same way as cars are. Rather, they are complements. Scientists are not satisfied with seeing only the top articles in their field. They want access to articles of the second and third rank as well. Thus for a library, a second copy of a top academic journal is not a good substitute for a journal of the second rank. Because of this lack of substitutability, commercial publishers of established second-rank journals have substantial monopoly power and are able to sell their product at prices that are much higher than their average costs and several times higher than the price of higher quality, non-profit journals.

By contrast, the market for authors’ inputs appears to be much more competitive. If journals supported themselves by author fees, it is not likely that one Open Access journal could charge author fees several times higher than those charged by another of similar quality. An author, deciding where to publish, is likely to consider different journals of similar quality as close substitutes. Unlike a reader, who would much prefer access to two journals rather than to two copies of one, an author with two papers has no strong reason to prefer publishing once in each journal rather than twice in the cheaper one.

If the entire market were to switch from Reader Pays to Author Pays, competing journals would be closer substitutes in the view of authors than they are in the view of subscribers. As publishers shift from selling complements to selling substitutes, the greater competition would be likely to force commercial publishers to reduce their profit margins dramatically.

Again, the empirical evidence supports this view. Even the most expensive open-access publication fees, such as those of the prestigious Public Library of Science journals, are less than $3,000 per article, with a more typical value in the $1,000-1,500 range. By contrast, the average revenue per article for subscription journal articles is about $5,000. Thus, the open-access model better leverages free market principles: Despite providing unencumbered access to the literature, it costs no more overall per article, and may end up costing much less, than the current system. The savings to universities and funding agencies could be substantial.

Conclusion

I began my comments by quoting the mission of academics such as myself to provide the widest possible dissemination — open access — to the ideas and knowledge resulting from our research. Government, too, has an underlying goal of promoting the dissemination of knowledge, expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s view that “by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people.”^[18] The federal agencies and science policies that this committee oversees have led to knowledge breakthroughs of the most fundamental sort — in our understanding of the physical universe, in our ability to comprehend fundamental biological processes, and, in my own field, in the revolutionary abilities to transform and transmit information.

Open access policies build on these information technology breakthroughs to maximize the return on the taxpayers’ enormous investment in that research, and magnify the usefulness of that research. They bring economic benefits that far exceed the costs. The NIH has shown one successful model, which could be replicated at other funding agencies, as envisioned in the recently re-introduced bipartisan Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA).

Providing open access to the publicly-funded research literature — amplifying the "diffusion of knowledge" — will benefit researchers, taxpayers, and every person who gains from new medicines, new technologies, new jobs, and new solutions to longstanding problems of every kind.

^[1] Ben R. Martin and Puay Tang, The benefits from publicly funded research, SEWPS Paper No. 161, SPRU—Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, Brighton (2007). http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/documents/sewp161

^[2] John Houghton, Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs (July 2010). http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/vufrpaa

^[3] Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, Report and Recommendations from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable (January 2010). http://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=10044

^[4] Alan Garber, Harvard response to the White House RFI on public access to research (January 2012). http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/stp-rfi-response-january-2012

^[5] Association of Research Libraries, Monograph and Serial Costs in ARL Libraries, 1986-2010 (2010). http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/t2_monser10.xls

^[6] Carl T. Bergstrom and Theodore C. Bergstrom, The costs and benefits of library site licenses to academic journals, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, volume 101, number 3 (20 January 2004). http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0305628101}

^[7] Andrew Odlyzko, The Economics of Electronic Journals, First Monday, volume 2, number 8 (4 August 1997). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/542/463

^[8] Association of Research Libraries, Monograph and Serial Costs in ARL Libraries, 1986-2010 (2010). http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/t2_monser10.xls

^[9] Text of the FAS policy and the other Harvard open-access policies is available at http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/policies.

^[10] http://dash.harvard.edu/

^[11] http://dash.harvard.edu/mydash

^[12] National Institutes of Health, NIH Public Access Policy Implications (2012).
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/public_access_policy_implications_2012.pdf

^[13] Committee for Economic Development. The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results? (2012). http://www.ced.org/component/blog/entry/1/765

^[14] National Institutes of Health, NIH Public Access Policy Implications (2012).
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/public_access_policy_implications_2012.pdf

^[15] According to the Directory of Open Access Journals, http://www.doaj.org/.

^[16] http://www.oacompact.org/. See also Stuart M. Shieber, Equity for open-access journal publishing, PLoS Biology, volume 7, number 8 (2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000165

^[17] Theodore C. Bergstrom and Carl T. Bergstrom, Can 'author pays' journals compete with 'reader pays'?, Nature Web Focus (2004). http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/22.html

^[18] Thomas Jefferson, Letter to George Wythe (13 August, 1786). http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib002184

The "Cost of Knowledge" boycott trajectory

2012-03-09T03:39:44+00:00

“Have scientists lost interest again?”

The "Cost of Knowledge" boycott of Elsevier is in its seventh week. The boycott was precipitated by various practices of the journal publisher, most recently its support for the Research Works Act, a bill that would roll back the NIH public access policy and prevent similar policies by other federal funding agencies.

Early on, several hundred researchers a day were signing on to the pledge not to submit to or edit or review for Elsevier journals, but recently that rate had settled down to about a hundred per day. On February 11, I started tracking the daily totals by scraping the site through a simple scraper I set up at ScraperWiki. I've graphed the results in the attached graph, showing raw count of signatories with the blue line (left axis) and the number added since the previous day with the green bars (right axis).

As you can see from the chart, there seems to be a slight drop in activity around weekends, and Sunday February 26 and Monday February 27 had clearly been the slowest days since I've been keeping records, and likely since the effort started. On the 27th (red arrow), Elsevier issued its quasi-recantation of support for RWA. ("While we continue to oppose government mandates in this area, Elsevier is withdrawing support for the Research Work Act itself. We hope this will address some of the concerns expressed....")

The day after Elsevier's announcement saw a bit of a bump back to previous levels. Was this an instance of the Streisand effect or was the 26-27 dip an aberration? It's hard to tell. However, since the 27th, it seems clear that the number of pledges is down considerably. It could well be that Elsevier's tactical approach has worked and it has stanched the spate of boycott pledges, despite the fact that the community was generally unimpressed with Elsevier's statement, as Peter Suber has cataloged. Alternatively, the current rate of new pledges may just reflect the natural reductions that had been happening over the last few weeks.

Elsevier has not changed its underlying stance. It still "continue[s] to oppose government mandates" for public access, as per RWA. It strongly opposes FRPAA. Have scientists lost interest again?

“Note the surges...”

[Update 4/20/2012: Now that a few more weeks have passed, here's an updated figure of the boycott growth. Note the surges around March 18 and April 10. As near as I can make out, these were the result of widely disseminated coverage in Slashdot and the Guardian, respectively. These surges show that the boycott hasn't played itself out yet, and that continued discussion of the boycott is likely to lead to a continued steady rise in the number of signatures.

At the current rate, I expect the number of signatories to hit 10,000 around April 27 or so.]

[Update 4/24/2012: Well, my guess was wrong. A big bump of activity in the last few days meant that the boycott broke 10,000 signatures on April 23. I'm not sure who to blame for the renewed interest in the last couple of days. Anyone have any conjectures?]

An efficient journal

2012-03-06T14:55:53+00:00

“You seem to believe in fairies.” Photo of the Cottingley Fairies, 1917, by Elsie Wright via Wikipedia.

Aficionados of open access should know about the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), an open-access journal in my own research field of artificial intelligence, a subfield of computer science concerned with the computational implementation and understanding of behaviors that in humans are considered intelligent. The journal became the topic of some dispute in a conversation that took place a few months ago in the comment stream of the Scholarly Kitchen blog between computer science professor Yann LeCun and scholarly journal publisher Kent Anderson, with LeCun stating that "The best publications in my field are not only open access, but completely free to the readers and to the authors." He used JMLR as the exemplar. Anderson expressed incredulity:

I’m not entirely clear how JMLR is supported, but there is financial and infrastructure support going on, most likely from MIT. The servers are not "marginal cost = 0" — as a computer scientist, you surely understand the 20-25% annual maintenance costs for computer systems (upgrades, repairs, expansion, updates). MIT is probably footing the bill for this. The journal has a 27% acceptance rate, so there is definitely a selection process going on. There is an EIC, a managing editor, and a production editor, all likely paid positions. There is a Webmaster. I think your understanding of JMLR’s financing is only slightly worse than mine — I don’t understand how it’s financed, but I know it’s financed somehow. You seem to believe in fairies.

Since I have some pretty substantial knowledge of JMLR and how it works, I thought I'd comment on the facts of the matter.

First, some history. JMLR was founded when most of the editorial board of the Kluwer journal Machine Learning (now a Springer journal) resigned to establish JMLR, Inc., a nonprofit to develop and publish the new journal on an open access model. The first editor-in-chief was Leslie Kaelbling, a computer science professor at MIT. The journal's first papers appeared in October 2000. Its twelfth annual volume just completed this past December.

One of the main things that journal publishers do is manage the logistics of the peer review and filtering of submitted articles. Starting with the former Machine Learning team, the journal put together an editorial board and a cadre of action editors to handle the reviewing process. At the time the journal was launched, there weren't the abundance of open-source journal management platforms that are now available. Being computer scientists, the editorial board took the expedient of implementing their own, a custom system that they still use. Much of the clerical effort of tracking the peer review process — assigning papers to action editors, engaging reviewers, tracking reviews, acceptances and rejections, and the like — is automated by the platform. Of course, these days, the platform situation has eased considerably.

Almost immediately, the journal was appreciated as being of top quality. The number of articles it published increased quickly over the first few years, its illustrious editorial team serving to convince prospective authors of its seriousness. Its first year in ISI's rankings, it had the highest Impact Factor of any journal in its Web of Science subject category ("computer science, artificial intelligence"). It is currently ranked eighth (of 108 journals) by Impact Factor and fourth by Eigenfactor and Article Influence. Machine Learning is down to 33rd. If you're into that kind of thing.

The journal does not charge any submission or publication fees and has never done so. It has never taken any advertising. Indeed, it has never had any direct revenue at all. In fact, JMLR, Inc. didn't even have a bank account until recently; there was no need.

Of course, there are costs, but they are all provided through in-kind support. By far the largest costs are the labor required for peer reviewing and its management by the editorial board, but this is all volunteer effort as in most all scholarly journals. The primary people involved, the editor-in-chief, managing editor, and production editor, are all unpaid, contra Anderson's conjecture. They volunteer for JMLR in their spare time away from their day jobs as computer science professors. MIT implicitly underwrites some clerical help, since Kaelbling's administrative assistant at MIT does a small amount of work for the journal, amounting to a few hours per year.

The webmaster is a student volunteer. Anderson is right that MIT provides the web server, saving JMLR the tens of dollars per month they would otherwise have to pay for commercial hosting. Kaelbling has paid for the domain name jmlr.org out of her own pocket. The going rate for .org domains is about $15 per year.

In addition to management of the peer review process, publishers provide production services as well, such as copy-editing and typesetting. One of the main motivations for JMLR leaving Kluwer was the sense that the help they were supposed to be providing was sparse and better avoided. Kluwer did no copy-editing of articles. JMLR relies on reviewers for the kind of light copy-editing they always have done in the normal course of reviewing. For accepted articles that require large amounts of language help, the authors are requested to find copy-editing help at their expense; such cases are extremely rare. Other than that, no copy-editing is done. It doesn't seem to have harmed the journal's perceived quality.

As for the typesetting of articles, computer science authors typically use the open-source LaTeX typesetting system for writing their articles, a system designed for beautiful typesetting of mathematical material and far better for mathematical typesetting than the typical systems publishers are accustomed to. The process of retypesetting that many journals have historically performed inevitably introduces errors, leading to a product inferior to that computer science authors typically provide. JMLR used an approach where authors submit camera-ready copy based on a publisher-supplied LaTeX style file. By dropping the retypesetting with an inferior system, errors in the process are eliminated and the quality of typesetting improved. Increasingly, journals in computer science and related fields (mathematics, physics) are moving to this system. In fact, Machine Learning itself accepts LaTeX submissions and provides an appropriate LaTeX style file for authors to use. Thus, the total cost to JMLR for copy-editing and typesetting is zero.

The biggest expense, it turns out paradoxically, is paying a tax accountant. Kaelbling explained the problem to me:

We have to file a bunch of annoying forms to maintain tax exempt status, etc. I have paid for the original incorporation and some amount of the accountant out of my pocket. But I have gotten a couple of donations (totaling $7K) which I have also used for that stuff. It wouldn't need to be so expensive, except I'm too disorganized and late to keep on top of it myself.

JMLR has always appeared both free online and by subscription in print. The print edition was originally intended to satisfy the desires of authors who hung onto a view that online-only journals may not be viewed as "serious", but also has the advantage of substantially solving the digital preservation problem for the journal. The print edition of the first four volumes was published by MIT Press, at first quarterly, then semi-quarterly as submissions grew and more articles were accepted. JMLR received no revenue from the print edition and paid no subvention to MIT Press. MIT Press handled all aspects of fulfilling the print subscriptions and kept all the revenues from a quite reasonable subscription fee of just under 30 cents per page. From the fifth volume on, the print edition was taken over by Microtome Publishing under the same zero-zero arrangement. Under Microtome Publishing's approach, which leverages important aspects of the print editions specific to open-access journals, the subscription cost decreased dramatically over the next few volumes, settling at a steady state of 8 cents per page for the last several volumes.

Adding it all up, a reasonable imputed estimate for JMLR’s total direct costs other than the volunteered labor (that is, tax accountant, web hosting, domain names, clerical work, etc.) is less than $10,000, covering the almost 1,000 articles the journal has published since its founding — about $10 per article. With regard to whose understanding of JMLR’s financing is better than whose, Yann LeCun I think comes out on top.

[Update 3/18/12: In the comments section, Leslie Kaelbling corrects her estimate of outside donations to $3,500, so I should revise my estimate of JMLR’s cost per article to be about $6.50 per article.]

How do I know all this about JMLR? Because (full disclosure alert) I am Microtome Publishing. Microtome is a sole proprietorship providing "publishing services in support of open access to the scholarly literature." I've worked with JMLR for many years now, and consequently have gained a good understanding of all aspects of its operations and of the operations of a subscription-based print journal as well. I don't pretend to have all of the knowledge of a professional publisher by any means. On the other hand, I don't believe in fairies.

Does JMLR’s success and efficiency mean that all journals could run this way? Of course not. First, computer science journals are in a particularly good situation for being operated at low cost. Computer scientists possess all of the technological expertise required to efficiently manage and operate an online journal. Journal publishing is an information industry and computer scientists are specialists in information processing. Second, the level of volunteerism that JMLR relies on is atypical for the entire spectrum of journals. Paid editorial positions for computer science journals are exceptionally rare; we're used to the volunteerism of running a journal. As authors, computer scientists are accustomed to performing their own typesetting and we prefer to do it ourselves. JMLR reviewers are relied on for whatever copy-editing is done. Paying professional copy-editors if that was desired would add more to the cost per page (though apparently not even Machine Learning’s commercial publisher was doing so when the board left). Third, some of the costs of operating a journal are the overhead costs that are being absorbed by various institutions. An independent publisher would have to pay for office space for staff, for instance, whereas the primary editors use their homes or offices, hiding that cost.

Nonetheless, the success of JMLR does provide a clue that the cost of running a premier journal might be far less than publishers imply, if they were to rethink the process substantially — maybe not $10 per article, but surely far less than the $5,000 average revenue per article that scholarly publishers currently receive. This expectation is borne out by the several non-profit and commercial open-access journal publishers that are able to operate in the black with publication fees a fraction of that average.

Anderson closes his comments on JMLR with these recommendations for LeCun:

You should look at yourself in the mirror, and ask why you don’t understand even the most basic financial realities (computers cost money to run, editors get paid, and webmasters get paid), why you don’t understand how JMLR is funded, how much you’ve benefited from tuition/fee increases foisted on students at +395% over the past decade,^[1] and why you feel compelled to argue points you haven’t adequately examined (you tell me how JMLR is funded, and you’ll have much better face validity).

The call not to argue points one hasn't adequately examined is surely apt.

^[1]With regard to tuition hikes foisted on students see my earlier post.

Is the pot calling the kettle black?

2012-02-26T00:03:51+00:00

“...the interpersonal processes that a student goes through...”
Harvard students (2008) by E>mar via flickr. Used by permission (CC by-nc-nd)

Is the pot calling the kettle black? Oh sure, journal prices are going up, but so is tuition. How can universities complain about journal price hyperinflation if tuition is hyperinflating too? Why can't universities use that income stream to pay for the rising journal costs?

There are several problems with this argument, above and beyond the obvious one that two wrongs don't make a right.

First, tuition fees aren't the bulk of a university's revenue stream. So even if it were true that tuition is hyperinflating at the pace of journal prices, that wouldn't mean that university revenues were keeping pace with journal prices.

Second, a journal is a monopolistic good. If its price hyperinflates, buyers can't go elsewhere for a substitute; it's pay or do without. But a college education can be arranged for at thousands of institutions. Students and their families can and do shop around for the best bang for the buck. (Just do a search for "best college values" for the evidence.) In economists' parlance, colleges are economic substitutes. So even if it were true that tuition at a given college is hyperinflating at the pace of journal prices, individual students can adjust accordingly. As the College Board says in their report on “Trends in College Pricing 2011”:

Neither changes in average published prices nor changes in average net prices necessarily describe the circumstances facing individual students. There is considerable variation in prices across sectors and across states and regions as well as among institutions within these categories. College students in the United States have a wide variety of educational institutions from which to choose, and these come with many different price tags.

Third, a journal article is a pure information good. What you buy is the content. Pure information goods include things like novels and music CDs. They tend to have high fixed costs and low marginal costs, leading to large economies of scale. But a college education is not a pure information good. Sure, you are paying in part to acquire some particular knowledge, say, by listening to a lecture. But far more important are the interpersonal processes that a student participates in: interacting with faculty, other instructional staff, librarians, other students, in their dormitories, labs, libraries, and classrooms, and so forth. It is through the person-to-person hands-on interactions that a college education develops knowledge, skills, and character.

This aspect of college education has high marginal costs. One would not expect it to exhibit the economies of scale of a pure information good. So even if it were true that tuition is hyperinflating at the pace of journal prices, that would not take the journals off the hook; they should be able to operate with much higher economies of scale than a college by virtue of the type of good they are.^[1]

Which makes it all the more surprising that the claims about college tuition hyperinflating at the rate of journals are, as it turns out, just plain false.

Let's look at what the average Harvard College student pays for his or her education. When we talk about journal prices hyperinflating, we're not just talking about list prices but about the net prices that libraries actually pay for the journals. If list prices hyperinflate but publishers provide discounts that moderate the inflation, you can't hold the list prices against them. But the hyperinflation in serials prices has been in net costs—for instance, as recorded by the annual ARL serials price surveys.

Similarly for colleges we need to look at net prices, not list prices. The list price of a college education, the cost of attendance (COA) is the published tuition and fees, room and board; the net price subtracts whatever financial aid the college provides. There is a substantial difference between the two, as this chart shows:

The green line, the average net COA (in green) has increased, surely, but not nearly as quickly as the list COA (in blue). And it is the net COA that we are concerned with.

We also need to make sure that we are comparing costs appropriately over time. We should compare in inflation-adjusted dollars. Looking at the net COA normalized against the consumer price index (CPI-U, in 1996 dollars), things look quite different:

Net Harvard COA has been basically flat for the last 15 years or so, with, in fact, a dip in the last few years.

Now, we can place the inflation-adjusted net COA on the same chart as inflation-adjusted net serials expenditures to gauge the comparison between the two. (I normalize them to 1996 = 1 so that the changes over time can be compared.)

Is this unique to Harvard? Certainly there is a lot of variation in net COA among different groups of colleges. Public universities have been losing large amounts of their state subsidies over the last few years, leading to real net COA increases. But those tuition increases result from a subsidy being reduced; they aren't generating windfall revenue increases to pay for journal price increases. Private four-year colleges and universities have not had huge increases in revenues from students. The College Board's study shows that over the time period they looked at

Average published tuition and fees at private nonprofit four-year colleges and universities are about $3,730 higher (in 2011 dollars) in 2011-12 than they were in 2006-07, but the average net tuition paid by full-time students in this sector declined by $550 in inflation-adjusted dollars over this five-year period. (College Board, “Trends in College Pricing 2011”. Emphasis added.)

You can be the judge as to whether a tuition decrease of $100 per year in real dollars constitutes hyperinflation at journal-price levels.

The hyperinflation in journal prices looks especially bad when we compare it against other pure information goods, say, music CDs. The information technology revolution has led to tremendous efficiencies in generating and distributing information goods. In the presence of competition, this leads in general to great efficiencies and price reductions, a phenomenon we see clearly in CD price history. Why hasn't the journal publishing industry been able to generate similar efficiency gains over time? Shouldn't journal prices be going down, not up?

[Update May 15, 2012: NPR's Planet Money podcast for May 11, 2012 featured a story ("The Real Price of College") on the divergence of list and net college prices stating the same conclusion of stable net COA over the last decade. They go into great detail about why list prices are increasing while net prices remain roughly constant.]

Data sources:

Serials expenditure data are from the ARL Annual Surveys.

Harvard COA and net COA data are courtesy of Harvard's Office of Institutional Research.

CD prices are from the RIAA report "CDs are a better value than ever!".

Consumer price index data are from the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics.

^[1]You may say that this aspect of college education is a waste of money. The Khan Academy is able to teach algebra at essentially zero marginal cost. This is true, and its tuition is not hyperinflating either. If students want that kind of education, that's fine, but for better or worse that is not the type of education provided by institutions that have libraries that subscribe to journals, so is irrelevant to this argument.

Switching to open access for the new year

2012-01-05T01:45:56+00:00

“...time to switch...”
A very old light switch (2008) by RayBanBro66 via flickr. Used by permission (CC by-nc-nd)

The journal Research in Learning Technology has switched its approach from closed to open access as of New Year's 2012. Congratulations to the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and its Central Executive Committee for this farsighted move.

This isn't the first journal to make the switch. The Open Access Directory lists about 130 of them. In my own research field, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) converted its flagship journal Computational Linguistics to OA as of 2009, and has just announced a new open-access journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Each such transition is a reminder of the trajectory that journal publishing ought to head.

The ALT has done lots of things right in this change. They've chosen the ideal licensing regime for papers, the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. They've jettisoned one of the largest commercial subscription journal publishers, and gone with a small but dedicated professional open-access publisher, Co-Action Publishing. They've opened access to the journal retrospectively, so that the entire archive, back to 1993, is available from the publisher's web site.

Here's hoping that other scholarly societies are inspired by the examples of the ALT and ACL, and join the many hundreds of scholarly societies that publish their journals open access. It's time to switch.

Clarifying the Harvard policies: a response

2011-12-02T20:59:34+00:00

My friend and ex-colleague Matt Welsh has an interesting post supporting the Research Without Walls pledge, in which he talks about the Harvard open-access policies. He says:

Another way to fight back is for your home institution to require all of your work be made open. Harvard was one of the first major universities to do this. This ambitious effort, spearheaded by my colleague Stuart Shieber, required all Harvard affiliates to submit copies of their published work to the open-access Harvard DASH archive. While in theory this sounds great, there are several problems with this in practice. First, it requires individual scientists to do the legwork of securing the rights and submitting the work to the archive. This is a huge pain and most folks don't bother. Second, it requires that scientists attach a Harvard-supplied "rider" to the copyright license (e.g., from the ACM or IEEE) allowing Harvard to maintain an open-access copy in the DASH repository. Many, many publishers have pushed back on this. Harvard's response was to allow its affiliates to get an (automatic) waiver of the open-access requirement. Well, as soon as word got out that Harvard was granting these waivers, the publishers started refusing to accept the riders wholesale, claiming that the scientist could just request a waiver. So the publishers tend to win.

I wrote a response to his post, clarifying some apparent misconceptions about the policy, but it was too long for his blogging platform's comment system, so I decided to post it here in its entirety. Here it is:

There's a lot to like about your post, and I agree with much of what you say. But I'd like to clarify some specific issues about the Harvard open-access policies, which are in place at seven of the Harvard schools as well as MIT, Duke, Stanford, and elsewhere.

The policy has two aspects. First, the policy commits faculty to (as you say) "submitting the work to the archive", that is, providing a copy of the final manuscript of each article, to be deposited into Harvard's DASH open-access repository. Doing so involves filling out a web form with metadata about the article and uploading a file. But if that is too much trouble, we provide a simpler web form that is tantamount to just uploading the file. Or you can email the file to the OSC. Or one of our "open-access fellows" can make the deposit on your behalf. We also harvest articles from other repositories such as PubMed Central and arXiv. I can't imagine that providing the articles is "a huge pain".

Second, by virtue of the policy, Harvard faculty grant a nonexclusive transferable license to the university in all our scholarly articles. This license occurs as soon as copyright vests in the article, so it predates and therefore dominates any later transfer of copyright to a publisher. Since the policy license is transferable, the university can and does transfer it back to the author, so the author automatically retains rights in each article, without having to take any further action. Because of this policy, the "legwork of securing the rights" is actually eliminated. By doing nothing at all, the author retains rights in the article.

You mention attaching a rider to publication agreements. Although we provide an addendum generator to generate such riders, and we recommend that authors use them, attaching an addendum is not required to retain rights. The only point of the addendum is to alert the publisher that the author has already given Harvard non-exclusive rights to the article (though publishers undoubtedly are already aware of the fact; the policy and its license have been widely publicized).

Because we want the policy to work in the interest of faculty and guarantee the free choice of faculty as to the disposition of their works, the license is waivable at the sole discretion of the author. Thus, rights retention moves from an opt-in regime without the policy to an opt-out regime with the policy. The waiver aspect of the policy was not a response to publisher pushback, but has in fact been in the policies from the beginning. The waiver was intended to preserve complete freedom of choice for authors in rights retention.

As is found in many areas (organ donation, 401K participation), participation tends to be much higher with opt-out than opt-in systems, and that holds for rights retention as well. We have found that the waiver rate is extraordinarily low, contra your assumption. For FAS, we estimate it at perhaps 5% of articles. In total, the number of waivers we have issued is in the very low hundreds, out of the many thousands of articles that have been published by Harvard faculty since the policy was in force. MIT has tracked the waiver rate more accurately, and has reported a 1.5% waiver rate. So for well over 90% of articles, authors are retaining broad rights to use their articles.

The statement that "Many, many publishers have pushed back on this" is false. Less than a handful of publishers have established systematic policies to require waivers of the license, which accounts for the exceptionally low waiver rate. Indeed, over a third of all waivers are attributable to a single journal.

The Harvard approach to rights retention and open-access provision for articles is not a silver bullet to solve all problems in scholarly publishing. It has a limited goal: to provide an alternate venue for openly disseminating our articles and to retain the rights to do so. It is extremely successful at that goal. Many thousands of articles have been deposited in DASH, accounting for over half a million downloads. Nonetheless, other efforts need to be made to address the underlying market dysfunction in scholarly publishing, and we are actively engaged there too. For those interested in what we're up to along those lines, I recommend taking a look at the various posts at my blog, The Occasional Pamphlet, which discusses issues of open access and scholarly communication more generally.

Conan Doyle on the prevention of cruelty to books

2011-12-01T12:00:29+00:00

“...dog-eared in thirty-one places...”

I've been reading Arthur Conan Doyle's first novel, The Narrative of John Smith, just published for the first time by the British Library. It's no The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, that's for sure. For one thing, he seems to have left out any semblance of plot. But it does incorporate some entertaining pronouncements. Here's one I identify with highly:

There should be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Books. I hate to see the poor patient things knocked about and disfigured. A book is a mummified soul embalmed in morocco leather and printer's ink instead of cerecloths and unguents. It is the concentrated essence of a man. Poor Horatius Flaccus has turned to an impalpable powder by this time, but there is his very spirit stuck like a fly in amber, in that brown-backed volume in the corner. A line of books should make a man subdued and reverent. If he cannot learn to treat them with becoming decency he should be forced.

If a bibliophile House of Commons were to pass a 'Bill for the better preservation of books' we should have paragraphs of this sort under the headings of 'Police Intelligence' in the newspapers of the year 2000: 'Marylebone Police Court. Brutal outrage upon an Elzevir Virgil. James Brown, a savage-looking elderly man, was charged with a cowardly attack upon a copy of Virgil's poems issued by the Elzevir press. Police Constable Jones deposed that on Tuesday evening about seven o'clock some of the neighbours complained to him of the prisoner's conduct. He saw him sitting at an open window with the book in front of him which he was dog-earing, thumb-marking and otherwise ill using. Prisoner expressed the greatest surprise upon being arrested. John Robinson, librarian of the casualty section of the British Museum, deposed to the book, having been brought in in a condition which could only have arisen from extreme violence. It was dog-eared in thirty-one places, page forty-six was suffering from a clean cut four inches long, and the whole volume was a mass of pencil — and finger — marks. Prisoner, on being asked for his defence, remarked that the book was his own and that he might do what he liked with it. Magistrate: "Nothing of the kind, sir! Your wife and children are your own but the law does not allow you to ill treat them! I shall decree a judicial separation between the Virgil and yourself: and condemn you to a week's hard labour." Prisoner was removed, protesting. The book is doing well and will soon be able to quit the museum.'

Portrait of Arthur Conan Doyle by Sidney Paget, c. 1890

What a wonderful, wonderful thing it is, though use has dulled our admiration of it! Here are all these dead men lurking inside my oaken case, ready to come out and talk to me whenever I may desire it. Do I wish philosophy? Here are Aristotle, Plato, Bacon, Kant and Descartes, all ready to confide to one their very inmost thoughts upon a subject which they have made their own. Am I dreamy and poetical? Out come Heine and Shelley and Goethe and Keats with all their wealth of harmony and imagination. Or am I in need of amusement on the long winter evenings? You have but to light your reading lamp and beckon to any one of the world's great storytellers, and the dead man will come forth and prattle to you by the hour. That reading-lamp is the real Aladdin's wonder for summoning the genii with. Indeed, the dead are such good company that one is apt to think too little of the living.

I know that there are those who think it is a sign of appreciation to write in, dog-ear, underline, highlight, and otherwise modify books — Anne Fadiman lauds such things as carnal acts — but I can't bring myself to do so. I just can't.

How should funding agencies pay open-access fees?

2011-11-16T14:00:37+00:00

“...a drop in the bucket.”
Drop I (2007) by Delox - Martin Deák via flickr. Used by permission (CC by-nc-nd)

At the recent Berlin 9 conference, there was much talk about the role of funding agencies in open-access publication, both through funding-agency-operated journals like the new eLife journal and through direct reimbursement of publication fees. I've written in the past about the importance of universities underwriting open-access publication fees, but only tangentially about the role of funding agencies. To correct that oversight, I provide in this post my thoughts on how best to organize a funding agency's open-access underwriting system.

The motivation for underwriting publication fees is simple: Publishers provide valuable services to authors: management of peer review; production (copy-editing and typesetting); filtering, branding, and imprimatur. Although access to scholarly articles can now be provided at essentially zero marginal cost through digital networks, some means for paying for these so-called first-copy costs needs to be found in order to preserve these services. The natural business model is the open-access journal funded by article processing fees. (Although most current open-access journals charge no article processing fees, I will abuse the term "open-access journal" for this model.) Open-access (OA) journals are no longer an oddity, a fringe phenomenon. The largest scholarly journal on earth, PLoS ONE, is an OA journal. Major publishers — Springer, Elsevier, SAGE, Nature Publishing Group — are now publishing OA journals.

However, OA journals are currently at a significant disadvantage with respect to subscription journals, because universities and funding agencies subsidize the costs of subscription journals in such a way that authors do not need to trade off money used for the subsidy against money used for other purchases. In particular, subscription fees are paid by universities through their library budgets and by funding agencies through their overhead payments that fund those libraries. Authors do not see, let alone attend to, these costs. In such a situation, an author is inclined to publish in a subscription journal, where they do not need to use any moneys that could otherwise be applied to other uses, rather than an OA journal that requires payment of a publication fee. And if authors are unwilling to publish in open-access journals because of the fees, publishers — even those interested and motivated to switch to an OA revenue model — are unable to do so.

The solution is clear: universities and funding agencies should underwrite reasonable OA publication fees just as they do subscription fees. But how should this be done? Each kind of institution needs to provide its fair share of support.

As I've written about before, universities can underwrite processing fees on behalf of their faculty, and do so in a way that does not reintroduce a moral hazard, by reimbursing faculty for OA publication fees up to a fixed cap per year. Since these funds can only be used for open access fees, they can't be traded off against other purchases, so they don't provide a disincentive against open access journals. On the other hand, since these funds are limited (capped), they provide a market signal to motivate choosing among open access journals so that the economic incentives will militate toward low-cost high-service open access journals.

This is the argument for the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), a commitment by universities to establish mechanisms for underwriting OA publication fees. COPE has grown well beyond its initial five signatories and is supported by a wide range of institutions and people. Harvard and other COPE signatories have already set up such OA funds, which work in just this way.

Many COPE-compliant OA funds don't underwrite articles that were developed under research grants, under the view that such funding is the responsibility of the granting institutions. COPE calls for universities to do their fair share of paying OA fees, no less, but no more. Funding agencies need to underwrite their share of OA fees as well, and crucially should do so in a way that respects several important criteria:

They level the playing field completely, at least for cost-efficient OA journals.
They recognize that publication of research results often occurs after grants have ended.
They provide incentive for publishers to switch revenue model to the OA publication fee model, or at least provide no disincentive.
They avoid the moral hazard of insulating authors from the costs of their publishing.
They don't place an undue burden on funders that would require reducing the impact of research they fund.

Of course, many funders already allow grantees to pay for OA publication fees from their grants. But this method falls afoul of some of these criteria. With respect to criterion (1), grantees are forced to trade off uses of grant moneys to pay OA fees against uses to pay for other research expenses, providing incentive to publish in subscription-fee journals where these costs are hidden. This approach maintains the tilted playing field against OA journals. With respect to criterion (2), because the funds must be expended during the granting period, grantees must predict ahead of time how many articles they will be publishing in OA journals, where they will be publishing them, and those articles must be completed and accepted for publication by the end of the granting period.

The mechanism that satisfies these criteria is for funding agencies to provide non-fungible funds specifically for OA publication fees, funds that are not usable for purchasing other grant-related materials. Funders would establish a policy that grantees could be reimbursed for OA publication fees for articles based on grant-funded research at any time during or after the period of the grant. This satisfies criterion (1) because grantees would no longer have to pay publication fees out of pocket or from grant funds that could be used otherwise. It satisfies criterion (2) because payments can be provided after the end of the grant. (If desired, the delay after the grant ends can be limited to, say, a year or two.) A reasonable requirement for reimbursement of publication fees would be that the article explicitly acknowledge the grant as a source of research funding.

Wellcome Trust already uses a similar incremental funding system. However, they (inadvisably in my mind) allow the funds to apply to so-called hybrid publication fees, where an additional fee can be paid to make a single article available open access. These reimbursements should be limited to publication fees for true OA journals, not hybrid fees for subscription journals. Willingness to pay hybrid fees provides an incentive for a publisher to maintain the subscription revenue model for a journal, because the publisher can acquire these funds without converting the journal as a whole to open access. Eschewing hybrid fees is necessary to satisfy criterion (3).

If funders were willing to pay arbitrary amounts for publication fees without limit, a new moral hazard would be introduced into the publishing market. Authors would become price-insensitive and hyperinflation of publication fees would be possible. To retain a functioning market in publication fees, we must be careful in designing the reimbursement scheme for OA journals; we need to make sure that there is still some scarce resource that authors must manage. This can be achieved in a couple of ways, by capping reimbursements or by copayments. First, reimbursement of OA publication fees can be offered only up to a fixed percentage of the grant amount. By way of example, if an average NIH grant is $300,000 (excluding overhead^[1]), a cap of, say, 2% would provide up to $6,000 available for OA fees. (Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services at the Wellcome Trust, estimates that at present rates all funded papers of the Wellcome Trust could be underwritten for about 1.25% of their total granted funds. In the short run, nowhere near that level of underwriting is necessary, since the number of publication-fee-charging OA journals is so small. In the long run, as competition in the publication fee market increases, this number may well go down.) That would cover two PLoS Biology papers, three BMC papers, four or five PLoS ONE papers, eight or so Hindawi papers. A grantee would apply separately for these funds to reimburse reasonable OA fees. Some grantees might use all of these funds, some none, with most falling in the middle (and currently at the low end); but in any case they would not be usable for other purposes. Since these funds can only be used for OA publication fees, they can't be traded off against other purchases, so there is no disincentive against selecting OA journals. On the other hand, since these funds are limited (capped), they provide a market signal to motivate choosing among open access journals so that the economic incentives will militate toward low-cost high-service OA journals. (This can't be repeated often enough.)

Alternatively, a copayment approach can be used to provide economic pressure to keep publication fees down. Reimbursement would cover only part of the fee, at least at the expensive end of such fees. It is important (criterion 1) that for cost-efficient OA journals, authors should not be out of pocket for any fees. Thus, reimbursement should be at 100% for journals charging less than some threshold amount, say, $1,500. (As publishers become more efficient, this threshold can and should be reduced over time.) Above that level, the funder might pay only a proportion of the fee, say, 50%, so that grantees have some "skin in the game" and are motivated to trade off publication fees against quality of publisher services. With these parameters, the payment schedule would provide for the following kinds of payments:

Publication fee	Funder pays	Author copays	Examples
$700	$700	$0	typical Hindawi journal, SAGE Open
$1350	$1350	$0	PLoS ONE, Scientific Reports
$2000	$1750	$250	typical BMC journal
$2900	$2200	$700	PLoS Biology

(What the right parameters of such an approach are may depend on field and may change over time. I don't propose these as the correct values, but merely provide an example of the workings of such a system.)

These two approaches are complementary. A policy could involve both a per-article copayment and a maximum per-grant outlay.

Finally, criterion (5) calls for implementing such an underwriting scheme as cost-effectively as possible, so that a funder's research impact is not lessened by paying for publication fees. Indeed, one might expect that impact would be increased by such a move, given that the tiny percentage of funds going to OA fees would mean that those research results were freely and openly available to readers and to machine analysis throughout the world. I would think (and I recall a claim to this effect at Berlin 9) that the impact benefit of providing open access to a funder's research results is greater than the impact of the marginal funded research grant. To the extent that this is so, it behooves funders to underwrite OA fees even at the expense of funding the incremental research. Nonetheless, there may be no need to forego funding research just to pay OA fees. Suppose that on the average grant incremental funds of $200 are used to pay OA publication fees. (With current availability and usage of OA journals, this is likely an overestimate of current demand for OA fees.) Where would this money come from? To the extent that faculty are publishing in OA journals, funders should not need to underwrite subscription journals, so that their overhead rates can be reduced accordingly. An overhead rate of 67% (Harvard's current rate) would need to be reduced by a minuscule 0.067% to compensate. (This is not a typo. The number really is 0.067%, not 6.7%.) This constitutes a percentage reduction in overhead of one part in a thousand, a drop in the bucket. In the longer term over several years if usage of the funds rises to, say, $1000 per grant, the overhead rate would need to be reduced by a still tiny 0.33% for cost neutrality. As more OA journals become available and more funds are used, the overhead rate would be adjusted accordingly. If hypothetically all journals became OA, and all articles incurred these charges, the cost per grant might rise higher to Wellcome Trust's predicted 1.25% (though by this point competition may have substantially reduced the fees), but then, larger reductions in overhead rates would be met by reduced university costs, since libraries would no longer need to pay subscription fees.

One of the nice properties of this approach is that it doesn't require synchronization of the many actors involved. Each funding agency can unilaterally start providing OA fee reimbursement along these lines. Until a critical mass do so, the costs would be minimal. Once a critical mass is obtained, and journals feel confident enough that a sufficient proportion of their author pool will be covered by such a fund to switch to an open-access revenue model, subscription fees to libraries will drop, allowing for overhead rates to be reduced commensurately to cover the increasing underwriting costs. Each actor — author, funder, publisher, university, library — acts independently, with a market mechanism to move all towards a system based on open access.

It is time for funding agencies to take on the responsibility not only to fund research but its optimal distribution. Part of that responsibility is putting in place an economically sustainable system of underwriting open-access publication fees.

^[1]The NIH Data Book reports average grant size for 2010 as around $450,000, which corresponds to something like $270,000 assuming a 67% overhead rate. $300,000 is thus likely on the high side.

The future of the library, expressed in sculpture

2011-10-13T09:33:48+00:00

I've just been at the conference in honor of the 30th anniversary of the University of Sao Paulo Integrated Library System (SIBi USP). David Palmer, one of the speakers at the conference, used in his presentation a picture of a wonderful sculpture that I had never seen before, which turned out to be a public art piece at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia by Petrus Spronk entitled "Architectural Fragment". I place a couple of pictures of it here in honor of Spronk's 72nd birthday, which happens to be today. You can find more images here.

Petrus Spronk, "Architectural Fragment", 1992. Photo by flickr user madam3181, used by permission (CC by-nc-nd).

Tales of peer review, episode 1: Boyer and Moore's MJRTY algorithm

2011-09-23T15:07:37+00:00

I'm generally a big fan of peer review. I think it plays an important role in the improvement and "chromatography" of the scholarly literature. But sometimes. Sometimes.

The Boyer-Moore MJRTY algorithm allows efficient determination of which shape (triangle, circle, square) is in the majority without counting each shape.

This past week I was reading Robert Boyer and J Strother Moore's paper on computing the majority element of a multiset, which presents a very clever simple algorithm for this fundamental problem and a description of a mechanical proof of its correctness. The authors aptly consider the work a "minor landmark in the development of formal verification and automated reasoning".

Below is the postscript to that paper, in its entirety, which describes the history of the paper including how and why it was "repeatedly rejected for publication". (It was eventually published as a chapter in a 1991 festschrift for Woody Bledsoe, ten years after it was written, and is now also available from Moore's website.)

In this paper we have described a linear time majority vote algorithm and discussed the mechanically checked correctness proof of a Fortran implementation of it. This work has a rather convoluted history which we would here like to clarify.

The algorithm described here was invented in 1980 while we worked at SRI International. A colleague at SRI, working on fault tolerance, was trying to specify some algorithms using the logic supported by "Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover." He asked us for an elegant definition within that logic of the notion of the majority element of a list. Our answer to this challenge was the recursive expression of the algorithm described here.

In late 1980, we wrote a Fortran version of the algorithm and proved it correct mechanically. In February, 1981, we wrote this paper, describing that work. In our minds the paper was noteworthy because it simultaneously announced an interesting new algorithm and offered a mechanically checked correctness proof. We submitted the paper for publication.

In 1981 we moved to the University of Texas. Jay Misra, a colleague at UT, heard our presentation of the algorithm to an NSF site-visit team. According to Misra (private communication, 1990): "I wondered how to generalize [the algorithm] to detect elements that occur more than n/k times, for all k, k ≥ 2. I developed algorithm 2 [given in Section 3 of [9]] which is directly inspired by your algorithm. Also, I showed that this algorithm is optimal [Section 5, op. cit.]. On a visit to Cornell, I showed all this to David Gries; he was inspired enough to contribute algorithm 1 [Section 2, op. cit.]." In 1982, Misra and Gries published their work [9], citing our technical report appropriately as "submitted for publication."

However, our paper was repeatedly rejected for publication, largely because of its emphasis on Fortran and mechanical verification. A rewritten version emphasizing the algorithm itself was rejected on the grounds that the work was superceded by the paper of Misra and Gries!

When we were invited to contribute to the Bledsoe festschrift we decided to use the opportunity to put our original paper into the literature. We still think of this as a minor landmark in the development of formal verification and automated reasoning: here for the first time a new algorithm is presented along with its mechanically checked correctness proof—eleven years after the work.

I have to think the world would have been better off if Boyer and Moore had just posted the paper to the web in 1981 and been done with it. Unfortunately, the web hadn't been developed yet.

Subscription fees as a distribution control mechanism

2011-09-11T12:46:07+00:00

Stamps to mark "restricted data" (modified from "atomic stamps 1" by flickr user donovanbeeson, used by permission under CC by-nc-sa)

Ten years ago today was the largest terrorist action in United States history, an event that highlighted the importance of intelligence, and its reliance on information classification and control, for the defense of the country. This anniversary precipitated Peter Suber's important message, which starts from the fact that access to knowledge is not always a good. He addresses the question of whether open access to the scholarly literature might make information too freely available to actors who do not have the best interests of the United States (or your country here) at heart. Do we really want everyone on earth to have information about public-key cryptosystems or exothermic chemical reactions? Should our foreign business competitors freely reap the fruits of research that American taxpayers funded? He says,

You might think that no one would seriously argue that using prices to restrict access to knowledge would contribute to a country's national and economic security. But a vice president of the Association of American Publishers made that argument in 2006. He "rejected the idea that the government should mandate that taxpayer financed research should be open to the public, saying he could not see how it was in the national interest. 'Remember -- you're talking about free online access to the world,' he said. 'You are talking about making our competitive research available to foreign governments and corporations.' "

Suber's response is that "If we're willing to restrict knowledge for good people in order to restrict knowledge for bad people, at least when the risks of harm are sufficiently high, then we already have a classification system to do this." (He provides a more detailed response in an earlier newsletter.) He is exactly right. Placing a $30 paywall in front of everyone to read an article in order to keep terrorists from having access to it is both ineffective (relying on al Qaeda's coffers to drop below the $30 point is not a counterterrorism strategy) and overreaching (since a side effect is to disenfranchise the overwhelming majority of human beings who are not enemies of the state). Instead, research that the country deems too dangerous to distribute should be, and is, classified, and therefore kept from both open access and toll access journals.

This argument against open access, that it might inadvertently abet competitors of the state, is an instance of a more general worry about open distribution being too broad. Another instance is the "corporate free-riding" argument. It is argued that moving to an open-access framework for journals would be a windfall to corporations (the canonical example is big pharma) who would no longer have to subscribe to journals to gain the benefit of their knowledge and would thus be free-riding. To which the natural response would be "and what exactly is wrong with that?" Scientists do research to benefit society, and corporate use of the fruits of the research is one of those benefits. Indeed, making research results freely available is a much fairer system, since it allows businesses both large and small to avail themselves of the results. Why should only businesses with deep pockets be able to take advantage of research, much of which is funded by the government.

But shouldn't companies pay their fair share for these results? Who could argue with that? To assume that the subscription fees that companies pay constitute their fair share for research requires several implicit assumptions that bear examination.

Assumption 1: Corporate subscriptions are a nontrivial sum. Do corporate subscriptions constitute a significant fraction of journal revenues? Unfortunately, there are to my knowledge no reliable data on the degree to which corporate subscriptions contribute to revenue. Estimates range from 0% (certainly the case in most fields of research outside the life sciences and technology) to 15-17% to 25% (a figure that has appeared informally and been challenged in favor of a 5-10% figure). (Thanks to Peter Suber for help in finding these references.) None of these estimates were backed up in any way. Without any well-founded figures, it doesn't seem reasonable to be worrying about the issue. The onus is on those proposing corporate free-riding as a major problem to provide some kind of transparently supportable figures.

Assumption 2: Corporations would pay less under open access. The argument assumes that in an open-access world, journal revenues from corporations would drop, because they would save money on subscriptions but would not be supporting publication of articles through publication fees. That is, corporate researchers "read more than they write." Of course, corporate researchers publish in the scholarly literature as well (as I did for the first part of my career when I was a researcher at SRI International), and thus would be contributing to the financial support of the publishing ecology. Here again, I know of no data on the percentage of articles with corporate authors and how that compares to the percentage of revenue from corporate subscriptions.

Assumption 3: Corporations shouldn't be paying less than they now are, perhaps for reasons of justice, or perhaps on the more mercenary basis of financial reality. It is presumed that if corporations are not paying subscription fees (and, again by assumption, publication fees) then academia will have to pick up the slack through commensurately higher publication fees, so the total expenditure by academia will be higher. This is taken to be a bad thing, but the reason for that is not clear. Why is it assumed that the "right" apportionment of fees between academia and business is whatever we happen to have at the moment, resulting as it does from historical happenstance based on differential subscription rates and corporate and university budget decisions? Free riding in the objectionable sense is to get something without paying when one ought to pay. But the latter condition doesn't apply to the open-access scholarly literature any more than it applies to broadcast television.

Assumption 4: Corporations only support research through subscription fees. However, corporations also provide support for funded research through the corporate taxes that they pay to the government, which funds the research. And this mode of payment has the advantage that it covers all parts of the research process, not just the small percentage that constitutes the publishing of the final results. Corporate taxes constitute some 10% of total US tax revenue according to the IRS, so we can impute corporate underwriting of US-government funded research at that same 10% level. (In fact, since many non-corporate taxes, like FICA taxes, are earmarked for particular programs that don't fund research, the imputed percentage should perhaps be even higher.) The subscription fees companies pay is above and beyond that. Is the corporate 10% not already a fair share? Might it even be too much?

If we collectively thought that the amount corporations are paying is insufficient, then the right response would be to increase the corporate taxes accordingly, so that all corporations contribute to the underwriting of scientific research that they all would be benefitting from. Let's take a look at some numbers. The revenue from the 2.5 million US corporations paying corporate tax for 2009 (the last year for which data are available) was about $225 billion. The NSF budget for 2009 was $5.4 billion. So, for instance, a 50% increase in the NSF budget would require increasing corporate tax revenues by a little over 1%, that is, from a 35% corporate tax rate (say) to something like 35.4%. I'm not advocating an increase in corporate taxes for this purpose. First, I'm in no way convinced that corporations aren't already supporting research sufficiently. Second, there are many other effects of corporate taxes that may militate against raising them. Instead, the point is that it is naive to pick out a single revenue source, subscription fees, as the sum total of corporate support of research.

Assumption 5: Subscription fees actually pay for research, or some pertinent aspect of research. But those fees do not devolve to the researchers or cover any aspect of the research process except for the publication aspect, and publishing constitutes only a small part of the costs of doing research. To avoid disingenuousness, shouldn't anyone worrying about whether corporations are doing their fair share in underwriting that aspect be worrying about whether they are doing their fair share in underwriting the other aspects as well? Of course, corporations arguably are underwriting other aspects — through internal research groups, grants to universities and research labs, and their corporate taxes (the 10% discussed above). And in an open-access world, they would be covering the publication aspect as well, namely publication fees, through those same streams.

In summary, maintaining the subscription revenue model for reasons of distribution control — whether for purposes of state defense or corporate free-riding — is a misconstruction.

JSTOR opens access to out-of-copyright articles

2011-09-08T15:41:25+00:00

Cover of the first issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, dated March 6, 1665. Available from JSTOR's Early Journal Content collection.

JSTOR, the non-profit online journal distributor, announced yesterday that they would be making pre-1923 US articles and pre-1870 non-US articles available for free in a program they call "Early Journal Content". The chosen dates are not random of course; they guarantee that the articles have fallen out of copyright, so such distribution does not run into rights issues. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean that JSTOR could take this action unilaterally. JSTOR is further bound by agreements with the publishers who provided the journals for scanning, which may have precluded them contractually from distributing even public domain materials that were derived from the provided originals. Thus such a program presumably requires cooperation of the journal publishers. In addition, JSTOR requires goodwill from publishers for all of its activities, so unilateral action could have been problematic for its long-run viability. (Such considerations may even in part underly JSTOR's not including all public domain material in the opened collection.)

Arranging for the necessary permissions — whether legal or pro forma — takes time, and JSTOR claims that work towards the opening of these materials started "about a year ago", that is, prior to the recent notorious illicit download program that I have posted about previously. Predictably, the Twittersphere is full of speculation about whether the actions by Aaron Swartz affected the Early Journal Content program:

@grimmelm: JSTOR makes pre-1923 journals freely available http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/individuals/early-journal-content Would this have happened earlier or later w/o @aaronsw?

@mecredis: JSTOR makes all their public domain content available for free: http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor%E2%80%93free-access-early-journal-content I think this means @aaronsw wins.

@maxkaiser: Breaking: @JSTOR to provide free #openaccess to pre-1923 content in US & pre-1870 elsewhere - @aaronsw case had impact: http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor%E2%80%93free-access-early-journal-content

@JoshRosenau: JSTOR "working on releasing pre-1923 content before [@aaronsw released lotsa their PDFs], inaccurate to say these events had no impact."

@mariabustillos: Stuff that in yr. pipe and smoke it, JSTOR haters!! http://bit.ly/qtrxdV Also: how now, @aaronsw?

So, did Aaron Swartz's efforts affect the existence of JSTOR's new program or its timing? As to the former, it seems clear that with or without his actions, JSTOR was already on track to provide open access to out-of-copyright materials. As to the latter, JSTOR says that

[I]t would be inaccurate to say that these events have had no impact on our planning. We considered whether to delay or accelerate this action, largely out of concern that people might draw incorrect conclusions about our motivations. In the end, we decided to press ahead with our plans to make the Early Journal Content available, which we believe is in the best interest of our library and publisher partners, and students, scholars, and researchers everywhere.

On its face, the statement implies that JSTOR acted essentially without change, but we'll never know if Swartz's efforts sped up or slowed down the release.

What the Early Journal Content program does show is JSTOR's interest in providing broader access to the scholarly literature, a goal they share with open-access advocates, and even with Aaron Swartz. I hope and expect that JSTOR will continue to push, and even more aggressively, towards broader access to its collection. The scholarly community will be watching.

On guerrilla open access

2011-07-28T23:00:27+00:00

William G. Bowen, founder of JSTOR

[Update January 13, 2013: See my post following Aaron Swartz's tragic suicide.]

Aaron Swartz has been indicted for wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. The alleged activities that led to this indictment were his downloading massive numbers of articles from JSTOR by circumventing IP and MAC address limitations and breaking and entering into restricted areas of the MIT campus to obtain direct access to the network, for the presumed intended purpose of distributing the articles through open file-sharing networks. The allegation is in keeping with his previous calls for achieving open access to the scholarly literature by what he called "guerrilla open access" in a 2008 manifesto: "We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks." Because many theorize that Swartz was intending to further the goals of open access by these activities, some people have asked my opinion of his alleged activities.

Before going further, I must present the necessary disclaimers: I am not a lawyer. He is presumed innocent until proven guilty. We don't know if the allegations in the indictment are true, though I haven't seen much in the way of denials (as opposed to apologetics). We don't know what his intentions were or what he planned to do with the millions of articles he downloaded, though none of the potential explanations I've heard make much sense even in their own terms other than the guerrilla OA theory implicit in the indictment. So there is a lot we don't know, which is typical for a pretrial case. But for the purpose of discussion, let's assume that the allegations in the indictment are true and his intention was to provide guerrilla OA to the articles. (Of course, if the allegations are false, as some seem to believe, then my claims below are vacuous. If the claims in the indictment turn out to be false, or colored by other mitigating facts, I for one would be pleased. But I can only go by what I have read in the papers and the indictment.)

There's a lot of silliness that has been expressed on both sides of this case. The pro-Swartz faction is quoted as saying "Aaron's prosecution undermines academic inquiry and democratic principles." Hunh? Or this one: "It's incredible that the government would try to lock someone up for allegedly looking up articles at a library." Swartz could, of course, have looked up any JSTOR article he wanted using his Harvard library privileges, and could even have text-mined the entire collection through JSTOR's Data for Research program, but that's not what he did. Or this howler: "It's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library." No, it isn't, and even a cursory reading of the indictment reveals why. On the anti-Swartz side, the district attorney says things like "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars." If you can't see a difference between, say, posting one of your articles on your website and lifting a neighbor's stereo, well then I don't know what. There's lots of hyperbole going on on both sides.

Here's my view: Insofar as his intentions were to further the goals of proponents of open access (and no one is more of a proponent than I), the techniques he chose to employ were, to quote Dennis Blair, "not moral, legal, or effective."

If the claims in the indictment are true, his actions certainly were not legal. The simple act of downloading the articles en masse was undoubtedly a gross violation of the JSTOR terms and conditions of use, which would have been incorporated into the agreement Swartz had entered into as a guest user of the MIT network. Then there is the breaking and entering, the denial of service attack on JSTOR shutting down its servers, the closing of MIT access to JSTOR. The indictment is itself a compendium of the illegalities that Swartz is alleged to have committed.

One could try to make an argument that, though illegal, the acts were justified on moral grounds as an act of civil disobedience, as Swartz says in his manifesto. "There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture." If this was his intention, he certainly made an odd choice of target. JSTOR is not itself a publisher "blinded by greed", or a publisher of any sort. It merely aggregates material published by others. As a nonprofit organization founded by academics and supported by foundations, its mission has been to "vastly improve access to scholarly papers", by providing online access to articles previously unavailable, and at subscription rates that are extraordinarily economical. It has in fact made good on that mission, for which I and many other OA proponents strongly support it. This is the exemplar of Swartz's villains, his "[l]arge corporations ... blinded by greed"? God knows there's plenty of greed to go around in large corporations, including large commercial publishing houses running 30% profit margins, but you won't find it at JSTOR. As a side effect of Swartz's activities, large portions of the MIT community were denied access to JSTOR for several days as JSTOR blocked the MIT IP address block in an attempt to shut Swartz's downloads down, and JSTOR users worldwide may have been affected by Swartz's bringing down several JSTOR servers. In all, his activities reduced access to the very articles he hoped to open, vitiating his moral imperative. And if it is "time to come into the light", why the concerted active measures to cover his tracks (using the MIT network instead of the access he had through his Harvard library privileges, obscuring his face when entering the networking closet, and the like)?

Finally, and most importantly, this kind of action is ineffective. As Peter Suber predicted in a trenchant post that we can now see as prescient, it merely has the effect of tying the legitimate, sensible, economically rational, and academically preferable approach of open access to memes of copyright violation, illegality, and naiveté. There are already sufficient attempts to inappropriately perform this kind of tying; we needn't provide further ammunition. Unfortunate but completely predictable statements like "It is disappointing to see advocates of OA treat this person as some kind of hero." tar those who pursue open access with the immorality and illegality that self-proclaimed guerrillas exhibit. In so doing, guerrilla OA is not only ineffective, but counterproductive.

I believe, as I expect Aaron Swartz does, that we need an editorially sound, economically sustainable, and openly accessible scholarly communication system. We certainly do not have that now. But moving to such a system requires thoughtful efforts, not guerilla stunts.

C'est la bouquet, or why translation is hard

2011-07-18T02:50:32+00:00

Grégoire Bouillier

I used to use as my standard example of why translation is hard — and why fully automatic high-quality translation (FAHQT) is unlikely in our lifetimes however old we are — the translation of the first word of the first sentence of the first book of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. The example isn't mine. Brown et al. cite a 1988 New York Times article about the then-new translation by Richard Howard. Howard chose to translate the first word of the work, longtemps, as time and again (rather than, for example, the phrase for a long time as in the standard Moncrieff translation) so that the first word time would resonate with the temporal aspect of the last word of the last volume, temps, some 3000 pages later. How's that for context?

I now have a new example, from the Lorin Stein translation of Grégoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest. Stein adds a translator's note to the front matter “For reasons the reader will understand, I have refrained from translating the expression ‘C’est le bouquet.’ It means, more or less, ‘That takes the cake.’” That phrase occurs on page 14 in the edition I'm reading.

The fascinating thing is that the reader does understand, fully and completely, why the translator chose this route. But the reason is, more or less, because of a sentence that occurs on page 83, a sentence that shares no words with the idiom in question. True the protagonist perseverates on this latter sentence for the rest of the novella, but still, I challenge anyone to give an explanation in less than totally abstract terms, as far from the words actually used as you can imagine, to explain the reasoning, perfectly clear to any reader, of why the translator made this crucial decision.

Language is ineffable.

The NIH responds to my letter

2011-06-07T15:05:40+00:00

Front steps of National Library of Medicine, 2008, photo courtesy of NIH Image Bank

Imagine my surprise when I actually received a response to my letters in recognition of the NIH public access policy, a form letter undoubtedly, but nonetheless gratefully received. And as a side effect, it allows us to gauge the understanding of the issues in the pertinent offices.

The letter, which I've duplicated below in its entirety, addresses two of the issues that I raised in my letter, the expansion of the policy to other agencies and the desirability for a reduction in the embargo period.

With regard to expanding the NIH policy to other funding agencies, the response merely notes the America COMPETES Act's charge to establish a working group to study the matter — fine as far as it goes, but not an indication of support for expansion itself.

With regard to the embargo issue, the response seems a bit confused as to how things work in the real world. Let's look at some sentences from the pertinent paragraph:

"As you may know, the 12-month delay period specified by law (Division G, Title II, Section 218 of P.L. 110-161) is an upper limit. Rights holders (sometimes the author, and sometimes they transfer some or all of these rights to publishers) are free to select a shorter delay period, and many do." This is of course true. My hope, and that of many others, is to decrease this maximum.
"The length of the delay period is determined through negotiation between authors and publishers as part of the copyright transfer process." Well, not so much. Authors don't so much negotiate with publishers as just sign whatever publishers put in their path. When one actually attempts to engage in negotiation, sadly rare among academic authors, things often go smoothly, but sometimes take a turn for the odd, and authors in the thrall of publish or perish are short on negotiating leverage.
"These negotiations can be challenging for authors, and our guidance (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm#778) encourages authors to consult with their institutions when they have questions about copyright transfer agreements." I have a feeling that the word challenging is a euphemism for something else, but I'm not sure what. The cited FAQ doesn't in fact provide guidance on negotiation, but just language to incorporate into a publisher agreement to make it consistent with the 12-month embargo. No advice on what to do if the publisher refuses, much less how to negotiate shorter embargoes. As for the excellent advice to "consult with their institutions", in the case of Harvard, that kind of means to talk with my office, doesn't it? Which, I suppose, is a vote of confidence.

So there is some room for improvement in understanding the dynamic at play in author-publisher relations, but overall, I'm gratified that NIH folks are on top of this issue and making a good faith effort to bring the fruits of research to the scholarly community and the public at large, and reiterate my strong support of NIH's policy.

Here's the full text of the letter:

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES
Public Health Service
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland 20892

May 27 2011

Stuart M. Shieber, Ph.D.
Welch Professor of Computer Science, and
Director, Office for Scholarly Communication
1341 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Dear Dr. Shieber:

Thank you for your letters to Secretary Sebelius and Dr. Collins regarding the NIH Public Access Policy. I am the program manager for the Policy, and have been asked to respond to you directly.

We view the policy as an important tool for ensuring that as many Americans as possible benefit from the public's investment in research through NIH.

I appreciate your suggestions about reducing the delay period between publication and availability of a paper on PubMed Central. As you may know, the 12-month delay period specified by law (Division G, Title II, Section 218 of P.L. 110-161) is an upper limit. Rights holders (sometimes the author, and sometimes they transfer some or all of these rights to publishers) are free to select a shorter delay period, and many do. The length of the delay period is determined through negotiation between authors and publishers as part of the copyright transfer process. These negotiations can be challenging for authors, and our guidance (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm#778) encourages authors to consult with their institutions when they have questions about copyright transfer agreements.

I also appreciate your suggestion to expand this Policy to other Federal science funders, and the confidence it implies in our approach. The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) has been charged by the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-358) to establish a working group to explore the dissemination and stewardship of peer reviewed papers arising from Federal research funding. I am copying Dr. Celeste Rohlfing at the Office of Science and Technology Policy on this correspondence, as she is coordinating the NSTC efforts on Public Access.

Sincerely,

Neil M. Thakur, Ph.D.
Special Assistant to the NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research

cc: Ms. Celeste M. Rohlfing
Assistant Director for Physical Sciences
Office of Science and Technology Policy
Executive Office of the President
725 17th Street, Room 5228
Washington, DC 20502

The benefits of copyediting

2011-06-04T22:11:22+00:00

Dictionary and red pencil, photo by novii, on Flickr

Sanford Thatcher has written a valuable, if anecdotal, analysis of some papers residing on Harvard’s DASH repository (Copyediting’s Role in an Open-Access World, Against the Grain, volume 23, number 2, April 2011, pages 30-34), in an effort to get at the differences between author manuscripts and the corresponding published versions that have benefited from copyediting.

“What may we conclude from this analysis?” he asks. “By and large, the copyediting did not result in any major improvements of the manuscripts as they appear at the DASH site.” He finds that “the vast majority of changes made were for the sake of enforcing a house formatting style and cleaning up a variety of inconsistencies and infelicities, none of which reached into the substance of the writing or affected the meaning other than by adding a bit more clarity here and there” and expects therefore that the DASH versions are “good enough” for many scholarly and educational uses.

Although more substantive errors did occur in the articles he examined, especially in the area of citation and quotation accuracy, they were typically carried over to the published versions as well. He notes that “These are just the kinds of errors that are seldom caught by copyeditors.”

One issue that goes unmentioned in the column is the occasional introduction of errors by the typesetting and copyediting process itself. This used to happen with great frequency in the bad old days when publishers rekeyed papers to typeset them. It was especially problematic in fields like my own, in which papers tend to have large amounts of mathematical notation, which the typesetting staff had little clue about the niceties of. These days more and more journals allow authors to submit LaTeX source for their articles, which the publisher merely applies the house style file to. This practice has been a tremendous boon to the accuracy and typesetting quality of mathematical articles. Still, copyediting can introduce substantive errors in the process. Here’s a nice example from a paper in the Communications of the ACM:

“Besides getting more data, faster, we also now use much more sophisticated learning algorithms. For instance, algorithms based on logistic regression and that support vector machines can reduce by half the amount of spam that evades filtering, compared to Naive Bayes.” (Joshua Goodman, Gordon V. Cormack, and David Heckerman, Spam and the ongoing battle for the inbox, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, volume 50, number 2, 2007, page 27. Emphasis added.)

Any computer scientist would immediately see that the sentence as published makes no sense. There is no such thing as a “vector machine” and in any case algorithms don’t support them. My guess is that the author manuscript had the sentence “For instance, algorithms based on logistic regression and support vector machines can reduce by half...” — without the word that. The copyeditor apparently didn’t realize that the noun phrase support vector machine is a term of art in the machine learning literature; the word support was not intended to be a verb here. (Do a Google search for vector machine. Every hit has the phrase in the context of the term support vector machine, at least for the pages I looked at before boredom set in.)

Presumably, the authors didn’t catch the error introduced by the copyeditor. The occurrence of errors of this sort is no argument against copyediting, but it does demonstrate that it should be viewed as a collaborative activity between copyeditors and authors, and better tools for collaboratively vetting changes would surely be helpful.

In any case, back to Dr. Thatcher's DASH study. Ellen Duranceau at MIT Libraries News views the study as “support for the MIT faculty’s approach to sharing their articles through their Open Access Policy”, and the same could be said for Harvard as well. However, before we declare victory, it’s worth noting that Dr. Thatcher did find differences between the versions, and in general the edits were beneficial.

The title of Dr. Thatcher’s column gets at the subtext of his conclusions, that in an open-access world, we’d have to live with whatever errors copyediting would have caught, since we’d be reading uncopyedited manuscripts. But open-access journals can and do provide copyediting as one of their services, and to the extent that doing so improves the quality of the articles they publish and thus the imprimatur of the journal, it has a secondary benefit to the journal of improving its brand and its attractiveness to authors.

I admit that I’m a bit of a grammar nerd (with what I think is a nuanced view that manages to be linguistically descriptivist and editorially prescriptivist at the same time) and so I think that copyediting can have substantial value. (My own writing was probably most improved by Savel Kliachko, an outstanding editor at my first employer SRI International.) To my mind, the question is how to provide editing services in a rational way. Given that the costs of copyediting are independent of the number of accesses, and that the value accrues in large part to the author (by making him or her look like less of a halfwit for exhibiting “inconsistencies and infelicities” and occasionally more substantive errors), it seems reasonable that authors ought to pay publishers a fee for these services. And that is exactly what happens in open-access journals. Authors can decide if the bargain is a good one on the basis of the services that the publisher provides, including copyediting, relative to the fee the publisher charges. As a result, publishers are given incentive to provide the best services for the dollar. A good deal all around.

Most importantly, in a world of open-access journals the issue of divergence between author manuscripts and publisher versions disappears, since readers are no longer denied access to the definitive published version. Dr. Thatcher concludes that the benefits of copyediting were not as large as he would have thought. Nonetheless, however limited the benefits might be, properly viewed those benefits argue for open access.

The Scouring of the White Horse

2011-04-18T15:00:40+00:00

The owld White Harse wants zettin to rights
And the Squire hev promised good cheer,
Zo we'll gee un a scrape to kip un in zhape,
And a'll last for many a year.

— Thomas Hughes, The Scouring of the White Horse, 1859

On a recent trip to London, I had an extra day free, and decided to visit the Uffington White Horse with a friend. The Uffington White Horse is one of the most mysterious human artifacts on the planet. In the south of Oxfordshire, less than two hours west of London by Zipcar, it sits atop White Horse Hill in the Vale of White Horse to which it gives its name. It is the oldest of the English chalk figures, which are constructed by removing turf and topsoil to reveal the chalk layer below.

The Uffington White Horse, photo by flickr user superdove, used by permission

The figure is sui generis in its magnificence, far surpassing any of the other hill figures extant in England. The surrounding landscape — with its steep hills, the neighboring Roman earthworks castle, and pastoral lands still used for grazing sheep and cows — is spectacular.

The Uffington horse is probably best known for its appearance in Thomas Hughes’s 1857 novel Tom Brown's Schooldays. The protagonist Tom Brown, like Hughes himself, hails from Uffington, and Hughes uses that fact as an excuse to spend a few pages detailing the then-prevalent theory of the origin of the figure, proposed by Francis Wise in 1738, that the figure was carved into the hill in honor of King Æthelred’s victory over the Danes there in 871.^[1]

As it turns out, in a triumph of science over legend, Oxford archaeologists have dated the horse more accurately within the last twenty years. They conclude that the trenches were originally dug some time between 1400 and 600 BCE, making the figure about three millennia old.^[2]

How did the figure get preserved over this incredible expanse of time? The longevity of the horse is especially remarkable given its construction. The construction method is a bit different from its popular presentation as a kind of huge shallow intaglio, revealing the chalk substrate. Instead it is constructed as a set of trenches dug several feet deep and backfilled with chalk. Nonetheless, over time, dirt will overfill the chalk areas and grass will encroach. Over a period of decades, this process leads chalk figures to become "lost". In fact, several lost chalk figures in England are known of.

Chalk figures thus require regular maintenance to prevent overgrowing. Thomas Baskerville^[3] captures the alternatives: "some that dwell hereabout have an obligation upon their lands to repair and cleanse this landmark, or else in time it may turn green like the rest of the hill and be forgotten."

Figure from Hughes's The Scouring of the White Horse depicting the 1857 scouring. From the 1859 Macmillan edition.

This "repairing and cleansing" has been traditionally accomplished through semi-regular celebrations, called scourings, occurring at approximately decade intervals, in which the locals came together in a festival atmosphere to clean and repair the chalk lines, at the same time participating in competitions, games, and apparently much beer. Hughes's 1859 book The Scouring of the White Horse is a fictionalized recounting of the 1857 scouring that he attended.^[4]

These days, the regular maintenance of the figure has been taken over by the National Trust, which has also arranged for repair of vandalism damage and even for camouflaging of the figure during World War II.

The author at the Uffington White Horse, 19 March 2011, with Dragon Hill in the background. Note the beginnings of plant growth on the chalk substrate.

Thus, the survival of the Uffington White Horse is witness to a continuous three millennium process of active maintenance of this artifact. As such, it provides a perfect metaphor for the problems of digital preservation. (Ah, finally, I get to the connection with the topic at hand.) We have no precedent for long-term preservation of interpretable digital objects. Unlike books printed on acid-free paper, which survive quite well in a context of benign neglect, but quite like the White Horse, bits degrade over time. It requires a constant process of maintenance and repair — mirroring,^[5] verification, correction, format migration — to maintain interpretable bits over time scales longer than technology-change cycles. By coincidence, those time scales are about commensurate with the time scales for chalk figure loss, on the order of decades.

The tale of the Uffington White Horse provides some happy evidence that humanity can, when sufficiently motivated to establish appropriate institutions, maintain this kind of active process over millennia, but also serves as a reminder of the kind of loss we might see in the absence of such a process. The figure is to my knowledge the oldest extant human artifact that has survived due to continual maintenance. In recognition of this, I propose that we adopt as an appropriate term for the regular processes of digital preservation "the scouring of the White Horse".

[A shout out to the publican at Uffington's Fox and Hounds Pub for the lunch and view of White Horse Hill after our visit to the horse.]

^[1]Francis Wise, A Letter to Dr. Mead concerning some antiquities in Berkshire; Particularly shewing that the White Horse, which gives name to the Vale, is a Monument of the West Saxons, made in memory of great Victory obtained over the Danes A.D. 871, 1758.

^[2]David Miles and Simon Palmer, "White Horse Hill," Current Archaeology, volume 142, pages 372-378, 1995.

^[3]Thomas Baskerville, The Description of Towns, on the Road from Faringdon to Bristow and Other Places, 1681.

^[4]One of the salutary byproducts of the recent mass book digitization efforts is the open availability of digital versions of both Hughes books: through Open Library and Google Books.

^[5]Interestingly, the Uffington White Horse has been "mirrored" as well, with replicas in Hogansville, GA, Juarez, Mexico, and Canberra, Australia.

Letters in recognition of the NIH Public Access Policy anniversary

2011-04-13T20:14:17+00:00

In recognition of the third anniversary of the establishment of the NIH Public Access Policy on April 7, 2008, I've sent letters to John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; Francis Collins., Director of the National Institutes of Health; and Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services. The letter to Dr. Holdren is duplicated below; the others are substantially similar. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access provides further background.

April 13, 2011

John Holdren
Assistant to the President for Science and Technology
Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President
New Executive Office Building
725 - 17th Street NW
Washington, DC 20502

Dear Dr. Holdren:

I write to you in my role as the Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University, where I lead efforts to broaden access to the research and scholarly results of our university. I and others at Harvard working towards these goals so central to the university's mission have been inspired by the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, now celebrating its third anniversary. The NIH policy has had an enormous impact in increasing availability of government-funded research to the citizens that have supported it through their tax dollars. Every day nearly half a million people access the over two million articles that the NIH policy makes available through the PubMed Central repository. I am especially proud that Harvard affiliates have contributed over thirty thousand of these articles.

The NIH should be applauded for these efforts to bring the fruits of scientific research to the public, and should be encouraged to provide even more timely access by shortening the embargo period in the policy. I believe that the NIH example should be broadly followed by all government agencies engaged in substantial research funding, as envisioned in the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) that has several times been introduced in Congress, and encourage you to extend this kind of policy to other science and technology funding agencies as soon as possible.

The tremendous success of the NIH policy should be celebrated. It provides a sterling example of government acting in the public interest, leading to broader access to the important scientific results that inform researchers and lay citizens alike.

Sincerely,

Stuart M. Shieber
Welch Professor of Computer Science, and
Director, Office for Scholarly Communication

The importance of dark deposit

2011-03-12T20:28:28+00:00

Hubble's Dark Matter Map from flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video, used by permission

The Harvard repository, DASH, comprises several thousand articles in all fields of scholarship. These articles are stored and advertised through an item page providing metadata — such as title, author, citation, abstract, and link to the definitive version of record — which typically allows downloading of the article as well. But not all articles are distributed. On some of the item pages, the articles themselves can't be downloaded; they are "dark". The decision whether or not to allow for dark articles in a repository comes up sufficiently often that it is worth rehearsing the several reasons to allow it.

Posterity: Repositories have a role in providing access to scholarly articles of course. But an important part of the purpose of a repository is to collect the research output of the institution as broadly as possible. Consider the mission of a university archives, well described in this Harvard statement: "The Harvard University Archives (HUA) supports the University's dual mission of education and research by striving to preserve and provide access to Harvard's historical records; to gather an accurate, authentic, and complete record of the life of the University; and to promote the highest standards of management for Harvard's current records." Although the role of the university archives and the repository are different, that part about "gather[ing] an accurate, authentic, and complete record of the life of the University" reflects this role of the repository as well.Since at any given time some of the articles that make up that output will not be distributable, the broadest collection requires some portion of the collection to be dark.
Change: The rights situation for any given article can change over time — especially over long time scales, librarian time scales — and having materials in the repository dark allows them to be distributed if and when the rights situation allows. An obvious case is articles under a publisher embargo. In that case, the date of the change is known, and repository software can typically handle the distributability change automatically. There are also changes that are more difficult to predict. For instance, if a publisher changes its distribution policies, or releases backfiles as part of a corporate change, this might allow distribution where not previously allowed. Having the materials dark means that the institution can take advantage of such changes in the rights situation without having to hunt down the articles at that (perhaps much) later date.
Preservation: Dark materials can still be preserved. Preservation of digital objects is by and large an unknown prospect, but one thing we know is that the more venues and methods available for preservation, the more likely the materials will be preserved. Repositories provide yet another venue for preservation of their contents, including the dark part.
Discoverability: Although the articles themselves can't be distributed, their contents can be indexed to allow for the items in the repository to be more easily and accurately located. Articles deposited dark can be found based on searches that hit not only the title and abstract but the full text of the article. And it can be technologically possible to pass on this indexing power to other services indexing the repository, such as search engines.
Messaging: When repositories allow both open and dark materials, the message to faculty and researchers can be made very simple: Always deposit. Everything can go in; the distribution decision can be made separately. If authors have to worry about rights when making the decision whether to deposit in the first place, the cognitive load may well lead them to just not deposit. Since the hardest part about running a successful repository is getting a hold of the articles themselves, anything that lowers that load is a good thing. This point has been made forcefully by Stevan Harnad. It is much easier to get faculty in the habit of depositing everything than in the habit of depositing articles subject to the exigencies of their rights situations.
Availability: There are times when an author has distribution rights only to unavailable versions of an article. For instance, an author may have rights to distribute the author's final manuscript, but not the publisher's version. Or an art historian may not have cleared rights for online distribution of the figures in an article and may not be willing to distribute a redacted version of the article without the figures. The ability to deposit dark enables depositing in these cases too. The publisher's version or unredacted version can be deposited dark.
Education: Every time an author deposits an article dark is a learning moment reminding the author that distribution is important and distribution limitations are problematic.

For all these reasons, I believe that it is important to allow for dark items in an article repository. Better dark than missing.

[Hat tip to Sue Kriegsman for discussions on this issue.]

Institutional memberships for open-access publishers considered harmful

2011-03-02T01:58:15+00:00

Some open-access publishers offer institutional memberships, whereby a fixed annual fee, often based on the size of faculty or expected number of submitted articles, covers all or a percentage of article-processing fees for the institution for the year.

The issue of OA publisher memberships is interesting and fraught. Harvard University is not currently a member of any of the major OA publishers—BioMed Central, Hindawi, or Public Library of Science. (Actually, Harvard Medical School is a PLoS member.) I’m not involved in Harvard’s decisions about institutional memberships, although I am not a fan of memberships in general, as you will see. I’ll explain my own view of the difficulty with memberships in terms of the market design for publisher services, and then talk about what alternatives there are.

There are a variety of different kinds of membership models but I will start by discussing the basic kind, where a fixed annual institutional fee is charged to reduce the per-article fee for articles emanating from that institution to zero, that is, a 100% reduction. This kind of membership is now rare—most memberships reduce fees by a smaller fraction, say 15%—but it is useful to examine as a thought experiment. There are other sorts of membership based on prepayment or cost sharing, which I’ll come back to.

The problem with institutional memberships (and here I mean the 100% reduction model for the moment) is that they have the potential to create the same moral hazard in the publication-fee revenue model that institutional subscriptions do in the subscription-fee business model. Institutional subscriptions hide the cost of a journal from the readers, leading to overconsumption, inelasticity of demand, and knock-on hyperinflation that is called, somewhat inaccurately, the “serials crisis”. Institutional memberships potentially have the same effect for authors, hiding the cost of the journal fees from the authors, presumably leading to overconsumption and raising the specter of hyperinflation of publication fees and membership fees down the line.

What does “overconsumption” of an OA journal mean? It means that authors publish in that journal more than they should given the relative tradeoff of fee for services. Imagine a university is a PLoS member but not a BMC member (and let’s imagine, contrary to fact, that the PLoS membership uses the 100% reduction model). Authors will see a fee of $0 for PLoS but $1500 (say) for BMC, leading them to preferentially publish in PLoS over BMC journals, even though the true cost to the university is well over $0 for PLoS publication. The result, ceteris paribus, will be that the numbers of PLoS articles will go up at that university, leading PLoS to raise the membership fee for the university over time.

Who benefits from the institutional membership at a COPE-compliant university? Whether there is an institutional membership or not, an author pays no fee; either the grant does or, if there is no grant, the university’s COPE fund does. If the article is grant funded, however, the author doesn’t need to use grant funds if there’s a membership. So authors benefit from memberships a bit by husbanding grant resources. But the major beneficiary of a university membership is the funding agency, which no longer needs to fund the publisher’s fee. Institutional memberships are essentially a transfer payment from universities to funding agencies.

The whole premise of COPE is that each stakeholder in the scholarly publishing milieu needs to do its fair share, no less and no more. Funders need to fund the fees for articles they support. Universities need to fund the fees for articles written under their auspices (but not those under a funder’s auspices). Memberships break this model.

I know what you’re thinking. Memberships mean that overall less money is being sent to the publisher. Isn’t that cost savings a good thing? If the university typically publishes 20 BMC articles a year at $1,500 ($30,000 total) and the membership is $20,000, someone or other has just saved $10,000. It’s not likely to be the university, but someone.

Here’s why it’s not the university that saves money: Imagine that 15 of the 20 articles were grant funded. (For science journals, this is a conservative estimate.) Then without the membership, grants would have paid for 15 of the articles, for $22,500, and the university just 5, for an OA fund cost of $7,500. So the university pays $12,500 more with a membership than without. But the funder pays $22,500 less. Together, funder and university pay $10,000 less, but the university is still paying much more. In essence, the university pays $12,500 for the privilege of saving the funders $22,500.

So university memberships have the effect of saving funding agencies some money and authors some grant funds, at the cost of skewing author behavior toward the particular publisher. When you buy a membership, you tilt the playing field toward that publisher; you are playing favorites. I suppose in the short term, there’s probably nothing wrong with playing favorites towards PLoS and BMC. They are nice folks, and maybe a little thumb on the scale isn’t a bad thing. But in the long run, it’s not the recipe for an efficient market.

Note that this effect holds even if the membership doesn’t reduce the fee to zero. A membership that reduces the fee by 15% still hides 15% of the true cost from the author, so it has a smaller but still non-zero skewing effect. And the cost savings issue is the same as well. With a 15% membership, the university is still paying (though less) to save the funding agencies (though commensurately less).

There may be a way of making memberships consistent with an efficient market, namely, by transferring some portion of the cost of publishing back to the authors even where a membership is in place. When an article is published, the author’s funder could be charged their share of the membership fee. If the article is not grant-funded but there is a COPE-compliant OA fund where (as in the Harvard and Cornell funds, and perhaps others’ as well) there is an annual per-author cap on fund reimbursements, the author’s cap would be charged against. If the cap is maxed out, the author would be charged for the remainder. Moral hazard eliminated. The bookkeeping is daunting, and the whole thing is cumbersome, but in theory at least it would work.

To my mind, the right thing is just not to pay for (these kinds of) memberships. Let the publishers charge what they think is an appropriate fee, and let them have to worry about whether the fee is so high they will scare off authors. If, in the short run, an institution wants to put a thumb on the scale for certain OA publishers (say because they think that in these early days OA publishers need special help—affirmative action so to speak), then buying a membership may be a good idea, but I’d hope they would realize that that’s what you’re doing, and plan on dropping the memberships once OA publishing is fully robust and can stand on its own.

Now, what about two different membership models: (i) BMC’s prepayment model in which the university prepays funds in return for a discount on processing fees, and (ii) BMC’s shared support model in which the university prepays funds to be used to cover a fixed percentage (say 50%) of each processing fee, again in return for a discount on processing fees.

In the prepayment model, there is still a per-article fee directly attributable to a given author (even if it has been prepaid), and the author—or the author’s funder if grant-funded, or the author’s OA fund cap—can be charged that fee. In the first two cases, the mechanism for doing so may be problematic. You’d have to invoice the funder for the article fee even though it was prepaid perhaps a year before. I’m not sure how the accounting would work. Similarly for charging the author if he or she had used up the annual allotment of OA funds. But assuming you could make that work, the prepayment model at least doesn’t have the moral hazard problems of the institutional membership. Given all the accounting and logistics difficulties of the prepayment model and given that almost all of the savings from prepayment is being recouped by the funders and not the university, I wonder if it is worth the trouble.

The shared support model only makes sense if you are not planning on charging back the university’s prepaid share of the fee, in which case it has all the same moral hazard and funder-gift problems as the institutional memberships.

There is something simple—and, if I say so myself, elegant—about the bare COPE model without memberships. The journal charges the author a fee. The author charges it off to the funder if there is one, or, if there isn’t, to the OA fund up to the capped limit. Done. The university supports the OA publishers (like it does the subscription publishers) without a major moral hazard or transfer payments to funders. I’d hope that universities considering OA publisher memberships would consider COPE-compliant OA funds instead.

[For my non-computer-scientist readers, the title of this post is a reference to a famous phrase used in the title of this classic CS article.]

Update June 21, 2013: The Open Access Scholarly Publisher's Association has posted a response to a request for input on the Finch report, in which they pick up on many of the same themes:

However, OASPA also recognizes the possibility that such schemes could lead to a lack of transparency regarding the cost of publication in different Open Access outlets, particularly if the terms of these deals are not publicly disclosed, which could be detrimental to the functioning of the market. Moreover, OASPA feels that membership schemes that are based on up-front commitments for a university to publish a particular volume of content with a given publisher can potentially reduce competition within the Open Access ecosystem, making it difficult for smaller publishers to compete on a level playing field with larger publishers, who are inherently better positioned to negotiate individual deals with universities.

It's good to see that OA publishers recognize the incentive problems with membership arrangements.

Dissertation distribution online: my comments at the AHA

2011-02-15T04:19:17+00:00

I spoke at a panel last month at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association devoted to the question of electronic dissertations and intellectual property rights entitled "When Universities Put Dissertations on the Internet: New Practice; New Problem?" My co-panelists included Edward Fox, professor of computer science at Virginia Tech and director of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations and Susan Ferber, history editor at Oxford University Press, with moderation by Sarah Maza, professor of history at Northwestern University. I have to believe that this was the only AHA panel ever with two computer scientists on it.

The panel was precipitated by a particular complaint about online distribution by then PhD candidate Ulrich Groetsch against his alma mater, Rutgers. Dr. Groetsch was initially supposed to be on the panel as well, but unfortunately was not able to attend. Dr. Maza read a statement that he had prepared outlining his concerns.

By way of background, Dr. Groetsch was basically concerned that the online availability of his dissertation from Rutgers' open-access repository RUcore would affect his later ability to publish a book based on the dissertation. The details of the case, when embargoes were granted or expired, whether proper notifications were sent or received, and so forth, are disputed, and in any case not particularly relevant, as the particular case is of interest because it raises more general issues of under what conditions and on what basis dissertation distribution should be controlled.

On the assumption that someone or other might be interested, I've paraphrased my comments on the issue here. Much of my thinking is based on nascent efforts I've been making at Harvard to provide for open online distribution of theses and dissertations at Harvard, which is an ongoing effort. Here's what I said:

Dr. Groetsch believes that his case has to do with intellectual property rights, so I'll start with that issue.

He says: "My main concern is the issue of whether authors retain proprietary rights over their own works, until and unless they assign them or can no longer exercise them". First, a caveat: I am not a lawyer, and cannot provide a legal opinion on the matter, nor am I doing so here.

Nonetheless, here is my understanding regarding the question of whether an author retains rights for a PhD dissertation.

The answer is Yes, in the sense that the author retains the copyright in the work.

But the answer is No, in the sense that the author cannot restrict access to the work at his or her whim.

The reason is this: We grant the PhD degree for substantial and original contributions to human knowledge. Not for private increases to knowledge, but public ones.

This is the premise of the PhD degree following the lead of Humboldt University and the German universities of the mid-19th century and imported to the United States at the founding of Johns Hopkins University.

As a condition of being granted a PhD, the author must provide his increment of knowledge to the world, must publish it in the particular sense of making it public.

Each university decides what constitutes a sufficient dissemination process, and the method of providing the knowledge to the public has changed over time — from university library circulation of print originals, to microfilm distribution after the founding of University Microfilms in 1938, to online distribution through Proquest or university-based dissertation repositories.

It should be clear to PhD candidates that although they own the rights to their work, they must make their dissertations available to the world as a condition of their degree according to the policies and practices of the university. In effect, the policies implicitly require that the candidate provide the university a nonexclusive license to publicly disseminate the dissertation.

This is certainly consistent with the situation at Rutgers, where the dissertation repository clearly indicates that copyright in a dissertation is held by the author. Nonetheless, the university acquires a distribution right to make the dissertation available through the university's RUcore repository.

Of course, it would help greatly if universities made these conditions explicit rather than leaving them implicit in their practices. (There may well have been a problem with Rutgers' clarity with respect to the policy, though views differ. Certainly, Rutgers made available documents that advised students about the practice of online distribution.) At Harvard, for instance, we have a document that describes the situation as follows:

"The assumption that underlies the regulations concerning the deposit of PhD dissertations is that they must be 'published' in the old sense. That is, they must be made available as proof of the candidate’s achievement. This assumption echoes a traditional European idea that the candidate for a doctorate must make a contribution to knowledge and cannot have a degree for making a discovery that is kept secret. It is, therefore, only in very exceptional cases that access to dissertations is restricted." [Harvard GSAS Form of the Dissertation, page 12]

Thus, even though we don't, as of yet, have online distribution of dissertations at Harvard, we make clear the basis for public availability of dissertations. The document goes on to describe the rare situations in which embargo of access to a dissertation for a limited time may be appropriate.

In general, Harvard's rules consistently represent the idea that the PhD degree is awarded for a public contribution to knowledge, and that exceptions to public distribution are to be limited only to rare cases. The process for obtaining an embargo is therefore made quite rigorous: "An author who wishes to restrict the use of copies of the dissertation in the University Archives must make a separate written request, outlining the reason for the request, to the University Archivist and the Chair of the department or committee under which the dissertation was written. The chair of the department or committee must support the request in a letter to the University Archivist. In general, restrictions last for no more than five years from the degree date." [page 12]

What about the issue that public availability of the dissertation may affect the author's ability to publish the dissertation later as a book? Even before the advent of the online dissertation repository, dissertations have been publicly available documents, obtainable from the university library and from UMI. This kind of public availability of the dissertation was understood as part of the point of the PhD degree.

There is first of all an empirical question as to whether online availability of the dissertation is an impediment to later publication. It turns out that the evidence points the other direction. Joan Dalton and Nancy Seamans have conducted multiple surveys of as many as 141 publishers. These surveys provide "concrete evidence to doctoral students and their advisors that the perception of rejection by the scholarly community of manuscripts derived from web-based dissertations is stronger than the reality." In their most recent survey, for instance, only 2% of publishers stated that "Research made widely available via the WWW would be considered previously published." This is about the same rate as publishers who state that "Manuscripts derived from dissertations would be considered previously published, regardless of format."

But whether or not distribution of the dissertation according to university practice would impede later publication of the dissertation as a book, the knowledge for which the PhD was granted cannot be held hostage by the author; that's not how the bargain works.

So what is the upshot? Dissertations are and should be public documents, disseminated as universities see fit to make good on the PhD degree's promise of contributing to human knowledge. Increasingly, universities are viewing open online distribution as the best means to that end. University policies on the matter should be transparent and, in particular, transparently conveyed to prospective and current PhD candidates.

Our attitude as scholars should always start with making our research results as open as possible. We should make that clear to everyone entering the profession as well.

That concludes what I wanted to say about the online PhD dissertation issue, but while I'm on the topic of openness, let me mention another issue. We've been working at Harvard to promote the accessibility of scholarly writings in general. One of the initiatives we've taken is to establish an open-access repository for scholarly articles written by members of the Harvard community. This repository now freely distributes thousands of articles online to tens of thousands of people each month. Importantly, we've found that articles from the humanities and social sciences tend to have the highest download rate, and history has the highest download rate of any department at Harvard.

Clearly there is unmet demand for access to articles in the field of history, and this demand can be met by historians providing copies of their articles online. Your university may run an institutional repository or provide you with a personal web page where your articles can live. By providing your papers in this way, you will dramatically increase the ability of scholars to read your writings. If openness is good enough for our PhD students, it's good enough for us as faculty as well. Our experience at Harvard shows that there is tremendous demand for this supplementary access.

Efforts such as this also may start to redress the real threat to young scholars publishing their dissertations, namely, the breakdown in the scholarly publishing system in general. Because of systemic problems in the scholarly journal publishing industry, there has been persistent hyperinflation in journal prices for decades now. This hyperinflation has led to scholarly monograph collecting being squeezed out, journals being cancelled, and access to journal articles being greatly degraded. The dramatic library budget cuts that have resulted from the economic downturn have greatly exacerbated the problem, but the underlying cause is systemic. Overall, scholars' ability to reach their potential audience has deteriorated and is continuing to do so. Frankly, this is a much bigger problem than the issue of online dissertation access potentially affecting publishability. In fact, the much bigger threat to young scholars' publishing of their dissertations is the collapsing of university presses that this economic meltdown has precipitated, rather than online access to the dissertation itself.

There is much more that can be done to promote a scholarly publishing system that provides the broadest access in an economically sustainable manner, but that is a much longer conversation, so I'll stop here.

The Tetrahedron test case

2011-02-02T04:01:00+00:00

Phil Davis's recent post over at The Scholarly Kitchen on whether open access might save the academic world some money misses the point of the COPE initiative and Harvard's open-access fund (HOPE). Davis speculates that for the case of one set of journals that happened to be mentioned in my colleague Bob Darnton's recent NYRB piece, HOPE would cost the university more than its current subscriptions, echoing a more general claim he has made in previous work that OA article processing charges (APCs) will cost many universities more than they now pay in subscription fees. In particular, with regard to Tetrahedron's $39,082 price tag, he says "Of the nearly 6,000 articles in the Tetrahedron bundle, Harvard researchers authored 22 of them in 2010. Given that COPE will pay $3,000 for each article out of this fund, paying for open access would cost Harvard $66K in 2010, $27K more than its subscription price."

Harvard's HOPE fund, like all COPE-responsive funds, is intended to cover Harvard's fair share of OA article processing fees. Harvard is dedicated to doing its part to underwrite OA fees — but not others' parts. For that reason, it does not cover articles based on grant-funded research; the granting agency should cover that. (The same is true of the open-access funds at many other COPE-signatory institutions.)

For the particular case at hand, I found 24 articles from 2010 in the Tetrahedron bundle with Harvard affiliations using a Scirus search. All of the articles were grant-funded (16 by NIH, 11 by one or more other foundations, 5 by companies; the sum is greater than 24 as some articles had more than one funder). Thus none of them would have been eligible for HOPE funding; the HOPE fund cost to Harvard would have been $0.

But even if none of them had been grant-funded, HOPE covers fees prorated based on Harvard authorship. Since only 65 of the 144 authors on these 24 articles were Harvard affiliated, it would have covered only 65/144 (about 45%) of the fees. The cost would be (65/144)×$3000×24 = $32,500. Further, it covers only authors at schools with open-access policies. Of the 65 Harvard affiliates, only 22 were at schools with OA policies, so payment would be restricted to 22/144 (about 15%), so the cost would be (22/144)×$3000×24 = $11,000.

Of course, BioMed Central journals with similar impact factors to the Tetrahedron journals charge publication fees of $1820. (PLoS journals with considerably higher impact factors charge $1350 or $2250.) Presumably, if the Tetrahedron journals were open-access journals, as hypothesized in the thought experiment Davis is implicitly undertaking, they would have to compete for authors with other open-access journals and would need to charge similar rates (just as Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports is doing relative to PLoS ONE). Redoing the calculation with the BMC rate gives (22/144)×$1820×24 ≈ $6,700. Even covering authors at ineligible schools, the cost would only be (65/144)×$1820×24 ≈ $20,000.

Two of the five bundled journals — accounting for all but 5 of the 24 articles — are "Letters" journals publishing quite short articles of a couple of pages. Presumably, they should require even lower APCs, reducing the likely cost further.

So, the upshot is that the cost to the HOPE fund for all of the Tetrahedron journals would be $0, and even if it were to cover the fees for grant-funded articles, the cost would be $32,500. Or $20,000. Or $11,000. Or $6,700. Or less.

The truth is that no one knows how much costs would be in a counterfactual open-access world with competitive APC fees. The kinds of calculations in Davis's post (and this one and other previous work) are a kind of silly game. But given that the highest APC for an OA journal ($2,900 for PLoS Biology) is far less than the average revenue per article for a subscription journal ($5,000 according to the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable), it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the overall costs would be higher. And we'd drop all of the access restrictions as a nice side effect. Seems like a bargain to me.

But the most important point is that the idea behind COPE and the HOPE fund is not to save an individual institution money. If in the long term COPE has the intended effect of shifting journals such as Tetrahedron to an OA model within a journal ecology based on an efficient market — a situation that we manifestly do not now have — and if under those conditions Harvard ends up paying a bit more, well, then the market has spoken.

By the way, the Tetrahedron bundle price is now up to $41,361.

Are open-access fees disenfranchising?

2011-01-19T04:48:13+00:00

I had an interesting discussion over coffee at the recent SOAP Symposium about the question of whether the article processing fee revenue model for open-access journals disenfranchises authors with fewer financial resources. It prompted me to write up a fuller explanation of why this worry is misplaced.

Opportunity for full participation in research by as wide a range of scholars as possible is, of course, central to our meritocratic notion of the scholarly endeavor. Perhaps the biggest impediment to such full participation — to getting to the point where one has a scholarly result to present to the world — is gaining access to the facilities for carrying out research in the first place, including access to the published literature. It makes little sense to worry about disenfranchisement from publishing research results if the alternative is disenfranchisement from the reading that would allow generating the results in the first place. For that reason, open access to the scholarly literature is inherently an enfranchising program.

It also bears mentioning that it is not only open-access journals that charge author-side fees, the kinds of fees that critics complain are disenfranchising. Many subscription journals charge quite substantial fees as well. For NIH-funded research, the average is $1250 per article, which is plenty big enough to give your average developing-country scientist pause. One would be hard-pressed to impugn open-access journals on these grounds without roping in many subscription journals as well.

That being said, of course we want everyone to have the opportunity to publish in the scholarly literature, even those with lesser means. And there is a simple mechanism to allow for this with open-access journals that charge article processing fees. Journals can, should, and commonly do waive fees for necessitous authors. The details of these waiver policies differ. (See here for the PLoS policy or here for BioMed Central.) But the effect is the same: authors unable to afford the fees can still publish in these journals. More importantly, they can read the articles published in the journals too.

Some worry that authors requiring fee waivers may be discriminated against in the editorial process. Editorial processes must, of course, be kept separate from the financial processes. Different groups separated by a Chinese wall can handle the two issues. Indeed, the question of whether a waiver will be requested needn't even be raised until an editorial decision on a paper is finalized, eliminating any possibility of a conflict of interest. PLoS has an especially simple method for handling waivers. After a paper is accepted for publication, authors can request a waiver of the fee, which is always granted.

Of course, the waiver idea can't possibly be controversial. It is the same approach that subscription journal publishers use to address the reader-side disenfranchisement argument. They point out that the World Health Organization's Hinari program provides subsidized access to journals for scholars in a specified set of countries that have been deemed sufficiently impoverished. A similar eligibility criterion could be used for processing fee waivers. But an approach based on targeting individuals rather than countries has much to recommend it. It can be much better focused on the real problem. For instance, it can address authors in needy cohorts who happen to live in a country not on the approved list. There are unemployed scholars in first-world countries or faculty at small schools in developing countries, for example, for whom Hinari is no help, whereas a fee waiver allows them to fully participate in the open-access publishing milieu on both the reading and writing side.

[UPDATE 1/21/11: The recent news that publishers have withdrawn Bangladesh's access through the HINARI program (because Bangladesh is "start[ing] to secure active sales") makes regrettably clear the problem with this approach. Just because some researchers in Bangladesh may now fall within the scope of an institutional subscription, all are deprived access.]

The issue of fee waivers is important, and we should actively promote their availability. By way of example, many COPE-compliant open-access funds — including those at Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, and Columbia — will only cover fees for journals that have a waiver policy. Hopefully, this will provide some impetus for OA journals to institute reasonable waiver policies.

Ironically, Nature Publishing Group is entering the OA arena with Scientific Reports, a PLoS ONE competitor. Phil Davis reports that they are apparently not allowing for fee waivers, and points out that this could lead to a problem of adverse selection, where PLoS ONE ends up handling all of the fee-waived articles to their competitive disadvantage. On the other hand, if this turns out to be true, Scientific Reports will not be eligible for support from the COPE-compliant open-access funds as discussed above. There thus may be ways to mitigate the adverse selection problem.

With open access, we can enfranchise both the readers and the writers of the scholarly literature. We can, and we should.

A ray of sunshine in the open-access future

2011-01-15T05:11:13+00:00

Used by permission of PLoS

I'm flying back from Berlin, where I gave talks at the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) Conference and the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) Symposium. Karmically, the SOAP Symposium was held in the very room, in Harnack Haus of the Max Planck Society, where the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was drafted in 2003. I'll post links to those talks at this site when they become available. [Update 1/31/11: Links to the talks are now available at right.]

These several days of listening to presentations and talking with publishers, academics, and librarians have left me, I have to say, more optimistic about the potential future of open-access publishing than I've been in many years, maybe ever. Of course, that may not be saying much; I've never been very sanguine. But at the moment I'm marginally positive.

Over the past years, a transition path to relatively widespread open-access publishing has been obscure at best, and progress has been slow to nonexistent. Uptake, however measured, has been grudging, and author apathy overwhelming.

Especially problematic, but completely understandable, is the relatively slow uptake of authors in publishing in OA journals. Part, of course, is a numbers game: there are very few open-access journals of sufficient quality to provide more than a tiny fraction of the needed capacity, and little hope at the moment of remedying that situation given the lack of a viable revenue model for OA journals; it's hard to imagine publishers starting a whole lot of OA journals if there's no revenue model to keep them going in a sustainable, scalable manner. That's the problem that COPE is attempting to address. In fact, that was the topic of my SOAP Symposium keynote.

Another contributing factor to authors' ambivalence is their need to chase journal brand. Indeed, this is the main reason academics publish in journals — to get the imprimatur of the journal on their paper, since for better or worse (and, to my mind, mostly worse) that's often what affects their career trajectory.

For a long time, I've assumed that a transition to a sizable role for OA publishing will require existing publishers to switch their existing journals to an OA publication-fee revenue model in order to cover enough of the scholarly fields, because the founding of enough new journals, whether by existing publishers or new ones, is a long and unlikely process, and won't be able to address the brand development problem for even longer.

But recent developments may indicate a breakthrough from a surprising direction: PLoS ONE, a new kind of open-access mega-journal. This journal has a set of interlocking characteristics: broad scope ("primary research from any scientific discipline"), focused peer review for validity and soundness (but not field or predicted impact), reasonable publication fees, and post-publication article metrics and other services. Surprisingly (to me at least; I was frankly skeptical when PLoS ONE was launched) this model has shown tremendous popularity; submission growth has been geometric. Evidently, PLoS is able to provide a venue for verifying scientific validity over a huge range of fields and a huge number of articles, and make money doing it. PLoS One has become the largest peer-reviewed journal on earth, publishing almost 7,000 articles last year. It is single-handedly allowing PLoS to break even, subsidizing its higher-selectivity and field-focused journals.

Publishers have not failed to notice the dramatic success of PLoS ONE, and they are jumping on the bandwagon. SAGE announced SAGE Open, a mega-journal for "the social and behavioral sciences and humanities", Nature Publishing Group is rolling out Scientific Reports (“all areas of the natural sciences— biology, chemistry, physics, and earth sciences”), and there's BMJ Open (“medical research”), AIP Advances (“applied research in the physical sciences”), Genetics Society of America’s G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics (“high-quality foundational research, particularly research that generates large-scale datasets”). As Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing for PLoS, pointed out in his talk at APE, all of these journals take up the PLoS ONE approach: broad scope, open access with an article-processing-fee revenue model, peer review for validity but not predicted importance or impact, post-publication article metrics and services, scalability, and a strong brand.

(NPG has decided not to use their trademark Nature in the name of their mega-journal, presumably out of fear that they would dilute the brand of their other journals. I think they are missing a strategic opportunity to strongly brand the new journal, based on a misapprehension that people primarily associate brand imprimatur with publisher journal collections rather than individual journals. PLoS ONE has shown that a publisher with an excellent high-quality brand association can run a mega-journal without diluting the brand signal of its flagship journals. I'd guess that sooner or later, we'll start seeing the journal referred to as Nature Scientific Reports, even if the name doesn't officially change.)

It seems extraordinarily likely that other major publishers will move in this direction as well. (You heard it here first.) [Update 5/25/11: Elsevier is now advertising for a Scientific Editor for a journal called Cell Reports from Cell Press, which “will publish high quality papers across the broadest possible range of disciplines in biology. It is an open access, online-only journal with continuous publication.” Sounds like PLoS ONE and Scientific Reports to me.] [Update 7/7/11: Bloomsbury has announced yet another new megajournal QScience Connect under sponsorship of the Qatar Science Foundation “for all research that is considered to be valid, ethical and correct”. Notably, they claim to cover “all fields”, including the traditional physical and life sciences, but also, math, computer science, law, the humanities, the social sciences, etc., etc.] [Update 1/12/12: Joining the other major scholarly publishers, Springer has launched SpringerPlus, covering "all disciplines of Science" with review based on scientific soundness alone.] [Update 1/17/12: I missed the December announcement of FEBS Open Bio, an OA megajournal published by Elsevier on behalf of the Federation of Biochemical Societies. The journal covers “the molecular and cellular life sciences in both health and disease” and reviews based on “soundness”, not “eventual importance”. Interestingly, this new journal would seem to compete directly with Elsevier's other OA megajournal, Cell Reports. How they'll handle that remains to be seen.]

The mega-journal trend means that strong traditional publishers with name recognition are entering open-access publishing in a big way. They'll be hard pressed to trot out their hackneyed canards (vanity press, disenfranchisement). And these journals will provide coverage of a huge swathe of academic fields. Between SAGE Open, PLoS ONE, and Scientific Reports, essentially all of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences are covered. In addition, the breadth of these journals means that they will be competing for the same pool of articles. Authors will have a choice between submitting papers in genetics, say, to PLoS One or G3, in physics to AIP Advances or Scientific Reports, and so forth. Publishers will have to compete in order to attract authors, either on price or publisher services or both. They'll have to market these journals to authors, using their intellectual capital to convince authors that OA journals (at least their OA journals) are a Good Thing. As authors and promotion committees get used to using the new article-level metrics (as they already increasingly are, with download counts and h-index), journal brand name — whether of these mega-journals or traditional journals — will become less important, and authors will feel freer to publish in these and other OA journals, again based on publisher services rather than journal brand name.

As an aside, I note that PLoS has another nascent service, PLoS Hubs, that could interact synergistically with the mega-journal trend as well. Hubs provide the ability to build subcollections of articles from PLoS ONE or other journals based on various selection criteria. At the moment, the hubs are specified and curated by PLoS editors, but you could imagine opening up the service to hubs based on whatever selection criteria a self-proclaimed editor chooses. For instance, I could put together a subcollection of articles in my own field, computational linguistics, essentially generating a bespoke computational linguistics journal of articles already vetted for validity by PLoS reviewers, and for field by me, and perhaps by predicted impact by a cohort of post-reviewers I assemble. It provides a platform for the kind of ecology of overlay journals that has been talked about for many years, but with little in the way of success. (Faculty of 1000 is a notable case for the life sciences, but hasn't been replicated elsewhere.) The ability to have their articles participate in such hubs would provide mega-journal authors with the ability to generate cachet from imprimatur without the access limitations of traditional field-focused journals.

Mega-journals could be the new new thing that makes open-access publishing viable at scope. If so, Public Library of Science would have cracked it — not through its flagship but self-consciously retro journals but through its unlikely innovation PLoS ONE.

[Thanks to Mark Patterson for his APE talk and for providing me copies of his slides. And for publishing the PLoS journals.]

Chicago Manual of Style on Open Access

2010-12-20T16:29:40+00:00

University of Chicago Library, from Carlos Jimenez via flickr, used by permission

Who knew? The Chicago Manual of Style's current edition (the 16th) includes for the first time a stance on open-access (Section 4.62), and on Harvard-style OA policies in particular (Section 4.63).

Written by copyright lawyer William S. Strong of Kotin, Crabtree & Strong, LLP, the chapter comes down hard on academics' attempts to use their own writings.

Section 4.62 on "Authors’ electronic use of their own works" claims that open access to articles in institutional repositories is "likely to diminish licensing revenues" (despite all evidence to the contrary). It concludes that "The fact that licensing revenue helps support the publication of important scholarly work seems to have escaped general notice." As if.

Section 4.63 on "University licenses" seems to be particularly aimed at Harvard-style open-access policies, "under which they presumptively receive nonexclusive licenses of journal articles written by their faculty, with the right to post those articles on the Internet and to make and license 'noncommercial' uses. (Commonly, faculty are permitted but not encouraged to opt out of this arrangement on a case-by-case basis.)" He lists as faults the claim that addenda "do[] not make clear what the author can, and cannot, do with derivative works that he or she creates" (because there is no limitation); that they "do[] not make clear whether what the author can distribute, display, and otherwise use is the author’s own manuscript or the finished, published work" (even though the Harvard addendum [paragraph 4a] is explicit about not distributing publishers' versions); and that they "do[] not prevent the author from licensing the article to a competing journal" (except that journals won't publish already published articles anyway). He frets about the vagueness of the term "noncommercial", though the Harvard policies are explicit in stating that articles "are not sold for a profit" and agreements with publishers have further clarified the university's intention not to sell the articles at all.

The Manual makes a recommendation to publishers to generate their own addenda "to use when presented with author requests for nonexclusive rights." But why make the addendum conditions available only upon request? If the addendum-specified activities are allowable, why not just allow them in the publisher's agreement from the get-go? In particular, how about a recommendation that publisher agreements allow authors of scholarly articles to post their final manuscript versions at their discretion, that is, allowing green OA?

Section 4.64 on "The NIH Public Access Policy" recommends that publishers "push for the maximum delay (i.e., twelve months) on public posting" if concerned about maximizing their revenues.

The most surprising thing about the new Manual sections is that a style manual is taking a stance on these intellectual property issues in the first place. The issues are obviously considerably more nuanced than Mr. Strong's RIAA-like stance makes clear. Given that stance, you'd hardly know that the book is owned by a university (The University of Chicago, as stated in three copyright notices on each page) filled with faculty and students whose interests are not best served by this kind of short-term profit-maximizing attitude. Perhaps the editors might solicit a broader range of informed advice ahead of their next edition.

[Hat tip to Tom Dodson for bringing these sections to my attention.]

I've been tweeting

2010-10-01T02:12:47+00:00

Observant followers of the Pamphlet will have noticed that I have taken up with Twitter over the last few months. A feed of my tweets is in the pane to the right as "Pamphlet says...". ⇒

As I get a hang of the medium, I've been tweeting on a wider range of topics than covered by the Pamphlet, but still hope this will be of interest to those of you who read the blog. So feel free to follow me (pmphlt) on twitter, and urge your friends, acquaintances, family members, pets, and hangers on to follow as well. And while you're at it, a plug for the Pamphlet would be most welcome too.

For publishers, using PMC to kill multiple birds with one stone

2010-09-07T15:47:18+00:00

Here's a clever way for a journal to efficiently and cost-effectively provide open access to its articles (at least in the life sciences): Use PubMed Central as the journal's article repository. This expedient has all kinds of advantages:

You have to allow for PMC distribution anyway, in fields where much of the research is NIH funded. Might as well make that version the version of record.
PMC provides articles in multiple formats (XML, HTML, and PDF), and handles the format conversion for you.
PMC provides pages for each issue as well as structured index pages for the full run.
PMC's user interface provides all kinds of added value for readers, like inline citation cross-linking, links to related articles and related citations, and other articles by the same authors. (Here's an example.)
NCBI has exceptional Google juice, so articles will appear high on Google and Google Scholar listings.
Your authors don't have to deal with the PMC process in addition to the publisher's process, since they are one and the same.
You don't have to worry about the headaches of running your own repository (though you may want to have branded pages linking to these articles that are more attractive than those provided by PMC).
It's not likely that PMC is going to disappear any time soon, so you've got some built in access longevity.
It's free to the publisher. PMC doesn't charge for storing and distributing articles.

I first heard about this idea a while ago at a PMC meeting in a discussion referring to Journal of Biomolecular Techniques, which uses this approach. It seemed like an awfully good idea to me, and still does. Almost a thousand journals submit all of their final published articles to PMC, but I'm not sure how many do so without embargo and as the sole and definitive version of record.

How much does a COPE-compliant open-access fund cost?

2010-08-06T21:19:08+00:00

Tightrope walker, sculpture, Berlin, 2008. Photo from beezerella at flickr.com. Used by permission.

The short answer? Almost nothing.

The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity is a statement of commitment to "the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds." Some institutions who were considering signing on to the compact at its launch held off because of a worry that it might cost a lot of money at a time when library budgets are under phenomenal pressure. I had predicted that the costs would be minimal in my PLoS Biology paper proposing the compact. There, I said

By design, the overall cost to a university of implementing the compact, in the short term, would be quite small. Hybrid open-access fees are explicitly eschewed, and true open-access fees tend to be found at present in just those areas of scholarship where grant support is most prevalent, reducing the underwriting load on the university substantially. Rough estimates based on the experience of the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative fall in the range of tens of dollars per faculty member per year.

But I can understand that some universities might have wanted to wait until there is some empirical evidence of this claim. That evidence is now available. Barbara DeFelice, Director of the Digital Resources Program at Dartmouth Library has compiled some statistics from the COPE signatory institutions about their OA fund expenditures, which she discussed at a recent ARL talk. I used her statistics to calculate approximate costs per faculty member per year. The numbers reveal that the outlays are even more manageable than even I had estimated, perhaps by an order of magnitude. (I've made these numbers quite conservative by counting faculty conservatively and estimating that each article funded cost $1,500 dollars. The actual average seems to be somewhat less. As more data is collected, I'll try to make it available.)

Institution	Months	# Funded	Funded/year	Faculty size	$/faculty/year
Berkeley	31	92	35.61	1582	$33.77
Columbia	7	2	3.43	1377	$3.73
Cornell	11	3	3.27	1594	$3.08
Dartmouth	11	1	1.09	450	$3.64
Harvard	11	1	1.09	1633	$1.00
MSKCC	5	0	0.00	560	$0.00
MIT	2	0	0.00	1025	$0.00
Ottawa	8	25	37.50	1257	$44.75

For universities that run their OA funds in accordance with COPE recommendations (that is, no hybrid fees, no grant-funded articles), the costs come to not tens of dollars per faculty member per year, but single digit dollars. The outliers are Berkeley and Ottawa, both of which will cover hybrid fees (though Berkeley places tighter caps on fee per article) and will cover grant-funded articles (though they ask for grant funds to be used first).

The bottom line is that the direct costs of running a COPE-compliant open-access fund are trivial, and the administrative costs of dealing with handfuls of requests are trivial as well. Cost should not be an impediment to setting up an open-access fund in this way. In particular, harangues about open-access funds amounting to throwing away large quantities of valuable dollars can please stop now. For instance, Stevan Harnad likes to say things like "COPE is based on the illusion that there is enough money available in institutions today to pay for OA publication in all the must-have journals — Nature, Science, the American Physical Society journals, and all the other top journals — while continuing to subscribe to those journals (and we don't as yet have OA for their contents, so it's premature to cancel)." He either misunderstands the compact or willfully misrepresents it, since COPE-compliant funds need not, should not, and generally do not pay publication fees for the subscription journals he lists. COPE does not support "double-dipping".

The reason that the costs of COPE-compliant open-access funds are so low is because demand for the funds is low because, in turn, there are very few quality OA journals charging publication fees, because, finally, to do so would be to put the journals at a systematic disadvantage in getting authors as compared to subscription journals that don't charge fees. (This disadvantage is exactly what COPE is trying to remedy.) Here is how the numbers break down. Of the 5,000 or so open-access journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals, only a hundred or two are of the character that these universities' researchers are likely to publish in them. For example, only a hundred or so are indexed by Thomson ISI for impact factors. Of these, the majority don't charge publication fees, so can't contribute to OA fund demand. Those that do charge a fee are overwhelmingly in the life sciences where grant funding is widespread, hence they also don't generate demand on the OA fund.

If there is so little demand for an OA fund, why have it at all? The goal of a COPE-compliant OA fund is not short term maximization of access to an institution's output. (If it were, then hybrid fees would be appropriate to underwrite. But that goal can be accomplished much more cost-effectively by establishing good green open-access policies.) Rather, the goal of COPE is to provide the basis for an alternative business model, should a large number of institutions similarly commit. If a large number of institutions were to commit to the compact, publishers would have a viable business model through charging publication fees in a way that they do not now have.

In essence, COPE is trying to establish a kind of safety net. Safety nets are useful even when they are not used. Safety nets allow people to take risks that we want to promote. A publisher changing its business model is incurring such a risk. We, the universities and research funders, may need collectively to build a very big safety net (university by university, funder by funder) to convince a publisher to take that risk. But given that the cost of each of our pieces of the safety net is so incredibly low, it is worth keeping our pieces up and encouraging others to add their pieces, in the hope that a big enough net will encourage the publishers to take the risk to walk the tightrope from the subscription model to the publication fee model. If we are successful, demand for the OA funds will grow as publishers will flip business model to an OA publication fee basis, thereby freeing up funds to pay those fees. If we are not successful, at least the costs are negligible.

(Thanks to Barbara DeFelice for collecting the data and making it available.)

[Update 11/16/2011: I've added a post on how funding agencies might best set up their part of the safety net.]

Will open-access publication fees grow out of control?

2010-07-31T20:42:49+00:00

I recently had a conversation with someone (I'll call him D) whose opinion I greatly respect, a staunch supporter of broadening access to the scholarly literature, who expressed a view I was quite surprised about. D is of the opinion that the publication fee business model for open access journals is economically flawed, so flawed that he thinks it is not worthy of support, for instance through university and funder commitment to underwrite publication fees as envisioned here and here and in nascent implementation.

D thinks that the only worthy alternative is what is sometimes called the "public access" business model, in which access is limited to subscribers but only for a short embargo period of, say, six months or a year. This model can effectively be mandated by having funders require public access for articles they fund. The NIH policy is an example of a public access mandate, and the pending FRPAA legislation would broaden the mandate to essentially all US-government-funded research.

Certainly, I am a staunch supporter of public access mandates, and the shorter the embargo period the better. Harvard University is on record supporting the approach, as am I. But I also think that the publication fee model is viable, and indeed preferable in the long term. Thinking about D's argument has led me to write this post explaining my contrary view.

D's argument against the publication-fee business model for OA journals (expanded and recast in my own words) is as follows:

Faculty must publish in order to maintain and advance their careers; this imperative is especially strong for junior faculty. If payment of a publication fee were a precondition to publish in the pertinent high-profile journal for a given faculty member, he or she would effectively be forced to pay it. Publishers would therefore be able to hyperinflate publication fees up to the marginal benefit to the faculty member of publishing the article. By way of example, Baser and Pema show that publication of a ten-page article in The American Economic Review corresponds to a 1.3% or 1.9% increase in salary (depending on how you measure). Such an increase might come to a couple of thousand dollars a year, equivalent to a net present value of tens of thousands of dollars. If AER were an open-access journal charging publication fees, what would prevent the publisher from charging those tens of thousands of dollars to the authors?

D expects publication fees to hyperinflate, with scholars unhappily having to acquiesce to a kind of extortion. This worry of runaway publication fees leads D to the conclusion that publication fees are an unsustainable business model for open access journals.^[1]

The problem with the argument becomes transparent when one sees that it applies equally well to subscription journals. Nothing prevents subscription journals from charging publication fees, and many do. Bill Hooker estimates the average at $1,250 per article for NIH-funded articles. By the argument above, these fees ought to have hyperinflated to capture the future salary benefit to the author of publishing in the journal. It's no counterargument that the subscription journals already are receiving revenues from subscription fees; for profit-maximizing journals, there's no such thing as "enough profit". D's argument thus doesn't distinguish between closed-access and open-access journals.

Similarly, open-access journals do not seem to be charging arbitrarily high fees. For OA journals that ISI provides an impact factor for and that charge a per article publication fee, the average such fee is less than $1,000. (If averaged over all OA journals, the number is, of course, much lower, as the vast majority of OA journals charge no publication fees whatsoever. I've provided the data in accompaniment with a previous post.) By contrast, the average revenue per article for scholarly journals in general is considerably more. Bill Hooker conservatively estimates the figure at $2,100-2,900 per article. Based on figures from the Report and Recommendations from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, the number is actually over $5,000. (They report (page 3) the total revenue for scholarly publishing at $8 billion on 1.5 million articles.) So OA publication fees don't seem egregiously high compared to subscription journal revenues.

Why does the argument fail? Simply because it doesn't take competition into account. Consider the following analogous argument.

Faculty must eat in order to maintain their careers, indeed their lives. If payment of a fee for food were a precondition to a faculty member eating, he or she would effectively be forced to pay it. Farmers would therefore be able to hyperinflate food costs up to the marginal benefit of eating, which is, roughly speaking, infinite since the alternative is death.

But we don't see infinite costs for food, for the simple reason that there is a competitive market for food, which competes away the surplus. Of course, if there were a single monopoly farmer, the argument would go through, and the farmer could charge arbitrary prices for food. Similarly, competition among journals can keep publication fees down so long as there is a competitive market. If one journal charges too much for publication fees, authors will consider submitting to other more cost-effective journals, journals that provide better value for the dollar. Authors will trade off cost for the quality of the publisher's services, including especially the imprimatur of the journal. The fact that the main selling point of a journal is that imprimatur means that publication fees will correlate with journal quality, as I have shown empirically occurs.

There can be a competitive market for author-side publisher services because from the author's point of view, publisher services are economic substitutes. You either publish an article in one journal or another. It's not helpful to acquire services from two publishers; in fact, it's typically not allowed! By contrast, from the reader's point of view, access to multiple journals constitute complementary goods: access to one journal doesn't diminish the value of access to another; in fact it enhances that value since one can then access the works in the one that are cited in the other. The complementarity of access, along with ownership of copyright in the articles, provides publishers with monopoly power in selling access, leading to the hyperinflation that is well attested. The Bergstroms make this point clearly:

Journal articles differ in that they are not substitutes for each other in the same way as cars are. Rather, they are complements. Scientists are not satisfied with seeing only the top articles in their field. They want access to articles of the second and third rank as well. Thus for a library, a second copy of a top academic journal is not a good substitute for a journal of the second rank. Because of this lack of substitutability, commercial publishers of established second-rank journals have substantial monopoly power and are able to sell their product at prices that are much higher than their average costs and several times higher than the price of higher quality, non-profit journals.

By contrast, the market for authors' inputs appears to be much more competitive. If journals supported themselves by author fees, it is not likely that one Open Access journal could charge author fees several times higher than those charged by another of similar quality. An author, deciding where to publish, is likely to consider different journals of similar quality as close substitutes. Unlike a reader, who would much prefer access to two journals rather than to two copies of one, an author with two papers has no strong reason to prefer publishing once in each journal rather than twice in the cheaper one.

If the entire market were to switch from Reader Pays to Author Pays, competing journals would be closer substitutes in the view of authors than they are in the view of subscribers. As publishers shift from selling complements to selling substitutes, the greater competition would be likely to force commercial publishers to reduce their profit margins dramatically.

(Peter Suber has also pointed out the importance of competition in his reply to Richard Poynder's post about hyperinflation of publication fees.)

There are two countervailing worries. First, OA journals still hold monopolistic control over their brand, their imprimatur, which is the primary good that the journal sells the author. So perhaps the situation with journals is not like the situation with food. Perhaps the monopoly a publisher has over the journal brand will allow uncontrolled inflation of publication fees.

But why does an author want their article associated with a journal brand? Not for its own sake but for the quality signal — the imprimatur — that the brand name provides. Since you can only publish an article in one journal, if multiple journals have similar imprimatur, then the journals are substitutes. A publisher can't have a monopoly on cachet, only on a journal name. Journals can charge higher publication fees if they have a good name, but other journals can develop their own brand and steal business by providing a similar quality signal at a lower fee, that is, by market competition.

Second, the costs of OA journals might end up hidden from the authors making the publishing decisions, vitiating the market mechanism. For instance, if universities and funders were willing to transparently pay arbitrary publication fees on behalf of affiliated authors, authors would be oblivious to the fees, and hyperinflation could well result. This is an example of a moral hazard, exactly the kind of moral hazard that has existed in the subscription-fee journal market, where libraries pay arbitrary subscription fees on behalf of an oblivious readership.

The solution is obvious: Design underwriting policies so that market mechanisms stay intact. As a negative example, university “memberships” (like this one) that replace per article fees for an open-access journal with a one-time annual payment have exactly the character of hiding the costs of publication from the authors making the publication venue decision. For this reason, I don't support this kind of membership in general. The open-access-fund design in place at Harvard, Cornell, and other institutions avoids the moral hazard problem by capping the outlays per author per year. This allows free choice to authors in choosing publishing venue and institutional underwriting, while still establishing a scarce resource to trade off against journal quality. [Update: I've provided some further comments on OA publisher memberships.]

D needn't worry that the publication fee business model is economically precarious. But what about his alternative, limited-embargo subscription journals? We already know that the subscription-fee business model suffers from market problems: the good being sold, access, is monopolistically owned (via copyright transfer from author to publisher), and the market embeds a moral hazard (with libraries paying on behalf of cost-oblivious readers). Adding a public access requirement eases the access problem, but doesn't eliminate it because of the embargo. If the need to access during the embargo period is strong enough, libraries will need to subscribe. If not, they can avoid subscription and rely on the embargoed access. The control of the effectiveness of the public access policy therefore depends crucially on the embargo length. But it is likely that the ideal embargo length will differ across different fields, and perhaps among different journals within a given field. And there is no distributed mechanism (like a market) to set these embargo lengths. Rather, the embargo length is determined by centralized control, a kind of command economy. What are the odds that governments will accurately pick the ideal embargo lengths — long enough to ensure viability of journals but short enough to provide reasonable public access? How do we know that a good tradeoff even exists? Given that there is an alternative business model that provides truly open access and that sets costs based on a functioning market mechanism, why do we want to prefer the public access route to the exclusion of the publication fee route?

I don't know if I can convince D that the publication-fee business model is worthy of support in tandem with the public access approach. I hope it was worth the try.

^[1]It's interesting to note that D's argument is inconsistent with — in essence the opposite of — the argument that publication-fee OA journals will operate as vanity presses. That argument presumes that good journals won't be able to charge high enough publication fees to cover their costs, so will have to lower their standards to get more revenue. I've shown previously that the vanity-press worry is ill-founded.

A proposal to simplify the University of North Texas open-access policy

2010-06-10T00:49:15+00:00

"In High Places", statue by Gerald Balciar, University of North Texas - Denton campus, installed 1990. Image via Wikipedia.

The University of North Texas is engaged in a laudable process of designing an open-access policy for their community. Draft language for their policy is now available at their site on open access; the most recent version is as of June 7.

They are pursuing a Harnad-style ID/OA policy, requiring deposit of articles but pursuing distribution only to the extent that publishers' agreements allow. Although I prefer a Harvard-style approach, this is also quite a good and reasonable approach. I have some concerns though about the details of the UNT working out of the policy. In particular, they have incorporated into the statement of the policy some language from the Harvard-style policies, which doesn't sit comfortably with the basic approach they have taken. Below, I argue that the intention of their policy can be more consistently specified, and in the process greatly simplified.

Here is the operative language in the current policy draft. (There is much more to the policy document, but the core is described in these paragraphs.)

In support of greater access to scholarly works, the UNT Community Members agree to the following for peer-reviewed, accepted-for-publication journal articles:

Immediate Deposit: Each UNT Community Member deposits a digital copy of his/her accepted manuscript, no later than the date of its publication. Deposit is made into the UNT Libraries scholarly works repository. Deposit of manuscripts provides long-lasting protection and preservation of scholarly works from loss due to computer failures.
Open Access/Optional Delayed Open Access: The author is encouraged to make the deposit available to the public by setting access to the deposit as Open Access Immediately Upon Deposit (the default). Upon express direction by a UNT Community Member for an individual article, the Provost or Provost’s designate (e.g., the Scholarly Communication Officer) will adjust the Open Access Immediately Upon Deposit requirement to align with the UNT Community Member’s request and/or to align with publishers’ policies regarding open access of self-archived works.
Licensing: Each UNT Community Member grants to UNT permission to make scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles to which he or she made intellectual contributions publicly available in the UNT Libraries Scholarly Works Repository for the purpose of open dissemination and preservation, subject to Open Access option selected above. Each UNT community member grants to UNT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do so, provided that the articles are not sold. The Provost or Provost's designate (e.g., the Scholarly Communication Officer) will waive application of the license for a particular article upon express direction by a community member.

The first paragraph mandates deposit of the manuscript. The second specifies distribution consistent with publishers' policies. So far, this is the ID/OA policy.

The third paragraph seems to specify rights retention à la a Harvard-style policy. In fact, a policy consisting of just paragraphs 1 and 3 would more or less constitute the Harvard policy. But why would broad rights need to be retained (paragraph 3) if no distribution beyond what publishers will allow (paragraph 2) is envisioned? Indeed, such broad rights retention may well lead to the possibility that the policy would inherit the problematic aspects of the Harvard-style policy (occasional requirements by publishers to get waivers of the license), without its advantages (wholesale rights retention for a broad swath of articles independent of publishers' policies). There is an inherent tension between the second and third paragraphs that acts to the detriment of the policy. In summary, if you're not going to use rights beyond what publishers allow, don't retain them. It just muddies the water.

This might argue for merely dropping paragraph 3 and going for a straight ID/OA policy, and that would be one reasonable approach. (Another reasonable approach would be to drop paragraph 2 and go for a Harvard-style policy, but this is clearly not UNT's intention.) However, there is one advantage to the rights retention aspect, namely that once the policy is enacted, no further effort will be needed for the university to acquire by default whichever rights the publishers do allow. But this advantage can be maintained without the broad language of the third paragraph, and in so doing, the entire policy can be simplified considerably.

My recommendation would be to simplify the third paragraph to grant only those rights needed to do what the policy envisions. Something along the following lines would work:

Licensing: Each UNT Community Member grants to UNT permission to make scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles to which he or she made intellectual contributions publicly available in the UNT Libraries Scholarly Works Repository for the purpose of open dissemination and preservation subject to publishers' restrictions. In legal terms, each UNT community member grants to UNT for each of his or her scholarly articles a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise those rights under copyright that the author retains in any agreements with the article's publishers. The Provost or Provost's designate (e.g., the Scholarly Communication Officer) will waive application of the license for a particular article upon express direction by a community member.

Once this restricted license is in force, UNT would have rights to distribute as widely as the publisher allows but no more, as is clearly the policy's original intent. At that point, the second paragraph (encouraging the author to allow distribution as broadly as possible) would no longer be needed. The university could already do so based on the license it was granted. If an author didn't want the university to distribute the article for any reason (as envisioned in the second paragraph phrase "to align with the UNT Community Member’s request"), the waiver aspect of the licensing clause would already allow for this.

Presumably, the number of waivers generated under this approach would be minuscule, as publishers would have no incentive whatsoever to require a waiver for publication; the policy involves no license to the university beyond what a publisher would already allow.

While we're adjusting language, I'd also recommend dropping the sentence providing motivation for deposit, which is appropriate for the explanatory material about the policy, but not its formal statement.

With these changes, the UNT policy becomes much simpler, more consistent, and would be what it was presumably envisioned as, an ID/OA policy with a built-in license to make sure that the university could distribute articles to the extent publishers allowed. This approach is an interesting variant open-access policy to be considered by other institutions in addition to the original ID/OA and Harvard-style approaches.

For completeness, the language I would propose (at least while hewing as close to the original UNT language as possible) would be something like the following:

In support of greater access to scholarly works, the UNT Community Members agree to the following for peer-reviewed, accepted-for-publication journal articles:

Immediate Deposit: Each UNT Community Member deposits a digital copy of his/her accepted manuscript, no later than the date of its publication into the UNT Libraries scholarly works repository.
Licensing: Each UNT Community Member grants to UNT permission to make scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles to which he or she made intellectual contributions publicly available in the UNT Libraries Scholarly Works Repository for the purpose of open dissemination and preservation subject to publishers' restrictions. In legal terms, each UNT community member grants to UNT for reach of his or her scholarly articles a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise those rights under copyright that the author retains in any agreements with the article's publishers. The Provost or Provost's designate (e.g., the Scholarly Communication Officer) will waive application of the license for a particular article upon express direction by a community member.

I must mention that I am not a lawyer, and have not vetted my proposal with any lawyers, and am not making any claims about the legal force or appropriateness of the original or modified language. That is the job for the UNT General Counsel's Office.

Green OA as "appropriation"

2010-05-27T20:52:02+00:00

Sandy Thatcher feels "very uneasy about the massive postings of Green OA articles at sites like Harvard’s, which given that university’s great prestige may well lead to the widespread appropriation of those versions by scholars who find it easier to access them OA than to hunt down (and perhaps pay for) the final versions." He should rest assured that we make every effort to make clear what version we are providing and where the version of record resides. We provide links to the version of record (when available) on the metadata page for each article (see here for a sample), and have even modified the DSpace software that runs our repository so that it provides users with links to the version of record on search results pages (like this) before they even get to the metadata page for the article. We provide citation information and links to the definitive version on the metadata page as well as on a front page added to the PDF for downloaded articles (for instance, this PDF). The PDF link is even clickable to go to the publisher's site for the version of record. In short, we try to make it as easy as possible to "hunt down" the version of record.

Calling the mere use of an article in the repository an "appropriation" seems tendentious. To appropriate is "to take possession of or make use of exclusively for oneself, often without permission." But in this case, there is nothing exclusive about the use of the articles, and permission is provided for. There is no inappropriate taking going on in DASH, or even in the Harvard OA policy, which allows for waivers of the license to Harvard. Publishers can feel free to institute and enforce policies to require waivers of the license for articles they publish if they fear that it might harm their business model -- though few have done so. I expect many publishers appreciate that Green OA is not really the big problem for their business model.

On the other hand, I second the sentiment expressed by Dr. Thatcher that he "look[s] forward eagerly to the day when OA fully takes over the dissemination of scholarship...partly because it will solve the problem I have with Green OA now." I agree that Green OA is a short term mitigation of an underlying problem that needs a fuller solution involving modifying the scholarly communication system in general.

World's most excruciatingly ironic conference?

2010-05-01T20:20:31+00:00

Could this be the world's most excruciatingly ironic conference? The Second International Symposium on Peer Reviewing (ISPR 2010) is soliciting papers. Their call for papers emphasizes the sorry state of peer-review, calling for "more research and reflections [that] are urgently needed on research quality assurance and, specifically, on Peer Review." What could be more reasonable than a conference to improve the quality of peer review and the standards of research dissemination?

The conference itself is part of the 14th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2010, and organized by the same institution, the International Institute of Informatics and Systemics (IIIS). Here's the irony: IIIS and the WMSCI conferences are notorious for their lax standards for paper acceptance, as a cursory web search testifies. For example, Justin Zobel has described his experience in submitting three papers to the 2002 WMSCI conference, all three completely unsuitable for publication in any venue whatsoever. (One, for instance, consisted of alternating sentences from two other papers on different topics. Zobel's excerpts of the papers form very entertaining reading.) All three were accepted for publication with no reviews or comments provided, even after repeated prompting. The WMSCI 2005 conference even accepted a computer-generated paper without review.

More suspicious signs: The conference charges a registration fee per accepted paper, not per participant. And presentation of the paper, even attendance at the conference, seems to be optional (but you still have to pay the registration fee). WMSCI's hounding of researchers for papers is also legendary. It led to David Mazières, a computer science professor at Stanford, submitting a paper to WMSCI 2005 entitled "Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List", complete with topic-appropriate charts and graphs.

Clearly, the organizers of the WMSCI conference and its many satellite conferences are not too concerned with optimizing peer review and solving problems with "research quality assurance". Yet these are the very organizers of the 2010 International Symposium on Peer Reviewing. The cynicism undergirding this "symposium" is truly jaw-dropping.

Presidents and provosts present an open letter supporting FRPAA

2010-04-27T14:53:42+00:00

Twenty-seven university presidents and provosts have posted an open letter in support of FRPAA. The list of institutions includes Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Cornell, Duke, Stanford, Tulane, Rutgers, Indiana, two campuses of the University of Texas, and the University of California system and two of its individual campuses. The letter echoes an earlier letter supporting the 2006 version of the bill. The original posting is hosted at the web site of Harvard's provost (one of the signatories), and Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication provides a copy as well.

An excerpt:

The United States Congress will have the opportunity to consider the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). FRPAA would require Federal agencies whose extramural research budgets exceed $100 million to develop policies ensuring open, public access to the research supported by their grants or conducted by their employees. This Bill embodies core ideals shared by higher education, research institutions and their partners everywhere. The Bill builds upon the success of the first U.S. policy for public access to publicly funded research – implemented in 2008 through the National Institutes of Health – and mirrors the intent of campus-based policies for research access that are being adopted by a growing number of public and private institutions across the nation.

We believe that this legislation represents a watershed and provides an opportunity for the entire U.S. higher education and research community to draw upon their traditional partnerships and collaboratively realize the unquestionably good intentions of the Bill’s framers – broadening access to publicly funded research in order to accelerate the advancement of knowledge and maximize the related public good. By ensuring broad and diverse access to taxpayer-funded research the Bill also supports the intuitive and democratic principle that, with reasonable exceptions for issues of national security, the public ought to have access to the results of activities it funds.

The broad dissemination of the results of scholarly inquiry and discourse is essential for higher education to fulfill its long-standing commitment to the advancement and conveyance of knowledge. Indeed, it is mission critical. For the land-grant and publicly funded institutions among us, it addresses the complementary commitment to public service and public access that is included in our charters. In keeping with this mission, we agree with FRPAA’s basic premise that enabling the broadest possible access to new ideas resulting from government-funded research promotes progress, economic growth, and public welfare. Furthermore, we know that, when combined with public policy such as FRPAA proposes, the Internet and digital technology are powerful tools for removing access barriers and enabling new and creative uses of the results of research.

FRPAA bill introduced into House of Representatives

2010-04-16T20:05:18+00:00

: Image via Wikipedia

The FRPAA bill -- S.1373 in the Senate -- has just been introduced into the House as HR.5037. The bill calls for federal agencies to "develop public access policies relating to research conducted by employees of that agency or from funds administered by that agency." You can register your support for the bill.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day

2010-03-24T19:59:07+00:00

Fragment of Charles Babbage's first difference engine, from the collection of the Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, here is a fragment of Charles Babbage's difference engine, from the Collection of Historical Instruments at Harvard University. Babbage went on to design a programmable computer, the Analytical Engine, though it was never built. However, Augustus Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, in her 1843 translation, annotation, and augmentation of a French description of the machine, provided an algorithm for computing the Bernoulli numbers, which is arguably the first algorithm designed for computer implementation. She is consequently considered the world's first computer programmer.

UPDATE (May 2, 2010): Bruce Beresford will apparently be directing a movie about Ada Lovelace entitled "The Enchantress of Numbers", starring Billy Crudup as Charles Babbage and perhaps Zooey Deschanel (or not) as the Countess herself. A way cooler computer science film, honestly, than a mo vie about Facebook.

Harvard Business School approves open-access policy

2010-02-28T21:38:37+00:00

Two years to the day after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences became the first school at Harvard to vote an open-access policy, the Harvard Business School enacted their own policy on February 12, 2010, becoming the fifth Harvard school with a similar policy. Under the HBS policy, Like the previous policies, faculty agree to provide copies of their scholarly articles for distribution from the university's DASH repository and grant the university a waivable license to distribute the articles.

HBS is the second business school to fall under such a policy. MIT's Sloan School of Management is covered by the similar MIT policy that was enacted March 18, 2009.

Correction (March 1, 2010): The HBS policy is the third OA policy of a business school, not the second, by virtue of the predating policy of the Copenhagen Business School of June 2009. Thanks to Stevan Harnad and Peter Suber for pointing out the error.

(Image of Baker Library at Harvard Business School via Wikipedia.)

Harvard response to White House RFI on public access policies

2010-01-22T21:11:21+00:00

Harvard's provost Steven Hyman has submitted a response on behalf of the university to the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy's RFI on public access policies. It should appear on the OSTP blog within a day or so, and is duplicated here as well. I am in strong agreement with the recommendations of Provost Hyman, and hope the White House process will lead to actual policies promoting open access to government-funded research.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
OFFICE OF THE PROVOST

January 21, 2010

Dr. Diane DiEuliis
Assistant Director
Life Sciences Office of Science and Technology Policy
725 17th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20502

I write on behalf of Harvard University in response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy request for information "Public Access Policies for Science and Technology Funding Agencies Across the Federal Government." In summary, I strongly support White House action to require and enhance public access to government-funded research. I provide our general recommendations, as well as more detailed responses to several of the nine particular questions that were called out in the RFI below. However, I emphasize that decisions on many of the detailed issues under discussion here and in the other responses to the RFI are secondary to the general principle of requiring public access.

I endorse the view that every federal agency funding non-classified research should require free online access ("public access") to the peer-reviewed results of that research as soon as possible after its publication. There are three simple yet powerful reasons to take such a step. First, taxpayers deserve access to the results of taxpayer-funded research. Second, public access makes research as visible and useful as it can be, maximizing the return on the public's enormous investment in the research. Third, public access accelerates research and all the benefits that depend on research, from public health to economic development.

The United States already recognizes the public interest in amplifying the impact of publicly funded medical research. A strong public-access policy has been in place at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for more than a year (since April 2008). But the same interest calls on us to amplify the impact of publicly funded research in every field, from alternative sources of energy to public safety to American history and culture. The NIH policy has been good for professional researchers, good for lay readers, good for medical professionals, good for patients, good for the NIH, and good for taxpayers. The same principles should be extended across the federal government.

While legislation on public access, which I support, is currently pending in Congress, the executive branch can uniquely take direct action to provide for public access, and can nimbly respond as new technologies and conventions are adopted through applications of the fruits of research keeping new policies current. Even Harvard University, whose library is the largest academic library in the world, is not immune to the access crisis that motivates much of the campaign for public-access policies. In fact, the Harvard library system has gone through a series of serials reviews with substantial cancellations, and further cancellations will undoubtedly occur in the future.

With respect to some of the specific questions posed in the request for information, I provide our recommendations below.

1. How do authors, primary and secondary publishers, libraries, universities, and the federal government contribute to the development and dissemination of peer reviewed papers arising from federal funds now, and how might this change under a public access policy?

A public access policy will not reduce the need for publishers or the services they perform. It will just prevent the fruits of our large public investment in research from being locked up by publishers that provide access only to paying customers. The NIH policy, for example, does not bypass publishers or peer review. It provides public access to peer-reviewed articles accepted for publication by independent (i.e. private-sector or non-governmental) publishers. Other research-funding agencies in the federal government should follow the NIH policy in this regard.

If publishers believe they cannot afford to allow copies of their articles to be released under a public-access policy, they need not publish federally funded researchers. To date, however, it appears that no publishers have made that decision in response to the NIH policy. Hence, federally funded authors remain free to submit their work to the journals of their choice. Moreover, public access gives authors a much larger audience and much greater impact.

2. What characteristics of a public access policy would best accommodate the needs and interests of authors, primary and secondary publishers, libraries, universities, the federal government, users of scientific literature, and the public?

The public access policy should (1) be mandatory, not voluntary, (2) use the shortest practical embargo period, no longer than six months, (3) apply to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, as opposed to the published version, unless the publisher consents to provide public access to the published version, (4) require deposit of the manuscript in a suitable open repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, where it would remain "dark" until the embargo period expired, and (5) avoid copyright problems by requiring federal grantees, when publishing articles based on federally funded research, to retain the right to give the relevant agency a non-exclusive license to distribute a public-access copy of his or her peer-reviewed manuscript.

There are two compromises here to support publishers: (1) the embargo period or delay before the government releases its public-access copy, and (2) the use of the author's manuscript rather than the published edition. For the length of the embargo period, publishers will have the exclusive right to distribute the peer-reviewed text, and for the full term of copyright they will have the exclusive right to distribute the published edition of that text, sometimes called the "version of record" (copy-edited, formatted, paginated, and so on). Of course publishers remain free to allow other kinds of distribution as well, for example, by allowing authors to "self-archive" their articles without delay.

These are compromises because there is a strong public interest in immediate or un-delayed access to the results of publicly-funded research, and a strong public interest in access to the final, published edition of the researchers' results. For more on both, see Questions 6 and 7 below.

3. Who are the users of peer-reviewed publications arising from federal research? How do they access and use these papers now, and how might they if these papers were more accessible? Would others use these papers if they were more accessible, and for what purpose?

Public access helps professional researchers as well as lay readers. It helps professional researchers who don't have access to the same literature through their institutions and it helps lay readers who generally don't have any access at all. (Public libraries rarely subscribe to peer-reviewed research journals.)

It doesn't matter whether many lay readers, or few, are able to read peer-reviewed research literature or have reason to do so. But even if there are many, the primary beneficiaries of a public-access policy will be professional researchers, who constitute the intended audience for this literature and who depend on access to it for their own work.

If the United States extends a public-access mandate across the federal government, then lay citizens with no interest in reading this literature for themselves will benefit indirectly because researchers will benefit directly.

Just last month, the Research Information Network released a report showing that researchers can discover new research more easily than they can access or retrieve it, and that access barriers slow their research, hinder collaboration, and "may well affect the quality and integrity of work produced...." <http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/overcoming-barriers-access-research-information>

That is the primary problem for which public access is the solution.

6. What version of the paper should be made public under a public access policy (e.g., the author's peer reviewed manuscript or the final published version)? What are the relative advantages and disadvantages to different versions of a scientific paper?

The policy should require public access to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript. This makes the publisher the sole distributor of the published version, unless of course the publisher has consented to allow author-initiated self-archiving or some other form of distribution. The NIH allows willing publishers to substitute the final published edition for the author's peer-reviewed manuscript in the government repository.

The published edition contains the final (often copy-edited) version of the language. It also contains authoritative pagination. For these reasons, the published edition is preferable for citing a paper or quoting from it. However, for the purposes of advancing research, it is sufficient for researchers to have access to the peer-reviewed manuscript. Allowing publishers to be the exclusive distributors of the published editions will help protect their business models, and will not harm research; hence, it is an attractive compromise.

7. At what point in time should peer-reviewed papers be made public via a public access policy relative to the date a publisher releases the final version? Are there empirical data to support an optimal length of time? Should the delay period be the same or vary for levels of access (e.g., final peer reviewed manuscript or final published article, access under fair use versus alternative license), for federal agencies and scientific disciplines?

The embargo period (time between publication and public-access) should be as short as possible. Because the public has a strong interest in immediate access, any delay is a compromise, and we should not compromise the public interest any more than absolutely necessary.

The NIH policy allows a 12-month embargo. However, I recommend a maximum six-month embargo, not only for other agencies but for the NIH itself. This is also the position taken by FRPAA. The NIH is the only medical funder in the world with an open access policy allowing an embargo longer than six months. Every other agency without exception caps the embargo at six months: the Arthritis Research Campaign (UK), British Heart Foundation, Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance, Canadian Health Services Research Foundation, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, European Research Council, Cancer Research UK, Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department, Department of Health (UK), Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (Canada), Fund to Promote Scientific Research (Austria), Genome Canada, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Joint Information Systems Committee (UK), Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (Canada), National Cancer Institute of Canada, National Institute for Health Research (UK), Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council, Sweden), and the Wellcome Trust (UK).

When the European Research Council adopted its public-access mandate (December 2007), it adopted a six month embargo but added: "The ERC is keenly aware of the desirability to shorten the period between publication and open access beyond the currently accepted standard of 6 months." <http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/ScC_Guidelines_Open_Access_revised_Dec07_FINAL.pdf>

When the European Heads of Research Councils (EuroHORCs) — representing all the major funding agencies in 24 European countries — recommended that its members adopt public-access mandates (April 2008), it also recommended that they "reduce embargo time to not more than six months and later to zero." <http://www.eurohorcs.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/EUROHORCs_Recommendations_Op enAccess_200805.pdf>

When the Canadian Library Association recommended that Canadian libraries support public-access policies (May 2008), it wrote, "If delay or embargo periods are permitted to accommodate publisher concerns, these should be considered temporary, to provide publishers with an opportunity to adjust, and a review period should be built in, with a view to decreasing or eliminating any delay or embargo period." <http://www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Position_Statements&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=5306>

If embargo periods should be no longer than necessary, then how long is necessary? This is a difficult question, chiefly because it is difficult to choose the most appropriate criteria. Publishers have often suggested that public-access policies should use embargo periods no shorter than those that publishers voluntarily adopt for themselves. This, at least, is the wrong criterion. Either it presupposes that publishers are already trying to minimize their embargo periods, or it presupposes that funding agencies have the same interests as publishers. Both are untrue.

I am not ready to propose the exact length of the shortest necessary embargo. But I urge that the decision be made in light of this principle: the public interest in shortening delays and the private interests in lengthening delays must each give up something. The public interest bends by allowing some delay (any delay). If we allow publishers the same delays they voluntarily adopt for themselves, then there is no compromise; we simply subordinate the public interest to private interests.

9. Access demands not only availability, but also meaningful usability. How can the federal government make its collections of peer-reviewed papers more useful to the American public? By what metrics (e.g., number of articles or visitors) should the Federal government measure success of its public access collections? What are the best examples of usability in the private sector (both domestic and international)? And, what makes them exceptional? Should those who access papers be given the opportunity to comment or provide feedback?

Among the metrics for measuring success, I can propose these: the compliance rate (how many articles that the policy intends to open up have actually been opened up); the number of downloads from the public-access repositories; and the number of citations to the public-access articles. As we use different metrics, we must accept that we will never have an adequate control group: a set of articles on similar topics, of similar quality, for which there is no public access.

Publishers sometimes cite downloads from public-access repositories as evidence of harm to them. But downloads are not cancellations, and so far publishers have not shown that increased downloads from public-access repositories correlates with increased cancellations. I recommend that increased downloads be regarded as a sign of success, among other signs. It is a sign of meeting previously unmet demand.

Sincerely,
/signed/
Steven E. Hyman
Provost

Why not underwrite hybrid fees?

2009-12-21T03:50:55+00:00

Several publisher representatives have recently asked about why the Harvard open-access fund does not cover hybrid fees. I thought I'd explain my thinking on this issue, though I am certainly not doctrinaire when it comes to institutional underwriting of hybrid fees, and am perfectly in accord with institutions coming to different decisions on the issue. In fact, as I mention below, I can imagine (counterfactual) situations in which I would support Harvard's open-access fund underwriting hybrid fees.

In the case of the current Harvard policy, I'll explain why for the time being at least we are not underwriting hybrid fees. My comments extend the arguments I give in my PLoS Biology paper.

Hybrid fees would be worth supporting to the extent that (as their proponents claim) they provide an approach to smoothly transitioning to an open-access publication fee business model. The argument is that as uptake increases in payment of the hybrid fees, revenue smoothly shifts from the reader side to the author side in a revenue-neutral way. At the end, the journal is openly accessible, with hybrid fees (now become just publication fees) providing the revenue. To the extent that the hybrid system works this way, there is no "double dipping" — using hybrid fees as a way to increase revenue rather than transitioning to OA in a revenue-neutral manner. I'll call such a model "true hybrid".

There are two problems with supporting hybrid fee systems. First, they may not be set up in the way just described as true hybrids, and determining whether this is the case may in fact not be possible. Second, even if they were set up in this way, game-theoretic problems may inhere in the system that prevent them from realizing the transition.

Whether "double dipping" is going on is independent of when the hybrid option is set up. In particular, whether a journal is hybrid from the start or a hybrid option is added well after the journal is founded is irrelevant. What matters is the dynamics of how hybrid uptake affects subscription fees and revenues. To be a true hybrid model, hybrid fees must be set at a rate no more than the true average revenue per article, so that universal uptake of hybrid payments is not a means to revenue enhancement. Further, uptake of hybrid fee revenues must be directly offset by reductions in subscription fee revenues, so that incremental uptake of hybrid payments is not a means to revenue enhancement.

True hybrid journals must therefore have a degree of transparency that is difficult to imagine achieving. The journal would have to demonstrate linearly decreasing subscription fees in direct proportion to the hybrid fee uptake. Determining hybrid fee uptake is straightforward. But determining subscription fee reduction is not. Publishers practice price discrimination, bundling, and price changes over time, which separately and together make it impossible to tell what a subscriber's costs would have been absent the hybrid fee discount. The issue of transparency is not all or nothing. Certainly some publishers, Oxford University Press for instance, may be more transparent than others in their hybrid discounting practice. But determining whether appropriate reductions are taking place is difficult at best.

Even if there were some way to determine that a journal were a "true hybrid", receiving no incremental revenue from its hybrid program, there is a more fundamental problem with the normal way in which hybrid programs are implemented, viz., that subscription revenue reductions are shared among all subscribers. As institutions decide whether or not to underwrite hybrid journals, they are confronted with a kind of prisoner's dilemma.

In a prisoner's dilemma, a set of agents can either cooperate or defect. If they all cooperate, all are better off. But if any defect, all are worse off except for the defector. In the case at hand, a cooperating institution underwrites hybrid fees, a defecting institution does not. Given a status quo ante (as we have) of all institutions defecting, all would be better off if they cooperated, since they would pay the same amount (true hybrids being revenue-neutral) but would gain open access. However, at the margin, an institution cooperating sees increased costs from the hybrid fees, but only a share (and a small one at that) of the subscription revenue reduction. Defectors see a reduction in their subscription costs relative to the status quo ante at no cost to themselves. Though both fully defecting and fully cooperating are equilibria,^[1] there is no transitional path from the former to the latter. This is an inherent flaw in the hybrid system as traditionally conceived. Empirical evidence accords with this analysis; uptake of hybrid fees has been exceptionally low.

It may be that institutions can be convinced to act temporarily against their financial interests in the expectation that others will join them and the cooperating equilibrium will be reached. Especially in the current economic climate, I'm not sanguine about this prospect. And without such temporary action against self-interest, the hybrid model is no transitional model at all. If however, evidence accumulates that the transparency problem can be addressed and true hybrids can be identified and institutions appear increasingly willing to pay these fees against temporary self-interest, I can imagine that the Harvard fund might then change its policy for support. Similarly, if changes to the hybrid model were made that eliminated the prisoner's dilemma — I believe that this may be possible, and hope to talk about it in a future post — then again hybrid fees ought to be supportable for true hybrid journals.

^[1]Actually, full cooperation is not an equilibrium per se, as each agent still has an incentive to defect from cooperation even at that point. However, once all agents (or even most) were to cooperate, the hybrid system could be jettisoned for a true OA model that effectively removed the defecting alternative.

Is open-access journal publishing a vanity publishing industry?

2009-10-16T04:13:26+00:00

Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.
—Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Open-access journal publishing has been criticized on a whole range of grounds as being unsustainable, unfair, or ineffective. Perhaps the starkest criticism is that open-access journals amount to a vanity publishing industry, and will exhibit a "race to the bottom" in which journals compete to lower editorial standards to capture the revenue for publishing articles. Is open-access journal publishing prone to the problems of a vanity press?

There are both theoretical and empirical arguments that the concern is unfounded. From a theoretical point of view, the prerequisites for vanity press are not found in scholarly publishing. From an empirical point of view, current open-access journals display a pricing structure that does not indicate a vanity press industry, as we demonstrate below in a new analysis of OA publication fee data.

What is a vanity press?

In traditional publishing, such as trade book publishing, authors want to be able to sell their writings to the public as an income source. Publishers provide services to authors to make this possible. Publishers have editorial and production expertise and marketing ability, and most importantly can provide authors entry to distribution mechanisms that make trade publishing scalable, and that are otherwise difficult or impossible to access. There is thus a natural trade that can go on, authors contracting publishers to provide these services.

How much should the publisher be paid for this transaction? Since high-quality books sell better than low-quality books, publishers have an incentive to use their efforts on the best books they can acquire. The better the book, the less the author will have to pay the publisher to take on the project. Indeed, if the book is good enough, the author may arrange to pay the publisher negative fees. These are called royalties.

In such a system, where publishers are attempting to maximize revenues, you would expect that different publishers might establish different quality standards, some pursuing high-quality books likely to sell well but requiring high royalties to acquire rights, others providing lax standards in return for high author fees. This is in fact what occurs. The latter type are just the vanity publishers.

In summary, the higher the publisher's quality standards, the lower the fee the author must pay for services. Conversely, if an author is willing to pay enough, some publisher will be willing to take on the publication. This is the genesis of vanity publishing, and its hallmark is the inverse correlation between publishers' quality standards and the fees they charge.

Since subscription journals are paid for by or on behalf of their readers, not their authors, there is no useful notion of correlation between a journal's quality standards and publication fees, as publication fees are constant (and zero).^[1]

Open-access journal publishing, however, is likely to have to rely on article-processing fees for the bulk of its revenue. (In fact, article-processing fees have a lot going for them as a funding model. In particular, they scale extremely well with the cost basis of open-access publishing, since the vast bulk of non-fixed OA publishing costs are first-copy costs.) This raises the issue of whether open-access publishing might have the negative properties of a vanity press.

Why vanity journals might be a problem

The existence of vanity open-access journals would not in and of itself be a problematic state of affairs, just as the existence of vanity book publishers does not infect the entire trade book industry with suspicion. The trade book industry offers a wide range of publishers along a spectrum from highly selective publishers who limit their catalog to books meeting only the highest standards to vanity presses that will publish anything for a fee. In fact, it is well known that closed-access journals already exhibit a huge variation in quality standards, with some accepting most all submissions and others a tiny fraction; it is conventional wisdom that any article can be published some place. (Some journals, such as Elsevier's Applied Mathematics and Computation, have even been willing to accept computer-generated nonsense articles.)

Rather, the worry is not about vanity journal existence but vanity journal domination: A profit-maximizing open-access journal can only increase revenues by increasing the number of articles published or raising the fee per article, both of which will require lowering its quality standards. Other journals, seeing lower-standard competitors steal articles from them, will have to lower their standards in response to maintain their article flow. A spiral of lowering standards will result. This race to the bottom could lead to a situation in which there is no longer a wide range of quality standards among journals, but only the low-standard vanity journals will be left standing.

You see this worry expressed in various forms. Here is a typical example (via Open-Access Journals Flourish):

But if the researchers pay, doesn't it turn journals into servants to authors, like the vanity-press publishers who publish anything for the right price? "In our capitalist society, one of our basic tenets is who pays the fiddler calls the tune," said Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor in chief of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, at the national meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on April 1.

It's possible, Drazen said, that an open-access journal would find itself in deep financial trouble and loosen its standards about the papers it accepts.

The argument implictly relies on the inverse correlation noted above. With a positive correlation, a journal would need to raise its quality standards to raise its fee per article.

Peter Suber has recapitulated a broad range of counterarguments against the worry that OA journals have intrinsic quality problems. I concentrate here on a particular set of questionable economic assumptions that underly the worry about vanity journal domination.

Counterarguments

There are multiple assumptions at work in the argument that OA journals would lead to vanity journal domination.

First is the assumption that journal publishers are purely profit maximizing. This is true for large parts of the journal market published by commercial firms, but non-profit publishers, including scholarly societies and independent journals, are set up not to maximize profit but to serve their scholarly constituency.

Second, even if a publisher is profit-maximizing, processing fees need not be publication fees. Journals are free to charge for other aspects of their services. In particular, it has been shown that the use of submission fees can eliminate any incentive to lower standards to improve revenue, even for profit-maximizing publishers.

Third, and most important, is the assumption that authors are willing to pay more for journals with lower standards, as they are for trade book publishing. Whether you accept this assumption depends in large degree on what you think authors are "buying" when they pay a processing fee. To first approximation, scholarly journal publishers provide four kinds of services:

management of article processing, including peer review
production (copy-editing, typesetting, etc.)
branding and imprimatur
distribution

An author's willingness to pay should correlate with the quality of these services, and all of these services (with the exception of the last in the case of open-access journals) should correlate with the standards of the journal. Primary among the services is branding, which by definition correlates with standards. Journals have a good brand exactly because they are selective in publishing only the best articles.

If you think that authors choose journals to publish in based on the brand of the journal (as a signaling mechanism to demonstrate the quality of their research), then authors should be willing to pay more for higher standards, not less. In other words, journals should show a positive correlation between processing fee and standards, and the worry about vanity journal domination is ill-founded.

Now any academic will tell you that imprimatur is exactly the reason that authors select journals. Academics must publish or perish, but not all publishing is equal. Publications in high-quality selective journals weigh a lot more than publications in bottom-feeding journals. Any journal that lowered its standards to raise short-term revenue would soon find its pool of submissions getting thinner and of even lower quality. It seems obvious to many academics that journals ought to be able to charge more for higher standards, not less.

Still, it's an empirical question. Which force is predominant in the journal publishing industry — the short-term profit-maximizing force that generates a negative correlation and vanity journal domination or a brand-payment force that generates a positive correlation and a range of journal qualities? We answer this question shortly, but first a digression.

The importance of editorial independence

You hear less of this kind of charge that publication fees lead to vanity press behavior now that major scholarly publishers all have instituted "hybrid open access" charges, where if an author pays a substantial fee (typically $3000 to $3500), the publisher makes the article freely available. Elsevier, Springer-Kluwer, Wiley-Blackwell, Sage, Taylor and Francis, and dozens of other publishers now offer this option.

One might worry that the availability of this option would lead to a journal willing to sell lower standards for authors willing to pay the hybrid fee. The worry is unfounded for exactly the same reasons that OA journal fees need not lead to a vanity press downward spiral: any lowering of standards would reduce the brand value of the journal that it depends on for its market position.

The ability to keep considerations of short-term financial gain from affecting quality standards depends on independence of the editorial process. Hybrid charges don't lead to vanity press worries because the editorial decisions can be systemically separated from the financial decisions, with no knowledge of whether a person will be paying the fee leaking into the editorial process. Publishers take pains to point out this separation in their descriptions of their hybrid OA programs. (Says Springer, "There is no difference in the way that they are treated between Springer Open Choice articles and other articles among the well over 100,000 that Springer publishes annually.") Similarly, it is crucial that editorial decisions not be affected by page charges, color figure charges, and any other author-side charges that a publisher might institute. Nor should editorial decisions be affected by advertiser interests. To the extent that subscription-based journals can maintain editorial and financial independence, open-access processing-fee journals should be able to do so as well, and are motivated to do so for the same reasons. The founding of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association is a sign that OA publishers appreciate the importance of sound practices to their authors and their readers.

Temptations to short-circuit editorial independence for financial reasons exist for subscription-based journals just as for open-access journals. Elsevier was discovered to have published several faux journals on behalf of and paid for by pharmaceutical companies, and many journals generate substantial revenue from advertising that might skew editorial decisions if not for strong editorial independence.

Gavin Yamey, an editor at PLoS, is quoted in Wired on just this point: "As for the vanity-press charge, Yamey said his company makes exceptions for authors who can't pay. Editors aren't in the loop on those decisions, however, 'so that cannot influence our decisions on which papers to publish.'"

An empirical study

I conducted a study to answer the empirical question that I raised before — whether open-access journals present the positive correlation between standards and publication fees indicative of a quality press or the negative correlation indicative of a vanity press. As a proxy for quality, I used the Eigenfactor-based Article Influence metric, as the Eigenfactor methodology is likely to lead to metrics that are more comparable across fields. Of the Eigenfactor-based metrics, Article Influence is appropriate to use as it, like publication fee against which it will be correlated, is a per-article metric.

Eigenfactors are calculated using citation data from Thomson ISI. We therefore extracted from the Directory of Open Access Journals all journals that had a Thomson ISI Impact Factor, and extracted Article Influence scores for each one.

We also tracked down the fee structure for these journals by examining the journals' web sites or contacting the journals by email or phone if necessary. We were able to acquire data for most, but not all, of the journals. (I am indebted to Tim Credo, Elmer Soriano, and Thomas Dodson for aid in acquiring this data.)

This data was used to calculate the correlation between publication fees and Article Influence. For simplicity, we excluded in the analysis those journals that charge a submission fee, as that would require modeling the effect of submission fee as well. As many have noted, submission fees in theory mitigate the vanity-press motive in any case, so the exclusion of these cases is a conservative step in the analysis.

A scatter plot of the data is shown in the following figure. In the figure I also show best fit lines for all of the journals (the green dotted line) and for those charging a non-zero publication fee (the blue dotted line). (The point in the upper right-hand corner is PLoS Biology.)

[caption id="attachment_329" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Graph of Article Influence as a function of publication fee for all open-access journals in DOAJ with publication fees and impact factors. (Click to enlarge.)"][/caption]

The correlation coefficient between standards and publication fees for those journals that charge them as calculated in the study was .70, a quite high positive correlation. Even if we include the journals that don't charge publication fees, the correlation is .47, which is typically thought of as a medium to large positive correlation. The study clearly demonstrates that OA journals show a positive correlation between fees and standards indicative of a quality press industry, not the negative correlation characteristic of vanity publishing.

For those interested in the details, I provide (as previously) the data that we compiled, as well as the computer program that calculated the correlations and generated the plot. All journal, pricing, and currency exchange data were acquired in January 2009.

Vanity journal existence is not a problem in the OA world

The positive correlation that the study demonstrates implies that a publisher of an OA journal will be disinclined to reduce standards merely to acquire more fees, since a journal with lower standards will only command lower fees. As it turns out, there is a way for an OA publisher to solve this quandary. Rather than lowering standards for a high-tier journal, it can set up a new journal with lower standards and lower fees to publish the type of articles that the higher-tier journal will not, thereby obtaining the revenues without diluting the brand of the higher-tier journal. In fact, this is the approach that subscription journals have taken for years: increase revenues by founding more journals. The availability of this approach is again consistent with having a healthy range of selectivity in OA journals; it provides a further argument against a race to the bottom.

Based on this study, then, one should expect that open-access journals will have a broad range of quality standards, from the most selective and expensive to bottom-feeding journals that will publish anything for a low fee. And this is exactly what we find. The premier PLoS journals are as high quality as journals come. On the other hand, Bentham Science Publishers journals are apparently willing to publish most anything, including the occasional computer-generated article. Scientific Journals International, at a $99.95 processing fee per author per article, shows signs of similar questionable standards.

Does the existence of bottom-feeding journals pose a problem? Ironically, such journals are far more problematic when they are subscription-based than when they are open-access. Though different journals have different average qualities, even journals that tend to publish lower quality articles trip over a decent one every once in a while. And when they do, if they use a subscription-fee business model you'll need to be a subscriber to read it. At least if they use an OA business model, you can read it without having had to subscribe all along "just in case". The existence of bottom-feeding open-access journals costs no one except for the authors gullible enough to submit their articles to them. Not so for the low-standards closed-access journals that bulk up bundles and place the very occasional read-worthy article behind a paywall.

Conclusion

Vanity journal domination is not occurring, nor is it likely to occur, among OA journals. Vanity journal existence will and does happen among both OA and subscription-fee journals, but at least for OA journals is a benign phenomenon. As subscription-fee journals more and more charge author-side fees, including hybrid open-access fees, one can only hope that the baseless vanity press recrimination against open-access journals will fade away.

^[1]This is strictly speaking not true. Most subscription-based journals also charge various sorts of author fees. And those fees can be quite substantial, commensurate with open-access journals' article processing fees. But for the sake of argument, let's pretend they don't.

Harvard's new open-access fund

2009-09-15T20:30:27+00:00

Harvard's participation in the open-access compact is being managed by the Office for Scholarly Communication, which has set up an open-access fund—the Harvard Open-Access Publishing Equity (HOPE) fund—consistent with the compact. Through HOPE, Harvard will reimburse eligible authors for open-access processing fees. Initially, members of the four Harvard faculties—Arts and Sciences, Education, Government, and Law—that have formally adopted open-access policies will be eligible to make use of the fund, with other faculties becoming eligible as they develop open-access policies. More information about Harvard's fund can be found at the OSC web site.

Five universities commit to the open-access compact

2009-09-14T16:00:30+00:00

Five universities—Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley—have now expressly stated their commitment to the importance of supporting the processing-fee business model for open-access journals just as the subscription-fee business model used by closed-access journals has traditionally been supported. These universities are the initial signatories of a "compact for open-access publishing equity" (COPE), which states:

We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents. Those universities and funding agencies receiving the beneﬁts of publisher services should recognize their collective and individual responsibility for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their continuing operation.

Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufﬁcient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature.

MIT provost Rafael Reif says "The dissemination of research findings to the public is not merely the right of research universities: it is their obligation. Open-access publishing promises to put more research in more hands and in more places around the world. This is a good enough reason for universities to embrace the guiding principles of this compact."

These universities realize that in the long run, underwriting processing fees for open-access journals is "an investment in a superior system of scholarly communication", as Peter Suber says and as I have argued previously. As more universities sign on to the compact, joined by funding agencies as well, fee-based open-access journals may become an increasingly viable alternative to subscription-based journals.

Full details about COPE are available at http://www.oacompact.org/.

Britain apologizes for treatment of Alan Turing

2009-09-13T22:17:21+00:00

: Image by Whimsical Chris via Flickr

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized on behalf of the British government for the appalling treatment of Alan Turing, who was obliged to undergo chemical castration for the crime of being gay. Prime Minister Brown's statement in the Telegraph follows an online petition drive that enlisted over 30,000 British citizens and residents, and a follow-on global petition with over 10,000 signatories worldwide.

Much has been made in the discussions surrounding the petition efforts and in the Prime Minister's statement of Turing's code-breaking efforts at Bletchley Park, which directly contributed to the allied victory in World War II. Less mentioned, but also central to his legacy, are Turing's seminal contributions to computer science. It is no exaggeration to say that Alan Turing was the progenitor of computer science, in his brief career providing building the foundation of theory, hardware, systems, artificial intelligence, even computational biology. His death at 42 as a result of the British government's misguided "therapy" constitutes one of the great intellectual tragedies of the twentieth century. I commend Prime Minister Brown for his prompt and complete apology.

More on academic freedom and OA funds

2009-08-31T14:05:56+00:00

In response to my last post, Kent Anderson says:

August 24th, 2009 at 2:04 pm

I think you missed Phil’s point, Stuart.

What Phil was saying is that libraries can’t control the disbursement of open access fees precisely because of academic freedom, which makes these fees more susceptible to unchecked growth and possible abuse. If they establish an OA fund, librarians will be on the horns of a dilemma — allow unchecked spending or violate academic freedom. Since they won’t violate academic freedom, their only option will be to allow unchecked spending.

I think you’re responding to a misinterpretation of Phil’s post.

via » Three good things: open-access funds, fiscal responsibility, and academic freedom The Occasional Pamphlet.

Yes, that's exactly how I understood the argument, so perhaps I didn't make my own view clear. Let me try to clarify it. (The issue is important enough and my response long enough that it makes more sense to devote a post to it than to place it in the comments thread.) Just so that my conclusion doesn't get lost below, here is what I am saying: What libraries will do is check spending but without violating academic freedom. The dilemma as stated is a false one.

Kent says "libraries can’t control the disbursement of open access fees precisely because of academic freedom". The premise here is that any method an OA fund uses to control disbursement must if effective necessarily cause a change in behavior of authors, for instance encouraging them to publish in less expensive journals over more expensive ones ceteris paribus. This much is true. Furthermore, there is an implicit assumption that any such policy that causes behavioral changes in where authors publish is coercive and a violation of academic freedom. They are not "free" to publish in any location because some are financially more attractive to them than others.

But no. Academic freedom means that faculty can study what they want, and publish the results where they want. It doesn't mean that the university must cover all costs for doing so, nor does it mean the university cannot cover some costs and not others in ways that redound to what the university sees as the benefit of its constituencies.

Let me provide some examples in the area of "studying what they want". Harvard has policies about what kinds of grants its faculty are allowed to take. They can study what they want, but they can't take money to do so if the grants violate university rules. For instance, university rules disallow grants that must be kept secret. (See Principle 2 of the Principles Governing Research at Harvard.) Nor can grants restrict investigators from publishing their results (Principle 4). And so forth. The fact that the university disallows investigators from taking certain grants is not a violation of academic freedom, even though it affects the financial support of certain research activities.

As a second example, the university itself provides funds to some researchers (but not others) to pursue research projects. (See examples here, here, and here.) It is itself, in a sense, a research funder. By playing favorites, and choosing among the applicants for these funds, is it violating academic freedom? No. No one brings up the horns of a dilemma between the university funding every single application for research funds or violating academic freedom.

Faculty must be allowed to publish where they want, but it is not a violation of academic freedom to monetarily support some venues over others. As a third example, universities have been systematically supporting subscription fees over processing fees for decades by paying the subscription fees, but not processing fees (page charges, figure charges, etc.), through their library budgets. Universities could have provided funds for these additional charges and have generally chosen not to. Some journals charge only subscription fees; others charge both kinds of fees. It has not constituted a violation of academic freedom that authors are out of pocket $0 for the solely subscription-fee journals but must pay the additional processing fees to publish in those journals that charge them.

A final example: My colleagues in the History of Art and Architecture department publish articles that typically contain large numbers of figures reproducing the artworks that they are studying, the reproduction rights for which can come to many thousands of dollars per article. These charges are not reimbursed by the university, and grants to cover them are hard to come by. The fees typically come out of the author's pocket. Some topics of research end up, by happenstance, to require very low rights clearance fees, others quite high fees. The differences in fees among these research topics may, for all I know, cause researchers to vary their research topics. But the fact that the university does not pay these fees does not constitute a violation of academic freedom. Scholars are free to study what they want, and to pursue funding to cover expenses to do so as available, and the university is free to support that research how it sees fit.

The fact that funds are differentially available for this or that purpose around a university may seem wrong, or unfair to one or another constituency, or well-balanced, or whatever, depending on where you sit. But the current apportionment is not fairer just because it's been around a while. And raising the specter of violation of academic freedom in these cases belittles the importance of this crucial concept. If you want to see violations of academic freedom, read the AAUP's Committee A annual reports.

Of course, if a university capriciously forbid publishing in this or that journal, that would be another matter, but no one is suggesting that. The suggestions, rather, are for support for certain kinds of charges for certain journals. Authors can avail themselves of these funds or not as they see fit, freely and without prejudice.

Just to make the OA fund proposals more concrete, let me list a few methods that allow for controlled distribution of OA fund fees without restricting academic freedom. (I'll couch them in terms of the amount of reimbursement an author receives from a fund to cover processing fees for an article in an open-access journal, but funds may choose to disburse funds in other ways than reimbursement of authors.)

Cap the total reimbursement per paper.
Pay all but a fixed amount of the fee, that is, institute a "co-payment".
Cap the total reimbursement provided to a single author per year. This method, discussed in my PLoS Biology paper, has the advantage that it forces authors to trade off the services that they receive from the publisher (including journal imprimatur) for the fee that they charge, providing exactly the economic market signal that the current system lacks.
Pay all but a fixed percentage of the fee, a percentage-based co-payment. This similarly provides an economic motivation to the author at the cost of placing them out of pocket for some costs for every article.
Steve Shavell, an economist at the Harvard Law School, proposed to me the following clever scheme: For each article, reimburse up to x dollars. If the fee f is less than x, some percentage p of the excess will be paid to the author (that is, p(x—f)), perhaps as an augmentation of a research fund. This provides a direct motivation for an author to search out high-value journals for each and every article, at the cost of increasing the total cost of running the fund.

None of these methods violates academic freedom (nor does removing all restrictions, as we've essentially done for subscription journals, but this could lead to hyperinflation of processing fees mimicking the subscription case). Several of them have the potential to introduce a self-correcting market signal into the payment scheme, thereby leading to controlled costs, rather than the runaway costs we see in the subscription model. I am not suggesting that all of these methods are equally good or effective or will solve the problem of sustainability of OA processing fee costs. They do not exhaust the possibilities; I am sure there are many other mechanisms that could be explored for setting up a properly functioning funding market for scholarly articles. The only limitation is our creativity.

Here is a dilemma for you: Do we continue the status quo, which involves only supporting a business model known to be subject to uncontrolled inflationary spirals, or do we experiment with new mechanisms that have the potential to be economically sound and far more open to boot? To me, this seems like an easy choice to make. Academic freedom, thankfully, doesn't enter the picture.

Three good things: open-access funds, fiscal responsibility, and academic freedom

2009-08-24T02:26:23+00:00

Just as I posted a response to Philip Davis's item on why open-access funds are putatively overly favorable to commercial publishers, out came another post by Mr. Davis, this time arguing that open access funds putatively violate academic freedom.

This new post, however, is so transparently spurious that it makes one wonder what Davis's agenda is. Nonetheless, at the risk of giving the post more credence than it deserves, I'll succinctly respond to the argument such as it is.^[1]

In summary, the claim is that open-access funds will either require vast amounts of additional funds, making them fiscally irresponsible, or will require aggressive filtering of claims on the fund, violating academic freedom. In fact, open-access funds are neither fiscally irresponsible nor contrary to academic freedom.

Open-access funds are not fiscally irresponsible

Open-access funds consistent with the "open-access compact" will require tiny amounts of funds in the short term (on the order of tens of dollars per faculty member per year based on extrapolations of current experience). My article on the compact discusses the issue at some length and I won't reiterate it here.

Once open-access funds require large amounts of money (if ever), it will be because many journals have switched to a fee-based open-access business model, thereby freeing up subscription fees. We know that in aggregate there have been in the past sufficient funds in library budgets to pay journals for the services they provide. Moving the funds from subscription payments to publication-fee payments doesn't change the macro situation for the worse.^[2] To the extent that the publication-fee model doesn't have the manifest market dysfunctionalities that the subscription model has, it is in fact likely to improve the situation.

Open access funds don't violate academic freedom

Davis argues that "Authors will view these [open-access] funds as a free lunch, and certainly much more appetizing than spending one’s own money paying those pesky page charges to non-profit society journals." He assumes libraries will respond by filtering requests based on publication venue, and that will constitute an arbitrary imposition on where scholars can publish that violates their academic freedom.

Academic freedom requires that faculty be allowed to publish what they want, where they want. It does not require that universities pay arbitrary moneys to make that possible. That's why it's not a violation of academic freedom that universities don't pay the thousands of dollars per article of page and figure charges that some journals charge. To the extent that universities add subsidies for some costs, that may change the incentives as to where to publish, but certainly doesn't decrease anyone's freedom. Thus, even if funds restricted disbursements, this would not constitute a violation of academic freedom.

Further, there is a variety of ways to set up an open-access fund that does not have the moral hazard that Davis imputes. The key is to make sure that funds for open-access charges are not fungible, as I've discussed elsewhere. It simply is false that open-access funds inherently can't be set up in such a way that a reasonable market for publication charges ensues. On the other hand, we know that the existing market structure for the subscription-based model is broken for just the moral hazard reasons that Davis worries about.

Summary

It beggars belief that providing funds to make open-access journals more accessible to authors decreases their academic freedom, and only a lack of creativity limits setting up funds for that purpose in economically sustainable ways. If you want to worry about problems of open access, these are not the ones to worry about.

^[1]This argument about academic freedom is distinct from one claiming that open-access policies of the type enacted at Harvard, Stanford, and MIT violate academic freedom. I've responded to that argument elsewhere, arguing that to the extent that the policies have any interaction with academic freedom at all, they enhance rather than limit it.

^[2]This macro argument has to do with costs in aggregate. Micro estimates based on extrapolating costs per article over the set of published articles are more problematic. The best known estimate, reported in a Cornell study, makes specific assumptions that indict the conclusions. But more generally, this type of analysis makes a range of assumptions about how contingent economic facts will be maintained despite the hypothesized wholesale shift in business model, for which there is no basis. (See for instance, this discussion about how moving from the subscription-fee business model to the publication-fee model turns complementary goods into substitutable goods, for just one example of how the markets completely differ.) For that reason alone, the sketched macro argument, which makes no such assumptions, is considerably more robust.

New paper on OA in PLoS Biology

2009-08-05T13:08:24+00:00

My paper on the "open-access compact" is now available from PLoS Biology and at my web site. An excerpt:

Scholars write articles to be read—the more access to their articles the better—so one might think that the open-access approach to publishing, in which articles are freely available online to all without interposition of an access fee, would be an attractive competitor to traditional subscription-based journal publishing.

But open-access journal publishing is currently at a systematic disadvantage relative to the traditional model.

I propose a simple, cost-effective remedy to this inequity that would put open-access publishing on a path to become a sustainable, efficient system, allowing the two journal publishing systems to compete on a more level playing field. The issue is important, first, because academic institutions shouldn’t perpetuate barriers to an open-access business model on principle and, second, because the subscription-fee business model has manifested systemic dysfunctionalities in practice. After describing the problem with the subscription-fee model, I turn to the proposal for providing equity for open-access journal publishing—the open-access compact.

Publishers cooperating with the Harvard OA policy

2009-07-29T03:13:19+00:00

One of the advantages of the Harvard open-access policies is that the university's cumulation of rights allows it to negotiate directly with publishers on behalf of covered authors. Such discussions can lead to win-win agreements in which Harvard authors can more simply comply with the open-access policies they have voted and publishers can express solidarity with their academic community partners while avoiding bureaucracy like addenda or waivers on a per-article basis.

We first took advantage of this possibility with an agreement with the American Physical Society. The APS wanted clarity on some issues regarding how the Harvard open-access policies would be used in providing access to APS-published articles before they could see themselves clear to fully supporting the open-access policies. The university was happy to provide that clarity in that our plans were wholly consonant with what APS wanted. The result was an agreement that was a win-win for both APS and the university. APS agreed to acknowledge the policy and not require addenda to their publication agreements (much less waivers of the OA policy). In return, Harvard made clear that for articles covered by the OA policy it would

Refrain from using facsimiles of the publisher's version of the articles unless the publisher permits;
Not charge for the display or distribution of articles;
Cite to the publisher's definitive version of the articles and link to them where possible;
Authorize others to use the articles only subject to these same restrictions.^[1]

The formal agreement and announcement are available at the web site of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication.

We've now concluded a large handful of such arrangements and have started listing the publishers and journals that have been supportive in this way in a listing of publishers who are "easiest to publish with". The listing provides a resource for our faculty to let them know which journals they can publish in without waivers or addenda. Already, we have affirmations from scholarly societies (APS, American Mathematical Society, American Economic Association), non-profit publishers (Public Library of Science, Berkeley Electronic Press), commercial publishers (BioMed Central, Hindawi Publishing), and university presses (Duke, Rockefeller, and University of California Presses). We expect more to be added soon.

Publishers interested in being added to the list of "easiest to publish with" should contact the OSC. We're happy to work with publishers to simplify compliance with the open-access policies.

^[1]In fact, we were already operating under just such conditions. The OA policy only provides a license to Harvard for a version of an article if the author controls rights for the version in its entirety. We were not charging for the display and distribution of the articles, and the uses we had envisioned were noncommercial uses. We already viewed it as crucial that we highlight the definitive version, even going so far as to modify the repository software to provide links to the definitive version on search results pages as well as individual document pages.

Commercial publishers aren't the bad guys

2009-07-22T18:15:43+00:00

Philip Davis brings up the issue of whether underwriting open-access publication charges, so as to "level the playing field" (as I've recommended elsewhere) disadvantages "a third team".

By focusing on the author-pays and the reader-pays teams, we ignore a third team: publishers who rely on page charges from authors. This group of mostly non-profit learned society and association publishers relies on this source of author payments to keep subscription costs down for libraries and their readers.

Cover all open-access publication charges and, all of a sudden, we put these publishers at a distinct disadvantage.

In creating a level playing field between subscription-access and open-access journals, we will create a playing field that pits commercial publishers against non-profit publishers and gives the commercial publishes a great advantage over their non-profit rivals. When the game is over, we will be left with just the commercial players standing.

Is that the future we wish to create for ourselves?

If libraries are willing to cover open-access publishing charges, they should be willing to support page charges. Only then can we maintain a fair and level playing field.

(via Open Access on a “Level Playing Field” « The Scholarly Kitchen)

Who is this "third team" that Davis is concerned about? The first two teams are "the author-pays and the reader-pays teams", that is publishers who use business models with charges at the author or reader sides. In the first sentence, he describes the "third team" as "publishers who rely on page charges". But page charges are author-side charges. Why aren't such publisher's part of the "author-pays team"? Presumably because Davis has in mind that they also charge reader-side fees. So the "third team" is publishers who use a mixed business model charging fees at both ends, and in particular charging author-side fees "to keep subscription costs down for libraries and their readers".

In fact, the study by the Kaufman-Wills Group concluded that well more than half of subscription-based journals charge author-side fees of one sort or another, placing them in the "third team". In the second sentence, however, Davis seems to be concerned about "non-profit learned society and association publishers" as the "third team". He is not clear as to why commercial publishers should be excluded from the third team. He seems to imply that there are good guys and bad guys among the publishers, that the commercial publishers are somehow the bad guys, and that a future where only the commercial publishers are left standing is somehow worse: "When the game is over, we will be left with just the commercial players standing." He thinks this would be a bad thing, though he doesn't explain why commercial publishers should be demonized in this way.

Davis thinks that this "third team" (non-profit publishers who use a mixed business model) would be at a disadvantage "all of a sudden" if universities started underwriting open-access processing fees but not page charges. Why? Because they rely on page charges. So do many of the commercial publishers, but Davis is not concerned about them.

In fact, the sentence "When the game is over, we will be left with just the commercial players standing" implies that he's specifically worried about competition with commercial publishers. But if he's referring to subscription-fee-model commercial publishers, the issue of OA processing fees is irrelevant. If the non-profits would be at a disadvantage when OA processing fees are covered because non-OA processing fees (page charges) are not, then they're presumably at a disadvantage right now. The OA fee underwriting is a red herring. Committing to underwrite OA fees would only change that comparative disadvantage if commercial publishers were somehow more able to take advantage of the OA processing-fee business model.

All subsidizing OA processing fees does is provide a new subsidized business model that such journals are free to take advantage of if they choose (but without compulsion). Frankly, this would seem to be a boon to a "third team" publisher. If Davis is right that some non-profit publishers at least rely predominantly on page charges, then a widespread policy of underwriting OA fees would be especially attractive to them. They could switch business model to an OA processing-fee model and be guaranteed payment of their processing fees. Given that non-profits seem to be able to provide publishing services far more efficiently than commercial publishers, making the switch seems all the more likely to be successful. The more a journal relies on page charges relative to subscription charges, the easier it is to switch to an open-access processing-fee business model in a world in which such fees are subsidized.

When I talk about a "level playing field" for journal business models, I don't necessarily mean that we commit to underwriting every possible way publishers might make money. Rather, I mean that if publishers are subsidized when using a closed-access business model (which both second and third team publishers are), there should be some kind of subsidy for some kind of open-access business model as well. We want to remove the disincentives to publish in OA journals not because we believe that all business models are equally good but because an OA model based on processing fees in particular is one we would like to see succeed, so it should not be kept at a systematic disadvantage.

Although a publisher's business model should be a factor in these discussions, certain factors should be irrelevant. Whether a publisher is commercial or non-profit, a learned society or a multi-national corporation, a large institution or a small one, is entirely beside the point. There is no need to demonize commercial publishers who choose to respond in perfectly reasonable ways to the market systems they are confronted with, nor is it appropriate to artificially support a scientific society merely because it has a feel-good mission statement. Rather, we should make sure that the business of providing publishing services can be done in an efficient sustainable way in the best interest of the scholarly enterprise. Where that is not happening, and it certainly is not happening, we need to remake the market system to support the goals of the scholarly community.

Some might think that commercial publishers are appropriate to demonize because they charge too much for their subscriptions relative to the value they provide. (Maybe that's why Davis is worried about only commercial publishers surviving.) To the extent that is true, the appropriate response is to examine why such inefficiency could come about, and to adjust the market mechanisms to repair the manifest dysfunctionality. Supporting page charges doesn't provide any help with this at all. Supporting open-access processing fees may.

As library budgets collapse, authors need to take responsibility for access

2009-07-06T19:04:42+00:00

Jonathan Eisen at The Tree of Life writes

If you need any more incentive to publish a paper in an Open Access manner if you have a choice - here is one. If you publish in a closed access journal of some kind, it is likely fewer and fewer colleagues will be able to get your paper as libraries are hurting big time and will be canceling a lot of subscriptions.

He's absolutely right.^[1] Eisen refers to a statement from his own university's library (UC Davis), describing a major review and cancellation process. Charles Bailey has compiled public statements from seven ARL libraries (Cornell, Emory, MIT, UCLA, UTennessee, UWashington, Yale) about substantial cuts to their budgets. My own university will be experiencing substantial collections budget cuts in addition to major layoffs following on from the Harvard endowment drop of 30%. The Harvard libraries are not being spared.

The ARL has issued an open statement to publishers about the situation on behalf of their membership, 123 premier academic libraries in North America. They note that in addition to 2009 cancellations, "Most member libraries are preparing cancellations of ongoing commitments for 2010."

Now more than ever, academic authors need to take responsibility for making sure that people can read what they write. Here's a simple two-step process.

Retain distribution rights for your articles by choosing a journal that provides for this or amending your copyright agreement with the journal (but don't fall into the "don't ask, don't tell" trap).
Place your articles in an open access repository.

As budgets get cut and cancellations mount, fewer and fewer people will be able to read (and benefit from and appreciate and cite) your articles unless you make them accessible.

^[1]Except for the implication that your only recourse is an open-access journal. In addition to that route, you can also publish in a traditional subscription-based closed-access journal, so long as it allows, or you negotiate rights for, your distribution of the article. Most journals do allow this kind of self-archiving distribution.

University open-access policies as mandates

2009-06-30T16:08:46+00:00

"You can always tell a Harvard man...
but you can't tell him much."
— Source unknown

In the abecedary Harvard A to Z, in the entry under "Deans", the story is told that "a president of the University of Virginia once received a letter requesting a university speaker for an alumni club meeting. To the club's request that he not designate anyone lower than a dean, the president is alleged to have replied that there was no one lower than a dean."

Why do deans get no respect? The reason, of course, is that the deanship is by reputation the quintessential position of responsibility without authority. You are in charge of a faculty who do what they will, not what you would have them. The phenomenon is sometimes referred to as "academic freedom".

I bring this up in the context of questions about "open-access mandates".

A mandate is an official command without option. An open-access mandate is a commandment that a set of authors make their articles openly available. A deposit mandate is a commandment that a set of authors deposit their articles in a repository. This is what scholarly communications people refer to when they talk about mandates.

On the one hand, the Harvard-style policies look like deposit mandates because they state something like this (as taken from the Harvard FAS policy): "[E]ach Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge" to the university.

On the other hand, the policies allow for a waiver: "The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request...".

On the third hand, certain variants of the policy language that we have now moved to (in particular those at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Graduate School of Education) restrict the waiver to the license, rather than the policy overall: "The Dean or Dean's designate will waive application of the license for a particular article upon express direction by a Faculty member."^[1]

On the fourth hand, the FAQs at the Office for Scholarly Communication web site advise faculty at all of the schools with open-access policies to deposit their articles in all cases:

What do I have to do to comply with the Open Access Policy?
Here is the two-word answer: always deposit.

On the fifth hand, the FAQ is merely advice, not voted policy.

(I've long ago run out of hands.)

Confused? Don't be, because none of this matters at all.

As any dean will tell you, there is no such thing as a mandate on faculty. One could stipulate a policy that all faculty must wear crimson at monthly faculty meetings; the only result would be benign neglect of the requirement by most faculty and assiduous wearing of blue by a small group interested in tweaking the administration. Trust me.

Try the following thought experiment. Suppose a policy on faculty were established that granted to the university a license in faculty articles but did not explicitly provide for a waiver of the license. Now imagine that a faculty member has an article accepted by a highly prestigious journal that does not allow for author distribution and will not accept an amendment of its copyright transfer policy. Perhaps the author is a junior faculty member soon up for tenure, whose promotion case will be considerably weakened without the publication in question. The author might naturally want to have the license waived even though no waiver is explicitly provided for. The faculty member is likely to storm into the dean's office, howling about the unconscionable practice of taking rights even when it harms the faculty member. Is the university going to distribute the article anyway against the express wishes of the faculty member? Be serious. The dean says "Fine, we won't make use of the license for this article." Voilà, a waiver. So much for university rights retention mandates.

Now suppose the policy "mandated" that every article be deposited into the repository. In practice, the deposit can only occur with the cooperation of the author. No one is going to rifle through faculty members' files or hard drives looking for copies of manuscripts to distribute. If a faculty member refuses to cooperate, no deposit occurs, and a waiver of the deposit requirement has been obtained by default. So much for university deposit mandates.

In summary, whether a waiver procedure is expressly provided for or not, it exists, whether a waiver of a license or of a deposit requirement.

Given that a policy has a waiver option whether expressly provided for or not, it makes great sense to take the high road and provide for the waiver possibility explicitly. This has multiple benefits. First, it acknowledges reality. Second, it explicitly preserves the freedom of the author. Third, it enables much broader acceptance of the policy. Meanwhile, the policy, by specifying rights retention and deposit for those cases where a waiver does not occur, places the defaults in a better place. Such changes in default are known to have dramatic effect on participation rates for activities ranging from 401K participation to organ donation.

That is why the Harvard open-access policy could not be, should not be, and is not a mandate. I've tried to be very careful never to refer to it as a mandate (though I can't promise I've never slipped up). The announcements of the policies at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Kennedy School, and the Graduate School of Education don't refer to the policies as mandates. (The law school announcement does call the policy "mandatory", which I suppose it is strictly speaking, though I would have avoided the term.) But as you can tell, I don't think it would be a mandate even if we'd left out the waiver language, and even given the narrower waiver language that we have now been able to move to.

Just to be clear, there are several things that I am not saying.

I am not claiming that there can be no true open-access mandates on faculty. Rather, such mandates must come from outside academia. Funders and governments can mandate open access because they can, in the end, refuse to fund noncompliers. They have a stick. All a university, school, or dean has, in the end, is a carrot.

I am not saying that university open-access policies are meaningless. Policies can be tremendously important even if they aren't mandates. There is a big difference between the Harvard policy and feel-good requests or exhortations or statements of support for open access. It's not mandate or nothing. What matters is the degree to which faculty participate in providing open access. Having a policy that faculty have overwhelmingly and voluntarily entered into that says we agree that deposits will be the norm and that exceptions will be made only by express direction is very different from no policy at all.

I am not saying that university open-access policies can't be successful. But success has to be based on something more than coercion, because universities just do not have the ability to coerce their faculty, nor would it be advisable to try. Success must be based on broad collective support. This is why it is important that university OA policies ideally be faculty-initiated and faculty-endorsed. To my mind, it is better to have no policy at all than one with hesitant, lukewarm support.

I am not even saying that people shouldn't refer to university OA policies such as Harvard's as mandates (although I do personally avoid the term). There is another sense in which the Harvard-style policies certainly constitute mandates, namely that faculty are technically required to either deposit (say) or expressly opt out of depositing. That may not be the sense that people typically mean when they refer to OA mandates, but the Harvard policy is a mandate in that weaker sense. Refer to a policy as a mandate or not as you see fit.

What I am saying, though, is that worrying about whether a policy is a mandate or not, or whether it allows for waivers or not, is beside the point. All university policies on faculty are waivable, whether they say so or not.

^[1] The reason that we adjusted the language from "written request" to "express direction" was first to remove any confusion inhering in the word "request" that it could be denied, and second to make clear that an expression of the direction need not be written in the traditional sense; email and web form direction can serve just as well. Indeed, the most common method for requesting waivers now is through a simple web form that we provide.

Institute of Education Sciences has an open access policy

2009-06-24T21:29:32+00:00

I haven't seen it discussed anywhere, but it seems that the Institute of Education Sciences in the Department of Education is now requiring its funded research be made openly available through the ERIC repository. The policy looks analogous to that of the NIH. The pertinent clause from the current IES Request for Applications is:

Recipients of awards are expected to publish or otherwise make publicly available the results of the work supported through this program. Institute-funded investigators should submit final, peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from research supported in whole or in part by the Institute to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC, http://eric.ed.gov) upon acceptance for publication. An author's final manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, and includes all graphics and supplemental materials that are associated with the article. The Institute will make the manuscript available to the public through ERIC no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this requirement.

Thanks to John Collins of Harvard's Graduate School of Education for bringing this to my attention.

"Don't ask, don't tell" rights retention for scholarly articles

2009-06-18T09:36:56+00:00

A strange social contract has arisen in the scholarly publishing field, a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" approach to online distribution of articles by authors. Publishers officially forbid online distribution, authors do it anyway without telling the publishers, and publishers don't ask them to stop even though it violates contractual obligations. What happens when you refuse to play that game? Read on.

Publishing of research, in the sense of providing for its widespread dissemination, is the means by which new discoveries join the collective knowledge of humanity. The means by which the distribution is implemented has been subscription-based publication via a publisher. Indeed, until recently, this was the only practical means by which research could be distributed, since the cost of the dissemination, which involved printing and shipping of paper, showed economies of scale that individual researchers could not take advantage of. Publishers made revenue by limiting access to the papers to paying customers.

Not coincidentally, scholars are motivated to publish because recognition of their research by this same system is the currency by which their career advancement is purchased. They are thus forced, effectively as a condition of employment, to make their research available through publishers.

With the availability of the internet, the marginal cost of distribution of a scholarly paper has been reduced to essentially zero. That particular economy of scale benefit that traditional print publishing relied on has disappeared. Still, participation in the traditional publication system remains important for its peer-review-based vetting system.

However, recognition of scholars' research is also measured by other metrics of impact, such as subjective judgements of influence on the field, sometimes formalized in proxies such as citation counts and impact factors. To optimize these metrics, it behooves a scholar to distribute writings universally, to take advantage of the network and its low costs. Study after study has shown that articles available freely online are more widely cited than those that are available only through publishers' access-limited venues.

An author has a simple solution to the quandary of whether to distribute through a publisher's access-limited mechanism or freely online: Do both. Unfortunately, publishers typically restrict authors from this approach through contractual limitations stipulated in copyright assignment forms.

This brings us to the strange social contract. What has arisen, perhaps surprisingly, is a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" approach to online distribution by authors. Publishers officially forbid online distribution, authors do it anyway without telling the publishers, and publishers don't ask them to stop even though it violates contractual obligations.

The standard system for scholarly communication is thus based on widespread contractual violation and fraud.

Why don't publishers police their contractees more carefully, as the RIAA does with their customers who distribute copyrighted material online? It would be a simple matter to find a small number of violators and send them take-down letters. General publicity of this effort would presumably have a substantial chilling effect among academics against their routine violation of copyright assignments.

We can only speculate that the fear of upsetting their content providers trumps their need to maintain control over the content itself, given that there is no evidence that the online availability is hurting their revenues. (The situation may be different with music, hence the RIAA's different strategy.) One can just imagine what kind of backlash an RIAA-style approach would have with academics, in addition to the desired chilling effect.

Nonetheless, individual authors still breach contracts regularly as they act to maximize their career advancement possibilities. To many, including myself, this state of affairs is untenable. I am not willing to routinely violate contracts in this way. Consequently, I and others have for some time reconciled the two distribution mechanisms explicitly, by amending the contractual conditions of copyright assignments. For many years, I have as a matter of course refused to sign copyright assignment forms that do not give me the right of noncommercial online distribution of my work. Originally, I would use alternative copyright assignments that I wrote myself. More recently, I have been attaching the SPARC addendum to publishers' assignment forms, and then the Science Commons addenda that superseded it.

In the many years that I have been routinely replacing or modifying copyright assignments, I have never had a complaint (or even an acknowledgement) from a publisher. In retrospect, this may make sense. Since the contractual modification applies only to a single article by a single author, it is unlikely that anyone looking for copyright clearance would even know that all copyright hadn't been assigned to the publisher. And in any case publishers must realize that authors act as if they have a noncommercial distribution license whether they formally retain one or not.

I say that I've never had a complaint from a publisher, and that has been true with one exception. This post describes that singular case. It may serve to illuminate several points:

How journal publishers think about rights.
How the rights landscape might be changing.
How authors can recoup positive progress.

I describe my experience in challenging an irrational and detrimental license clause, and how it spiraled into a battle that resulted in the publisher changing its policy for the journal as a whole. My experience is certainly not unique but accounts are rare, so I encourage others to share their experiences with successful (and unsuccessful) rights retention negotiations with journal publishers in the comments section.

In May of 2004, I submitted a paper to the Blackwell philosophy journal Nôus. The contents of the paper is immaterial^[1] and its trajectory through the normal review process is unexceptional. After a round of revisions, the paper was accepted for publication in the journal in November of 2004, some six months after submission, and my final copy was submitted the following May and a copy placed on my web site.

After the article sat in the journal's backlog for eighteen months, I received notification in November of 2006 that the paper's publication in volume 41, number 1 of Nôus (the March, 2007 issue) was imminent. Blackwell would be sending me proofs around December 19 (in the event, they arrived December 21) and I was to send any corrections by January 5 coincident with the winter holidays to perform the work. At that time the managing editor of the journal (an employee of Brown University, not the publisher) stated that Blackwell had changed the copyright form that they require from authors from a Copyright Transfer Form to an Exclusive License Form (ELF). She attached a copy for me to sign and return.

The copyright policy of Blackwell was only alluded to on their web site. Their public statement on open access stated that "Our copyright assignment policy allows authors to self-archive their final version of their article on personal websites or institutional repositories." Historically, Blackwell has been quite progressive when it comes to copyright policies and author rights. For all these reasons, I had little reason to expect a problem with distributing my paper online.

However, Blackwell's Exclusive License Form turned out to be a mixed bag. In most ways it was progressive, specifically allowing prepublication distribution on the author's web site and afterwards as well, with the exception of a twelve-month hiatus immediately after publication, what is termed in the parlance an "embargo period". With the exception of the embargo period, the ELF seemed relatively unobjectionable. As was my usual practice, I attached the SPARC addendum and returned the ELF to Blackwell shortly after my final corrections to the proofs in early January 2007.

On February 1, 2007, an assistant journals editor at Blackwell (who I will refer to as "L—" to retain anonymity) informed me by email that

We noticed that you submitted a signed SPARC Author's Addendum along with the signed Blackwell Exclusive License Form (ELF) for your article 'The Turing Test as Interactive Proof', which will appear in an upcoming issue of Nous. I have attached a copy of these forms for your reference.^[2] According to the terms of the SPARC agreement the Blackwell ELF takes precedence. However, I wanted to make you aware that several of the points in the SPARC agreement differ with the rights you agreed to in the Blackwell ELF.

This email struck me, frankly, as bizarre, and the Office of the General Counsel at my home institution seemed puzzled as well. I replied on February 7.

L— --

Thanks for bringing up a possible misconstrual of the copyright provisions. I and many others appreciate the expansiveness of the Blackwell copyright assignment.

I recognize that there are some differences between the terms of the Blackwell ELF and the SPARC addendum. My understanding of the SPARC addendum is that, where there is conflict between the addendum and the Blackwell ELF, the addendum takes precedence, based on the following language in the addendum:

"The parties agree that wherever there is any conflict between this Addendum and the Publication Agreement, the provisions of this Addendum are paramount and the Publication Agreement shall be construed accordingly."

I don't understand your statement that "According to the terms of the SPARC agreement the Blackwell ELF takes precedence."

Regards,

Perhaps this was an attempt on the part of Blackwell to have on record my acquiescence to the Blackwell ELF as taking precedence over the addendum despite the addendum's plain language to the contrary.

On February 9, L— now adjusted her claim saying that the SPARC form "does appear to be unclear" as to precedence. In any case,

Blackwell and the Nous Editorial office are not in agreement with the terms of the SPARC Addendum, especially the lack of embargo period, which could jeopardize the journal.

This email for the first time was copied to Professor Ernest Sosa, the editor-in-chief of Nôus.

This began a period of emails back and forth in which I tried to find a minimal change to the ELF that Blackwell would accept. Blackwell viewed their job as "to be the guardian of Nous content"; they must "protect the journal". They worried that my posting my paper on my web site over the next twelve months (where it had been for the last several years) "could jeopardize the journal".

Meanwhile, fearing the worst, I started contacting Nôus board members for advice on the matter. By February 28, an email from L— reminded me that time was running out and a resolution had to be reached by March 2 or the paper would have to be pulled from its intended issue. As a final attempt, I sent a copy of the ELF with just four words elided to drop the embargo period, the first four words of the clause "12 months after publication you may post an electronic version of the Articles on your own personal website, on your employer's website/repository and on free public servers in your subject area."

L— requested a phone call.

On March 1, I spoke to L— by phone. She was quite pleasant and professional, but stated definitively that the embargo period was non-negotiable.

We talked about various issues regarding the policy. First, I was interested in the reasons for the embargo period. She provided three, serially, as I argued against each. I turn to them below.

I asked if the embargo policy was a Blackwell policy or a policy of the Nôus editorial board. She said the latter, and reported that she had spoken with the editor-in-chief who she said was supportive of Blackwell's stance.

In the end, neither of us would budge, so we agreed to disagree and L— said she would have to pull the paper. I emphasize that she was gracious and understanding throughout.

During the phone call, L— put forth three arguments for the embargo period, none of which was well founded.

The citation argument: The first claim was that the embargo period is necessary so that there are not multiple versions available that could cause citation confusion. However, Blackwell's own agreement allows posting of papers both before and after the embargo period, which they apparently do not believe leads to citation confusion. It is unclear why there would be confusion generated just within the embargo period. In any case, with or without an embargo period, the agreement already requires that the posted version provide correct citation information for the definitive version, so that anyone downloading the paper is provided accurate information.

The economic argument: Second, L— claimed that the embargo period was necessary for the financial health of the journal. Presumably, the worry is that if papers were available for free without a subscription during the embargo period, libraries would stop subscribing, eliminating the main source of Blackwell's revenue from the journal. In fact, although the journal officially has this embargo policy, it seems to be honored more in the breach. A quick study revealed that over 80 percent of the Nôus articles within the embargo period at the time were available from the authors' web sites or other open access repositories. (In fact, some authors were even posting the publisher's version.) Thus, over 80 percent of Nôus articles were already in violation of the copyright agreement that the publisher asserts is critical for the journal's financial health. Furthermore, there is ample empirical evidence from fields such as physics that enjoy essentially 100 percent open access to preprints that availability of preprints does not lead to reductions in subscriptions.

The standards argument: Finally, L— claimed that the embargo period was "standard policy in the industry". This is false. For instance, Elsevier allows posting of authors' final versions of papers on authors' websites without an embargo period. Springer-Kluwer has a similar policy (as reported by SHERPA/RoMEO). Apparently even among Blackwell journals embargo periods varied with some having no embargo period. But even if the claim were true, the fact that an embargo period is standard is no argument for retaining the restriction if there is no other good argument for it.

In summary, Blackwell was singling me out for special treatment in not allowing me to post a copy of my paper on my web site, whereas all other Nôus authors are apparently allowed to do so with impunity. As far as I can tell, I was singled out solely because I was attempting to do legally what other authors were willing to do illegally. No plausible argument for the restriction was provided. Indeed, the fact that violation of the contractual condition is so overwhelmingly widespread demonstrates that the contractual condition is unnecessary.

At this point, I gave up on Blackwell making an exception for me, and moved to try to get Nôus to change its policy overall, following on L—'s assurance that the embargo period was a policy of the editorial team of the journal. I enlisted help from a Nôus board member to ask the editor-in-chief Sosa to reconsider the policy. Eventually, he did so, stating that "something needs to be done" and that the "situation with Nous seems unsustainable". He passed on a request to his Blackwell contacts to change the Nôus copyright policy.

On May 5, 2007, Sosa reported that the matter was in the hands of the Blackwell legal department, but that Blackwell's pending merger with Wiley may slow things down.

Finally, on May 24, 2007, Sosa informed me that Blackwell had agreed to drop the embargo requirement from the Nôus copyright form, and that my article could now reenter the publication stream. The paper appeared, finally, in volume 41, number 4 of Nôus, and remained on my web site with updated citation information.

What is the moral of this story? First, all participants — including the editorial board and editor-in-chief of the journal, the managing editor, the publisher's staff — were people of good will. They all acted in ways they thought in the best interest of the institutions they represented and the larger missions of those institutions. However, to a great extent, they may not have fully thought out the connections between the policies they acted under and the missions. The editorial board may not have realized that the journal's policy embargoed author distribution; certainly the journal's contributors didn't, or chose to ignore it. The publisher may not have realized the inconsistencies between the journal policies and the facts-on-the-ground.

But it is also apparent that authors are far too acquiescent in the process of rights retention with publishers. We are overly willing to accept the rulings of publishers as a fait accompli. Despite the fact that publishers assert that their policies are supported by their editorial boards, editorial boards are in fact responsive to reasoned arguments. And although a negotiation for rights retention between an author and a large commercial publishing company asymmetrically disfavors the author, one in which the author is supported by the editorial board is a different matter entirely. This example calls for taking advantage of rights retention negotiations to enlist editors and editorial boards in the process of expanding access to scholarly articles in a way consonant with law, moving past the "don't ask, don't tell" social contract.

Update 6/19/11: Jeffrey Pomerantz has an interesting story about his own "copyfight" with Taylor and Francis, ending in the publisher refusing to vary the conditions of the publication agreement and his decision to withdraw the article, providing it via unilateral open access instead. He raises the only partially tongue-in-cheek possibility of this as a new scholarly communication strategy. Worth thinking about.

^[1] But since you asked, the paper concerns the status of the Turing Test as a philosophically tenable criterion for attributing intelligence. The paper is freely available from my web page and other sites.

^[2]She didn't and the email appears to have been truncated.

Harvard Graduate School of Education announces open-access policy

2009-06-16T21:21:03+00:00

The Harvard Graduate School of Education has just released its official announcement of their June 1 enactment of an open-access policy, following the approach of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Law School, and Kennedy School of Government, as well as the Stanford University School of Education.

Four down, six(ish) to go.

An economic solution to reviewing load

2009-06-15T10:00:22+00:00

Hal Daume at the NLP blog bemoans the fact that "there is too much to review and too much garbage among it" and wonders "whether it's possible to cut down on the sheer volume of reviewing".

He lists several possible approaches, most of which apply only to conference papers (which is appropriate since his field [and mine] is computer science, in which peer-reviewed conference proceedings constitute the bulk and much of the best of the archival literature). But to avoid parochialism, I'll restrict attention to ideas that might apply as well to journal reviewing. His recommendations center on the idea of tiering the review process, allowing the editor to preemptively reject an article, or enlisting a full contingent of reviewers only if the article passes muster by a smaller cohort. Many journals already use these approaches, but they have the negative side-effect of reducing the scope of review for rejected papers, which may reduce the overall quality and fairness of the review process. (He doesn't mention a different approach to tiering, which we might call "trickle-down reviewing", in which a single review process is used for a set of journals with different publishing thresholds, so that papers rejected from a high prestige journal don't generate requests for new reviews from a lower prestige journal that the authors resubmit to.)

There is an economic solution to the problem that bears consideration: Charge for submission. This would induce self-selection; authors would be loathe to submit unless they thought the paper had a fair chance of acceptance. Consider a conference or journal with a 25% acceptance rate that charged, say, $50 per submission. (The right amount may be different; I use this figure just as an example.) Authors who tended to write and submit average quality papers would be confronted with a cost of some $200 (in expectation) per published paper. If they wanted to reduce that cost, the expedient method would be to submit fewer papers and papers with higher average quality. The most plausible approach is to refrain from submitting the lowest quality papers, but other methods of improving quality would work as well. This has several positive effects: reduced reviewing load, higher average submission quality, less "salami-slicing", and revenue generation to boot.

To avoid disenfranchisement of scholars with more limited means, fee waivers should be supplied in exigent circumstances, as they are for page, figure, and other publication charges by many journals. The application process for the fee waiver would be separated from the editorial process to prevent mercenary considerations from affecting editorial decisions.

Submission fees have a further benefit over publication fees in eliminating any economic incentive for lowering quality standards as a means for increasing revenue, as discussed in detail by McCabe and Snyder.

Submission fees could go a long way toward solving problems not only with reviewing but also journal financing and overpublication, a win-win-win situation, all without limiting entrée to publication.

The argument for gold OA support

2009-06-11T10:54:32+00:00

Are green and gold open access independent of each other? In particular, is worry about gold OA a waste of time, and are expenditures on it a waste of money? Stevan Harnad has brought up this issue in response to a recent talk I gave at Cal Tech, and in particular my remarks about a potential "open access compact". I will take this opportunity to explain why I think that the answer to both questions is "no".

Enaction of green OA policies at universities requires the broad support of faculty and administration, and careful attending to their wholly reasonable concerns. Chief among these is the following argument against a green OA policy: The services that the journals provide are important, as are the scholarly societies that publish many of the journals. They constitute a good to the scholarly community. But now consider the following dystopian scenario. Suppose the green OA policy being proposed were to be adopted universally, and further that it were widely followed so that the vast majority of scholarly articles were thereby openly available (though admittedly in the deprecated form of author's final manuscript rather than publisher's version). This might lead some libraries to feel freer about canceling subscriptions, which would lead to price pressure on journals. This price pressure might become so great that publishers might not even be able to recoup their costs by sale of subscriptions. In the absence of other business models, the publishers will have no choice but to shut down their journals. Then by a Kantian argument, it follows that the green OA policy should not be supported.

This worry is by far the most common one that I encountered in working with three Harvard faculties in passing green OA policies, and still encounter as I work with the remaining faculties at Harvard and talk with other institutions.

Of course, there are a lot of "might"s in the worry. But, it doesn't matter that there is no evidence that such a scenario will transpire, and that there is in fact evidence against it. (The case of physics is well known.) It doesn't matter that many of the steps in the process may not occur. I myself have recapitulated these counterarguments many a time. What is important is that it certainly might occur, it is consistent with the laws of economics (even if not dictated by them), and most importantly, it is widely perceived as being a real possibility. For that reason alone, it is important to have a response.

Let me first dismiss two inadequate responses:

"Once mandates become universal, even if the journal affordability problem is left entirely unaltered, that problem immediately becomes far less urgent, since all of its urgency derives from the accessibility problem, which universal mandates will have solved, completely!"

If all that journals provided were access, then this response would be entirely correct. However, access is the least important of the services that journals currently provide—least important because technological advances have led to the ability to provide access at essentially zero marginal cost by the authors themselves. The important and valuable services that publishers provide in greater or lesser quantity are management of peer review, a variety of production services, and imprimatur. Of these, the last is by far the most important to the authors, but all are valuable to the scholarly community. If universal green OA were to make journals unsustainable by not addressing the affordability problem, and the dystopia ensued, then all of these services (other than access) would be lost. This potentiality introduces its own urgency. We cannot postpone the urgency until the dystopia ensues, as its mere possibility impedes the enactment of green OA policies right now.

"If good sense were to prevail, funders and universities would just mandate Green OA for now, and then let supply and demand decide, given universal Green OA, whether and when to convert from subscriptions to Gold OA, and for what product, and at what price."

A response that "the market will solve this problem down the line" is not sufficient for two reasons. First, markets are not magic. They solve problems by virtue of the behaviors of their participants and within rule systems that surround them. It therefore behooves us as participants to make sure that our behaviors and rule systems are set up to allow salutary changes to occur. If eventual conversion to gold OA publishing is the way that the problem (if it arises) ought to be eventually solved, then we must make it possible for a publisher to convert a journal to a gold OA business model. Currently, publishers cannot feasibly do so, as gold OA journals are at a systematic disadvantage against subscription-based journals from the point of view of attracting authors, since universities and funding agencies subsidize the subscription-based journals through their library subscription payments, whereas they do not subsidize article-processing charges for gold OA journals.

I return to the underlying issue, which is assuaging the worries of faculty considering green OA policies who are imagining the possibility of the dystopian scenario. The natural response is to assure the worrier that there is a reasonable alternative business model in the wings, namely gold OA. And to make that assurance plausible, we must address the viability of gold OA journals in a realistic way, at least under the same universalization that leads to the dystopian scenario. That is what the open access compact that I discussed at Cal Tech and elsewhere is intended to do.

In summary, a university that commits to the open access compact will more easily be able to answer objections against green OA policies specifically because it has an approach to long-range support for gold OA publishing, not in spite of it. The two models are inextricably tied. I, like Professor Harnad, am interested in facilitating the adoption of green OA policies. I proposed the open access compact in large part because I expect that adoption of the compact will lead to more green OA policies. The open access compact is therefore contributory to the promotion of green OA, not a sidetrack to it. I of course encourage universities to adopt green OA policies before gold OA support, but given that dystopian fears of faculty are preventing adoption of such policies, an open access compact that might assuage these worries should not be delayed.

Let me conclude by arguing against a view that support for the open access compact is at best "a needless waste of scarce research funds." At least in the near term, the cost of the open access compact as I have proposed it is minimal. Universities implementing the compact would not underwrite hybrid gold OA fees, would not pay fees where grants had funded the research, and would be able to set up market mechanisms to ensure that economic signals from the fees are passed on to authors. A university supporting the open access compact may even choose to implement it by limiting its application to faculties falling under a green open access policy (as I hope and expect we will do at Harvard). All of these are consistent with the point of the compact, that it has the appropriate effect in mitigating the dystopian scenario, which arises from universalized green OA, just in case it is universalized in the same way. The point is subtle, but important. Not all mechanisms for supporting gold OA charges are equal. Some may involve wastes of money; indeed all of the extant OA funds that I know of collapse under universalization of their practice. But that does not mean that gold OA underwriting cannot be implemented in a way that supports the goal of allowing transition to gold OA in case of the dystopian scenario without wasting money now. And to the extent that we can provide such a system, the counterarguments against green OA policies will be much more easily dealt with. Insofar as the open access compact increases the odds of establishing green OA policies, it is ipso facto not a waste of the minimal funds that it requires.

Are the Harvard open-access policies unfair to publishers?

2009-06-09T10:58:27+00:00

Recently, the representative of a major scientific journal publisher expressed to me the sentiment that the position that Harvard faculty have taken through our open-access policies — setting the default for rights retention to retain rights by default rather than to eschew rights by default — is in some sense unfair to subscription-based journals that require embargoes, that we are favoring one scholarly publishing business model over another and setting up an unlevel playing field.

By way of background, the Harvard open-access policies specify that faculty authors grant a nonexclusive license to the university to distribute our articles, which can be waived for any reason at the sole discretion of the authors. The license applies immediately upon copyright vesting in the article, and thus predates any transfer of copyright to a publisher. If a publisher has a policy that is inconsistent with this license — for instance in requiring that no distributions occur until expiration of an embargo period — then it must either make an exception for an article falling under the OA policy or get the author to obtain a waiver of the license. Open-access journal publishers, who do not mandate embargoes on distribution, will not need to engage their authors in obtaining waivers. The publisher in question thought that this difference was an unfairness toward embargo-carrying subscription-based publishers because it favored open-access publishers.

Of course, as a private company, Harvard is well within its rights to set up its policies to favor whatever it wants, even if third-parties are disadvantaged. For instance, Harvard has policies that disallow faculty performing research for funders that have certain kinds of policies, even though that disadvantages such potential funders. But I for one am not interested in unfairly advantaging one business model for scholarly publishing over another, and in any case, the argument that the Harvard policy does so is fallacious.

Before describing why, let me mention again that there is a different issue that I will not address here, that immediate open access of author's manuscripts endangers the subscription-based business model. That is a separate issue, with a set of standard arguments and counterarguments, which have convinced me that the only empirical evidence is to the contrary, though others may not be so persuaded. But for the purpose of this discussion, let us stipulate (counterfactually to my mind) that wholesale adoption of the Harvard policy would in fact prove detrimental to the business of subscription-based journals at least a little bit. Does that make it intrinsically unfair?

This other argument is different and seems to rely on an assumption that the Harvard policy is an undue intervention, whereas without the policy, there is no intervention. It seems to go something like this: In designing a system of rights allocation between author and publisher, the approach in which all rights are transferred to the publisher with the publisher selecting some rights to provide back to the author is the privileged position, and any other arrangement involves some kind of intervention. But what makes that the privileged (nonintervening) position? Why isn't the privileged position an approach in which all rights are transferred to the publisher subject to a nonexclusive limited noncommercial license to the author, with a publisher's requirement for exclusive transfer of all copyright being the intervention? It is true that one was the status quo ante for some time, but that is a historical contingency, and gives it no privileged position as consisting of the appropriate default position. There is in fact no privileged position one way or the other. All choices of design involve intervention. There are just a large variety of possibilities, which the actions of various stakeholders choose among.

Another way of thinking about the issue is this: The faculty must make a decision about what portion of their rights they retain by default: none, a few, a lot, this subset, that subset. A decision is inevitable; there is no option of making no decision. The status quo ante made a decision, namely that no rights were retained by default. The Harvard policy makes a different decision, that a nonexclusive limited license is retained by default; some other policy might state that exclusive rights are retained by default. But one way or another, a decision must be made. The faculty are obviously inclined to make decisions that benefit them as they perceive it, and have done so. The change is not from making no decision to making a decision, it is from making one decision to making another that the faculty perceives as preferable.

Sunstein and Thaler make this argument in detail in their paper "Libertarian Paternalism is Not an Oxymoron" (a precursor to their popular book Nudge). They point out that in a wide variety of cases, decisions as to a default rule are inevitable, so that changing the default does not constitute a new intervention.

They use as an example a company cafeteria presenting a variety of foods. "Suppose that the director of the cafeteria notices that customers have a tendency to choose more of the items that are presented earlier in the line. How should the director decide in what order to present the items?" If he places the desserts first, the employees will eat more desserts, which will have an aggregate negative effect on the health of the employees, to the detriment of the company. If he places the desserts last, they will eat fewer and be healthier, perhaps to the detriment of the dessert supplier. If the cafeteria changes its placement of desserts from the front of the line to the back of the line, the dessert supplier may rightly claim that the change will hurt its business, but it can't claim that this is an undo intervention in the freedom of choice of the employees. The original cafeteria layout was not privileged; the company has to place the desserts somewhere. Why is the front of the line the privileged position just because of historical familiarity? It isn't.

We all make decisions about policies, defaults, and the like. So long as the designs of the systems do not preclude options (and the Harvard open-access policy certainly does not), they protect the liberties of the participants. The particular design may advantage or disadvantage some participants. I do not think there is any evidence that the Harvard policy, even extrapolated to all universities, disadvantages subscription-based publishers. But even if it were to, that does not make it intrinsically unfair relative to a given alternative.

I appreciate that some publishers may not like the waiver process, and I do not begrudge them that view or think it is unreasonable. But preferring X to Y doesn't mean that Y is unfair.

The death of scholarly journals?

2009-06-08T10:33:33+00:00

One of the frequent worries I hear expressed about open-access policies such as the ones at Harvard is that they will lead to the death of journals (or of scholarly societies, or of peer review). When we first began addressing Harvard faculty on these issues, I heard this worry expressed so frequently that I wrote up my standard reply to save myself time in answering it. I supply that reply in this entry. There is little original in the argument. It has been made in various forms in various places in writings about open access, most notably and comprehensively by Peter Suber here . But it may be useful to see it in this distilled form.

(By the way, the issue of switching business models brought up at the end is one that I have been increasingly focused on and will turn to in later posts.)

Many of the worries about the Harvard open-access policies rest on a dystopian scenario in which, first, there is systematic uptake of the idea of authors making their papers available through open access because of initiatives like ours, and then journals are unable to function, leading to the end of journals and peer review. The worry is a legitimate one, as journals and peer review play a crucial role in the scholarly enterprise. But the worry is misguided on both empirical and principled grounds.

What would happen to journals if, by magic, the author's prepublication version of every scholarly article were freely available in an institutional repository? Arguably, nothing. In fact, this is the situation in physics, in which arxiv.org provides essentially total open access to physics articles. Nonetheless, subscription journals have not seen cancellations in physics due to this open access, presumably because readers (or their proxies, the libraries) are willing to pay for the value added by the publishers that they receive. The only effect is that there is universal access to physics scholarship.

But suppose that at some point readers (or libraries) decided that the value publishers added were not sufficient to endorse subscribing at the current prices. The result would be price pressure on journals, arguably a propitious side effect. This price pressure would accrue to journals with the highest price to value ratio, that is, to commercially published journals in general. These are the journals where there is the most room for price reduction. (Consistent with this intuition, a 2006 study by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers concluded that price far outstrips open access availability in libraries' decisions to cancel journal subscriptions.)

In his study of the economics of electronic journal distribution, Andrew Odlyzko notes "Many publishers argue that costs cannot be reduced much, even with electronic publishing, since most of the cost is the first-copy cost of preparing the manuscripts for publication. This argument is refuted by the widely differing costs among publishers. The great disparity in costs among journals is a sign of an industry that has not had to worry about efficiency. Another sign of lack of effective price competition is the existence of large profits." For instance, economics journals published by commercial publishers are six times more expensive per page than those of noncommercial publishers. Such price disparities are a clear sign of inefficiency and excess profit-taking.

But suppose further that the price pressure were so strong that readers or libraries were unwilling to pay anything at all for the journals. Would that be the end of journals? No, because even if publishers (again, merely by hypothesis and presumably counterfactually) add no value for the readers (beyond what the readers are already getting in the [again hypothetical] universal open access), the author and the author's institution gain much value: vetting, copyediting, typesetting, and most importantly, imprimatur of the journal. This is value that authors and their institutions should be and would be willing to pay for. And fortunately, in this scenario in which libraries are unwilling to pay for subscriptions, there is plenty of money available to pay for this value, namely all of the money that otherwise would have gone to the subscriptions. The upshot is that journals will merely switch to a different business model, the open access journal, in which the journal charges the author a one-time charge to cover the costs of publishing the article. (By the way, there are already thousands of open access journals, many published by profitable commercial publishers.)

In this scenario, the cost of journal publishing would be borne not by the libraries on behalf of their readers, but by funding agencies and institutions on behalf of their authors. Already, funding agencies such as Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute underwrite open access author charges, and in fact mandate open access. Federal granting agencies such as NSF and NIH allow grant funds to be used for open access author charges as well. Not all fields have the sort of grant funding opportunities that could underwrite these charges. For those fields, the university should underwrite charges for publication in open access journals. One of the recommendations of the provost's committee is that Harvard do just that: underwrite reasonable open access publication charges that are not otherwise covered by research funds, regardless of field. Remember, in this utopian scenario, the funds required for these charges are amply provided by the savings from subscriptions. In any case, this scenario is, at best, many years, perhaps many decades, away, so there is plenty of time for the market to adjust business and funding models so long as the books balance overall.

How can we know that the books will balance? In aggregate, the costs to run the journals are now paid for by university library budgets. In the depicted scenario, these costs would not rise, and would likely even be mitigated by the economies of open access distribution. So in total, the funds will be adequate for the costs.

Another happy fact about this scenario is that the open access funding model has revenues directly tied to costs. For open access distribution, where access has essentially zero marginal cost, all of the costs are first-copy costs. Under the new business model, revenues are first-copy revenues as well. The market basis for the spiraling hyperinflation—prices rising to recoup revenues from cancellations leading to more cancellations—is thus eliminated.

In summary, the worry that open access to articles will lead to journal death is based on an extrapolation that doesn't take into account all of the moving parts in the publishing milieu, the time course of changes, and the value basis that journals provide. The market will provide for journals because journals add tremendous value. Funds to pay for that value are patently available; they are being paid now. What will change—slowly over time if and as the situation changes—are the market mechanisms that match the costs and value. They will change to a system that doesn't have the market dysfunctionalities of the present one.

A final word: What is the alternative to this open-access policy or similar steps to improve access? The status quo involves hyperinflation, squeezing library budgets, and further journal cancellation, all of which lead to even more limited access, monograph demand withering, and scholarly societies in trouble. We have been on this spiral for decades. Something needs to be done.

What percentage of open-access journals charge publication fees?

2009-05-29T19:50:51+00:00

In the popular conception, open-access journals generate revenue by charging publication fees. The popular conception turns out to be false. Various studies have explored the extent to which OA journals charge publication fees. The results have been counterintuitive to many, indicating that far fewer OA journals charge publication fees than one might have thought. You can verify this yourself using some software I provide in this post.

The first study of what we'll call the "publication-fee percentage", by Kaufman and Wills, showed that fewer than half of the OA journals they looked at charge publication fees. The figure for publication-fee percentage they report is about 47%. (For convenience, we put all publication-fee percentages in boldface in this post.) Following on from this, Suber and Sutton provided a figure of 16.7% for scholarly society journals charging publication fees.

Bill Hooker came up with a clever way of calculating a figure for publication fee percentage, by taking advantage of the publication fee metadata hidden in the "for authors" journal listings at the Directory of Open Access Journals to calculate the figure as of December 2007. Here are his totals:

Charges 534 (18%)

No charges 1980 (67%)

Information missing 453 (15%)

Total (excl. hybrids) 2967

Depending on the disposition of the "information missing" cases, Hooker's study indicates that 18-33% of OA journals charge fees.

Hooker performed his study using a combination of automated and manual methods. In particular, he apparently used manual effort to eliminate the hybrid journal listings. But it isn't difficult to write software to perform the entire analysis automatically, which allows anyone to replicate the results him- or herself. Unfortunately, the OAI-PMH feed that DOAJ kindly provides doesn't include the crucial information of whether journals charge fees and whether they are pure or hybrid OA journals, so I, like Hooker, resorted to screen-scraping. The method is effective, if inelegant.

Here are the results computed by my software, as of May 26, 2009:

Charges 951 (23.14%)

No charges 2889 (70.29%)

Information missing 270 (6.57%)

Hybrid 1519 (26.99%)

Total 5629

The numbers are consistent with those of Hooker's study some 16 months earlier. You'll see that the total number of full OA journals is up from 2967 to 4110, and the number with missing information has been halved from 15% to about 7%. The reduction in those with missing information seems to have gone more to those with fees than those without, so that the percentage charging fees is up some 5% and those not charging fees only up 3%. Again, depending on the "information missing" cases, the range of fee-charging journals is 23-30%. Assuming that the missing information cases are similar in distribution to those that were resolved over the last year, the figure would be about 27%. That leaves 73% of OA journals, the overwhelming bulk, charging no fees.

Anyone interested in replicating the results should feel free to use the simple Python script below, provided without warranty.

#!/usr/bin/python

'''
Calculate the percentage of open access journals with different
publication fee policies using data from the Directory of Open Access
Journals (doaj.org)

Stuart M. Shieber
March 26, 2009
'''

from urllib import urlretrieve
import os
import re
from collections import defaultdict

feecount = defaultdict(int)
hybridcount = 0
journalcount = 0

def processpage(file):
    '''Process a file of article listings from the DOAJ "Authors"
    listing of articles, which includes publication fee information to
    extract journal entries and update running counts'''

    global hybridcount, journalcount, feecount

    # Get the contents of the file
    f = open(file, 'r')
    contents = f.read()
    f.close

    # Clean up the file by removing some header stuff
    pat = re.compile("^.*End Result.*<p /><br />", re.DOTALL)
    contents = re.sub(pat, "", contents)
    # Get rid of newlines to make pattern matching easier
    contents = re.sub('n', '|||', contents)
    # Place each article entry on a separate line by keying off of the
    # serendipitous use of "passMe" at the start of each entry
    contents = re.sub('passMe', 'npassMe', contents)

    # Match each article record, getting title, hybrid status, fee
    # info
    pat = re.compile("passMe[^>]*>([^<]*)</a>.*class=info>([^<]*)</span>.*Publication fee.*>(.*)</font>")
    for match in pat.finditer(contents):
        journalcount += 1
        title = match.group(1)
        accesstype = match.group(2)
        feetype = match.group(3)
        # Print an entry for a csv file
        print ""%s", "%s", "%s"" % (title, accesstype, feetype)
        # Bump counts
        if accesstype == 'Open Access':
            feecount[feetype] +=1
        else:
            hybridcount += 1

### Download all of the pages at DOAJ, caching locally, and process
### each one
for letter in "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ":
    for page in range(1,8):
        # Generate source and destination locations
        url = "http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=byTitle&p=%d&hybrid=1&query=%s" % (page, letter)
        local = "/tmp/%s%d" % (letter, page)
        # Pull over the page if not cached
        if not os.path.exists(local):
            print "retrieving " + url
            urlretrieve(url, local)
        # and process it
        processpage(local)

### Print a table of results
for fee in feecount.keys():
    print "%-20s : %5d (%5.4f)" % (fee, feecount[fee],
                                   feecount[fee]/float(journalcount-hybridcount))
print "%-20s : %5d (%5.4f)" % ('Hybrid', hybridcount, hybridcount/float(journalcount))
print "%-20s : %5d" % ('TOTAL', journalcount)

Open-access policies and academic freedom

2009-05-28T19:00:30+00:00

I very occasionally hear expressed a concern about the Harvard open-access policy that it violates some aspect of academic freedom. The argument seems to be that by granting a prior license to Harvard, faculty may be forced to forgo publication in certain venues. Our rights as scholars to determine the disposition of particular articles would thus be assailed by the policy.

A requirement to publish or refrain from publishing in particular venues would certainly infringe on academic freedom. But the Harvard policy leaves choice of whether and where to publish fully in the hands of authors. The policy allows for the license to be waived for any article at the sole discretion of the author. (Obtaining a waiver involves filling out a web form at the OSC web site with some metadata about the article. The process takes about 20 seconds.) This "opt-out" provision makes the policy consistent with libertarian principles. The policy manifests "libertarian paternalism" in the sense of Sunstein and Thaler.

Of course, one could attempt to argue that even that 20-second web form serves as an impediment to one's free choice of where to publish. Presumably, the seconds required to fill out copyright transfer forms for closed-access journals, the costs of having to negotiate use rights for one's own articles published in closed-access journals, and the like should also be considered impediments to free choice of publishing venue, although I haven't heard these concerns raised before.

Frankly, a more substantial argument can be made that the traditional scholarly publishing mechanism infringes academic freedom. The status quo in scholarly publishing requires authors to assign copyright to publishers as part of the publication process. With this control, publishers can and do limit access to the scholar's writing. Scholars are therefore not free to disseminate their academic work in the broadest way. A claim that authors can choose not to publish through scholarly journals is disingenuous; publishing is necessary for their career advancement. The status quo thus arguably presents a direct and substantial limitation in practice on scholars' academic freedom: it infringes on the author's freedom to distribute copies of one's articles to interested readers. I am not claiming here that this is an undue limitation on freedom — there are countervailing arguments for the need for closed access — but a limitation on freedom it surely is, much more so than the Harvard open-access policy.

Indeed, the Harvard policy attempts to further scholars' academic freedom to disseminate their work by providing a mechanism by which the unified voice of the community of scholars expresses its priority that scholarship should be openly accessible. Insofar as an individual's actions are limited by the policy (through the 20-second web form impediment), it is countervailed by the potential expansion of academic freedom for all members of the scholarly community that we are members of and rely on.

In the same way, we as scholars are not free to refuse to participate in the shared responsibilities of academic governance, of peer review of our literatures and colleagues, of education, advising, and mentoring of our students. Our responsibility to widely disseminate our writings is even codified in the explicit University policies under which we were hired: "when entering into agreements for the publication and distribution of copyrighted materials individuals will make arrangements that best serve the public interest." The policy makes clear that we as a community feel that the best service of the community involves open access to the scholarly literature.

Some background on open access

2009-05-27T21:38:22+00:00

I assume that readers of the open access discussions on this blog are familiar with the state of play in the area, but just in case, here's some background.

Peter Suber defines open access in his A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access as follows: "Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder." Suber's Introduction also describes the two primary approaches to achieving open access:

"Green" OA, in which articles are provided by their authors via posting on a personal website or in an institutional or subject-based repository. Under the green OA approach, open access is provided as a supplement to access in a peer-reviewed venue.
"Gold" OA, in which articles are provided as part of the normal operation of the journal in which they are published. Under the gold OA approach, open access is provided directly by a peer-reviewed venue itself.

Suber's Open Access Overview provides more detailed background, and I recommend it highly. Why don't you read it now? I'll wait.

Back? Good.

Access to the knowledge generated at universities is a good. It is what universities are about. Open access is therefore deserving of support, and to that end, a number of universities have promoted it through exhortations or policies of various sorts.It is important, however, that open access to scholarly writings be generated in appropriate and sustainable ways, consistent with the principles of academic freedom and the laws of economics.

At Harvard, we have taken a particular approach by voting open-access policies composed of three aspects:

Permission: Faculty give permission (technically, grant a license) to the university to make their articles available via open access.
Waiver: Faculty can waive the license for any article at their sole discretion.
Deposit: Faculty provide a copy of their articles to the university for storage, preservation, and distribution in an institutional repository.

To date, three of Harvard's ten or so faculties have passed such policies, the texts of which are provided here. In addition, other schools, including Stanford's School of Education and MIT, have enacted similar policies, and others are considering them.

I plan on addressing some of the motivations for the policy and concerns that are commonly raised in future posts. If there are particular topics that you think should be considered, please let me know in the comments or by email.

Why this blog?

2009-05-22T16:44:04+00:00

This blog presents occasional writings on whatever I'm interested in at the moment, which currently includes topics such as:

scholarly communications and open access, and other university matters
computer science topics of various sorts
language, linguistics, and computational linguistics
pedagogy and writing

I expect that in the near term, I'll primarily be commenting on open access issues.

I've avoided having a blog until now because in the past I've been constitutionally incapable of presenting my thinking in any kind of interim state. This blog is my attempt to change this archaic aspect of my personality, and to provide a venue for writings of a more exploratory or ephemeral nature. Still, I expect many posts will be relatively long as compared to a typical blog, though short compared to a scholarly article and more topical.

I chose the word "pamphlet" to describe these writings, as I was inspired to experiment with this style of writing by the pamphlets of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). The use of the word "occasional" under both of its first two senses was intentional.

The opinions expressed here are my own. I am not speaking on behalf of Harvard or any of its constituent parts, or on behalf of anyone else for that matter.

When copy editors make things worse

2008-05-15T01:56:19+00:00

"Besides getting more data, faster, we also now use much more sophisticated learning algorithms. For instance, algorithms based on logistic regression and that support vector machines can reduce by half the amount of spam that evades filtering, compared to Naive Bayes." (Emphasis added.)

— Joshua Goodman, Gordon V. Cormack, and David Heckerman. 2007. Spam and the ongoing battle for the inbox. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, volume 50, number 2, page 27.

[Update 4 June 2011: I've commented further on the benefits and pitfalls of copyediting, with discussion of this example, here.]

Running on parentheticals

2006-05-17T01:53:47+00:00

A common source of run-on sentences is the inclusion of a parenthetical full sentence at the end of another sentence, for instance,

This is an example (there may be others).

This construction is always wrong. Separate the two sentences, as

This is an example. (There may be others.)

or coordinate or subordinate the two, as

This is an example (though there may be others).

This is an example (and there may be others).

The following is not correct:

This is an example (however, there may be others).

“However” is an adverb, not a subordinating conjunction.

MS Word defects

2006-05-17T01:51:35+00:00

Writers using MS Word tend to make certain standard errors in their typesetting. For instance, they use hyphens instead of em-dashes (ctrl-alt-hyphen or option-shift-hyphen). Mathematical typesetting is especially bad. There is essentially no way to typeset mathematics well in MS Word. The best solution: LaTeX.

That/which

2006-02-09T01:50:03+00:00

For a while, I've been meaning to comment on the "that"/"which" controversy, the claim that "which" should not be used with restrictive relative clauses, nor "that" for nonrestrictive. From a linguistic point of view, it seems clear that this view is descriptively barren. Geoff Pullum provides a convincing and entertaining argument on Language Log, based on the sentence "The key point, that all the popular reports missed, is that FOXP2 is a transcription factor...". The rarity of sentences like these, in which "that" is used for a nonrestrictive relative clause, leads Pullum to refer to it as "ivory-billed".

I suppose, and am happy to stipulate for the purposes of discussion, that the use of "which" for restrictive relative clauses and "that" for nonrestrictive (or supplemental, as Pullum prefers) is grammatical. Nonetheless, the overwhelming preponderance of occurrences of "which" for nonrestrictive clauses means that the use of "that" in that context is much more likely to give pause to the reader, a kind of cognitive setback. For that reason, a charitable writer (and shouldn't we all strive to be one of those?) ought to use "which" for nonrestrictive relative clauses -- not because it is "wrong" to use "that", or ungrammatical, but because the use of "that" is likely to be jarring to a significant fraction of one's readers. (And I don't only mean the Fowler-type prescriptivist readers, though I suppose there's no reason to be jarring them needlessly either.) An excellent point of evidence is the fact that Pullum had to ask the author directly which meaning he had intended in the ivory-billed sentence; had he used a "which", no clarification would have been needed.

In the particular case of the sentence quoted above, there is no concomitant advantage to using "that" over "which" that would compensate for the negative effect of jarring or confusing the reader. Thus, its use should be prescriptively deprecated. (This issue of compensation allows me to avoid proscriptions against splitting infinitives or dangling prepositions, the slavish following of which leads to circumlocutions and semantic errors. Avoiding these negative effects clearly compensates for the oh so very slight jarring effect on some small fraction of true-believing Fowlerians.) By a similar argument, the use of "which" for restrictive relatives should be deprecated as well in formal writing.

What I am arguing is that even though the language does not enforce the distinction between nonrestrictive and restrictive in terms of "which" versus "that" (and commas versus none), respectively, there is still a good reason to write as if it did. There was nothing wrong in the quoted sentence even under the intended interpretation, just something infelicitous.

Am I trying to have my cake and eat it too? To be able to rail prescriptively while keeping my linguistic descriptivist moral stance? Yes.

Three styles for writing a paper

2004-10-09T01:45:24+00:00

Different people have different styles for overall organization of a technical paper. There is the "continental" style, in which one states the solution with as little introduction or motivation as possible, sometimes not even saying what the problem was. Papers in this style tend to start like this: "Consider a seven-dimensional manifold Q, and define its hyper-diagonal as the ...." This style is designed to convince the reader that the author is very smart; how else could he or she have come up with the answer out of the blue? Readers will have no clue as to whether you are right or not without incredible efforts in close reading of the paper, but at least they'll think you're a genius.

Of course, the author didn't come up with the solution out of the blue. There was a whole history of false starts, wrong attempts, near misses, redefinitions of the problem. The "historical" style involves recapitulating all of this history in chronological order. "First I tried this. That didn't work because of this, so I tried this other way. That turned out to be stupid. Then I tried this other way...." This is much better, because a careful reader can probably follow the line of reasoning that the author went through, and use this as motivation. But the reader will probably think you are a bit addle-headed. Why would you even think of trying half the stuff you talked about?

The ideal style is the "rational reconstruction" style. In this style, you don't present the actual history that you went through, but rather an idealized history that perfectly motivates each step in the solution. "We consider the problem of XXX. The obvious thing to try is X. But such-and-such a pithy example shows that that fails miserably. Nonetheless, the example points the way naturally to solution Y. This works better, except for such-and-such an obscure case. We patch solution Y to handle this case, forming solution Z. Voila." Of course, the author doesn't tell you that he came up with solution Y before solution X, which only occurred to him after he came up with solution Z, and he skips solutions A, B, and C because, in retrospect, they are nowhere on the natural path to Z, even though at the time he was completely convinced they were on the right track. The goal in pursuing the rational reconstruction style is not to convince the reader that you are brilliant (or addle-headed for that matter) but that your solution is trivial. It takes a certain strength of character to take that as one's goal. But the advantage of the reader thinking your solution is trivial or obvious is that it necessarily comes along with the notion that you are correct.

James Pryor's Guidelines

2004-06-10T01:44:40+00:00

I've just discovered James Pryor's "Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper". Despite the ostensible limited goal of the guidelines, they are much more broadly applicable than just to philosophy papers. I especially like the characterization of readers as "lazy, stupid, and mean".

Running on howevers

2004-05-26T01:14:43+00:00

People seem to fall prey to adverbials like "however" and "rather" seducing them into running on sentences.

This type of approach has been used in previous models, however, the presented algorithm adopts a different foundation.

But these words are not conjunctions, subordinating or otherwise. They are adverbs, like "on the other hand" or "unfortunately". The following is, presumably, clearly infelicitous.

This type of approach has been used in previous models, unfortunately, the presented algorithm adopts a different foundation.

By the same token, so is the sentence with "however". It is easily corrected:

This type of approach has been used in previous models; however, the presented algorithm adopts a different foundation.

This type of approach has been used in previous models. The presented algorithm, however, adopts a different foundation.

In email, neatness counts

2004-05-11T02:31:55+00:00

Email messages should be treated as personal letters. You wouldn't write a handwritten letter with misspellings, would you? Or a typewritten letter in which you didn't bother to use the shift key? Then you shouldn't do that in an email. Doing so implies to many readers that you don't respect them enough to bother with such "niceties".

On a related topic, by convention, words in all caps in email messages are to be read as if the author were shouting them. This is typically not the intended interpretation. According to RFC 1855:

Use symbols for emphasis. That *is* what I meant. Use underscores for underlining. _War and Peace_ is my favorite book.

Recursion

2004-05-11T02:18:13+00:00

To recurse is to curse again, not an activity that an academic, or an algorithm for that matter, should engage in. When a process is repeated or is subject to recursion, it is said to recur.

Epicene pronouns

2004-05-11T02:06:05+00:00

The use of the pronoun "he" as a bound pronoun of neutral gender is problematic on two grounds. First, its use is blatantly sexist (although the sexism is of a historical nature, so that those who continue to use "he" in this way have a defensible position). Second, and more importantly, many readers confronted with such a use of "he", including myself, tend to find that it causes a jarring effect as they stop to wonder whether or not the writer intended to imply that the referent of the pronoun is male. Anything that causes a jarring effect like this on a substantial portion of your readers should be avoided, as it serves only to distract them from the important substance of your writing.

Now, I turn to a more recent variant of the same problem. The use of the pronoun "she" as a bound pronoun of neutral gender is problematic on two grounds. First, its use is blatantly sexist (although the sexism is of an anti-historical nature, so that those who continue to use "she" in this way have a defensible position). Second, and more importantly, many readers confronted with such a use of "she", including myself, tend to find that it causes a jarring effect as they stop to wonder whether or not the writer intended to imply that the referent of the pronoun is female. Anything that causes a jarring effect like this on a substantial portion of your readers should be avoided, as it serves only to distract them from the important substance of your writing.

But what alternatives are there? In everyday speech, "they" or "them" is used for this purpose, but this disturbs the sensibilities of prescriptivists, who, I should remind you, are a substantial portion of your readers. And anything that causes a jarring effect like this on a substantial portion of your readers....

Rewriting the sentence is the only practicable alternative. Do it and be done with it.

Covering overhead slides

2004-05-11T01:59:46+00:00

Pat Winston in his lecture on How to Speak notes that covering up parts of overhead transparencies and revealing them slowly like a strip-tease artist is a technique that drives 10 per cent of your audience nuts. I am in that 10 per cent. The desire to use this technique means only one thing: There is too much information on the slide. Split it into multiple slides. Winston recommends using overlays instead, but overlays are really a different and specialized overhead technique, and are not typically necessary for remedying this problem.

By the way, if you make slides using computerized means and want to use an overlay, consider "implicit" overlays instead. An implicit overlay is a series of separate slides each of which includes the contents of a different prefix of the overlay slides. Implicit overlays have the advantage that no Scotch taping of slide material is required, and no fumbling with the overlay pieces is needed. One just continues placing single sheets on the projector as usual, but each one in the overlay series has some additional material added to the previous one.

Citations are parentheticals

2004-05-11T01:32:15+00:00

A citation is not a first-class participant in a sentence; it cannot serve as a noun phrase. Rather it is a parenthetical -- that is why it appears in parentheses -- and like all parentheticals should be removable without changing the well-formedness of the sentence in which it appears. Thus, the following sentences are ill-formed. (Try reading them without the material in parentheses.)

The reader is referred to (Dewey et al., 1756) for further details.
(Dewey et al., 1756) describes the bizarre climatic conditions of northern South Nordland.
In (Farmer, 1987), it is shown how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
(Farmer, 1987) describes how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
Many researchers have followed the research methodology described in (Farmer, 1987) for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.

The following versions should be used instead:

The reader is referred to the early work of Dewey et al. (1756) for further details.
Dewey et al. (1756) describe the bizarre climatic conditions of northern South Nordland.
Farmer (1987) describes how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
Many researchers have followed the research methodology described by Farmer (1987) for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
Many researchers have followed a research methodology for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment (Farmer, 1987).

(Note that "Dewey et al." serves as a plural noun phrase.) The BibTeXfullname style file and associated TeX style provide support for generating references like these. They are available with accompanying documentation at URL ftp://ftp.das.harvard.edu/pub/shieber/fullname/.

Charges	534	(18%)
No charges	1980	(67%)
Information missing	453	(15%)
Total (excl. hybrids)	2967

Charges	951	(23.14%)
No charges	2889	(70.29%)
Information missing	270	(6.57%)
Hybrid	1519	(26.99%)
Total	5629