OA in the UK

Between the Finch Report in the UK, and more direct moves towards a comprehensive Open Access policy for government funded research in the US, it seems we are confronted by an important moment in the evolution of the ecology of scholarship within which academic history writing is produced and published.     

A recent one-day colloquium sponsored by the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society was called precisely to bring together major institutional players (Scholarly Societies, Journals, and Publishers) for a conversation about the best ways forward (the Tweet stream is here).  The general feeling seems to be that while every well-meaning historian is keen to promote Open Access (a show of hands at the conference confirmed this), the Gold Route, whereby authors and institutions are asked to shoulder the cost of peer review and publishing, is just not workable in the humanities.   

There is also the beginnings of what many feel is an apparent solution to the problem.  Both the past and present presidents of the Royal Historical Society, and some 21 editors of major humanities journals, signed a letter proposing the imposition of an increased embargo period on the articles in their journals - essentially suggesting they be allowed to have three years in which to make money on their publications before being forced to make them available through Open Access.   They also proposed maintaining a two-track system to ensure that overseas and non-academic authors are excluded from the government led requirement for Open Access.

To me this feels like Saint Augustine's plaint: "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet." (Confessions 8:17).

Let me be clear, though.  I understand completely the anxieties motivating these institutions and commentators.  A narrowly defined Gold Route process of the sort privileged by the Finch Report is not workable in the humanities.  The 'author pays' model is predicated on the direct funding of research by government, and on the assumption that the consumers of research outputs are the same as the producers.  In the case of history this is not true. 

 The vast majority of historical research and publication is not funded by project grants; and while a higher proportion is funded through the Universities, and through QR, there is still a large body of excellent work that is undertaken by independent scholars, or as part of a self-funded PhD, or by staff in institutions which do not receive QR funding or participate in the REF.  And similarly, all historians seek to reach a wider audience than most scientists, and imagine their work in the light of a successful 'trade monograph'; which itself forms a recognised academic achievement. 

In other words, I largely agree with the diagnosis that the main thrust of the Finch Report is unworkable.  Though, of course, the Report does not restrict academics to the single route to Open Access, and makes it clear that other types of OA (Green Route) are entirely consistent with the objective of making publicly funded research available to the public.  Following on from this, I also believe the RCUK policy to cover the new costs entailed through grants is also largely unworkable, and if poorly executed in pursuit of a narrow Gold Route form of publication will create issues of fair access, with institutional meddling in academic decision making and serious problems for post-graduates and early career academics. 

What is missing in all this is any positive model of Open Access publishing that takes seriously the fundamental interests and values of history as a discipline, as opposed to the interests of the collection of institutions and journals that purport to speak for it.  For myself I have a clear sense of what I would like Open Access in history (and more broadly in the academy) to look like in ten years' time; and it would have the following characteristics:

•   It would be built on the deposit of articles and research data (including notes) in institutional repositories, linked to APIs that allow their content to be re-'published', mashed up and re-used (with acknowledgment).
•  The route to 'publication' would include the initial deposit of research materials, followed by the posting of a 'rough draft' for comment and revision, leading to a post-publication peer review system.  The author would then be allowed to specify at what revision the 'article' is complete, with perhaps a six month norm for revisions.  See for instance the History Working Papers Project.
•  Metrics for downloads, re-use and citations for the now online article will be used to generate a measure of scholarly importance.  These metrics can include the kind of complex systems for assessing 'authority' (i.e. whose post peer review assessments are worth most) implicit in the Altmetrics movement.
•  'Journals' will be made up of adopted 'articles' that fit their theme and which are moulded to a particular house style in the open peer review process.  In this ecology of scholarship journals will take on a new intellectual role in shaping debate and argument, and in defining academic communities, and will have a 'promoting' role rather than a 'publishing' role.
•  Academic monographs will be seen as a simple extension of article publication - i.e. either in the form of long articles, or perhaps as a collection of pieces created as 'articles'.
•  Genuine 'Trade History' will continue to be sold in the generic forms of biography and narrative etc., but the underlying academic historical content will be available in institutional repositories, while the revisions and adaptions for a popular audience are dealt with separately.
•  The co-archiving of secondary writing and notes and research materials will allow for the creation of an increasingly vertically integrated form of writing, in which source material and commentary are connected.
•  The costs of maintaining, curating and archiving the system will be borne by the Universities, with savings from the journal and book purchasing costs.   A separate tNA or British Library repository will support and archive the work of otherwise unaffiliated scholars.

Getting to this point is not straightforward.  But the universities are fully empowered to use the RCUK funding to beef up their repositories, rather than paying journal fees.   The repositories could also take a first step towards a more rigorous ecology of scholarship by archiving and making available the underlying research data we all endlessly collect (and jealously guard as the capital of an ego driven system of professional advancement). 

At the moment most public debate and effort seems to be devoted to preserving the current business model that underpins the public/private partnership that lies at the heart of academic publishing. The journals worry that their main income stream (allowing them to provide studentships etc) will be eliminated; while the publishers worry that their privileged position between subsidised creators of content and subsidised buyers of content will be squeezed.  Both these anxieties are justified.  

 But, we need to ask ourselves whether we really want to use the roundabout and expensive route of generating income from University Library budgets via the publication of materials produced by academic staff, to take money from the providers of education - the Universities - in order to give it to the journals and scholarly societies, in order to allow them, to in turn purchase education from the Universities.  It is ridiculous.

As for the academic presses, they have spent thirty years squeezing the 'added value' from their operation.  In-house copy-editing and proof reading for the most part went ages ago.  And many presses now demand what amounts to 'camera ready' copy.  If the presses do not want to serve their traditional role in an ecology of scholarship (sifting and polishing its products), then it is not clear what their profits are based on.  At the moment, the greatest input on the part of the presses lies in advertising and licensing content, policing its re-use and in producing hard copy versions of books and articles that are largely unwanted (ask any librarian).  A thoroughgoing Open Access model eliminates the need for selling, licensing, and policing, while time will take care of the romantic attachment to wood pulp.

Current debate seems most fully motivated by a reactionary and defensive fear that a change in the nature of academic publication will unravel the systems of authority and organisational finance that used to deliver public debate.  But, if we have faith in the importance of the academy and of scholarship, then we need to continually re-invent the process.  Open Access provides a perfect opportunity to reconnect with the founding principles of the academy.

Drills and holes

I have just spent a couple of days at the annual conference of the NFAIS (National Federation of Advanced Information Services) in Philadelphia.  I was giving a brief paper at the request of the good people at the British Library about developments in text mining in the Humanities, and I was happy to be invited and to participate.

But it was only when I had sat through a day or two of presentations that I realised just how out of place I was, and how irrelevant my comments were.  It turns out the NFAIS is the trade organisation for all the companies (and some libraries) that have been building a commercial operation for a hundred years by placing themselves between information and those who need it.  Thompson-Reuters were heavily represented, as was Cengage/Gale, several medical abstracting services, and a host of companies providing data to particular sectors of the economy such as the building trades and architects.   And they were all presenting their well articulated models of data gathering and manipulation designed to deliver a pablum of stuff to the desktops of America's commercial movers, shakers and capitalists.  Interestingly, the people who weren't there, were Google, Facebook, Twitter, the Creative Commons or representatives of the Open Access movement.  Neither new model capitalists, nor Open Access evangelists were present.  And while there was a strand of discussion focussed on research and academic library services, this was a small corner of an essentially old style commercial ecology.  Nor were the real innovations in data modelling and analysis coming out of CS on display.  A constant sub-theme of the conference seemed to be a tetchy criticism of Google for having done a half-arsed job of inter-mediating between data and users, while the Twitter stream for this event was almost non-existent.  It was clear that these data professionals were having their conversation somewhere else - though I never did find out where. 

There was a lot of talk about Altmetrics as a way of adding value to the data people already had, prior to selling it to the managers of research and education.  And the theme of the event appeared to be a call to extend a hundred year old business model to ensure that these companies were delivering precisely the data that people needed (rather than what they thought they wanted), in a form that allowed them to use that data without thinking.  The controlling metaphor was - people buy a drill, because they really want a hole.

I was bemused by this.  I don't want a hole.  I want a drill, a hammer, a saw and a workshop to make stuff in.  And I certainly don't want anyone else to second guess what it is I am making (perhaps wonky, but original).

And then it occurred to me where my disconnect came from.  The NFAIS and the companies they represent derive from a long and largely American tradition of late Enlightenment data processing.  Their origins lie in Union Catalogues and abstracting services via microfilm; in creating a pre-digested, post-Enlightenment world of understood data, that could be packaged and catalogued and sold as yard after yard of uniform reference volumes. NFAIS used to stand for the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services. I have always put the American obsession with this kind of thing down to its inability to get over the European Enlightenment long after the rest of us got bored.

My overwhelming impression was that all these companies were anxious to widen the gap between data and its users, to ensure that they continued to have a role and an income - tapping the stream between the two for annual profit.  Some of the work was reasonably sophisticated (though most of it felt more 'relational database' than anything more innovative), and it was clear that many saw the way forward as providing faster access to real-time data in a form that would become normalised in a business context (or well funded, close to market STEM).  

In retrospect, and after having heard the presentations which came after my own, what I really should have said more forcefully, is get out of the way, this is boring, and it misses the point entirely.  We are rapidly approaching the stage when the devil's contract between private companies and the public sector, which has governed data delivery in both the humanities and STEM for the last fifteen years on line (and a hundred years off-line) is going to break down.  Open Access, for example, is just a wedge issue for a wider re-thinking of how research and data, and its users will interact.  And the fact that both the British and American governments were there first, is an indication that this particular community is not paying sufficient attention.

I am not overly exercised by the profiteering of these companies (if people want to sell their souls for a health plan and a cheap suit, that is OK by me).  Nor do I really want to castigate them for their place in an information food chain.  Companies like Cengage/Gale have coralled a useful amount of money for data processing.  I am just struck by the lack of serious engagement with the real changes in the fundamental relationship between the production and consumption of data that the last fifteen years has wrought.  More than anything else, my three days in Phili has brought home to me that I simply don't inhabit the same data universe that I did fifteen years ago. 

Peer Review Smells.

Most academics who have thought about it will agree that peer review is just rubbish. It is ridiculously hard work - work volunteered by academics as a mulct on their lives. And it is subject to the politics of the playground. Most subjects and academic communities are simply too small to allow true anonymity, and as a result the outcome of peer review is frequently informed by nothing more than hubris and hurt feelings.

My personal bugbears regarding peer review are that, first, it is inherently conservative - encouraging a narrow definition of scholarship; and second, that it forms a comprehensive subsidy on publishers that in turn shifts money that should be spent on either research or dissemination into the coffers of private companies. Universities pay for the privilege of buying journals that are written and edited by their own staff, and reviewed at their own expense. In an online environment, where the costs of printing is decentralised, this makes no sense whatsoever.

At the same time, there are aspects of peer review I like. I want to know that someone with some expertise thought an article was worth publishing. It saves me the time (the seconds it takes to skim a few hundred words) otherwise spent on determining whether the material being discussed is worth the effort of reading.

The traditional answer to these complaints and observations is the care-worn observation that peer review is the worst system ever, except for all the others.

But, with the advent of new models of online sharing and community interaction, it seems to me the moment to reinvent this particularly irritating wheel. Why not create an open 'academic journal space' for all articles that anyone cares to post, with a tagging regime for subject definition. In other words, anyone could post under the tags 'eighteenth-century British history', or indeed 'past & present'. If editors, or foundations, chose to shepherd particular collections of tags and to create an 'identity' from this association, this could certainly be accommodated. Moves in this direction were commonplace in many science subjects in the 1990s, but it hasn't resulted in a reform of the world of journal publication.

The point, however, would be to ask all contributors (all people - even academics - who choose to post a contribution) to also undertake a series of peer review assessments. These would be post-publication, but since online material could be continuously edited, it would nevertheless act in the way current pre-publication peer review acts in relation to polishing an article.

The point, however, would be to rate the assessors. I am more interested in what Natalie Zemon Davis thinks about an article on 16th century France, than I am in the opinion of a third year undergraduate (at least in the first instance). By allowing assessors to themselves build up an online profile you could incorporate a continuum of quality that is made up of the opinions of all assessors, weighted according to authority (i.e. the opinion of three senior figures in a field, could balance out that of 12 graduate students, or 18 unrated individuals, or whatever). The rating of individual assessors, could be determined by what they have contributed in the past, or based in a metrics of cross posting of the sort being used by the Australian and UK higher education systems to distribute research income. There are real problems with metrics, but they do form a consistent measure of community regard (at least in most subjects).

The result would be an academic commons that nevertheless preserves the 'authority' that is the single valuable aspect of peer review. It would also open up academic publishing to a broader community. There is no reason for 'outsiders' not to post material. Much of it might be denigrated by 'high authority' reviewers, making it possible to still select out articles of a certain 'standard', but it would also create a way in of a sort that doesn't frequently exist in the current system. Groups of reviewers who choose to generate a 'journal' identity, could still do so - with the 'journal' being made up of those articles that a defined group of 'assessors' chose to assessn positively.

As an evolving community of assessment and contribution, the system would be self-validating, and a lot cheaper to run than the plethora of journals currently clogging our libraries and lives.