Zombie Pinups and Open Access.

From ren at her blog - this great pinup I had to share!

How does this tie into Open Accesss (OA)? Recently I completed a LIS course on OA and our first guest speaker was Brian Owen from Simon Fraser University, who spoke about the Public Knowledge Project. Brian is also involved in some clandestine research on a zombie problem Burnaby Mountain has been having. He gave an uproarious presentation on his methods of zombie rehabilitation at the recent British Columbia Library Association Conference! PKP is a federally funded OA initiative that seeks to bring together researchers and academics, journal editors/publishers, librarians, and software/IT specialists (thanks Francesca!). From their brochure: “PKP has developed free, open source software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals and current conferences” and PKP has numerous awards including the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. This is a tremendous OA resource and is currently the leading open source software for journal publication.

Our second speaker was Jean-Claude Guedon, a participant in the formation of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. He even has his own Wikipedia article. All I can say is WOW!! He gave some mind-altering information to us about some real issues facing the OA movement, especially around academic journals (that which the OA movement is seeking first to free from the claws of private distribution companies).

This is where we learn that Elsevier is evil (insert ominous music here).

The objective of big publishers (in pursuit of a profit) is to figure out how to maximize control of the content they produce. Actually it’s to maximize revenue and one of the ways they do this is through careful control of their product (the finished journal). As an example of this Guedon described how Elsevier allows self archiving of the article if an author desires, but not the pdf version of the same article. Presumably they do this because of pagination issues. When you cite a journal article, you are going to have difficulties doing this in a standardized way unless you’re using the journals official pagination, therefore the publishers still own the version (branding) that has any real value in academia. Control of citation gives the publishers control over reputation (Impact Factor) which means tenure, grants, and references. It's the giant circle of suck with the big publishers acting like big vampires (Guedon's analogy).

We give the publishers free content, paid for with public money, free peer review, and then they in turn, get to charge mainly public entities (universities, libraries) to access that said same material because we currently need their branding matrix (What’s your Impact Number?). I hope I explained all that correctly. My pardons to Mr. Guedon if I messed anything up.

Even if all journals went fully online OA right this instant, how would all the individual libraries be able to know which ones to subscribe to instead of just getting a big bundle and the assurances that come from the giant publishing businesses. How do smaller journals (and other producers) get seen or heard if there are no big Publishers (like Elsevier) out there to push their product into academia. One possible solution that Guedon suggested is that maybe the big aggregators (who receive fees from subscribers) can pay the OA journals (content providers). Another possible solution Guedon suggested is maybe a wiki model with limited entry (wiki with credentials). Wikis have the advantage in that it “is a not a thing but a process” and in that it retains a complete history of changes made. Wikis could provide a true communication matrix that is missed even in the vaunted peer-review process (or at least at a much s-l-o-w-e-r response rate). David Lee King also blogged about the immediacy of comments/criticism on a blog vs. the s-l-o-w rate of official peer review response in traditional publishing. He questioned which one is a better form of peer-review.

This big question about the future development of OA journals won't disappear until the OA community comes up with its own set of branding metrics. Until then the branding monopoly that is tied to the current production of journals will continue.

A larger question also came up (yes, this was a VERY meaty discussion) on how open is OA when large chunks of the world have no access to the networks or infrastructure necessary to access the online content? Guedon had some interesting ideas about the solution to that, worthy of further discussion.

1. Local production of digitized materials.

2. Physical distribution - Bring the material in, (maybe through an embassy?) make copies to go to the universities who could then redistribute them where needed.

Access to OA is a big concern, especially in Africa where any access is nearly impossible. Closer to home, in many rural areas, people have dial-up at best which makes going online a teeth-pullingly painful experience. This is not the spirit of OA.

I do wish we had discussed, in addition to the resources we did cover, specific strategies for implementing OA policies in our institutions and promoting OA in our reference work or our library systems. Unfortunately this was just a short little seminar and not a full course offering (yet!) and as such it suffered like most of them, from being material rich and time poor.

Any suggestions for promoting local adaptation of OA?"