T. Scott

Quantifying the value of peer review

David Shulenburger's talk yesterday left me thinking again about the conundrum that seems to me to still be at the heart of the dispute between some publishers and the NIH over the public access policy.  Despite all of the blather and charges and countercharges we still haven't really sorted out the relationship between the value of peer review, the role of the publishers, and the impact on the public good.

Explicit in the NIH policy is that peer review has substantial value -- so much so, that NIH does not want any manuscripts deposited that have not gone through a rigorous peer review process and gotten the stamp of approval from a recognized peer review authority -- i.e., a publisher.  In developing the policy, NIH could have come up with their own vetting mechanism, but instead they quite sensibly chose to rely on the experts in managing peer review.  (And don't be fooled by the oft repeated truism that "peer review is all done by volunteers anyway."  If it were that simple, why wouldn't NIH just set up their own peer review system?)

But here's where it gets sticky.  In "the old days" (when everybody understood what the rules were), publishers gained control of copyright in exchange for managing the peer review process.   They were then entitled to use that control to develop revenue streams that would compensate them for the value that they were adding to the system.  Copyright gave them control of the distribution of the work to which they had added value.   Under the terms of the NIH policy publishers are expected to give up that control.  And it irks them.

Publishers add value in many ways.  The editing, layout, design of graphs and figures and supplementary material, the context that can be provided through editorials and relationships to other articles in a journal -- all of the elements that visually distinguish the final published article from the author's manuscript version can be useful and worthwhile.   The public access policy says that the publisher is still free to get compensated for all of those things, as if they were the totality of the value that the publisher adds.

But the publisher has already lost control of what is most important -- the imprimatur that says that this article has gone through the peer review process and has been accepted as worthy.    Since that process doesn't necessarily result in significant changes of expression, it's not part of the copyrightable package, but it adheres to the author's manuscript version every bit as much as it does to the final published version.

It is argued that this is not an unfair "taking" since the publisher has the right to refuse to grant the license that allows the author to deposit with Pubmed Central.  Puh-leeze!  This is, no doubt, technically and legalistically true.   But since when is a choice between complying with a policy and going out of business a real choice?  "Dear publisher -- we respectfully ask that, for the benefit of the common good, you give up control of the most significant element of value that you add to the scholarly communication process.  We don't actually have any way of compensating you for that, so you are perfectly free to refuse to do so -- in which case, you will, of course, be put out of business since you will no longer receive the manuscripts that are your bread and butter, but them's the breaks.  Good luck."

Shulenburger's been on campus doing some consulting for the university on matters not directly related to scholarly publishing, but we were fortunate that he was willing to take some time to do a public lecture on the topic.   The substance of his talk was drawn from a document that has received wide distribution since it's release last February:  The University's Role in the Dissemination of Research and Scholarship.  It makes a compelling case for the necessity for universities to take a very active role in disseminating, via institutional repositories, the scholarly output that they produce.  Peer-reviewed journal literature is only a part of that, but it's a critical part.  Shulenburger encouraged us to consider developing a policy similar to the Harvard and MIT mandates.  There were several Deans in the audience and I could see a lot of heads nodding.

While everyone involved in the debate agrees on the fundamental importance of peer review, and everyone seems to agree that it ought to be managed by the traditional peer review authorities, the pro-policy advocates have not directly confronted the fact that the policy does require publishers to give up control of something of great value without providing anything in return.   Wouldn't it be more constructive to acknowledge this fact and try to develop policies that account for it in some way, rather than dodging behind legalisms and hyperbolic rhetoric? 

Really, I'm just lookin' for a little intellectual good faith here.

Deep Reading Dylan

The alarm woke me from a dream where I was playing at an outdoor festival.  I was sitting in with a couple of people that I didn't know well.  It was just past dusk, and the stage lights were coming on.  Naturally, I was strumming a Dylan song.  ("Tangled Up In Blue," in fact, which I haven't played in quite awhile.)

No doubt this comes from having finished Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin last night.  I'd started it on the plane back from Honolulu and have been reading a bit every evening since.  I had a great time, but I have to think that the audience for it is pretty limited.  And that it is likely one of those books that far more people acquired than actually read.

No matter.  Ricks was clearly writing for the love of it, and it's a tour-de-force of close reading.  He uses the trope of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Four Cardinal Virtues, and the Three Heavenly Graces as an organizing principle.   But his interest is not so much what Dylan has to say about each of these, but to examine, in detail, how he achieves the poetic effects he does, particularly with his use of rhyme.  Ricks loves the mysteries of rhyme.

He sees things that I never would have noticed -- how, for example, the mix of masculine and feminine rhymes in a song can intensify the impact, and how different that impact would be if the mix were different.  Or, in noting the difference between a poem (meant to be read from the page), and a song (meant to be heard), how the singer's drawing a syllable across several beats can create an entirely different effect from what the words on the page alone would achieve.

Ricks takes pains throughout the book to make it clear that he is not suggesting that Dylan was consciously creating these effects -- at least not always.   Right at the beginning he addresses the question of intention:

...I believe that an artist is someone more than usually blessed with a cooperative unconscious or subconscious, more than usually able to effect things with the help of instincts and intuitions of which he or she is not necessarily conscious.  Like the great athlete, the great artist is at once highly trained and deeply instinctual.  So if I am asked whether I believe that Dylan is conscious of all the subtle effects of wording and timing that I suggest, I am perfectly happy to say that he probably isn't.

Ricks reveals himself to be a fine artist as well, dancing across the service of Dylan's lyrics with a light touch, throwing out a bouquet of allusions, puns, and startling correspondences with T.S. Eliot, Keats, and, of course, the Bible.  He liberally quotes the critic William Empson, the novelist Samuel Butler, and the dyspeptic poet Philip Larkin.

In the 40 years that separate his first book, Milton's Grand Style, from Dylan's Visions of Sin, Ricks has established himself as one of the premier British literary critics of the second half of the 20th century (and into the 21st, as he is still going strong, having just recently finished a term as Oxford's Professor of Poetry).   But here, he writes as a fan -- a fan who just happens to know more about the ways that poetry actually works than just about anybody else who might be inclined to try to write about Dylan. 

So what's the point of reading a book like that?  Did I come away from it with an enhanced appreciation for Dylan's prosody?  Will it increase my appreciation for his songs?  Probably not, actually.  It'll make me listen a little differently, I suppose.  Mostly, it was just great fun.

Thanks be for Jay Daly

Medical libraryland is mourning the loss of Jay Daly, who passed away last week.  Can there be a medical librarian who hasn't heard his name?  And can there be anyone who managed to spend some time with him who wasn't better off for the experience?  I didn't know him at all well -- only chatted on a couple of occasions -- but just that much improved my life.  And, he was a member of the Thicket Society.

I can scarcely imagine what the loss must be like for those who were close to him.

Marc Laroque does a fine job with the obit in today's Globe.  Read it, and pledge to Jay's memory that you're going to be a better, kinder person from now on.

Open forum on the ethics task force at the MLA annual meeting

I volunteered to be the note taker for the open forum on ethics that was held at the MLA annual meeting in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago.  Those notes are now up on the MLA Connections blog.  Rachel's notes, which include tweets from the session, can be found on the Official MLA meeting blog.

Earlier today I spoke with Lucretia about how we're going to proceed.  There are four broad areas:

• Potential revisions to the MLA Code of Ethics itself
• Potential revisions to MLA Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest policy
• Review of MLA Business Practices pertaining to relationships with vendors
• Draft of "preferred practices" for vendors in their marketing & advertising efforts, particularly in relation to activities at the annual meeting

We hope to have a final set of recommendations ready to go to the Board of Directors by mid-August so that they can be considered at the Board's September meeting.

I thought the discussion at the open forum was very good, and we will be incorporating many of the ideas that came up as we prepare our final report.  We would still like to get additional ideas and feedback, however, so I'd welcome any additional comments or questions here, or on the posts at the Connections blog or the MLA meeting blog.

You can't catch swine flu by kissing a Bearded Pig

My standard line, usually delivered to the hotel guys who are helping us schlep equipment, is, "When you're over 50 and still playing rock n' roll, you've long since given up on the hit record.  You don't even care so much about the groupies.  What you really wish you had were roadies."

It's a lot of work, and it amazes me that we're still doing it -- the gig in Honolulu was the sixth year in a row that we've done the Sunday night thing as the Bearded Pigs.    It's taken on a life of its own. 

This year we were "an enucleated band" -- so said the legend that TG put on the shirts.   The past several years SG, Duke and Russell had worked up a mini-set as a power trio -- we called them The Nucleus.  But SG retired from the band after the Chicago gig and Duke, Russell and Cogman weren't able to make it to Hawaii -- hence, we were "enucleated."  Did that slow us down?  Of course not.  We had Boutch filling in on drums and Fearless Frank on harmonica.  We even had Sparky running sound (which was a tremendous help since we couldn't hear a damn thing on stage -- I really screwed up with how we arranged the amps).

Little Lulu joined us on tambourine, as she has the last few years, and we even got the Princess Josphine up for a few tunes before she announced that it was time for her to go to bed (she'd just flown in that afternoon).  

Count the Memphis weekends, Atlanta, Savannah, Chapel Hill, Edinburgh, London, the Presidents' party in Philadelphia, a couple of North Carolina Pigs gigs, along with the two or three "proto-pigs" performances and some version of the band has played nearly twenty times or so since 2002.   Mister TomCat and I were talking about it and we're pretty sure that we've never had exactly the same lineup twice.

Never could've happened without The Thicket Society.  It still astonishes me that so many people are willing to put up $40 apiece to make it possible for us to play every year (and to get the t-shirt, of course!)   When we put The Thicket Society together I thought we'd get maybe ten of our crazy friends to put up a few bucks to help us out.  This year we ended up with 65.  (Good thing, too, 'cause Hawaii was expensive!)  Can't possibly thank them all enough.

When I started playing music again, back in '92 in St. Louis, after a hiatus of a dozen years, I took it as a life lesson about never saying never and seizing crazy opportunities when they come your way.  What we love most about being The Bearded Pigs is that we're playing without a net.  Give it everything you've got and make a glorious noise.

That's rock n' roll.

MLA is my professional home

My first MLA committee appointment was in 1988.  I'd been a member for five years.  The last year in which I did not have some kind of official role was 1996.  I'm ready for a break.  I've enjoyed most of my MLA work, but when I stepped off the stage last Tuesday after finishing my term on the Board of Directors, it was with a light step indeed.

I'll continue working with the Ethics Task Force as it completes its recommendations, but once that's done (probably by the end of the summer or so), I would really like to have a couple of years where I don't have any organization responsibilities.   Next year, with the meeting in DC, I'm looking forward to going to Josie's dance recital on Saturday morning, flying to DC in time for the welcome reception, spending a couple of days hanging out with friends and colleagues, going to a few interesting sessions, and coming home on Wednesday.  (That plan will have to be altered if we go ahead with the Chicago Collaborative symposium, but I'll indulge in the fantasy for now).

This doesn't in any way mean that I'm done with MLA.  I've got another decade or so of active career and I fully expect that there'll be more association work for me.   I can't imagine it being otherwise.

I'm always taken aback a little when I come across medical librarians who speak of MLA as if it is something "other," or who question joining because they can't see what the immediate practical benefit is, or who complain about the cost.  I guess I was just brought up differently.

It was a given, when I went to NLM as a Library Associate (what's now called an "Associate Fellow") that I would join the association and get involved.  I accepted the notion that it was part of my professional responsibility.  It was about what I would give to the association and the profession, not what I would get out of it.  In that year, living in DC, my government salary was $16,500, my wife was working part-time as a department store clerk and I would no more have considered not paying my annual dues than not paying the electric and water bills.   This year, when I eliminated my travel funding due to the economic situation, there was no question that I would still go to the annual and chapter meetings.  To quote Sonny Rollins, "This is what I do."

And while personal benefits may have been the least of my reasons for joining back in 1983, those benefits have, in fact, been tremendous -- professionally, in terms of what I've learned, and in terms of the opportunities that I've had to influence the direction of librarianship in this most exciting of changing ages; and personally, in that almost all of my closest friendships have come about through the connections I've made in the association.   For heaven's sake, Lynn and I got married at a chapter welcome reception!

It's been exciting in the past couple of years to see an increasing number of energetic and creative librarians who have come to the field within the last five to ten years digging in and working to make the association responsive to the changing times.  It's been rewarding that during my time on the board, focusing on leadership development and the needs of new members and recent grads has been a top priority.   I've said many times that this is the most exciting time to be a librarian in the past 500 years.  We have opportunities that were unimaginable just a couple of decades ago.  MLA has been, and will continue to be, a significant force in making the most of them.  And I intend to be there.

Rush is not the Republican party and Dick Cheney is a man of principle

While I'm fixing supper I turn on the little TV in the kitchen to watch the commentariat dissect the day's news.   It's their job to view everything through a political lens, which seems sometimes to leave them fairly blinkered about the motivations of the actors on the stage.

I was amused at Rove's comments on the Powell/Cheney flap.  "Neither one of them are candidates," he said, dismissing the entire matter.   He's only interested in winning elections.  Anything else is the "false debate that Washington loves."

The talking heads on MSNBC continue to be baffled.  They're trying to figure out the strategy.  If Cheney & Limbaugh continue to be polarizing figures, then how is that going to help the Republican party make a comeback in the next election cycle?  They shake their heads in puzzlement and disbelief.

Except that there's nothing to indicate that either Cheney or Limbaugh are particularly interested in helping the Republican party win elections.  Limbaugh, for all his bluff and bluster, is consistent in one thing -- he's an entertainer whose interest is self-interest and driving his ratings up.  If the Republican party falls apart and the ensuing controversies raise his profile and get more people to tune into his show, that's a good thing.  Zev Chafets's profile of Limbaugh in the Times Magazine last July makes it pretty clear what drives him.  You will consistently misunderstand Rush if you think that he's trying to build, preserve or further the interests of the Republican party.

Cheney is similar in that way.  But much scarier.   If you take him at face value -- and I see no reason not to -- he believes deeply that the actions that he took, the agenda that he drove until even W. couldn't stomach it anymore, kept the country safe.  And that what the Obama administration is doing now is terribly wrong and is opening the door for another attack.  His mission now is to do as much as he can to hammer home that message in hopes that public and congressional opinion can be turned enough to put roadblocks in Obama's way.  Whether or not that serves the interests of the Republican party is irrelevant.

Once you quit trying to view their actions through a political lens, they're both remarkably consistent.   I was never outraged at Limbaugh's comments about wanting Obama to fail.  How could he not want that?  Obama's vision for the United States is fundamentally antithetical to the view of the U.S. that Rush holds.  If Obama were to succeed, he would be moving the country in a direction that would make it much more difficult for Rush to sustain his riches and his notoreity.

I imagine that during the days between the election and the inaugural, Cheney must have wondered if there wasn't a way to stop the succession from happening.  He must have considered the implications of declaring a state of emergency, of some sort of martial law.  His actions over the past eight years have made it very clear that he believes that the President has unlimited authority to do whatever is necessary in advancing the war on terror.  It must have been deeply disappointing to him to realize, finally, that he'd made a president who just wasn't as tough as he was.

In the water

I'm vain enough that I'm uneasy about displaying my pale plump torso to the multitudes around the pool or at the beach, despite the fact that I'm far from the plumpest or palest one there.  (Well, not the plumpest, at any rate; I am pretty damn pale).  But as with most things Josephine, the prospect of getting out for a swim with her overcomes my venial inhibitions.

There were plenty of places to swim, and we didn't get to all of them.   We started with the lagoon on Wednesday morning, and over the next few days spent time in the little blue pool, the slide pool, the ocean in front of the hotel, and at Kailua Beach on our way back from Kualoa Ranch.  By the time we were at Kailua, she was at ease enough in the ocean (with her arm floaties on) that she was swimming back and forth from Nonni to me, and letting us toss her around some in the water.

Josie's always loved swimming.  I think back to the trip to San Francisco, August 2007, when Mom and I took her down to the pool in the hotel.  The way she paddled around, I was sure that Marian had taken her to the pool several times, but it turned out to be her first.  She'd swim every day if given the chance.

I'm often in hotels with pools and almost never think of taking advantage of them, but on this trip I was determined.  During the conference itself I was only able to get in the water once, but after it finished up I made sure to swim for a bit every day, and I am trying to pledge to myself to do a better job of it when I'm travelling.  When I was a kid there were few activities I enjoyed more than swimming, and that lasted well into my teens.  (When my dad received a small inheritance from a relative he spent a portion of it putting a pool in our backyard and I loved diving in on mornings after I'd been out late).  But it's something I've lost the habit of as an adult and it's time to get it back!  Think Brisbane.

Seeing through her eyes

"So did you pick out the movie you want to watch, JoBug?" I say, as I finish straightening up the dining room.

"Can we watch that one again about the friends?" she says.

"Which one is that?"  I'm trying to track through the movies I know that she likes to figure out which one this might be.

"The one from... the one... that one," she gropes for the words that will get me to see what's in her four year old brain. "We watched with the witch...  and the scary monkeys?"

"Oh, you mean The Wizard of Oz!"  We'd watched it the previous Friday night.  And again two nights before.  (Lynn and Marian had gone to see Wicked on Easter, which is why I'd borrowed it on Netflix).  She was ready to watch it again.  I love that she identifies it as the movie "about the friends."

"Sorry, Bug.  I've already sent it back.   We'll get it another time."

"Okay," she says, agreeably.  "That witch was scary.  But not too scary."

It's a luxury to have her to myself for nearly a full week while L & M are in Boston.  I arrange my schedule at work so that I don't have any early morning meetings (although despite the fact that she's sleeping later these days I still manage to get us out of the house and on the way to school by 8:15 or so each morning), and I leave early on Wednesday to get her to her gymnastics class.

In the evening, before dinner, I tell her that she needs to play by herself for just half an hour, so I can relax and do a little reading.  She usually lasts about fifteen minutes before she pops in, "Are you still relaxing?"  Fifteen minutes can be a long time when you're four.

She had just a bit of a mommy meltdown the first night, but that was it.  For the rest of the week she was her usual bright, happy, reasonably well behaved, chattering and singing self. 

"Nonai?" she says from the other end of the couch.

"What's up Josie?"

"Call me 'Bug' again," she giggles.

Talking to each other is a good thing

The past six weeks have been some of the most hectic and emotionally tumultuous of any similar stretch of time that I can remember.  Lots of travel, deeply painful personnel issues to confront at work, Josie's daddy entering the picture, a week's site visit from my NLM/AAHSL Leadership Fellow, Memphis 3: Return of the Pigs, and much more.  It's been a time of very low lows, but also some wonderfully high highs.

In the latter camp I put the third meeting of the Chicago Collaborative, which took place on April 8th.  The common consensus afterwards was that this was the best of the three, and given how good those first two were, that's a pretty high standard.

Much of our discussion had to do with upcoming programming and what we can do to develop concrete activities that will help bring our vision to a reality.  There will be an introductory and Q&A session at the MLA meeting on May 19 in Hawai'i, and a similar one at the NASIG meeting in June.  We've put together a proposal for a symposium that will be held at MLA 2010 in DC if it's approved by the CE Committee.  And it's on my list to put in a proposal for this year's Charleston Conference.

I'm particularly pleased with the Statement of Purpose that we developed immediately after the meeting.  While the press release and the framework document on the website provide more detailed background on how the Collaborative came to be, the Statement of Purpose tries to succinctly describe the vision.  I think it works pretty well.

We're hoping that the upcoming sessions will be a step towards broadening the conversations.  We've already scheduled our next meeting for November, and one of the things on the agenda for that meeting will be governance and how we more formally involve other organizations that may have an interest.  Since we're still in our baby steps (I tend to refer to the CC as an "unorganization"), we're a little unsure of exactly how we'll proceed with that, but we do know that in order to achieve our goals we've got to figure out ways to involve the broadest possible range of voices.  Given the energy and determination at this last meeting, I think we'll get there.