T. Scott

The Caricature of Taypayer Access

I am avidly following the discussion about public access on the OSTP blog and I see this morning that of the 26 new comments that have come in overnight, 21 are from Harnad.  Sigh.  "Bless his heart," as we say in the South.  I applaud the folks at OSTP for trying to be as open and inclusive as possible, but is this really any way to have a reasoned discussion?  I would hate to have to be the person who's got to read through all of this stuff and try to figure out if it actually reflects any consensus of opinion.

Hardly anyone that I talk to disagrees with the general abstract principle that the public should have ready access to the results of federally funded research.  But that's not really what all the heat is about.  What SPARC and its legions claim is that the public should have free access to the peer reviewed literature that results from federally funded research.  This is quite a different thing, and SPARC has been extremely effective at papering over that critical distinction.

There's the expected amount of publisher bashing in the comments of course, best illustrated, perhaps, by Evans Boney's "overview of what happens in peer-reviewed research:"

1- SCIENTISTS spend weeks preparing a grant proposal and sometimes get a grant, likely paid for by citizens of the USA.
2- SCIENTISTS do the research.
3- SCIENTISTS submit a paper to their peers
4- these other SCIENTISTS review these papers and send back comments.
5- PUBLISHERS claim a copyright on the result of the SCIENTISTS work and make the money that should rightly belong to the people who did the research. This money comes from subscriptions paid by libraries which, at public universities, are ALSO paid for by citizens. PUBLISHERS add two extra costs to the public at large, and are entirely worthless and burdensome to today’s scientific structure.

What one would logically conclude if this were actually the case, is that scientists should quit sending their articles to established journals, and simply organize their own peer review mechanisms and post their papers on their own.  Problem solved. 

Alas, this description is an ignorant caricature, although one that passes for reality among far too many of my colleagues in libraryland.  Even on a very small scale (for example, my experience with the four slender issues a year of the JMLA) there is a tremendous amount of labor involved in getting something from manuscript to published article, and then in getting that to the attention of the people for whom it will be useful, labor that is completely unacknowledged in the silly simplification that Evans presents. 

The advocates for public access mandates implicitly recognize this, of course.   It is the post-peer review articles that they want made publicly available.  They'd like the final published paper, of course, but those damned copyright laws prevent them from just taking those -- so they'll settle for the final peer-reviewed manuscript, which, they claim, the publisher doesn't quite have the rights to yet (although the fact that the NIH policy requires that the written agreement between the publisher and the author allow Pubmed deposit indicates that maybe the publisher does have some kind of a claim after all... but we'll try to avoid going there...).  One gets a headache from trying to follow the tortured logic.  So much easier to just raise the banner of "taxpayer access!"

So I'm left with this conundrum:  if what the publisher provides is so valuable that no mandate urges making papers available that don't have the benefit of it, how do we justify taking that value (and diminishing the value to the publisher who provided it) without giving something in return?  Conversely, if what the publisher provides is of no value at all, why don't the mandates suggest that we simply bypass the publisher altogether?

(As a postscript, I feel compelled to add that I do believe that the public should have unfettered access to the peer-reviewed results of federally funded research.  Indeed, I think that all of the peer-reviewed scientific literature should be made freely available.  After all, one of the professional accomplishments of which I am most proud is having played a part in making the content of the JMLA freely available -- the first library journal that did so.  I just think that we need to develop policies that do a much better job of acknowledging and accounting for the contributions made by publishers.  I don't think that the taxpayer access argument, in the simplistic form in which it is usually stated, is intellectually honest.  Evans Boney may not know any better, but surely many of the others who make that same case do).

Policy and Passion

I know that it startled some of my colleagues when I said, during some of the meetings in Boston last week, that as far as I could tell Open Access just wasn't very controversial among publishers any more.  When I was at the STM meeting in Frankfurt, I detected very little opposition to the concept -- indeed, all of the major publishers appear to be experimenting with some form of open access publishing, and the best of the open access publishers are treated with increasing respect for the strength and quality of their operations.  If you'd gone prowling through the halls of the Arabella, or spent time hanging out in the bar listening in on conversations, you'd have been hard pressed to find anybody expressing opposition to "open access."

"What is controversial," I said, during one of those Boston meetings, "is the NIH public access policy.  But opposition to the policy is not about opposition to open access.  It's opposition to what many publishers consider to be unwarranted government intrusion."

One of the things that SPARC has been tremendously successful at is controlling the terms of the debate and equating support for Open Access with support for the NIH policy and FRPAA.  If you're a supporter of Open Access, you are necessarily a supporter of the policy.  Express reservations about the legislation and you open yourself up to charges of being opposed to Open Access.  It's been a very effective advocacy strategy.

Unfortunately, this rhetorical sleight-of-hand effectively cuts off serious discussion of the implications and trade-offs inherent in any policy proposal.  Issues of stewardship, interoperability, commercial and non-commercial reuse, branding, context, differences in how the literature of different disciplines is handled, as well as the appropriate role of government all have a place in the discussion.  It is perfectly possible to be completely committed to the widest possible unfettered dissemination of peer-reviewed scientific literature and still have serious reservations about whether or not the legislative approach enshrined in FRPAA is the best way to get there.

"For America to obtain an optimal return on our investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible," states the recent open letter from the 41 Nobel Prize winners to the U.S. Congress.  I don't know a single person in publishing who would disagree with that statement.  But I really do wish that we were having a serious, honest discussion among all of the stakeholders about the best way to get there.

Stewardship

"Trust is the only important thing!"   Slightly hyperbolic, but I knew what Geoff was getting at.  We were talking at the end of the CrossRef 10th anniversary dinner about the various projects under development at CrossRef in support of their mission:

CrossRef is a not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to enable easy identification and use of trustworthy electronic content by promoting the cooperative development and application of a sustainable infrastructure.

I'd be speaking the next day on issues surrounding the development of sound policies for handling plagiarism and duplication of publication.  The Baroness Onora O'Neill, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, would speak on "Trust, Communication and Academic Publication."  Heady stuff.  (The slides for the presentations are now all available on the CrossRef site).

While issues surrounding the protection of the integrity of the scientific record were front and center at the CrossRef meeting, the same themes permeated all of the various venues in which I found myself engaged with publishers throughout the summer and fall, be it with the Scholarly Communication Roundtable, the STM meeting in Frankfurt, the publishing panel we put together for the NLM/AAHSL Leadership Capstone, or the Chicago Collaborative meeting in Boston.  The fact is, serious publishers of all stripes, be they large or small, commercial or not-for-profit, spend a helluva lot of time worrying about ensuring not just the integrity of the single article before them, but the ongoing stewardship of that article. 

Stewardship involves not just shepherding a manuscript through the peer review process -- there are issues of image manipulation, unintentional errors or violation of publication norms through ignorance or cultural differences, the challenges of dealing with post-publication updating, errata, error, fraud,  retraction and preservation.  In our focus on access, librarians tend to ignore most of this.   Is it that we think these issues are unimportant or trivial?  Or do we just not think about them at all?

Of course access is important, but as Professor O'Neill pointed out in her talk (done without slides, so not, alas, reflected in the presentations that are available online), access is not sufficient -- what we're really after is communication.  And ensuring communication requires that we pay adequate attention to integrity and to stewardship. 

Librarians haven't put enough energy into those aspects of the discussion, and we need to.

OA and Library Lit: Methodology

Even with all of the enthusiastic support for open access among librarians, relatively little of the LIS literature is openly available.   Perhaps there is some delicious irony in the fact that a self-described "open access heretic" such as myself was the editor of the Journal of the Medical Library Association when it became fully open access back in 2000 -- the first major LIS journal to do so.

Despite the manifest problems with Jason Griffey's 2004 master's paper, it was effective in highlighting the fact that virtually all of the ALA-associated journals were closed.  Now, Doug Way has released a paper on "The Open Access Availability of Library and Information Science Literature" that indicates that the situation has improved little in the five years since Griffey posted his paper.

Of course I scanned the paper immediately to be sure that the JMLA was included and to find out what he had to say about it.  My interest was immediately piqued by "Table 2: Percentage of OA articles by journal" which says that 94% of JMLA articles are OA.  What?  All of the JMLA is OA.  All of it.  Every page.  Back to 1898.  What gives?

Turns out to be a methodological issue.  Way is not actually measuring OA availability; he's measuring the degree to which Google Scholar is effective in identifying OA versions of articles from his set of twenty LIS journals.  If I'm calculating the math back correctly, he identified 68 research articles published in the JMLA during 2007, and was only able to identify 64 of them using Google Scholar.  I'm dying to know which four didn't show up!

But that percentage was better for JMLA than for the two other OA journals that Way identifies.  Google Scholar found only 70% of the articles in Law Library Journal and only 68% of those in College and Research Libraries. 

This methodological confusion pervades the discussion section, and one has to read carefully to keep things straight.    For example, Way says that, "No journal, including the three OA journals included in this study, had OA versions for 100% of their articles."  In fact, what he means is that Google Scholar was not successful in finding all of the OA versions actually available.  I know that Google Scholar failed to identify 6% of the OA articles in the JMLA.   And it appears that it failed to identify about 30% of those in the other two OA journals (unless those journals are not, in fact, completely OA).

If I had been editing this article, I probably would have tried to put the brakes on his conclusions somewhat.  (This was, by the way, the number one editing issue that I had when I was working with the JMLA -- authors claiming more than their results actually showed).    His results show that Google Scholar is not a completely reliable means for identifying OA versions of articles.    It is probably also safe to conclude that fewer than 50% of the articles published in the non-OA journals have an openly available version, but the specific numbers that he presents should be approached sceptically.

One other point about the JMLA.  Way mentions that all of the OA versions that Google Scholar identified were "found in PubMed Central and not on the journal's Web site."  This is completely unsurprising, since the JMLA does not have a separate journal website.  Except for a very few early release articles, the electronic versions exist only on PMC.

Despite these quibbles, the larger point that Way makes is indisputable -- for all of the advocacy work that librarians have done in support of various OA initiatives, they have not done a very good job of making their own research output widely available and easily discoverable.    Our advocacy efforts would be more persuasive if we were taking a more aggressive leadership role within our own field.

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.

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.

What I Said About Public Access at the ER&L Conference

I'm not planning to jump on the bandwagon of the SPARC advocacy machine's drive to defeat the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (what an abysmally named bill!)  It's not that I'm necessarily opposed to the NIH Public Access Policy or in favor of HR 801, just that I think that there is much less to the former and a bit more of interest in the latter, than the OA lobby proclaims.

At UCLA, I referred to this Santayana quote, which I used to use for the motto on my blog:

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

I think of skepticism as a discipline, and part of that discipline is listening very critically to the arguments of the people whose conclusions you agree with, and very generously to the people whose conclusions you are inclined to oppose.  It keeps you intellectually honest.  There hasn't been nearly enough of that in this debate.

SPARC has been tremendously successfully in equating support for the NIH Policy with support for open access, and vice versa.   A blog post at Public Knowledge refers to HR 801 as an Anti-Open Access Bill and this morning I received an invitation to join a Facebook group called "Oppose Bill HR 801: Repealing Open Access to NIH-funded Science."

But it is certainly possible to be very supportive of providing free access to peer reviewed literature and still think that the NIH Public Access Policy is lousy legislation.   An article in the latest issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association points out that from a sample of articles taken from that database in 2005, 26% were freely available, with 40% of those coming from society publishers.  As of this morning, there are 1,806,192 articles freely available on the Highwire Press site -- the full published articles, I might emphasize, not just the final manuscript version.  And it is worth remembering that of the 80,000 articles per year that the proponents of the NIH Policy claim are "freed," a significant proportion of those are published in journals that are making those articles freely available in any case.

The people who are leading the fight against the NIH Policy are clearly and demonstrably not opposed to making peer reviewed research articles (not just those funded by NIH) freely available, and I assume that the people leading the charge against them know that.

So if the fight isn't really about public access, what is it about?  That's easy, if one is paying attention.  It's about control.  Who should get to decide the terms under which articles are made freely available? 

This is most clearly demonstrated if one bothers to actually read the testimony from the original hearings from last September (when it was HR 6845), along with Heather Joseph's follow-up letter to Representative Berman.  In his testimony, Marty Frank, who has been the most prominent voice in opposition to the NIH Policy, points to the freely available articles on Highwire and elsewhere as evidence that journal publishers are not opposed to making articles freely available.  But he argues that a one sized solution is not appropriate, that different journals have different needs, and that the interests of science are best served if we leave it up to the journal publishers (and here he is speaking primarily about the scholarly societies) to set their own embargoes and establish their own terms.  He claims that the NIH policy is unwarranted government interference.  In her letter to Berman, Joseph addresses this directly.  While it is true, she says, that many of the Highwire Journals have embargoes of 12 months or less, "There is no requirement for them to do so and therefore no guarantee that access will continue to be provided permanently."

So the argument isn't about making articles freely available -- Joseph and Frank agree on the importance and necessity of doing that.  It's about whether or not we should enable the government to dictate the terms under which this happens.  But this is not the way that SPARC has framed the public debate.

For me, personally, I'm somewhat more inclined to give the government the edge here.  Having started my career at the National Library of Medicine and being steeped in the history of that amazing institution, if I had to choose between relying on NIH/NLM to maintain the permanent archive of research publishing or relying on independent organizations, worthy though they might be, I'd go with NLM.  But that doesn't mean that I must therefore think that the NIH Public Access Policy, as currently implemented, is the best way to do that.

And this brings us to HR 801.  The NIH Policy relies on the fact that publishers are going to continue to manage the peer review process.  This is implicit in the whole thing.  "Yes, we want taxpayers to have access to the results of government funded research, but only after the reports of that research have been vetted by a non-governmental organization."  The independent peer review process is essential to the philosophy underpinning the NIH Policy, and it depends on the publishers continuing to manage that process.

Now whether you think that the mandate creates a high or low risk to the financial viability of any individual publisher, it clearly injects some risk.  And NIH's position appears to be that "we (the government) will now require publishers to accept some additional financial risk, while continuing to provide the services of peer review and in exchange for that, we will give you....?"  Nada.

The response to that is HR 801.  The message here is, "If you are going to require us to continue to provide peer review to underlie the scholarly publishing system, then it isn't fair for you to make publicly available versions of our articles available to compete with us.  This interferes with our right to control the distribution of our copyrighted material, as provided to us under copyright law."  Note that the claim here is not that the publishers have a copyright interest in the author's manuscript version, but that by putting up a competing version, NIH is infringing on their right to control the distribution of their version of the article to which they clearly do hold the copyright.  I have no idea if that claim would hold up in court, but it is a different argument from the one that the opponents of HR 801 have been so busily dismissing.

This certainly is an important issue of public policy.  But it isn't about making articles freely available.  It's about the role of government in the scholarly publishing process and whether or not the government should have the right to take advantage of independently funded peer review without providing anything in return.  It's about whether or not the relationship between government, the research community and publishers should be adversarial or collaborative (as John Willinsky suggests it needs to be at the end of his recent article in PLoS).

That would be a discussion worth having.

Rhetorical Excess in Advocacy

The Open Access Working Group has released an open letter to Obama's transition team.  Among other things it says,

Peer-reviewed articles reporting the results of scientific research funded by U.S. tax dollars should be made publicly available online no later than six months after publication. ...  One U.S. agency has taken the lead in successfully implementing such a policy...  (italics in the original).

'Scuse me?

I've read the damn thing a bunch of times and it is really difficult for me to see this in any other light than intentionally implying that the NIH's policy, developed "[a]fter careful examination of the issues and extensive consultation with stakeholders" and which "appropriately balances the interests of all stakeholders" includes a six-month embargo, rather that the actual twelve-month.  Interesting sleight of hand.

Does it matter?

Maybe not.  But I note that in her written testimony for the hearing back in September on the "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act," Heather Joseph, from SPARC, emphasized that the 12 month embargo was one of the important safeguards embedded in the policy to insure that it wouldn't damage journal publishers.  She even references a survey stressing that for 92% of librarians, an embargo period would have to be "6 months or less" before it would factor into their cancellation decisions.

I spoke with Ray English at the Charleston Conference after his talk in 2006.   He expressed surprise that publishers should be concerned about the NIH policy -- after all, he claimed, he and the other advocates had worked hard to develop the 12-month compromise explicitly to address the concerns of publishers.   Why should they be worried?  Maybe because at the end of his talk he had explicitly called for the complete dissolution of the subscription system?

It's the inconsistency that bugs me -- to argue on the one hand that publishers have no reason to be concerned about the NIH policy because of the length of the embargo, while at the same time laying the groundwork to try to get the embargo shortened.  Peter Suber, at least, has been consistently vocal in his belief that the embargo is a "needless sop to the publishing lobby."

There are other cute rhetorical flourishes in the letter.  "Open access of scientific data has already revolutionized life science research..."  Absolutely true.  The letter uses the examples of GenBank and the sequencing of the SARS virus as examples of the value of open access to data.  Equally true.  But it's a non sequiter to move from those examples to the claim that mandated open access to peer reviewed articles is just more of the same thing, or is likely to lead to similar advances.  Few publishers have ever expressed concerns about the open sharing of data.

I've written in the past about my dismay at the poisonous tone of much of the rhetoric that surrounds the open access debate.   There are librarians and other OA advocates who are quick to accuse those who have opposed the NIH policy of being disingenuous, of using discredited arguments, of outright lying, and worse.  Why shouldn't publishers feel the same way about OA advocates?

But maybe none of that matters, as long as your side wins.

Asking Students About Open Access

I had an ulterior motive.

What would happen if a small group of smart doctors-to-be without much background in intellectual property and scholarly communication were presented with the key issues surrounding the open access debates without being told what they ought to think, and then given the chance to discuss the relative merits of the various arguments that have been floated around for the last few years?   What would they be persuaded by?  What conclusions might they come to?

A couple of weeks ago, I had a bit of a chance to find out.

Awhile back, the School of Medicine established one- and two-week long "Special Topics" electives for 1st and 2nd year students.  (There's been a similar program in place for 3rd & 4th years for some time).  I put in a proposal for a one-week seminar grandly (if clumsily) titled, "The Internet, Intellectual Property, and Their Impact on the Future of Medicine."  My intention was to provide some background on basic copyright law, implications of licensing, developments in open access over the past few years, particularly with regard to the NIH Public Access Policy, and some speculation about what the future might hold. 

The proposal was accepted and my first session was scheduled for the week before Christmas.  Three students enrolled.

Then, to my delight, just as I was starting to think concretely about the seminar content, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act was introduced.  The congressional hearing, which occurred on September 11th, provided the perfect focal point for what I was trying to achieve. 

So I structured the seminar this way: 

We met for a couple of hours each morning, and I gave them progressively more reading as the week went on.

On Monday, I went over basic copyright law, implications of licensing, and some of the current controversies about copyright, highlighting things like the Creative Commons, orphan works legislation, and the recent Google books settlement.

Tuesday, we got into scholarly publishing itself -- some history, some economics, some nuts and bolts of the publishing process, peer review, impact factors, ethics, etc.

Wednesday was open access -- some of the background & history, PLoS, DC Principles, BioMed Central, DOAJ, institutional repositories.    I tried to be clear with them when I was stating what I thought was opinion and what I thought was fact, and how uncertain those distinctions can be in all of these debates.  I tried to present what I thought were the strong arguments from the various sides while also pointing out where I think the various factions go overboard in their claims.   I didn't want to be an advocate and I didn't want to convince them of any point of view.  I wanted them to think.

Up to this point, I'd been doing most of the talking, trying to lay the groundwork.  They asked good questions and we had some good discussion, but it was still mostly me leading.  For Thursday, I wanted things to shift.  I'd given them a couple of reports to read and some websites to look at, and we spent that morning talking about how things were changing and what the future might hold and what that might mean for them as students now, and as practitioners later.

Which brought us to Friday. 

At the congressional hearing on September 11th, four individuals testified -- Elias Zerhouni, Director of NIH; Martin Frank, Executive Director of the American Physiological Society and coordinator of the DC Principles; Ralph Oman, Pavel Professorial Lecturer on Intellectual Property Law at GWU; and Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC.  If you've followed the debates, you probably already know the various points that each of them tried to make.

My students didn't however, and that was the key.  So I had them read all of the written testimony, as well as the transcript of what actually transpired at the hearing.  And then gave them this assignment for the Friday morning discussion:

Examine the written testimony and the transcript of the verbal discussion on the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which occurred on September 11, 2008.  Based on what you have learned and what you know, be prepared to identify which of the four witnesses you think did the best job of presenting their case and why.  This may not be the one with the position that you most agree with.  Focus on how effectively they made their arguments, and how persuasively they countered the arguments against them.  Identify any particular weaknesses or evasions that you see in the testimony or discussions.

In thinking about possible directions for the future, identify what you consider to be the top five likliest and/or most desireable trends.

My hope was that by putting it this way, rather than asking them which point of view they agreed with, I would get them to look critically at all of the arguments and gain a greater appreciation for the complexity of the issues involved.

My ulterior motive was to find out what would stand out in the testimony when it was approached critically by bright young doctors-to-be who didn't have an axe to grind and who didn't come to the testimony with their minds already made up.

I don't want to put words in their mouths, or misrepresent their views, but some of the things that came up in the discussion included:

• Heather Joseph was compelling in the emotional tug of her testimony, particularly in relating the story about her son, but it is very difficult to really assess the costs and benefits of making radical changes to the system based on this kind of anecdotal example.
• Martin Frank somewhat "shot himself in the foot" by pointing out that many journals make their contents free after 12 months without suffering negative consequences -- it seems to be more a matter of control and who gets to make the decisions about what gets made freely available.  He did a good job of making that case against "one size fits all."
• Elias Zerhouni seemed more interested in the ability to do computing across the body of literature than he was in making the articles freely available, and why couldn't that be done in a dark archive of some sort?  To do that kind of analysis in this day and age, do you really need to have everything in the same database in the first place?
• Ralph Oman seemed primarily concerned with making the case that this would be a huge headache for congress and never really addressed the underlying copyright question.  His claim that this would put publishing as we know it out of business seemed to be contradicted by Frank's testimony.

There was much more, of course.  We had a spirited discussion for a couple of hours and I suspect minds changed about more than one point more than once during that time.  I suppose my favorite moment of all was when one of the students said, "I had no idea these issues were this complicated and this interesting when I signed up for this course!"

There was consensus about the fact that we have to continue to do everything possible to make scholarly information more widely available and that we have to be creative and innovative in using all of the new tools that have been developed in recent years.  I think sometimes in the heat of the open access debates people forget that everyone involved -- authors, librarians, editors, educators, publishers and scientists -- agree on that.  The debate is really over what's necessary and what's possible and what the unintended negative consequences of various actions might be.

I have my own views on many of these issues, and I wouldn't necessarily have responded to my own assignment in the way that my students did.  But I didn't want them to come to my conclusions.   I wanted them to understand that the issues are complex and that there are valid points on all sides, being made by people of good faith, who still occasionally fall into rhetorical excess in their desire to make their case.  I wanted them to care about the issues, and I wanted them to think.

When I got back to the office this morning, after the holiday break, the grading sheets were waiting for me.    I marked all of them "Pass" and sent them in.

Open Access 2.0

In general, when Joe Esposito posts to the liblicense-l list, I find that I agree with him about 65% to 70% of the time (a high percentage for me, I hasten to add).  But in his new article in the Journal of Electronic Publishing, "Open Access 2.0: Access to Scholarly Publications Moves to a New Phase," his percentage has definitely moved up a notch.

He does an excellent job of describing the broad functions of publishing that I was clumsily alluding to in my post this morning (had I read his article sooner I could've saved myself some typing and just linked to it there).  Part of what he describes so well, and which I wish that my librarian colleagues would get a better handle on, is just how various publishing is -- how different publishers can be from one another in their intent and their reach and their audience and their services, and how, as a consequence, whenever we make blanket statements about publishers they are invariably wrong or trivial.

His "nautilus model" for scholarly communication is, I have to say (just having returned from a trip to the UK), brilliant.  It's clear, accurate, and provides a wonderful template for a much more nicely nuanced discussion of open access than we usually see.  What is so refreshing about Esposito's discussion is that he clearly doesn't have an evangelical axe to grind either way -- he's just trying to figure out where open access might fit within the very broad spectrum of scholarly communication.

Do I agree with 100% of what he says in the article?  Of course not.  But hell, on any given day, I don't agree with myself 100%.