[LAUGHTER] Click on it once. I think it'll work.
Use the mouse. I think
you just have to click in that screen.
[inaudible]
submit your article.
Was that yearly or was that [inaudible]
Yeah, yearly.
Yeah. Do you have any publications that are
having journals that details on that?
That had that price?
You're right, yeah. That's yearly.
Maybe there's more, and all that's here.
It would be like $10,000 for [OVERLAPPING]
For issues.
I mean, that's the variable.
In some cases, these journals,
maybe in 2002,
they were publishing fewer issues or fewer articles,
but still, to increase by that amount is outrageous.
[inaudible].
Are you going to talk about what
the library's overall venture
is versus this room?
Yeah, if you want to mention it.
I think the library's [OVERLAPPING].
I think the library's budget for collections
is $10 million plus.
What we spend on journal articles and databases and
journal subscriptions is nearly nine million dollars.
That's how much of our budget is going to make
these things accessible to the Virginia Tech community.
I come from the book publishing world,
and book publishing basically been stifled by this.
If you go back to this,
the price of books has increased,
but not at an extraordinary rate,
but this is the increase of serials.
It's just unsustainable no matter how you define it.
That sets the background
for when it comes time to think about publishers.
You have two options,
toll access journals or open access journals.
Toll access are the ones like these
that are restricted access,
so they're hidden behind the paywall,
and the business model
is essentially subscription to [NOISE] the library.
They rely on libraries paying
institutional subscriptions for those journals.
Open access journal flips it.
They're free online, free of charge,
free of most copyright and licensing,
and the business model is to pay for
it upfront by authors,
granting agencies or publishers.
They're already familiar with the term APC
, article processing charge.
Increasingly, in a journal like PLOS One,
one of the largest open access journals,
they charge an article processing charge of about $1,600.
That's how open access journals are funded,
and I'll come back to that in a second.
But then there's an
in-between which are called hybrid
journals or what we call hybrid journals.
They're toll access journals.
They're subscription-based, but individually,
you as an author can choose to have your article made
open access if you pay that article processing charge.
For Neuroscience, which we talked about,
which has the institutional
annual subscription of 14,000,
the APC is $2,400.
That's typical, $1,000-3,000 is the range of APCs.
What happens is, if you go to the website,
for say, Neuroscience,
they will tell you,
here are your options,
and they describe if
you want it open, here's what you have to do.
If you want a subscription,
this is what you have to do.
That's why, here in the libraries,
we have a Virginia Tech open access subvention funding.
We help faculty students.
Anybody in the Virginia Tech community
who wants to publish in an open access journal,
we will fund up to $1,500 per article or
$3,000 per year for those articles.
We've been giving out for the last few years,
well over $100,000 in APC grants.
Who just spoke, Gail is the person who oversees that.
You can harass her if you're interested
in getting enough in that subvention for an APC.
The benefits of open access are pretty clear
that you're basically providing worldwide access.
The international distribution is much higher.
You get more exposure to your work.
In terms of when you get
grant funding from the US government,
it's required, in many cases,
that you make your work open access.
It's requiring or it's fulfilling grant requirements.
There's some questions about
higher citation rates that
you're more likely to influence policy.
All of these things are what people talk about
when they are making the case for open access.
I just wanted to quickly give you before we starts
a quick overview some of the terminologies.
Here you're going to find out in open access if
they all are color-coded as others,
so there's green,
gold, platinum, and everything.
But green is essentially self archiving,
which means that you as the author,
you take early version of your article,
not the published version and you put it in
a disciplinary repository or
the Virginia Tech repository, VTech works.
Gold OA is when
the publisher takes care of the making the article
open access and they will deposit it
in the appropriate repositories.
Is anybody familiar with the terms pre-print,
post-print, and published versions?
That's as well something that will come up as
you're operating in this realm.
The pre-print is the draft that
you're ready when it's ready to be submitted to
the publisher but the publisher has not seen it yet.
That's the pre-print.
You're free to do whatever you want with that pre-print.
Green archiving is when you take
that pre-print and you put it online.
Some fields like physics now,
preprints or the way
that scholarly communication happens.
There's a preprint server called Archive
and it's hugely successful and popular in physics.
It's less so in other fields.
The post-print, which is a misnomer,
but because it suggests that
it's after the article has been printed.
It is the accepted version. It's a draft.
It's been peer-reviewed and
incorporates all required versions.
They're are all required revisions.
That's important because some publishers
have requirements around what you can make
available open access and they will
refer to those reprinted.
Then there's the published version
or the version of record.
That is the final published version of
the article that's out on the copy editing.
All of the publishers value add to it.
There they are again, pre-print,
post-print, and published version.
Another term is embargo.
I have here a page from the library's online catalog.
Sometimes you look at these articles,
you find a journal and you see it
says full text delayed six months.
All of those are six months.
That's when publishers say that
they're willing to provide
an Open Access version of your article.
But they're going to wait
six months because they want to get
the money from the subscriptions.
That as well is something you have to factor
into your decision making in choosing a publisher.
The future of open access and
these are the things we can talk about.
Some of the questions, how do we pay for it?
The question of article processing charges,
funding agencies, and university system subsidies.
There's also a predatory publishing.
Some of you may have already seen this.
If you've had an instance
where you get an email inquiry from
a publisher asking you to submit
an article and it looks legit,
but it also looks not very legit,
this is an example of one,
the International Organization of Scientific Research.
It's a bogus organization.
They have this IOSR-JEN of engineering.
This was from an email sent to someone saying,
please submit your article to our journals.
Increasingly when you think about publishing,
you really have to pay attention
to the journals because there are
a lot of these are called predatory publishers out there.
Here's another instance.
This was a call for paper
for an international conference.
I like that it's called insane.
The other big problem with this is what's called
flipping the system that Elsevier,
which is the largest publisher.
It's making money off of subscriptions.
It's also now one of the largest open access publishers
by doing this hybrid form of publishing.
[NOISE]
For the predatory publishers,
I know that one video that I watched
had suggestions on what to watch out for,
but most of it was just things
that you see for watching out for spam.
Is there any good way
to go about finding out if it's predatory publishers?
Yes. There is a directory of open access journals, DOAJ.
There is a thing called Sherpa Romeo, it's odd name.
There are places to go.
If you're ever in that situation,
you can call any of us here or
email any of us here in the library before you do those.
The DOAJ is the main place to go. Yeah.
I have a follow-up question for the predatory publishing.
Obviously data for sharing
our personal data or selling
our personal data is big problem.
Is that what's going on here when
you submit 20s open access journals in there?
How are these predators getting here?
Basically, I think it's much simpler than that.
I think what they're doing is they are
working on the notion that you
will pay an APC of $1,000,
$2,000 and they're going to pocket that money.
If there's enough researchers published with them,
they make a tiny sum.
A better term for
predatory publishers really would be something like
dishonest publisher is that they're
basically selling you something
that they can't deliver on.
Finally, I just wanted to mention here,
there are efforts now around the world
to move us towards this question of flipping the system.
But the problem with changing over to a new system
is all this money invested in subscription journals.
It's very hard to gradually move
that battleship to the right.
What's happening in Europe in particular,
there's been this call for immediate Open Access
to all scientific papers by the year 2020.
That was by the EU.
There's this plan now called Plan S,
which you should look up.
It's basically 11 research funders from the UK and
Europe that collectively are
responsible for over eight
billion dollars in grant funding.
They are saying now they're not going to fund
any articles that aren't immediately made Open Access.
That's something we can talk about
because we probably need something radical like that.
But it can be actually pull it off to the question.
That's my section here.
When you just get to talk more
about broadened the picture of it.
I'm not sure [inaudible] if
you could just stay near the podium.
Stay near the podium. Okay.
It was working for a while.
Yeah. I had to turn off
the room because it was interfering.
It was an issue with the mic [inaudible]
This is all right. My name is Anita Walz.
I'm the Open Education Copyright
and Scholarly Communication librarian.
A special hi to those of you who are remote.
I've been doing this work for
about five years in the university libraries.
One of the things that is confusing
talking about open is that we're
not defining what we mean by open.
When you think about open access,
what comes to mind?
Just shout out any of you.
Free.
Free, available. Anything else?
Always free.
Always free. [LAUGHTER] Great.
Collaborative.
Collaborative, we'll get there.
Good. So lots of different ideas around open,
but mainly that you can get to it.
You can see it, you can use it.
The traditional definition,
and this is from a convention in Berlin,
is that open means that you can adapt it,
change it, modify it.
That's not typically how we think of it.
The way we typically think of it
is it's free, we can get to it.
My question, and we'll talk about
this other term that starts with the word open,
is is open access the same thing,
just a different name for what we
call open educational resources.
Has anyone heard the term OER?
Great. The question is
these teaching and learning resources
that are called OER,
are they the same thing?
Well, to the degree that they are under a license
that allows them to be changed and
modified, they're the same thing.
We don't really think of journal articles that way.
I'm going to talk a bit about
this thing that we call open educational resources.
I'd like to give you a really quick overview
of Creative Commons licenses.
Raise your hand if those look familiar.
Some of you have seen them before,
those of you online.
Excellent. Thank you.
I think it's really great to include people
online because you probably feel far away,
so thank you for participating.
There are a number of Creative Commons licenses.
The middle cluster, and this does not work on the screen.
The middle cluster of
Creative Commons licenses essentially say,
you can copy me,
you can change me,
you can revise me,
you can adapt me.
The bottom collection, the bottom two say,
no, you can't make any changes,
there are no derivatives allowed.
This locks things down.
You can copy and share if something
has this license on it,
but you can't make changes.
The bottom category is really everything that's
in copyright that doesn't have an open license.
We have the continuum from very open things maybe
that don't enjoy any copyright because they're too old,
or they were made by a US government employee,
to things that enjoy all kinds of copyright.
We'll get these slides to you a little bit later on.
There's also in the back of the room.
For those of you online we'll make sure you get this too.
There's a brochure that
explains the different Creative Commons licenses,
but they are what they do.
Why might it be important for you
as a future and probably current educator,
as a professor, to adapt materials.
What might you want to do if you could adapt
materials for your class? Yes.
[inaudible] Being somewhat lazy
if I find some very good materials online,
I don't want to redesign
the wheel and rebuild something that was already
done very well that I could ideally just use.
You could reuse something that
already exists. You have the mic.
I was going to say pretty much the same thing but
not admit to being lazy and just say it
would save us time [LAUGHTER]
to not reinvent the wheel. I agree.
Anybody else? Anybody from online? No, that's okay.
There are ways that you could leverage these licenses.
Typically the licenses that we say are
open have five R's permission.
They allow you to retain something,
you can keep it, you can revise it,
you can reuse it,
you can remix it,
you can redistribute it, you can share it.
These map to the things that you cannot do in copyright.
When you put an open license on
your work, any of your work,
because even the notes that you're writing right now,
you're creating a copyrighted work. Did you know that?
[LAUGHTER] You're creating a copyrighted work
right now, which is fine.
[LAUGHTER] But if you don't put an open license on it,
nobody else knows that they can use it.
If you want people to use your work,
put an open license on it. Yes, ma'am.
Any of those,
do you need to give credit to where you got it.
Absolutely.
Thought I would mention that.
[LAUGHTER]
This is for your original work.
Being very simple,
most of us like to take pictures with our phones.
We take pictures of all kinds of things.
If you wanted to put your pictures on Flickr
or on Wikimedia Commons,
or you want to put them
somewhere and you want people to be able to
use them because you think they're great
and you're not planning to do anything with them anyway,
so you want people to use them.
You could put a Creative Commons license on your work.
If you are using someone else's work,
you will want to look at the link at
the very bottom that says how to provide credit,
how to provide attribution.
Very important.
The Creative Commons logos
are actually a symbol of a license.
You're entering into an agreement about
how you will use something,
how you won't use it.
Part of that agreement is to say,
I will give credit if I use
somebody else's work that has this license on it already.
Two sides, you could be a contributor,
you could be a user.
Hopefully you'll become both.
How is this in use at Virginia Tech?
This is really fun.
In 2014 one of the professors here came to me and said,
my book is $200.
It's coming out in a new edition
of the book for my class,
not my book, but the book from my class is $200.
Thank you. I need a lot of help. Thank you.
[LAUGHTER] The book for my classes, $200.
I don't want to do that to students.
It's too expensive, what can I do?
I said, well, let's,
would you be open to remixing a book?
I said yes.
We entered into this experiment of creating
this open textbook from a book that
was already had an open license on it.
We released it to the world and it's been downloaded
over 185,000 times around the world.
This is the first version,
and the second version came out in August.
We decided to make some changes,
it's a little smaller.
It's a lot cheaper if you buy the paper copy.
It has some updated features like quizzes
and videos linked from it.
I'll ask you to send this over here.
I can show you panelists later if you don't want.
That's one example, yes.
What is the price range for an open printed textbook?
The black and white version of the first one was $15.
That's a good price for black and white.
Color is really nice.
Sometimes colors necessary.
If I wanted to do that for one of
my classes that I was going to teach
the say next semester,
would I be able to go to
somebody in the library to help me with that.
This first book took 14 months.
[inaudible] Next semester [LAUGHTER].
This is our second book,
and it took nine months,
which was really fast, but let's talk.
Possible.
We also would want to make sure that you are also
getting all the rest of
your work done because this is a lot.
But let's talk because I think those are
good ideas to explore.
The question was, if I wanted to do
this in my class next semester,
could I, who would I talk to
you? You have a question too.
What does remixing exactly mean?
What is remixing mean?
Technically, it means that
you are mixing more than one thing.
You have maybe one openly licensed work
and you're adding,
you're combining it with something else.
For this book, we took the original source material.
We probably got rid of about 50% of it.
Then we took a part of
another book and we made a new chapter out of it,
and then we took other material from different places.
It's really a way of revising. Does that help?
I got my question is,
so let's say you have four different books.
I've had classes where there's four different books,
but they only take selected chapters.
What are we mixing also entail taking the chapters,
relevant chapters from these different books,
I'm just making a new book.
If your book had an open license.
All four of them.
If all four had open licenses,
you could do that and they're in copyright.
Assuming that's the case, then
what would the author of the book, this new book B.
You could have it be a compilation by
this person with contributions from person 1,2,3,4.
You would want to attribute all of your contributors,
there's a lot more detail to this.
I would be very happy to talk with any of you
after if you want to talk more details,
but really good questions. Yes.
Can this also be applied to scientific manuscripts?
Like if I was publishing the research I did,
what I apply a Creative Commons license
or is this specifically for textbooks?
Some publishers, especially open publishers like clause,
what is your area of your.
Food science and nutrition.
I'm not as familiar with your journals,
but some publishers will say
Open Access is a creative commons license of this type.
Something I've seen professors do where
when they have had figures or images,
maybe they took a photograph of
something novel and they said,
I don't want to sign away my rights to this.
They might put it in Wikimedia Commons,
and then they cite themselves
this image from this location.
That way they can use the image later,
they don't have to sign away
all their rights because they
already licensed it openly.
In an ideal world,
yes, you would get to decide,
but often it's the publisher that says,
no, this is how it is.
We will take all of your rights. Thank you very much.
You can negotiate.
I would encourage you to do that.
There's some tools to do that also.
You can put a Creative Commons license on
anything you want and put it online.
Peter says you can put
a Creative Commons license on
anything you want and put it up online.
Is there a place besides that?
Is there a repository for all Creative Commons?
No, ma'am. [LAUGHTER] There
are repositories for things like open textbooks.
There are popular places
and a lot of these places are
listed on the back of this brochure.
The search.creativecommons.org site has many
of the places where you can
find music, media, videos, images.
There's an opened the link for the Open Textbook Library.
There are some scientific simulations
that are openly licensed,
that are very engaging and
really interesting if you're in a stem field,
those are actually fun to play with.
Yes, question in the back.
Wave you just wanted to make like
I think you're going to really feel like there
were revise and redistribute version.
We've used when they can a bridged version to
a textbook and then,
or make it like an online like
an e-book or something like that.
Not just remixing it.
It depends on what you start with.
The Common licenses would work with that.
If something already has
a license that allows you to do that, you can.
That's the very exciting part of this,
is maybe you want to
translate something into a different language.
Maybe you want to make it more
relevant to students in a particular context.
Maybe the people in the pictures need to change or
the questions at the end of the chapter or the examples.
Those are all things that
help students as they're learning,
to see themselves in the learning material,
to contextualize, to better
understand what you're teaching them.
That said, there's some labor intensity
with some of this.
But there are some platforms that we make available,
like press books that
are very helpful for doing this thing.
An example of this at,
I believe this is at Brigham Young University, students,
graduate students took a book
on project management and they
customized it into
project management for instructional designers.
This was a multi semester learning experience.
This was a very deep way of engaging a text,
of showing fluency and understanding of
the material and produce
something that was valuable for the world.
This is something that's freely available
online through various links.
If you put the title in Google,
you would get there.
Here's another example for
those of you in the humanities.
Many of the humanities texts are public domain,
especially the older ones.
Anything created, published in the US prior to
1923 and in January prior to now to 1924,
which is really exciting. Sorry.
34.
34
Let's talk about this later
[LAUGHTER] because that's new to me.
Things that are in the public domain
where copyright has expired are fair game.
This professor said, I'm assigning a Norton Anthology,
we don't use the whole book.
These are readings that I want to include.
So she and her students created
an anthology of this type of literature.
Obviously in all these things,
copyright is a question.
Now, let's talk
more details if the user things you want to do.
Going beyond OER, sometimes we
give students assignments that
are just for the professor.
Oftentimes, we'll learn things from those as students.
Definitely is a place for not sharing
our content if we're not ready to share it.
But there are times that as instructors,
we can assign our students to do
something that is public and get comments,
public comments on it,
also create things that are of public value.
So just want to
briefly introduce the idea of open pedagogy.
I believe that you talk about this more in
your course and you may run into
this in various classes as a graduate student here.
Open pedagogy is a way to more deeply engage students,
leverages student agency, student interest,
and it engages students in the real-world.
Open education is this movement,
it's a philosophy and it's a set of
expanding practices of different kinds of
practices that are based on a collection of values.
I think what we want to do now
is open it up for more questions.
But thank you very much for your time.
Please feel free to talk with any of us afterwards.
Actually, I was just going to ask Darren.
I know we're not to the Q&A,
but what you're doing the project with VD grade,
I think it's really important for you to share
with the class and with the colleagues in the room.
Yeah. So I'm trying to put together
an open repository for instructional material.
My motivation for this is
less on the content side and the book side,
but more just like activities
that we do in the classroom.
Like the in-class stuff that we
spend a lot of time putting that stuff together
and then don't necessarily have a place to share it with
others or even just put it so
that if we want to use it in
another class later we can use it.
So that's where I'm coming from that.
I don't know want to spend a lot of time
talking about the details now because I think
some of that will come up in the Q&A.
But I'm primarily interested in
the remixing and reuse part of that equation
because I think technologically and
what we have out there already are
a lot of repositories of content,
but then it's a matter of how do we
actually put that into practice in the classroom.
So examples would be a syllabi,
some assignment, is that right?
Yes. Syllabi, assignments,
in-class activities with a focus on facilitator guide.
So in particular, if you want to
use a different type of activity in the classroom,
if you're used to doing lecture
style and you want to get into
some more engaging styles of pedagogy,
but maybe you don't have
sufficient support in your department to do that,
having some resources support online to provide that,
including commentary of other folks
who might have used similar activities and
said this is the context I use this
in and this is what went well,
this is what didn't go well,
this is how I would change it.
Then see hopefully a history of that.
So as people reuse
similar assignments or reuse assignments or activities,
you get this chronology of how it was used,
the different contexts it was used and then what had
to change each context.
Thank you.
We're going to open it up now for discussion.
One of the things to
get things started, I was going to ask,
in terms of open access for those of you who are
familiar with it or have had any experience with it,
what's your sense of what the downsides of it or
what do people say is a problem with open access?
Has that come up,
where somebody will say,
well, you know, I don't want
to publish open access because of X.
I believe the problem of open access is quality
to like low-quality papers are usually open access.
If you look for high-quality papers,
most of them are like closed access,
so you have to pay to get them.
Okay. So that was the question, basically about quality.
That open access does have
this unjustified connection with
low quality because there are those predatory journals
out there and they give
open-access publishing a bad name because it's possible
for anybody to really start
a publishing company and charge APCs.
That's why you have to be
very careful what you choose from.
But really open access all it is is a business model.
Everything else should be the same.
Peer-review, all of it.
If a reputable publisher
publishes a book open access or an article open access,
they should apply the same standards
that they would apply
to any other work.
Peter. So do the open access journals
hold to the same standards?
Do they do a peer review?
Who are the reviewers?
Again, just describe a little
bit more about that process.
Sure. So if it's a hybrid journal, for instance,
so it's a journal that is otherwise
a toll access journal
and you want to publish it up open access,
it goes through the same review process
that every other article does.
But I mentioned plus one which is all
open and online and
they go through the same rigorous practice.
It's one of the most respected journals.
I mean, it covers multiple fields,
but it is a very respected journal
and has a very high impact factor.
So there's no reason why
open access journals can't be
of the highest quality and they should be.
Who reviews?
Would be scholars in the field.
So if you're in Electrical Engineering,
it'll be read by other electrical engineers who will
then evaluate it and
you'll get reports from those readers.
Usually, working with these conferences,
there's like an infrastructure cost and operation cost.
Who's covering these costs if it's open access?
So the question is who's covering the cost of
actually publishing these books and that's where
the APCs come in.
The money is earned upfront
and there's an argument to be made for the fact
that because open access journals don't have all of
the costs associated with subscriptions,
you don't have to have the accounting departments,
you don't have to do the policing of access,
they're spending less money
on the actual production of it.
So that money is money that
doesn't have to be spent for an open access journal.
So in time, open access journals should be less expensive
than total access journals. Any question?
Going back to the question with
the publishing of the textbook,
what incentives exists or available to
publishers dog breed to do of Max's books
when they know that it can be
easily remodeled or reworked
or redone and then they won't get the sales from it.
Sure. I love that question because that question asks,
why do we typically publish textbooks?
Most people don't publish
textbooks because they want to make money.
Most people don't make a lot of money, some people do.
But most people write textbooks
because there isn't a book that meets
their needs and they have something novel
to say and no one else is saying it.
They take it upon themselves to
create a work that is unique and that's valuable.
I would say incentives that are
available at this point
are a lot of help and a lot of handholding,
which you don't get from
your publishing house every time.
Being first, there are disciplines where
there are no open textbooks where people ask sometimes,
what do you have for fluid mechanics that's good?
Well, nothing. Not a textbook anyway.
Being first getting your name out
there I think is prestigious.
You could make part of
an argument for tenure and promotion.
Some institutions are looking
very carefully at tenure and promotion as
an incentive to write books. It's a mix.
I think most people who are writing
an open textbook also believe that the impact
that they will have is very
valuable beyond the amount
of money that they might have made,
which might not have been very much.
There's a calculus that I think people go through to say,
''I'm going to write this,
I'm going to put it out there.
I want people to read and let it be what it is.''
But great question.
Just going back to the reviewers,
I was looking at a journal in my field in there,
it was open access, and they did
an open discussion forum for their reviewers.
Now it doesn't seem to me that that's the best.
There are always going to get the best audience
for viewing that paper.
Is that more common in terms of reviewing for?
I would say that there's
more experimentation going on now with open peer review.
That's another of the opens
that we could have put up there.
Open peer review is basically saying we put
it up online and let people
comment on it or you do it
publicly where you assign readers
to it and they comment on
the article or the book publicly.
There've been some books published that
were published first in
a preliminary form and then people commented on
it and those comments were
incorporated into the official published version.
There's more and more experimentation going
on with the idea of open peer review.
I guess the process wasn't very clear,
but is it possible that they actually did ask
specific people in the field to
come to this open discussion?
It's possible, yes.
Because that would make you feel a little better about
their [LAUGHTER] process of reviewing.
I was wondering how
publishing companies react to the open access movements.
Are they try to shift
towards open assess culture or are they just
try to defending their business?
Well, so the example I gave of Elsevier,
they are trying to basically co-opt
open access publishing by offering hybrid journals.
There's a lot of argumentation out there as to
whether if you go the hybrid route,
if that's ever going to really change the system.
If that money is still going
to the big commercial publishers,
are we ever going to really change the system.
Some publishers, I would say,
are afraid of open access and so they're
trying to co-opt it for themselves.
There are other instances of new publishers coming up
that are just focusing on open access.
There's a wide range of responses.
As a younger graduate student,
to be going into the industry,
what can I do to promote open access and
this whole turning the industry?
Well, that's something I'd like to turn it
over to the panel here.
Because there's a big question
about recognition for open access.
I'm curious, Marie,
you're starting an open access journal,
so should people who publish in your journal get tenure?
Well, of course, they should. [LAUGHTER] There's
a lot of factors to consider that go into it.
I think one of the things that's come up,
I'm trying to think about where to start
answering that question,
because we're starting a new journal,
so that's a complicated.
There's things about it being
new as well as things about it
being open access that get embedded in there.
But one of the things that helps journals,
and this gets back to the earlier question
about quality,
has to do with where they're indexed and how they're
ranked by the systems
which are also for profit that ranked journals.
There's things out there that journals have
impact factors and citation factors
and all of those things.
The things that build
scholarly reputation in part
or when open access works gets cited.
The more an article gets cited or
the more articles from a given journal gets cited,
the higher that journal's impact factor
and rank are going to be.
Because journal rank is about citations,
like does your journal publish quality work?
Well, the way we know whether or not
it publishes quality work is
whether other scholars in
the field cite articles from that.
Part of it as new scholars is one,
being able to publish an open access journals, but two,
making sure that reputable open access journals
are also in your citation list
or in your reading lists that you are attentive
within your field to
what the open access journals might be.
For example, in engineering education advances
in engineering education isn't open access journal,
so citing that will increase
the impact factor of
that journal which increases its prestige,
which addresses the issues of quality.
It's about becoming part of that dialogue.
Prioritize open access journals
and cite from those journals?
That helps them. Review for open access journals.
One of the biggest challenges,
and I'm an associate editor for a four-page journal,
as well as trying to start a new open access journal.
One of the big challenge is,
and this going back to something Peter said,
the reason publishers make so much money is
that a vast majority of
the work in scholarly publishing is done for free.
Editors of scholarly journals
are us who do it as service to the community.
Reviewers of any scholarly article is us.
We produce it, we edit the journals,
we do the peer review,
we make sure the system works.
When you're called upon to be a reviewer for
open access journals as well as
for paid print journals in your field.
Review for those journals because that's also
what keeps the quality up.
That can be getting your name out there.
Reviewing in conferences in
your fields helps establish you as a reviewer,
which can then lead you to journal publications
as you coauthor papers in your field.
Once you're an author,
then your name is in the database and
you'll show up when I search for reviewers.
That's part of our responsibility as scholars.
Being attentive to doing that for open access as well as
for what are currently
the top ranked journals in your field.
That's part of how we get quality and how
we establish the quality of the work.
Does that mean then that if you're
an assistant professor without the reputation,
if you publish in an OA journal,
is that going to count against you?
If the younger scholars
are not able to publish and not get tenure,
that the system is going to continue, right?
There's not a simple answer to that question,
because different universities
and different departments within
universities are going to rate
the journals that you publish in differently.
There are departments and colleges
at Virginia Tech that have a list of journals that say,
these are the top journals in the field,
and if you want tenure and if
you want to a raise and if you want a promotion,
you must publish in them.
There are other departments and
other colleges at Virginia Tech and
elsewhere that are interested in the impact of your work.
One of the good things that are less about,
you must publish in journals x and more
about we want to see the scholarly impact of your work
and that can include citations to your work in things
like Google Scholar have also
begun transforming how we think about tenure.
You can get citation counts.
Departments may be more
interested in the citation counts,
but they'll also ask about.
In Virginia Tech's dossiers,
you have to include indicators
of the impact of every article that you produce,
which might be citation counts,
it might be about the impact factor of the journal.
Again, there are departments
where whether it's OA or [inaudible]
best journal is less relevant than what's
the impact factor of this journal and what are
the citation counts of your article.
There are other departments that
are published in these five journals,
otherwise have a nice life.
Changing that really takes pressure from both directions.
It takes younger faculty saying, ''Okay,
I got my two articles into your lovely list of journals,
but I'm also publishing open-access,'' how those count.
You can push the system and then
that tenured faculty have to push the system from
the other direction and argue
for the value of open access journals.
It has to be bidirectional.
Actually I would like to add on a little bit to this one.
For young scholar, when you want to choose OA journal,
what you can look into is the editor team.
If you see the mainstream researcher in
your field on a board, that's usually good.
If you don't see any,
is all junior faculty,
most likely probably stay away from it.
I want to add another question a little bit,
is how publisher deal with this open access,
in addition to Peter says that they are hybrid type,
actually hybrid type is terrible in my view
because they charge laboratory subscription fee,
also charge ulcer open access fee.
Publisher make money twice.
Another type is some publisher start to flip
the subscription journal to fully opening size,
as well as you're doing that.
The reason why I know is, I'm editor chief
of one of the journal for that.
We're flipping from a traditional journal
to a fully open access journal.
In that way, that's fully
open access. Not really the hybrid.
That comment about editorial boards is also important.
We are very intentional as we're starting this journal in
terms of who's on the advisory board.
You look around the field and you say, okay,
here's my list of people I want to
meet at the advisory board,
here's the list of people I want as associate editors.
As co-editors, Shane and I are
both relatively well-known in our fields.
We put a lot of attention into
the people that are involved in this journal,
because that's also part of the quality issue.
I want to add something thinking from
the teaching materials side because I think it's
really interesting that there's
this established currency of
reputation and H factor and all this stuff
that goes into looking
at someone's published history and saying,
okay, I'm assessing them.
I've gotten into some interesting conversations
with different people who are in
the space trying to prepare open educational resources.
One of them, Michael Stewart, who's VT alum is at JMU.
He's really interested in trying to
recreate this idea of
H factor but with teaching material,
so that if you can
start tracking who is reusing your material,
how does it get changed?
How does it get used in different environments?
That becomes a value-added resource that
right now institutions aren't necessarily
looking at as part of the tenure and promotion.
But maybe once there's an established currency
for preserving the authorship chain and seeing
how your material that you're
producing is getting used and
reused can be another aspect of that,
it's adding value to an institution.
Quick question going off that.
I don't know too much about this.
When I was doing a blog post for this class,
I came across an open access University,
University of Catalonia.
I was wondering if you guys
had any information off of that.
It looked like it was a subsection of the university.
I don't know if you guys have ever come [inaudible].
Eric's a good person to answer that
with Colorado State where he published his book.
Yeah, but this is a question about an entire university.
The tradition of a university.
It looks like it's either a section of a university or
a total university that's open
access for graduate and postgraduate education.
It's probably a publishing division
within the university.
It's probably an open admission.
Like the university itself.
The UK has had those,
and it's open university.
They need access in a different way of
the humans going into the university.
Can I return on that for just a second though.
I think it's related though insofar as having
a populist priority for maximum accessibility.
I come at this from a lowbrow perspective of
having been at a regional comprehensive university,
a public university in the state of Michigan,
and really insisting from very early on in
my career that knowledge wants to be free.
The stuff that I do,
it actually it's not very happy on paper,
it can't be at its best when it's paper-based,
so paper-based journals don't
really care too much for my work.
I needed to publish in journals that would
allow my work to be at its best,
which was dynamic and interactive and
usually digital. That's an important piece of it.
When that work was in that environment,
it was quick to publish,
it was circulating in ways that weren't
encumbered by some of these other bottlenecks.
Over time, those couple of
choices just became first principles for me.
Now, were they risky?
I was at a Tier 2 institution.
My work was valued there.
I'm here now less than three months,
and the rules,
the attachments are different, if you will.
But it is back
to where do you set your sights
on how you want your work to be in the world.
It really is that basic,
I think in so far as deciding
what choices to make early on in your career.
[inaudible] that they had
open access journals and stuff like that,
so they're producing a lot
of the stuff I just didn't know.
Thank you for that explanation.
Another piece of that is that universities
themselves are committing to supporting open access.
Colorado State has had a couple of
open access journals for
a while and they publish open-access books.
Virginia Tech publishing is supportive of open access.
Somebody asked a question earlier about
who pays for open access.
Some of it is VT Publishing also supports,
our journals not paying all of the fees connected to
contracting with the system that publishes,
because many journals like there's a system that
manages reviews and collects
admissions and does all the things.
We pay for some of that and
the university pays for some of that.
Colorado State's been the same way,
that there are universities,
Purdue I think has a publishing,
that support open access journals,
and that's, again,
another facet of quality is that this is
not open access publisher in Gary's garage,
this is VT Publishing,
it's Colorado State University Publishing
, it's Purdue Publishing.
That's a big part of what I think has to
happen in the open publishing world,
is that it's that brand
associated with universities that more and more
the open access needs to be
associated with quality universities,
and that will help build the reputation.
A lot of these predatory publishers,
they come out of nowhere and they try to make it look
like they're reputable organizations,
but they're just something that grew up overnight.
One way to combat that is to take advantage
of the quality and the branding of universities.
Peter, I'm just going
to add to that about the universities,
because you mentioned Europe,
but Switzerland, all of
the universities in Switzerland which are
some pretty top like
[inaudible] and University of Zurich,
and the top rankings around the world,
2020, everything has to be open access.
All of their publications.
We get a few of those universities
that are going to do that.
Many of the top are actually in Europe,
they're in the states as well if we could
pull some of ours over,
then that would contribute to it as well.
It's also true that there are
entire countries that have basically said to Elsevier,
and this this is Germany and Sweden,
that the countries have said,
we're not going to pay at
that outrageous price that you're charging for journals.
They've been unable to come up with a compromise,
so now German researchers
in universities don't have access
to the new research
coming out of those Elsevier journals.
But they're playing hardball now
because if an entire country pulls out,
that sends a signal that
they're weak and they're going to lose their revenues.
being in our position,
being a PhD student,
you have a certain limited time to finish
your program and you have to publish during that time,
so you're not going to publish endlessly,
probably five, six articles or whatever it is.
When you go to the job market and
you will find your first job,
then for example in my major in business,
we have some certain elite journals that if you
don't publish there, you cannot get a job.
Looking back at that,
publishing to open access alliance with my principles,
but also I have to find a job to survive.
What would be your suggestions
to us in terms of that one?
This is a very important question of course for
all of the faculty and especially the young people.
I would recommend go into
your faculty here at VTech and also researching
the places you're applying to get a sense
of what is absolutely necessary and also explore,
is there a movement toward open source,
our faculty at those institutions publishing
and some of the open journals.
If there is that opportunity,
there may be a great benefit as
a young scholar and
that ties to an earlier discussion about plus
one for example which was mentioned as
a top journal just open access, high impact.
The question was, who are the reviewers and how do
we know full disclosure?
I've served as a reviewer for that journal and it was
golden standard double blind review process with
very serious scientific editorial process.
But I could tell us a review or that there was
a very strong preference
on please get your review sooner,
and there was a short I can't remember now exactly a
short turnaround time and they asked you explicitly,
would you be able to complete this?
If not, we will move on.
If a journal you're looking at is within
acceptability for your target job market,
then an open journal could get your workout sooner.
It's better to have a published or accepted work
on your CV when you're applying then a draft.
There was also an option for
the viewer to reveal yourself if you want.
It was double blind,
but you could choose to make your name
known either after it's
published or earlier in the process.
It's also creates a community and builds.
If I want to emphasize the point that was made earlier,
if you can serve as
a reviewer that gets your name in the field,
that gets you known to
other faculty in the field and that could help as well.
Quick question on the association or organization.
They have like multiple journals.
They both have the open access and then toe access.
Because when I searched organization in my field,
I think is a American Society of Microbiology.
They have 17 journals,
and then at least three of them are open access,
and one really interesting thing
is they're rejection policy.
Hope that doesn't happen to us.
But once your manuscript was rejected,
by The Open Access,
you are ruled out, like you're ruined.
You can resubmit it to any other journals.
But if your manuscript
was rejected by other non-Open Access journals,
you can still submit to
other journals including the Open Access ones.
How do you know that's the case?
I just read through the policy.
I don't know do
the associations were organizations they value
different journals in different ways or whether they
prioritize the Open Access better.
Because it's like more a frontier
or pioneers thing. Nowadays.
That may be a particular way
that the association is trying to confront open access.
One of the things about It's important
to distinguish between, say,
society publishers,
association publishers and these commercial publishers.
Most of the society,
these societies are non-profit organizations,
and I personally don't have
a problem with reasonably priced journals,
and in the humanities.
It's still because journals
don't cost that much and it's still
where you publish in these total access journals,
but they're not outrageously expensive and
that's a big part of it is I would
be okay with there being
a mixed system where there's
open access and total access.
The problem is that you have
these companies that have
just created this stranglehold on it.
As I said, they're making this 37 percent profit,
which is well above what I think is reasonable.
I was going to go back to
this question about strategy because it's also
connected to how societies rank things.
I think when you're starting your publishing career,
you're always making strategic decisions,
and you're trying to figure out a balanced portfolio.
That's going to be different in different fields
and sometimes in different sub-fields within fields,
and yet business is one that has, there's a list.
But that's the thing that you would want to
strategist with your mentors and say,
well, how many articles do I need in these journals?
If Open Access is an important commitment to you,
identifying what are the top OA journals in the field,
and so it's, maybe it's three and two,
maybe it's four and one,
maybe it's whatever that is,
and you do the same thing on
the path to tenure is try to think about,
what do I need to do if I'm in a department that says I
must publish in nature or this journal or this journal,
where are you going to do that?
Then where do you have the flexibility to push and say,
I'm going to be in Open Access because as you become
an increasingly well-known scholar in
your field and your work shows up in Open Access,
you are then having an impact on that.
Conversations with your mentors,
and if your mentor is someone who is
opposed to Open Access,
other people in your field who are supportive to say,
what is my strategy?
Where do I need to go to get a job?
How many OA journals if I'm going to do OA,
what's a well-known OA journal
in the field where people publishing?
That's where again, that journal or the directory of
open access journals will
provide a good list and you can
find what your options are.
I'm in computer science and there's
a I definitely know about in the software industry,
at least there's a huge ongoing problem
of intellectual property theft,
especially across international borders.
I know that's an industry,
but in the educational side and academic side,
that same theft can pretty much happen with
citations and with
improper attributions and things like that.
I was wondering, how can Open
Access combat this with a much lower budget than
these huge publishing companies
while still trying to protect somebody who
publishes the work and put
all their other efforts behind it when it can be so
freely accessed and taken by somebody else
and not given the credit that's due to them?
That could affect their reputation
and their career opportunities,
especially when their career is based off of
their citation counts and things like that.
I was wondering, especially, our guest here,
I'm sure, quite a bit about.
Thank you. Well, it is a big challenge,
but I think all the work is vulnerable.
Speaking of cybersecurity tomorrow,
everything that's online or accessible is potentially
vulnerable to theft, misuse, and whatnot.
When that sense, because it's all vulnerable,
Open Access could be a solution,
but I would emphasize Open Access
through library like here,
or through an Open Access journal that's
affiliated with the university and with the library.
Because then the university and
the library curator system in
particular provides the vetting process and
attaches the institutional name and prestige and
makes that work clearly
identifiable as for example your authorship,
and in that sense,
what it would be easier to catch if
somebody claims your work as their own,
whereas you just go to
Virginia Tech Library and you see it.
There's no easy solution but I think doing
Open Access through a reputable institution
with a journal that's run by faculty members with
an established reputation could actually be a solution.
I think journals, just like now as graduate students,
you all have to run your thesis
and dissertations through authenticate,
more journals are also using authenticate
or similar system as part of the vetting process.
The more that's out there Open Access,
the easier it becomes defined plagiarism
like authenticates what's going to say.
This work has already been published.
This exists in someone else's dissertation.
This exists in this journal does exist here.
You're seeing that coming up more in
journals using that plagiarism software.
I have a question a little more
directed towards the field of engineering.
But we focus a lot of times on standards like ISO
or ASTM for the guidelines for how to do something.
I know most of those organizations are
filled with volunteers, but for example.
I tried to get copies of some of
that through our library here,
and Larry's awesome, and if he has it, I get it.
If we have to pay for it and I'll say, well,
I can get it for $120,
but you can't share it with
your students so I can't get a digital copy.
These are guidelines for how to be good engineers.
It seems like if anything should be open access,
it should be standards,
and does anybody know of any movements or talks to get
engineering standards to be open access
because it just seems ridiculous that they're not?
Anybody have an answer to that?
[LAUGHTER]
On the panel. But I know one thing in common in
computer engineering and one thing that we
do is most of the time,
so for a lot of different things,
computer engineering, pure science.
There are the published ISO standards
and ANSI standards and things like that.
Honestly, most of the time we
ignore those and go straight for the drafts.
Because most of the drafts are those ISO standards,
to my understanding, are free and openly available,
so while that's not maybe the final version
necessarily, to my understanding,
the difference between a published draft and
a final version of one of
those ISO or ANSI standards or ASTM.
I don't know about ASTM but ANSI an ISO,
the differences might be minor,
and unless you're doing truly nitty-gritty deep work,
odds of you ever running into
those differences are minimal.
That's not a perfect solution,
but that's been a workaround that we've,
in my field, been able to
use more or less fairly effectively, for a while now.
I wonder though if
that pressure is going to
mount for that for them to make those open access.
They are as you said,
that's perfectly,
those are exactly what should be open access.
They're developed by the professional societies though.
Is that where some of those come from?
I think there's debate.
Because the ones produced
by the government should be open.
But the professional society ones
I would imagine are done.
You can get the MILs. I haven't found a MIL Standard.
I couldn't get for free.
But all the other ones are by that group of
voluntary people that are apparently
associating a publishing cost with it.
Maybe it's so they can travel and all
meet someplace to talk
about what the standards should be.
But there's still for whatever reason if they're not.
Because ANSI and ISO and all those are not,
to my knowledge, purely government-run.
I don't know what their costs are,
but they're trying to recoup it somehow.
Peter, You said something about
professional societies as non-profits,
which is sometimes true and sometimes, I mean,
yes, technically they're non-profit organizations.
But if you are connected to any of
the big professional societies.
IEEE, which is for Electrical and Electronic Engineers,
is a massive worldwide organization.
It's invested in,
it's the profits of its non-profit in the same way,
in some ways as a publisher.
The American Chemical Society.
I want to not be naive about the non-profitness of
professional societies because I think
whether it's ISO or some of those other organizations.
Again, US professional
will begin to join these organizations.
You'll serve as officers in these organizations.
You will have opportunities to explore, examine,
and think about how to push the organizations that you're
part of towards these kinds of transformations.
We are the people who are
making all the rules and we're the people who are
producing all the content and editing all the content and
reviewing all the content and doing all the work.
Were actually the ones who can make the change.
Gets me the question here.
I just wanted to say that at least for ASTM,
if the student signs up on the website
as a member of the ASTM organization,
they can get all of them for free.
This is the case for a lot of the professional societies,
is if students just sign up to be a member,
it's usually free for students
and they can usually get full access, so for.
Don't you have to pay dues.
Now, oftentimes you don't.
Oftentimes for students, they're covered.
for example the society of plastics engineers.
Throughout the entire thing it says that it'll be
like 25 bucks a year or something.
But as soon as you get to the end, it says, surprise.
This organization is actually paying for it,
so you'll be charged zero dollars,
and I've had that for, I think,
two different bio-engineering
societies couple of years ago.
Then two of the three societies I'm in for here,
so there's a good chance if they just dig into it,
you can get the resources for free.
I had a general question about open access
is often touted as
a way to get science to reach the public and taxpayers.
But I have strong doubts about that because it's still
written in the same format as toll access.
It doesn't really do the general
public any good if I write about
the CT reconstruction of [FOREIGN] and it's phylogenetic
implications because that's not
written in a language for the public.
There is one journal in my discipline that has
a plain language summary that you have to submit with it.
But I was just wondering about
the link between open access
and then actually being open to the public.
Well, you would be surprised.
But that's a great course,
so I have one example from my work
and I tend to do policy-relevant work.
My broader areas, national security,
international security,
and role of technology in those areas,
so cyber is one aspect I've looked at
nuclear weapons negotiations
strategic issues between major countries,
and what I found.
I like to work with practitioners and make
the science useful to
decision-makers who serve the public
in the military intelligence services and whatnot,
or congressional members wherever
the appropriate venue is.
What I found in
serious meetings with people who want to know.
They want to know the findings of the science.
Now they're not necessarily experts in
those fields and they don't want the jargon.
Please tell me what I need to know right now?
What's your takeaway?
What's your finding?
How could I use it now?
But they also want to know
that there is science behind it,
and that they could go to
a journal article that has been properly vetted,
and if it's behind the firewall and they don't
have university access that
they won't be able to make that step.
Or they could if they have time, but they're very busy.
I've had to scale
these problems and get the institution to pay for.
They want to know the science behind it,
either just to know so they can ask more questions or to
send some of their experts in their shop to go read it.
That's maybe not the exact direct route,
but it's something that I have experienced in it.
It makes your work as an author, as a scholar,
as a scientist more impactful,
and your reputation out there as
a serious scholar who can
communicate to the science community,
but also to regular people, decision-makers,
and business or politics. It's worth a try.
It's also the case,
I think that you'd be surprised how many people
with engineering degrees who aren't associated with
a university still need access to that material.
They may be specialists.
There's an increasingly educated
public where there are people who
will appreciate what you're doing and they don't have
access to it through a university.
Then there's the international component,
which I think is a huge part of it.
And that is you have really skilled practitioners
around the world who simply don't
have access to that research.
There is an audience out
there that you'd be surprised how substantial it is.
I think that's true even in the US.
Gail said nine million.
There's not a lot of community colleges
that are able to afford access to those journals.
But there are young scientists, young historians,
budding scholars in human nutrition
in all of those places
who may want to learn to do research and
may end up in these exploratory places.
I think across these spaces
internationally and in the US,
there are more people who are interested
and who would be interested in
our work at community colleges,
at regional colleges, at Tier 2,
Tier 3 places that don't have budgets for
these journals than we might imagine.
You'd be surprised at who would care.
Sometimes I think if they had access.
Then developing nations.
Yeah, that's the international.
The risk of asking a semi-loaded question.
[LAUGHTER] How has for
example Sci-Hub affected the open access movement?
Has it been a positive,
a negative as it hurt the image, help the image?
Does everybody familiar with Sci-Hub?
Sci-Hub is a rogue.
I guess I should be careful
by using that word these days.
[LAUGHTER] A rogue site where they
illicitly capture tons of
research that's behind paywalls
and make it openly accessible,
and it's organized by a Russian woman
who is committed to this work being open,
but she's been sued many times by Elsevier and Springer.
But what are they going to do?
There is a big question about
Sci-Hub and what its long-term impact is going to be.
Does anybody here have thoughts about that?
Generally, I think it comes down to
ethics in the profession and
especially in our profession as
scholars and contributors to the various fields.
As authors you don't want your work stolen.
Don't be going around using it.
I'm no familiar with, so I have very
directly so I can't speak to that experience but
I would say it behooves
us to start with the ethics and what's
the right thing to do and if it has
the proper licenses use it.
If not, think about it.
You'll be out there teaching and
affecting young people or
old people and we need to lead by example.
I would also say though I do think that as
more universities are pulling
back from subscription journals;
expensive ones, and they're finding
less push back from their faculty,
I think part of it is because
people they have other ways to find it,
some of it legally,
some of them illegally.
But I think much of Sci-Hubs
downloads come from university IP addresses,
so it;s definitely having an impact inside the academy.
[inaudible]
There's a parallel that may or may not be a good one,
but does anyone remember
Napster and illegally downloading music?
[NOISE] I'm sure that still happens,
but as soon as commercial companies figured out how to
make it accessible in
the ways that people wanted to consume it,
it went from a major problem
in the industry to just the back burner.
I think that just had a lot to do with people.
People were doing it illegally because there was
no other way of
consuming that media in the ways they wanted to,
but as soon as there were
legitimate ways of doing that then people use that.
That is a good parallel.
I think that's exactly right.
I think Sci-Hub shows how broken our system is right now
and how much people want access that they cannot get.
It's a symptom of
the problems that we have right now of providing access.
[LAUGHTER]
We've talked about at least you guys have
mentioned community colleges in
developing countries or an international student
not being able to access some of these things.
What does open success look like or it
looks like for people who are not in academia,
who might be out there doing
research and they want to publish their word.
But when I came here
or before,a couple of days ago is when I started.
M, I hope actually has a fee.
I had to pay though upload,
an article or something like that.
I was starting or $1,500 or something like that.
Those folks do not have a university backing
or the current 25,000 grant money.
For me, it doesn't make much sense.
I'm doing all this work research wise,
but then I still have to go pay for it to get out there.
It's a huge question.
It's definitely one of the biggest I
guess controversial topics inside of publishing right
now which is open access publishing inadvertently
reinforcing some of the developers
and non-developed boundaries.
You're right. If you have to pay 1,000,
2,000, $3,000 to publish an article, that's an issue.
That's true in non open access journals as well.
In some fields in the humanities,
it's less likely that there's a publication fee.
One of the things that really confused
me when I got to engineering
was that even in subscription journals,
I still have to pay 1,000 bucks
give or take to get an article published.
It's not necessarily different,
but it's also true that both paywall;
what did you call them told journals NOAA journals,
some of them do have their own invention funds so that
if you can't afford to pay the publication charges,
the journal itself can do some subsidizing.
Some of that is in
the same way that insurance premiums work.
Everybody pays in,
and maybe if you're healthy and functional
and you have a grant from the National
Science Foundation or DOE,
you're paying a little more so that
if we get someone who can't afford
that because of the university
that they're add or they're an independent researcher,
we can subsidize that cost.
That's almost separate from
open access depending on
the field because in the humanities,
when I published in English
there were no article charges.
When I got to engineering,
I was like you got to pay to a page charge.
It's 68, 100 bucks a page to publish in a print journal.
I was going to say close to
the same thing while you're here,
at Virginia Tech you want to apply to this pension fund.
The form is with people
outside of universities who don't have. [inaudible]
Exactly. But what [NOISE] you
said is very true that many of the journals that
have article processing charges will waive
them for people in developing countries.
You need to just look a little further and see if you
can take advantage of that after you leave Virginia Tech.
The other thing I'd point to this is
the question we were talking about flipping the system.
All these libraries are paying
millions and millions of dollars for the subscriptions.
If the system were flipped,
that money would not have to be paid.
There is a way to then
reconfigure the system so that a library,
all of this money that's going to subscriptions goes to
supporting the front end of open access publishing.
That's the hope of this plan S is
that eventually the system will be flipped and
that all of that money that's going to the big publishers
can sub end the cost of
actually of the authors publishing with those journals.
And that is just changing when the money is going out?
No.
Back end or front end.
The authors don't have to then pay those charges.
If enough libraries subscribed to this
and are propping up these journals,
authors don't have to pay the article processing charges.
If you're in somewhere
where you someplace where you don't
have access to money to publish an article,
that's fine because it's the cost is being
shared across many different institutions.
Can I just ask,
who has access to open access journals?
Now it sounds like a silly question,
but we're focusing right
now on the pain part before the authors.
But I think part of your question was, who has access?
The farmer down the street as well as the scholar?
Yes.
It depends on their Internet connection.
[LAUGHTER I know it sounds a little silly,
so let's not lose sight of
that because we've really been talking
now about the money part of it which is important,
but part of the reason that we want to
publish in that is so that
anybody who has access to the Internet which then there's
still a divide they can access it.
I wanted to get back that to what directly said
about the ethical understanding of knowledge and
the role of the university
[NOISE] I don't want to lose those comments and
maybe you could say a little bit more about that ethic
of knowledge dissemination that drives
a lot of this because I think the role of
libraries like all of this is
about why do we do what we do?
Again, it's first principles,
it's [inaudible] I was at Syracuse doing my PhD in 2004,
blogs were making a big splash.
There are a lot of academics trying to
write kind of iteratively and publicly,
their in-progress stuff as they were working through it,
not publishing everything online,
but it's in pieces and snippets.
Doing that as a way to engage real audiences,
real readers dynamically in
real time as they're doing the work.
It was profoundly eye-opening moment to be,
to be emerging through a PhD program.
But at that time Lawrence Lessig,
that Creative Commons, all this stuff was really
happening in the early 2000s.
There came to be a greater recognition of
fundamentally whatever is this list of the top five,
all of these, it's parasitical.
I'm a state employee.
I wok for the State of Virginia, Virginia Tech,
but the State of Virginia,
I'm going to sell my scholarship
to what Blackwell, something like this.
I don't know. Pick your company.
You give it to.
You give it to give it to so they can sell it back to
my own university to make it available to
the people I'm working with and teaching.
It's fundamentally absurd.
Who bought us to check it?
If not us, no one will, and it will continue.
Obviously it's profit interested.
But this is why I think it
matters now for us to actually take that stand.
It is risk-taking.
It's not a panacea.
Open access doesn't solve all of our problems.
But it does just bring us back to caring for
what do we want our work to do in
the world and with whom?
I think we should decide that the oligopoly
of you publishers. Soapbox, sorry,.
Yes. [NOISE]
You had a question before that we never had to get to.
[LAUGHTER]
It's been mentioned so many times
how much the publishers make money.
I know it all too well.
I work on a paper for a year,
and at the end of it,
I pay to get it published and I sign off my rights,
after I sign it off and start doing my paper,
I can plagiarize myself basically.
[LAUGHTER] My question is,
how did you get to this point?
How did you get to a point where publisher have
so much power and the people in power have zero power?
I would answer this question,
authors need to value their work.
When authors value their work,
they will insist to retain at least some of their rights.
The publisher may still publish it,
but if you can't share it with your class,
or you can't post it online,
or you can't share it in some other way,
or you can't adapt it and use the same model and run
it in a different place or a different context,
then your scholarship is impeded,
your ability to teach others is impeded.
I think part of this comes down
to encouraging authors to say,
no, this is worth more than what you're giving me,
and to push back.
There are several tools to do that,
there's an open-access addendum
that you can attach to your work,
there are ways that you can archive
but I think a lot of this comes down
to authors saying no,
that they realize that
this work is valuable and they want
to not to make money off of it,
but they realize that it's
valuable for more than somebody's commercial gain.
Just add though that,
in terms of historically how it came about,
it really started in basically the 1970s.
I've read articles about this,
about there were a few publishers,
men in every case,
who figured out there's money
to be made with scholarly publishing.
These journals typically you don't make
money off of them but if you get enough of them,
put enough of them together and you control the system,
then you can charge whatever you want for it.
A few of these publishers figure that out.
How did we get that way?
It is like the frog in the water as it starts to boil.
All of a sudden, editors of journals started to say,
well, we published our journal independently,
but Taylor and Francis or Elsevier wants to give
us extra money to publish this journal with them.
How can I turn down that money?
It ends up snowballing to the point where
now we're down to five publishers controlling everything.
Let me also add,
part of the problem is the system because
[NOISE] that may be how the five got there.
But then we as
faculty and institutions of higher education,
we literally bought into it.
Now our value and
I'm not speaking for me or a lot of us,
but our value is evaluated
is on how much we subscribe to the system.
Faculty have to be in that brave space to say,
I'm not going to do this anymore,
and the system has to change,
and tech has to change.
I suspect too it's also connected to university rankings.
Why does a department want
its scholars to publish in a prestigious journal X?
Because if its scholars are publishing in
prestigious journal X when
the US News and World Report survey comes around,
people are going to cite it.
It's also embedded in that system as well.
Again, there's got to be both scholars willing to take
risks and then post-tenure scholars willing
to push for different ways of evaluating,
different standards,
recognition of alt metrics as an indication.
The value of our work is the meaning
that it makes in the world.
Alt metrics, news release,
citings, press reports, interviews,
as well as, Google Scholar says
413 people have cited your article.
It's that piece of
it too because I think the university rankings,
departments, education is a business,
at least now, departments want to be well-ranked.
We want to go up in US News and World Report,
we want to be one of the top 5 business schools,
we want to be one of the top 5 engineering schools,
and so we do that by building a reputation because
all of our people publish in
the journal of really smart people in our field.
We manipulate the impact factor.
Yes, we do.
It's eight o'clock and it's really hot in here.
[LAUGHTER] Is there anybody just dying to ask a question?
I just wanted to clarify.
My article came out in Piaget,
so it's open access.
It reached experts in Argentina in
developing countries but it's not accessible in
terms of content to the farmer or
the brick worker that the fossil came out of.
Maybe that's going beyond what
open access journals are the problem 1
of being the industry and then problem 2
actually reaching general public.
But there is an argument that when we go to open
access and we're no longer tethered to the journal,
the idea of a journal with a certain number of issues,
the nature of the journal article can change.
I've seen really reputable scholars talking about
how you can think about
journals in the future journal articles
having like you said,
that pricey at the beginning that gives the summary,
and the undergirding is much of the research.
There's a lot of things that can be done structurally to
the research article to
make sure that it reaches multiple audiences.
We've only touched the surface of that.
A response.
I've seen at least a lot of citations that
I've come across in my field.
I came across them through newspaper articles.
A newspaper article that
cited according to this study in nature,
this in this climate change will do this and
this whole tree or whatever.
Then I go to the nature and looked at that article,
and then I end up going back to
the newspaper article because that's what it says.
[LAUGHTER] That's one way of doing it,
having newspapers or the break it down
on layman's term, or simple language.
Thank you all. This was great.
Thanks for contributing.
[APPLAUSE]
We'll get the slides we'll put them in
Scholar and no class next Monday.
[BACKGROUND]