The new RCUK guidelines on open access

The new guidelines from the RCUK reveal a certain amount of dithering over the issue.  First, there is the usual conflation of 'open' access and author-charging, with no suggestion at all of preferring genuinely open journals that do not require authors to pay for the inclusion of their papers, nor any notion that Research Council funds might be used to support 'platinum' open access of the kind practised by Information Research. The fact that we are now in our 17th year of publication ought to be enough evidence that the model can work, and direct subsidy from the research councils would encourage the development of similar journals.

Secondly, there's a lack of consistency over the embargo period, with different councils tolerating different periods of time:

No support for publisher embargoes of longer than six months from the date of publication (12 months for research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)).

The fact that, presumably, agreement could not be obtained suggests that the AHRC and the ESRC are in deeper thrall to the publishers than are the science, medicine and technology councils. And the fact is that any embargo period is a contradiction of the Councils' avowed aim of ensuring open access to research findings.  Given the pace of developments, especially in science, a six-month embargo period could mean that researchers in developing countries in particular proceed in research directions that would prove unproductive in the light of research published within that six-month period.

The biggest laugh of all is occasioned by the Council's claim:

Free and open access to publicly-funded research offers significant social and
economic benefits. The Government, in line with its overarching commitment to
transparency and open data, is committed to ensuring that such research should be
freely accessible.

In fact, as the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee noted in its report, "Free for all"

It is discouraging that the Government  does not yet appear to have given much
consideration to balancing the needs of the research community, the taxpayer and
the commercial sectors for which it has responsibility. (Paragraph 22) 

and the Government of the day ignored the Committee's recommendations and no Government since then has done anything at all to pick up on those recommendations.  This is called "buttering up to the government" - let's not disturb the status quo too much, lads, otherwise our peerages and knighthoods may be at risk. And, as far as governments of all descriptions are concerned, the same applies - let's not disturb business too much, otherwise where will we get our highly paid, non-executive directorships when the electorate turn us out of office?

The lack of real progress towards genuine open publishing - let's forget 'open access' since it allows bodies such as this to fudge the issues - is down to matters such as this - self-interest on the part of both politicians and research council leaders, timidity on the part of university administrators, and fear on the part of the academic community at large.

An interesting 'infographic'

Readers might find this graphic display of the development of means for organizing information of interest:

http://info.mindjet.com/FromCartographytoCardCatalogsTheHistoryofInformationOrganizationInfographic.html

The browser wars

It's quite a while since I posted anything on the browsers used to access Information Research, but my attention was drawn to this by one of counter services I use.  Way back, Internet Explorer had the lion's share, with, if I recall aright, more than 80% of the hits.  Things have changed:

IE - all versions - 39.2%
Firefox - all - 26.2%
Chrome - all - 13.2%
Opera - all - 1.2%

Phone browsers - all - 1.2% (Nokia contributes 0.8%)
Miscellaneous browsers and bots - 16.4%

That leaves 2.6% missing - lost in cyberspace.

If Msoft is no longer quite so dominant in the browser business - a fact largely due at this point to the success of Firefox (although Chrome is beginning to bite), in the operating system world it is a different picture.
Windows (all versions) - 75%
Unknown  -  16%
Mac OSX  -  4.0%
Linux  -  3.4%
Phone OS  -  1.6% (led by Sybian - Nokia - with 0.8%)

There are a couple of interesting things to note here:  Linux is almost as popular as OSX - possibly having to do with the computer-oriented part of the readership of the journal; and the fact that the mobile OS do not figure very largely. Presumably Windows will get a further boost, given the new connection between Nokia and Microsoft, but the iPhone and the iPad appear to be very little used by readers of the readership.  My guess is that the use of IOS - Apple's mobile OS - will grow, given the sales success of various versions of the iPhone and the iPad - but they have a long way to go, even to reach the 3.4% 'market share' of Linux.

Penguin and e-books

I wonder how long it will take for Penguin to discover that if its e-books are not available through public libraries, its sales of books in general will decline?  Library loans are often viewed by publishers as lost sales, but they would be better to regard them as marketing for their products.  Just about all the evidence suggests that people who borrow books, buy more books than those who don't use the library. Penguin's action looks like the act of a company seeking decline, rather than growth!

Apple's textbook dream a false dream?

There's a very interesting exploration of Apple's ideas for a textbook revolution over at ZD-Net, which draws attention to some of the real problems associated with the idea of handing out iPads to all kids in the US school system.  Most of the discussion that follows doesn't really take issue with the basic arguments, other than to suggest that the suggested cost of $27.5 billion for the hardware is pretty insignificant given that the total cost of K-12 education in the US is $536 billion - forgetting the crucial question, What do you stop doing in order to spend $27.5 billion.  Personally, I think the arguments against using the iPad are pretty strong and I suspect that the real market for books created with iBooks Author is going to lie in higher education, business and industry.  The typical book in these areas is not going to sell as many copies as, say, a new algebra text, but it will be a very quick way for authors to get their books into the market place.

iBooks Author

I see that there's a view that books prepared with Apple's iBooks Author software are not taking full advantage of the possibilities for interactivity.  In fact, it is easy to understand why that might be the case - it is simply extremely expensive and time-consuming to take advantage of the features.  For years now, publishers have been loading a good part of the production process on to authors by demanding photo-ready copy in computer files and cutting down on in-house staff to increase profits.  No doubt many readers will have noticed one effect of this - a significant rise in uncorrected errors and typos in texts. Most publisher will simply not have the kind of multidisciplinary (and multimedia) team to take advantage quickly of Apple's new offering.

I can see the use of interactivity in school textbooks - and probably also at undergraduate level - but there will be many kinds of book for which interactivity would probably be a time-consuming and little used add-on to the text. Trying to squeeze in multimedia and interactivity when all the reader needs to do is to read, would be a waste of time.

OA again

A couple of weeks ago Heather Morrison had an entry in her blog on the economics of peer-reviewed repositories vs. subscription-based publishing.  As many have noted before, the economics of the situation are obvious: the former approach would be much cheaper for institutions than the latter.  However, I don't see it happening.  Sixteen years ago, when I started Information Research it was so blindingly obvious that academics could create and publish their own journals at relatively modest cost that I assumed that in ten to fifteen years, open access would be the norm.  It isn't, because a number of things get in the way.

First, few (and increasingly fewer) academics have the motivation and the time to start up new journals - and yet new journals are being created continually and edited by the same academics, with contributions reviewed by the same academics.  In other words, they have time and motivation to work for publishers, but no time or motivation to work for their academic community. I don't see this changing since, before all else, humans are driven primarily by self-interest.

Secondly, it has so far proved impossible to get the message across to university administrators that the present system costs them money that could be redirected to better use.  Essentially, the idea is too radical and if vice-chancellors, rectors, etc. are any one thing, it is not radical.  They'll happily shuffle around departments and create new faculties or disband them, but ask them to take a really critical look at the present system of scholarly communication and its alternatives and they'll shuffle back into their holes.

Thirdly, governments everywhere are at the beck and call of business.  If a business sector tells the minister that a move of OA will cause the loss of n thousand jobs, the minister will rapidly back off, whether the business proposition is true or not.  Faced by a determined business lobby, ministers are wimps.  In any event, certainly in the UK, none of them has any knowledge of the academic research process and scholarly communication.

So there we have it: no drive from below, no support in the middle, and apathy and capitulation to the forces of the market at the top.

The situation is not helped, of course, by the recent crop of dodgy 'publishers', relying on the desperation of those who cannot get their work published in the established journals to pay for inclusion in a new international journal of this and that.  The number of OA journals as recorded in DOAJ may be ever increasing (standing at 7,431 today), but a significant proportion of those are author charging journals, and not 'open publishing' or 'platinum' model, and I doubt whether 10% of the remainder will be around in another ten years.

Ultimately, I believe, the present subscription/author charging model will collapse, but, sadly, it is unlikely to do so as a result of the actions of academics.