Publish or Perish — but publish how?
Thursday, June 21st, 2007Keynote: “Sorting and Classifying the Open Access Issues for Digital Libraries: Issues Technical, Economic, Philosophic, and Principled” John Willinsky, University of British Columbia (But, as announced, very soon to be Stanford)
John Willinsky’s talk, an acknowledged “preaching to the converted,” was lovely and inspiring. It was not just his enthusiasm for the mission of libraries, access and preservation, but also his faith in the result of democratic access, his faith in humanity to — in general — do the right thing. He’s involved with The Public Knowledge Project.
“We have not yet begun to plumb the depth of public interest in research”
Why are Open Journals, Open Data important? JW provides three rights which open access supports, the principles on which we should rest our support.
(1) The Right to Know, a human right included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Open publishing online makes information available to everyone. He describes a discussion with policy researchers in Ottowa: what resources had they used in the past? They’d call the faculty members they had in the past — research by cronyism is how JW referred to it. (And i suggest that there’s evidence that journalists essentially have their network of folks they call.) Now though, the Ottowa policy researchers search on-line finding the open access research. Building on a poster from last night, he refers to the “fingerprints” of ideas (as opposed to citation “impact”) and notes as motivation to researchers that if they wish to leave their fingerprints on the future they improve the possibility by publishing openl.
(2) The Right to Participate, more journals filling out the spectrum of authority and audience opens the possibility for more participants in scholarly discourse. It’s hard for me to pull out particular issues here — i am such a convert to the value and process of open participation. Influenced by my thoughts about the participation of women in physics, from the value open software development has brought to me, to the education and pleasure reading openly published blogs, novels, graphic novels, articles, movies…. I do what i can to give back in that economy.
I can’t say JW added to my understanding much here, but there was a tangential comment about the use of the open journal technology: he hopes that the efficiencies such a tool would bring would support editors nurturing authors, going beyond the right to participate to improving the quality of that participation.
Personally, i find a little nudge here — should i be participating in scholarly discourse? (An appeal in my mind for more time, more energy, a longer life….)
(3) Academic Freedom, there are several aspects here. Part of it is the mechanics of the open journal software which keeps workflow records. JW never quite spells it out, but i believe that the unstated point here is that one can challenge a journal on biased acceptances and rejections. The story JW tells is of a Canadian medical journal and the run of events where the journal published an examination of how Plan B prescriptions were handled by pharmacists (somewhat critical review), the protest from the professional association of pharmacists, the medical association’s firing of the editors. JW notes, who would have thought that one would need to have academic freedom protected from an academic society?
I thought of that in the evening at the very sparsely attended community meeting. (I’ve been trained by attending Meeting for Business as a Friend, i suppose.) Someone spoke up about the proceedings — they should be open. Oh, ACM and IEEE would never allow it. Well, ACM (IEEE?) authors can publish papers on their own sites.So, tell us where your paper is and we can link to it from the meeting website.
Not — we *are* the ACM (or IEEE). We need to carry Willinsky’s call back to our professional societies. We need to take on that model he offered, where libraries support journals (not purchase them) and have our societies work to transition to a different publishing model.
I suppose i should write a letter.
Related: Directory of Open Access Journals and Public Library of Science.
