open access
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Privileging AI over people
Many of you will have seen that the Internet Archive lost an appeal against publishers recently. This related specifically to their National Emergency Library project when, during the pandemic, they removed the loaning cap on digital copies of books they had scanned. Remember, this was during the pandemic, when people couldn’t access physical copies, and many commercial publishers were effectively engaged in price gouging of digital copies. Access to some 500,000 books has been removed. I suppose I have some sympathy with authors who may be losing income as a result, and some of the digital-print analogies break down around copying a physical book and making it available to everyone,…
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The darkish side of open licences
A few weeks ago Eamon Costello highlighted that Taylor and Francis/Routledge had sold the rights to harvest their content for Ai to Microsoft. I, like many others, felt a sense of outrage (although I haven’t published with them for quite a few years). I think it is the sense of powerlessness that is frustrating, they can do this, and make even more money from your content, without any consultation. However, I also reflected that as someone who ran an open access journal and publishes under open access licences, then Microsoft (and any other AI harvesters) could have been doing this happily already, without any need to consult me. I remember…
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25 Years of OU – 2011: JIME
Around this time I became a co-editor of The Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) with my colleague Ann Jones. It had been founded in 1999 by Simon Buckingham Shum, operating their own software, fully open access and an open peer review model. It was very experimental at the time – even a fully online journal was novel. Simon and Tamara Sumner outline the innovative nature of the journal in this article. It transferred into IET later, and shifted its focus more to open education. The recurring academic institution issue of maintaining legacy software arose, and finding funding to do so, and so it was relaunched using OJS, the…
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Sci-Hub and the Rebecca Riots
Going on one of my extended, and tenuous analogy skits, you are warned. In order to consider recent developments in open access publishing, particularly Sci-Hub, and #ICanHazPDF I’m going to go back to, where else, a set of rural riots in 19th Century Wales. The Rebecca Riots as they were known, were a series of protests and disturbances in South-West Wales concentrated in the period 1839-1844. The target of the protests were usually toll-gates, which were demolished by large crowds during night-time raids, although toll-gates were seen as symbolic of a wider series of grievances. The leader of the crowd would be dressed in women’s clothes and be referred to…
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The role of policy in open ed
I was invited to give a talk at the Dept of Business Information and Skills for a meeting organised by ALT, on the role of policy in open education. I looked at OER policies at the institutional, regional and national level and open access policies. I argued that open policies are a good example of how policy can influence practice, and also some of the issues. But the same applies to other areas you might want to consider. The Open Flip I argued will be significant, and policy offers us a means of reallocating resources and encouraging new models, such as Open Library Humanities. Putting these slides together was a…
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Should bid proposals be open access?
I was at a UNESCO OER meeting in Paris last week (impersonating an important person) and a topic that came up a couple of times was the waste of resource that we just accept. Someone highlighted all the EU funded projects which are difficult to search, or find outputs for. They were from an AI, machine learning background so they wanted access to this to discern patterns and create links between projects. In the Battle for Open I talk about how much effort is wasted in the current bid writing proposal: Some of the inherent waste in current practice often goes unnoticed, because it is accepted practice that academics have…
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Battle for open – latest skirmishes
(you should read this post in 1940s BBC voice) I did a post a while back on some of the frontline reporting from the battle for open (I am being slightly tongue in cheek with this militaristic language), so thought I’d give another quick account. First, some good news. The US Dept of Education continues to engage with OER, and announced “the launch of its #GoOpen campaign to encourage states, school districts and educators to use Open Educational Resources (OER).” This is great news for several reasons – it reduces costs, allows diversity of resources, and if the ‘open virus’ theory has any weight (okay, it’s just me who proposes…
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Do not go gentle
(T-shirt available from Fake Elsevier) This post is a plea really to academics to not surrender rights, or the promise of openness so readily. I completely understand that I am in a privileged position, and it’s easy for me as a prof to say “only publish in open access”, or “share your stuff openly”. But it’s a different story if you are a new researcher, and after one of those ever more elusive permanent positions. But even so, I am often surprised at just how readily academics acquiesce to bad deals, particularly with regards to publishing. I have frequently heard “I would love to publish open access, but in my…
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Social media and Open Access
(image – https://flic.kr/p/aFuQYt) I often make this point in talks on digital scholarship, but don’t think I’ve done it in a blog sized chunk before. There is an interesting relationship between social media and open access. As you develop an online identity as an academic, so the role of social media (twitter, blogs, academia.edu – whatever is your preferred mix) takes on a more central role in your activity. So it is natural that you use these to disseminate research findings and publications. And this is where the relationship with open access comes in. If you want to disseminate your recent article via your carefully cultivated online network, then it…
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JIME, Ubiquity & OA models
I’m a co-editor of JIME at the Open University. It’s had a long tradition here, started in KMi it piloted open peer review, using it’s own software back in the late 90s. It has always been open access, and when maintaining our own software became a burden, it switched to using the open source system OJS. It’s focus has changed over the years – although it’s called the Journal for Interactive Media in Education, it is more about open education and ed tech in HE now. It has remained free to publish in and open access. I think its story is similar to that of many journals run by universities,…
