KMDI Pioneer Award in Electronic Publishing

While Leslie Chan and the gang bus their way down to Niagara Falls this morning as part of a post-conference tour (they'll be going on the Maid of the Mist and taking in a few winery tours, I understand) I am hanging around here to catch up on posting some of the events of the past few days (plus I have to do some roofing, my former/current trade while I transition to librarianship). . .

As part of the ELPUb extracurricular events there was a Boat Cruise and Dinner arranged by the organizers ~ I blogged about it earlier in terms of drink tickets and "vanilla access," which the following morning Leslie Chan greeted me with that knowledge, "You didn't like the beer,eh?!" . . . I replied, "So someone IS reading this stuff . . . " [;-)

I should mention too, conveying the light wit that has been undergirding the conference here, Lynn Copeland's comment prefacing her presentation on the context behind the development of OJS at SFU, "I hope our boat trip last night, going around and around in circles behind a bigger boat while it got darker and darker, is not a metaphor of what we are trying to do here."

One highlight of the Dinner & Cruise was the presentation of the KMDI Pioneer Award for outstanding contribution to the field of electronic publishing. Gale Moore, just days before stepping down as Director of KMDI and starting a super-sabbatical, introduced the context behind the award. She also suggested this could pose a model for subsequent ElPub host organizers to find someone in their host country who has contributed significantly to the field of electronic publishing. This year's recipient was John W Senders, Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. This brief description in the evening's Program situates Mr. Sender's accomplishment,

John Sender's 1975 Report to the U.S. National Science Foundation-Scientific Publication Systems: An Analysis of Past, Present and Future Methods of Scientific Communication (with UT colleagues Anderson, C & Hecht, C) provided a systematic account of the concern at that time that "the current methods of scientific publication are becoming inadequate to meet the needs of the scientific community" (p.ii). The future he saw was electronic. In 1976 he started what may be the first electronic publication.

John, in accepting the award, recounted some of the career history that led his recommendations and explained the reason he was not a billionaire like Bill Gates today was that when he introduced his e-journal idea to a funder and named the substantial dollar figure for launching the project, the funder readily agreed with the potential of the new venture and replied by substantially increasing the amount of seed money that should be allocated (exponentially increasing!), It was at that point that Mr. Sender's saw "the money would own him and that he would not be in control of it" . . . so he quietly stepped away after the initial journal. Still full of energy, wit and charm at the age of 80, John Sender's seems to have made the right decision. And the profound foresight of his article is evidence that he was indeed, a significant pioneer in this now full-blown field of electronic publishing. An article, "The Scientific Journal of the Future" (The American Sociologist, 1976 vl 11 (August): 160-164), is proof that Mr. Sender's saw quite accurately into that future.

Read it here (please make allowances, I haven't taken a Digital Scanning course yet!)

Senders%2C%20Scientific%20Journals.pdf

So you are one of the few people in the world who are unacquainted with Stevan Harnad's opinion whether OA should go Gold or Green . . . you must be tuned with anticipation for any disclosure he might make here as the ELPUB closing keynote. Before I disclose I'd like to extend our best to his Mom who is ill in Montreal, which prevented him from making a live appearance here in Toronto. We hope she is feeling comfortable Stevan. And I'd like to remark that Stevan is probably one of the few in research out there who would make a comment like, "Could you possibly remove my face from my slide?" The rest are seeking to strengthen their imprimatur on their work and he is trying to erase it !?! (There was a video feed that kept messing up so Les Carr positioned the slides on the full screen where Stevan could see . . . but his Skype (?) feed was super-imposed over a section).

And now they big disclosure . . . Harnad suggests/recommends/is solely convinced!! that Green should in all ways and in all cases precede Gold with respect to OA'd research. The rationale: the research is 100% in the hands of researchers ("in their fingers") and can be self-archived (Green) straight away . . . while Gold requires the persuading of publishers, persuading of authors and the need to pay $$ for submission to these environments (Stevan would rather see that money stay directed toward the research itself). what struck me was the amount of research undertaken to prove this point (convincingly, I might suggest): There's Peter Hirst (2006 and graph) and Harnad (2007 ~ How come I can't find this one Stevan? 'Request a copy' Sci Editor 50(10): 500-510 ) , Carr and Harnad (2005) and of course Elma Swan (2005) . . . how's that for upping the bibliometrics . . .!!
The point there is whether Eve Gray and colleagues could have benefited from those R-dollars that just confirm #-crunching and done something viable with edu or health care in the South? But perhaps the whole "positive feedback" loop that launched Stevan's PP about metrics and mandates (mandates increase metrics which reward mandates) is an important step (?) to convince researchers to publish their findings so they can benefit communities . . . not simply to promote and sustain their own interests . . .
Maybe its just the 3 days of intensive study (rehearsing the efforts of what local communities have been doing to try to push for OA in Js and Rs, with all the streamlining of protocols, advocacy efforts, mandate successes, etc. etc.) that make me wonder what all this intensive effort needs to be made around
Repositories
+ Incentives
+ Mandates
to get the high depository rates that we all long to see in the end. That's not to say the Stanford announcement, as well as the NIH mandate and Stevan's reference to a Finnish mandate, all which bring the totals to 46, are not important details. I'm just trying to wrap my librarian-in-training head around why people wouldn't want to get their stuff out there and accessible. Has the individualism so intruded our best intentions that we can't even sense this sublime/and obvious error of our ways.

That publishers are making huge profits on research that should be directed toward the public good (has anyone done a study of how much Big Publishing Co's have invested in research as a "payment in thanks" for all these fees they charge libraries for access to the research that was often conducted in their very institutions . . .?) and somehow we need to soft-peddle our way around policies and strategies to get some of this in IRs . . . its no wonder Stevan says Green before Gold. Its your stuff, researchers! drop it in the box and lets see how it works toward tending the world's woes. I'm going to bed, maybe I'll feel a little softer tomorrow.

OA and the real world . . . the South!

This is one of those days I wish I could be in 2 places at the same time . . .Peter Pennefather's session on "assignments of relevance" and Eve Grays' talk on African U's and the knowledge economy. Since Peter and I are both here at U of T (and I dropped in to tell him I'd buy him a beer one day if he'd give me a personal presentation) I chose Eve's session and the India, Mexico and Brazil talks that were also part of the "OA in Less Developed Countries" umbrella (less developed than what? and developed how?).

With such such witty lines as "Let them Read cake!" and that "Free the Book" has downloads in every country in the world except Greenland . . . is anyone in the room from Greenland who can tell me why?" I knew I was in the right room. Eve (already meriting a strong reputation in the halls here for her penetrating questions in other session) offered some amazing statistical maps that disclosed the myopic focus of world research and the embarrassing graphic stats of world poverty (check out world mapper for an adventure that just may change your philosophy of life!). Eve tosses out names (Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture and Jean Claude Passeron) like bread crumbs, but an attentive audience might realize that following them might actually lead one out of the forest of despair our global economy has constructed. Passeron's phrase "knowledge economy and knowledge society" (the 1st about greed, the 2nd public good and public growth) fairly captures the gap that exists behind Publishing North and Publishing South (even within OA! since without a tech infrastructure to access them all the available documents of research are just a watery mirage in a desert journey) . . . this is a gap that Eve seems wisely and shrewdly capable of closing, if only by degrees (she states that there is "360 degrees of openness and it needs to be taken a degree at a time!" in S. Africa).

Here colleague Mark Burke made this observation at the beginning of his piece,
"spending these few days at the conference I am both overwhelmed and really really depressed . . . the wealth and resources I have seen and heard about at ELPUB make all the developments of OA in S Africa pale in comparison!" Not only are there increasing needs of OA awareness and development in SA Universities but also major infusions of infrastructure development and bandwidth increase . . . and something that Eve notes well, "a complimentary metrics and incentives model" that fits the culture and not the bibliometric system that so defines the West.

One promising signal I saw leaving the room afterward was the "computer in plastic" prototype Peter Pennefather and his partners had set up in the hall that sits in a tupperware container, boots and runs from a usb key (the Ubuntu system runs the whole thing on the web and removes the need for a hard-drive . . . pic to follow asap) and is made entirely of generic parts that are available anywhere from Mozambique to Moscow.
. . . and it makes the Macs Thin "so 90s"!! Very Cool!

video feeds - fixed

Sorry for the false post yesterday but I had a chance to speak with Leslie this am and got some links from Peter Thiessen who is involved in this tech-end of ELPUB (thanks Peter!). I add his e-mail post here for your viewing pleasure,

as requested here are the archived recordings, though please know that I haven't had a chance to test these links - I'm afraid Adobe Connect may throw an error if I do. So if you have a chance please try them. Also, here is the link to the current live recordings: http://connect.scholarsportal.net/elpub
sorry these should work:

DAY 1 - PKP Workshops
http://connect.scholarsportal.info/p44194770/
http://connect.scholarsportal.info/p52785629/
http://connect.scholarsportal.info/p89339284/

DAY 2 - Sessions 1
http://connect.scholarsportal.info/p75467897/
http://connect.scholarsportal.info/p33803731/
http://connect.scholarsportal.info/p65696920/

DAY 2 - Sessions 2
http://connect.scholarsportal.info/p11511502/
http://connect.scholarsportal.info/p13251676/

DAY 3 - Sessions 1
http://connect.scholarsportal.info/p80348385/
http://connect.scholarsportal.info/p28633214/

Regards,
-peter

publishing business models

I sat in on three uniquely distinct presentations yesterday, "Should UPresses adopt an OA Business model?, "No Budget, No Worries," and "Sydney's eScholarship framework," and came away with a sense of tremendous commonalities in OA and equally significant distinctions. Albert Greco's fast paced number crunching comparison of Big Publishing vs OA alternatives was a brilliant display of the tremendous profits still available in an industry with "low betas" and "high alphas." Greco stressed the reason Wall Street was still investing heavily into an industry "where 7 of 10 loose money, 2 break even and 1 is a financial hit!" was that "while the economics of publishing are harsh and unforgiving, they are still understandable and predictable . . . you can model with confidence for 5 years!" I can't begin to presume to cover the details of his confidently projected industry review (see the PP here
GRECO%20%26%20WHARTON%20ELPUB%202008%20TORONTO%20POWER%20POINTS.ppt) but the end-game of the talk is that OA can offer as reliable and sustainable a business model for publishers . . .

What followed was a PP presentation by Tarek Loubani (in "low resolution" he intro'd!) was a realized example of full-blown OA Journal founded and maintained on zero business (though perhaps Greco would want to see some profit margins?). The description of Open Medicine's founding and development was in turn a sales pitch for the value of OJS
and a walk through of some amazing open source tools that frame the backend of the journal (and which Tarek encourages everyone to explore and use which is why I list them here . . .). Openwengo is the communication protocol they use (think Skype in os), mediawiki which undergirds Wikipedia can be used to underlie all wiki traffic, gnu mailman is their mailing list mgmt system; they also use Open Office (" . . . nothing beats them in the backend!" Tarek stressed), Firefox, Konqueror and epiphany are browsers (and Canada is 2nd in world using os browsers, which these 3 are) and Lemon8 is what flips their Word doc into XML and then PDF or whatever format they require (including "generating HTML on the fly"). We are about to launch an OA journal for Faculty of Information here at U of T (F/IQ) so I will be sure we try out many of these tools for our own project . . .

The third of this publishing models trio was Ross Coleman's comprehensive overview of the very successful eScholarship program being run at USydney. Like Greco's PP, the content was so dense I can't hope to re-present it here (but I didn't snag the slides so poke around the Sydney site for egs. of their successful project) . . . but I would comment that the one person who approached Ross after the session was Greco himself because he was intrigued in this example of a UPress that consisently runs in the black. It would be interesting to follow their on-going correspondence (if any) after this conference. We are in a rich time of publishing re-tooling and these interchanges of ideas, models and cut & paste mash-ups that happening here in the ELPUB lecture hall and hallways is surely one of the engines behind the horizon of things that will come into our view as we travel forward (think Gutenberg on the net!)

the biology in OA

Tried my hand at the Metadata and Query Format sessions during the morning got to realize very soon that this conversation was very much for those in the field. Even my coursework in Bibliographic Control at the Faculty of Information Studies didn't help me negotiate the technical jargon and complex systems (each presenter was exhibiting "streamed-down" versions) . . . yet the Q&A after each proved their were engaged listeners who were trying to hammer out their own solutions in their own environments and came, perhaps to gain a few clues from their peers. Strong human interests shared in the body collect of OA.

Lunch offered an opportunity to see a few "breaks in the skin" of the OA community, when Leslie Chan mentioned his reproof to John Willinsky in times past that Hindawi Publishing was not OA. John referenced in his morning talk the casual nature in which the librarian employing Hindawi disinterestedly announced "19,500 titles on-line" when asked how many journals they maintained. Remarkable, and allowing for unparalleled access in the region (though issues of technical infrastructure still need addressing, comments John) but for Leslie, the facts behind Hindawi are that they began as profitable business model that required no subscriber support to launch (something I had learned just the day before in the PKP workshop on OJS (Willinsky's very project!?!). But hey, I'm just a newbie to this whole ELPUB community and its hard to know how to sift issues of authority and truth. I admire the efforts of both Leslie and John.

So I was a little more peeked to hear Gunther Eysenbach question/comment in the early afternoon session during the Stranack session on OJS (my source for the Hindawi insights) when he came to the piece on Lemon8. This is a great little convertor that turns a Word doc into XML in minutes. In fact, in a later session Tarek Loubani of Open Medicine stated this one software "has changed everything for me" . . . in 5 minutes it turns anything into XML, and then O minutes (measurements in nanoseconds he boasts!) into a PDF other other formats . . . and generates HTML on the fly. "This should be at the top of the tool list for anyone and everyone in publishing." Back to Gunther's question, what does it mean to take something that was originally developed somewhere else and then to rebrand it as Lemon8 . . . and in of all places, at PKP. "Does this not undermine the expectations and intentions of OA?" Turns out the code was written by the developer while at the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) who is now over at PKP . . . launching this new sweetheart. The only reply Kevin could muster, being put on the spot in this way, was "you'll have to ask - - - who knows more about it." [Kevin is a great guy, I need to add, and his workshop walking us through OJS was excellent yesterday . . . and the quick presentation and highlights today were informative for the room, etc. etc.] How does OA handle issues of "attribution" which is really all that Gunther's question was pointing to (and JIMR is his brainchild, as PKP is Willinsky's). So "cracks in the skin."

I got a chance to speak with Tarek after his presentation and ask a bit about this Lemon8 situation (I've promoted this tool enough to flag some metrics crawler so I'll mention that Journal of Internet Medical Research is the leading OPEN ACCESS peer-reviewed transdisciplinary journal on health and health care in the Internet age and Gunther Eysenbach launched it as an intentional high level competitive OA journal to show the world this can be done ~it ranks 2nd in the field!! ~ just to level the bibliometrics if anyone counting). Tarek suggested there may simply be an instance of "forking," where OA software seems to be going in one direction and a developer sees other promises for it . . . thereby releasing an alternative expression. In fact, in some instances the forked paths might re-converge at some point down the line suggested Tarek at which point Rea Devakos of TSpace, overhearing my whole exploration of this theme, "the issue still is a simple expectation of attribution . . . and in fact if you do scroll to the bottom of the webpage of --8 you'll see something resembling this credit." But is it enough? and when I did try to look for the credit I couldn't find it! So no matter how much "public knowledge" is out there, no matter how much code is available OA and environments are accessible regardless the ability to pay (I use to get my health care at Cook County Hospital when I couldn't afford Insurance while a student-pastor . . .) we are still faced with the question of what it means to be human, to have feelings, to have attachments, and to presume standards of rightness. How do we negotiate toward those regions? I think there is room for a conference that explores these themes . . .

video updates and day-end wrap up

I just checked the link for the videos and regrettably it was only set for a live feed. I will try to get Leslie's help in am to make that available 24/7 . . . right now he's making his way back from the dinner boat cruise. Great Toronto evening on the harbour . . . lots of conversation, swapping stories, sharing knowledge, eating good food. A little metaphor surfaced early in the night, though, that captured seems to capture some of the issues flow around OA and fee based access . . .
we were each given a drink ticket when boarding the vessel, and cashing mine in for a brew I was offered a choice between a few domestics and a Bud . . . returning to the bar a little later in the evening for a 2nd round I found that "cash" allowed me access to a number of European and other premium brews ?!
Talking with a few colleagues about the upgrade options through the pay model, it seemed to remind us of the various journal business models described over the course of the day's session!). I was tempted to ask Leslie why the evening wasn't full OA, not to say the article ~ I mean, beer ~ wasn't enjoyable (Steam Whistle is a fine Toronto brew) . . . but then I recalled his earlier comment from the day that he wasn't against OA with a little pay here and there. Maybe he was prepping us for the night ahead?! [;-)