Here’s a relatively unsorted list of thoughts that I’ve mentally penned since the last attendee headed for the exit of the Roy Lichtenstein Atrium.

We (as ‘the Open Access movement’, however vaguely that term is defined) need to…

• …do a much better job at bringing the scholarly societies to the table. The session on that topic was a good start, but it revealed that there is a communicative and perceptual rift between societies, who are by necessity conservative (they need to survive!), and OA activists, who can afford to be progressive. How will going OA impact a society’s membership? The common assumption is that members will defect if they no longer pay for the society journal with their fees, but there is no entirely conclusive evidence for that. Does going OA mean cutting off a source of revenue? Not always, as some societies heavily subsidize their print operation, meaning that going digital and OA may actually be a way of reducing costs for them.
• …look at more constructive ways of working with commercial publishers. In some disciplines and areas their role is more important than in others (in the natural sciences they are powerful because they frequently control impact, in the human sciences their expertise is important for the publishing process itself) and I don’t think it is impossible to publish or assure quality without them. But there is no reason whatsoever to shut them out and ignore their experience and ability to innovate – if they can find ways of recouping costs from non-subscription sources (author fees, advertising, associated services, POD…) we’ll all be better off if we have them with us.
• …convince funding agencies and politicians that publishing is not free, and that moving to a model in which access is both free and open means that costs must be recouped elsewhere. I’m entirely aware that this is widely known and accepted, but understandably public institutions are not jumping at the opportunity to spend additional money, especially while both the closed access system of subscriptions and the Open Access system of publishing subsidies must be funded in parallel.
  One strong argument for OA from a political perspective is global competition when it comes to cutting edge research. This presentation given at Berlin 6 by Solange Santos from Brazil on the immense scope of the SciELO network drove home that point: if we (in the [more] developed countries) do not move towards OA swiftly enough, and OA turns out be a significant catalyst for research innovation (as some claim it will be), we may find ourselves losing footing to developing countries that embrace OA more quickly at some point.
• …get librarians to work much more closely with researchers to support the publishing process. There has already been significant change in how libraries and librarians regard their role, but I think there is still a vast potential for change, especially here in Germany (my excuse for making blatant generalizations!).
  Librarians tend to see themselves as guardians of physical objects (books) and of digital objects which can be treated like physical objects (papers, dissertations, stuff that can be put into an institutional repository). In my (admittedly limited) view, they tend to be too far away from the researchers who desperately need someone to help them with the financial, legal and technical issues of publishing. I greatly recommend watching this presentation by David Weinberger for insight on the physical/virtual ‘objects of knowledge’ issue and some of the questions it raises.
• …and finally, approach researchers in a new, completely different way. There is still the belief among many involved in financing, supporting and disseminating research that those who undertake it have both the ability and the motivation to “move to open access” by themselves. I don’t believe that this is true. Many junior researchers who might be in favor of OA cannot choose freely where they want to publish, because the wrong choice is a risk to their career. Many senior researchers who have the influence and standing in their discipline to drive a paradigm shift do not embrace OA because the formats, publishing channels and procedures involved are unfamiliar and appear unreliable to them. But at the core, neither of these issues is decisive.
  The pivotal problem is that most researchers, regardless of where they stand on the career ladder, are not impacted personally by whether or not something is Open Access, and that their perspective as individuals, and not the common good, shapes their views. As Steve Anderson (I believe) pointed out in his talk at the conference, there’s a difference between free beer and free speech, between “I don’t have to pay for it” and “It’s in the public domain”. Researchers are by and large shielded from the subscription costs of the closed access system by their institutions and I honestly believe that many of them are not too concerned over the privatization of public assets that follows from the entrenched system. The business of business is business, to quote Milton Friedman, and similarly in our modern, globalized research environment the business of research is research, and not a whole lot of anything else.
  Let me drive the economic analogy a bit further. Those in favor of deregulating the world’s financial systems often cited the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (Alan Greespan) as a strong fail-safe, one that made third-party intervention unnecessary. But just as investors (primarily) focus on short-term profit, researchers (primarily) focus on immediate career benefits, not on the public good or the taxpayer’s burden.
  Open Access is a societal issue and not an individual one, therefore we cannot expect individuals with individual interests to be the driving force behind it, but only institutions with collective interests. Only by providing the right mix of incentives, mandates and support (both financially and in terms of know-how) can we get the horse to drink, to use Dieter Stein’s metaphor of the horse and the trough.

So how do the parties listed above succeed at supporting Open Access?

I believe that one very effective way of enabling OA in the long term is to push for entirely new forms of publishing, forms that are ‘OA by nature’, such as blogs and wikis. The entrenched forms are conceptually associated with the entrenched system and it will probably be harder to disassociate the one from the other than to popularize entirely new forms of science communication (i.e. ‘journal’ and ‘article’ are conceptually associated with ‘paper’, ‘commercial publisher’ and ‘subscription’, while ‘blog’ and ‘wiki’ aren’t).

New forms of scholarly communication that have novel advantages over existing forms will be adopted not because they are open (because, as outlined above, by itself that hardly matters) but because they offer specific benefits to the individual scholar. Obviously they will exist side by side with established forms. But they could act as a catalyst that raises awareness among researchers for the benefits of Open Access, because the reach and openness of hypertext publishing is what makes it so attractive.

I think it’s necessary to work on many different fronts at once. One thing that institutions (specifically those with a disciplinary anchoring) should do, is to give all their researchers easy-to-use tools for personal hypertext publishing.

What about starting a wiki-based platform similar to OpenWetWare as an inter-institute channel to facilitate collaboration among Max Planck institutes? Why does no major university (that I know of, at least) operate an institutional blog planet so that I can see what my colleagues in psychology, economics or computer sciences are working on? If these tools can facilitate collaboration at transnational companies, why not at universities and research institutes, which should be about collaboration by default?

Update: I have found a blog planet at an academic institution after all – at the University of Cape Town. I think this underscores my point about so-called ‘developing countries’ being more innovate than we are. While I’m sure there are other examples of institutional blog aggregators in different countries, I am not aware of a single one at a German university.

Here are my slides:

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Edit: if this looks strange, please reload the page. For reasons I cannot fathom slideshare’s embeds manage to blow up the page unless I manually adjust the source code…

As some of you might know, I’m very much engaged in the Open Access movement and involved in several projects related to making scholarly information more accessible. In light of this, I am enthusiastic to announce that I will be organizing a panel with the working title New Forms of Scholarly Communication: Blogs, Wikis and Web 2.0 in Academia at the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference in November. The event is the successor to previous Berlin conferences organized by the Max Planck Society and its partners and will take place here in Düsseldorf.

What exactly is behind the title of the panel? Essentially, I envision a bundle of presentations centered on these interconnected aspects:

• research publishing beyond e-books and e-journals – what new forms of publishing (if any) has the Net brought us?
• new ways of dealing with data – how do platforms such as IBM’s Many Eyes and MIT’s SIMILE library affect how we can look at data and, consequently, how we publish?
• new ways of collaborating – how do new means of communication and collaboration affect us – for example, the use of social bookmarking tools to create shared bibliographies, use of wikis to collaboratively write books etc?
• new ways of evaluation and discussing – how do approaches such as open peer review affect our view of science and the way in which we evaluate research results?

I am pinging the institutions and individuals listed below, which I believe could contribute greatly to making this an interesting and diverse panel. Please do let me me know (via blog or email to puschmann@gmail.com) if you are interested in contributing, or if you have suggestions for subtopics or speakers.

Tools/Technology

Zotero

Many Eyes

SIMILE

SciVee

Research into eScience and blogs/wikis/social networks in an academic context

Virtual Knowledge Studio

HUMlab

Lilia Efimova

Eszter Hargittai

New concepts and approaches in publishing/reviewing

Nature Peer-to-Peer

Living Reviews

Note that these are just a few names that popped into my head spontaneously – there are many more.

I also realized this morning that one immensely interesting speaker on the changing forms of information and on how we share it, disseminate it and evaluate its usefulness would be JP Rangaswami. About 1,5 years ago, I read this fascinating post by JP about what he called “livebrarians”. The post, in which he sketched out differences between the Net and physical libraries, ignited a debate about what role information “professionals” (in other words, librarians) can play in a read-write environment where retrieval happens via keyword search and semantic information is annotated automatically or by amateurs. I particularly liked this quote: “my problem is I really think that any damned fool can be a librarian.” I fully agree. JP has also recently posted about Many Eyes, a project that I very much want to integrate into the discussion.

One might think that open access publishing is a very specific issue, relevant only to academics and librarians, while what we generally call Web 2.0 is just a bundle of trendy buzzwords and an opportunity for tech companies to make money, and that the two issues have little to do with each other. But I believe that means not seeing the big picture. Ultimately, open access publishing is about making information accessible to anyone with an interest in a given area of research, because it is assumed that what can be created as a result of the information being free is worth more than what can be earned by selling it. Open access is to research what open source is to software and for that reason it should be every bit as relevant to companies.

It’s no longer cool – or even ok – to publish a web site in PDF to browsers and some other data via a WS-* type web service to others. Instead, once you forget about browsers being the only user agents, quite a bit of the web 2.0 developments seem very natural.

So the participative aspect of web 2.0 starts well before everyone creating content; it starts with not making restrictive assumptions about who and how people – or programs – will use your site. Let the web participate in reusing your content.

With much of the 2.0 hype coming from a non-technical direction theses days, it is easy to overlook that access is what greases the wheels of the social web. Web 1.0 basically treated every user the same and forgot who you were or what you had just done a moment ago each time you clicked on a link. Data and design were essentially inseparable and websites were conceptualized as real estate on the Net – the more you had, the better (this was the age in which Yahoo still wanted to be a portal). We now get that websites are not like real estate and that our content is not synonymous with our website. People will want to use your content in ways you haven’t anticipated and it hardly matters whether they use it “here” (on your site) or “there” (on a portable device, their own site etc). As Robert points out, Web 2.0  is about making up for technical mistakes that were made in the past and about losing the spatial metaphor that makes us see the Web as consisting of sites and pages.

Following informational breadcrumbs like that, I’ve just discovered a very interesting piece by Bill Hooker asking What do we mean by Open Science? Have a look if you’re also a researcher, though Bill is thinking specifically of natural science. Also, read this short report on presenting in Second Life by Jean-Claude Bradley, Bill Hooker’s essay on Open Science and Open Data and Richerd Akerman’s post on the future of research and impact if you have the time.

Here’s a great quote from Richard:

What I keep hearing is, how can we impact factorize open science. Well, the answer is, you can’t. Let’s stop trying to find some magic algorithm whereby a machine tells us what quality science is. What’s completely mad to me about this is that we already have processes to assess science quality. Every time you review a new student, every time you look at a grant proposal, heck, even on the infamous tenure committees and research assessments, a group of humans looks at a portfolio of existing or proposed work, and decides whether it is good enough.

I guess because the ways we find and retrieve information have changed drastically, we also expect quality assessment to become automated at some point. One could argue that it already has in other contexts with things like PageRank, though of course that’s popularity being ranked, not quality (the two seem to converge to some extent when it comes to web search).

Regarding terminology (“Open Science”, “Open Research” etc): like Bill, I could care less. Linguistically the Science-Humanities-Social Sciences split doesn’t map to languages other than English anyway. In German we say Wissenschaft (which is all of the above) and add a prefix (Naturwissenschaft for (Natural) Sciences, Geisteswissenschaft for Humanities and so forth). The other thing is where to situate many new disciplines in regards to these traditional categories. If, like me, you do natural language processing, social network analysis and genre studies more or less at once, does that belong to Science, SocSci or Humanities? I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. Human language is just one phenomenon that can be studied with a variety of methods and I won’t wait for disciplinary delineations to catch up. We should call it Open Science and just broaden the semantic range of the word science a bit. Words do, on occasion, change their meanings.