Complicating the Question of Access (and Value) with University Press Publications
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Marguerite Avery, who is a Research Affiliate in the program, presented the talk below as part of Shaking It Up -- a one-day workshop on the changing state of the research ecosystem jointly sponsored by Digital Science, MIT, Harvard and Microsoft.Her talk focuses on current challenges around the accessibility of scholarly content and on a scan of innovative new models aimed to address them.
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Complicating the Question of Access (and Value) with University Press Publications
- 1. Shaking It Up: How to Thrive In – And Change – The Research Ecosystem Marguerite Avery | Program in Information Science, MIT Libraries
- 2. Barriers to Access Price Time Format
- 3. About University Presses… Mission-driven, not-for-profit organizations charged with serving the public good by generating and disseminating knowledge Publish works of of scholarly, intellectual, or creative merit for more specialized audiences UPs are extensions of their sponsoring institutions Considered a key node in knowledge and research network of learned societies, scholarly associations, and research libraries
- 4. Barrier: Price OA Advocacy Groups Authors Alliance OA Publishing Initiatives (recent) Knowledge Unlatched Open Library for the Humanities Amherst College Press Oberlin Group / Lever Initiative
- 5. Barrier: Time research results [Twitter] draft paper [SSRN] Conference paper Published book Journal article Research findings Published content
- 6. Omg! A ship passing thru the Panama Canal uses 52 MILLION gallons of water! [Twitter] Environmental impact Panama Canal Watershed – UNESCO report “The Machete and the Freighter: Making the Panama Canal Watershed, 1977- 1999” 4S 2009 Conference paper, posted [SSRN] Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal (MIT Press, 2014) “Nature as Infrastructure: Making and Managing the Panama Canal Watershed” Social Studies of Science 42(4)
- 7. Barrier: Format What does content want to be?
- 8. Short(er) formats Existing content New content Developing content
- 11. A recent access experiment from a UP Cambridge University Press, 2014
Editor's Notes
- When we think about barriers to access, price tends to be the primary concern, but this isn’t the only issue: Price – the fee charged for a reader to access the content. (It’s important to acknowledge the difference between price, what the publisher charges for the content, and its cost, the expense of the labor expended to create the content, as this is considerable.) Time - The amount of time that elapses before research and content reaches its audience (or market) is a major barrier. Format is also a barrier to access, as if we do not have the means to make content available, to publish it in the proper format that does justice to the research and its conclusions, then we have failed to make it accessible. These three factors are often enmeshed and can be difficult to tease apart, however I do think it is a worthwhile pursuit to consider this with more precision as it yields a more complex picture of the research landscape.
- - close, sometimes fraught relationship with academic libraries, as these entities were the primary market for their publications, obviously this is changing with the digital and electronic dissemination of content - AAUP – the other AAUP – the Association for American University Presses, is the umbrella organization overseeing the 130+ university presses www.aaupnet.org American university presses are represented by the other AAUP – Association of American University Presses.
- While there are too many to list, some of the latest efforts in open access monograph publishing platforms include Knowledge Unlatched Authors Alliance - Promoting the public good by supporting authors who write to be read The objectives of the Authors Alliance are: - Managing authors rights: helping authors to understand and manage the rights necessary to make their works broadly available now and in the future - Authorship law and policy: providing education and advocacy for sound politics that help authors create their works, make them accessible to the public, and ensure their preservation - reaching audiences: helping authors identify online platforms, journals, libraries, and other tools, techniques, and partners that can help them communicate with their audiences - authorial reputation and integrity: working to ensure that authors can make their contributions to knowledge and culture widely available without sacrificing their interests in reputation and integrity
- Time is a complex issue and there’s not enough time to do it justice, but I would like us to keep in mind the different between research findings and results, which might find an early audience via Twitter or SSRN before evolving into a polished publication. But even polished publications do not represent the end of the conversation. As David Weinberger notes, the book (or insert your choice of publication here) is just a pause in the conversation that continues after the work is published.
- Here is this cycle in action from a slice of research through the development process to a polished publication. Time span = ~5 years Please note that the publications listed are actual publications however I have taken liberties with the first two stages. Apologies to Ashley Carse!
- With apologies to architect Louis Kahn, who famously asked, what does a brick want to be? After spending over a decade with a university press, I believed that our formats – books and journal articles with little flexibility to accommodate non-print content, to be compromising our ability to capture and publish research. Thus I have stepped away from University presses to champion the development of new digital formats for authoritative scholarly publications in the digital space. I’m currently sheltering in place in the MIT Libraries as a research affiliate in the Program for Information Science. But I’m not here to talk about me…
- To move away from the current book- journal binary we find ourselves ensnared in, at least in the UP space Here is the range of possibilties: Stanford UP – Briefs, also Rutgers UP Pinpoints
- And naturally, such a publication experiment would be motivated by historians, who are generally on the vanguard of scholarly communication developments due to the lavish funding scenarios associated with their discipline…
- A paradox about this book is a curious container with its fast-paced production is that the content of the book focus on temporality of historical research and the value of long duree history, by looking at big data over periods of centuries Thus doing things quickly shouldn’t negate the value of the slower pace of intellectual thought .