Author Archive
Open Access legal articles can expect 58% more citations
To date, there have been no studies focusing exclusively on the impact of openaccess on legal scholarship. We examine open access articles from three journalsat the University of Georgia School of Law and confirm that legal scholarshipfreely available via open access improves an article’s research impact. Openaccess legal scholarship – which today appears to account for almost half of theoutput of law faculties – can expect to receive 58% more citations than non-openaccess writings of similar age from the same venue.
The present article offers empirical justification to assert that these benefits are real,consistent, and sizeable. The open access advantage reported for other bodies of literatureextends to include legal scholarship, albeit with some identified caveats. Open access is mostlikely to impact other legal writings, but less so the citations within court opinions.
when free e-books are offered for a relatively long period of time, without requiring registration, print sales will increase
I don’t think the conclusion of this paper can be generalized across other book types (academic ones), but it’s a worthwhile read.
The present study indicates that there is a moderate correlation between free digital books being made permanently available and short-term print sales increases. However, free digital books did not always equal increased sales. This result may be surprising, both to those who claim that when a free version is available fewer people will pay to purchase copies, as well as those who claim that free access will not harm sales. The results of the present study must be viewed with caution. Although the authors believe that free digital book distribution tends to increase print sales, this is not a universal law. The results we found cannot necessarily be generalized to other books, nor be construed to suggest causation. The timing of a free e-book’s release, the promotion it received and other factors cannot be fully accounted for. Nevertheless, we believe that this data indicates that when free e-books are offered for a relatively long period of time, without requiring registration, print sales will increase.
See full article HERE. (thanks to Patrice and Indian/sarai connection).
The access privilege of the academic class
From our special correspondent …
(In the Dutch language part of the post, TvT asserts that commercial scientific publishers have pressured university libraries to limit access to journals etc (now all digitalised) to certified, registered users only – and bill for that use.)
Academic resources, especially periodicals, are more and more published and subscribed to in digital format. This diminishes non-academic public access to these resources as such data sources tend to be closed to non-members of universities and the like. Freedom of information is thus declining in our area of ubiquitous electronic communication. One needs to be a privileged member of the academic class to have access. This situation demands a reestablishment of the right to information for all citizens. Now commercial interests ban many people from scientific information sources. Some Dutch University Libraries have left open a backdoor for the knowledgeable general public, who can put their USB stick in some computers within the university to thus realize the traditional notion of freedom of access to the sciences for all.
from: http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com (Tjebbe van Tijen’s blog. ) Read the full post in Dutch here.
Peer review contributes to creation of unfounded authority?
In this fascinating and quite overwhelming study published in BMJ, Steven A Greenberg, associate professor of neurology, argues that in the citation network that was the object of his research, backdoor invention affected negatively the quality of knowledge produce, since it: “repeated misrepresentation of abstracts as peer reviewed papers to fool readers into believing that claims are based on peer reviewed published methods and data” . Although author clearly states that it is through abstracts, which in his view is a way to avoid peer reviewing, that backdoor is introduced, my conclusion is that on the basis of this research, we can say that peer reviewing in medical science is capable of significantly contributing to the creation of a large unfounded authority. Here’s authors conlusion paragraph in full:
“Citation is both an impartial scholarly method and a powerful form of social communication. Through distortions in its social use that include bias, amplification, and invention, citation can be used to generate information cascades resulting in unfounded authority of claims. Construction and analysis of a claim specific citation network may clarify the nature of a published belief system and expose distorted methods of social citation.”
He develops a vocabulary of citation distortions, and backdoor is the method how peer review is bypassed:
“In another form of invention, claims are introduced as fact through a “back door” that bypasses peer review and publication of methods and data. This is accomplished by repeated misrepresentation of abstracts as papers (seven different papers, 17 citations to 12 different misrepresented abstracts; […] Back door invention—repeated misrepresentation of abstracts as peer reviewed papers to fool readers into believing that claims are based on peer reviewed published methods and data”
He lets peer review lightly off the hook here. Isn’t the task of peer reviews to spot any problems with the quality of work reviewed, regardless of what form the distortion of knowledge claims takes? 
In my reading of his text, the author confirms the responsibility of the peer reviewing implicitly when he states that a medical claim (see his paper for specific claim used here) “is supported in this manner and accepted by peers as fact”. In other words, peers accepted as fact a claim that slipped through peer reviews, multiple times, in multiple papers. The graph on the right shows that “Only one of 32 citations flows to papers70 71 72 73 77 78 that present data that conflict with the validity of these models” – models that were the basis of knowledge claims supported as the fact by all the papers on the right of the graph in the blue. It’s a complex analysis, and it’s possible that i misunderstood. I emailed the author and asked for his view on my understanding that he let peer review too lightly off the hook. Here’s the full paper How citation distortions create unfounded authority: analysis of a citation network.
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OA book web publishing increases readership twentyfold
Writing recently about his Adventures in Web Publishing at the Inside Higher Ed website, professor Douglas J. Amy described his problem as one typical for many academics: although previously an author of three scholarly books, he wrote a manuscript for a wider audience which failed to attract any suitable publisher. So, he turned it into a website in 2007. Here’s what he says about the result:
“I had over 75,000 visitors to the site. Only half of those stayed long enough to read some of the material […] I can safely say that more people have read this online material than have read my other three books combined. Two of these books were published by university presses and were considered successful. But for these publishers, good sales are often measured in the hundreds – numbers which now seem very modest in comparison to the tens of thousands of readers who have visited my Web site. […] I’ve had readers from over 50 countries. This kind of broad geographical readership would clearly not have happened with a conventionally published book.”
If the print version would have sold 700 copies, and each of them was partly read by a single reader, while only a quarter of unique web visitor were partial web book readers, it still leaves us with 18750:700, or 26:1 ratio in favour of the web book edition.
Živković predicts future self-publishing real time peer reviewing science
From an interview with Bora Živković, the online Community Manager of the Open Access Journal PLoS One, answering the question will Open access change the way science is done, he says:
I think it is inevitable that we get there, the only thing I do not say is how fast, because there will be a lot of resistance, because scientist are reall very conservative and risk-averse in changing the system. But there are pioneers that are going to lead the way. They are going to get us to that point where research is put directly online in real time. There will be no such things as journals any more, only platforms for self-publishing, where massive peer-review is going on in real time. What’s going to happen is the evolution of a system that assigns reputation to individuals depending on their contribution to the process. That is the key, I think. Once you can gain scientific reputation by your online contribution, theoretical work, commenting, or peer-reviewing others, then people will participate
He predicts that scientific papers will evolve into collections consisting of parts from various scientific sources, in which people with talent for synthesis will emerge as those who monitor ongoing open research and write review papers. Read the full interview here.
OA books – detailed familiarity leads to multiple on-going sales
Previous post on five new OA monograph series is phenomenal news for the Free Our Books campaign, and an example of, i believe, future to come soon. We, the authors, will be battling with publishers to give our books away electronically, hoping that we will capture readers attention enough to buy a print copy. Early this year, in May, i went through a short discussion with my, then potential (contract signed since), publisher, in which i suggested, and was without any problems granted, an Open Access book contract for which i drafted an Addendum – more details on that in another post soon.
I buy books weekly, and my biggest problem is where to store them and when to find the time to read them. However, most books that i buy these days are books whose content i already know reasonably well. Either through finding a copy somewhere online, or often by reading parts of full length essays which make up the book, frequently posted by authors on their personal website, sometimes presentations from conferences, or published in journals.
A clear example of this is Graham Harman’s work. I first heard of him through a one day workshop on Speculative Realism, held in April 2007 at Goldsmiths in London. Although i missed the workshop, I saw some of the authors on multiple occasions presenting papers in other conferences too. Full transcripts from the conference were published in Collapse III, which was the reason why i bought it (familiarity leading to a sale). I liked Collapse III so much, that i bought 4 out of 5 of issues published so far (familiarity leading to multiple sales). The only one i missed, strangely enough, is the sold out one, Collapse IV, which was provided for free on-line after it sold out, as reported on this blog. I then saw slides and part of the video from Harman’s talk at LSE in November 2007. Earlier this year, in April, i was at the second Speculative Materialism / Speculative Realism workshop in Bristol at UWE, where i saw Harman for the first time live, presenting. Because i liked the conference, and was intrigued by his presentation, i downloaded and read part of his book Prince of Networks, published by Open Access book publisher Re.press. I started writing on object-oriented philosophy and if it develops in a full text, i will most likely buy Harman’s books (familiarity leading to sales).
If i end up liking his work a lot and using it extensively in my own work, his book will become automatic-buys for me, in the same ways books by Antonio Negri, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou are – i have vast majority of their books published in English, because i’m familiar with their work and because i always get the taste of what’s in the coming books from their conference papers, texts they continuously publish, often with free access (like lacan.com), on blogs, websites and in journals. Again, it’s my familiarity that leads to multiple, on-going, sales.
Authors that only publish in closed access journals, that do not self-archive on their websites — especially if institutions in which i work are not subscribed to the journals in which they publish, and if i don’t follow conferences at which they present — have hardly any chances of me buying their books. Some clever publishers and authors expose their books almost entirely through Google Books preview option, i bought several books like that (familiarity leading to multiple sales).
Publishers and authors which do not allow me to get familiar with their work in detail through some form of Open Access before i buy it, if it is to judge by my book buying patters, are loosing sales. And we’re not talking small sales here either. While a student, my books budget is modest (£600 this year, estimate annual average over last 5 years is £500) in comparison with a busy researcher with a budget that comes with the job . If, and when, i finish my PhD and get a job in a department doing well financially, i might end up with a annual research fund between £1300-1700 to spend on books, every year, for many years to come. My colleagues who are already in this position told me that once you work in academia, you end up getting lots of books for free. But you don’t necessarily get exactly the books you want. Nor do you get them when you want them. And these are two key criteria for a fast developing research. I’m used to immediate access to texts in my research so much, that if and when i think i really need a book, i buy it immediately on-line. Sometimes i make mistakes, and long distance selling regulations helped on several occasion to return the book bought by mistake in a rush – i don’t use book sellers which do not easily, with no postage to pay, allow books to be returned within a week, or often two weeks. In short, i don’t think that i will buy less books because i will be geting some of them for free. The only reason i might be buying less books is storage space, and i’m working on a solution to that too (it’s the hardest part).
Over 15 years, roughly £23.000 is likely to be the budget that i’ll be spending on books. I’m far from the only person with this buying pattern. It is more likely that my pattern represents a significantly large category of academic book buyers. How large and how significant, statistically speaking, i can’t tell. A rough judgment would be that it’s large enough to be taken seriously, researched in more detail, and taken in consideration when decisions on Open Access are made by authors and publishers. For us, book addicts with this pattern, the more an author and publisher embrace Open Access, the more likely is a part of our budget going to be spent on their books.
With Open Access Books, familiarity leads to sales.
Detailed familiarity leads to multiple on-going sales.
OA books key to focus on purely academic considerations
The title of this post are the words of Graham Harman, philosopher known for his work on object-oriented philsophy, who is a co-editor of one of the five newly announced Open Access monograph series by the Open Humanities Press. Here’s the exact quote:
“This model allows us the speed, editorial flexibility and boldness to focus on purely academic considerations in our series, and with the sharp sense of mission that accompanies such ventures”
Only few days ago, Harman finished an interesting experiment, writing a new book and documenting the time spent and the amount of words written on his blog regularly. You can read the entire log at Harman’s blog here.
Science is already a wiki, just a really inefficient one
In another excellent post, Publishing science on the web, John Wilbanks reacts to discussions he had with British Library staff and leaders, who told him that:
Publishers frequently claim four functions: registration (when was an idea stated?), certification (is the idea original, has it been “proved” to satisfactory peer review?), dissemination (delivery), and preservation of the record. The journal thus provides for both the claiming of ideas by scientists and for the “memory” of the sciences.
He reponds by saying that the Web already does a lot of this, outside of journals and existing scientific and publishing mechanisms: “Wikis and blogs provide almost costless registration and dissemination of new scientific communication.” However, resistance to integration of the Web into science is strong. Referring to science as an inefficient wiki, he states that, in the current model of scientific production “the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate the existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one-to-three new assertions made in any one paper”. Another major problem he underlines, one that i find hugely problematic in my own work, is that each disciplines has its own highly specialist language through which it operates. This is a problem for creating scientific mashups:
Right now the problem is we still think about cross disciplinarity as a function of people choosing to work together. But the internet and the Web give us a different model. What’s more cross disciplinary than Google?
Although we use Google daily in our research, and it leads us across scientific fields, the obstacles are still both the language barrier between fields and “lack of knowledge interoperability at the machine level”.
OA is the beginning, not the end game, science needs rewiring
John Wilbank in his recent blog post Integrate, Annotate, Federate makes some key points which i entirely share and work on. That is, Open Access is only the beginning. The most important work, on rewiring sciences, is about to start happening. And, like Wilbanks suggests, we have to loudly ask for it, work on it. It’s not going to happen “naturally”, we have to make it happen. Citations, as the only way of integrating scientific works, are not any more the only possible method, that has to change. Here’s his description of one of those principles:
Annotation is the second new essential function. The old method of annotation is through either writing a new paper that validates, invalidates, extends, or otherwise affects the assertions made in an old paper. Or if something is really wrong, there might be a letter to the editor or a retraction. In a wiki world, this is fundamentally insane. The paper is a snapshot of years of incremental knowledge progress. We have much better technology to use than dead trees.
Other than publishers providing annotation, Wilbanks suggests we need to move on and: “create an open platform that actually tracks the kind of annotation-relationships that the web enables”. Extending bloggers’ use of trackback, we should extend those protocols to connect articles, wiki pages, database entries … which would make explicit, visible and trackable already existing links. A logical move would be to either implement pingback protocol in major software applications that are key for the other types of material. Or, if required to achieve that, to extend the protocol to support it.
Free Our Books 