Party Hard. Make It Happen. Scream at Each Other.

It's said that when you don't have anything nice to say you shouldn't say anything at all. But when you just have to say something negative, perhaps it's best to do so on your blog which gets maybe two dozen readers per post.

Over the past few months, my opinion of the the library profession, of which I'm not even a member yet, has sunk a lot. Now, I'll admit I joined library school with a naive image of librarians, but I think that was mostly sorted out in my first year. So this is not that. This, I think, comes almost entirely from the flame wars that erupt on the ALA Think Tank Facebook group. I joined because I expected a lot of great conversations about libraries, and there still are plenty of these. I learned so much after I asked people about their weeding policies following the Urbana Free Library weeding disaster. But there are an increasingly number of threads that devolve into screaming matches that make me hate both sides. It's gotten to the point where, in spite of all I've learned there, the toxic environment is making me hate librarians. Considering 99.99% of librarians are not people who are posting on these threads on ALATT, this is unfair, and I think the only way to get myself back on balance is to get the hell away from that place.

Shall I Keep Blogging?

I've had a blog for almost a semester now. It's been class-mandated, and soon we'll see if I keep it up. Would it be worth it? What do I get out of blogging? Luckily, at the end of said class we had a few articles on scholarly blogging, and there was one in particular that had good framework for me to use when reflecting on the future of my blog. Which I will do now. In blog form.

Sara Kjellberg (2010) interviewed 11 blogging researchers on why they maintained blogs. These people ranged from humanists to natural scientists, and ranked anywhere from PhD. student to professors. Not librarians, but I think what she found holds well enough. She identified six functions of scholarly blogs in their responses: disseminate content, express opinions, keep up-to-date on material in their fields, write, interact, and build networks of relationships. So, which of these am I getting out of my blog? 

I don't particularly pass along much I'm doing in my blog in terms of content I've created, whether it be research or library practice, though perhaps that will change at some point. I do like showing things I've read that I've found worth engaging. Right now, these things are often article read in this class, though I'll often pull in other things I've found interesting, such as my last post where I brought in a great blog post from Scholarly Communications @ Duke. I imagine what I pass along will grow in breadth of both form and topic if I keep the blog going after this class. As for expressing opinions, well, I have them, I like using the blog for it (see my attack on Google Scholar or totally non-expert opinion on the White House OA policy), and I definitely would keep using the blog for it. So, big check mark here.

The "keeping up-to-date" function was that some of the bloggers would pay more attention to developments in and related to their field in order to have something to blog about. I'm an info addict, so I really don't need my blog to motivate me to read constantly. Though, for the few weeks I did The Best Things I was much better at keeping track of what I read. This fits well with Kjellberg's sub-function of the blog as a notebook. Also, if I ever did want to go back and see what I thought was so import that I had to blog about, it's all there. 

Many of the researchers blogged to practice their writing skills and work on articulating their ideas. I love blogging for this. I don't have the worse writing, but I also don't think it's great, nor do I feel I've really cultivated my own distinct writing style, so I really appreciate the practice. I can't say it has always improved my writing (I still overuse parentheses [PARENTHESES!]), but I appreciate the practice all the same.

Interaction and relationship-building are very entwined. I also don't see much of them happening with my blog. I don't get many comments. Most of them are Joe, who is forced to comment on my blog until this class is over, though there was that one time Walt Crawford dismantled a number of my presumptions about APCs. I also don't see many comments on library blogs that have many more followers than me, so I don't see a lot more interaction in the future. I can't say this blog has built any new relationships will others in the library world, though this could partially be because I'm terrible at promoting this thing. Still, having a blog really hasn't changed much in the two virtual places I make connections with other librarians: Twitter and ALA Think Tank.

I do think I'll keep my blog, in spite of the name I gave it and now find to be annoyingly twee. I get a lot out of it, and I think I could get a lot more the more I use it. Of course, I say all this, but it wouldn't be the first time I've flaked at keeping a blog going when not forced to...

Kjellberg, S. (2010). I am a blogging researcher: Motivations for blogging in a scholarly context. First Monday, 15(8). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2962/2580

It's My Fault (At Least Partially)

I want to talk game theory. Specifically, coordination games. Carl T. and Theodore C. Bergstrom (2006) identify the scholarly publication business as a coordination game. In such a game, there is an existing convention, a way of doing things, that is practiced by a large group. While that convention may no longer be the ideal way of doing things, no one individual can move away from the convention and benefit, because unless everyone else does. So, to steal their example, suppose we have three scholars in a field. There is the legacy journal, with publishing practices no one likes, and a new journal appears. The new journal is cheaper and it has the potential for more circulation, so one author considers publishing in it. However, if the other two stick with the legacy, the legacy will still be preferred by most readers, academic libraries will only buy the legacy if they have to make a choice, and that first scholar's work will actually receive less attention. All three would have to jump ship. Now change 3 to however many scholars there are in a given field, and you see how difficult this can be.

So, I bring all that up to give some context to my interpretation of this blog post, detailing how Keven Smith accidentally published an article at a Taylor & Francis journal, whose author's rights policies he disapproves of.  Smith, as the Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke, is exactly the sort of person you expect to be making careful, informed decisions on what publishers he chooses to publish with, and no doubt he usually does. The story he spins on how this publication came to be is not, I think, the standard method one usually goes about getting something published. Still, he draws many good lessons from this experience, one that really stuck out to me: "authors choose journals, not publishers."

Scholars, when determining where to publish, don't think about who the publisher is but whether the topic they are writing about fits the journal they are writing for, and this is what Smith considered when he signed. He thought his work would be a good fit for the journal. He's almost certainly right, as well: Serials Librarian, T&F journal in question, probably is "a proper venue" for a write-up of the talk he gave. Why? It's where there are readers interested in these topics. Which makes me think, why do authors choose journals, not publishers? Probably because readers choose journals, not publishers. Bergstrom and Bergstrom stated that readers choose journals because quality scholars publish there, but I think it's also true that quality scholars choose journals because there are many readers. It's mutually reinforcing.

If I am honest about my own inchoate practices as a scholar, as I determine what I should be reading to keep track of my interests I don't consider who is actually publishing these journals. I care about what is in them. I am an OA advocate and talk a big game about it, but it in no way changes my research practice. I don't prioritize finding information in an OA journal. I prioritize finding information in the best journal, and OA doesn't factor into my definition of "best." As a budding librarian I care about publishing practice, but as a budding scholar I really only care about best information,* and sometimes (often) that information is in journals with publishing practices I don't approve of. In thinking this way, I'm helping to keep the convention of the coordination game stable. As long as I, and my fellow readers, keep reading journals without interest in how they publish, what incentive is there for authors to try to disrupt the convention?

* Actually, as a librarian I only care about publishing practice when advocating for new publishing practices. When doing reference or information literacy instruction, I don't care about publishing practice when I guide patrons and students towards resources. I don't think I'm unusual in this. The only one of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards that could be used for considering publication practices is Standard Five, maybe, if you squint at it and turn your head sideways a little bit.

Bibliography:
Bergstrom, C. T., & Bergstron, T. C. (2006). The economics of ecology journals. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 4(9), 488-495. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3868823

Google Scholar

This whole Google Reader thing is why I should probably second guess giving my entire life to Google.
— Carl Hess (@CarlSHess) March 14, 2013

I was reading a 2010 article from Brian D. Edgar and John Willinsky surveying journals published on the Open Journals System. These in many ways are the sorts of journals that the new, digital, OA order makes possible: small, non-commercial, run by dedicated scholars, international, interdisciplinary, investigating new areas of inquiry. It was interesting stuff, but one quote, basically made offhandedly, stuck out to me:

These journals owe a debt, if perhaps more so than other journals, to the indirect support of Google Scholar for indexing the contents of these journals on publication, making them open to discovery on the same grounds as other journals, while providing readers with a degree of quality control, through Google’s page ranking and the citation counts it provides in its search results.

This is not the first time I've seen this sentiment come up. Actually, over the course of my scholarly communications class, it has been brought up in article after article how OA journals and IRs get most of their traffic from GS. This...may not be a good thing. First, is GS really going to be around in a few years? GS is currently not providing ads, and I'm presuming that the information Google learns about its users from GS are not really helping it all that much with its main money-makers, ads for the finance & insurance industries, retail, and tourism. Perhaps it's not surprising that after they announced Google Reader was dead, there was a fair amount of speculation that Google Scholar was next.

Still, let's assume that Google feels like keeping GS around for a while. Should the scholarly community, from scholars to librarians, really be content with reliance on GS? I do not think so, and I think why is well summed up by Charles Potter (2008): "We should not be fooled that any technology used by Google (or any search technology, really) is a neutral force in the information seeking process." (10)

Potter then goes on to lay out multiple ways in which Google Scholar is influencing the search process in ways that we, as librarians, generally do not approve of. Google is, of course, an advertising company, not an information company (that Venture Beat article linked above notes that Google makes 96% of its revenue from ads). To sell these ads, Google data mines, and then it keeps its information about you basically forever. Librarians would probably consider many of Google's practices to be in violation of our Core Value of Privacy/Confidentiality if we were doing them, and yet so many of our libraries link to GS. Google, whether through the main page or GS, is also dependent on a mass-model view of information in order to mass advertise. The single search bar is built on the idea that our information needs are homogeneous, that you can just passively put in a couple keywords, and that Google, through its algorithm, can find your information for you (Go ahead, try to find the Advanced Search). This is anathema to what librarians do: we try to meet the specific needs of our users, and we empower them to control and adjust their search results. 

In addition to Potter's reasons, there is also, of course, the infamous filter bubble. For those unaware, the filter bubble is the idea that Google (and other online services) are personalizing the information they deliver to you by your biases, so that potentially a searcher would never find information that they disagree with. The actual extent of Google's personalization is debated, but that actually helps the argument: Google is a black box. Nobody knows what they are doing, what they are planning to do, and what they could do in the future. Do we really trust them to do the right thing? 

I don't think so. We need a DPLA for Open Access materials. The White House OA memo is going to put a lot more OA material out there. Let's not make it a trade from the monopoly of the current scholarly commercial giants to a monopoly of Google.

Bibliography:
Edgar, B. D., & Willinsky, J. (2010). A survey of scholarly journals using open journal systems. Scholarly and Research Communication, 1(2). Retrieved from http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/24/41

Potter, C. (2008). Standing on the shoulders of libraries: A holistic and rhetorical approach to teaching Google Scholar. Journal of Library Administration, 47(1/2), 5-28. doi:10.1080/01930820802110563

Institutional Repositories: What Are They Good For?

Edit: all of the following presumes that we define success of IRs in terms of holding peer-reviewed scholarly works, as Steve Harnad does. Whether that is a good idea or not is its own argument.

Discussing institutional repositories yesterday in my scholarly communications class and how to convince faculty to archive in them, a question was posed: how do you convince a faculty member that submits their work to gold OA publications that participate in CLOCKSS to self-archive in the IR? Is there a good reason for them to?

Well, to answer that question, we need to look at the benefits of a IR versus that of said publication. Cullen and Chawner (2011) identify four key aspects of scholarly communication: registration (who  does this belong to?)*, certification (is this any good?), awareness (how do we let others know about this?), and archiving (how to we ensure this is always available in the future?). A traditional publication does all four of these things to varying degrees of success: they identify the author, they certify the work through peer review, they raise awareness through marketing the publication, and they keep back-copies, though they really rely a lot on research libraries for archiving. When librarians and others who promote and maintain IRs stress the value of them, we generally focus on awareness and archiving. We increase awareness of the publication through making it freely accessible in the IR with a permanent link and searchable online, through standards such as OAI-PMH, and build trust among scholars that we will maintain those documents online (Kim 2011).

But, Cullen and Chawner (2011) find in their research that scholars are considered more with registration and certification than awareness and archiving, which are two things that IRs do not do at this moment. Now, let's compare it to that gold OA publication: it has the registration and certification (peer-review) part down, and it compares favorably with the IR on awareness and archiving. Like the IR, it's online, for free, with a stable link, and is indexed by search engines, making it findable and accessible by more than the traditional article. Additionally, with CLOCKSS it ensures that even if the publisher goes under the article is preserved. It does it all in one. How can the IR compete with that, especially long-term?   

Well, we could draw on the idea of the decoupled journal championed by Priem and Hemminger (2012). Putting aside the good objections with their ideas on implementation and looking at the idea in the abstract, they identify functions of scholarly communication nearly identical to Cullen and Chawner: archiving, registration, dissemination, and certification. IRs have the archiving down, as well as part of the dissemination through their metadata. Now, why would a scholar want to disengage their certification from archiving and dissemination?** Priem and Hemminger hope for an increased diversity of certification/assessment under a decoupled system, and I agree that there is a lot of potential benefit here. A multidisciplinary work could be certified by groups in multiple disciplines. There could be certification as to how well the work follows accepted research practice, as well as those for "significance." Those representing traditionally disadvantaged perspectives could have certifications for disciplines, so a mainstream economics paper could be evaluated by feminist economics as to how well is avoids andocentric ideas. There can be anonymous and open review. Some of these the author would submit to, while others may take the Journal of the Digital Humanities model and go looking for things to certify. Thus, the object could investigated and certified from a variety of perspectives, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of quality than now (where something is either accepted or rejected). The object in the IR could display the varied certifications that the scholarly work received with it, perhaps using an open badge framework, so while the IR does not certify, it archives certifications.

Cullen, R. and Chawner, B. (2011). ' Institutional Repositories, Open Access, and Scholarly Communication: A Study of Conflicting Paradigms.' The Journal of ACademic Librarianship 37:6, 460-470. DOI:10.1016/j.acalib.2011.07.002

Kim, J. (2011). 'Motivations of Faculty Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories.'The Journal of Academic Librarianship 37:3, 246-254. DOI:10.1016/j.acalib.2011.02.017

Priem, J. and Hemminger, B.M. (2012). 'Decoupling the Scholarly Journal.' Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 6, 1-13. DOI:10.3389/fncom.2012.00019

*Cullen and Chawner, as well as Roosendaal and Geurts, whom they borrow this framework from, never do a particularly good job of explaining what they mean by registration, other than in involves intellectual property and copyright, so I'm going to focus less on it.
**Remember, I'm still not touching registration.

The Debate is About Implementation

Joe at Fragile Interstices asked whether or not there should even be a debate over open access. The benefits are clear, what's there to talk abot? Respectfully, I think there is a debate. Let's start with where we agree: well, we agree pretty much completely. Every benefit of OA he lists is true, and I'm not disputing them. I am an Open Access advocate. However, the debate comes into play when we talk about implementation, because if implemented in the wrong way I think OA could create new problems even as it is solving old ones (and, to be fair, I'm sure Joe knows this, and I'm creating a strawman Joe because that's easier to debate against).

Let's start with the gold/green distinction. For those not in the know, "gold" is publishing in an Open Access journal, while Green is publishing in a traditional journal that allows the author to make a copy of the article (pre-print or post-print) available online, often in an institutional repository (Harnad et all 2008). Both forms of Open Access are currently in use, but there is considerable debate as to which should be prioritized and what benefits can be achieved but also what damage might be caused. Stevan Harnad strongly advocates pushing green OA over gold, for the present moment. He has a number of reasons for this. Green can be easily mandated, such as Harvard's mandate, and thus gets us more quickly to universal OA, while under gold we could stay in a mixed OA/non-OA environment. He also feels only green OA actually solves the serials costs problems. To explain this, we have to talk article-processing charges (APCs). A common method for gold OA journals to make money is through APCs, where in order to publish in the journal an author (or their institution) pays the journal in order to get the work published. Harnad believes that these APCs will not get paid until after universal green, because at that point institutions can cut their serials budgets (if you are subscribed to a traditional journal important to a field and only 2/3 of its articles are green, then you'll keep paying for it to get that last 1/3), and the money can be used to pay APCs.

Is Harnad right here? Well, yes and no. In presuming that only authors or institutions will pay APCs, he leaves out an option: grants. Can research grants cover the cost of APCs? Well, they do right now, at least in some fields. For natural sciences research, grants will sometimes cover APCs, at least at higher rates than in social sciences or humanities (Solomon & Björk 2012). If we push gold over green, we run the risk of further advantaging the natural sciences over all others. I think we also run the risk of harming researchers at smaller, more teaching-oriented institutions (as well as independent researchers), again especially humanists and social scientists, who under a universal gold OA environment may finally have access to all the research they want but now find they cannot afford to publish it. However, even here we have different models. On one extreme, we have Taylor & Francis making the pathetic offer to make the Journal of Library Administration less restrictive (as far as I can tell, not even fully OA) at the fucking insane outrageous cost of $3k per article, prompting the board to resign. On the other extreme, we have the Forum of Mathematics, a gold OA journal, which promises that if you cannot afford the APC they will still publish your work, no questions asked. Now, of course, we have no idea whether Forum can survive if it let's researchers skip the APC. This could be unattainable. That's the point. We have yet to successfully create a fully OA environment, and until we do, there will be a debate about how to do it. And, if we choose wrongly, we could end up doing some people a lot of harm.

Harnad, S. (2010). Gold Open Access publishing must not be allowed to retard the progress of green Open Access self-archiving. LOGOS: The Journal Of The World Book Community, 21(3/4), 86-93. doi:10.1163/095796511X559972

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallières, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y., ...Hilf, E. (2008). The access/impact problem and the green and gold roads to Open Access: An update. Serials Review, 34(1), 36-40. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2007.12.005

Solomon, D. J. & Björk, B.-C. (2012). Publication fees in open access publishing: Sources of funding and factors influencing choice of journal. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(1), 98–107. doi: 10.1002/asi.21660

Making the Most of the New Federal Agency OA Policy

So, at this point I think most people have either read about the new White House Open Access policy or read the memo itself. This is rightly lauded as a big step forward, and it could have a major effect on institutional repositories (IRs) and libraries. The requirement that agencies have "a strategy for leveraging existing archives, where appropriate," strikes me as an opportunity for existing IRs to get involved with this policy, especially since IRs hold a wide variety of resources beyond just journal articles that research that stemmed from federal funds could be published in, such as books and conference articles, as well as hold data sets (Burns, Lana, and Budd 2013) which are also to be made public under the new policy.

However, IRs as they currently are have a major weakness. As Arlitsch and O'Brien (2012) have noted, many IRs are currently using the Dublin Core metadata, even though it is not the best tool for journal articles, since important citation data such as "journal name, volume and issue number, and page numbers span of the article is usually entered into a single field, such as DC.Relation or DC.Source in simple Dublin Core, and there is no specified format or consistency" (p72). This makes it difficult for retrieval tools, such as Google Scholar, to find archived content in IRs, which diminishes their potential for providing access to federally-funded research to the public. Yet, just below the part of the memo that invites partnership with IRs is this requirement: "a strategy for improving the public’s ability to locate and access digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research". Agencies could potentially use this to push IRs away from Dublin Core, by requiring that, if they want to be in partnership with federal agencies on OA, they need to support metadata standards sufficient to improve access to archived research. This would improve access to all content in IRs, not just the federally-funded content.

This could also be a great opportunity for IRs and libraries to come together to create retrieval tools for OA materials to rival Google Scholar. While GS is a useful, if flawed, tool, there are many that worry about making ourselves even more dependent on Google. Google also has a tendency to kill unprofitable services, and so the library world could solicit support from the creation or their own major mutli-IR OA retrieval tool, since GS might not be "an approach for optimizing search...while ensuring long-term stewardship of the results of federally funded research". This could be done under the auspices of the Digital Public Library of America (though god help me I'm still not sure what exactly the DPLA is supposed to be) or something new. Either way, libraries and IRs could create a tool that, unlike GS, would be open about what materials it is indexing, improved display, allow for scholars to have easier access to citation data (Meho and Yang 2007).

Bibliography: 

Arlitsch, K. & O'Brien, P. S. (2012). Invisible institutional repositories: Addressing the low indexing ratios of IRs in Google Scholar. Library Hi Tech, 30 (1), pp.60 - 81. doi:10.1108/07378831211213210 

Burns, C. S., Lana, A., & Budd, J. M. (2013). Institutional repositories: Exploration of costs and value. D-Lib Magazine,19(1/2). Retrieved from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january13/burns/01burns.html

Meho, L. I., & Yang, K. (2007). Impact of data sources on citation counts and ranking of LIS faculty: Web of science versus Scopus and Google Scholar. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2105-2125. doi:10.1002/asi.20677