The case of the disappearing journals - open is not forever

"erasing" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by mbanere6

Printed documents from hundreds of years ago are still accessible and stored in museums and library archives. Digital resources can simply disappear forever if the site is taken down and no-one has thought of making a copy. This includes many scientific articles according to a new article, Open is not forever: a study of vanished open access journals. Open access publication has significantly widened access to scientific research articles and offered alternative channels for many researchers around the world. However, open access journals are often run on a low budget within universities or by organisations with little funding but high levels of enthusiasm and dedication. Unfortunately, some of these organisations eventually run out of steam and have to close down, leaving their journal unprotected and vulnerable. This study has examined the fate of these journals.

We found 192 OA journals that vanished from the web between 2000 and 2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world. Our results raise vital concern for the integrity of the scholarly record and highlight the urgency to take collaborative action to ensure continued access and prevent the loss of more scholarly knowledge. We encourage those interested in the phenomenon of vanished journals to use the public dataset for their own research.

The authors claim that there are over 1,000 open access journals today that are inactive and whose material risks disappearing if nothing is done and this trend is likely to continue. Journals published by scholarly societies or research organisations are at most risk since they operate on low budgets. There are a number of international preservation services that save copies of journals but the article shows that a large number are not preserved and the risk is that if a journal closes down then all articles are lost.

If there is no general agreement whose responsibility it is to preserve electronic resources, no one will be responsible, and we risk losing large parts of the scholarly record due to inaction. Exactly how much digital journal content has already been lost is unknown since the data needed to assess the gravity of the situation is not collected anywhere, which also complicates assessing the risk of journals vanishing in the future.

Presumably there are similar concerns for the many repositories of open educational resources that have been established, often thanks to project funding. If the responsible organisations close down what will happen to these collections? I wonder if there are schemes to preserve even OER collections. The article closes with a plea for more collaboration.

As we have highlighted throughout the discussion, open is not forever, and so we close with a note on the urgent need for collaborative action in preserving digital resources and preventing the loss of more scholarly knowledge.

Reference
Laakso, M., Matthias, L., Naiko, J. (2020) Open is not forever: a study of vanished open access journals. Cornell University. arXiv:2008.11933.

Digital or print course literature - it's complicated

CC0 Public domain on Max Pixel

Do you prefer to read print or digital books and articles? To me this sort of question is largely irrelevant because it all depends on the context and which form is most fit for purpose. I read enormous amounts both in print and online and switch from one medium to the other many times a day. I still love the feeling of reading a print newspaper or having a printed book to read in bed or while travelling. I have many packed bookshelves at home and the collection continues to grow. I even save years of back issues of the magazines I subscribe to and get satisfaction from my groaning bookshelves. At the same time I read a wide variety of online news sites, e-books and journal articles on my computer, tablet and mobile and I see these two forms of reading as complementary and not as an either/or conflict.

I suspect this is the same even for students. The growth of digital course literature, both from commercial publishers as well as free open textbooks from sites such as BC Open Textbooks (University of British Columbia), prompts frequent media interest often promoting the idea of a battle between print and digital. A new article by Andy M Benoit in the Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Textbook Affordability and Student Acceptance of eTextbooks: An Institutional Case-study, sheds light on this issue and shows that the choice between print and digital is complex and there is no clear "winner" or "loser". The abstract summarises the study as follows:

There is significant interest among institutions of higher education in the potential of digital textbooks to enhance student learning and to address issues arising from textbook affordability. Innovations in digital textbook design and delivery infrastructure and the emergence of exemplary practices from early adopters signal that digital reading may be a practical alternative to print. Less well understood, however, is students’ experience of textbook affordability, their experience of print and digital textbook utilization, and factors that might influence their acceptance of digital textbooks. This paper explores the results of a semester-long eTextbook research project at a Canadian college and shares six suggestions grounded in student feedback.

Several issues are relevant here. Firstly there is the high cost of buying printed course literature and the study shows that many students do not buy all the required reading because of this. Many share books and I'm sure that many pages are copied and scanned to save money. The students in the study are particularly critical of teachers' underutilisation of some "required" reading in the course itself. Required reading must be an integral part of the course, otherwise it should be described as optional or recommended reading. Interestingly, despite the students belonging to the supposed digital generation, 65.8% of them stated that they prefer printed course literature. At the same time the cost savings of lower price or free digital literature are also extremely attractive and this leads to students having an ambivalent attitude to the print-digital dilemma. Even when the digital option is chosen there are issues around format and readability. The reading experience depends so much on which device is used and whether there is sufficiently good resolution, accessibility options, device portability and battery life.

The article makes a number of recommendations urging universities to offer more support to help students chose the best option for their course literature. If they choose digital material they need help to choose the right option for their device, or in some cases choose the right device to read the literature. Vendors of e-books should be able to offer a variety of formats adapted to different devices (as many already do). The author makes the following recommendations to universities and publishers.

• Strengthen the value proposition for “required” textbooks to inform student purchasing decisions
• Support students in identifying the medium that meets their needs
• Provide information to ensure personal devices are conducive for eReading
• Ensure eReader applications meet performance expectations
• Develop vendor partnerships and relationships
• Support students in developing medium appropriate reading strategies and study skills

The important point here is that there is no "right" answer; it all depends on context and ease of use. Sometimes I want the print version because I know I will refer to it for many years to come and I want it on my bookshelf. Other literature can be accessed digitally. Some literature will be read on a mobile device and other works will be read on my laptop or desktop computer. When I read digital material I want optimal resolution and the ability to annotate easily as well as being able to look up terminology and easily create references. Let's make sure that students are able to make informed choices and are able to read the course literature according to their own preferences.

Reference
Benoit, A. M. (2018). Textbook Affordability and Student Acceptance of eTextbooks: An Institutional Case-study. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 9(2). Retrieved from https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cjsotl_rcacea/vol9/iss2/3

Combating academic spam

CC0 Public domain on Max Pixel

One of the week's most interesting stories is the disappearance of Jeremy Beale's (University of Colorado at Denver) excellent watchdog site on predatory journals and publishers. According to an article in Inside Higher Ed, No More 'Beall's List', the site was suddenly taken down and replaced with a notice "This service is no longer available" and since then Beale has not been available for any comment, leading to speculation in social media and news sites. According to an article in ScienceInsider:

Beall declined to comment. But a CU Denver spokesperson told ScienceInsider that Beall made a “personal decision” to take down his list of low-quality journals that charge authors a fee to publish, often with little or no review or editing. The spokesperson says the blog was not hacked, nor was it taken down as a result of legal threats, and Beall will remain on the school’s faculty. The spokesperson could not confirm whether the blog's removal is permanent.

Beale's list has become an important monitor of publications that spam academics, offering publication at a price and falsely claiming to use peer review, as well as a myriad of bogus conferences that invite academics to contribute (at a price) and then at best only offering a token event. Academic spam is a major issue and it can be hard for many to tell between the serious journals and conference organisers and the bogus ones. I'm not a very significant name in the academic community but even my in-box receives several academic spam mails per day offering me the chance to publish in some obscure journal or an appearance at a conference on a theme that I don't even work with. The extremely long list of so-called open access publishers in Beale's lists could be seen to discredit the open model but at the same time there are thousands of serious peer-reviewed open access publications. Whenever new models are tested there will be people who will try to exploit new freedoms and therefore it is vital to have watchdogs and whistle-blowers who can expose the less serious actors.

According to some reports, the site and its related Facebook group has been withdrawn due to pressure or threats, though there are no precise details on this. Anyone providing such a watchdog service risks the fury of those who are blacklisted and Beale has certainly had to put up with considerable opposition over the years. At the same time there is always the risk of accusing an innocent party. This is a major undertaking and is simply not sustainable if it is run by an individual, not matter how dedicated. A better solution would be an international organisation with high credibility to take over the role but more in terms of quality assurance rather than as whistle-blower. A colleague of mine suggested that the list could instead be one of approved journals and conferences and that a quality assurance framework and certification could make it clear which journals were serious and which were not. We need to build on and promote internationally recognised quality labels for open access publications to make it easier to spot the fraudsters.

Not surprisingly Beale's list has now been republished on a number of sites but such measures are only a temporary solution. The list must be continually updated and reviewed and it is also essential that those on the list are given a fair chance to improve and be taken off the list. Jeremy Beale has done a great job over the years but one pioneer cannot keep such a service going. Which organisation can step up and take over?

A detailed chronicle of this story is given in this blog post, What Happened to Jeffrey Beall’s List of (Allegedly) Predatory Publishers?

Amazon goes OER

"openness" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by coolnalu

Are we in the midst of a major change in the distribution and sharing of open educational resources?
Just as I had published my previous post on the platform panOpen, I read that even Amazon are entering the OER arena. Amazon have announced a new platform called Amazon Inspire that will allow schools to search for, share and manage resources in an environment that will to some extent resemble the massively successful Amazon website. They promise that the service will be completely free for all schools and a beta version will come online for pilot testing in the next few weeks.

An article on Edweek Market Brief, Amazon Education to Launch New Website for Open Education Resources, describes the platform:

- Users of the site will be able to add ratings and reviews, and to receive recommendations based on their previous selections. Educators will be able to curate open resources, self-publish material they have developed, and put a school’s entire digital library that is open and freely available online.

This sounds very similar to the platform offered by panOpen except there's no mention of the twist that they offer; charging students for access and offering revenue sharing to contributing teachers. The difference is of course the sheer clout behind Amazon in terms of being able to sweep the board if their idea hits the soft spot. Schools and teachers can upload their resources and make them available to all, assumedly with Creative Commons licenses, and Amazon offers powerful search, analytics and safe storage. The problem with OER has always been the lack of consistent metadata making many resources extremely hard to find as well as the lack of efficient search tools that can harvest suitable material from the myriad of OER repositories that exist. If anyone is able to pull it all together then Amazon seems like a good bet given the success of their business so far with recommendations based on previous searches and preferences.

Matt Reed in Inside Higher Ed is enthusiastic about the new venture, Amazon OER? He sees a similarity between Amazon's interest in OER and Apple's interest in podcasting when it launched iTunes and the iPod. Most of the podcasts available on iTunes are, like OER, largely free and produced by enthusiasts but the impact of some podcasts is global thanks to the power of the iTunes platform. Similarly hundreds of universities already offer over 2 million lectures free to download on the iTunes U channel. 

In the best of all possible worlds, the podcast analogy comes to fruition. Apple was the first to bring podcasts to scale, and itunes is still the most popular place to find and distribute them. But there’s no shortage of alternatives. (I’m a fan of Pocket Casts, fwiw.) It’s easy now to listen regularly to a host of podcasts without ever dipping a toe in the Apple universe. If enough alternatives come along to Amazon that it can’t control the market, even if it remains prominent within it, we could all win.  

The inevitable question is what Amazon gets out of offering this platform. There must be a business model in there despite their insistence that they will never put it behind a paywall. The logical conclusion is that they will try to sell commercial resources based on your preferences and this was indeed the logic behind Pearson's Open Class venture a couple of years ago. It will be up to the user to decide whether the openr resource is better than the commercial one but I don't think it needs to be an either-or issue. In some cases the commercial resource will offer opportunities that no open reosurce can match and then the price is justified. There must be room for commercial high-quality material as long as we can make wise choices. The other attraction for Amazon must be big data. A platform like this if it takes off will get millions of clicks and the user data must be worth quite a bit for developers. Amazon, like the other giants (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc), are drilling for the new oil, data. The rewards are in how you refine that crude oil into new products and services.

Could 2016 be the year OER go mainstream and at what cost?

E-books - managing the transition

  by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ on Flickr

Every time a report indicates that cherished traditional concepts like classroom teaching, printed books, writing with pen and paper or reading printed newspapers are more effective than their digital equivalents you can almost hear the collective sigh of relief that maybe we can soon return to the world we once knew before all this new technology came along. We all have an instinctive fear of the new and an often illogical love of the practices we grew up with. I have my own blind spots when it comes to new concepts whereas I fully embrace some of them. Maybe the results of some studies are affected by the fact that the test group was more used to the traditional method then the digital version. In the early days of say the motor car you would probably have found that the majority preferred horse carriages until the new invention had matured and the advantages became self-evident. It's funny how we have happily abandoned some media (vinyl LPs, audio cassettes, VHS, letter writing, film cameras) but hang on passionately to others (above all books).

An interesting article by Dan Cohen, What’s the matter with ebooks? In our praise for print, we forget the great virtues of digital formats, calls for some balance in the debate between printed and digital literature. Even if reports show sales of e-books leveling off this is really a mirage since a great deal of e-reading is not traceable. There are vast amounts of e-literature available from open publishers as well as private publication and the mainstream surveys only track sales of commercially published e-books. I read vast amounts on the net but almost never commercial e-books and I'm sure millions of others do likewise. As the technology improves and new business models emerge (many present models almost actively discourage e-reading) the present analogue/digital debate will become largely irrelevant.

... jump forward 10 or 20 or 50 years, and you should have a hard time saying that the e-reading technology won’t be much better—perhaps even indistinguishable from print, and that adoption will be widespread.

Reading will become digital even if the transition will not be as abrupt as the move from analogue audio or from fixed to mobile telephony. Digital reading offers an enhanced reading experience with advanced referencing and notetaking functions as well as multimedia support. Future digital reading interfaces could well be able to reproduce the feel of leafing through a first edition or ancient manuscript in a way that would be impossible in print today unless you are privileged enough to have access to the right library. The present arguments in favour of print will probably evaporate as digital publishing matures. Cohen argues that we should shift the focus from preserving tradition to embracing digital publication and focusing more on how to successfully manage the transition.

I’m a historian, not a futurist, but I suspect that we’re not going to have to wait anywhere near forty years for ebooks to become predominant, and that the “plateau” is in part a mirage. That may cause some hand-wringing among book traditionalists, an emotion that is understandable: books are treasured artifacts of human expression. But in our praise for print we forget the great virtues of digital formats, especially the ease of distribution and greater access for all—if done right.

Your book just tweeted

I always like to find examples of how digital and analogue can interact with and complement each other and that there is not always a conflict between the two. Penguin Books in Brazil have gained considerable media attention recently by releasing a smart bookmark that communicates with you via Twitter (see article in Springwise, Smart bookmark lets authors tweet at readers who have neglected their novel). The premise is that we are so distracted by social media today that it's easy to start a book and then forget it. Now the book gets a voice in the digital cacophany.

The concept is well demonstrated in the video below but basically it's a physical bookmark that contains a light sensor, timer and a nano-processor with wifi. You leave it in your book and if you don't open the book for a while the bookmark will tweet you a gentle, witty reminder in the style of the book's author. If you still don't pick up your book you will continue to receive regular reminders. Exactly how the tweets come in the style of the book's author is not explained in the articles I have read but I suspect that each book comes with its own bookmark preloaded with that author's potential reminders. You probably can't use that bookmark in any other book though an interesting development could be allowing the bookmark to register the new book via its barcode.

Yet another example of the internet of things where just about everything in our lives will be able to communicate.


PENGUIN BOOKS | Case Tweet For a Read from Rafael Gonzaga on Vimeo.

Science on auto-pilot

  by peyri

Fifty years ago each academic field would have a limited number of journals and an even more limited number of conferences and it was quite possible to keep abreast of what was happening. That is simply not possible today with an ever-increasing deluge of publications and conferences in even the most narrow and specialised of fields. With such volume it is inevitable that some events and publications will have serious quality issues. Many less serious journals seem to publish just about anything without any peer review and the same is true for some conferences where accepting all papers can mean that authors will pay to attend.

An amazing news post in Nature, Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers, reveals that publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 published papers after discovering that they were automatically generated by computer and were, in fact, complete nonsense. These papers are generated by software called SCIgen that was developed by students at MIT about 12 years ago to see if random generated articles could get accepted for academic conferences. The articles produced by SCIgen certainly look plausible at first glance and if that is all the conference or journal reviewers have done it's possible to accept them. However anyone who actually tries to read them will see the bluff pretty quickly - have a look at one and see for yourself. If you can't spot them yourself then there is even a program that will detect computer generated papers, SCIgen detection. Read more on this in an article in the Guardian,
How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia.

What's really interesting here is that although SCIgen was developed so long ago, nonsense articles are still finding their way into journals and conferences, to the amusement no doubt of those who submitted the articles and developed the software. In a way you could claim that they are doing an important job by revealing publications and conferences whose peer review of submissions either doesn't work or doesn't exist. These revelations will no doubt inspire some to take a serious look at their routines and some may hopefully be forced out of business.

Academics are under intense pressure to publish, conferences and journals want to turn their papers into profits, and universities want them published. "This ought to be a shock to people," Krohn said. "There's this whole academic underground where everyone seems to benefit, but they are wasting time and money and adding nothing to science. The institutions are being ripped off, because they pay publishers huge subscriptions for this stuff."
Guardian 27 Feb 2014, How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia

Copyright Bermuda Triangle

 by Dave Stokes

The book shops of the world are crammed with titles and more books are published today than ever before. However once a book has been available for a few years it disappears from the shelves and unless the publishers think it worth a new edition it will become extremely difficult to read the book unless your local library happens to have a copy. This is one major problem with current copyright law. Popular titles will of course be republished regularly but the vast majority will not be worth a publisher producing a new edition and as a result they will become unavailable outside a few libraries or second-hand bookstores. Millions of books are lost until the copyright period expires.

This problem is well illustrated by recent research summed up in an article by Rebecca J Rosen in The Atlantic, The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish.

"A book published during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur has a greater chance of being in print today than one published during the time of Reagan."

The article examines research by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois who has analysed all books available on Amazon to see how different decades in the last 150 years are represented. The copyright Bermuda Triangle is clear in the statistics presented. Books available from the 1850's are double the number of titles from the 1950's. Basically you can buy and access millions of currently published titles plus just about everything pre-1923 but very little in between. So millions of books are hidden away because they're not worth republishing and copyright prevents them from being published digitally. Heald sums up the situation:

"Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability ... Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners."

Since no-one is going to make any money from selling this vast resource why not let them be available as simple e-books for free? At least they will be available and read by some. Maybe they could be sold for micro-payments, a bit like the music service Spotify, where subscribers pay a low monthly fee and can read whatever they want. That way the authors could at least earn a little from their title instead of zero if it is out of publication as at present. I'm not suggesting that we do this for best-sellers but for the millions of forgotten books that are now languishing in the Bermuda Triangle of copyright.

Libraries and MOOCs - the missing link?

  by Universitetet i Bergen

Several surveys indicate that the majority of people studying on MOOCs already have a university background and that these courses are not reaching new learners as much as many would hope. The problem is that most people have a traditional school education behind them and need clear instructions, feedback and supervision. Many MOOCs on the other hand demand rather advanced study skills, independence and digital literacy and for those who lack these skills a MOOC can be a bewildering and daunting environment.

That's where libraries come in according to an article on OEDb, Librarians: Your Most Valuable MOOC Supporters. Libraries provide study guidance and information retrieval tuition for campus courses so why not for MOOCs? The article urges librarians to get involved in the MOOC debate by trying them out for themselves and finding ways of supporting MOOC students with trustworthy study guides and literature lists. Many MOOCs that are already on offer have not integrated library services into the package and librarians at MOOC-universities need to get involved in course design from the beginning.

"Miller sees libraries supporting MOOC students by doing many of the things they’ve always done, like providing access to resources, and even existing as a place where learners can use the Internet to access a MOOC. Miller points to the many potential MOOC support roles for librarians: as copyright consultants to MOOC faculty, tech and research assistance for MOOC learners and instructional design consultants as MOOCs are built.

Librarians can extend beyond the role of MOOC support, though. Librarians are experts in information and other resources that can help both faculty and students in MOOCs. In addition to a support role, Miller would like to see librarians move to the role of collaborators in growing MOOC potential."

The difference is that the people taking MOOCs are not on campus, they're everywhere else. So it's time for public libraries to get involved in MOOCs providing support for informal learning, offering computer access, advice and hands-on support for learners unused to online learning. It's not just university level MOOCs, there are lots of other types of informal online courses through channels like Udemy or Peer 2 Peer University and many of the people who would most benefit from them are completely unaware of what's available. There are many libraries who are already offering support for lifelong learning but the rise of the MOOCs puts this even more in the spotlight.

Can you own a digital purchase?

  by Jemimus

If I buy a book, a music CD or a DVD movie I own it and when I get tired of it I am free to sell it to someone else. This principle of ownership seems simple enough but in the digital world it suddenly ceases to apply. An article by Dan Gillmor in the Guardian, In our digital world you don't own stuff, you just license it, describes a recent American court ruling against a start-up, ReDigi, who proposed to start a market for people to resell digital music.

"Had the users of the startup, ReDigi, been selling used CDs via any number of online stores, there would have been no issue. But the music in this case was stored in computer files, so the doctrine of "first sale" – your right to resell what you've bought – didn't apply.

ReDigi tried hard to live up to the spirit of copyright law. It created a system where the uploader of a "purchased" iTunes song would lose access to the music after the file was transferred to the new "buyer's" computer. Yeah, right, said the record company and the judge – there's no way to ensure that the "seller" wasn't keeping the song anyway."

The same problem applies to e-books, e-magazines and all types of digital content. Because it's so easy to make perfect digital copies the companies argue that you can't really own digital content, simply the right to access it yourself and that right is not transferable. Many libraries have encountered difficulties in lending e-books and often have to pay considerable sums to be able to lend such content.

June Breivik points out another absurdity with digital content in a post about how e-books are often much more expensive than the printed equivalent (blog post in Norwegian).

Is the high price some kind of compensation for the fact that once bought the content may be copied? The ruling against ReDigi would suggest that we need to rethink our principle of ownership when it comes to digital products and that you merely pay for the right to borrow rather than own. Many digital content services are subscription based and if you stop paying the subscription your content is no longer available.

But if I pay money for something that I don't really own and do not have the right to resell, the price for this service should logically be much lower than the purchase of the physical equivalent which include reselling rights? It seems that the content companies are still uncomfortable with digital formats and are applying an analogue business model that doesn't quite fit. I don't have the answer but new models are needed to avoid absurd examples like the above.

Searching for open educational resources

One of the often quoted barriers to the adoption of open educational resources (OER) is the difficulty of searching for them in a reliable way. Below is a nice infographic that describes a service I use regularly, in particular for finding photos to use on this blog, namely CCSearch. Here you can search for Creative Commons material in the most common repositories such as Flickr, Google Images, Fotopedia and Wikimedia Commons for photos or Jamendo and SoundCloud for music.

Another tactic is to make an advanced Google search but that requires good information retrieval skills to get all the right search criteria. My colleagues at the Blekinge Institute of Technology here in south-east Sweden have formulated an excellent Google search for teachers that is open for all and that searches only for OER.

Try it at OER@BTH.

by coerll. Learn about infographics software.

Source

The unbundled library

What is the academic library's role in a world of open educational resources, online learning, MOOCs and other examples of informal learning? More important than ever in my opinion. As libraries move from place to service; from being buildings with books towards providing trustworthy services in information retrieval, source criticism, study guidance, research, business intelligence and knowledge management. The physical space is already being transformed into a meeting place and a learning space. The virtual space is however more interesting and offers many alternative opportunities. Libraries can offer global services on the net and this will result in new niches. There is already a major opportunity for libraries to provide services to all students involved in informal online learning. In the first place libraries can offer study guidance to make more people aware of the new types of online learning such as MOOCs, Peer 2 Peer University, Udacity, MITx and many others. Secondly libraries can provide online support for these learners by linking up in some way with the course providers.

These themes are developed in.an article in Education Futures, The future of academic libraries: An interview with Steven J Bell which includes the interview embedded below with Steven J. Bell (Associate University Librarian for Research and Instruction at Temple University, and current Vice President and President Elect of the Association of College and Research Libraries). Bell believes that traditional universities will continue but that an increasing number of students will choose part-time studies in combination with work due to the increasing costs of full-time campus education. There will be a wide range of education providers, both formal and informal and students will choose courses from different providers depending on needs. Libraries need to be able to follow these learners as well as the traditional student market and this offers new opportunities for those willing to innovate. Some will refuse to change and become entrenched in a traditional role whereas others will test new avenues:

“Another scenario might involve unbundled academic libraries that would offer different types of resources and services. A student might connect with one library for help with a question on ancient Rome, but contact another depending on the subject matter or the service needed. This might involve some extended version of resource sharing where academic libraries would serve more than their own local community. We do that now, but think of it on a much larger scale and for much more than just content sharing. Who pays for it? Perhaps the students, who might pay a fee to access the services and content on a per-use basis, or they might get “library credits” from the institution providing their unbundled course that could be used to obtain service at a participating library. An unbundled system of higher education might require academic librarians to think more entrepreneurially about how they operate.” 

The bookless library - good idea but there's a catch

Continuing on the theme of e-books (see earlier posts Why students don't use e-books as much as expected and Library extreme makeover) I'd like to return to the subject of bookless libraries. We've already got banks that have no cash and the paperless office is fully feasible though seldom seen. So what about the bookless library? As sales of e-books and varieties of tablets, e-readers and iPads increase the need for libraries to be filled with books becomes questionable. So let's move out the books and journals and create the library of the future.

But is there a catch here?

There is a problem and that becomes clear after reading an article by Barbara Fister in Inside Higher Ed called The myth of the bookless library.The problem with collections of e-books and e-journals is that the library has to pay a hefty yearly subscription to gain access to them. If you stop paying you lose the collectiuon. Instead of winning freedom by going digital the library commits itself to often extortiate annual fees to maintain its virtual collection. The books you used to buy were not cheap but once they were on the shelf you knew what you had. Not so with much e-literature.

"When you know that a subscription you’ve been spending tens of thousands of dollars on will vanish if you fail to pay the rent, you trim where you can, and for the past thirty years, that’s been the book budget, which is more discretionary than those demanding subscriptions. No wonder university presses and other scholarly book publishers are banding together to license digital book collections by subscription. It seems the only way to guarantee your product will get into libraries is to charge a lot for something that disappears if you stop paying."

Interestingly there is no sign of print book production falling despite the hype. We've never printed as many books as we do now so they won't be disappearing any time soon. It's easy to fall into the trap of seeing all digital resources as free. Yes there are plenty of open educational resources and open access material out there but the publishing industry is busy remodelling its business for the digital market and there's a lot of money being made out there still. The transition to the bookless library will not be such a smooth one.

Photo:
by quinn.anya 

Library extreme makeover

As the shelves of books become less relevant there's plenty speculation about the future of the public library. The library's future roles of digital information hub and learning space are well discussed. Traditional librarian skills such as information literacy and source criticism will be even more essential in the future as the vast amount of information mushrooms. Libraries may well need to change their name to encompass their new roles as they turn into community centres, learning spaces, information centres and cultural arenas.

  3D printer by  kakissel 

However there may be other roles for libraries to adopt and one possible avenue is described in an article on the excellent news site Mind/Shift, The public library, completely reimagined. The article describes a library in the USA, Fayetteville Free Library, that has recently been completely rebuilt and, in addition to the roles described above, hs also taken on the role of techshop or as they say Fab lab. Here visitors can borrow equipment such as 3D printers to design and produce plastic shapes and designs or a laser cutter. Basically you can learn how to use expensive and new technical equipment with assistance at hand and develop new skills and new project ideas. The library becomes a workshop and the fundamental idea of stimulating culture and education takes on a new dimension.

In the past, books were seen as a luxury so libraries gave everyone access to that knowledge for free. Now that books are accessible for all libraries can instead offer public access to new technologies that are beyond the reach of the average citizen. Devices and tools that would otherwise only be available to employees of major companies can be tested by anyone and in this way new skills can be learned and new ways of using technology may be discovered.

Librarian Lauren Smedley, one of those responsible for building the new library in Fayetteville, says in the article:  

"... libraries aren’t just about books. They are about free access to information and to technology — and not just to reading books or using computers, but actually building and making things."

Why is public research not public?

Public money often funds research. That research is carried out by publically employed university researchers. The research findings are then submitted for publication and are peer reviewed by other university professors to see that the research is good enough for publication. Fine so far but here comes the catch that is attracting increasing controversy. This public research is then published in scientific journals that charge often very high subscription rates. University libraries then pay a large chunk of their budgets to get access to these journals so that students can read them. So more public money is paid to the publishers to see articles written with public money but which is inaccessible to the general public. Amazingly the researchers and reviewers get paid very little for their efforts. The reward for the researcher is of course academic reputation but the cost to public funds is unacceptably high.

In the last few weeks there have been several highly critical articles on this theme, for example Steve Wheeler, Sharp practice:

"For a long time I have felt very strongly that some academic publishers are operating a sharp practice by exploiting the goodwill of scholars. Large groups of lecturers and researchers act as journal authors and reviewers without payment, and then the publishers sell this content on to other academics at grossly inflated prices. Other highly knowledgeable academics give up their time, also for no payment, to review and advise editors on the content, and this can be painstaking work - read this by Martin Weller on the real cost of 'free reviewing'. This is not sustainable and must change."

The answer is of course the now widespread principle of Open Access where articles are published in open journals and are free to all. These journals have not yet achieved the academic status of the traditional publications but they are run by the academic community for the academic community. The peer review process is just as rigorous and the articles are available to the world. Many traditional journals now allow parallell publication whereby the article is also published in an open access journal, often 6 months after initial publication. However many journals still own exclusive copyright, effectively locking away public research from the public.

Last week the academic heavyweight Princeton University made a highly influential move in favour of open access by preventing staff from signing away the copyright to their articles to for-profit journals and insistig that articles also be made avaiable as open access. Exceptions to the rule must be first approved by the university. If Princeton can do this then many other prestigious universities may well follow suit. Read the details of this in an article in The Conversation, Princeton goes open access to stop staff handing all copyright to journals.

In that article the significance of Princeton's announcement is summarised as follows by Professor Simon Marginson (University of Melbourne): 

“The achievement of free knowledge flows, and installation of open access publishing on the web as the primary form of publishing rather than oligopolistic journal publishing subject to price barriers, now depends on whether this movement spreads further among the peak research and scholarly institutions.”

If university libraries did not have to pay millions of dollars/euros to pay for access to articles written by university faculty maybe they would be able to use that money to fund more important work like providing better support to students and faculty. Let's hope more universities take a stand like Princeton and work out a new way forward for scientific publication.

Steve Wheeler has posted a list of recommended open access scientific journals in a new post, The open case.



Photo:

 

  by  maolibrarian 

Borrow a librarian

Up till now you a library was judged by the extent of its book collection. Floors of bookshelves demanded respect. But soon when most resources are digital and available on the net the library will need to redefine itself and that process is already under way in many places. When all information is just a click away and students can have their entire course resources on a thin tablet or even smartphone. What then is the library's key resource? In a word - librarians.

  by  UBC Library (people in photo are not connected to the story)

I came across a short but thought provoking news item from Canada, Public library will lend out people as ‘living books’. A library in Surrey, BC, offers the opportunity to borrow a librarian. You can check out a librarian to get help with finding information for a project for example. Not for days of course but for an hour or so. An extension of this would be to discuss how to gather business intelligence for your company, how to study online etc. The key resource is expertise in how to find and exploit the resources of the web.

Numerous such “living books” have reportedly already volunteered and will be available for chats over coffee in the library’s new cafe. “What we’re aiming to do is bring the library to life for people,” explains deputy chief librarian Melanie Houlden. “There are huge repositories of experience and knowledge in their own brains.”

The opportunity for all libraries is clear. Content is everywhere but human beings can give context and support. The library of the future depends on the expertise of the staff and not on the mileage of bookshelves. Even the smallest library in terms of space can provide invaluable support to its users.

Cloud library

  by  Extra Medium 

Imagine a place where you can download books, music and films completely free as often as you like. When you're finished with them you just give them back.You never need to buy them yourself and if this place doesn't have what you want they can get it from their network of contacts.Sounds a bit dodgy doesn't it? Some kind of pirate web site? No it's called a library.

The point is that we have been borrowing books and other media for years without any debate about copyright. A new article by Paul Carr in Tech Crunch, Book piracy: a non-issue, doesn't see any reason for fearing the free sharing of e-books. Books have always be read by many more people than buy them, either by borrowing from libraries or friends or from second-hand shops. You can sell maybe 10,000 copies that are then read by 100,000 people. It's very doubtful if you would sell more books if all lending was forbidden and it's better to reach a wider audience than a very narrow paying one.

"To all intents and purposes, books borrowed from libraries mean authors receive no compensation. Meanwhile, every day, millions of people around the world loan books to their friends, or donate books to charities, or leave them on public transport or otherwise share them in ways that negate the need for the recipient to buy their own copy. None of this constitutes stealing from authors, and you won’t hear a peep of objection from the publishing industry or authors."

The problem with e-books is that they cannot be shared very easily and there are strict restrictions on how libraries lend them. Publishers fear they are heading the same way as the music industry but forget that millions of books are shared in accepted ways already. Carr argues that genuine readers will be quite happy to download e-books legally if the price is reasonable and the purchasing and downloading process is simple and hassle free but once you've bought the e-book it's quite natural to lend it to friends and family as we always have done.

Or maybe we pay a standard access fee every month and then read anything we want from the cloud with no need to download at all? The cloud library.

All tagged up

QR codes (quick response)are finally beginning to provide useful services and before long they could be even more common than their less sophisticated cousins the simple bar codes we see on every product in the supermarket. The principle is simple. Most smartphones can download a QR reader app and so if you see a QR-code your phone can scan it and immediately take you to a website or instruction film. No need to put long web addresses on advertising since our mobiles will simply remember the site automatically if the code is scanned.

At the moment QR-codes are being used mostly in advertising where you scan the code and can see more product information on a website. DIY chain The Home Depot have started using QR-codes to let customers access video DIY tips, product demos and further information. You can see how to use the product before you decide to buy. See more on Mashable, Mobile bar codes come to The Home Depot.

In education there are already many innovative applications of this technology, as well demonstrated in this excellent overview (below) by Carol Walker from JISC RSC Scotland N&E (see original post). QR-codes are used in libraries to help students access e-books and e-journas, to speed up borrowing and returning and for catalogue access. QR-codes around campus can be used to help new students get acquainted with the campus. Museums can have QR codes on every exhibit to provide extra information, activate video or audio commentary. Books can have QR-codes leading to new updated material. The potential is enormous.



At the moment this is still not mainstream. You need a smartphone and you need to download the application before QR codes become meaningful. Hopefully new mobiles will have a QR reader pre-installed thus eliminating one major hurdle. We're still waiting for the critical mass to be reached but the potential uses are so wide ranging that the only reason QR won't take off is that an even better solution emerges.

Basically everything could be tagged like this and you can't help wondering when we can have a bar code on our foreheads so people can find out everything about us without all the bother of engaging in long conversations.

The QR-code above will lead you straight to this blog!

Revolution or evolution?

I feel increasingly uncomfortable about the terminology I use every day to describe what I work with. I talk and write about e-learning, m-learning, net-based learning, distance eductaion and so on as if they were something completely new and different from all that has gone before. Similarly there's a tendency to present radical visions of how the web will make schools, universities, libraries and books virtually obsolete. Examples of this are Bill Gates a few months ago proclaiming that In five years the best education will come from the web and Nicholas Negroponte at the same event claiming that The physical book is dead in five years. I fully understand how they think but maybe the shock tactics cause more harm than good.

  by  Kevin H. 

There's a lot of truth there and I do believe that we are seeing a major change in how education is perceived but it's important not to polarise the issues. The web is not going to wipe out the great universities and kids will still need to attend school in the future. To sweep them away completely is simply too radical and we'd then need to create new fundamental structures in society. Similarly the way we access books and magazines is changing but the concept will remain roughly the same. What would we replace them with? Can't they evolve and develop?

Some people react to our talk about net-based learning by thinking that we're against all physical meetings. They mistakenly think that we want all learning to take place via a computer and that we reject anything that is not digital. This kind of either/or interpretation is very damaging and often leads to entrenched positions at schools and colleges between traditionalists and the net educators.

We need to gather round the concepts we all believe in such as learning, education, teaching, training and study and then look at how they can be developed using the tools and methods available today. I don't think there is any e-learning or m-learning; it's all learning but using different media when relevant. Sometimes chalk and talk can be very effective and other times social media can be used to great advantage. We should welcome new technology and ask ourselves what new avenues can we explore with their help rather than digging trenches against the threat of innovation.

Copyright black hole

Below is a talk by James Boyle (Duke University) called The incredible shrinking public domain taken from a conference of the Open Rights Group a short time ago. In it he talks about the absurdity that vast amounts of books, films and photos are locked away from public view because of existing copyright legislation. These are works that are no longer commercially available but cannot be reproduced due to copyright. Libraries are full of archive material that could be of interest but is sadly almost impossible to trace. It could be scanned and put on to the net. The authors earn nothing from these works any more and in many cases they are dead but due to copyright the works are locked away for ever.

Boyle calls this a black hole whereby copyright law has cut us off from our collective heritage. He does not advocate total freedom from copyright. Works that are still commercially viable may happily continue to generate income but the vast majority of material will never generate a penny so why not let it out into the light of the public domain?

This reminds me of an example I heard from a colleague about how a museum's collection of 19th century photos were released with Creative Commons licences. These photos had not been seen by anyone for dozens of years but within a few months some of them had been viewed by thousands of people on Flickr.


[ORGCon] James Boyle: The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain from Open Rights Group on Vimeo.