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Posts from the ‘IP (Intellectual Property)’ Category

Nov 2

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Open Access Proposals Made at an IU Faculty Forum on the Future of Libraries

What follows are the remarks and proposals that I offered during the libraries-focused event held today at Indiana University. Hosted by IU Provost Karen Hansen and Dean of the Libraries Brenda Johnson, the event was framed as “A Faculty Discussion on the Future of University Libraries.” I was one of eight members of the faculty invited to offer 5 minute reflections on the questions before the assembly. I took the opportunity to suggest that the time has come for the IU faculty to get moving toward a green OA mandate. A proposal towards that goal, and two related ends, are expressed in my comments, which I share here for those who might be interested. The opening remarks and slides by the Provost and the Dean did a nice job framing the issues and my fellow panelists all offered important reflections and goals. The event was very well attended and I thank everyone involved in organizing and attending the gathering. I think that the event was a good step forward towards additional discussions and the work ahead.

I want to thank Dean Johnson and Provost Hansen for their kind invitation to participate in today’s discussion. This afternoon, I wish to carefully offer three proposals while keeping to the allotted five minutes. This context explains my pre-preparation of these remarks.

I am not speaking on anyone else’s behalf, but my suggestions are conditioned by my past experiences, present commitments, and the collaborative projects on which I am working. My efforts as a curator, teacher, researcher, journal editor, library committee member, scholarly society board member, and collaborator working with disadvantaged communities still dealing with the legacies of colonialism, all shape my concerns and motivate my efforts as an activist for scholarly communications reform. My knowledge of the current scholarly communications system and its prospects have been profoundly shaped through my collaborations with librarians and technologists at the IU Libraries and I appreciate the many ways that they have supported and taught me. I have tremendous appreciation for all that the Libraries are doing to support my work and that of my students and colleagues.

I look forward to our discussions of the full range of topics surveyed by the Provost and the Dean, but my proposals focus on the activity that we once called publishing and the changing ways that the libraries engage with it. My hope is to provoke the faculty to take greater ownership in the work of scholarly communication and thereby to partner more meaningfully with our library in fostering a more equitable, ethical, sustainable and sensible communications and learning environment for ourselves, for the communities that need our work, for our debt-crushed students, and for every lifelong learner, regardless of their ability to pay to access our scholarship.

Later I will be very willing to provide needed background, but the most economical approach for me now is to just offer my three proposals for the faculty to consider. The IU Libraries are contributing in a number of key ways to an international effort to protect and improve the scholarly communications system, but without broader leadership here on our campus, there are limits to what can be accomplished. I have tremendous hope for what we might do by working together. Here goes:

  1. I propose that the Bloomington Faculty Council, in consultation with the Dean of the Libraries, the Office of the Provost, and the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs, begin formal work towards what is known as a green open access mandate for faculty on the Bloomington campus. With mandates already in place at Harvard, MIT, California, Oberlin, Kansas and hundreds of other institutions worldwide, we are prepared to take advantage of the experiences of those who have preceded us on this path. Our leadership in IT, our international commitments, the prominence of our scholarship, and the stature of our library insure our success in such a venture. Delay wrongly suggests that we are not an institution of the first rank. Read more

Oct 29

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If robots write one of these biographies about you, will you purchase it?

Its crazy stuff like this that makes my senior colleagues so dubious about the internet in general and the changing publications landscape in particular.

I follow a twitter feed called Anthropology Books. I have never investigated who put it together and I do not know anything about it except that it has been useful to me. Using some kind of automated approach, the person or software behind Anthropology Books has been very usefully telling me (and about 1000 other folks) about “All new anthropology books posted on their publication day.” If a title seems interesting, there is a link that takes one to the book’s Amazon.com page.

Today, books with the names of famous and not-so-famous anthropologists (and folklorists) started showing up in the stream today. Alan Dundes was one that caught my eye first. He is very important figure in folklore studies and a very good candidate for a proper biography. Other names started showing up, including those of active colleagues who are basically my own age! They all had unfamiliar to me authors and publishers.  There was a flood of them today.

Looking at the books on Amazon.com, one is (sometimes) confronted with the information that “the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online.” I took this quote from the book on Dorothy Eggan. This 84 page book is selling for $47.00 and has been published by Lect Publishing. The book is credited to the editorship of Nuadha Trev. This editor shows up in Amazon.com as the person behind about 3000 books. Lect Publishing is only one of several names associated with the same basic project and Nuadha Trev is only one of several editors.

I know that others have been writing a lot recently about Amazon’s publishing toolkit. Also at issue here is the CC licensing of Wikipedia etc. content. The student publishing group that I work with here at Indiana–Trickster Press–makes great use of CreateSpace+Amazon for the publication of real peer-reviewed monographs and I am certainly appreciative of, and in debt to, the Creative Commons. These resources are not to blame for the creation of this kind of spam-like books, but I think that they represent a problem on several fronts. Perhaps it is enough to say that they give the Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Amazon, remix, and scholarly communications reform a bad name.

I would love to know who would purchase one of these books. Maybe some of them are traps designed to extract cash out of their living subjects. Here is an example. The publisher “Fedel” has just published a 108 page/$54 book on ethnomusicologist/linguist/anthropologist Aaron Fox. (He and I know people in common but are not yet acquainted.) Would Professor Fox feel like he had no choice but to purchase this book to see what it said about him? Would I feel similarly compelled if one were published on me? His is one of about 3000 titles edited by “Christabel Donatienne Ruby”, but does Christabel Donatienne Ruby actually exist?

I would also love to know about the technical infrastructure that automatically (?) assembles these books and feeds them into Amazon. Anybody understand this stuff?

Update:  Thankfully the people behind the wikipedia article for VDM Publishing seem to understand it pretty well. For background, see the entry here. See also the discussion on slashdot here.

Oct 28

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Know Your Publisher: Annual Reports Edition #oaweek #oa

Have you read the annual reports for the largest commercial scholarly publishers? I have and I hope that you will too. These publishers generously make these key documents freely available on the open web. Here they are for some of the largest scholarly publishers, with a few notes of anthropological interest along the way.

Springer

As noted in its 2010 Annual Report, Springer established an agreement with the Anthropological Society of Paris.

Springer reported revenues of 866 million Euros for 2010. (about 1.2 billion dollars)

Annual Reports:  http://www.springer.com/about+springer/company+information/annual+report?SGWID=0-175705-0-0-0

Reed Elsevier

While it did not note any specific anthropology oriented activities in its 2010 annual report, Reed Elsevier does publish a number of scientifically oriented anthropology journals.

Reed Elsevier reported revenues of 7 billion 84 million Euros for 2010 (about 10 billion dollars)

Annual Reports: http://www.reedelsevier.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Pages/Home.aspx

Informa (home to Taylor and Francis, which is home to Routledge)

While it did not note any specific anthropology oriented activities in its 2010 annual report, Informa does publish a variety of anthropology journals (Visual Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Anthropological Forum, etc.) and many relevant books via its Routledge unit.

Informa reported revenues of 1 billion 226.5 million Euros for 2010 (about 1.7 billion dollars)

Annual Reports: http://www.informa.com/Investor-relations/Results–Reporting/

Sage

I cannot find an annual report for Sage Publishers. I think that this is because they are not (I think) a publicly traded company. Big news for Sage was partnering with the American Sociological Association to publish its journals beginning in 2010. Sage publishes such anthropology journals as Critique of Anthropology, Field Methods, and Anthropological Theory.

Company Information:  http://www.sagepublications.com/

Wiley

Wiley is a central partner for a number of anthropology societies, including the Australian Anthropological Society, the American Anthropological Association, the Royal Anthropological Institute. They did not specifically note any anthropological activity in their annuall report for 2010.

Wiley reported revenues of 1 billion 699 million Dollars for 2010.

Annual Report:  http://www.wiley.com/legacy/annual_reports/ar_2010/financial.html

Oct 24

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Open Access Week + Occupy Scholarly Communications #occupyscholcomm #oaweek

My job is eating my lunch at present so I have not yet had time to engage properly with open access week, which began today (well, yesterday since it just passed midnight where I am). Learn more from the Open Access Week website here ( http://www.openaccessweek.org/ ) and by searching “Open Access Week” on the open web and by looking for “open access week” and “#oaweek” on Twitter. Thankfully many good folks are working hard to get the word out.

If you think that the Occupy Wall Street (etc.) folks have anything like a point in their concerns about the unsustainable nature of the status quo or the need to acknowledge the influence that a small number of large corporations have in our lives and work, then the open access movement, together with the critique of, and efforts to reform, the scholarly communications system are for you. Above and beyond discussions of open access, a taste of the Occupy Scholarly Communications conversation can be found in Heather Morrison’s October 23, 2011 post “High Profits for Commercial Publishers-or Jobs for Academics Let’s #occupyscholcomm”

Next year, when open access week comes again, lets hope that some of the most vocal, articulate, and visible scholars working on questions of income inequality and corporate power will not have published their sophisticated accounts of emergent phenomena such as the Occupy movement with publishers like Polity (people Polity effectively = Wiley) and Palgrave-Macmillian or in journals owned wholly by Sage or Taylor and Francis. Our doing this occasionally is ironic and even kind of funny, but its starting to suggest that we actually do not get it, even when we get it.

Oct 19

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Loans and Books: Two Brief Observations Made During the Student Debt Revolt

Many excellent graduate students with whom I have the honor of working receive only modest or no assistantship or fellowship aid. Historically, many have supported themselves in part during graduate school with government-backed student loans. This has always been a source of anxiety for me, but matters grew worse for U.S. students earlier this year when the major federal loan program changed its structure so that graduate students receiving such loans must begin paying them back immediately rather than after graduation. For students studying in the world in which I work, such a scenario is hardly possible. Even students with assistantships are just above the poverty line.

Meanwhile, more and more excellent scholarly resources ideal for the training of these students are being produced. But they are on the market at a price that no starving graduate student can afford and at which most professors would feel guilty assigning them. This reoccurring thought returned to me when I noted the publication of a very impressive looking ethnobiology textbook. It was also on my mind when I spoke last week to an editor of what promises to be the absolutely essential handbook for folklore studies. That volume will be rich beyond measure, but at 680 pages and 29 cents per page how will any of us afford to purchase it? If my library can afford it, I plan to sit and read it cover to cover in the stacks. Excellent scholars are producing excellent work, but the business model fails us, or at least our students.

A glimmer of hope came during the #AFS11 meetings. A group of folklorists have begun discussions aimed at creating an free and open access textbook for undergraduate folklore studies. One possible publication platform being discussed is connexions centered at Rice University. Hopefully folklore studies can become a leading field in the cultivation of Open Educational Resources. I cannot see how we can continue down the path that we are heading.

Sep 27

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@Mukurtu Project Wins Major IMLS Grant

Congratulations to Kim Christen and everyone working on the Mukurtu project on news that the effort has received a major grant from the (U.S.) Institute for Museum and Library Services (announced here). This is a major development for a major project.

As noted on the Mukurtu project site, Mukurtu is “A free and open source community content management system that provides international standards-based tools adaptable to the local cultural protocols and intellectual property systems of Indigenous communities, libraries, archives, and museums.” It is “a flexible archival tool that allows users to protect, preserve and share digital cultural heritage through Mukurtu Core steps and unique Traditional Knowledge licenses.”

Sep 26

“Your royalty share will be 0%”

Thanks to the amazing Laura Gibbs for pointing me to this new video.

Sep 19

#HathiTrust Partnering with Rights-holders

This note represents my own personal views and is not an official organizational statement of any kind.

It is a terrible shame that so many scholars, as well as members of the broader public, are only learning about the important public-interest work of the HathiTrust Digital Library as a consequence of the unfortunate and counter-productive (in my view) lawsuit brought against the organization and its university partners by The Authors Guild and a group of associates. More articulate voices than mine have been speaking of this issue and there are now many discussions available online. A summary story by Steve Kolowich is freely available via Inside Higher Education. Reflecting my perspective is the remarkable piece, “An Open Letter to J.R. Salamanca” by Kevin Smith, the Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University.

What I want to flag here in the smaller corner of the larger landscape in which I work is the very important work that HathiTrust is doing in cooperation with rights-holders to in-copyright works. My case is from the Open Folklore project on which I work. On both our end (the Open Folklore project team) and on the HathiTrust end, we are still working out strategies, processes, and techniques, but already we have succeeded in partnering together with rights-holders to make very important journal titles for the field of folklore studies freely available to interested users. This is done with the full involvement and consent of the copyright holders and the outcome is a real gain for the world of scholarship and for the many communities who look with interest to the documentary record of human culture and creativity that folklorists have compiled.

HathiTrust is a human-built institution and like other human-built institutions, including most especially The Author’s Guild and U.S. copyright law, it has flaws. When considering the loud noises being made by those seeking to call these flaws to the world’s attention, keep in mind the purposes that HathiTrust was established to address: “The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.” What purposes do those who are working to shame and discredit HathiTrust serve?

Want to see full text of journals that the Open Folklore project and HathiTrust have made available through generous partnership with the relevant rights-holders?

As is shown on the Open Folklore portal site, we have a very significant number of other in-copyright journal titles ready to be made openly accessible in this way. The rights-holders have already said yes. Its just a matter of moving these works through the relevant permissions and technical systems with HathiTrust. It is deeply discouraging that so many resources–time and attention most of all–are having to be redeployed to deal with The Author’s Guild’s suit (when, The Author’s Guild could instead be a partner and join collaboratively in this work). These resources could be better used for advancing shared goals, such as the desire by rights-holders to make scholarly journals (and books) freely available via HathiTrust.

Given The Author’s Guild’s apparent love of official snarky comments published online, I’ll just close by saying that you could not pay me (as an author of books) to join the The Author’s Guild after watching the organization at work over the past week or so.

Sep 13

Authors Guild Sues HathiTrust and 5 Universities Over Digitized Books

Boo. Authors Guild and others are suing HathiTrust, U Michigan, Indiana U, etc.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/authors-guild-sues-hathitrust-5-universities-over-digitized-books/36178

Sep 10

The Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest

It has been several years now since I last taught my seminar on intellectual and cultural property issues in folklore and ethnology and I have not succeeded in keeping up with recent developments. In this context, I am especially glad that so many of my favorite colleagues have taken up work in this area. Thanks go to one of them, Alex Dent (Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University and Associate Editor of Anthropological Quarterly [a awesome not-for-profit journal in its 84th year]) for calling to my attention the The Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest. I have signed the statement as an expression of my basic values in this realm and I support the project. Even if you feel differently, reading the declaration is a valuable learning experience. I urge folks with concerns about where we are and where we are going to take a look. Here is an excerpt.

The next decade is likely to be determinative. A quarter century of adverse changes in the international intellectual property system are on the cusp of becoming effectively irreversible, at least in the lives of present generations. Intellectual property can promote innovation, creativity and cultural development. But an old proverb teaches that “it is possible to have too much of a good thing,” and that adage certainly applies here. The burden falls on public interest advocates to make a coordinated, evidence-based case for a critical reexamination of intellectual property maximalism at every level of government, and in every appropriate institutional setting, as well as to pursue alternatives that may blunt the force of intellectual property expansionism.

Find the whole document in its organization, institutional, and policy context online at http://infojustice.org/washington-declaration. Thanks Alex!

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