There are lots of digital resources out there for scholars
and students of ancient history and ancient languages, which are my main
interests. A really useful searchable version of the classic Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon for
example, and the wonderful resources at the Perseus project; the electronic
corpus of Sumerian literature at Oxford (ETCSL), The Sumerian Dictionary at the University of Pennsylvania (PSD), the
Melammu database on Assyria and Babylonia at the University of Helsinki, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, (TLG), which
gives access to the whole corpus of Greek literature from Homer onwards to the
fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE, and so on. Most of which I had occasion to
use in the course of writing The Sacred History of Being.
My bread and butter for many years was in scholarly
communications – we built and ran repositories and encouraged open access
deposit of scholarly papers in those repositories. Open access, for anyone who
doesn’t know, is an important subset of digital publishing, which is about
improving the circulation and use of research by taking it from behind a
publisher paywall, where possible.
The presence of papers available on open access terms with
the appropriate licenses has been invaluable for many researchers, including
myself. The physics community knows this better than any other part of
academia, since they have had the facilities to upload their papers to Paul
Ginsparg’s Arxiv, formerly run as a
site using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), a repository of electronic
preprints (note the archaic description!) originally based at Los Alamos from
1991, and at Cornell since 2004 . Papers are available via a searchable
interface shortly after uploading. CERN has also maintained an active
repository in High Energy Physics for many years. To some significant extent, the
Web itself owes the necessity of its invention to the need to find an easy way
to organise and disseminate the large collection of papers generated by the
research done at CERN.
The publishing community naturally was not very happy about
the idea, when it began to be more generally promoted as a solution to a number
of problems in contemporary scholarly communication, since it threatened the
subscription fees that the publishers charge the academic libraries, if all
research was to end up freely available in institutional repositories, or
otherwise on author websites. Without those subscription fees, commercial
publishing would find itself largely cut adrift from the academic business of
doing research, and disseminating that research.
In the early days, some minor concessions were made by the
publishing community, in that they would perhaps offer a downloadable
unformatted version of a paper in addition to the formally published paper,
behind a paywall. Sometimes ‘unformatted’ was taken to extremes, so that the
papers were virtually unreadable. Formatting information was present visibly in
the text, cluttering the view, but not contributing anything useful to the documents.
Formatting became the thing that the publishers clung on to,
as their main value-added contribution to the publishing process, in addition
to copy-editing and the organisation of peer-review. They also clung to the
practice of authors signing away their copyright in the published articles as
part of the acceptance of the article for publication. So along the way we
ended up with distinctions being made between preprints and post-prints; the
author’s final copy, and the publisher’s final copy; green and gold routes to
open access publication; and the invention of rules concerning what authors and
institutions could and couldn’t do with these different versions. From the
publisher point of view, they argued that what they were doing was maintaining
the integrity and quality of the publishing process, and their important role
in that. Then we ended up with the invention of article processing charges,
which attempted to envelop the research publication process entirely within
publisher dictated assessments of cost.
Naturally I’ve compressed a number of years of development in the foregoing,
but that is the broad shape of the struggle which has developed since the late
1990s. The publishing community cannot be blamed for attempting to protect
their interests, but ultimately it seems to be obvious that research should not
be a free resource for publishers which can be used to extract increasingly
expensive subscriptions from university libraries. In theory at least, it
should be about the quality of scholarship, and its dissemination.
Unfortunately that is not the perspective of many university
administrators and senior academics. Early on in the progress of open access,
it became possible to see how the community would divide. We spent a lot of
time talking to senior academics, with the idea that if we persuaded them of
worth of the open access idea, they would encourage their research students to
stop signing away their copyrights, and to deposit their work in institutional
repositories. Some were interested. Others responded with the specious
objection that If they wanted a paper to make an impact they would submit it to
Nature, or another publication of similar status. As if we were suggesting that
no-one should submit papers to high status, high-impact publications. But that
fracture in the nature of the response was a phenomenon which should have told
us something important about how senior academics understand publishing, and
how open access would fare in succeeding years. It’s about status and its modern
double, research funding.
Eventually open access began to be promoted as an aspect of
institutional reputation management, which of course is about how an
institution and its component faculties and departments are perceived. Of
course a perception of quality is not necessarily the same thing as quality
itself, so reputation management is more problematic than a real assessment of
research output. Publish or perish was an attitude which was already well
established In UK academia however, and reputation management became another
way to raise an institutional profile, even if the quality of the research was
not clarified by doing this. ‘Width’ was also important.
A little later, repository technology was spotted as a way
of automating the submission of a sample of research papers in what was called
the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). So the deposit of papers in a
repository became an important part of the way in which universities would be
assessed for research funding. Open access was now about academics not keeping research
information (and their papers) hidden away in their departmental records, but
making them available to the institution as a whole, as a component of both the
institution’s reputation management, and its pursuit of research funding.
So open access, and the associated technology, in the end
became an adjunct to the already established importance of reputational status
and the acquisition of government research income for the universities. Yet it still
isn’t regarded as a proper publishing route. Is this a strange state of affairs? I think it
is, and I will write about this in my
next post.
Thomas Yaeger, March 2016
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