Publishing, Peer Review and Quality Certification in the Digital Age

Every month the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam hosts a book salon, each focusing on a special theme. Last Thursday’s gathering focused on ‘the scientific publisher in the digital age’ and brought together a panel of three experts on the subject. Cees Andriesse, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Utrecht and the author of Dutch messengers. A history of science publishing, 1930–1980 (2008), was accompanied by Geert Noorman, the head of NUV (Nederlands Uitgeversverbond – Dutch Publishers Association) and Eelco Ferwerda, publisher digital projects at Amsterdam University Press (AUP).

Questions leading the discussion were: What is a publisher? What is its function in the digital era and how is the Internet affecting the publisher’s value proposition?

Professor Andriesse, the first speaker, stressed that the main incentive for scientists to publish is reputation building and not money-making. Their foremost aim, even though this might seem ideological, is the improvement and enlargement of human knowledge. In this respect publishing is a must: scientists can only deepen their insights through dialogue with fellow scientists scattered over the earth. To ensure the growth of (accurate and valuable) knowledge, scientists let their fellow researchers judge their work on originality and correct reasoning. They then give a (honest) judgment on the value of the research, mostly in a nuanced manner with suggestions for improvements. Of course this system knows its critics, but as Andriesse states, it is the only true way to establish quality: the scientific journal is what it is today because of peer review and the organization thereof. And this is the primary task of the publisher; together with his editorial board and secretariat, the publisher is to ensure the proper functioning and arrangement of the peer review.

Andriesse goes on to consider what the influence of the Internet is on scientific publishing and thus on the peer review process. How does the Internet influence and shape peer review? As Andriesse states, being a publisher is increasingly a question of personality and networking. It is the personal qualities of a publisher that makes his or her name and brand and this will continue to be the case in the digital era. He also states that when it concerns the arrangement of peer review, a lot of discretion is needed. Andriesse ends his talk by discussing two famous Elsevier publisher-scientist combinations: Roosenvelt and Frank (Nuclear Physics) and Akert and Remarque (Brain Research). He concludes by stating that although the shape and the communication of peer review has become digital, this has not accelerated the process significantly. Emerging models like PloS and Biomed are on the rise but they are not really a distraction from all the, as Andriesse states, crap on the Internet. Andriesse clearly states that the Internet can add near to nothing to the scientific journal and its peer review.

Eelco Ferwerda, the second speaker, takes another starting point and discusses two young publishing companies, both Open Access, but each playing a different role. He states that Open Access is a growing phenomenon, where for instance the Dutch funding organization NWO has recently chosen to pursue an open access policy. This rise of Open Access is a direct result of the nature of science and the new possibilities for publishing: computers play a tremendous role in the gathering of information, and re-use should not be prohibited via copyright. Creative Commons and free licenses offer possibilities in this respect, Ferwerda states.

He starts by discussing Hindawi a STM publisher which has since 2007 been completely Open Access. And they make a profit. They make use of a very ‘reductionist’ model: they do not have any direct contact with their editorial boards, everything gets handled by mail. Ferwerda states that the business model of Hindawi is completely focused on growth and profit making and on the development of new journals. By doing market research in Web of Science they search for the best scholars in a certain niche and build up a new journal around them. According to Ferwerda Hindawi thus uses a modern and strictly commercial model with a quantitative and a-personal approach to quality. Open Humanities Press on the other hand follows a different strategy. Founded by academics in 2006, their aim is to remove the cultural barriers that inhibit scientists to make full use of the digital possibilities; their strategy is centered on trust and quality. They seek out the best, well-known scholars to support their product (also e-monographs) and they give a home and a quality stamp to journals set up by academics. By establishing connections with the Library of the University off Michigan and the Public Knowledge Project (with their OJS software) they hope to work more efficiently. They operate on a volunteer basis. As Ferwerda says, they don’t offer money but quality through both their business model and their network. The question is however, as Ferwerda ponders, if this will be a sustainable model in the future. Amsterdam University Press is somewhere in between these models: although they are in many ways a lot like OHP, AUP is a professional publisher that needs to make money. For them Open Access is not so much an enthusiasm as it is a real business model. But as OHP shows, the web has led to a renaissance of scholar-lead publishing which is forcing publishers to rethink their value: they are foremost brand builders, organizers, sellers and distributors in the digital age.

As a final example of new developments in science publishing Ferwerda mentions environments like H-net, a portal for researchers and educators covering all areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences. H-net is essentially a discussion network for knowledge exchange. Every sub-field is moderated by a team of scholars and an editorial board. Although not a publisher, H-net is an example of a semi-official form of scientific knowledge exchange. What will this model bring in the future and what will this mean for the publisher? – Ferwerda asks. 

Geert Noorman, the final speaker, brings the focus back to issues of peer review and the Internet. First of all he states that not every article needs an extensive discussion. Peer review also fulfills another function, namely that of ranking research. Being a reviewer is even a form of ranking or reputation building. And doing peer review is important work. And it is still work done by human beings that are fallible, which means mistakes are also still being made. However, as Noorman states, peer review is the only instrument to classify the results of science. It is hard work however, with, as he estimates, between 1-1,5 million articles published yearly. Do we still have enough reviewers (who can and want) to perform this job? Hasn’t peer review become old-fashioned and shouldn’t we replace it by usage statistics? Noorman clearly urges against this notion, citing figures showing that peer review is still very popular. According to these figures only 20% of the people think the current or classical system of peer review is no longer sustainable. 86 % however states they find it very valuable work to do and 91,5 % of the authors says it helped improve their work. When it comes to the digital developments, 73% of the reviewers say digital technologies has made their work easier the last 5 years. What is missing however, says 56 %, is proper information about how to conduct peer review. As to the future of peer review, the research shows processing tools will definitely increase in importance. And this is where, as Noorman states, publishers and universities could play an important role. The Internet could mean a lot to peer review: it builds communities, enlarges communication and it assists peer reviewers in doing their work faster and more efficient and it also enables meta-analysis.

However, as Noorman states, focusing solely on citation scores is a bad thing. Peer review will never become obsolete, although 25% of the researchers mentioned in the previous research think user statisctics might be an alternative to peer review). A thing publishers could focus on is the development of new tools and services that assist with better and faster peer reviewing like CrossCheck, the plagiarism detector by CrossReff.

These kinds of tools will make sure peer review remains alive and kicking in the digital age. Noorman states there should be more attention towards peer review in post-doctoral education, as it is a skill that needs to be trained and it is increasingly part of ones scientific responsibility. Noorman concludes by stating that usage statistics in some cases can be useful but that they miss the discussion element. And scientific discourse will always stay essential..

In the following discussion it becomes even clearer that the participants feel that the review of scientific publications remains essential. However, as Eelco Ferwerda states with pre-print repositories like arXiv, it gets a different function: peer review is more essential for ranking and branding afterwards, and less for direct scholarly communication. Peer review in this sense can be seen as a certificate, it is the end of a discussion, a final qualification: without this qualification you will not be admitted to the scientific annals, it serves as a threshold. With the online comments and the discussion on the preprint version a lot of rubbish also gets sifted out. In the end every article will have to be certified some where, some time. 

After a heated discussion on the need for Open Access (which according to some of the participants is being imposed on scientists by the government, publishers and libraries where others stated that Open Access was initiated by scientists) and the perceived ‘hidden agenda’ of the Dutch governments and its Open Access policy (which according to one participant will be used as an excuse to cut back on scientific funding even further, which was received very skeptical  by the majority of the participants), the concluding remarks focus on the fact that peer review as a process is first of all the property of the scientific community. But to organize it we still need publishers. To make things work better scientists should make clear what their needs are and publishers should keep on showing how they can fulfill these needs and how they can add value to the research process and outcome.

The problem, I felt, of the whole discussion on peer review as reflected on above, is that the speakers most of the time seemed to conflate peer review with (one of) its function(s): the certification of research as being qualitative. What the panelists seemed to essentially agree on was foremost the importance of the certification of scientific research by other scholars (the filter function), for which peer review is just one method. The lack of definitions used to describe peer review during the evening (not one definition was mentioned, if you don’t count ‘classical’) seemed to ignore the fact that not only there are already different levels and manners of doing peer review (from open to semi-open to blind etc.) there are also different methods to perform peer review per field. The difference is also huge between how peer review (often more an editorial process) is conducted in the HSS and in the Sciences. Statements made during the evening like ‘peer review will remain important in the digital age’ thus became quite meaningless with a term and a practice that can have so many meanings and manners. More important to question is what kind of peer review will become more important, and even more, how can we help it, advance it, adjust it or complement it in the digital age with the (alternative) tools and methods at our disposal (which are the more interesting questions concerning peer review I feel).

Next to that we might also start thinking about alternatives to peer review that still fulfill the same basic function as peer review in order to make this process more efficient. In this respect the article ‘On the future of peer review in electronic scholarly publishing’ by Kathleen Fitzpatrick gives many insights, where she separates the structure of peer review from the purposes it serves (and those purposes we want it to serve and those it actually fulfills).

She distinguishes two functions of peer review: fostering discussion and improving the work, and quality filtering (two functions Ferwerda and Noorman also already touched upon briefly during their presentations). However, the first can also already take place during the research process in an open setting, using user comments on the preprint and focusing more on the communication between scholars. Fitzpatrick goes on to establish the benefits these kind of open peer review systems offer to scholarly communication: 

“Vast amounts of scholars’ time is poured into the peer review process each year; wouldn’t it be better to put that time into open discussions that not only improve the individual texts under review but are also, potentially, productive of new work? Isn’t it possible that scholars would all be better served by separating the question of credentialing from the publishing process, by allowing everything through the gate, by designing a post-publication peer review process that focuses on how a scholarly text should be received rather than whether it should be out there in the first place? Would the various credentialing bodies that currently rely on peer review’s gatekeeping function be satisfied if we were to say to them, “no, anonymous reviewers did not determine whether my article was worthy of publication, but if you look at the comments that my article has received, you can see that ten of the top experts in my field had really positive, constructive things to say about it”?”

It is this discussion on how to really improve scholarly communication foremost (which in my opinion comes before quality – not saying that quality establishment is not also of the utmost importance) with the digital possibilities which I felt was missing[*] in especially Andriesse’s and also Noorman’s discussion of this system and which made the evening into a not very exiting all-agreeing praising of systems we now actually have the chance to improve – apparently not during these kind of panel discussions however. 

By the way, Kathleen Fitzpatrick is currently offering her book manuscript, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy for public review via MediaCommons Press.

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[*] Next to a further discussion on the rise of scholarly- and library-led publishing initiatives, which can certainly be seen as threatening the traditional roles of the publisher when it comes to both arranging peer review and to arranging the production and distribution of scientific content.

Proust, Squid and Wolf

I just finished reading Proust and the Squid, the fascinating book by Maryanne Wolf about how we developed and acquired a ‘reading brain’. Although sometimes a little dense in its use of linguistic terminology, it is a very nice read and highly recommended if you are interested in the way we developed one of the most precious gifts available to mankind: the ability to read and write. If Wolf does one thing with this book, it is give you back the amazement pertaining to your own capability to read; to make out meaning out of tiny shapes and forms on paper and their linguistic, grammatical and semantic connections, literally in the blink of an eye. Wolf not only describes how we as a species adapted our brains over centuries to be able to read and write (which is not an innate capability), but also describes how children every day in a limited time-span are required (and able) to do the same thing. She also describes everything that can go wrong in this process, discussing various reading disorders and their origins in a different mind or brain ‘set-up’ or arrangement. After having read this you will truly realize what a wonder it is you now seem to be reading this text so naturally and smoothly as you actually are (I hope!).

She ends her book with a reflection on the future development of our writing capabilities and skills in a world that will increasingly be dominated by screens and where oral and visual communication and literacies will again be more stimulated. She is neither skeptic nor overly enthusiastic about these developments, bringing back into memory Socrates objections to written knowledge, but also the many positive things text culture has brought to humanity. At the same time the present shifts to new forms of literacy should be judged on their face-value. We will learn new things and develop many new (mental) capabilities, but should also try to preserve the mind-set associated with writing, becoming in a way as she calls it bi- or multitextual, thus still being able to analyse a text in multiple manners, capable of ‘probing what lies beneath any form of information.’ There are some good reviews of the book here and here. I would like to finish with a nice quote from the end of the book:

“In the transmission of knowledge the children and teachers of the future should not be faced with a choice between books and screens, between newspapers and capsuled versions of the news on the Internet, or between print and other media. Our transition generation has an opportunity, if we seize it, to pause and use our most reflective capacities, to use everything at our disposal to prepare for the formation of what will come next. The analytical, inferential, perspective-taking, reading brain with all its capacity for human consciousness, and the nimble, multifunctional, multimodal, information-integrative capacities of a digital mind-set do not need to inhabit exclusive realms. Many of our children learn to code-switch between two or more oral languages, and we can teach them also to switch between different presentations of written language and different modes of analysis. Perhaps, like the memorable image captured in 600 BCE of a Sumerian scribe patiently transcribing cuneiform beside an Akkadian scribe, we will be able to preserve the capacities of two systems and appreciate why both of them are precious.”

Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing

“But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be for the way in which scholarly research is conceived, communicated, acquired, exchanged, practiced, and understood?”

Gary Hall – Digitize this book! (2008)

Ubu web was founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith and has developed from ‘a repository for visual, concrete and (later) sound poetry, to a site that ‘embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions.’ As Wikipedia states, Ubu is non-commercial and operates on a gift economy. All the same – by forming an amazing resource and repository for the avant-garde movement, and by offering and hosting these works on its platform, Ubu is violating copyright laws. As they state however: ‘should something return to print, we will remove it from our site immediately. Also, should an artist find their material posted on UbuWeb without permission and wants it removed, please let us know. However, most of the time, we find artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and displayed in a sympathetic context. As always, we welcome more work from existing artists on site.’

Where in the more affluent and popular media realms of block buster movies and pop music the Piratebay and other download sites (or p2p networks) like Mininova are being sued and charged with copyright infringement, the major powers to be seem to turn a blind eye when it comes to Ubu and many other resource sites online that offer digital versions of hard-to-get-by materials ranging from books to documentaries.

This is and has not always been the case: in 2002 Sebastian Lütgert from Berlin/New York was sued by the “Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur” for putting online two downloadable texts from Theodor W. Adorno on his website textz.com, an underground archive for Literature. According to this Indymedia interview with Lütgert, textz.com was referred to as ‘the Napster for books’ offering about 700 titles, focusing on, as Lütgert states ‘Theorie, Romane, Science-Fiction, Situationisten, Kino, Franzosen, Douglas Adams, Kritische Theorie, Netzkritik usw’.

The interview becomes even more interesting when Lütgert remarks that one can still easily download both Adorno texts without much ado if one wants to. This leads to the bigger question of the real reasons underlying the charge against textz.com; why was textz.com sued? As Lütgert says in the interview: “Das kann man sowieso [when referring to the still available Adorno texts]. Aber es gibt schon lange einen klaren Unterschied zwischen offener Verfügbarkeit und dem Untergrund. Man kann die freie Verbreitung von Inhalten nicht unterbinden, aber man scheint verhindern zu wollen dass dies allzu offen und selbstverständlich geschieht. Das ist es was sie stört.”

But how can something be truly underground in an online environment whilst still trying to spread or disseminate texts as widely as possible? This seems to be the paradox of many – not quite legal and/or copyright protected – resource sharing and collecting communities and platforms nowadays. However, multiple scenario’s are available to evade this dilemma: by being frankly open about the ‘status’ of the content on offer, as Ubu does, or by using little ‘tricks’ like an easy website registration, classifying oneself as a reading group, or by relieving oneself from responsibility by stating that one is only aggregating sources from elsewhere (linking) and not hosting the content on its own website or blog. One can also state the offered texts or multimedia files form a special issue or collection of resources, emphasizing their educational and not-for-profit value.

Most of the ‘underground’ text and content sharing communities seem to follow the concept of (the inevitability of) ‘information wants to be free’, especially on the Internet. As Lütgert States: “Und vor allem sind die über Walter Benjamin nicht im Bilde, der das gleiche Problem der Reproduzierbarkeit von Werken aller Art schon zu Beginn des letzten Jahrhunderts vor sich hatte und erkannt hat: die Massen haben das Recht, sich das alles wieder anzueignen. Sie haben das Recht zu kopieren, und das Recht, kopiert zu werden. Jedenfalls ist das eine ganz schön ungemütliche Situation, dass dessen Nachlass jetzt von solch einem Bürokraten verwaltet wird. A: Glaubst Du es ist überhaupt legitim intellektuellen Inhalt zu “besitzen”? Oder Eigentümer davon zu sein? S: Es ist *unmöglich*. “Geistiges” Irgendwas verbreitet sich immer weiter. Reemtsmas Vorfahren wären nie von den Bäumen runtergekommen oder aus dem Morast rausgekrochen, wenn sich “geistiges” Irgendwas nicht verbreitet hätte.”

What seems to be increasingly obvious, as the interview also states, is that one can find virtually all Ebooks and texts one needs via p2p networks and other file sharing community’s (the true Darknet in a way) – more and more people are offering (and asking for!) selections of texts and books (including the ones by Adorno) on openly available websites and blogs, or they are scanning them and offering them for (educational) use on their domains. Although the Internet is mostly known for the pirating and dissemination of pirated movies and music, copyright protected textual content has (of course) always been spread too. But with the rise of ‘born digital’ text content, and with the help of massive digitization efforts like Google Books (and accompanying Google Books download tools) accompanied by the appearance of better (and cheaper) scanning equipment, the movement of ‘openly’ spreading (pirated) texts (whether or not focusing on education and ‘fair use’) seems to be growing fast.

The direct harm (to both the producers and their publishers) of the free online availability of (in copyright) texts is also maybe less clear than for instance with music and films. Many feel texts and books will still be preferred to be read in print, making the online and free availability of text nothing more than a marketing tool for the sales of the printed version. Once discovered, those truly interested will find and buy the print book. Also more than with music and film, it is felt essential to share information, as a cultural good and right, to prevent censorship and to improve society.

This is one of the reasons the Open Access movement for scientific research has been initiated. But where the amount of people and institutions supportive of this movement is gradually growing (especially where it concerns articles and journals in the Sciences), the spread concerning Open Access (or even digital availability) of monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences (of which the majority of the resources on offer in the underground text sharing communities consists) has only just started.

This has lead to a situation in which some have decided that change is not coming fast enough. Instead of waiting for this utopian Open Access future to come gradually about, they are actively spreading, copying, scanning and pirating scholarly texts/monographs online. Although many times accompanied by lengthy disclaimers about why they are violating copyright (to make the content more widely accessible for one), many state they will take down the content if asked. Following the copyleft movement, what has in a way thus arisen is a more ‘progressive’ or radical branch of the Open Access movement. The people who spread these texts deem it inevitable they will be online eventually, they are just speeding up the process. As Lütgert states: ‘The desire of an increasingly larger section of the population to 100-percent of information is irreversible. The only way there can be slowed down in the worst case, but not be stopped.

Still we have not yet answered the question of why publishers (and their pirated authors) are not more upset about these kinds of websites and platforms. It is not a simple question of them not being aware that these kind of textual disseminations are occurring. As mentioned before, the harm to producers (scholars) and their publishers (in Humanities and Social Sciences mainly Not-For-Profit University Presses) is less clear. First of all, their main customers are libraries (compare this to the software business model: free for the consumer, companies pay), who are still buying the legal content and mostly follow the policy of buying either print or both print and ebook, so there are no lost sales there for the publishers. Next to that it is not certain that the piracy is harming sales. Unlike in literary publishing, the authors (academics) are already paid and do not loose money (very little maybe in royalties) from the online availability. Perhaps some publishers also see the Open Access movement as something inevitably growing and they thus don’t see the urge to step up or organize a collaborative effort against scholarly text piracy (where most of the presses also lack the scale to initiate this). Whereas there has been some more upsurge and worries about textbook piracy (since this is of course the area where individual consumers – students – do directly buy the material) and websites like Scribd, this mostly has to do with the fact that these kind of platforms also host non-scholarly content and actively promote the uploading of texts (where many of the text ‘sharing’ platforms merely offer downloading facilities). In the case of Scribd the size of the platform (or the amount of content available on the platform) also has caused concerns and much media coverage.

All of this gives a lot of potential power to text sharing communities, and I guess they know this. Only authors might be directly upset (especially famous ones gathering a lot of royalties on their work) or in the case of Lütgert, their beneficiaries, who still do see a lot of money coming directly from individual customers.

Still, it is not only the lack of fear of possible retaliations that is feeding the upsurge of text sharing communities. There is a strong ideological commitment to the inherent good of these developments, and a moral and political strive towards institutional and societal change when it comes to knowledge production and dissemination.

As Adrian Johns states in his article Piracy as a business force, ‘today’s pirate philosophy is a moral philosophy through and through’. As Jonas Anderson states, the idea of piracy has mostly lost its negative connotations in these communities and is seen as a positive development, where these movements ‘have begun to appear less as a reactive force (i.e. ‘breaking the rules’) and more as a proactive one (‘setting the rules’). Rather than complain about the conservatism of established forms of distribution they simply create new, alternative ones.’ Although Anderson states this kind of activism is mostly occasional, it can be seen expressed clearly in the texts accompanying the text sharing sites and blogs. However, copyright is perhaps so much an issue on most of these sites (where it is on some of them), as it is something that seems to be simply ignored for the larger good of aggregating and sharing resources on the web. As is stated clearly for instance in an interview with Sean Dockray, who maintains AAAARG:

“The project wasn’t about criticizing institutions, copyright, authority, and so on. It was simply about sharing knowledge. This wasn’t as general as it sounds; I mean literally the sharing of knowledge between various individuals and groups that I was in correspondence with at the time but who weren’t necessarily in correspondence with each other.”

Back to Lütgert. The files from textz.com have been saved and are still accessible via The Internet Archive Wayback Machine. In the case of textz.com, these files contain ’typed out text’, so no scanned contents or PDF’s. Textz.com (or better said its shadow or mirror) offers an amazing collection of texts, including artists statements/manifestos and screenplays from for instance David Lynch.

The text sharing community has evolved and now knows many players. Two other large members in this kind of ‘pirate theory base network’ (although – and I have to make that clear! – they offer many (and even mostly) legal and out of copyright texts), still active today, are Monoskop/Burundi and AAAARG.ORG. These kinds of platforms all seem to disseminate (often even on a titular level) similar content, focusing mostly on Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Literary Theory, The Frankfurter Schule, Sociology/Social Theory, Psychology, Anthropology and Ethnography, Media Art and Studies, Music Theory, and critical and avant-garde writers like Kafka, Beckett, Burroughs, Joyce, Baudrillard, etc.etc.

Monoskop is, as they state, a collaborative wiki research on the social history of media art or a ‘living archive of writings on art, culture and media technology’. At the sitemap of their log, or under the categories section, you can browse their resources on genre: book, journal, e-zine, report, pamphlet etc. As I found here, Burundi originated in 2003 as a (Slovakian) media lab working between the arts, science and technologies, which spread out to a European city based cultural network; They even functioned as a press, publishing the Anthology of New Media Literature (in Slovak) in 2006, and they hosted media events and curated festivals. It dissolved in June 2005 although the Monoskop research wiki on media art, has continued to run since the dissolving of Burundi.

As is stated on their website, AAAARG is a conversation platform, or alternatively, a school, reading group or journal, maintained by Los Angeles artist Sean Dockray. In the true spirit of Critical Theory, its aim is to ‘develop critical discourse outside of an institutional framework’. Or even more beautiful said, it operates in the spaces in between: ‘But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.’ To be able to access the texts and resources that are being ‘discussed’ at AAAARG, you need to register, after which you will be able to browse the library. From this library, you can download resources, but you can also upload content. You can subscribe to their feed (RSS/XML) and like Monoskop, AAAARG.org also maintains a Twitter account on which updates are posted. The most interesting part though is the ‘extra’ functions the platform offers: after you have made an account, you can make your own collections, aggregations or issues out of the texts in the library or the texts you add. This offers an alternative (thematically ordered) way into the texts archived on the site. You also have the possibility to make comments or start a discussion on the texts. See for instance their elaborate discussion lists. The AAAARG community thus serves both as a sharing and feedback community and in this way operates in a true p2p fashion, in a way like p2p seemed originally intended. The difference being that AAAARG is not based on a distributed network of computers, but is based on one platform, to which registered users are able to upload a file (which is not the case on Monoskop for instance – only downloading here).

Via mercurunionhall, I found the image underneath which depicts AAAARG.ORG’s article index organized as a visual map, showing the connections between the different texts. This map was created and posted by AAAARG user john, according to mercurunionhall.

Where AAAArg.org focuses again on the text itself – typed out versions of books – Monoskop works with more modern versions of textual distribution: scanned versions or full ebooks/pdf’s with all the possibilities they offer, taking a lot of content from Google books or (Open Access) publishers’ websites. Monoskop also links back to the publishers’ websites or Google Books, for information about the books or texts (which again proves that the publishers should know about their activities). To download the text however, Monoskop links to Sharebee, keeping the actual text and the real downloading activity away from its platform.

Another part of the text sharing content consists of platforms offering documentaries and lectures (so multi-media content) online. One example of the last is the Discourse Notebook Archive, which describes itself as an effort which has as its main goal ‘to make available lectures in contemporary continental philosophy’ and is maintained by Todd Kesselman, a PhD Student at The New School for Social Research. Here you can find lectures from Badiou, Kristeva and Zizek (both audio and video) and lectures aggregated from the European Graduate School. Kesselman also links to resources on the web dealing with contemporary continental philosophy.

Society of Control is a website maintained by Stephan Dillemuth, an artist living and working in Munich, Germany, offering amongst others an overview of his work and scientific research. According to this interview conducted by Kristian Ø Dahl and Marit Flåtter his work is a response to the increased influence of the neo-liberal world order on education, creating a culture industry that is more than often driven by commercial interests. He asks the question ‘How can dissidence grow in the blind spots of the ‘society of control’ and articulate itself?’ His website, the Society of Control is, as he states, ‘an independent organization whose profits are entirely devoted to research into truth and meaning.’

Society of Control has a library section which contains works from some of the biggest thinkers of the twentieth century: Baudrillard, Adorno, Debord, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Habermas, Sloterdijk und so weiter, and so much more, a lot in German, and all ‘typed out’ texts. The library section offers a direct search function, a category function and a a-z browse function. Dillemuth states that he offers this material under fair use, focusing on not for profit, freedom of information and the maintenance of freedom of speech and information and making information accessible to all:

“The Societyofcontrol website site contains information gathered from many different sources. We see the internet as public domain necessary for the free flow and exchange of information. However, some of these materials contained in this site maybe claimed to be copyrighted by various unknown persons. They will be removed at the copyright holder’s request within a reasonable period of time upon receipt of such a request at the email address below. It is not the intent of the Societyofcontrol to have violated or infringed upon any copyrights.”

Important in this respect is that he put the responsibility of reading/using/downloading the texts on his site with the viewers, and not with himself: “Anyone reading or looking at copyright material from this site does so at his/her own peril, we disclaim any participation or liability in such actions.”

Fark Yaraları = Scars of Différance and Multitude of blogs are maintained by the same author, Renc-u-ana, a philosophy and sociology student from Istanbul. The first is his personal blog (with also many links to downloadable texts), focusing on ‘creating an e-library for a Heideggerian philosophy and Bourdieuan sociology’ on which he writes ‘market-created inequalities must be overthrown in order to close knowledge gap.’ The second site has a clear aggregating function with the aim ‘to give united feedback for e-book publishing sites so that tracing and finding may become easier.’ And a call for similar blogs or websites offering free ebook content. The blog is accompanied by a nice picture of a woman warning to keep quiet, very paradoxically appropriate to the context. Here again, a statement from the host on possible copyright infringement: ‘None of the PDFs are my own productions. I’ve collected them from web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, socialist bros, cross-x, gigapedia..) What I did was thematizing.’ The same goes for pdflibrary (which seems to be from the same author), offering texts from Derrida, Benjamin, Deleuze and the likes: ‘None of the PDFs you find here are productions of this blog. They are collected from different places in the web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, all socialist bros, cross-x, …). The only work done here is thematizing and tagging.’

Our student from Istanbul lists many text sharing sites on Multitude of blogs, including Inishark (amongst others Badiou, Zizek and Derrida), Revelation (a lot of history and bible study), Museum of accidents (many resources relating to again, critical theory, political theory and continental philhosophy) and Makeworlds (initiated from the make world festival 2001). Mariborchan is mainly a Zizek resource site (also Badiou and Lacan) and offers next to ebooks also video and audio (lectures and documentaries) and text files, all via links to file sharing platforms.

What is clear is that the text sharing network described above (I am sure there are many more related to other fields and subjects) is also formed and maintained by the fact that the blogs and resource sites link to each other in their blog rolls, which is what in the end makes up the network of text sharing, only enhanced by RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, holding together direct communication streams with the rest of the community. That there has not been one major platform or aggregation site linking them together and uploading all the texts is logical if we take into account the text sharing history described before and this can thus be seen as a clear tactic: it is fear, fear for what happened to textz.com and fear for the issue of scale and fear of no longer operating at the borders, on the outside or at the fringes. Because a larger scale means they might really get noticed. The idea of secrecy and exclusivity which makes for the idea of the underground is very practically combined with the idea that in this way the texts are available in a multitude of places and can thus not be withdrawn or disappear so easily.

This is the paradox of the underground: staying small means not being noticed (widely), but will mean being able to exist for probably an extended period of time. Becoming (too) big will mean reaching more people and spreading the texts further into society, however it will also probably mean being noticed as a treat, as a ‘network of text-piracy’. The true strategy is to retain this balance of openly dispersed subversivity.

(Interim) Wallace prophecy

“There existed today, the three sham-Stans sang, an untapped national market for myth. Linearity was a cul de sac. Novelty was old news. The national I was now about flux & eternal return. Difference in sameness. “Creativity” — see for instant Nar’s recombinant own — Now lay in the manipulation of received themes. & soon, the C^# siren Foretold, this would itself be acknowledged, this apotheosis of static flux, & be itself put to the cynical use of just what it acknowledged, like a funnel that falls through itself. “Soon, myths about myths” was the sirens’ prophecy & long-range proposal. TV shows about TV shows. Polls about the reliability of surveys. Soon, perhaps, respected & glossy high-art organs might even start inviting smartass little ironists to contemporize & miscegenate BC mythos; & all this pop irony would put a happy-face mask on a nation’s terrible shamefaced hunger & need: translation, genuine information, would be allowed to lie, hidden & nourishing, inside the wooden belly of parodic camp.                                                       ‘I.e., the Medium would handle the Message’s P.R.”

David Foster Wallace — Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko — Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)

Post Literacy

The concept or theory of post literacy (which I learned about via James Bridle from booktwo.org) is described by Wikipedia as a stage ‘wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary’. However, literacy encompasses much more than just the ability to read (and analyze) written words. Media literacy, the equally broad term used to expand the concept of literacy, is mostly used to describe the capability to analyze, decode and criticize the manifold messages incorporated in the different (digital) media. Media literacy has with the growing popularity of online communication, again become a much debated topic and an interest of educational reformers. Post literacy, as a concept, incorporates media literacy but pushes the idea even further, to a future where text no longer is perceived as the dominant medium. According to postliteracy.org, post literacy focuses on the other (medial) means of communicating messages, exploring ‘visual, interactive, computational and textual literacies’. As they state, to be able to decipher the (often hidden) messages in multimedia communication, polymodal literacy is needed. This creation of a polymodal literacy is a necessity in today’s society, where the advance of the Internet has lead to an enormous rise in the use of multi(-digital-)media communication, transcending the explicit focus on text inherited from the print era. As postliteracy.org states on its website:

“Postliteracy.org is a response to the relationship that people in the twenty-first century have to literacy and shifting modes of communication. The Web has evolved from a text-based technology to one focused on graphic display and visual layout. Multimedia content largely privileges visual over verbal content.”

Exploring the concept of post literacy in a very practical manner, postliteracy.org is using steganography and online deciphering software to post multimedia puzzles with hidden messages for you to solve (as a means to further develop your post literacy level), as you can see here.

As Doug Johnson states, the interest in multimedia and the concept of post literacy has grown due to the increased use of small and portable video and movie playing devices, further pushing the dominant textual media into a supporting role. This demise of the power of textual media reminds us of a foregone past, showing similarities with preliterate (oral) societies in which, as Wikipedia states, people have ‘not yet discovered how to read and write’, the difference being that ‘a postliterate society has replaced the written word with an electronic oral culture, or some other means of communication.’ As Walter Ong describes in Orality and Literacy, in the transformation from a preliterate to a literate society, the capability to write and read had to be acquired, in a similar fashion as one learns to use a tool. According to Ong this fundamental transformation also meant a shift in the way we think and structure thoughts. Mike Ridley is very much interested in this change in how we think, triggered by the use of different media, and in the influence this media use has on the way our brain functions (some even state that the way we process information in today’s information overloaded society has lead to our brains looking ever more like those of schizophrenics, giving rise to ponderings about a new schizophrenic society and schizophrenic ways of thinking). But Ridley wants to stress not the negative connotations surrounding post literacy, which focus on the decline of textual communication and reading, where he wants to emphasize the inherent strengths of both orality and literacy, to see what the potential of a post literate society could be.

As Dough Johnson remarks, the increased use of media other than textual (especially in an online environment) combined with the fact that we, as recent studies have shown, read differently online, might mean we are heading towards a post literate society faster than we think. Although Johnson states that he does still see a role for textual media and communication, in his definition of a post literate society, people choose to use the other media as their main means of communication, they have a preference for them or, as he states ‘The post literate’s need for extended works or larger amounts of information is met through visual and/or auditory formats.’

This development described by Johnson and others can be seen as closely connected to the research that is being conducted on new ways of data visualization, in which graphic or figurative representations of large amounts of data are used to get an overview of and deeper insight into complex and huge information compounds and objects, constructing a way of dealing with information overload and representing it in a non-textual manner. As Wikipedia states, the primary goal of data visualizations is ‘to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means’. The necessity of these kinds of tools or representations in a way illustrates the short-fall of textual communication in the online environment (in some occasions). Where information is ever more superfluous and the need to grasp large amounts of data (especially in science) ever more important, other media might be more convenient.

Doug Johnson looks at the way the move towards post literacy is influencing books and the way we use them (online), noting the rise of comics and graphic novels, (or think for instance of the popularity of Manga and role-playing games which increasingly use complex narrative structures in a non-textual manner). He then goes on to denote what the coming of a post literate net-generation means for the future (post literate) library. One of the most important point Johnson makes is that we need to get away from and look critically at our bias towards print, which is prejudicing our literacy skills when compared with our other media knowledge and apprehension. He sees the ‘return’ to a post literate society as a natural development towards a more multisensory way of communication:

“But I would argue that post literacy is a return to more natural forms of multisensory communication—speaking, storytelling, dialogue, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion, and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multimedia formats.”

John Connell responds to Johnson in a post in which he emphasizes the continuing importance of text, even in an online environment. Although he agrees with Johnson concerning the lack of attention for other forms of literacy, he does state that ‘the debate should not be about print but about the utility, beauty, strength and continued resilience of text in its multifarious contexts, whether on paper or on any other medium.’ This is actually a very interesting point that he makes, to take a closer look at and investigate how text ‘mixes’ with other media, and how it is perceived and consumed in the context of other (digital) media. How does the interaction between text and other media change the way we analyze and interpret the message inherent in this multimedia format, which then in a way transcends the mere textual medium?

Mike Ridley perhaps captures the full meaning of post literacy best (agreeing more with Johnson than with Connell where it comes to the dominance of text) in his definition, in which he says that ‘post literacy is the phrase used to capture the possibility of rich human communication that exceeds (and hence replaces) visible language (writing and reading) as the dominant means of the understanding and exchange of ideas.” Ridley introduces here an important aspect I feel has been missing in the above discussion, focusing mainly on post literacy and the consumer side of multimedia communication. For as I believe, to be able to communicate in a post-textual manner, the producers of these new forms of online communication also need to become post literate.

One way to think about the idea of a post-literate-writer (a contradiction in terminus) or a post textual content producer, is to reflect upon ideas that transcend the concept of media, focusing rather on (the development towards) a single medium or on the disappearance of media as such. As Kiene Brillenburg Wurth states in her article Multimediality, Intermediality, and Medially Complex Digital Poetry (referring to Friedrich Kittler), the Internet is leading to ‘the end of medial compartmentalization’. She cites Kittler saying:

“(…) If the optical fibre network reduces all formerly separate data flows to one standardized digital series of numbers, any medium can be translated into another. With numbers nothing is impossible. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, memory, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping – a total connection of all media on a digital base erases the notion of the medium itself.”

This closely resembles Mark Amerika’s idea of ‘the artist as the medium’, through which the different communication streams flow, as he states ‘the artist is the medium or instrument, and the networked space of flows play this instrument to facilitate the development of creative compositions’ (Meta/Data,19). This idea of the content creator as the real medium, putting things on its head in a way, literally incorporating and mixing the different media into one single communication expression, in whatever format, could be a nice fit for thinking about what a post literate content producer should be able to do.

As Brillenburg states, with the coming of digital art, the idea (or the myth) of separate and sustainable media with their own specifics or ‘essence’ is destroyed. She refers to the 19^th century connotation of a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which one tried to connect the different media. However, as she states, the Gesamtkunstwerk has been ‘evolving into the kind of aural-visual-verbal computer games and multi-sensory interactive art works that have now grown so familiar to us.’ Brillenburg thinks the idea or concept of multimedia is no longer sufficient to describe the new forms of digital media communication that are taking place online, and she proposes to use the term intermediality instead, which can incorporate better the different ways in which media ‘contaminate’ each other, as a way to describe the ‘in-between’ of media. As she describes it:

“Intermediality projects not simply a ‘together-art’ or any other continuation of nineteenth-century Gesamtkunst, but a criss-crossing between and mutual infusion of different medial modalities. Words become like colours, colours like words, texts like buildings and spaces, sounds are spatially heard – such contaminations date back not so much to Wagner’s utopian view of the arts united, but to those avant-garde experiments that questioned the respective identities and conditions of possibility of the different art forms.”

For me this summarizes quite clearly how the move towards a post literate society is not only about being able to analyze and interpret polymodal ways of communicating, but also about being able to produce these forms of communication in a good (and comprehensible) way. Not only can we be seen moving towards a society in which the consumption of media is increasingly becoming post literate, the digital media producer, artist, or even scholar, is also increasingly working in a mixed medial manner. Like Mark Amerika remarks when he states that he lets the media flow through him (or her) this means the online content producer will be using media less and less as separate entities. Although these post literate characteristics of mixing media are mostly seen in visual arts, we are also increasingly seeing multimedial (or intermedial) writers, poets (the focus of Brillenburg’s analysis) and even scholars, who are less biased towards text, using different media in a natural and even unconscious way (emphasizing the flow) like for instance Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky) or Mark Amerika have been doing in their scholarly and/or artistic works. It might be interesting to reflect upon what the influence of these ways of post literate thinking and (more important perhaps) of post textual doing, might be on the production and consumption of scholarly books. What kind of consequences might these developments have for the way scholars operate in a digital environment, using new digital media to communicate their research? It would be equally interesting to think about what a post literate (or post-textual) humanities field would look like, a form of humanities scholarship in which text would no longer be the dominant choice for transferring or communication research. Maybe the experiments Lev Manovich has been doing with digital humanities and data visualization, and his emphasis on a new methodology of ‘cultural analytics’, are a good example of what a post literate, post textual or polymodal humanities might start off from.

The Concept of Bible

Some small stuff from around the world or the web or the world that is the web that deserves some attention here in this and future posts to be. First of all the oldest bible (ok maybe no small stuff), the Codex Sinaiticus, has been digitized and has concurrently been made accessible online. As the project website states ‘Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript of the Christian Bible written in the middle of the fourth century, contains the earliest complete copy of the Christian New Testament’. I attended a lecture by David Parker, one of the project members, last year as part of a symposium on Text comparison and digital creativity, at which Parker presented the project as it was enfolding and discussed the difficulties and challenges the online presentation of a document that has been scattered around different institutions, presents, making it truly a ‘virtual’ Codex Sinaiticus. Collected once more into one online object, now you can actually browse through the quires and folio’s of the manuscript and zoom into details that fancy your interest. And you can even adjust the lighting and surely do many more interesting things that I have not as of yet explored.

The goals of the project revolved around the historical research, conservation, digitization,  transcription and dissemination of the manuscript. The study of the production of Codex Sinaiticus has proved invaluable for the study of book or manuscript history and production. The history of Codex Sinaiticus has also been very important for the development of the idea and the creation of the concept we nowadays refer to as ‘bible’ as a collection of canonical books: 

‘The ability to place these ‘canonical books’ in a single codex itself influenced the way Christians thought about their books, and this is directly dependent upon the technological advances seen in Codex Sinaiticus. The quality of its parchment and the advanced binding structure that would have been needed to support over 730 large-format leaves, which make Codex Sinaiticus such an outstanding example of book manufacture, also made possible the concept of a ‘Bible’. The careful planning, skilful writing and editorial control needed for such an ambitious project gives us an invaluable insight into early Christian book production.’

The presentation of the manuscript on the website is marvelous. And what a chance to brush up your Ancient Greek! You can check it out for yourself here.

Encore! More Free Playing

The story around Free continues (talking about a nice marketing strategy). A review from Malcolm Gladwell (yes, the Blink and Tipping Point guy) in The New Yorker elicited a response from Anderson on his blog, causing another Internet aficionado, Seth Godin, to again take sides (Anderson’s side that is). Seems like a dinosaur fight (though very gentlemanlike of course). Gladwell’s argument revolves around the notion that the money, or better said, the payment for services provided, has to come from and end up somewhere. As Gladwell states: ‘It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.”’  He thus states that ‘free is just another price’ and information can’t actually want to be free, as it can’t really ‘want’ anything; the actors in the system want it to be free in order to make some money around free (‘free represents an enormous business opportunity’). Next to that Gladwell argues that whereas the costs of the digital product might be nearing zero, the costs to produce the product or content still make up a large amount of the price, as John Naughton also elaborates on in his review in The Observer.

Anderson responds by stating that the circular reasoning of which Gladwell accuses him does no longer pertain in a gift economy in which content is truly being produced without the aim of creating money. The circle ends when it concerns money and expands into the realm of the nonmonetary. In Andersons words: ‘Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).’ Godin takes this argument even further stating that ‘In a world of free, everyone can play’, meaning that in an abundance and attention economy as the world wide web is, many people are willing to write for free. This does not mean everybody will write for free and no one will pay for online content anymore.

As Drake Bennett writes in his review for The Boston Globe, this idea of a minority of fee-payers for the deluxe services in a freemium model, is one Anderson sees as highly probable. From the review: ‘The advantage of freemium, Anderson argues, is that in a digital world, the cost of widely disseminating the free stuff is low enough that you don’t actually need that large a percentage of premium clients to make it work. Indeed, in general, Anderson sees the mind-boggling scale of the Internet as central to its ability to sustain free institutions, especially totally free ones like Wikipedia, which survives on the altruistic efforts of a minuscule proportion of its planet-wide set of users.’ Selection might also become more valuable in an attention economy, becoming another basis of potential revenue, picking the pearls from the heaps of free. As Godin writes: ‘The reason that we needed paid contributors before was that there was only economic room for a few magazines, a few TV channels, a few pottery stores, a few of everything. In world where there is room for anyone to present their work, anyone will present their work. Editors become ever more powerful and valued, while the need for attention grows so acute that free may even be considered expensive.’

Meanwhile, Chris Anderson had been busy thinking about ways to offer Free for free, whilst of course creating the necessary viral buzz around that at the same time. Latest news is the free availability of the MP3 audio book download, either as a free download via Wired or via the online radio community Spotify. Next to that Anderson thought of an elaborate scheme to offer not only the e-book as a free download but also to distribute free paper-back and price-reduced hard-back copies via Random House and BrandRepublic.com, sponsored by Adobe. Although a little UK centered, I am already very glad with my audio download and will await the e-book. I will keep you posted when it goes live.

And here it is, from Scribd. Not sure if I can lawfully embed this though, since it has a traditional copyright notice (why no CC license Chris?). But hey, then don’t offer the embed option I would say

 

View this document on Scribd

The Land of Free

Looking forward to reading Free, the long awaited book by WIRED main man and digital prophet Chris Anderson, author of the book with the already institutionalized title ‘The Long Tail’. In The Long Tail Anderson argued that the Internet will offer a new future (and bright business opportunities) for all those precious backlist titles and other long lost ephemera, now again findable and traceable thanks to the ultimate search powers of the world wide web. This theory, set out first in an article with the same title, has recently been criticized, but still gives a nice insider view on what the net is really all about: seek and thou shalt find.

Anderson’s new book Free: the future of a radical price, to be released July 7, is also based on an article released previously on/in WIRED. In this article, and more elaborately in the book I presume, Anderson discusses the omnipresence of free on the Internet, giving rise to what many believe is an inherent law of the web: everything online will eventually be free (in Anderson’s words: ‘It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned’).

But how to make money with free? How to create incentives for people to produce content if everything online is free? How can we build an economy around freemium?

Two nice reviews in the Guardian (here and here) look at the book from different perspectives. The first one is mostly interested in the potential of the web for free business models, as an extension of the public domain. The last on the other hand criticizes Anderson’s lack of attention for what this trend will eventually lead to and this might perhaps have to do with the problem of incentives for creating content when everything is free. But as Anderson shows, free does not mean money can not be made in another way (for instance through advertisements, cross-subsidizing, premium services, offering experiences, online vs. offline models etc.). Next to that the principle of the gift economy also plays a large role online. As Anderson states, money is not the only motivator to produce, and our economies are increasingly based on values like respect and time (reputation economy and attention economy). Still, on a very basic, practical level, something does sting here, foremost a lack of certainty that the free will actually make revenue in another way (granted in the old model sales are not certain either). So, I am looking forward to see how Anderson tackles this problem at a less theoretical level. A first preview part of the book has been published on/in WIRED here. Also via WIRED video, you can find a video of Anderson talking about Free underneath. And for the rest the wait is until July 7^th.

On a side note: the book has been accused of plagiarism, taking uncredited source material from amongst others Wikipedia. Well, that only shows free has limits. Even free sharing of information still means we need to refer to our sources. Seems to me one of the basics of the reputation economy and this little stunt is definitely harming Anderson’s.

Where Open Philosophy meets Open Music

Via Transversalinflections I learned about Re.Press, an Australian publisher of Open Access titles in Philosophy. Their business model is based on a free Open Access edition in combination with print sales, the model at the moment many presses are experimenting with (amongst others: Open Humanities Press, Open Book Publishers, National Academies Press, fellow Australians ANU E Press, Rice University Press, AU Press, and Bloomsbury Academic.

Re.Press already established a wonderful collection of titles, amongst others The concept of model by Alain Badiou, Graham Harman’s new book on Bruno Latour and forthcoming titels on Walter Benjamin and on first love by Sigi Jöttkandt, also co-founder of Open Humanities Press. I especially like Re.Press’s statement from their website:

“In line with this ambition, re.press is itself a new kind of publisher. Attentive to the latest developments in contemporary technologies, re.press publications are available globally, wherever there is access to the internet. We seek to make as many of our publications as possible available as open-access files, free to anyone who wishes to download them. Our hard-copy books are print-on-demand, minimizing waste and cost. Yet our publications also maximize design values, boosting clarity and aesthetic qualities.”

They clearly state in there Open Access policy that they believe, as I concur, that the digital and the print fulfill different functions (at least will do so for the time being) making it possible for them to thrive side-by-side. And this dual existence can even strengthen (traditional) Humanities/Philosophy publishing and scholarly communication :

“Our academic titles are published under an open access licence ensuring the greatest possible exposure for our authors’ work through the almost unrestricted distribution channels of the internet. This does not mean that re.press is a digital publisher: we are a publisher of ‘real’ books that are available in bricks and mortar booksellers (as well as on-line retailers). However, our open access titles are also available free of charge in digital form. We do not consider the digital version a replacement for the physical book. On the contrary, we believe that the two mediums perform different functions, offering the best of both worlds. In fact, it is our hope that open access publishing will strengthen traditional publishing and scholarship more broadly by releasing ideas and thinkers from the constraints of the market. You can support our endeavour to make our books widely available as open access titles by encouraging your library to buy a print edition (from the usual sources) or by buying one yourself.”

Via the Re-press link section I discovered another very interesting ‘Ópen Access’ initiative, to be more precise, a record company, called Records on Ribs. They actually seem to bring into practice the Maecenas model I described before (and up to now thought to be kind of hypothetical): they give away their music for free (with Creative Commons licenses) and offer deluxe editions for sale and hope that community support will generate some extra revenues. So they actually take donations targeting the ‘good-music-loving-and-supporting hearts of their community. 

I love their manifesto so I am going to publish that integrally here now. Read and weep: 

Manifesto

Records on Ribs gives away it’s music for free.

Records on Ribs is against nothing. We are not here ‘in reaction’ to anything. We are merely putting into practice what we believe. And this is what we believe…

To sell music for profit is to deny its worth. It is to reduce it to numbers, spreadsheets, targets.

Desire cannot be quantified thusly.

Tapes, CD-Rs and the internet give us the opportunity to distribute music for free without losing significant sums of money.

Anyone could do what we are doing. A free for all. Brilliance obscured by an avalanche of mundanity.

So what? There is an avalanche of mundanity already in the shops, and it costs you £9.99 a go.

We only ask that you listen with open hearts and minds. And if one hundred, one thousand, one million people want to do the same as us then good luck to them. What a world that would be! Desire freed from profit.

We accept donations, but do not expect them. What we do costs us little, but we cannot avoid making a loss. Nor can the artists who have to buy equipment and take time to rehearse, perform and record. Any money you give us will go to loosen these burdens and will be gratefully received.

You can also buy lovingly crafted CD-Rs of our albums (made to order). We like to think they are objects worth owning, because we know you are all commodity fetishists when it comes to music, and an MP3 isn’t quite the same. We are hoping to do vinyl one day in the future.

All the best

The Records On Ribs Team

 

Are there more record companies working with such a model I wonder? And does it work, does it create enough revenue to be sustainable?

Digital Scholarship

Christine Borgman is one of my scholarly heroines; when it comes to her fine nose for current developments in e-scholarship and digital information retrieval and her thorough and concise way of communicating (alas, she is a specialist in scholarly communication) these issues via monographs, articles and lectures, she definitely belongs to my scholarly all-star gallery. Her latest book Scholarship in the Digital Age, was an indispensable resource for me when writing my Master’s thesis on the Scholarly Communication System and Open Access.

So I was really glad I found this lecture (which I can’t embed, sorry) by Christine Borgman online, in which she discusses most of her main topics: cyberinfrastructure and e-science, Open Access, the data deluge, collaborations and intellectual property and the scholarly communication value chain. The lecture is entitled Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, and was delivered at Columbia University.

 I also found, via Open Access News, this podcast with Alma Swan, Key Perspectives main consultant on Open Access, Scholarly Communication and Academic Publishing. In this podcast, conducted by Sara Bartlett from Talis, she discusses amongst others the current state and difficulties concerning e-books or digital monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the main subject of my current research for the OAPEN project. I especially like the way she recommends in the end that we need to stop the ‘pillarization’ in the Open Access focus, as OA journals, OA books and OA data are mainly targeted as separate issues by separate initiatives, whilst they need to be combined to create a truly interconnected collaborative scholarship.

Alma Swan also maintains a weblog, Optimal Scholarship and has been interviewed before by Richard Poynder. You can find that interview here.