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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?
Last Wednesday one of Holland’s most famous and disputed anti-copyright defendants, Joost Smiers, presented his new book (or essay) co-written with partner-in-crime Marieke van Schijndel, at cultural hot-spot De Balie (a former courthouse in Amsterdam). Surrounding the presentation a debate evening was organized based on the utopian notion of ‘imagining a world without copyright’. The essay, entitled Adieu auteursrecht, vaarwel culturele conglomeraten (Goodbye copyright, farewell cultural conglomerates) was presented to economist Arjo Klamer. Klamer gave a sparkling speech – setting the tone for the following discussion – by claiming that Smiers and Van Schijndel’s essay was just not radical enough. By referring to well known numbers (10% of the cultural producers claim 90% of the remits) and hopelessly cumbersome and complicated processes of IPR regulations, upholdings and claimings, Klamer wondered why we even have such a system. He went on to systematically explain how property right is closely intermingled with a product, an object one can trade. This proprietary right is the basis of our market thinking. This market can only function through the merits of a state that enforces this proprietary right. Klamer calls this a conspiracy between the market and the state. He explains that in the utopian thinking of Smiers and Van Schijndel, the abolition of copyright serves mainly to break down the power of the large cultural conglomerates that control the cultural market in order to encourage a fairer system of competition. They claim this would be more democratic, will encourage free communication and will be beneficial for our cultural life.
Klamer wants to go even further. He claims that the authors still grasp too much to the idea of music and art as products. Klamer questions the whole idea of cultural products and product oriented thinking. He claims the way we look at these cultural artifacts or expressions as products is a simple metaphor for our ability to buy them. But artistic expressions are no products, they are ‘words’, they only get their ‘meaning’ when they are uttered, they function in a larger context and in this way are dependent on us, the ‘utterers’, the consumers, the potential readers. His starting point is not the product but the metaphor of the conversation [the term discourse to me sounds even better]. Art is a conversation, music is a conversation, science is a conversation. Nobody owns a conversation; it can be compared with friendship [also an inalienable, tangible good]. A conversation is a good people share together in a community, you cannot enforce it (not even the state), you cannot steel it and you cannot free-ride on it; and it is based on the principle of reciprocity [think of the gift economy about which I will write some more in the future].
But money comes into this system too. Klamer calls this the third sphere, the ‘in-between sphere’. Science still functions like this to a large extent. The scientific community works from the common understanding that knowledge is something we all share, science is the conversation we all build upon. Who owns an idea? Even Nobel Prize winners base their ideas on endless conversations with others. IPR does not do right to this conversation and to the quality of the conversation. In science this problem is solved by the providing of services (Klamer gives the example how in the US many artists have a position at the university were they teach and work. There art work is seen as a kind of service to the community in which art is ‘less commercialized’). Klamer’s final statement: leave the state and the market for what they are and let’s acknowledge cultural expressions for their true value, which is much better realized or finalized in the social space, the ‘third space’ in which communal goods reign. This is the sphere we want to contribute to, from which we can get acknowledgement and establish reputation. For the real and true scarce good is attention. This is what distinguishes the one from the other nine, both in science and in art. This is not a fair system and it will never be a fair system. And this unfairness lies not in the power and the influence of the cultural conglomerates, Klamer states, attacking Smiers and Van Schijndel’s premise; the scarcity of attention is a social phenomenon. This scarcity is also exactly what can be liquidated (see for instance how Damien Hirst plays with this notion). This is not to say that the market and the state should rule this world, and in this sense Klamer states the presented essay is still of the utmost importance. Cultural life exists in the third sphere and is realized in (this) community with others, people who feel committed to a bigger interest instead of in the creation of a product for their own profit. Reciprocity, conversation and attention: that is what this sphere is all about.
After Arjo Klamer finished his speech, Joost Smiers gave a short exposition of the book. He stated that with the abolishment of copyright the market will no longer function as radical around the numbers of one and ten: the public will be much more able to follow their own taste [ignoring the fact I think that the long tail maybe does not exist as recent research has contested]. Smiers does however throw away notions like Creative Commons, stating that they no longer merit the ownership of products and this is an issue he does not want to discuss. He does not believe we should do away with the ownership of cultural goods [on a side note, I feel Smiers is conflating Creative Commons licenses, which are alternative copyright license and thus still centre around the notion of ownership, with the more radical parts of the free culture and free information movement. They are interlinked but not the same!]. Smiers asked the question what will happen to the market once we abolish copyright, how will the market function? He strongly believes entrepreneurial people will be needed in such a new system and this will offer opportunities for those who are active.
In the first debate Annelys de Vet (graphic designer at the Sandberg Institute) and Nirav Christophe (lector theatrical creation processes and open dramaturgy) engaged with each other and the public. De Vet argued that copyright is a closed manner of handling things; it is a standstill opposed to an open movement. Artists don’t design products, they create processes in a context of processual design in which they are part of a larger whole. Artists don’t quote; they are part of a dialogue or a conversation. Copyright is based on a world of fear where she wants to work and collaborate in a world based on trust. Christophe concurs that theater is foremost a dialogue and thus serves as a good metaphor for the evenings debate. For theatre is always a half-product: as a theater writer your play only comes into existence once it is finished by others. A theatre writer is used to people making adaptations to his texts, making their own interpretations; it makes the texts better. Theatre does not create products, it creates processes. Christophe states that copyright is foremost also a philosophical problem. What is the relationship of the author to his text? Is the text yours? Since Roland Barthes and the death of the author it is no longer maintainable that texts produced by an author are the possession of that author. Only the experience of them being read or uttered, the interaction, makes them come alive. A cultural experience is only created during a certain amount of time in a process that is often created together with others, even together with the public.
De Vet thus concludes that art should be seen as a dialogue, as a process. The oeuvre of an artist consists of all kinds of different moments, in which the links between these moments create the meaning and this is not linkable back to a product. There is so much pressure on artists nowadays to be original, and so much fear to appropriate, to copy. Yet De Vet encourages this, it will still be different, it will always be used in a different context, it will follow another trajectory. Being unique and signing your work can go hand in hand with the above attitude, they are not each others opposites. Many people are involved in the creation of a design; design is about the creation of a dialogue. Copyright has no relevance in this process, claims De Vet. Christophe concurs and states this is a more realistic view of the modern artist than the romantic 19th century conception of the individual performer. De Vet and Christophe see the economic difficulties of their notions but are up to the challenge of thinking in different ways.
Questions from the audience phrased the fear of plagiarism: what if one copies or steals my work? What if I get ‘screwed over’? As we know from the debate between Habermas and Foucault, conversations are not always open and honest. This is a way to idealist stance. De Vet replied that no system is perfect, in a 1 to10 system people are ‘screwed over’ too. She wants to keep a positive stance based on trust. Media sociologist Jaap van Ginneken replied by stating that under the current copyright system Walt Disney steals everything and then patents it again as its own. Even the Lion King is an adaptation of a Japanese story. So big business seems very efficient in screwing you over too. Joost Smiers remarked that for wrongful appropriation (for instance by a fascist regime) you have alternative laws, you do not need copyright for that. Next to that a system of shaming will probably develop. Other mechanisms will thus develop to maintain the system
In the second debate we met Hans Abbing, emeritus professor in art sociology and Jan-Willem Sligting, programmer at Paradiso and musician. Sligting remarked that copyright is such a different concept where it covers multiple domains, from law to philosophy and economy. Referring to Thomas More and Utopia, he states that a world without copyright will unfortunately just be that: an utopia. But Abbing dives into this make believe world, stating the time is ripe: copyright is increasingly contested online and the current economic crisis urges for the need of equal playing fields. First of all it will improve the situation of artists, where their incomes while become more equal. But most of all the consumer will benefit. There will be more space for diversity and niches. But Abbing also doubts this fantasy. Diversity is not inherently connected to copyright. A society can only handle a certain amount of diversity: you cannot know the details of everything. We need to trust on others, on selection, our attention span is always crooked. The consumer wants selection and we shouldn’t trust too much on the premise of ‘small is beautiful’. And what about that level playing field? How does this relate to different regions on a world scale? We also need big corporations. We should just as well fear social monopolies. Don’t underestimate the power of funders for instance.
Klamer still emphasizes the benefits of contributing to something that is bigger than you. In science and religion the financing is done by way of gifts (gift economy), which according to him is a very valuable system as we are reimbursed for our services. According to Abbing however, gifts only work in small societies on a personal level. Gifts on the Internet will never have a real shape, this will not work according to him.
Sligting however mentions initiatives like Fabchannel and SellaBand which have business models which are centered on the community. Abbing states that there are a lot of experiments going on but that they need to be based on reciprocity, people will not just donate something, and they want to feel connected to a cause. Simple commercial artifacts (t-shirts, stickers) already help a lot.
Arjo Klamer remarks that science is also totally based on reciprocity: services for reputation. There is however a fierce strive for recognition in this field. This situation is very similar to the independent arts; Klamer claims that such a reciprocal model will be very well applicable to this sector too. Using copyright in this realm is abnormal, it does not work like that in other cultures and it should thus not be norm giving. We need to be more creative with how we establish value. Think about the potential of deluxe editions.
Comments from the crowd focused on the elitism of the debate: not all art is equal, the 1/10 rule is there for a reason, simply because not all works are good. We also need to discuss quality in this context. With a final statement Joost Smiers ended the debate, using the scientific metaphor of the paradigm shift: if a model no longer works we need another one. A world without copyright is not imaginary. We need to break through this dominance to establish a more normal and competitive market in which more people will earn more money. Smiers’ goal is to support this notion with hard figures. It is not an utopia. Smiers wants to create alternative business models and will keep developing them in the future.
My feeling about the evening was that from a theoretical point of view it hopelessly complicated matters and on a practical level didn’t offer any solutions. Although the debate an sich was very interesting, I think the attack on the big conglomerates by Smiers and Van Schijndel should not be the primary goal of the abolishment of copyright. I feel the fierce attacks on the state and the market that were uttered during the evening (notwithstanding the fact that their powers and reach might actually be too large) unnecessarily complicated the issue, and made it more disputed than it already is. Compare the debate between Lawrence Lessig and Kevin Kelly in which Kelly compared Web 2.0 with socialism (I agree with Lessig in this matter).
Even if we accept the notion of art as a process and dialogue, this does not mean we have to do away with the big companies and commercialization. Making money with their work, in what way they deem fit is still a free choice of creative producers, and commercialization of an experience economy, more akin to the processual and fluxual nature of the current art procedure, is already well on its way. This is why I applaud initiatives like Fabchannel, SellaBand and also Creative Commons, who, on an alternative note, try to create new business models based on sharing, community and reciprocity. Without loosing the option to liquidize these created values. This criticism connects to that of the confused public, which during the evening continually begged for practical solutions and did not receive any. The debate remained too theoretical on many levels, without offering truly new potentials. And doing away with initiatives like Creative Commons, that in a very practical manner try to do something refreshing with the whole IPR problem, to me seems just stupid. The total lack of references to new business models by Smiers and Van Schijndel was also very disappointing. Maybe the practical solutions can be found in their book, however, it is not available Open Access on the net and unfortunately, after this evening, I felt neither compelled nor convinced to buy the book. Felt kind of like a lost chance….
To continue the freedom of knowledge and information debate on a more
practical level,
as most of you might have heard, bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay (which I have written about before here) is currently on trial. Interesting enough the people behind The Pirate Bay and similar Swedish organizations, like Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge, use the freedom of information argument to defend piracy. As he states:
“On the one side, there is the public. Every human with access to the Internet has received fingertip round-the-clock access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge and culture. This is a fantastic leap ahead for mankind – much larger than when public libraries arrived 160 years ago, and comparable to how society changed with the arrival of the printing press.
On the other side, there are the current people in power, who would like to harness this power to build a surveillance machine – collecting information about regular Joes, and actively preventing the free exchange of ideas – that would make George Orwell look like a cheery, skipping optimist. Many powerful institutions are pulling in this direction.”
The trial is already been called the ‘political trial of the century’ and seems to be going favorably for the Pirate Bay. Via BoingBoing I discovered that in honor of the trial of the Pirate Bay’s founders, the people behind the documentary series ‘Steal this film’ have released a new trial edition of what is eventually to become a movie on intellectual property right and file sharing. You can download it from their website. The first part of this documentary can be found in many places, including here.
This is actually a very interesting documentary (series), which follows the same idea as the remix documentary RiP I wrote about before, putting raw (searchable) footage and snippets of what is to become the final documentary online, together with more or less finalized versions of the documentary (like a sort of preprint in scholarly communication lingo).
The documentary follows roughly the same logic as Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix, arguing that it is of no use to criminalize a whole generation of downloaders or ‘pirates’ for that matter, and that it is much more productive to search for an alternative solution to this problem, or in other words to search for an alternative business model that will sustain the free flow of cultural goods and information. The documentary includes a very nice book history analogy, referring not only to the coming of the printing press but also to historical notions of book piracy, with contributions from famous book historians like Elisabeth Eisenstein and Robert Darnton. The documentary includes interviews with other renowned figures like Yochai Benkler, and Rick Prelinger from the Prelinger Archive. I like the way he makes the following statement near the end of the documentary:
“I think we need to have a broad conversation that is probably going to be an international conversation where people who make things and people who use things, I am talking about cultural works, sit together and think about what kinds of rules best serve these interests. I don’t know that we are going to agree, but I think we need to ask a little bit more about utopia, we need to really figure out what kind of a world we would like to live in and then try to craft regulations to match that. Being reactive doesn’t cut it.”
I saw Rick Prelinger speak at a Creative Commons conference in de Balie in Amsterdam a year ago, together with speakers like Kenneth Goldsmith from Ubuweb and people from Fabchannel, discussing alternative business models. The panel I attended discussed amongst others:
“…the public content zone beyond that of user-generated-content: the possibilities and problems related to making professionally produced cultural productions publicly available on the internet. What kind of revenue models exist for that? How is the public interest in accessibility squared with the need of professionals to make a living? What new and alternative distribution models emerge for professional cultural producers and cultural institutions?”
I think this is the important discussion, as Rick Prelinger also stated above, we need to find a solution for both producers and consumers of cultural and knowledge products and content. For as the documentary and Lessig’s books also show, the potential value of the free availability of all this information on the Internet is huge, stimulating new cultural creativity and knowledge production in. Next to that this development can even be very beneficial for society and the economy in general. In fact, as a recent Dutch report on file sharing showed, file sharing can even foster (the Dutch) economic growth in the long run.
Update April 30th 2009: Another report from researchers at the BI Norwegian School of Management shows that people who pirate the most from P2P sites are also the ones most likely to buy legit downloads. Of course there is some discussion about these findings, but the conclusions are interesting nevertheless. (via: Ars Technica)
Be sure for more posts on alternative business models in the future.
The first day of the APE conference in Berlin, which, as mentioned before, focused on the impact of publishing in the digital age, started with a keynote by Georg Winkler from the European University Association (EUA), entitled Universities in the 21st century. Winkler started off by asking the question of what makes an university unique, quoting Ralf Dahrendorf’s conception of a university as “a ragbag of institutions with no clearly defined boundaries and no substantive core”. After a historical overview of different types of universities and different kinds of university reform, Winkler asked what we want to achieve for the university of the 21st century, which is now functioning more and more in a digital system. While sketching his vision for a future university, Winkler made a plea for the relevance of “open science” for knowledge societies. As Winkler states, in knowledge societies the bulk of new knowledge should be generated and disseminated via rapid publication by giving up the rights over it. This will not only facilitate the generation of further knowledge, but it will also help students to be equipped with the best and latest knowledge and it allows the latest results to feed into the innovation system. According to Winkler, open science is justified by the huge positive external effects it will have in knowledge societies. But as a counter note he states that this ideal can clash with the academia-business relations, and can create problems with the incentive to do research and to publish (the principal agent dilemma). Winkler however strives for coexistence of these matters. The question remains how to give incentives and set the mechanism in such a way without obstructing the scientific freedom of the researchers. Winkler concludes that the future definition of universities can be seen as the outcome of these kind of discussions.
A nice flashback to the preconference day occurred with yet another lecture on the Semantic web, as the second keynote lecture was delivered by Rudi Studer from the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) on Semantic web applications and tools. Studer starts by comparing the classical web, which focuses on humans as consumers of (semi-structured) content and in which the meaning of information is not accessible to computers and search is keyword-based, with the semantic web, which publishes data in structured and linked formats, specifies the meaning of data and their relationships with formal models (ontologies) (meaning that application systems of computers are able to understand, capture and process the meaning ) and focuses on technical standards as set out by the W3C.
Studer goes on to discuss RDF (Resource Description Framework) as a common data model of the Semantic web. RDF gives a natural representation of all kinds of data and it is graph based, which means it is made for integration. The Semantic web can thus be seen as a global database, as a web of data and data models and the interlinks between them. Data integration can than take place using triples. They allow information to be combined in a very flexible way. The question now is how to generate these triples? Studer explains that we can generate semantic web content by using semantic wikis. He states that Web 2.0 approaches can be used to generate ontologies in a Semantic MediaWiki. Through this Semantic MediaWiki you can specify the specific property in the RDF and than connect it in the ontology, which allows you to add semantic annotations to the wiki content. In this way mashups can be created in a Semantic MediaWiki. The Web 3.0 thus becomes a big knowledge mesh connecting people and information to create and share knowledge. Using semantic wikis enables the producing of semantic content collaboratively and more easily.
Creative Commons also uses powerful semantic models which allows search for works based on their licenses and allows for precise definitions of desired rights (e.g commercial use etc…). This can of course be very helpful to help solve the problems coined on integration and standardization of licenses at the preconference day.
In the second session, on usage and impact, Ian Rowlands (CIBER Group) talked about Electronic journals: modeling journal spend, use and research outcomes. CIBER is a research group at the University College London (UCL) that studies the digital transition to scholarly communication and more in specific scientist’s information behavior in this respect. What do scientists do online? How do they behave and how do they use the online content? They conducted a study framed around two very important research questions:
How have researchers responded to the unprecedented levels and convenience of access to scholarly journals?
How has enhanced access to the literature affected the research process and research outcomes?
According to the study, Google is hugely popular and influential, it is the first choice of preference for scholars and so it drives a lot of content to journals. Opening up journal content to Google is thus a way to get more traffic to your journal. Now does this continued or enhanced access lead to greater productivity, Rowlands asks? According to the study, the work activity of researchers increasingly goes on beyond the working week. Working days becomes elongated and one third of the searches on which the study was based were made outside the working week. What does this mean: does this mean scholars are much more pressurized? Does this mean that information consumption and production are in some way related to each other? Is there a link between efficient search and successful research? According to Roland we still need to explore these questions more thoroughly. What was clear however from the study, was that the most successful research institutions tend to use gateways more often and this is reflected in much shorter sessions on the publishers platform. Does this mean that super-users are also super-producers? Yes, says Rowlands, they found a tentative link between e-journal consumption and research outcomes. Rowlands concludes by mentioning that this is still a preliminary report, primarily used also to frame (upcoming) questions for the stakeholders in scholarly communication. The study will be published on the CIBER website in 4 weeks.
Highlights of the second day of APE will follow soon.
From the 19th to the 21st of January I was in Berlin to visit this magnificent city and to go to the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference. From their website:
“APE Conferences encourage the debate about the future of scientific publications, information dissemination and access to scientific results. They offer an independent forum for ‘open minds’ with a free exchange of opinions and experiences between all stakeholders.”
This year’s edition was themed “The impact of publishing”. The Preconference day, which focused on information competence, was organized by Anthony Watkinson of University College London and Matthias Wahls of Brill Academic Publishers. I will focus here on what I deemed the most interesting parts. The first panel was on Licensing: collective and specific and featured Wilma Mossink from SURF and Marc Bide the incoming director of EDItEUR, who both talked about licensing schemes. Mossink focused on national and international initiatives and possibilities for cooperative licensing schemes and frameworks like Knowledge Exchange (a cooperation of JISC, DEFF, SURF and DFG) to enhance access to scholarly information on the Internet. These initiatives want to help out the smaller publishers who don’t have much money and time to invest. Knowledge Exchange serves as an umbrella organization aimed at supporting the use and development of ICT infrastructure.
Where Mossink went on to discuss initiatives like AGORA and HINARI and different Open Access frameworks for licensing models, Mark Bide focused mainly on the challenge of how to communicate these licenses in their new technical environment. Problems like correct interpretations of licenses and how to express licenses in machine-readable forms in order to support machine to machine communication (especially important when using a search engine like Creative Commons when searching for certain kinds of CC
licensed material) are important to consider. The goal is to communicate clearly what you can and can’t do with the digital content the license refers to. Bide stressed that we need a method of communicating publishers policies that is flexible and extensive and that supports any (future) business model. Because, he warns, if publishers don’t care about communicating licenses, nobody will, especially not the search engines.
One of these publisher initiated initiatives is ACAP: Automated Content Access Protocol, which was launched in 2007. This is an initiative that focuses on machine to machine licensing (where for instance Creative Commons focuses on machine to person licensing communication). Like Creative Commons, ACAP is a general protocol for all kinds of content where initiatives like ONIX (books) and PLUS (photography) are more sectoral.
Bide argues that the need for standardization of licensing protocols, particularly of their semantics, needs to be recognized. Convergence is needed: there are too many standards and we need to get them out of their sectoral seclusions. It is all about the communication of licenses and permissions, not about their enforcement. This convergence of standards applies also to Open Access licenses, which are creating difficulties on how to define open access. We need to make clear with which particular kind of license content is truly Open Access and with what license it is not.
Another interesting panel focused on Discovery: helping users find what is appropriate and featured Jan Velterop. He focused on 
what one can do to make scientific literature even more useful. Since we have access to too much information, we need to find a way to navigate the information. In order to do this, we need to connect elements of knowledge to each other: we need to publish articles and visualizations.
This requires new skills, not only for the researcher (who needs to become a real knowledge worker), we also need a change in culture. Velterop argues that we need to focus on concepts: it’s all about concepts (and thus about meaning) and not about keywords. He mentions for instance the word ‘Jaguar’. As a keyword this refers to both cars and animals. If you focus on the concept you take out the ambiguity. Now, when you search for information you want to connect these concepts. This is what, as Velterop explains, semantic relationships and semantic highlighting do. Concepts are interconnected and interlayered. Velterop’s company, Knewco, offers a free service that does exactly that, so he states.
From the Knewco website:
“Where search engines are concerned with the whereabouts of information, Knewco is concerned with the meaning, significance and connection between elements of knowledge. Knewco offers – free – services based on putting knowledge from different and disparate sources together, in a conceptually coherent and consistent way. The knowledge is disambiguated, redundancies are removed, and keywords and terms are normalized into concepts.”
As Velterop explains in his lecture, Knewco wants to remove the ambiguity and redundancy. They do this by making so called ‘smart triplets’ in concept spaces on an ontological, observational and hypothetical level. Velterop argues that by using this functionality, scientific publishers can add semantic functionality to their material by way of highlighting.
As Velterop concludes: the basic idea is just to make relationships between stuff, to bring back the serendipity, enabling you to find the things you did not even know you were searching for. This introduces new ways of thinking about information and this technology can have direct consequences also for the way researchers might be writing their articles in the future. You can find more about Knewco here and here.
More information about the APE conference will follow soon.
Happy days for Creative Commons and NIN! Trent Reznor managed to make a huge profit selling his bands 2008 album Ghosts I-IV online, topping Amazon’s best selling list for 2008. Strange enough, the album was legally available for free at the same time (even on the same website). This nice article over at Ars Technica gives one possible reason for this phenomenon (next to obviously the much heralded ease of using Amazon, and might I note the lack of awareness of many law abiding citizens of the existence or workings of sites like The Pirate Bay, where the album could also be downloaded legally for free). According to the article in Ars Technica, the music lovers bought the album on Amazon because ‘fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked’. (One wonders though, wouldn’t the ‘fans’ buy the album from NIN’s website rather than from Amazon?). It’s like the Radiohead model all over again (didn’t NIN invent that basic model anyway?) but now even better! The same article makes the suggestion that small indie record labels could probably profit from this model too: use that dedicated fan base that does not mind to pay a little extra money to support their favorite artists.
It looks like we might be slowly returning to the old Maecenas system, or Maecenate, when it comes to culture, flourishing as it did in the old Rome of Virgil and Horace, and still visible today in many a countries’ subsidy system, stimulating (historically) mostly the so called ‘high arts’ which in some cases and some countries have known some kind of patronage or state subsidy for ages (the Dutch system is a good example in this respect).
What seems clear however is that this new digital Maecenic culture will be quite different in many respects from so called subsidy systems. It will be way more ‘democratic’ for one, no longer favoring art picked out by committees of wise experts but directly benefiting those chosen by the public to merit their money. It will also not be a ‘traditional’ Maecenic culture in which a few rich people out of philanthropy and the goodness of their hearth give their money to the arts or the projects they endorse. This new Maecenic culture will probably be upheld by large communities of people of all income classes, all offering a little money to support their favorite band, artist or cultural entrepreneur (think of those small labels again).
Now is this a bad development? Does this mean that, might such a system in the future prevail, all art should be foremost about marketing, about creating a sustainable community and those with the most fans get the most money? Not necessarily. Sure there will be large communities supporting crappy artists, but as NIN shows (which although definitely a big band you will find harder to categorize as ‘mainstream’ like you might do with for instance Radiohead, and by the way, both bands have been credited with making qualitatively high and good music according to ‘artistic standards’, whatever they are), ‘alternative’ bands can also make an income this way, maybe supplementing this new kind of business model with added value products, merchandising and intensive touring, so it does surely also offer possibilities for those small little indie pearls out there.
Finally, and I will go in to this some more in the future for sure: could this model work for books? Why not? Some have tried already: Cory Doctorow is one of the most successful examples of this model. He has given his books away for free for years already and has made a lot of money with this scheme. The difference between music and books in this day and age of course being that the made the profit from his printed books, whilst the digital versions are available for free online. And a lot of these print sales can be explained by the by some felt ‘awful screen reading experience’. But with the rise of digital books and with Kindle editions being available of a growing amount of various book titles, competition will begin to rise between free digital books and paid for digital content in this segment of the media market too. And why not help out good old Cory and his mates by sponsoring them in the good old Roman way, thanking them for their generous sharing of their cultural creations in an alternative way? I know some artists who would like such a model…. Interesting times, interesting developments….
RiP: A remix manifesto, is the first Open Source documentary, in which film maker Brett Gaylor (founder of www.opensourcecinema.org) invites the public to remix his footage in his participatory media experiment. The documentary ‘explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers’. With appearances by Lawrence Lessig, the Creative Commons founder who just published his great new book Remix (also see my previous post about Science Commons) and Cory Doctorow, our favorite blogger over at Boing Boing and writer of the equally great (and freely downloadable) book Content.
Underneath you can find the trailer of the documentary and you can contribute your own mash-up here.
Update April 6th 2009: you can now watch RIP: A remix Manifesto – version 1.0 – here: http://www.opensourcecinema.org/book/rip-remix-manifesto-1-meet-girl-talk
Today Science Commons, a subdivision of the larger Creative Commons non-profit organization, launched a short video explaining what Science Commons stands for. Science Commons, headed by John Wilbanks, is a project that tries to improve scientific communication and research by making a plea to lower access barriers and to free locked-up research results. They want to ‘accelerate the research cycle’ by creating and promoting a new cooperative scientific infrastructure. From their website:
“Many scientists today work in relative isolation, left to follow blind alleys and duplicate existing research. Data are balkanized — trapped behind firewalls, locked up by contracts or lost in databases that can’t be accessed or integrated. Materials are hard to get — universities are overwhelmed with transfer requests that ought to be routine, while grant cycles pass and windows of opportunity close. It’s not uncommon for research sponsors to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in critically important efforts like drug discovery, only to see them fail.”
The video is directed by director Jesse Dylan, the director of the Emmy-award winning “Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign video:
The last couple of days I have started thinking about what the concept of free knowledge exactly entails. I want to dedicate a few future posts to this subject, in order to explore the idea to its fullest and to give it a proper categorization (at least I will try to). This can be seen as a first outline for a series on free.
A few thoughts come to mind when thinking about freedom if information:
- What does free exactly mean? What distinguishes free knowledge from or relates it to other concepts such as open science or open access, libre or gratis knowledge and ideas like creative commons, open content and copyleft?
- Is there a fundamental difference between freedom of information and freedom of knowledge?
- Is freedom of knowledge possible? And if so, what are the pros and cons of such a development; do we really want our knowledge to be free?
- Where does the idea of ‘information wants to be free’ originate form, and what is its historical context?
- What kind of different economic, political, social and philosophical issues play a role when we talk about free knowledge?
- Can we develop an economy of free, or a business model that revolves around free access? If so, what kind of possibilities or models are there (and which are sustainable?) and what are their pros and cons?
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