On crowd funding Open Access scholarly books

With academia increasingly being abused by budget cuts whilst at the same time being overtaken by the language of business, profit, and sustainability, new ways are being sought to gain funds to subsidize academic projects and publications. Especially scholarly publishers within the Humanities and Social Sciences (be they not-for-profit or commercial) have become accustomed to the mixing of and the experimenting with business and revenue models. As the specialized scholarly book has developed into a format from which it has become very hard to gain a profit (mainly due to library budget cuts, the main buyers of academic books), in most cases (cross-) subsidizing schemes are now a necessity for publishers.

Joseph Esposito gives a nice overview of the different business models in use in scholarly communication in his blog post What We Talk About When We Talk About Business Models: A Bestiary of Revenue Streams. In this post he zooms in on revenue streams derived by publishers using traditional or ‘user-pays’ publishing, author-pays publishing, institutional sponsoring, marketing services, ‘freemium’ publishing and licensing. And, as he confirms, in many cases content is made available by the aid of a hybrid model, in which revenue streams from the different categories mentioned above get mixed up in various forms and models. In a later post entitled The Membership Business Model for Scholarly Communications, Esposito discusses another business model, one which I want to explore more deeply here, namely the one in which ‘a group of people working in the same area (the area does not have to be academic research) might decide that they have a shared interest in publishing some of their material. They thus pool their resources, appoint individuals to oversee the publications, establish policies, and make the material available to fellow members of the community.’

As Esposito states, this membership model is a good example of the above mentioned hybrid model, as it is a mixture of different economic models:

‘At first glance, the membership model appears to be a form of user-pays publishing, as access to content requires a fee.  But this model differs from the traditional one in its reciprocal nature: One fee provides access to both content (like the user-pays model) and to the publishing process itself (like the author-pays model). It’s thus very much a community model of publishing, where membership has its privileges.’

It’s the later two aspects described by Esposito that I am most interested in here, namely the concept of community and the idea of member privileges.  For the model I want to focus on here, the crowd-funding model—well known from popular platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo—can be seen as a combination of the membership model and the Maecenas model I have written about before, but now targeted to the web. In this model the traditional ‘community model of publishing’ is being exported to the web and tried out in new forms and with a new, potentially global, community. At the moment this model is mainly being used in or experimented with in artistic and creative projects, but it has already been tried out extensively in other fields, media and formats too. The idea behind this model is that a community of people with an interest in (the funding of) a certain project, donate a small sum to support the project or to pledge for the project, in return for which they get ‘access’ to the project or gain certain ‘privileges’ (such as special previews, a copy of the final book/record/movie, a dedication in said media, or in some cases even a chance to go out for lunch with the artist).

My current aim is to explore in what way this model might work for academic book publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in specific in combination with an effort towards increasing accessibility and stimulating (Gold) Open Access publishing. However, before I go on to explore the different possibilities such a system might offer, note that I see the current proposal or set of ideas as an urgent necessity, a necessity to look for and experiment with new revenue streams and business models to help the specialized monograph survive, to make its creation and dissemination possible and to safeguard its existence. At the same time I see the ideas and possibilities explained and examined here as the nadir of what academic publishing has become, as an exemplar of the strains academic authors, publishers and their institutions have to go through to get their projects funded and their work published. Projects that society should deem important enough to fund from the outset, work that should be made accessible by default and not only when it is able to make a profit. The idea of crowd-funding a project or a publication in many ways reveals what the modern academic has become, spending increasing amounts of her/his/their ‘research time’ on securing internal or external funding, and on managing the paperwork that comes with that. The crowd-funding model, at least the one that is made popular by platforms like Kickstarter, might push the scholar to an even further extreme, were she/he/they will have to become a performer, playing out an act, juggling expertise, expected research outcomes, and promised deliverables in a snappy marketing video. All in order to persuade an already over-commercialized public to spend money on this specific, unique, and important project—instead of on one of the other hundreds of endangered publications—in a race for the competition of who can make the best promo clip.

An example of how this can become a bit ridiculous, or better said,  ‘problematic’, is sketched out by this recent article from The New York Times, that shows how, in order to obtain funding, two biologists ventured into selling t-shirts and trading cards in an effort dubbed by The Times similar to an ‘online bake sale’. The question is, are we headed towards a world in which scholars will increasingly have to become performers to obtain funding, for example by giving talks before paying audiences—which seems to be a growing trend—mimicking super-star scholarly authors such as Žižek? This trend is also visible in the increasingly popular format of the TED talks for instance (although TED does not pay its speakers, it is definitely a marketing device for authors). Will scholars be forced to go the same path literary authors have already gone, making money to finance their projects, publications and livelihoods by giving readings, signing books and selling merchandise? Increasingly it seems that in the present climate, with a lack of commercial interest for profit making, a lack of institutional backing, and a lack of (alternative) patronage systems in place in many of the countries hit by budget cuts, scholars, educators, authors and artists will have to go to drastic measures. Will this be the consequence of a society in which culture and scholarship are no longer seen as a necessity or as a public good? And aren’t we with that, as Žižek noted in a recent talk in London, killing of exactly those ‘traditional western standards and norms and values’ that the current right-wing European governments are at the same time craving to restore and maintain?

On the other hand, although the crowd-funding model showcases the extremes scholars have to go to nowadays to get money, it also offers many real possibilities. Against the gloomy vision sketched above, we should not underestimate the power of the community, and the self-organizing skills of the public sphere, when the commercial powers and the institutions that govern us increasingly abandon the Humanities and Social Sciences. Let’s get together with both our peers and with the wider community out there to discuss what we deem worthy research. Research that merits publication, research that deserves to be spread more widely.

So what is new about this crowd-funding model? As I stated before, it combines a membership model with a sponsorship model. In this way the statement made by Esposito that ‘a society that makes its content available through open access may experience declining interest among its members to continue paying membership dues’, underestimates the ideologies that trigger people, like for instance doing things for a common good, to support a certain charity or a certain goal—like increasing accessibility to scholarly publications. Furthermore the crowd-funding model finds a solution for another problem in the membership model Esposito notices, namely, as he states, ‘what, after all, is the point of being in a community unless it serves to define those who are outside it?’ The crowd-funding model no longer defines a community by giving it privileged access to the outcomes of the project—to the final publication—but to the process itself. It makes the community part of the process in a way. Crowd-funders thus become both member and part of a specific project (whilst attaining certain benefits at the same time). And this can very well go hand in hand with financing an openly available outcome at the same time. As the NYT article states ‘generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue.’

One of the problems noted in the NYT article however is the lack of a review system with crowd-funded projects. With this they mean a lack of a peer review system by experts of course, as a crowd selection system is already part of the crowd-funding process. As the article states, ‘most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process.’ However, peer review can of course take place at several stages during a project (for instance on acquiring funding, during the process of the project, during the publication phase and after the publication). These selection and quality assessment processes can be build into a crowd-funding model. Crowd-funding is just another revenue stream and needs not be without peer review or branding. A journal, publisher or a group of peer scientists can still endorse a project after or even before it has attained crowd-sourced funding. I think the problem these kind of new revenue models target has to do with the fact that projects that do measure up to quality and peer review standards, do not necessary have the funding to carry out these projects or to make the outcomes (openly) available. Competition has become harsh, and as Jean-Claude Guédon has showed us, the present system is mostly catering to let the best of scientific outcomes prevail. However, as Guédon also argues, the issue of excellence should not come to substitute quality thresholds.

The idea of crowd-sourcing funding for academic endeavors has already led to a few experimental platforms, of which the most promising might be the Italian Open Genius project, set up by Andrea Gaggioli. Open Genius, in adopting crowd-funding to scholarship, specifically focuses on the quality evaluation element. As Gaggioli and his colleague Riva write in a Science article here, ‘to assist (non-specialist) investors in deciding the awarding of contributions (and to audit thereafter), a peer-review procedure could be used. (…) Fraud could be prevented by implementing a reputation system (…) and by indicating the scientific track record of the proponent.’ As it states on its website, Open Genius is a not-for-profit initiative set up by the scientific community. It also lists it motives for using crowd-funding on its website and states it wants ‘to increase the resources for research, to reduce the gap between science and the public, to enhance transparency in funding allocation and use, and to inform donors about the results of their investments.’ The idea behind Open Genius is again that crowd-funding is seen as an additional revenue stream, where it looks to partner with similar academic, philanthropic or government funding initiatives. Their ideological background is also clear from their choice for open-source software and platforms. Ironically however, although the thinking behind this project seems solid, it hasn’t actually commenced yet, as it lacks the funds needed to start accepting proposals.

Where Open Genius is mostly focusing on funding whole (academic) projects, there are already some crowd-sourcing experiments up-and-running that focus more specifically on the funding of (literary) book publications. One of them is the Unbound Books platform, which works similar to Kickstarter but at the same time takes on a more traditional publishers role, as Unbound’s cofounder John Mitchinson states in an interview with Fast Company here: ‘we’re managing the back end in a way that Kickstarter doesn’t,” (…) “They’re a pure fundraising platform” (…)”We’re printing and distributing and finding the market for the books”. This publisher’s involvement has however led to forms of critique, as it is not a ‘pure’ crowd-sourcing project. Also, as is stated in this article by Bobbie Johnson, the problem with the Unbound Books model is that they got the underlying idea of ‘community’ wrong that seems to be essential when it comes to crowd-funding: the idea of ‘by the community and for the community’. As Johnson states: ‘It’s really about communities choosing their own destinies. As with crowdsourcing before it, there needs to be a real sense of involvement and authenticity if projects are to be about more than just doing things inexpensively.’

This idea of keeping traditional publishing functions alive whilst at the same time focusing more on the idea of community seems to be much better implemented in the Cursor platform set up by Richard Nash especially for book communities. The first community set up with Cursor is Red Lemonade. In an interview with Richard Nash by Digital Book World’s Rich Fahle, Nash states that Cursor is set up as a platform for publisher to also become membership organizations. Getting fans, writers and other interested parties to become members and comment upon each other’s work is the basis of the platform. The community then becomes the sole source of books to publish. In this way Nash’s project is more about ‘social publishing’, about the relationships between writers and readers. As Nash further states in this article in Publishers Weekly, ‘Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities’, a kind of ecosystem offering different publishing services.

These are all valuable insights and lessons to learn when thinking about applying a crowd-funding model to academic book publishing. One benefit of applying this model to academia is that the academic world already has a strong communal background in the form of disciplines and networks and formal and informal ties between publishers, authors, libraries, and journals (amongst others). And perhaps even more than in literary publishing, the writers of scholarly works are also the readers of these scholarly works. Furthermore, an elaborate communication and marketing network to keep up and strengthen the bonds between these communities is already in place in the form of mailing lists, blogs, (social) research platforms etc. And many of these digital platforms are from the outset already integrally connected to the rest of the web and the wider community of interest. Finally, as already mentioned above, the community ideology and the idea of sustaining and making accessible publications and research outcomes for the wider community fits in very well with Open Access principles and open source ideologies as they are at play within scholarly communication.

So, what could such a crowd-funding model for academic books look like? Underneath a very initial draft model.

First of all, as mentioned before, peer review and branding can very much be part of this model, as publishers or (groups of) authors can pre-select projects, endorse projects, or can conduct various forms of open and/or closed peer review as part of the project or publication process at different stages of its development. Also, crowd-funding can apply to already (traditionally) published and peer reviewed books, for instance to assist in making them openly accessible. A few different scenarios:

–      A book can be funded from its initial idea (more of a project fund in a way). Scholars can submit a proposal (a draft chapter, a promo video) plus a reward scheme for those who pledge a certain amount of money. For instance, funders could pledge 15 euro and receive a free paperback of the book (where students could get the same for only 10 euro). There could also be schemes for libraries, where they receive a print copy after pledging a certain sum.

–      Secondly, there could be an option to fund an Open Access edition of an already existing print book or of a book that will soon be available in print. At the moment projects like OAPEN.nl are looking into getting Open Access editions funded by government or funding institutions, by separating the costs of the Open Access edition from the costs of the printed edition. Another option, next to or instead of this institutional funding, could be to get the Open Access edition funded via crowd-sourcing.

–      Thirdly, the publication of a dissertation could be funded via crowd-sourcing platforms. Dissertations, although in most cases highly peer reviewed, are hard to get published at the moment due to their often highly specialized nature and the lack of build-up prestige of their authors (early-career scholars).

–     Fourth, if you fund a book you can get access to the way it develops. Following the idea of increased transparency or openness, crowd-funding could mean gaining access (for the funder or for the wider community) to the notes, updates, initial findings etc of the research project as it develops. This will draw the community closer towards a project and will also make them the initial pool of commentators (or even reviewers) of the document-in-development. Both authors and readers gain to profit from such a model, close to the ideas surrounding ‘social publishing’ as promoted by Nash.

A motion towards Open Access can be part of all these models, as an online version can be made available free for all—under a CC-license for instance—as a first requirement or outcome of all of these models. The community on which these models can be based, will first of all be made up of scholars in a certain field, but can be extended to students, libraries, other scholars in adjacent fields, the general public, companies (supporting publications as a charity cause for instance) etc. And again, different communities, and different projects, can exist on one platform.

It’s hard to say whether such a model might actually work, as much depends on, as said before, the willingness of a specific community to support projects and on the right model or platform. And again, although this might be just another revenue stream in that increasingly popular ‘hybrid model’ used to get publications funded, as long as it is working towards getting important and valuable research results out there, it is a shot worth taking.

Full circle with Open Access Monographs

After a previous guest post where he developed an interesting forecast related to academic publishing, Ronald Snijder is back with his thoughts on Open Access monographs. You can reach him at r.snijder@aup.nl

Full circle with Open Access Monographs

 

When I look at publishing academic books in Open Access, the story surrounding it tends to go a full circle, starting and ending with technology.

Technology is disrupting. Publishing in Open Access could only become an option because information technology enabled us to create files in a format – PDF – that could be used for printing and also be widely read on a screen. And the Web made it possible to publish those files without a lot of hassle. It made it possible to think about books that are free as in beer.

Of course, technology did not stop there. Apart from the ‘traditional’ web channel, we can access content from a mobile device. The number of available channels is not just increasing for the readers; those who make OA monographs available can now use several platforms such as repositories, the Google Books or other platforms like OAPEN[1]. Using the right channels also influences the availability: will my precious books be found in all the search engines?

Technology may also be changing our definition of what a monograph actually is. When you add moving pictures, sounds, complete databases, is it still a book? When it is updated regularly, possibly as a result of an online collaboration, can we still speak of a monograph? Some may also question the academic status of a monograph, compared to articles. Books are too long to read, too slow to write. Or maybe not. Personally I do believe that monographs have merit, and that making them freely available is beneficial.

But how beneficial are they, and for who? This is something that I would like to explore a little further in the future. Open Access monographs may have a scientific impact, as barriers are removed. Pricing barriers may be important for scholars in developing countries. Full access may enhance research, by making the contents fully searchable. Making monographs accessible may help to carry their ideas to places beyond the academic circles. All this may happen right now, but on what scale? Open Access should not be just a believe system, it must be backed up with facts.

This leads to another question that is much easier to answer. How can Open Access be sustained? That is simple: through money and power. Funders of research can also fund Open Access publishing of the results. Libraries and publishers could adjust the way they operate; universities could mandate that all research must be made freely available. Sustainability also means that the digital monographs must be preserved, which is a technical issue. So this story ends where it started: technology.

If you like, you can look at a more visual representation underneath or here.

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[1] Disclosure: I am employed by Amsterdam University Press, an academic publisher with a large portfolio of books. Furthermore I am deeply involved in OAPEN, aimed at Open Access publishing of monographs.

New Visions for the Book II: Remix

Part 3: Remix re-examined

See here for part 1 and here for part 2

Navas’s and Manovich’s thinking on remix seem to complement each other nicely. Where Navas analyses remix as discourse from a historical context, taking into account power-relations and the wider societal context shaping and triggering the rise of remix, Manovich takes a deep leap into the future, trying to think a world in which remix and the free flow of information through meta-media have become ubiquitous. He explores what this will mean for the way we produce, consume and analyse culture. Navas shows how remix has been an active force for change in the past, Manovich wants to explore how remix can still be an active stance to shape culture in the future. Both of them introduce the problem of fluidity and time and what this means for our (print-based) object-oriented society based on repetition of well-defined objects created by specific authors. Navas looks at the archive as a means to capture and stabilize cultural fluidity whilst at the same time creating reliability. Manovich looks at the way we can work with modularized recombinable data-sets to structure and control information flows. Both of them struggle with the dilemma of object-like thinking within a fluid environment. For both of them remix is or has become the defining characteristic of our digital culture.

Open Books

The dilemma’s Navas and Manovich touch-upon in their writing on culture at large can be directly related to our thinking surrounding the book and/or the future of our knowledge and communication system within academia. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, a book is an assemblage, a multiplicity, it only exists in its connections. The paradox lies in the fact that a book can at the same time be seen as an organism as well as a body without organs, with neither a subject nor an object, as pure becoming:

“A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive.”¹

This very well captures the dilemma between a more closed off and object-oriented thinking of the book and a more fluid, open thinking of the book as a network of relations, making contact on and through the outside. The metaphor of remix and the influence of remix culture and theory on the way we look at the book is thus an interesting one. What happens with the order of the book as we embrace this more open thinking of the book as becoming, without a stable core, no fixed author and a yet unknown system of authority? The question is whether it is still useful in the digital age to think of the book—and our knowledge system based upon it—as a stable object and whether it is possible (and necessary!) to look at the book more as an object of possibilities, a fluid moment of potentiality and becoming. And this is where remix theory comes in handy, trying to think exactly what it means when objects increasingly become bodies without organs and only exist in their connections to each other.

The importance of Navas analysis of remix for the book and the knowledge system we have created around it, lies in the way he tries to cope with the problems of stability and authorship. Navas discusses three partway solutions that are, as I feel, of direct interest for scholarly communication and its battle with these notions in the digital age. First of all he explores the archive as a way of both stabilizing flow and creating a form of authority out of flux and continual updating. Next to that he proposes the role of s/he who selects (or curates or moderates) as an alternative for the author. In a way one can argue that this model of agency is already quite akin to scholarly communication, where selection of resources and referring to other sources, next to collection building, is part of the research and writing process of most scholars. Finally Navas tries to explore an alternative means of critique based on a fluctuating identity and culture that tries to resist commercialization by staying on the liminal threshold; one based on seizing the production tools, and on seizing control over repetition by means of representation. And Manovich argues for a similar potential, the potential of culture (and in this respect knowledge) creators to modularise data and make it adaptable within multiple media and various platforms, mirroring scientific developments with standardized meta-data and the semantic web. These are all interesting steps beyond thinking ‘the book’ status-quo, challenging scientific thinking to embrace process, sharing, and letting go of idealized ideas of authorship that can stand in the way of true creativity. Navas does an interesting job in starting to deconstruct them, to show how they increasingly become problematic in todays remix culture brought about by the possibilities of digital media.

But in many ways Navas (as well as Manovich) runs up against what seem to be the borders of this more process-oriented thinking. His alternative options are equally still very much connected to stability: the archive is needed to objectify culture; selection is another form of agency and does not (fundamentally) do away with authorship; and an alternative form of critique is still a critique focused on agency and on a (stabilized) object, on a structure of control. The question of keeping an archive also becomes increasingly problematic when objects become dispersed amongst various platforms. How do we keep track of an object or of data once it goes viral? And what about the role of the selector when selections can be made redundant, choices can be altered and undone by mass-collaborative, multi-user remixes and mash-ups? In what way are the solutions Navas and Manovich offer only temporary solutions to cope with a world that is and always has been in flux and is now increasingly unstoppable in all its fluid manifestations? In what way might it be necessary to let go of this object-like thinking and to start theorizing a perception of culture, science and critique that lets go of these fixed frames of thought and immerses the real of eternal becoming? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to perceive culture as a fluidity from which we abstract objects for the sake of analysis and clarity, instead of seeing culture as being build up out of separate building blocks and recombinable data-modules? Isn’t it time to start thinking a knowledge and communication system based on continual updates and change, without a stable core, both as its object and subject? And is this even possible? In what way does the concept of the open book present us with a paradox in this respect?

Performative inflections

Remix Theory and many remix theorists (like for example Navas, Manovich, Lawrence Lessig, Paul Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky, Mark Amerika) have one more important aspect in common. Many of them experiment with different kinds of remix-practices themselves. In many ways their work poses a challenge to the often perceived dichotomy between theory and practice. Navas remixes his older writings, updates them and uses various media (amongst others film) to bring his message across. By using a blog as his main outlet he connects to other thinkers and consumers. On his blog he also acts as a curator or selector, bringing together other texts on remix. Furthermore he practices an interdisciplinary practice mixing his theoretical writing with his curatorial and art practices concerning remix. In Navas words:

“Remix Theory is designed to move towards a remix of itself, by recombining much of the material that is archived to put to test the possibilities of Remix. This will become transparent as the database grows, and specific projects are developed. The site is designed to host, archive and promote projects which explore the current possibilities of Remix online and offline; it is prepared to become a repository of collaborations with different people and institutions.”2

Manovich approach to his work in many ways mirrors software production. He brings out various versions of his work, unedited, and in many ways “unfinished”, waiting for feedback from the community after/from which they can subsequently be updated. His books can also clearly be seen as a remix of his various articles. Furthermore his scientific method can be seen as one in which media and methods from the hard sciences get mixed up and applied to ‘traditional’ humanities subjects within his cultural analytics framework.

Remixing knowledge

What is so interesting about remix for academic knowledge production, consumption and dissemination? I see remix as an exciting way to initiate a ‘thinking beyond the book’. Digital texts and books contain the potential to transform our knowledge system or the way we think and relate to knowledge. This ‘thinking beyond the book’ is not something that only became possible with the rise of the digital. It has always been part of the way we have envisaged and constructed our knowledge system.  There are however some ‘knowledge practices’ we have adopted and grown accustomed to, such as authorship, stability and authority. Digital and online media offer the potential to increasingly critique these notions where thinking a knowledge system beyond these notions increasingly seems to become a practical reality. Remix is a liminal concept in this way; it stands on the border of these customary ways of thinking. It shakes them up. It poses a potential crisis.

Remix Theory can be seen as a new way to critically think the potentiality of the book, as a way to think beyond the book, as a strategy to explore its multiple potentialities, to challenge established notions like stability, identity and materiality that are all bound up with (printed) books and at the same time with our current conception and practice of knowledge.

Remix is a cultural and a political phenomenon, it can be seen as a resistance against essentialisms. It can be used as means to critique the essentialist doctrines at work within the Humanities. Remix Theory can be a framework to question issues of authorship, stability, authority and originality within these disciplines and within science at large, just as much as it has been a framework to question these in for example music, art and poetry. Finally, the way it mixes theory and practical methodology, and the way it mixes media can be seen as both a commentary on and an inspiration for the (digital) humanities. And although, as I have argued before, it does not fundamentally challenge or alter these concepts, it is a (necessary) step in the right direction, towards a more fluid conception of the humanities.

 

1 See: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

2 See: http://remixtheory.net/?page_id=2

 

New Visions for the Book II: Remix

Part 1 – Eduardo Navas

In the first part of New Visions for the Book, I described how the concept of the book is being used as a strategic power tool to argue for a certain knowledge system. I tried to show how within this discourse certain essentialist notions—such as authorship, stability, and authority—still hold a lot of prestige and are hard to discard. In the subsequent parts of New Visions for the Book I therefore want to take a few expeditions outside the world of the scholarly book to look at the way other disciplines and other media have struggled with or have come to terms with the above mentioned notions. I want to start with looking at the concept of remix, engaged with mostly in music and art theory but increasingly a concept applied to describe and analyse culture at large. Here I want to focus on two thinkers who have extensively theorized remix: Eduardo Navas and Lev Manovich. After taking an in depth look at Navas work on remix first, I will explore Manovich’s thoughts on the subject in the next post, contrasting it with Navas’s ideas. Finally, I will explore what the consequences of their thoughts and their analysis of remix are for the scholarly book, the knowledge order it stands for and the concepts it reifies.

Eduardo Navas is a researcher and an artist with an interdisciplinary practice, a crossover between art, culture and media. Remix can however be seen as the overarching theme of his work. Remix Theory is the name of his blog, where he posts his own essays and articles on remix, and where he also ‘host(s), archive(s) and promote(s) projects which explore the current possibilities of Remix online and offline’. I will reflect on some of his writings as published on Remix Theory, predominantly on Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, Remix: The Bond of Repetition and Representation, and After the Blogger as Producer.

Allegorical strength

Navas analyses the concept of remix from a historical materialist perspective. According to Navas it is necessary to explore the history and development of remix to understand the dialects at play within remix. He describes how the concept of remix was derived from the model of musical remixes in the late 60s and 70s with roots in Jamaica. The musical remix then expanded through hiphop DJs via versions, turntablism, sampling and the practice of cut n’paste. According to Navas remix culture only came about with the coming of digital technologies: ‘Generally speaking, remix culture can be defined as the global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies that is supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste.’ The concept of remix, which Navas defines as ‘the activity of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms according to personal taste’ has thus been extended to other areas of culture. New Media and the Internet are for example based on the concept of sampling (cut/copy & paste ).

Navas descibes how remix has as an allegorical function. This allegorical function enables it to be a critical reflection on history and society. Navas distinguishes four main types of remix, which more or less developed chronologically: the extended remixⁱ, the selective remixⁱⁱ, the reflexive remixⁱⁱⁱ and the regenerative remix^iv. Although not all in an equal manner, these four types of remix all rely on the allegorical function. They reference history; they rely for their authority on the sources they cite, even if they claim autonomy:

“Allegory is often deconstructed in more advanced remixes following this third form, and quickly moves to be a reflexive exercise that at times leads to a ‘remix’ in which the only thing that is recognizable from the original is the title. But, to be clear ‘no matter what’ the remix will always rely on the authority of the original song.When this activity is extended to culture at large, the remix is in the end a re-mix, that is a rearrangement of something already recognizable; it functions at a second level: a meta-level. This implies that the originality of the remix is non-existent, therefore it must acknowledge its source of validation self-reflexively. In brief, the remix when extended as a cultural practice is a second mix of something pre-existent; the material that is mixed at least for a second time must be recognized otherwise it could be misunderstood as something new, and it would become plagiarism. Without a history, the remix cannot be Remix.”¹

For Navas remix is an active force which originated as a critical discourse from an outsider position. He describes remix in music in the shape of the DJ as a form of resistance. He draws upon Jacques Attali‘s concepts of repetition and representation and on Attali’s claim of how repetition (brought about by the possibility of mechanical reproduction) functioned as a force that took over representation in music and became the power tool of commercialism and the culture industry to enslave the artist. Repetition became ideology. Navas critiques Attali by showing how the DJ was able to turn repetition into an active force again. The DJ caused a rupture in the culture industry, Navas states, disrupting repetition and reintroducing representation with agency. Navas makes clear that the DJ was able to take back this critical position with the use of remix and by being able to reclaim the production tools (for instance Navas shows how this accessibility was pivotal in the development of Dub). The same development can be seen in the rise of blogging as a critical (remix) practice, and the potential of the blogger as a producer of information, independent from the vested publishing channels and institutions. Navas states: ‘Representation, then, is repeated in a perfect loop—the result is a constant remix of repetition by representation.’ However, Navas goes on to show how this form of resistance is soon again seized and incorporated by commercial parties. When this happens remixes are no longer critical but become part of consumer culture. This is where Navas claims, borrowing the term form Adorno, they become regressive.

“To be clear, then, what the DJ initially brought forward is the appropriation of repetition by representation; thereby making representation friendly to repetition. Thus, representation does not resist co-option by repetition; if anything, today it is optimized for assimilation, by being constantly reblogged (remixed). What does this signify for cultural production? How can we reflect on the contentions of such shift?”²

In this way, next to being a potential for critique, next to being reflexive, as Navas states, remix can also be regressive. It has a ‘double face’. For Navas however it is essential to keep the loop alive, to keep on taking and producing this critical position to battle the forces of repetition which give people ‘false comfort’. We need to confront this false-consciousness by taking in a critical position, to enable ‘a constant flux between representation and repetition’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fluid mashups

But this constant battle with the forces of repetition and commercialisation is not the only problem Navas is struggling with concerning remix as a critical discourse. Another problem has to do with (the development of) remix itself. Increasingly the allegorical (and thus critical) function of remix is marginalized. Navas makes this clear by his discussion of reflexive mashups, an example of what he calls the fourth kind of remix, the regenerative remix. In the regenerative remix, updates are made constantly, for example by the use of software that also creates a well-organised archive, as with the example given by Navas: Google News. Here allegory is no longer the main function, but functionalism and efficiency are. Regenerative remixes are (at least initially) proposed to serve as convenient and efficient forms to stay informed rather than to be entertained. This development too has its benefits:

“The principle of periodic change, of constant updates (i.e. Google news are regularly updated) found in the Regenerative Remix makes it the most recent and important form that enables Remix as discourse to move across all media, and to eventually become an aesthetic that can be referenced as a tendency. Nevertheless, even in this fourth form, allegory is at play—only it is pushed to the periphery.”³

As it is automated however, reflexive mashups increasingly seem to loose their critical power. Partially to this is the problem of the lack of ‘agency’ in reflexive mashups. Where for Navas authorship has been replaced by sampling—’Sampling allows for the death of the author’—and the critical position in remix is taking in by s/he who selects, this stance becomes increasingly problematic once remix is automated. How are we to regain this critical power in the real-time web and without the fixed position or identity of s/he who selects?

Navas touches upon an important point here where when allegory and authorship are pushed to the borders, critical reflection becomes a challenge:

“The concept of critical distance, which has been used by researchers and intellectuals to step back and analyze the world, is redefined by the Regenerative Remix. This shift is beyond anyone’s control, because the flow of information demands that individuals embed themselves within the actual space of critique, and use constant updating as a critical tool.”⁴

As Navas shows, the regenerative remix is focussed on creating efficiencies in the ever-present, in the constantly changing now. It however still needs its archive, or history, as a legitimation device. The ability to search the archive of the regenerative remix gives the regenerative remix both its reliability as well as its market value, Navas argues.

Thresholds and Liminality

Navas trows out a few extra life-lines to cope with this situation. First of all, in order to get more grip on these fluctuations, he looks at postcolonial identity politics, mostly at Homi Bhabha‘s concept of liminal space ‘where identity is constantly defined, where one is neither one nor the other, where one is both and neither; where a third space to gain autonomy can begin to take place’. He uses the marxism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to criticise Bhabha’s position, where they state his position leads to undecidability. Although Navas concludes these positions mostly seem to clash, he also sees them both as integral and complementary aspects of the project of Critical Theory, they are ‘mutually intertwined’. For Navas is interested in how agency in the end does occur from this liminal position and from a culture that is in a constant state of flux, on ‘a feedback loop from the periphery to the center’. For Navas, even from within the liminal space, their remains the option to take in a critical position, to break through the undecidability:

“With these contradictions on trying to take control of the tools of production, what one can find in Bhabha’s proposition of searching for agency within the threshold is that, even when one has been pushed to the margins, and is not there by choice, one can actually do something productive within this space. One can actually take control of the tools available if one figures out how to do that.”⁵

A second life-line looks not so much at the problem of hybrid and fluid agency but at how to deal with culture that is in a constant state of renewal and real-time updates. Drawing on the example of the regenerative remix mentioned above, Navas looks at the idea of the archive to give legitimacy to fluidity retrospectively. By recording information, it becomes meta-information, information that is, as Navas states, static, it is available when needed and always in the same form. And this recorded state, this staticity of information retrospectively, is what makes theory and philosophical thinking possible, Navas claims:

“The archive, then, legitimates constant updates allegorically. The database becomes a delivery device of authority in potentia: when needed, call upon it to verify the reliability of accessed material; but until that time, all that is needed is to know that such archive exists. But there is another face of the coin: the database, which is played down in the front pages, is actually extremely crucial for search engines. Here the archive becomes the field of knowledge to be accessed; it is the archeological ground to be explored by sophisticated researchers and lay-people alike. It is a truly egalitarian space, which provides answers to all queries possible.”⁶

But again, the archive is easily commercialized too. The data we collect is harvested by Google and our databases are predominantly build up on social media sites. This has lead to an increasing rise of information flow control:

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is evident that the Regenerative Remix is defining the next economic shift. Remix culture is experiencing a moment in which greater freedom of expression is mashed up against increasingly efficient forms of analysis and control.”⁷

As Navas however states, with the coming of the regenerative remix, remix moves beyond basic remix principles, and a rupture develops which enables new forms of cultural production. The potential of the regenerative remix is a strong one for Navas, where it ‘mirrors while it also redefines culture itself as a discourse of constant change.’ And for Navas this movement of culture is then a movement between the centre and the periphery, between repetition and agency. Music (or culture) is always in a constant state of change to create progression. However, to thrive and evolve, culture needs to dwell on the threshold.

 

1 See: http://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3

2 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=361

3 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=444

4 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=444

5 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=345

6 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=444

7 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=444

 

i A longer version of the original song containing long instrumental sections making it more mixable for the club DJ. (reference: remix defined)

ii Adding or subtracting material from the original song. (reference: reflexive and regressive)

iii Allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original; material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact to be recognizable. (reference: reflexive and regressive)

iv A recombination of content and form that opens the space for Remix to become a specific discourse intimately linked with new media culture. The Regenerative Remix can only take place when constant change is implemented as an elemental part of communication, while also creating archives. (reference: reflexive and regressive)



New Visions For The Book – Part I

A few weeks ago the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University brought together a group of digital humanists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds as part of the unique summer institute One Week | One Tool. The aim of One Week | One Tool was to come up with an (open source) digital tool to aid humanities scholarship. The catch was that this whole process of tool-building could take no longer than a week. The tool the group came up with and, as part of the deal, actually build, is called Anthologize. Anthologize, as the tagline proclaims, ‘use(s) the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.’ The idea is that you can grab content from your own blog or other blogs, order it, determine the layout and publish it, both in print and in different electronic formats.

Next to being a refreshing project and a useful tool, what I found interesting about Anthologize is the (implicit) notion that lies behind it’s conception, namely the idea of what a scholarly book should or can be.

Anthologize it

Let’s take a closer look at a blogpost about Anthologize written by Dan Cohen, the director of the Center for History and New Media. Cohen is a historian who, in his own words, ‘explores—and tries to influence through theory, software, websites, and his blog—the impact of computing on the humanities.’ In the post he wrote to introduce Anthologize, there are a few interesting preconceptions concerning the book. For instance, he begins his post with stating the following:

“A long-running theme of this blog has been the perceived gulf between new forms of online scholarship—including the genre of the blog itself—and traditional forms such as the book and journal.”

This sentence is very interesting for various reasons. First of all Cohen talks about the perceived (and thus not real) gulf between online scholarship, such as the blog, and traditional forms such as the book. Furthermore he states that the book and the blog are both forms of scholarship, they are just different genres. Finally, he refers to how discussions surrounding the scholarly book mostly have been conducted by opposing new online forms of scholarship to traditional print scholarship such as the book and the journal.

Further on Cohen explains more in detail what Anthologize has to offer:

“Today marks the launch of this effort: Anthologize, software that converts the popular open-source WordPress system into a full-fledged book-production platform. Using Anthologize, you can take online content such as blogs, feeds, and images (and soon multimedia), and organize it, edit it, and export it into a variety of modern formats that will work on multiple devices.”

In this sentence it becomes clear that both Cohen and the One Tool | One Week people argue for a concept of the book that goes beyond the print format, where in their view books can be delivered in various formats (including, but not exclusively, print) suitable to be read on (and by) various devices. Furthermore, they—I would say consciously—push for a broad(er) idea of what a book can consist off: in their vision a (scholarly) book can, besides text, consist of all kinds of multimedia content. Furthermore, it can consist of material that has been previously online available—hence published—such as blogposts. Thus with Anthologize a book becomes a selection of online available material which can be expanded with new texts and/or multimedia content. Finally, it offers the creator of the book the possibility to instantly publish the book her or himself, without the help of publishers or self-publishing platforms.

As I will state, with this tool Cohen and the people from One Week | One Tool argue for a concept of the book that goes beyond the idea of the traditional printed scholarly book. Anthologize forms a, perhaps implicit, critique against connotations that are an intrinsic part of the production process of a scholarly book as it is currently common in print publishing: double-blind peer review and quality control and branding by a reputable press. In this way they try to challenge or by-pass the traditional authorities that determine whether a scholarly book is fit to be published.

The New Age of the Supplement

About a decade ago there was another historian that thought about new futures for the book: Robert Darnton. Darnton is a leading expert on eighteenth-century France, a book historian who writes about electronic publishing, and the founder of Gutenberg-e, the electronic monograph series. Currently Darnton is a professor in the History department at Harvard University and the director of the Harvard University Library. In 1999 Darnton wrote the article “The New Age of the Book” published in the New York Review of Books, in which he criticizes the publishing system surrounding the scholarly monograph and opts for a different system based on the electronic publishing of books. In this article Darnton puts forward a concept of the book that again differs from that of Cohen et. al.

In the first paragraph of his article Darnton paraphrases Marshall McLuhan:

“Marshall McLuhan’s future has not happened. The Web, yes; global immersion in television, certainly; media and messages everywhere, of course. But the electronic age did not drive the printed word into extinction, as McLuhan prophesied in 1962. His vision of a new mental universe held together by post-printing technology now looks dated. If it fired imaginations thirty years ago, it does not provide a map for the millennium that we are about to enter. The “Gutenberg galaxy” still exists, and “typographic man” is still reading his way around it.”

Darnton puts the printed book here in direct opposition to the web, and can in this sense be seen as part of the discourse which emphasises the gulf between the online and the book mentioned by Cohen. Darnton casually argues that the world as we know and perceive it is still build on the concept of the printed book. For Darnton a book is foremost distinguishable by its codex format. In his vision the codex is a great technology; it is a format which is great for packaging information, it is superb for storage, and thus for archiving, and remarkably resistant to damage and is therefore good to preserve. Furthermore, it misses some of the tiresome drawbacks one can attribute to electronic publications (such as charging batteries). Most importantly, Darnton states the codex is valuable in that it has been the basic tool for learning for thousands of years.

However, Darnton’s vision for the book is more versatile, as we soon will see. But by equalling the book with the codex here and highlighting the codex’s continued benefits, he seems to be catering to a certain rhetoric in this part of his article, where he refers to the continued fear that electronic publishing will cause people to do away with the traditional book:

“If the future brings newspapers without news, journals without pages, and libraries without walls, what will become of the traditional book? Will electronic publishing wipe it out?”

By proposing a new future for the book, Darnton paints a picture of two visions of the book (one print and one electronic) that can exist side-by-side. Furthermore the electronic book is in his view something different, a supplement to the traditional book, not a replacement of it.

In this carefully crafted article Darnton goes on to show how this alternative concept, of the electronic book as a supplement, could even be beneficial for the scholarly book. Darnton’s push towards electronic publishing seems to be triggered essentially by two related problems in the field surrounding monograph publishing: the crisis in scholarly publishing, making it increasingly hard to get a monograph published, and the related problem of attaining tenure for young scholars, were tenure is directly coupled to the publishing of a monograph by a reputable press. In this way we could interpret this article—and the concept of the book put forward here by Darnton—foremost as a rhetorical device aimed at solving these problems.

The possibilities of electronic publishing however lead further than just saving the current print publishing model and the reputation system that is build upon it from extinction. And this is where Darnton carefully sets out his famous vision of the book as a pyramid build up of different layers of diverse data which can expand on and supplement the printed book in an online environment. The function of this electronic book is not so much to be read however, but to serve as an archive, a database, a search engine and a social text were people can interact with the text and with each other. In the final paragraph of his article Darnton sums up his strategy concerning the use of his book concept perfectly:

“Far from being utopian, the electronic monograph could meet the needs of the scholarly community at the points where its problems converge. It could provide a tool for prying problems apart and opening up a new space for the extension of learning.”

Although perhaps in practice Darnton’s vision of the book as pyramid model and Cohen’s et.al. Anthologize model seem to lie not that far apart, there are some clear differences between both visions. In Darnton’s view for instance, putting something on the web does not make something into a book. Here he gives the example of a dissertation:

“Certainly, we can dump unlimited numbers of dissertations onto the Web. Several programs exist for providing this service—and it is a genuine service: it makes research available to readers. But as a rule, this kind of publication provides mainly information, not fully developed scholarship, at least not in most of the humanities and social sciences. Anyone who has read raw dissertations knows what I mean: with few exceptions, they are not books. A world of difference separates them. To become a book, a dissertation must usually be reorganized, trimmed here and expanded there, adapted to the needs of a lay reader, and rewritten from top to bottom, preferably with the help of an experienced editor.”

As Darnton states above, professional editing stays a necessity, electronic publishing is still something that needs to be done by a publisher, who provides a certain amount of authority and adds value to the publication and thus turns it into a full-fledged scholarly book.

Books as Power Tools

In both Darnton’s and Cohen’s articles the concept of the book is part of a larger strategy. Darnton wants to take away the fear concerning electronic publishing by focussing on the remarkable assets and staying power of the printed book. Cohen wants to create a tool that makes it easier for people to publish their own digital book without necessarily loosing the quality offered by professional publishers. Darnton wants to experiment with the new features online publications offer but without loosing the quality control and authority invested upon these online works by professional publishers. Cohen introduces a tool that can serve as an alternative to professional publishing. Darnton wants to heal the scholarly communication system made up of publishers and tenure committees by introducing electronic publishing. Cohen wants to subvert this same system by proposing a system that forms an alternative to the vested authority and quality provisions offered by publishers. But at the same time he doesn’t really touch upon other vested notions surrounding the book such as authorship and the stability of the text, and neither does Darnton, nor do they actively challenge the format of the book as the one being most suitable for (humanities) scholarship. Darnton’s and Cohen’s strategic concepts are also very time-bound. Darnton made a plea for electronic publishing and electronic books when the publishing industry only just began adapting to the online environment. Cohen’s et. al. Anthologize is developed in a time were electronic publishing is a must and Anthologize is one of the many tools that are being developed to encourage online humanities scholarship. Both their concepts of the book are very much part of these specific struggles. And it is not unlikely that Darnton’s vision concerning the book in the last ten years has become more like that of Cohen.

What I wanted to show by conflating these two viewpoints is that there is no such thing as a ‘book’ or an essential definition of the book. The book is a contested concept. As history has shown us a book can be a scroll as well as a codex, a paperback, a PDF or a collection of blogposts. The book is what we make of it. A book consists of possibilities; a book is becoming. As I have tried to show above, definitions and essentialist notions concerning what a book is (or should be, or was) can be seen as rhetorical devices used to argue for a specific knowledge and communication system. Visions concerning the book are being used as a means to control, shape, structure and think these systems. Consciously or unconsciously, the way we define the book, the way we work with and create the book, says a lot about the knowledge system we prefer or would like to have.

However, although I claim that there is no essential definition of the book, this doesn’t mean that in the discourse surrounding the book essentialist notions don’t play a major role. All the same, they should be seen as part of the struggle for, to put it bluntly, a remainder of the status quo, a return to the past or a turn towards another possible future of scholarly communication. Definitions of the book are power tools, books can be seen as discursive weapons to defend a virtual future both for the book and for knowledge. This becomes clear amongst others by the way definitions or essentialist notions surrounding the book often take the form of dialectical oppositions. One of the most common examples is when the book gets contrasted with the ebook. The ebook is opposed to the book as something different, were it connotes a knowledge system based on or turning toward the Internet and digital media. The need for such a distinction is quite strange if we think about it. There is no such thing as an e-song for instance, or an e-album. If we take it closer to home, there is also no such thing as an e-article (although there is an e-journal). The use of the word ebook is part of a struggle, it is a strategical tool used both by proponents and critics of ebooks to connote that here something different is happening. We can broaden this allegory to other fields were the struggle for a new system is felt the most. Think about the digital humanities and electronic literature (again: no digital biology). These dialectical stances are used to defend another notion of the humanities and another notion of literature. Interestingly enough one could argue that once these ‘other’ positions become more mainstream and accepted the additive e- mostly seems to disappear.

Essential Bookfuturism

Another use of this dialectical essentialism can be found in the term bookfuturism. Bookfuturism is a term invented by Joanne McNeill—an American science and technology writer—for a Twitter list following book aficionados. The term also shows similarities with the blog Bookfutures, written by Chris Meade, director of if:book London, a think thank for the future of the book. The term Bookfuturism was picked up and given theoretical grounding by Tim Carmody, self-proclaimed bookfuturist, Wired Gadget Lab editor and writer for various blogs on book technology and media. Carmody started a group blog called Bookfuturism and wrote “A Bookfuturist Manifesto” for The Atlantic. As Carmody explains, Bookfuturism plays with two dialectial oppositions: bookservatism and technofuturism. Carmody describes them as follows:

“Now, even bookservatives acknowledge that things are changing. But they fear that these changes will result in catastrophe, for some part or whole of the culture they love. Because of that, they would prefer that book tech and book culture stop, slow down, or go back. (…) On the other side of the aisle are technofuturists. They’re winning most of the arguments these days when it comes to e-books, so their rhetoric isn’t as wild. Technofuturists are technological triumphalists, or at least quasi-utopian optimists. These are the folks who believe that technology can solve our political, educational, and cultural problems. At an extreme, they don’t care about books at all: they’re just relics of a happily closing age of paper, and we should embrace the future in the form of multimedia and the networked web.”

As Carmody rightfully proclaims however, there is no such thing as a bookservatist or a technofuturist, these are simply stances people can uptake to argue for something:

“Almost nobody is a pure bookservative or technofuturist. Rather, these are rhetorical positions that anyone can take up, from moment to moment and case to case. Moreover, each is dependent on the other, because each imagines their opponent as the other. They are easy caricatures. But sometimes we ARE caricatures.”

Bookfuturists, in Carmody’s vision, refuse both positions. He sees it as a way of thinking about the book that is critical to both positions. Again here the book becomes a rhetorical device, a metaphor to think about new technology and its impact on knowledge:

“We’re usually more interested in figuring out a piece of technology than either denouncing or promoting it. And we want to make every piece of tech work better. We’re tinkerers. We look to history for analogies and counter-analogies, but we know that analogies aren’t destiny. We try to look for the technological sophistication of traditional humanism and the humanist possibilities of new tech.”

Although, as I have argued above, there is no essential definition of the book—only positions—that does not mean it is not interesting to analyse the different positions people take up and the different characteristics or essential notions they assign to the book to argue for a certain knowledge system. For although the book has been a contested concept for ages (as the history of the book has shown), the specific (dialectical) positions we take in when it comes to the book at this moment, say a lot about the particular issues we are struggling with at the dawning of the digital age. How do we create a knowledge system that might in the future no longer be build upon the book (exclusively) anymore and which will perhaps mean a definitive shift away from the previously cited Gutenberg Galaxy and Typographic man?

To explore what these essential notions are that get attributed to the book by specific groups these days—for instance the stability of the printed book vs. the limitless networked book—is crucial, as it says a lot about not only the book but about our age as well. The struggle for the book is a struggle to keep up with technological change and a reaction against these upheavals. However, the discourse surrounding the book at the same time structures the way we use and adopt new technology. Media transform but they are also invented at the same time.

Furthermore, as I will argue next, it might prove essential to deconstruct these notions that we have attributed to the book to see what we actually value about them and how we can either adopt them or transform them concerning our needs and the possibility offered by digital technology. Some of the deepest essential notions that seem to stick with the book (and have been part of the discourse on the book since its conception), even in the digital age, have to do with authorship, stability and, especially in scholarly communication: authority. Fresh insights and experimental practices might be a necessity to bring these notions up to the next level and to expose and confront them to new possibilities and alternative futures. Futures in which the book is never just a book.

Who Owns Research?

Or better yet, who should own research? Last Thursday CRASSH―the Cambridge based institute for Cultural Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities―assembled an expert panel from the publishing and library community to tackle this question.  Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), Rupert Gatti (Open Book publishers), Gary Hall (Open Humanities Press) and Elin Stangeland (DSpace Cambridge), engaged in a discussion with the CRASSH Postdoctoral community on copyright and ownership of research. The exchange soon evolved into a wider debate on subjects as diverse as authorship, (Open Access) publishing and business models, peer review, branding and credibility, and deposit mandates and PhD theses. Google Books, Internet control and plagiarism also seeped into the discussion. The atmosphere was open and the crowd in a problem-solving mood. All the more surprising (and fulfilling) considering the fact that the principles of the panelists and the audience could be located on a sliding-scale from more traditional to highly experimental.

Linda Bree described herself as “the one in traditional publishing”, which, according to her, entails giving away forms of control. By default, she explains, the system revolves around the single author doing a substantial research (preferably in the form of a book). This research is then reviewed, published, disseminated and marketed. The researcher gains in this process by gathering career benefits, where the publisher receives a financial gain―which in academic publishing mostly means not going bankrupt. So, Bree explains, we find ourselves in a semi-commercial situation. In this context the publisher is not so much involved content-wise, but s/he does have a big say in the way research gets presented. This is an important aspect of the publisher’s work and is based on the possibility of presenting a work within certain financial limits. Because all of the above mentioned processes cost money, from reviewing to marketing. And they are all essential in the end for the scholar to, as Bree calls it, get a “nice published book” and to achieve the idea of “I wrote this”.

            Although you could say that giving away this amount of control over one’s work costs quite a lot for an author, Bree defends her and CUP’s position by stating that the transference off control to the publisher is a necessary process. The publisher has invested money along the way and needs to attain revenue. And CUP does give some rights to re-use the work (often fee-based). However, the current technological changes in the publishing process have now given individual scholars the possibility to assert more control over their research (through Open Access and electronic publishing). The individual scholar now has much more choices than in the traditional model (which as Bree admits, is in many ways not sufficient anymore). The seminal question an author thus needs to ask himself is what kind of added value traditional publishing gives him (in forms of branding and other benefits) and whether this is worth the loss of control?

Elin Stangeland from DSpace Cambridge explains the special position Cambridge scholars have in the UK, where they (and not their universities) actually hold the copyright to their research. Giving away forms of control can take place in various settings, as an author can also give a publisher a license to publish (as with a Creative Commons license). Other options for a scholar to keep more in-control include publishing your work with an Open Access book or journal publisher (according to Stangeland, half of the journals in the DOAJ are HSS journals) and self archiving. Scholars can also try to retain their rights from a publisher. Often traditional publishers—like CUP—also provide a hybrid option, where the author can opt to make his specific work openly available. DSpace—which can both be used for books and articles—takes care of the storage and dissemination of the researchers work. They also offer services and advice, like the copyright toolbox (developed by SURF and JISC), and provide information on funders’ policies concerning self-archiving requirements. And they are looking ahead, actively thinking about the archiving of research data (and the management hereof), new citation and reward systems for publishing in the digital humanities and developments concerning the social and semantic web.

            Rupert Gatti explained how he—an economist at Trinity College—started Open Book Publishers out of frustration: publishers were not responding quickly enough to the digital developments. Publishers will not sell books they deem to be in un-publishable areas (even though they match their quality criteria) and if they are published, these books are only bought by elite libraries in the west. But the POD revolution and the Internet brought new possibilities to disseminate research. And as Gatti states, dissemination is an important justification of research. Society needs access to research, were the current model prevents dissemination. Open Book publishers takes another route where their publications are completely searchable though Google Books and authors and readers have the freedom to transform and distribute the research. As publishers they have a non-exclusive right to publish (via a CC license). And they don’t give in on the quality aspect: OPB’s books are just as rigorously peer-reviewed as books in the traditional model. OPB is not for profit (and in case they do make a profit they share it 50/50 with their authors) and for a large part counts on the work of volunteers. And they take care of the ‘lap value’, as Gatti calls it, where they publish (affordable) hard and paperback copies of their publications—using the same printer as CUP does, Gatti adds. As Gatti concludes, there are alternatives to the traditional model and they are growing quickly.

 

After shortly describing the development of the Open Humanities Press—an international Open Access publishing collective—Gary Hall focused on one of the more experimental projects the press is undertaking. For next to more traditional forms of publication, OMP wants to experiment—through its Liquid Book Series—with changing the physical conception of the monograph. Liquid books offer open editing and free/libre content on a Read/Write basis and can for instance consist of a collage of different media and texts; snippets, pages, references, podcasts, youtube clips, etc.. This form of publishing directly confronts the idea of the author. Remembering Barthes, Hall explains how by giving a text an author, we at the same time give it a limit. Liquid Books are an experiment with the decentralization of the author. In a way this decentralization is already on its way. With the massive rise of authorship through the online medium the (discourse on the) author has again become more open, decentralized and distributed. With Google as our major spotlight and Internet filter, the performers of different roles (authors, editors, compilers) are not always identifiable. Everyone is potentially an author or an editor online.

The discussion that followed focused for a large part on the differences between the traditional subscription and the new Open Access models. Worries about the sustainability of Open Access models and their quality assurance were systematically taken away by the panelists. As all panelists confirmed and agreed upon, there is no such thing as one sustainable model for publishing books. In the future there is likely to be a mix of eclectic models with various revenue sources. Where it comes to quality standards, Gatti for one emphasized that the thorough peer review methods of OBP confirm to the highest standards (comparable to those of CUP for instance). Bree however emphasized that for young authors—publishing their first book—the brand of a publisher also plays an important role. She clearly advised young authors to think about this when making their choice on where to publish. Gatti replied by stating that the more open availability of Open Access publications (and in OBP’s case the lower pricing of their print books) is also an important aspect of the marketing and dissemination of publications.

In this respect it is again about the added value of the publisher and about which addition you value the most. And as this seminar showed, with the increased possibilities for authors to publish their research online, publishing is now more than ever about making choices. What the right choice is in this respect, especially concerning the ownership of research, is up to the researcher. Perhaps now more than ever, s/he is in control about how and where to publish.

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?

Highlights from APM – Day 1

 

Last week, on the 19^th and 20^th of March, the first Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean Region (APM) conference was held, an offshoot of the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference, which was held for the fourth time last January in Berlin. Both conferences want to transgress the traditional sectoral boundaries that exist in scholarly communication, where the scholars, publishers, policy makers, middlemen and librarians all have their separate gatherings and meetings. APE and APM are independent and international conferences about all aspects of academic publishing, to foster knowledge exchange and dialogue between the different stakeholders in scholarly communication. The APM, held in Florence, specifically focused on the diversities and particularities of the Mediterranean region with its many languages and its focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and monographs. Culture, tradition, books and manuscripts are still very important in the Mediterranean region, as the opening speaker Augusto Marinelli (the rector of the University of Florence) remarks. However, electronic experiments and digitization projects are also inceasingly undertaken. These innovations are however taking place in the context of the current financial crisis, which is hitting hard on the Italian publishing and library industry, says Mauro Guerrini, from the Italian Library Association (AIB – Associazione Italiana Biblioteche). He states that where in a knowledge economy knowledge is the key to innovation and development, decreasing (library) resources and cutbacks in science and scholarly communication might be detrimental to the overall economic development.

 

One of the possible solutions to this impasse might lie in what Maria Cristina Pedicchio (President of the Technology District in Molecular Medicine and Professor of Algebra at the University of Trieste) calls private-public partnerships in research. Referring to the knowledge triangle from the Lisbon Strategy; research, education and innovation should lead to growth and jobs, as was the expected scenario. Public private partnerships could be a powerful tool for innovation in this respect. When knowledge and research are the key issues for economic and social development and governements do not invest in them, they will fall even further. We need to invest in research and human capital in order to stay competitive says Pedicchio. Part of the EU strategy is focused on clusterpolicies to develop innovative clusters. But there is no single model, we need different clusters operating in different models. The specific local aspects also play a large role. Pedicchio says that in order to obtain open innovation, we need open clusters. Innovation can only be created in visible dynamic environments, not in isolated organisations. For this to come about we need the support of the triple helix: academic research, private sectors and public administrations. Innovation depends on the interaction between strong academic research (universities), dynamic entrepreneurship and the availability of risk capital (private sector) as well as public administration.

 

Pedicchio goes on to discuss different kinds of cluster experiments in various European countries. From these experiments she concludes we need a multidisciplinary cultural approach. Pedicchio shows that these kind of collaborations can lead to the development of cultural open spaces which can foster and enhance research and innovation and can attract human resources, companies and financing.

 

The prerequisites for these kind of open collaborations, says Pedicchio, are the possibility of international and intersectional mobility, the availabilty of knowledge by means of open access policies for the dissemination of science and frontier knowledge, the investment in young people, and the dissemination of knowledge to society at large. We need to make national clusters but at the same time we need to try to integrate them. National policies need to be involved in this process, as locality is a physical request for clusters; they need to be local, physically based adhering to regional policies. This means a constant changing and adaption between European policies and national policies.

 

 The second keynote, delivered by Andrea Bozzi (Director of the Institute for Computational Linguistics) focused on the scholarly editing of old manuscripts in digital library collections by means of computational tools. Bozzi explained the connection between computer science and the tradition of text transmission, focussing especially on texts that are transmitted by manuscripts. As Bozzi explained, we can now make a model for digital philology, developing integrated tools for scholarly editing. This can lead to a new kind of historical publication which can be enriched and which adds new value to the publication which hitherto has been static. Bozzi asked what the dimension of these integrated tools can be for a new kind of library and its users. He mentioned several digital tools for scholarly editing, such as an integrated open source environment for images and/or texts, image enhancement (within this environment), text indexing and concordance (by means of free web services), collaborative textual criticism, stemmatology and NLP tools (lemmatization, morphological analysis, treebank construction, comparison, meaning extraction, etc.). These are all new tools for studying manuscript archives in a collaborative way. They need to be combined with scholarly editing criteria. An example of a digital annotation tool is the Pinakes Text-architecture, which is a web based relational database application (Pinakes was the first library catalogue system, developed in the Library of Alexandria by the Greek poet Callimachus of Cyrene). From the website:

“Pinakes is a non-commercial tool the aim of which is to offer a renewed historiographic approach to the classification of the scientific heritage. Thanks to the integration of different types of objects, such as instruments, manuscripts, texts, iconography a.o., Pinakes aims at transforming the traditional approach to the primary sources of the history of science into a sort of archeology of scientific knowledge.”

 

As Bozzi stated, it is a highly flexible system and can find its application in for example Greek papyrology, egyptology, Roman philology and general philology. It can also be applied to different languages and documents. As an example of what Pinakes can do as a tool for the textual criticism of Medieval manuscripts, Bozzi showed how it can for example link to collated sources. In this way one can make an analysis of the variants in the collated source. Differences and variants can be retrieved in the critical apparatus, which is a very important aspect of historical linguistics. Framing tools can remember the encoding and record the variants in the critical apparatus: in this way you have enriched the text by using these specific tools. This technique could also be applied to old print books says Bozzi, where one could find different editions and detect the differences between them.

 

 

In the future Bozzi wants to focus on the integration with other NLP tools and on the application of the system to cuneiform texts on tablets. Most importantly he wants to develop a way to export the edited texts, critical apparatuses, annotations and indexes, to a print publication under agreement with publising houses via POD.

Pinakles can become a specialized scholarly editing tool and an integrated web-based platform within the electronic publishing roadmap of Interedition (an interoperable, supranational infrastructure for digital editions). Bozzi reflected on what the role of libraries can be in building this infrastructure and which role publishers could play. For one, libraries also need to receive tools to offer them to their users. In this respect Bozzi argued that it is very important that we have standards for these kind of research infrastrucutres, also for primary sources.

The ultimate goal should be a digital infrastructure for the Humanities: we need to enrich the European research by cooperation and in this respect the setting of standards is fundamental, as Bozzi concludes.

 

 From the afternoon session on the Mediterranean region and its diversities I would like to focus on Andrea Angiolini’s (Società editrice il Mulino, Italy) lecture on The Darwin Project, a publishing infrastructure and working space for monographs & textbooks. As Angiolini argues, the differences between HSS and STM are fading out. This means new challenges for the publisher and new needs for our scholars and students. Angiolini clarifies that Mulino is a very traditional publisher, who believes that physical books are still the best thing to publish especially when it comes to reading them. In this respect Mulino is quite slow in the whole digital process. As Angiolini says, they would like to stay in between scholars, librarians and the market. However, something is gradually changing in Italy, both in the university and in the market. HSS research is increasingly moving from monographs to both monographs and journals and from a generalist approach to a more specialized one. There is also a visible shift from Italian to mixed language communication and from a less formal career and texts evaluation process to a more formalized one.

As the bookstores are buying less and acquisition budgets for libraries are decreasing, the break-even point for publishers is moving further away. This, combined with a research style that is increasingly being conducted online, has led Mulino, in order to stay effective (to reach a public, to service the scholar and the market) to move to the online domain and develop the Darwin (Digital Archive for Web Integrated Networks) project. Darwin is an integrated system for the online publication of digital editions. It can be seen as an infrastructure aimed at adding value to printed books. In this resepect Angiolini says it wants to meet the needs and demands of the users, based on standards.

 

Within the Darwin project, monographs will be published both in print and in digital editions. Abstracts and DOI will be added at the chapter level and all the books will be fully quotable. New is that texts are based on docbook and not on PDF, where docbook is a better format for searchability etc. It is a richer format that can do anything the paper can. Some more functions include opening and collapsing comments within the text. You can also interact with the text and annotate it and make the note public or private. You can search different parts of the publication and highlight certain parts (semantic search). In this respect Angiolini argues that Darwin is not only designed for reading and searching but also for studying and collaborating while doing research.You can make it into a workspace, with public or private note taking and public or private bookmarks. The project will be online in autumn 2009.

 

It will be an open project claims Angiolini, adoptable to different texts and formats, and different access models (though it will be based on and start off as a subscription model). As Angiolini states, if we want to publish research and be effective at the same time, we must take a mixed way, otherwise soon monographs will no longer exist. We are moving from contents to contents plus editorial services. This produces a new publishers profile.This change is almost mandatory if publishers want to be part of the solution and not of the problem in the digital age.

After Angiolini’s lecture a remark was made from the public, whether Angiolini thinks people would annotate (on) a propriatory platform? How to combine Darwin with other platforms and will Darwin be compatible with other publishers websites and will it let scholars mix their notes? Wouldn’t users rather use Zotero, or other browser based environments? Angiolini replied by stating that Darwin is still an experiment and that he does not know how scholars will exactly go about and use it.

 

Highlights from day 2 of APM will follow soon.