Highlights from APM – Day 2

The second day of the Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean region (APM) conference started with a session (entitled Strength in numbers) on cooperation between and the (future) role of university presses.

 

The first speaker was Roman Schmidt (Sens Public, editor-in-chief of crossXwords), who, in his very inspiring lecture entitled Request for comments: discussing the role of the University Press within the university, took on the role of an observer who is working on media change, but not necessarily within the university press.

Schmidt argues that we need to stress for formalized criteria when it comes to Internet standards concerning academia, being an inaugural act of science where deliberation is a pivotal point. This approach has two problems however. The first problem is concerned with the publish or perish paradigm, which is especially urgent amongst young scholars. Schmidt calls this a structural problem of the university system, where oral presentations, discussions, comments, blog entries etc. do not pay off career wise, where much time is actually invested in them. What does pay off is the writing of an article or a book. The question is however if these are still the preferred formats of communication for (young) scholars.

In this respect the university press could play a role in establishing a relationship with the university to facilitate these kind of more discursive, non ‘academic’ (non peer reviewed) academic discourses. Schmidt argues that we need an epistemological shift out of this intramural space to break the publish or perish spiral. We need a new ecology of scientific publications. This shift to editorial models needs to be accompanied in a good manner however, and in this aspect European university presses could play a big role in new ways of knowledge production and experimentation. They could form experimental labs for the future of academic publishing.

 

Schmidt mentions 3 aspects of a possible relationship between an university press and an university:

 

1. Quality management and specialization: university presses could focus on the formation of thematic research hubs, replacing the university in the Humboldian sense. Specialization could in this sense both lead to economies of scale and to quality labels, by means of cooperation and combination (Schmidt mentions the OAPEN project in this context). Another interesting initiative connected to this that Schmidt mentions is ADONIS in France, an overall portal of research in the HSS field.
2. Training of university staff. According to Schmidt training and mentoring is a much neglected area of media change. How should we train (scientific) content producers? The prosumer paradigm does not make this distinction obsolete he argues. For good stilistic and qualitative high scientific writing the university press is still needed. And this is a role that is especially well suited for university presses and less for publishers. This training is an investment in human resources, preparing them for a variety of editorial roles. Schmidt mentions for instance the website Hypothèses, which hand picks quality scientific blogs. He argues that these kind of initiatives are excellent platforms for learning to write smaller pieces as a natural evolution to learning to write a monograph.
3. International credibility and translation. University presses are not only facing a problem of scale but also of international visibility of their titles. This is closely connected to the problem of European multilingualism. Schmidt quotes Umberto Eco: translation is the language of Europe. Scale and cooperation could assist: university presses could get funding for translations as a consortium. Schmidt mentions the journal Eurozine as a good example of this policy. One could also adopt this model to monographs. As Schmidt says, these kind of initiatives correspond very well to the post national constellation, following Rimbaud’s adagio to create a new medium, il faut être absolument moderne.

 

Gonzalo Cappellàn from the University of Cantabria Press, talked about the situation of the Spanish university presses (consisting of  at the moment 60 public university and research centers), their strenghts and weaknesses and the need for quality assesment. The Spanish universities differ very much when it comes to size, specialisation and the way they rule their presses. Initiatives have arisen for Spanish publishers to join together, in 2007 UNE (Spanish university publishers association/ Unión de Editoriales Universitarias) and, more recently, the G9 group of universities.

These cooperations offer the presses greater presence on a national level as a collectivity, a strategic alliance which can present joint measures which are almost impossible to achieve for small publishers. The collaborations also function on an international level: international catalogues, media, newsletters, promotion lobbying on an higher level for their authors etc.

Another benefit has to do with the fact that, as Cappellàn states, Spanish university presses are very much focused on their own institution, which has lead to the feeling that their quality check is not that great. Editorial boards are becoming increasingly important however, as is formalized peer review.

 

The G9 group consists of public universities in autonomous communities. They develop joint electronic projects. Editorial cooperation takes place on two levels: first step is to create a distinctive label, which is growing further with joint publishing. This is also a quality label, it consists of an editiorial board with representatives of the 9 universities, so no editoiral board consisting of the staff of one university. A scientific board can be set up with expertise in a certain field, functioning as referees to evaluate the scientific quality. In this way the combined group of 9 can be a distinctive pressence in the Spanish publication landscape. On another level the group could focus on interesting publications that are not published by the 9 but that are interesting because of their quality. This is a totally new experience in Spanish publishing. The G9 will start up in April and experiment. It will be open spirited, inter-university and internationally focused, concludes Cappellàn.

 

Werner Mark Linz from the American University in Cairo Press (AUC) talked about the differences of academic publishing in the Arab world and the cooperation between mediteranean and Arab publishing. The main goal of AUC is the dissemination of ideas and knowledge about the arab world to the english reading public. They mainly publish books in the Humanities in 6-7 areas, mainly arabic literature in translation, but also on archaeology in ancient Egypt, Islamic art and architecture. Linz states that in the Arab market not much is being published and their exists not much of an infrastrucute (bookstores etc.). Linz recalls how AUC needed to develop a booktrade in order to function. In Egypt for instance the printer/publisher/bookseller is still one trade, there is not so much differentiation. The focus is also mainly on religious books (Koran and Koran related books). Next to that one can also see much translations: a lot of energy is spend in translating books into Arabic (instead of the other way around). Arab countries are financing these translations, which thus form a big market for publishers.

 

Saskia de Vries from Amsterdam University Press (AUP) gave a presentation on the OAPEN project, in which OAPEN functions as an EU presses cooperative publishing network. She sees the public function of the press as a mission, to experiment with new modes of book publication, as for example Open Access.

De Vries, quoting the American Association of University Presses (www.aaupnet.org), states the value of university presses as follows:

 

 

 

-         University Presses add value to scholarly work through rigorous editorial development; professional copyediting and design; and worldwide dissemination.

-         University Presses, through the peer review process, test the validity and soundness of scholarship and thus maintain high standards for academic publication.

-         University Presses sponsor work in specialized and emerging areas of scholarship that do not have the broad levels of readership needed to attract commercial publishers.

-         University Presses make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty.

 

University presses have always been a service provider for the academic world, mostly in the HSS. In this respect Open Access publications are a very important new way of disseminating research, argues De Vries. It gives academics new possibilities to publish their research. De Vries mentions the Ithaka report. University presses need to look to the dissemination side, they need to make a renewed commitment to publishing. De Vries also refers to Robert Darnton’s pyramid model as set out in his article The new age of the book (from The New York Review of Books). The OAPEN project is a direct result of these two developments. De Vries also mentions the possibility to create an European University Press Association and plans that are being made in this respect.

 

In the afternoon session on the outreach of scholarly publishing, Stephen Barr from SAGE talked about SAGE’s experiments in Open Access publishing and their collaboration with Hindawi.

When it comes to Open Access Barr states that SAGEs mission is to be ‘the natural home for authors, editors and societies’. The journals landscape is changing however and we have to change with it. As Barr states, in order to maintain the high quality service they provide, SAGE has constantly embraced new technology and business models. And in the journal environment part of this is now Open Access. Barr talks about the different Open Access models and options, mentioning Open Archiving (Green OA, Mandates, Peer project), the hybrid option (SAGE Open) of which the take up so far has been limited and restricted to biomedical disciplines, funder policies such as the Wellcome Trust’s and many more funding agencies which are now allowing a portion of grants to be used for OA financing, and finally, gold Open Acces publishing: author side charges in the form of article processing charges. In this area PLoS and BioMed Central are of course the big players.

SAGE wanted to find a way to experiment with gold OA publishing that would not detract from its other priorities and would complement its existing operations. It decided, says Barr, to get into OA publishing through strategic partnerships, in this case with the Hindawi  publishing agency.

Barr mentions some reasons why SAGE partnered with Hinawi: synergy in organisational philosophy, low risk experiment with new business model, minimum organisational risk, access to Hindawi’s technology and low cost base, complementary, the advantage to Hindawi is SAGE’s reputation, marketing abilities and editorial reach and experience. Barr’s conclusion is that SAGE is embracing new business models and that this is necessary in order to keep up with developments.

 

 

Ancient texts in new worlds

I am now the proud owner of number 167 of the hand-bound limited second edition of Anthony Grafton’s little booklet called Codex in crisis.

 

The colophon states amongst others:

 

Cover paper Neenah Classic Laid in Peppered Bronze

Text paper Mohawk Superfine in Bright White

Flyleaf paper Frazier Pegasus in Black

 

 

Codex in Crisis, an adaptation of Grafton’s article Future Reading. Digitization and its discontents, previously published in The New Yorker, is published by The Crumpled Press, who, as they state on their website, perish to publish. Their business model revolves around the production of ‘custom cut, bone folded, hand sewn pamphlets and books’ for the real bibliophile. And they are beautiful.

 

The contents itself are equally inspiring. Anthony Grafton, who is Professor of History at Princeton University, and is a specialist in the field of Renaissance and Reformation studies and Historiography, published amongst others, books on The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

 

Codex in Crisis concentrates on the history and development of the book as format, medium and conceptual idea. Grafton spook about his book during an interview held with him about a week ago as part of the Historisch Café (historical café) series organized amongst others by Athenaeum bookstore in Amsterdam. The talk was entitled ‘Would Erasmus use Google’, and focused on the book and its relationship to the accelerated world we live in today in which changes are going faster than we could ever have imagined before. Referring to his previously published article, Grafton talked about how he holds The New Yorker in high regard, jokingly calling it one of the last magazines where they actually read what they publish and where they work with a whole lot of smart and alert people.

 

Grafton’s main focus is on how the situation for books and reading texts has changed the last years. This shift has had some major implications where at the moment the newspaper is dying in the US and staff is being sacked en masse in US publishing industries. The world of publishing and bookselling is in uproar: only a few major players survived; Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and Borders, that’s it, and Borders is almost bankrupt. Simultaneously we are seeing the rise of eBook readers. As Grafton remarks, they are only getting better and better. But their development will be like the codex to the scroll. We won’t get rid of the old format just like that, but Grafton does foresee a development in which the main thing we are going to be reading in the near future is electronic text. This will bring major changes, not only in reading but also in our consciousness.

Referring to an UK eBook survey, Grafton remarks that scholars spend on average 8 minutes with an online article. The online medium is very well amenable to what is called power skimming: your eyes just scan the text and don’t really process. We get lots of information, but we have no clue.

In the US the bookstore has been driven out. Grafton’s surprise at seeing so much bookstores of all shapes and sizes in Amsterdam makes him to conclude that their must be more of a reading culture in Europe than in the US. The decline in reading culture has been going hand in hand with the rise of a gaming culture, where according to Grafton every male under 30 in the US plays games for at least 2 hours a day. This effects not only their way of reading but it is also a form of competition in time spend for leisure.

Grafton also sees the changes taking place within the library itself. In the library nobody reads books anymore, it is increasingly filled with fast computers. And a café.

The new kind of reading is an interactive way of reading. Students still read intensely says Grafton, but the level is lower than two generations ago. The GI bill generation, which transformed the universities and made them radically more democratic, saw the rise of Catholics and Jews in universities, who came to college because they now could. There are real changes to be seen, says Grafton, in current student and university culture. He claims that for instance Jakob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien is simply found to hard to follow for students nowadays. And that’s a worry. The students do write better according to Grafton, but they don’t read as well anymore.

 When asked what he is aiming at with his book, Grafton responds his goal was to state his worries but also his exhilaration about the new possibilities for the book. The idea of the universal library, which is never going to happen of course, was what Google and its comrades promised to create. But one of the first problems was that there were not an estimated 30, but 100 million books in the world. Another problem is that although you can find a lot of content via Google, you can not access it all. It is searchable, but that does not mean it is all available. In this way Google could be seen as a live catalogue. They are fast and at the same time incredibly secretive. This explains Robert Darnton’s stance in a recent article in The New York Review of Books. Darnton, whom Grafton calls an eloquent and brilliant guy, is currently head librarian of the Harvard libraries. But he is also a diplomat. Harvard library is digitized by Google, but what Google will not do is guarantee that it will never charge any money to have access to the books. That is why Harvard is breaking off their deal with Google: they want the guarantee of free content. This is another reason why we will never have an universal library since not all the libraries are or will be working together with Google. And what about the books that Google is not interested in: Third World country books for instance. Those cultures are neglected. If it will be anything, it will be a universal Western (plus Russian) library.

 

Grafton is however a huge enthusiast of digitizing books and the possibilities this offers for research, information retrieval and teaching. The thing that worries him though is again the reading. Online reading is interactive, and thus distracting: you move in irrational paths. In a novel on paper there are no links, no distractions. Will you still have writers that write these kinds of static, thick books if people don’t read these books anymore? Writing will change with reading. But, history has shown us also that no system of publication was capable of ruining every kind of book writing production.

 

What about the analogy of history? Johannes Trithemius said that the printed book was going to ruin writing; only copying is really reading, reading means reading aloud and printing was going to destroy that contemplative and meditative form of reading. But forms of Benedictine writing and reading survived and even improved in the print world. And as it survived the move from script to print so Grafton hopes it will also make the present shift.

 

But do we still write just as well? Look at the rising use of emoticons. Emails are shorter and shorter. The online medium is not suited for that. The email isn’t the letter. The scroll still exists, as does the manuscript, but they are not what they were. Grafton’s aim is not to be totally reactionary and he does also see a lot of good coming from online forms of communication. The rise of political blogs and interactive communication is wholly good and its influence on politics is great.

 

The book is an incredible easy and convenient system. Links are nothing; they are ephemeral, where footnotes are a rich standard. After a year more than half of the links are no longer working. This is a big problem, without upkeep electronic texts don’t survive.

 

Grafton concludes by stating that notwithstanding the current developments, more books are being published and sold than ever before. But nobody is reading them.

 

Turning back to Codex in Crisis. Although I enjoyed reading the book very much, my critique of the book (or rather of the adapted essay) has to do with the, to my opinion, lack of truly opinionated argumentation from the side of the writer. I applaud his deliberation of all the different arguments pro and con the current development of the book both concerning its preproduction and mental conceivement, its birth as content depicted on a certain carrier (be it print, scroll or screen), its frequently simultaneous production or publication by a publisher, printer or the writer itself, its postproduction and dissemination into the world of reading and readers, and its consumption and role in communal coffee shops or social media sites, depicted in an amazingly concise stream of thoughts which is at the same time filled with anecdotal and detailistic reminiscences. One might even call me a big fan of this kind of overview writing, in which the scholar summarizes, analyses and distills main trends and developments, covers simultaneous occurrences and clears up conceptual difficulties.

 

Anthony Grafton does all this in his fine little booklet, but he does leave me somewhat expectant in the end. But maybe this has more to do with my own misperceptions and hopes that such an outstanding scholar may have the answer or may offer a clear path out of the problems that face the book in its present and future forms. But Grafton does not offer such an answer and of course he doesn’t, how could he, he is foremost a scholar and not a visionary and praise him for that. He is a historian, not a weather forecaster.

 

Another small comment has to do with the conservative stance his critique towards the new online book culture sometimes takes. Although he does downgrade his own critique frequently when considering the other side of the coin, his description of the (lack of) possibilities of the format of the weblog and his meager depiction of the possibilities that Open Access offers to the Humanities, strike me as a little outdated, but that might again be my own predisposition. But his conservatism in this respect does not annoy me in the way other writers and thinkers can, mainly because he gives clear examples and argumentations where, according to him, the main problems of the digital medium lie when compared to the past print situation. He only wants to preserve what is good in tradition in the middle of all this innovation going on. Grafton hopes the future will be a hybrid one, in which a laptop stands next to a pile of magazines and a stack of books, which the scholar can browse simultaneously accompanied by a nice coffee confined in one of the newly designed communal focused city libraries. This corresponds to Grafton’s feelings of melancholia towards an increasingly lost past (“It’s an old story, quiet and reassuring: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom”) but also to his excitement (though of course critical) about the new possibilities the digital world offers the book.

 

Codex in Crisis offers no question mark and no solution, only memories and hopes for a better future.

 

Freedom on trial?

To continue the freedom of knowledge and information debate on a more practical level,

as most of you might have heard, bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay (which I have written about before here) is currently on trial. Interesting enough the people behind The Pirate Bay and similar Swedish organizations, like Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge, use the freedom of information argument to defend piracy. As he states:

 

“On the one side, there is the public. Every human with access to the Internet has received fingertip round-the-clock access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge and culture. This is a fantastic leap ahead for mankind – much larger than when public libraries arrived 160 years ago, and comparable to how society changed with the arrival of the printing press.
On the other side, there are the current people in power, who would like to harness this power to build a surveillance machine – collecting information about regular Joes, and actively preventing the free exchange of ideas – that would make George Orwell look like a cheery, skipping optimist. Many powerful institutions are pulling in this direction.”

 

The trial is already been called the ‘political trial of the century’ and seems to be going favorably for the Pirate Bay. Via BoingBoing I discovered that in honor of the trial of the Pirate Bay’s founders, the people behind the documentary series ‘Steal this film’ have released a new trial edition of what is eventually to become a movie on intellectual property right and file sharing. You can download it from their website. The first part of this documentary can be found in many places, including here.

This is actually a very interesting documentary (series), which follows the same idea as the remix documentary RiP I wrote about before, putting raw (searchable) footage and snippets of what is to become the final documentary online, together with more or less finalized versions of the documentary (like a sort of preprint in scholarly communication lingo).

 

 

 

The documentary follows roughly the same logic as Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix, arguing that it is of no use to criminalize a whole generation of downloaders or ‘pirates’ for that matter, and that it is much more productive to search for an alternative solution to this problem, or in other words to search for an alternative business model that will sustain the free flow of cultural goods and information. The documentary includes a very nice book history analogy, referring not only to the coming of the printing press but also to historical notions of book piracy, with contributions from famous book historians like Elisabeth Eisenstein and Robert Darnton. The documentary includes interviews with other renowned figures like Yochai Benkler, and Rick Prelinger from the Prelinger Archive. I like the way he makes the following statement near the end of the documentary:

 

“I think we need to have a broad conversation that is probably going to be an international conversation where people who make things and people who use things, I am talking about cultural works, sit together and think about what kinds of rules best serve these interests. I don’t know that we are going to agree, but I think we need to ask a little bit more about utopia, we need to really figure out what kind of a world we would like to live in and then try to craft regulations to match that. Being reactive doesn’t cut it.”

 

 

 

I saw Rick Prelinger speak at a Creative Commons conference in de Balie in Amsterdam a year ago, together with speakers like Kenneth Goldsmith from Ubuweb and people from Fabchannel, discussing alternative business models. The panel I attended discussed amongst others:

 

 “…the public content zone beyond that of user-generated-content: the possibilities and problems related to making professionally produced cultural productions publicly available on the internet. What kind of revenue models exist for that? How is the public interest in accessibility squared with the need of professionals to make a living? What new and alternative distribution models emerge for professional cultural producers and cultural institutions?”

 

I think this is the important discussion, as Rick Prelinger also stated above, we need to find a solution for both producers and consumers of cultural and knowledge products and content. For as the documentary and Lessig’s books also show, the potential value of the free availability of all this information on the Internet is huge, stimulating new cultural creativity and knowledge production in. Next to that this development can even be very beneficial for society and the economy in general. In fact, as a recent Dutch report on file sharing showed, file sharing can even foster (the Dutch) economic growth in the long run.

Update April 30th 2009: Another report from researchers at the BI Norwegian School of Management shows that people who pirate the most from P2P sites are also the ones most likely to buy legit downloads. Of course there is some discussion about these findings, but the conclusions are interesting nevertheless. (via: Ars Technica)

Be sure for more posts on alternative business models in the future.