How do we do make change if we keep doing things the same way?
April 7th, 2007 | Published in Intellectual Property | 7 Comments
I had heard about this new journal a while ago, and it was sitting in some small corner of my brain, waiting for me to pay attention. I ran into an old colleague at NTC, and it came up, because he had been thinking of contributing to the journal, but decided that he probably won’t, for reasons I will talk about.
The new journal, the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, is, I think, a needed part of our landscape of resources for the sector. And the editors, both of whom I respect highly, are impeccable in their credentials to pull this sort of thing off, and make it successful.
But then I looked deeper. The journal is, basically, business as usual. It’s peer reviewed (good), but it’s got a rather restrictive license, and the content is not freely available. The licenses are as follows:
Personal License:
If you have purchased a copy/subscription to the Journal with a personal license, this means that it is for your personal use. You may make copies for backup purposes or to allow you to personally use this report on more than one computer. You may also print copies, but not for circulation of any kind [emphasis mine].
Corporate License:
For most of you, we recommend a corporate license. If you have purchased a copy/subscription to the Journal with a corporate license, this means that it is for use by people within your organization. You may make paper copies for internal circulation. You may post it to your intranet, so long as access to that intranet is restricted to those who work for your organization [emphasis mine].
In other words, don’t make a copies for a workshop, or for a colleague who isn’t inside your organization, and definitely don’t make a copy for your mother to read.
But it’s a journal about technology and social change! This goes back to my constant refrain - the means are the ends. How can we talk about technology in social change, while, at the same time, publishing in a format that limits the availability of this knowledge to people privileged enough to pay for it? How can we talk about promoting change when we’re not pushing this content into the commons?
The Public Library of Science is a wonderful example of a reputable, respected peer-reviewed journal where articles are freely available to the public. They say:
Published research results and ideas are the foundation for future progress in science and medicine. Open Access publishing therefore leads to wider dissemination of information and increased efficiency in science …
Which is, actually, a very practical down to earth argument. Benkler goes further, and I go with him:
Information, knowledge, and information-rich goods and tools play a significant role in economic opportunity and human development. While the networked information economy cannot solve global hunger and disease, its emergence does open reasonably well-defined new avenues for addressing and constructing some of the basic requirements of justice and human development … More importantly, the availability of free information resources makes participating in the economy less dependent on surmounting access barriers to financing and social-transactional networks that made working out of poverty difficult in industrial economies. These resources and tools thus improve equality of opportunity. [emphasis mine]
I think it is incumbent upon knowledgeable leaders to provide models for how to do things differently - provide tools that foster social change in ways that foster social change, not in ways that help to sustain the status quo.
I invited Michael Gilbert to a dialogue about this, which he readily agreed to. Below is his response. We’ll be continuing this on each of our blogs, with cross-linking. Please feel free to join the dialogue, either in comments, or on your own blog. I’ll respond to Michael’s response in another post.
Thank you so much for wanting to start a dialogue on this issue.
I would like to respond in three parts. First, I want to say a few words about my enthusiastic support for the critique of closed licensing offered by Michelle by reflecting a bit on my past actions in this regard. Second, I want to lay out as clearly as possible the circumstance that led to a decision to use a traditional closed license. Third, I want to invite people to participate in a conversation about how this could be done differently.
As anyone who has followed my advocacy work over the last ten years will know, I am a fervent supporter of open licensing models as a profound public good. I started promoting the Public Library of Science to the readers of Nonprofit Online News as far back as December of 2002. I’ve praised the innovation of the Creative Commons licenses on more than one occasion, along with Lawrence Lessig’s other work and ideas. (I have in fact offered a great deal of content under Creative Commons licenses in the past and will no doubt do so again.) I have been a champion of openness of all sorts, including such things as open licenses and the destructiveness of DRM, in panel after panel in the nonprofit tech community for a decade. I have more than once written challenges of others similar to Michelle’s challenge of me and I must say that I can only hope that I’ve been half as courteous as she has been.
Before I explain the circumstances that led to our licensing decision, I want to make one thing very clear. Although the Journal was prepared in partnership with NTEN, I take full and personal responsibility for the decision to use a closed license. Katrin Verclas (the Executive Director of NTEN, for those who don’t know) was eager to know if there was any way to make it open and pushed hard for it. I am the one who, with the interests of the sustainability of my own small organization in mind, refused.
The question of licensing is a terrible dilemma for authors, readers, reviewers and publishers right now and I happen to be all of the above. I’m in an absurd position, personally. I want our efforts to reach the broadest possible audience and at yet on a gut level, I loathe the restrictive nature of the journal industry. At the same time, I have a small organization with an established based of customers that will pay for high quality information. (In other words, I have paying subscribers who have been waiting for this journal for months.) Most importantly, I have staff to pay. Thus, the journal has a fee, although we’ve done our best to make the personal rate much lower than the organizational one and in no case are we anywhere near some of the stratospheric prices of many mainstream journals.
I’ve watched open journals fumble along and when they publish at all it’s the result of great sacrifice on the part of the people publishing it. Some, that have a home in the extra time that some academics can spend on such things in their jobs, are almost sustainable. Others aren’t at all. I’m really not sure what the answer is. The overhead of finding sponsors for a small publication is enormous. We experimented with it briefly two years ago when we first decided to publish a journal, but we couldn’t make it happen. Is there a business model that will make this work? I’m really not sure.
Quite frankly, nothing would please me more than to find a way to finance the expense of the journal without fees for licensed copies. The licensing is a pain for everyone. It’s friction in the system designed only to create some financial accountability for the work involved in nurturing the relationships involved and husbanding the papers into the best form we can manage. Maybe the answer is to abandon that and just use the Internet for direct publishing by authors, but I don’t think we’re far enough along yet in developing network centric models that do what competitive selection, peer review, and editing will do. Maybe the answer is for a single donor to step forward and fund the next half dozen issues. Maybe the answer is some kind of quarterly bounty which, as soon as financial pledges reach a certain amount, the publication goes to open license (or maybe that’s when the next issue is commenced). I really don’t know. If you want to help figure it out, I would be very grateful.
To wrap up, I just want to say thank you to Michelle for jumping on this right away. (I only wish you had been at the panel for the Journal on Friday where we talked about our larger goals. The licensing issue would have been a good piece of that discussion.) The sector benefits from this sort of criticism and we’ll all be better off for it.
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April 8th, 2007 at 9:49 am (#)
Michelle: Thanks for asking the question. Michael: Thanks for your candid answer.
This comment is for Michael. One way that your journal can support open access (OA) without giving up subscription revenue is to allow your authors to deposit their peer-reviewed postprints in an OA repository. (In the jargon of OA advocacy, journals charging subscriptions but permitting this kind of author-initiated self-archiving are called “green”, while journals giving up subscriptions and providing OA themselves are called “gold”.) About 70% of traditional, non-gold, peer-reviewed journals are green. For example, all of Elsevier’s journals went green in 2004.
Going green helps readers, of course. For the same reason, it enlarges the audience and impact of the journal. Finally, it helps attract the kinds of authors who want to appear in your pages *and* provide OA to their own work.
I hope you’ll consider it.
Best,
Peter
April 8th, 2007 at 4:24 pm (#)
First, thanks Michelle, for raising this important issue vis a vis the Journal and thank you for inviting us to comment before posting. That is a generous, courteous act and appreciated in an age where it is easier to simply gripe online than to engage in a genuine, forthright, and frank yet respectful conversation with those with whom you have an issue. I so very much appreciate this, Michelle.
Second, as Michael suggested, I would nothing more than having a CC license on the Journal. Since Michael and the Gilbert Center did a lion share of the work, with his staff, and we at NTEN did not have the resources to pay him, I agreed to the license with the hope that we would continue the conversation and fundraising to make the Journal available to everyone, widely and free of charge.
One caveat: We did make the Journal available to all attendees of the Nonprofit Technology Conference who could download a copy without subscription.
I appreciate Peter’s suggestion for using the OA repository, and also Michael’s idea of an ‘open’ bounty. I believe there are also sponsorship and fundraising opportunities that we have not explored that would allow us to pay for the production costs while providing the Journal at no charge with a Creative Commons License (as is all of our content on our site). I welcome this communitie’s suggestions and hope that we will see the next issue widely disseminated. Thanks for starting the conversation, Michelle.
Katrin Verclas
NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network
April 9th, 2007 at 5:32 am (#)
How do we make great new content if it always needs to be free?
Michael as always has an even-handed and calm approach to criticism – allow me to be a bit more passionate in his defense. Michelle writes:
I think it is incumbent upon knowledgeable leaders to provide models for how to do things differently - provide tools that foster social change in ways that foster social change, not in ways that help to sustain the status quo.
I would love nothing more (and I know that Michael’s with me all the way) to find a way to do things differently – to be able to create well researched, thought out, and edited content and provide free access for all. After having spent more than a year trying to find that model, though, I don’t know if it exists.
And I have to admit that I find it incumbent upon the leaders who are advocating for openness of everything to provide models on how this can work for small organizations who make a living based on content (like Michael’s). Good content is a service that requires hours and hours of time and thought. If you’re doing it full time, money is a necessity. And to me, high quality content is worth paying money for, especially in the nonprofit sector, where there is so little sharing of information. If we as a sector advocate against models that allow authors or editors to be paid then we make it even more difficult than it already is to try to put this – incredibly needed - content in the world.
Michael’s not in this for the money. I would be extremely surprised to find out that his organization has even come close to covering their costs for the Journal. While I know he’d love to find a way to provide this content in an open manner, may I suggest that it’s better to have it in a closed format than not to have it at all? That tradeoff really does exist. And if putting things out there in a closed fashion results in an outcry about the format, it’s easy to feel as an organization that it would be better just to not publish it at all.
If people have thoughts on a sustainable model by which small organizations can both publish open content and cover their costs in writing it, I’d be excited to discuss that. That’s a terrific conversation to have. But I’ll put an unpopular suggestion out there: I think we as a community also need to consider possible negative impacts of advocating that all content ought to be open. It’s already very difficult to pay for the effort of creating great content; if in addition we promote in people’s mind the idea that all content ought to be free, it’s hard to escape promoting the idea that no content is worth paying for. Which puts us in danger of tipping an environment in which it’s very difficult to support good content into one in which it’s downright impossible.
April 9th, 2007 at 11:43 am (#)
I come to this issue as an complete outsider to the non-profit world but for my involvement as Michael’s partner in his “secret” project. I count among my careers software engineer, business entrepreneur, tech writer and fiction author. So I have a bit of experience in both business and with intellectual property, all of which brings me to this question:
Do NPO people value what they get for free?
In my experience, for-profit business people simply don’t. If you offer them something for free, whether it’s a journal or a service or a pen, they’ll take it, sure, but they’ll suspect it isn’t really any good because you aren’t charging for it.
But most engineers do, and did even in the government-funded R&D world I entered in the 80’s. Even then, when money wasn’t the issue, we were using GNU-emacs because it was better. (I’m still using it.)
These worlds are radically different. Software geeks love what works and works elegantly, and can tell by looking at the code and running it. Business people evaluating process advice have a much harder task: they have to evaluate the product based on their experience and the reputation of the author, and if they do try to “run” the advice, they have to do it in the real world of their enterprise at a very high cost for failure.
I’ve been a consumer of free software as an engineer and free business advice when running a multi-million dollar company, and I was a lot more comfortable taking the software, which could be tested, even if it wasn’t supported. When it comes to valuing something, it seems to me that the real currency is reputation, not money. But money is the way you “tag” valuable items in the business world.
Are non-profit companies and people different?
April 9th, 2007 at 12:23 pm (#)
That’s a really good question - in my experience, I think it’s mixed. Many nonprofits that I have worked with have to beg, borrow and steal almost everything, so they highly value what is free. And they value what is highly useful to them, free or not. But others, I think, work from a more business-like model. Those are generally the larger nonprofits - the ones that have some resources to spend.
And I think that in the new Web 2.0 world, people are beginning to understand that they can and should value what is free. Think of the people who now depend on Linux, on Google everything, on MySpace and Blogger, etc.
April 10th, 2007 at 4:40 pm (#)
Is there some way to provide a mixed distribution model, where some pay, but other copies are made available in libraries? The public library system has long been a valuable distribution mode of commercially-produced content available for free to all.
April 11th, 2007 at 7:27 pm (#)
Using Information Technology for Social Change? Insert Coins Here
A new technology journal relies heavily on old closed technologies, to the dismay of those who want to see real change to open models. And I make a modest suggestion.