Access Copyright activism disconnected from realities in educational publishing.

Dr Danny Kingsley recently concluded a series of articles titled The case for Open Research:  the mis-measurement problem (part 1), the authorship problem (part 2), reproducibility, retractions & retrospective hypotheses (part 3), does peer review work? (part 4), and solutions? (part 5).

Anyone wanting to understand some of the complex issues that are top of mind in academic and scientific publishing should read this series.  I found it extremely valuable.

The series discusses issues quite different than what some Canadians have been claiming are issues in academic publishing, namely the Access Copyright activism.  Their nonsense claim is that the primary problem is educational institutions using "foreign" free texts and this is pushing out Canadian non-free texts. (See: "Copyright-free" material is not edging out Canadian educational texts)  This misinformation campaign has even tried to waive the "Digital Canadian Content" flag even though modern business models allow for better localisation (making texts more Canadian) than the largely foreign educational publishers can.

Having given this a lot of thought over the years I have come to an obvious conclusion about why it seems like the educational sector and Access Copyright activists are talking about different things: they are talking about different things.

With educational and scientific publishing we are talking about largely non-fiction works created by and for the educational and scientific communities.  The authors are educators and/or scientists, and the (primary, but not exclusive) audience is educators, students and/or scientists.

What Access Copyright activists are talking about are largely fiction works created outside of the educational sector which just happen to be used in classrooms.  Think of that copy of The Handmaid's Tale used in English class, but not the physics textbook.

When it comes to budgets within the educational community the bulk of the costs are with the educational and scientific publications (journals and textbooks).  Given these sectors are predominantly publicly funded, it is unconscionable to be wasting taxpayer money by not adopting the most modern methods of production such as peer production and distribution such as peer distribution.  Fortunately these models are ideal for the bulk of this non-fiction body of works, and it is the various issues discussed in Dr Kingsley's series that have delayed this inevitable transition.

The fiction works which Access Copyright activists are talking about are at the level of being a rounding error in the budgets spent on copyrighted works by the educational sector.  These are works authored outside of the educational sector, and as more artistic works from the minds of individuals or small groups of collaborators do not lend themselves to peer production techniques.  These are works that could very easily be fully funded using a variety of techniques (I have previously suggested a transparent and accountable model based on the public lending right).

The political problem we are observing is a failure within Access Copyright itself.  The bulk of the royalties flowing through Access Copyright are destined to the very foreign educational publishers that modern business methods must replace if taxpayer are allowed any type of fairness.  Their days are and must be numbered, and we as Canadians (whether authors or not) should be cheering and encouraging this transition.

The authors of those largely fiction works created outside the educational sector may represent a minority of the royalties flowing through Access Copyright, but it is their stories that are used (abused) by the educational publishers to try to extract more taxpayer money by delaying the inevitable transition.  What these educational publishers are doing is throwing these authors under the bus, and creating a hostile environment where rather than authors getting paid well deserved royalties for the use of their works in the classroom they are being lumped together in the battle to save public education from the antiquated business models of older educational publishers.

The solution has always been obvious: the creators of these fiction works need to create separate bodies for advocacy and royalty collecting from the educational and scientific publishers. The interests of these two groups are not only dissimilar, but opposing.  What is good for the educational and scientific publishers has been very bad for the literary authors.  Too many of the existing groups have "leadership" that promotes the fiction that what is good for Access Copyright is good for writers, and this leadership must be changed if authors want to reduce their decline in income.

It is critical for the educational community to recognize this as well.  They can't be fooled by the misinformation campaigns suggesting that educators using royalty-free resources (online or otherwise) is somehow hurting Canadian authors, students, or anyone else.  Please pay attention to the lobbyists behind the curtains. We all need to recognize that it is in aid of Canadian authors, students, educators and taxpayers that the outdated business models and foreign publishers represented by that campaign be allowed (or actively encouraged) to fade away.

Why a Canadiana.org and CRKN.ca merger could be great

A press release from CRKN launches a dialog about the potential of a closer relationship between CRKN and Canadiana.org.

I've been at Canadiana for 5 years, starting in January 2011 as a consultant and then September as staff (See photo of me receiving 5 year recognition from our previous board president Leslie Weir) .

My beliefs come more from my personal political advocacy work on Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), Open Access, and Open Government than it does from being a staff person.  As staff I can can clarify what Canadiana.org is doing from a FLOSS/OA perspective if there are misinterpretations (See: Good News Canadiana & LAC project spun into bad news? ,Why is a license required for a Canadiana project built from public domain material?)

What I believe to be the source of some of the potential benefits.

For funding reasons, Canadiana has had a bit of a dual identity (Alter Ego?) between being a charity created by the Library, Archive and Museum (LAM) community and having to supplement our funding with commercial work.

What we do would work best if we had base funding for operations and all of what we offered was open access. For reasons out of our control we have needed to create subscription services like Early Canadiana Online and our ongoing work to add premium subscription services on top of Heritage.  We also do digitization work that isn't deposited into our Trustworthy Digital Repository or made accessible via our access platform.

The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) is already one of our largest single funding sources, but thus far primarily in their role as a "buyers club" of some of our services for Canadian universities.  Reading their Mission,Vision, Values page you can see that they have far more in common with Canadiana than should be thought of in the context of a "buyers club" or commercial services.

At this time the boards are exploring a closer relationship.  While merger is one possibility, I believe any type of closer relationship would be quite positive.

Thinking about this a few ideas come to mind.

CRKN is libraries - what about Archives and Museums?

This is a good question which I hope the boards will think about.

Since our funding has come from libraries, it is this community that we have been most focused on.  While this is the case, we have always tried to keep the interests of the archivist and museum community in mind.

As a technical person involved in the team that designed and implemented the technology behind our trustworthy digital preservation network, we have always tried to keep the design agnostic to any particular view someone might have of the repository. We've tried to keep the technical policies behind the software we use for digitization, preservation and access modular. New types of data can be preserved in the repository even if it is unlike anything we have processed previously, or that our current access platform thus far can't offer access to.   This means that the repository could be used by archivists to preserve any digital data, even data that isn't in a format able to be easily accessed via a web access platform.

A stronger relationship between Canadiana.org and CRKN might greatly improve our relationship with archivists and museums.  If it allowed us to finally move access to the repository to open access, and get rid of the subscription services, our trustworthiness within those communities might increase.

Would Canadiana still do commercial work?

There is commercial work that fits well within what we would already be doing, and commercial work that has created confusion about our identity.

An organization that isn't already a CRKN member institution that wanted to make use of our digitization, preservation and/or access services wouldn't expect CRKN members to pay for any custom work.  These types of services make sense to continue, with funding coming from the depositing institution.

It is the subscription services that create the identity confusion and thus would be great to see go away.  It really requires buy-in from the libraries to fund this as open access, and stop believing there is a free-rider problem with open access to this type of preservation and access work.  This change has always been possible, but a closer relationship with CRKN might allow this to finally happen.

We need the institutions which are members of CRKN (many of which which overlap with Canadiana.org, CARL, etc) to stop thinking of us as a vendor.  There isn't a conflict of interest when a board or other member wants us to collaborate with their institutions on a project, and there isn't a need to "compete" a contract to collaborate with a partner.

Could this expand the preservation network?

Our preservation network currently has three partners: University of Alberta and University of Toronto that offer co-location for servers (rack space, power, network, "hands", etc), and Library and Archives Canada that offers office space.   A closer relationship to CRKN may make our relationship with the universities more clear, and encourage more partnerships.  The less we are thought of as a vendor, and the more we are thought of as a partner, the better.

More partners would allow us to get rid of our commercial hosting in Montreal, and hopefully move additional services out of our Ottawa office which uses a commercial ISP for connectivity.

The design of the preservation network is quite flexible.  While we retain a minimum of 5 copies (including one dark offline copy) of every AIP, this does not limit us to having only 5 hosts.  The architecture allows us to spread resources among many more partners, with each host potentially having a subset of all the AIPs.  There is no minimum or maximum size for hosts.

Images to Data?

An area we have been discussing for quite some time is growing from providing access to images to collaborating on data.  The work that researchers in the digital humanities will need goes far beyond needing access to images of documents to requiring linked data derived from those documents.  Research is also less restricted (or sometimes only made possible) when that data is open (Linked Open Data) and allows for linking between multiple data sources.

A barrier to being able to create data from these images has been the subscription services.  Researchers are less likely to deposit data they built from or otherwise linked to the images if the images or their data will have restricted access.  This is also true of volunteer contributions, who would be willing to volunteer for something open but wouldn't have interest in contributing for free to a subscription service.   These images and resulting data being behind a subscription service has considerable costs -- far beyond the small costs of managing the service as open access.

Your thoughts?

While the boards of Canadiana.org and CRKN discuss this, there should also be discussion within the community.  I want to do what I can to avoid any of the type of misconceptions that happened with the launch of the Heritage project derailing a closer relationship. I believe that closer relationship will benefit far more than the institutions that make up the CRKN membership.

I'll do my best to ensure that any comments that are made to this article make it to board members as well.

My comments on: Have Millennials Made Quitting More Common?

My comments on: Have Millennials Made Quitting More Common?

I'm not a Millennial, and nearing 50. I am one of those people who might be considered "disloyal" by those who presume blind loyalty to an employer is a positive trait in an employee.

I need to feel passionate about my work.  Paying the bills works for shorter term contracts, but if I'm going to be employed for any length of time I need to feel what I am doing is valuable beyond the salary.  Such a large part of our lives is spent at work, and I want work-life integration and not simply work-life balance.

I could be considered disloyal to one of my previous longer-term contracts because I believed that millions of dollars of taxpayer money was being wasted because government lawyers and other policy makers refused to make important data sets open access.  This was data that the government collected, and which Canadian farmers needed access to.  Inexpensive (some free-libre) technology tools to access the raw data exist for farmers to use, and all that was needed was to make the data sets open.  Instead, massive amounts of taxpayer money was being spent to create a website which offered restricted access to that data.   This included the large consulting fees I was being paid that was then marked up by 3 different intermediaries between me and the government. (Since the "accountability" brought in after the "sponsorship scandal", my observation has been that government waste has gone up rather than down).

I believe what my current employer is doing has very high social value and I feel pride in what the organization is trying to accomplish.  The salary is much lower than what was being extracted from taxpayers in that previous contract, but when I add the salary plus the pride it has almost always come out on top.  I have turned down multiple offers over the years to return to the previous position.

Where what some might consider disloyalty comes into my current position is that I'm not shy to express to others, including those above me in the organization chart, when I feel priorities aren't aligned or that the organization is being distracted by scope-creeping side-projects.  I have strong loyalty to the goals of the organization, but don't have blind loyalty to the hierarchy within the organization.

I started in my current position as a consultant just over 5 years ago (anniversary in January), and was converted from a consultant to staff in late August 2011.  Before that I was a self-employed consultant since 1995, where contacts that didn't reflect my values were short-term.  Will I celebrate 10 or more years at my current job? (there are people that have been here for over 37 years)  My core values have been consistent throughout my career, but I doubt it will be my personal values changing that would lead to a decision on my part to look elsewhere.

Are "Millennials" feeling similar, where they evaluate their employers as much as employers might evaluate them, and explore other career options when their evaluation of their employer falls short?  I started my self-employed business in 1995 because I was unhappy with a string of employers early in my career, and it would feel like a career setback to go back to consulting.


Note: I recently started participating more on LinkedIn .  I have found it interesting and flattering that recruiting calls,  emails and other contacts have increased. I was on to add recommendations and confirm skills of one of two colleagues that were recently laid off for budgetary reasons, and it was not at all an indication I'm planning on moving onward.