open access

A story on the front page of the New York Times a few days ago cleverly smeared open access scholarly publishing as somehow responsible for the rise of low-quality, pseudo-academic conferences and OA journals.  

The piece noted a mini-trend of hustlers announcing conferences and open access journals that trade on the names of respected conferences and journals – and then charging academics high fees to participate in a process of dubious scientific value.  Such scams represent “the dark side of open access,” according to the article by Times science reporter Gina Kolata.

There is no question that such phenomena exist.  But the idea that the Public Library of Science and other OA journals are somehow responsible for these scams is absurd.  As Michael Eisen, a UC Berkeley biologist and a cofounder of the Public Library of Science suggests in a recent blog post, “suggesting, as the article does, that scam conferences/journals exist because of the rise of open access publishing is….the logical equivalent of blaming newspapers like the NYT for people who go door-to-door selling fake magazine subscriptions." 

“The real explanation for the things described in the article,” said Eisen, “is that it’s insanely easy to create conferences and journals and to send out blasts of emails to thousands of scientists hoping a few will take the bait.  It’s science’s version of the Nigerian banking scams – something far more deserving of laughter than hand-wringing on the front page of the NYT.”

Aaron Swartz’s death is a sobering story about the collision of free culture activism with vindicative prosecutorial powers.  It’s also about an amazing tech wizard and the personal costs of his idealism.  Here’s hoping that Swartz’s tragic suicide at age 26 prompts some serious reflection about the grotesque penalties for a victimless computer crime and the unchecked power of federal prosecutors to intimidate defendants.  Perhaps MIT, too, should reflect deeply on its core mission as an academic institution – to help share more knowledge, not fence it off. 

Swartz was a hacker-wunderkind, a boy genius who played a significant role in many tech innovations affecting the Internet:  RDF tags for Creative Commons licenses; a version of RSS software for syndicating web content; an early version of the platform that became Reddit, the user-driven news website.  In 2006, when I interviewed Swartz for my book Viral Spiral, I was astonished to encounter a 19-year-old kid who had already done the path-breaking technical work that I just mentioned.  

Swartz had been a junior high school student when he was doing mind-bending coding and design work for the Creative Commons licenses and their technical protocols.  “I remember these moments when I was, like, sitting in the locker room, typing on my laptop, in these debates, and having to close it because the bell rang and I had to get back to class….” 

When a windfall of cash came Swartz’s way following the sale of Reddit to Conde Nast, Swartz did not launch a new startup to make still more money.  He intensified his activism and coding on behalf of free culture.  He sought out new projects that would make information on the Internet more accessible to everyone.

In 2006, he worked with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive to post complete bibliographic data for every book held by the Library of Congress – information for which the Library charged fees.  A few years later, working with guerilla public-information activist Carl Malamud, Swartz legally downloaded a large fraction of court decisions that were hosted by PACER, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records.  PACER is the repository of US court decisions.  Swartz’s idea was to reclaim documents that taxpayers had already paid for.  Why should we have to pay 10 cents per page to access them?  (Those documents can now be found at Malamud’s site, www.public.resource.org.)

Here’s something that any student or academic can do to promote the free flow of scientific and scholarly inquiry:  pressure your college or university to sign the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity.  It’s a statement of solidarity among institutions of higher learning to promote open-access publishing. 

In the more specific language of the Compact, universities commit to “the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.”

This imperative is growing stronger every day now that publishers are trying to roll back the existing open-access rules for federally funded research.  Under the Research Works Act, introduced in December, the federal government could not require open access rules for the research it funds.  In other words, highly lucrative commercial journal publishers would have a protected market for taxpayer-subsidized research for which it would hold the copyrights.  A sweet deal!

Open access is getting a lot more attention these days now that more than 5,700 researchers are calling for a boycott of Elsevier, one of the leading publishers of scientific journals.  It started when mathematician Timothy Gowers of Cambridge University announced that he would no longer have anything to do with Elsevier-publisher journals; he would neither submit articles or act as a referee or editor for them.  Soon the boycott had spread. 

In the 1990s, a variety of industries dependent on copyright, trademark and patent law decided that the Internet and new digital technologies were getting way too dangerous. Upstart competitors with innovative business models were starting to invade well-established markets.  Worse, ordinary people were starting to bypass the market system and challenge the supremacy of copyright and patent law (and to a lesser extent, trademark law).  People began to create their own freely shareable alternatives using free software, co-production of content and virtually free distribution.

And so it was that the corporate giants of information and culture staked out the high ground of “property rights.”  It would be the citadel from which they would defend their entrenched business models and fight the “dangers” of digital networks.  The result has been the IP Wars, a sprawling set of political, economic and cultural conflicts that continue to rage today. 

It is a far-ranging conflagration that affects dozens of creative and cultural enterprises -- film production and distribution, musical performance and recording, book publishing, photography and video production, pharmaceutical development, scientific research, scholarly publishing and databases, among many other arenas.

There has also been a strenuous backlash to IP industries.  People with HIV/AIDS have risen up to fight the broad patent claims of the pharmaceutical industry, which has made life-saving drugs unaffordable to millions of people in need.  Hackers have organized to resist the proprietary lock-down of software code, and insisted upon basic human freedom to copy and share their code.  Subsistence farmers have resisted patent laws that promote genetically modified crops and threaten their seed-sharing practices.