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 | Will Harvard Become First American University To Mandate Open Access?
In what would be a historic first, faculty at Harvard University were set to vote late this afternoon on a motion that would compel faculty to deposit their research in an open access (OA) repository managed by the library to be made freely available to anyone via the Internet. Although details of the final policy now up for approval before the faculty have yet to be released, Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton, in an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson said the motion "represents an opportunity to reshape the landscape of learning."
Under the proposal, individual members of Harvard's College of Arts and Sciences (FAC) would be directed to retain their copyrights, as opposed to assigning them exclusively to publishers as part of their publishing contracts, so their research could be made available. Faculty could still publish their articles in any journal that would not abridge Harvard's institutional repository rights.
By directing faculty to "retain rights for the widest possible dissemination of faculty's work," Darnton wrote in his op-ed, "it would make scholarship by FAC freely accessible everywhere in the world, and it would reinforce a new effort by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth." Further, the plan could have major, transformative implications for the library, which would have the remarkable task of collecting and disseminating Harvard's faculty output in addition to its current roles.
The proposal, however, also includes an "opt-out" provision for faculty who do not wish to deposit their articles—a provision that some OA advocates say could undermine or slow the benefits of the effort. Stevan Harnad, the leading voice in the call for mandatory author-archiving or "green" open access, told the LJ Academic Newswire that Harvard's initiative is "extremely timely, and welcome," and certainly well-intentioned but said that the motion missed on a few critical details. Specifically, he noted, the policy should not direct authors to retain copyright but should simply mandate deposit of their peer-reviewed final drafts immediately upon acceptance for publication. "The rest will take care of itself," he noted, adding that copyright retention can be encouraged but need not be required. Requiring copyright retention, he observed, could cause the motion to be defeated, or if passed, could lead to "massive opt-out through the loophole it requires in order to make it adoptable in the first place."
In addition to the altruistic goals Darnton has expressed for Harvard, he took aim at the current system of scholarly communication, noting that "the spiraling cost of journals has inflicted severe damage" on libraries. "It would be naïve to assume that a positive vote by the FAS on February 12 would force publishers to slash their prices," he conceded, "but by passing the motion we can begin to resist the trends that have created so much damage."
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At O'Reilly "Tools of Change" Conference, Publishers Look Warily to the Future
The 2008 O'Reilly Media Tools of Change (TOC) Conference kicked off yesterday in New York City, with a keynote session that gave voice to the conference's underlying, rather uneasy theme: will publishers matter? While the opening day mood of the conference suggested optimism, the keynote speakers' differing perspectives demonstrated that for all the power of today's information technology, publishers, authors, and the industry's various service providers and vendors face no small amount of risk, and in some cases nothing short of an all-out revolution in terms of business models.
The three speakers agreed that the old adage "content is king" no longer rings true. Their agreements pretty much ended there. Starting things off, Stephen Abram, VP of innovation for SirsiDynix, chief strategist for the SirsiDynix Institute, and 2008 SLA president argued that "context, not content" is the driving force behind "Information 3.0." Millennials, the digital-native Generation Y have no use for fact-based knowledge, he asserted, and instead solve their information needs with the tools available to them whenever and wherever those needs arise. Rote memorization is of little use to future generations when "the half-life of a fact is eight years," said Abram. Deft information seekers already can readily find facts using the web browser on their cell phones, he noted as an example.
Bill Burger, VP of marketing at the Copyright Clearance Center, said neither the content nor context were king, but rather the information-sharing tools themselves reign supreme. Burger envisioned a future where documents become the "living expression" of an author's work. As these tools continue to shape content creation, Burger said, he sees a future in which Creative Commons and other flexible licensing is pervasive but invisible, hidden so effectively that content appears free to the end user.
Wrapping up, Doug Rushkoff, a lecturer at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and author of Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, offered yet another take. As he sees it, contact is king.
Rushkoff said the main appeal of large networks of users is entirely self-evident: people are drawn to sharing their experiences with others. He explained that "community-oriented social currency" is as or more valuable than regular currency, and frequently wins out when the two are at odds. The Web 2.0 boom isn't a result of the massive amounts of content available online, he said, but rather a result of people's desire to share that content, and the ease with which they can do it.
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| Publishers: If You're Not Failing, You're Not Trying Hard Enough
Book publishers are no stranger to change, noted James Lichtenberg, president of Lightspeed, LLC, a New York-based management and consulting practice for publishers, but nothing like what the Internet has wrought. In an afternoon ballroom session at the O'Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference yesterday, Lichtenberg, in a session entitled Service Innovation: The Path to Success in the Internet Age, said that after decades of selling products, book publishers must now think of themselves as service providers.
Content in the age of the Internet is a "free-for-all," and the "legacy model" of authors writing, publishers publishing, and readers buying only what booksellers stocked on their shelves, Lichtenberg said, has broken down. Instead, he argued, "innovation" is key, and publishers can expect—and should not fear—failure along the way to a new era where "one-offs" are as easily accommodated as large print runs, and where books will become an increasingly "integrated experience" involving not only a manuscript but user comments, social media, links, audio, and video.
Of course, this represents a profound shift in business models, Lichtenberg acknowledged, where "value is a co-creation" of the publisher responding to the needs and wants defined by their customers for each transaction. Lichtenberg cited video gamers as an example of how the book industry could grow, noting that gaming used to be a solitary experience that has now grown into a large, vibrant online community as well as a lucrative business. "We are witnesses," he said, "and midwives to the birth of a new industry."
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| Web Fight: Yahoo! Rejects Microsoft Bid
In a resounding rejection, the Yahoo! Board of Directors yesterday said no to Microsoft's hostile takeover bid, saying the nearly $40 billion offer "substantially undervalues" the company's "global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments in advertising platforms and future growth prospects, free cash flow and earnings potential, as well as our substantial unconsolidated investments." The question now, say analysts, is whether the company can stave off Microsoft's further advances, which most experts say are almost certain.
The New York Times suggested that Microsoft could take the deal directly to shareholders, reporting that Microsoft has already polled Yahoo! shareholders who responded warmly to the deal. Indeed, one group of shareholders has launched its own effort to support the deal—you guessed it—in a blog. If eventually consummated, those in favor say the deal would provide needed competition in a search market dominated by Google. According to Comscore, which monitors Internet usage, Google garnered 58.4 percent of searches by U.S. Internet users in December, 2007, compared with 22.9 percent for Yahoo! sites and 9.8 percent for Microsoft's sites.
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