2008 Apr 18 MIT Free Culture. Present: price yoz aresnick vatsa driscoll ecprice foner dsheets quentin thwang deaner montfort Started 17:05. Minutes taken by price. Guests. montfort: I started last summer here in the faculty of the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. I'm a fan of open access; not a scholar of it, haven't done ethnographic studies on it, but have gotten a feel of what faculty think about the issue. So I'm here to talk with you about open access, what faculty can do, what Free Culture can do to get us a better publishing model, and about free culture at the faculty level. aresnick: Greg invited me to show my book scanner here. As you can see, I don't actually have a scanner here; the lab was suddenly locked this week, and I waited for a janitor to no avail; but I can talk about it. Open Access. montfort: My perspective may not be exactly typical. I did a PhD in CS before coming to the writing program here, before that a master's in poetry and one at the Media Lab. I teach "The Word Made Digital", where students' literary output is programs, and the CMS workshop. In my own practice, I create things known as digital writing, or the more pretentious "electronic literature", some interactive-fiction pieces. So some of that has relation to Free Culture. I want to get mainly on the issue of faculty thinking about open access. Partly this comes from my experience as a blogger. I write on a blog "Grand Text Auto", with some other academics and others. I find I'm particularly hurt, as a blogger, when some piece of academic work isn't available, because we're having some discussion and there's a piece of good work, right on the topic, that the people outside the academy that I'm discussing with don't have access to. Some of the myths about open access, I've actually encountered in other faculty members' beliefs about it. I think of OA as just the idea of free, open access to academic writing; a principle, not a business model; so not distinguishing between Gold, Green, etc, particular ways a journal might be edited and published. Sometimes people say that because it's publicly funded research, it should be available. I'm not sure that's a good argument, because it wouldn't apply to most humanities research, or to making it available outside the country. It's really that we're creating this not to hide it, but to share it. deaner: A clarification. Do you mean people also being able to share the material, or just to get at it? montfort: I think that helps a lot, there's a lot of problems with saying we'll just put up one server and people can only get it there, but I think that's at a finer level than the main principle here. For instance, some of the details may vary across fields. In humanities, people will come to a conference, have a paper, read it word for word, but they're not ready to publish because they're still working on it. foner: And in some fields like biochem, you won't be allowed to publish until you put your data, sequences, up in GenBank etc. montfort: So, some myths. Many faculty think if you have open access you'll have author charges, page fees; this smells to people like conflict of interest, vanity publishing, etc. Some OA journals may have page fees, but so do many closed-access journals. So I don't see why this is a core issue. And plenty of OA journals don't; two in my discipline, Game Studies and Digital Humanities Quarterly. Another, some people think it means doing away with peer review. I don't know where this idea comes from; we have plenty of OA journals with peer review. Partly it's inertia and reputation. Partly a confusion that nothing online can possibly be peer-reviewed. Another myth -- oh, well, I put my paper on my website, so it's all OK, I don't have to make it open access. But for one thing, this is ridiculous that people have to take this extra step after getting it in a journal, maybe paying these people with page fees, the library is paying them. It really shows that publication is not really publication! It's not really out there until you take the extra step. So, I don't know what the administration's position is on this. I know the libraries would love to have OA. They're good people, they're doing the best they can. Two more things I want to mention. First, why people are not acting on this. First of all, faculty members have other stuff to do. Teaching classes, grading, runnign research labs, ten students to secure funding for and meet with and make sure their research is on track, plus all the rest of life. So I don't think the people who end up in academia want to bury their results and writing in the back yard, they're for public access to their work, but there are just all these other issues. Some people have been told, if you publish something online, OA or not, that's not going to count for tenure and promotion, we need a real journal. So it's hard for them to be activists. I've had collaborators where I say, let's publish this in Digital Humanities Quarterly, they say no, that won't count for me. Another, a thing which I see in my field, the humanities. People who embrace free culture, access to research, they may actually be on the board of a closed-access journal. But it doesn't mean they have influence; the publisher decides. They can leave, form a new journal, that's how some OA journals have started, but it's hard to organize that. So, let's talk about what can be done. Other things to say about OCW, blogging. We tried to add a CC license to our blog, but we appropriate so much from other sources that it became too hard to keep up. Let's talk about how we can help faculty to publish their work, and actually publish it. foner: Also Science Commons. price: You know about the new Harvard OA policy. montfort: Yes, so that means there'll be self-archiving. But that doesn't mean the journals will become OA. We've had the arXiv for over a decade in high-energy physics, and the journals are still closed access. What MIT could do that's better is to support OA journals, which is better than just self-archiving. aresnick: So I don't know what the weakest point is here, the place to apply pressure. Is that individuals saying they're not going to publish in those journals, or what? montfort: You can say you're not going to publish in them, or you can say they're not going to review for them. montfort: I don't have an issue so much with journals like Science, which have big print distribution channels. But there are people today, in 2008, who are starting closed-access journals. They're planning to print 500 copies, distribute to universities, and that's they're plan; I think they're making a mistake. aresnick: What about going through funders? There's a mandate now from NIH. What about funders in humanities? montfort: Well, a lot of people aren't funded except by their salary. Book scanning. aresnick: Some context. Midway through my time at MIT, I decided to focus my efforts on education. So eventually I started looking into book scanners. Cheap ones cost $800; good-quality ones cost more like $1500-$5000. I looked at them, and they seemed pretty simple, so I looked into how to build one myself. I've got one now that handles hardcover and loosely-bound softcover books, at accuracy around 97-98%. I'm hitting a price point of around $47. To be fair, a lot of the cost of the commercial scanners is in the OCR software, which really is a lot better than the Google Tesseract OCR that I'm using, but you can improve things by running multiple scans. I have one model for people to build themselves, out of parts they can easily get at Radio Shack. I'm working on another for people who want it built for them, for $150. It's BYO digital camera, which is part of how it's so cheap. foner: Is this on the web? aresnick: Not yet; it'll debut at Maker Faire, in early May. dsheets: One thing this'd be good for is reading aloud for visually impaired people. If you hook it into a text-to-speech engine, it can serve that purpose. For interaction it'd be helpful to have the chapter, etc, structure; have you looked into ebook formats? foner: I'd like to "rip" my personal library of books; that'd be really convenient. yoz: For one thing, you can search in an ebook. Also, it means having an archive, a backup in case of e.g. flood. aresnick: A present limitation is that all math is just rendered as images; I don't know how to OCR TeX. montfort: One cool demo would be to start scanning, stop on the first page that mentions some word. Academics would love that, searching for their name. foner: I'd like to go further, making a whole index for a book. I own some great books with no index. aresnick: Here's another question. I'd like other people to make their own designs, to have plenty of designs. But I don't know how to effectively share open source hardware. Instructables is great for releasing, but not for editing. This is a much bigger project, but I'm interested in it for other reasons too. Meeting ended at 18:25.