I promise I'll get back to datablogging after the end of next week, but right now Open Access Week is eating my brain like a demented zombie, so…

I had an odd thought last night, partly in response to Eric Hellman's idea of an open-access rights-purchasing consortium for ebooks. (I think this is a fantastic idea, by the way, and I hope it's tried!)

Over time, the academic literature has been bought less individually and more collectively. Libraries weren't the initial market for scholarly journals; Henry Oldenburg didn't even know if libraries would buy such things, though he must have hoped so. No, the market was the individual gentleman-scholar who would otherwise be stuck reading third-hand letters that other gentleman-scholars had gotten their grubby hands all over.

Eventually this market expanded, even as the research enterprise did, and the individual scholar had to stop pretending he could—or even wanted to—buy every journal there was. Typically he still bought some, whether via individual subscription or as a perk in a scholarly-society membership, but if he wanted to look at a greater breadth of journals, he went to his nearest academic library, the collective operating on behalf of him and all his institutional colleagues.

Then the serials crisis happened, and even libraries couldn't individually get their hands on any appreciable swathe of the journal literature any more. So collectives expanded. On the demand side, libraries banded together into consortia to multiply their buying power. On the supply side, publishers and aggregators started banding journals together into what we librarians now call the "Big Deal."

So, looked at in this light, the open-access movement is just one more step into collectivity of journal production and acquisition. We're buying everything for everyone, this time.

Makes sense to me…

It's no news to most librarians that the academic community generally has a pretty shaky handle on the politics and economics of information—even the information they themselves produce. Given that, it's not terribly surprising that the serials crisis has gone on for thirty-some-odd years without a great deal of comment or action from the academic community. After all, the housing bubble told us something about bubbles: they go on and on and on, despite doomful forecasts, until they suddenly don't.

So what's happening with the journal bubble? Is anyone cottoning on?

Well… yes, I am starting to think so. The resulting thought processes aren't what I would have them be, but more awareness being better than less, I'll take what I can get.

What I see going on as I peruse academic weblogs, as I listen to academics on Twitter and Friendfeed, as I watch mainstream higher-ed periodicals, as I pay attention to conversations I hear at conferences and elsewhere, is the start of a sort of bargaining with the publishing establishment. Academic folk aren't getting what they want or need, and certainly not what they think they deserve. That doesn't mean they're storming the bastions. At the moment, it seems to mean they're looking for the postern gate into the castle, hoping it's unguarded.

Academic samizdat is booming, and indications are that academics don't think this is in any way a problem (though many publishers would disagree). Here, there, and all over the place, I hear researchers at institutions with less-well-funded libraries sighing, "if only I worked at a Research I," and not only sighing, but trying to find ways to get themselves into the e-journal candy stores there. (Barbara's right, of course, that researchers did it to themselves and therefore have mostly themselves to blame. But again, they don't know this, because like some sort of strange information-fish, they don't understand the water they swim in.)

Most of those ways aren't going to fly (trust a librarian on this; we know what's in the contracts we sign with publishers and aggregators), even as academic samizdat has its limits. Still, I can't manage to be surprised at folks trying to work around the system rather than reform it. It's a big system, and a threatening one.

Which brings me to the cautious rejoicing that must be going on at Georgia State University around now; electronic reserves appear safe, unless what's left of the lawsuit takes a strange and unheralded hairpin turn. Barbara Fister has a rundown of the situation, as does Duke's Kevin Smith. I have to be happy about any victories for fair use in this copyright-maximalist age, and I am happy, but I can't help feeling regret as well.

I'm a bit of a revolutionary at heart, you see. I get tired of putting my heart and my career on the line only for slow, plodding progress. I want a Boston Tea Party! I want to storm the Bastille! And people and systems being what they are, I know that won't happen unless something prominent breaks outrageously. Sage and Oxford and Cambridge had better be happy the Georgia State lawsuit is going how it is, if you ask me, because ruling electronic reserves copyright infringement would in my estimation be just the kind of outrageous breakage that would make academics themselves rip the system to pieces with their bare hands.

Ah, well. No revolution today. Back to the slow, plodding salt mines. Back to building a little more awareness of breakage every single slow, plodding day.

I need some help thinking this through, folks. If (for the sake of argument) you wanted to know who at your institution was publishing in gold-OA journals, how would you go about finding out?

Hindawi makes it fairly easy; they do institution-specific pages. PLoS has nothing public, though it's possible to ask PLoS staff for the rundown at your institution. BMC has an articles-by-institution search box, though if your institution is of any size at all, wading through the results is a killer.

That's only a partial sampling of what's out there, though. Assuming a campuswide survey is impossible (and I suspect such a thing would have a pretty low response rate), how would you try to capture local gold-OA authors who aren't publishing in the big OA houses?

We have any number of print-on-demand book shops, from the big dogs Lightning Source and Lulu to university-sponsored ones like Michigan's reprints series. The black-box model for these is relatively simple: camera-ready copy goes in, fulfilled individual-copy orders come out.

Here's what we don't have: print-on-demand journal shops. I'm not sure why; I believe there's a demand.

The HP service MagCloud comes close, but it fails in two specific respects: it only prints glossy mags (rather than the sober matte archival paper journal readers expect), and it doesn't handle subscriptions, only single-issue purchases.

Maybe I'm missing something, but at base, without all the weird bells and whistles magazine publishers have created over the years, managing subscriptions doesn't strike me as impossibly hard. You keep addresses and build an address-change mechanism. You build in a multiple-issue price-discount mechanism. You keep track of how many single issues a given customer has paid for. You send them. End of story. Not so?

Perhaps not. I welcome correction in the comments. I do think, though, that the simplistic system I've outlined would hit a fairly important 80/20 point for many open-access journals, who would like to put out a "print edition" but are stuck with the book-focused POD vendors. I'm a little bewildered that this doesn't exist, honestly.

Business opportunity, anyone? Anyone? PLoS? BMC? Anyone?

Open-access advocates of all stripes—researchers, librarians, publishers, consultants—are in my experience voracious readers on open access. I fit the profile, but I know people who read even more than I do, approaching "everything."

One practical result of all this reading is that every single one of us—me included—has wanted to read an article on open-access that was published in a journal that we don't have access to. And almost every time, we grumble about the irony.

Here's the thing, though. If we're going to maximize the reach of our message, we're going to have to put up with that particular irony. I don't like that academics have tunnel vision either, but they do—which means publishing in enemy outlets.

Do we need to call it out every time? Only if we care to annoy and antagonize by looking incurably smug. I suggest instead that we mourn our missing access. That, after all, is the actual problem. Irony isn't.

Not shockingly, there's quite a bit of confusion in the research enterprise about what exactly "open" means. Open access is bad enough, with its green and its gold and its gratis and its libre and its cha-cha-cha (okay, I made that last one up). Open data is worse, partly because it started happening on a noticeable scale before the Panton Principles could frame it properly.

It's pretty safe to say, though, that the Cacao Genome Project ain't open data. Glen Newton has all the details, but the basic upshot is that to get to this supposedly (and trumpeted-ly) "open" data, one has to register (pseudonyms need not apply) and agree to an extraordinarily restrictive license that precludes data mashups and publications, among other things.

Now, I don't know what happened here. It may not have been the researchers' fault. Maybe somebody's lawyer wasn't clear on the concept—funny how often this seems to happen in an "open" context, as open-source developers in academia and industry will tell you at great length. Maybe somebody's website developer was asleep at the switch. I won't poke fun at the researchers themselves, nor assume malice or cluelessness, until more is known.

Just for a moment, though, let's think about what this false claim tells us about the brand value of "open." With regard to data, particularly genome data, it seems to be higher than I would have guessed at this early date. The CGP didn't just quietly put their dataset out there; they made a big deal of its supposed openness. That's fascinating, and it's hopeful. Science is prestige-mad. If open data is a prestige brand, that's a good thing for those of us who want to see more of it.

Curiously, I can't come up with analogous cases of "fauxpen" in publishing. There are the lovely hybrid publishers who can't tweak their website designs enough to get rid of demands for money on articles whose authors have purchased the open-access option, I suppose. In my head that's not quite the same thing, though; it's not really trying to leverage the "open" brand falsely, more trying to ignore "open" in order to grab at more money. I might suggest that publishers have done enough of a smear job on open-access publishing that the "open access" brand is worth less than "open data." I hope that sad situation can be reversed.

The comments are open for LOLresearchers, LOLpublishers, or any other (PG-13, please) illustration of the post title. If I get some good ones, I'll post them here (with credit, naturally).

I've been thinking again about the question asked me at UCLA: why should academic libraries divert staff and budgetary resources to open access (green or gold, gratis or libre) if our mandate is to serve our local patrons? I gave an answer that I wasn't particularly happy with. I have a bit of an esprit d'escalier answer now, the borrowed words of Benjamin Franklin:

We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.

A lot of us academic librarians know that our faculty basically see us as wallets. We pay for the stuff they use. That's pretty much all they know about us, all they think we do (aside from checking books out at the desk, don't you know—and I am being sarcastic because this function is rarely performed by actual librarians). If we just hang back contentedly being wallets, what will happen to us when the wallet-function breaks, as we all know it's breaking? Particularly, what will happen if we have nothing to fall back on—no rhetoric, no advocacy, no best practice, nothing—from the profession, the collective? A library under siege from its institution with no support external to that institution isn't playing a strong hand.

We also know that toll-access publishers and aggregators have been playing divide-and-conquer for a long time. What are all these NDAs about, if not to divide libraries one from another and prevent us from gathering the collective intelligence that would let us all negotiate fair prices? At this late date, we seem unlikely to reverse this behavior as individual libraries and consortia. It's going to take a full-court press, from as many of us as possible.

Just as open access will. It's perhaps a measure of my own demoralization that I was quite chuffed by this preprint finding that 49% of current academic-librarian–authored materials can be found open-access. Forty-nine percent is dismal, but it's also extraordinary, and rather better than I would have expected. The lesson is clear, though: individual efforts on individual campuses and in individual libraries don't get us very far.

At the risk of sounding all commie and stuff: we work toward a collective openness, or we die off one by one as the business model sustaining us as well as publishers crumbles to bits.

Briefly…

BioMed Central recently issued a draft statement on open data. The details aren't earthshaking; you can read them yourself if you care to.

What I'm interested in is whether this manoeuvre puts BMC in a good position to disrupt other journals, particularly those announcing that researchers with supplementary material can go climb trees.

I'll repeat myself:

See, one of the lesser-known bits of Christensen’s market-disruption pattern is that the disrupting force needs to start out by “competing against nonconsumption.” You can’t take on the incumbent on its own turf; the incumbent will eat your lunch and you for dessert. (What’s the lesson for institutional repositories here? Starting with peer-reviewed journal articles was a doomed strategy, that’s what. Those are the crown jewels. The incumbents own those.) You have to find something else to work with, something unused or underserved that the incumbents turn up their august noses at—a low-end market, a different raw material—establish a market beachhead there, and expand your beachhead over time.

I do think it significant that it should be an open-access publisher taking up the data gauntlet when toll-access publishers won't. There's an asymmetry there worth examining.

For a toll-access publisher, data is a cost center, pure and simple, and one that they can't make any additional money from. Why can't they? Because their business model is based on closing off access, and closed-but-nominally-published data is becoming more useless by the day. If a research dataset can't be found quickly and computed upon at will—someday this may be translatable to "if it's not part of the linked-data web"—there's no point to "publishing" it. So our toll-access publisher has three unappetizing choices: refusing the data (in which case researchers who value their data may go elsewhere), opening the data (which will lead to awkward questions about why the accompanying papers aren't open too), or taking on a significant new cost center just to keep up with the BioMed Centrals of this world.

(Yes, there are some flourishing industries based on closed access to data, granted. They're separate from journal publishing, and they presume a type or quantity of data that people will pay for. I don't think that's true of most research-generated datasets, so my argument should hold up. As usual, though, my crystal ball is cracked and hazy, so you follow any prophecies it generates at your own risk.)

The big author-fee-supported open-access publishers, in my estimation, are focused on gaining market share right now, where "market" is defined as "attracting publishable submissions." So doing something smart with data looks likely to turn into a competitive advantage for them, and if it costs them too much, well, they're already charging, so they just figure out how to adjust their fee structure, no big deal.

Will PLoS and Hindawi follow BMC's example? I don't know. They should. Will data become the wedge that allows open-access journals to disrupt their toll-access counterparts? I don't know, and it will likely be some time before that can be assessed. The likeliest outcome is the hoary boring old "it will differ by discipline." Time will tell whether BMC has bet on the right disciplines.