“As the Spanish poet Antonio Machado once wrote: ‘Caminante no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar’ (Traveller, there is no path. The path is made by walking).”
Glòria Pérez-Salmerón, Acceptance Speech, 24 August 2017; International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) President 2017-2019
Most summaries of open access focus on analysis of the present obstacles in the way of greater openness, the details of the day-to-day toil of wresting scholarship (which is often accomplished for the sake of the public good) from behind the paywalls of plutocrats— or what Ms. Pérez-Salmerón references in her acceptance speech as “information for all.” This work has brought us a long way fast and if you read to the end, after we examine the major dramas, there will be highlights of the year’s most encouraging victories. Nevertheless, events of the last year suggest that the open access movement faces complex problems that pertain not to the practical issues of openness, but the technical infrastructure of access. These are problems we will also overcome, but doing so will mean attention and advocacy within spheres that we may have neglected or left for others. So, I begin with an alert: fellow travelers, we will all need good walking shoes.
“we, like Canute, understand our power is limited”
Tim Berners-Lee, ON EME IN HTML5, 28 February 2017
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is unpopular this year because he conceded that the web’s standards will conform to the law(s) of the land, meaning copyright, which means Digital Rights Management (DRM), which tends to make a mess of user experience among other things (like diminishing the prospects for fair use which, around here at least, is also the law). Canute, for those of us without knowledge in medieval European history, is noted for learning from and reforming in the (literal) wake of his mistakes; the world needs more like him. Sir Tim’s endorsement echoes the spirit of the Copenhagen Letter which states: “Tech is not above us. It should be governed by all of us, by our democratic institutions. It should play by the rules of our societies. It should serve our needs, both individual and collective, as much as our wants.” Regardless of the web founder’s prevailing interest in sustaining the interoperability of the web, the Electronic Freedom Foundation was not impressed, neither were advocates and many librarians familiar with the issue. If you read deep into the comments below his rationale, Berners-Lee agrees with a commenter who suggests that the controversy should be “kept alive.” Even optimists know that the implications for open access will be mixed. From a digital literacy perspective, keeping the web interoperable is a good thing; more DRM is not, and Berners-Lee admits that he recognizes implications for ebooks are on the way.
Perhaps the saddest news this year involved the acquisition of bepress, otherwise known as Berkeley Electronic Press, a digital emblem of the public, land-grant University tradition in the United States, a system enacted with the intention to “teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts… in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” The spirit of this system involves the idea that public and academic sectors have mutual interests and that if we recognize and build accordingly, we might better manage some of civilization’s problems. This year’s reminder that the infrastructure created in the public/academic interest can be gobbled up by the private sector as quickly as Jabba the Hutt devours a frog has served as an unfortunate learning experience. It also proves that Aaron Swartz, whose co-creation of tools we take for granted, RSS, Creative Commons, and Open Library, was correct to namecheck Reed Elsevier as Enemy #1 in the 2008 Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. Elsevier won’t catch us unawares next time. But I needed to make sure, so I emailed the creator of MIT’s institutional repository, PubPub, Dr. Travis Rich. I asked him what would prevent Elsevier from buying PubPub. Note that his answer is basically a definition of why open source implementations will be key to open access infrastructure:
“There are a few things that come to mind immediately.
For one, at the moment, there is nothing to ‘buy’. Every bit of PubPub (aside from encrypted keys) is open source and public. This means that even if I woke up and decided to sell my soul to Elsevier, there is nothing stopping MIT Libraries or anyone else from relaunching PubPub on their own servers and keep the community going.
Beyond the source code of the site, all of the data produced by PubPub is available through a public API. So again, MIT Libraries or anyone would be able to port all of PubPub over to a set of servers if needed.
The remaining cases I see are 1) if they ever found value in buying the pubpub.org domain name, or 2) if they found value in buying the private (not public-API accessible) data that PubPub holds on unpublished works. I don’t have a clean explanation for how to guarantee avoiding this situation. If you or MIT Libraries has any ideas, I’m more than open to implementing all the dead man’s switches we can come up with!”
So, this time with confidence, I say: next time, Elsevier won’t catch us unawares.
The most ironic story of the year requires the background knowledge that facebook.com is a corporation whose own particular brand of digital colonialism involves marketing itself to the people of the Global South through offering the “benefits of the internet” for “free” without offering the same access to the web (which keep in mind, naturally poses all kinds of problems for digital literacy, with logical impacts for things like science scholarship). Mark Zuckerberg, a dude who behaves with the impunity of an Aztec king (and saying so may be an insult to Aztec kings) is offering financial support through his Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to bioRxiv, an open access preprint service which lives in a space that is also the most important scholarly communication invention in history so far, itself a product of academic and public sector collaboration, and so well-known to those of us among the world’s privileged that it resembles water to a fish; of course I mean the world wide web. Perhaps someone who can put two ideas together will point the way for Zuck to realize that digital/web literacy may present a problem upstream of, and not as sexy as curing the world’s diseases, but that promoting scientific discovery is inseparable from fostering information discovery (for all of Earth’s inhabitants). Or maybe if he just sat in a corner for five minutes and thought of what the web has done for him, he might emerge with some better ideas than the ones he’s had so far. As a side note: what needs to happen before librarians declare his websites to be public health hazards? Undermining democracy is one thing, not everybody sees the same advantages for it as me, but exploiting the vulnerabilities of children, I think most people would agree, is all bad. In an Information Age, classifying threatening information architectures as such ought to be solidly within the ‘librarian’ wheelhouse.
Information ethics also seem to be heavy on the mind of Berkman Klein Center Professor Jonathan Zittrain, who recently made the case that we may need a university/academic sector to preserve the Internet itself. I would caution that the academic sector does not always overlap with the public good; as the work of Tressie McMillan Cottom best exemplifies, the academic sector can sometimes be indistinguishable from extremely negative private interests. Zittrain also makes the compelling argument that data scientists should join ‘learned professions’ like clergy, medicine, and law, which codify ethical practice, meaning he thinks data scientists should become information ethicists. Bravo! This is a great idea; but while we wait, let’s remember that we already have a profession of information ethicists. Indeed, the open access movement demonstrates what librarians can help accomplish. Our rapid progress is evidence of what can happen when we foreground our professional values and serve not just the interests of universities, but also those of the public. Copyright reform, promoting guiding principles for the development of Artificial Intelligence, and net neutrality advocacy are issues that need our voices. On the immediate horizon: as early as November 22nd, the USA is about to embark on an ill-advised departure from net neutrality protections, and while universities often operate on our own networks, public access to the internet will be subject to the whims of a few telecommunication corporations. Countries like Canada, Chile, the Netherlands, Norway, and Slovenia have protected net neutrality and California is also on the way to becoming its own country in that respect. Librarians should thwart all efforts to mystify net neutrality. It only means: No Blocking (of legal websites); No Throttling; and No Paid Prioritization. In the policy parlance of the United States, these are known as the Title II Bright Line Rules.
The growing awareness of open textbooks and open educational resources (OER) represent the brightest stories of the year. Mind you: these involve many of the same infrastructure issues as academic articles, but in terms of their practical adoption and popularity within the public imaginary, here, the open access movement is taking a W. As we step into book territory, we will be questioned: Should all published information be immediately and always free? That’s craaaazy. Librarians have our own ideas, and sometimes they are crazy, so, for some insight from an artist and rights holder I asked Rachel Lynett, a playwright who recently earned a degree in our theatre program; she has also accessioned one of her unpublished plays (in print only) to my university library’s Special Collections. I asked for her philosophy of access to work that she would (ideally) like to earn a living from. The gist is that because it’s difficult to track the performance of her plays in general, offering online access enables more performances without her consent. As with many efforts in communication, what we should focus on is the intent. ebooks and other e-formats not intended in the first place as scholarly literature/learning spaces do not need to be open access unless their authors choose to license them that way. That said, as long as academic publishers charge too much for awful user experiences which get in the way of, instead of assisting with, pedagogy, profiteers will be advised that librarians are likely to promote options like this open source/ open access beauty (which sets the tone for what e-learning experiences should strive to accomplish) poeticcomputation.info (it would be an amazing experiment to see what horrible things happen to this if you add EME/DRM—I don’t know). One more thing: since many academic librarians serve within communities that groom and credential artists, we will need to develop policies for our repositories that are sensitive to the unique needs of these scholars. The work of creative artists is different than other kinds of academic texts.
In anniversaries: one of the first open access journals, founded only four years after the web was invented, Education Policy Analysis Archives celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. Its founder describes it as: “a gift freely given from the state of Arizona to the world.” In new beginnings: Oxford University Press has begun an open access sister journal for Journal of Clinical Oncology, JNCI Cancer Spectrum and its editor-in-chief, oncologist Dr. Pamela Goodwin is matter-of-fact about the logic of the publishing model: “We will use an Online, Open Access publication model, allowing the scientific community immediate and unrestricted access to our manuscripts.”
2018 will be better. Happy Open Access Week. I know ‘theme weeks’ are clichéd, but this theme is close to the heart of your faithful scribe. And so, I file this report with love to both my own academic community and to library colleagues far away from Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA.
Author: Michelle Gibeault
Michelle is an academic librarian at the University of Arkansas, a public university in the southern United States. In her role as English & Communication Librarian, she focuses on helping students develop fluency with the changing information landscape. As a consequence, learning spaces, ecomedia, and library instruction pedagogy are research topics of interest for Michelle. If you would like to contact her, please write to gibeault (at) uark.edu.
IFLA New Professionals Special Interest Group 
Great overview of the recent issues and ideas in open access, Michelle! Thank you 🙂