Editor Indexer Trainer Publishing consultant ResearcherI’ve been firmly planted on the editorial side of publishing since my early days as a volunteer writer and proofreader at my student newspaper in undergrad, but my first paid gig in publishing was in production and design: after I moved cities for my MSc, I got a job laying out the student newspaper once a week at my new school.
I absolutely loved it. Continue reading “Bye, design”
This post is part rumination and part self-indulgent whining, but it’s just enough about publishing that I can barely justify putting it on this blog.
When I started my PhD, I never intended to pursue an academic position. What I’d hoped for was some dedicated time to learn more about plain language and knowledge translation so that when I returned to my editing and communication consultancy after graduating, I’d be equipped with research evidence and, frankly, the credential to be taken seriously by the academics I was hoping to work with to make their findings more accessible.
I still don’t want an academic position. But my transition back to freelancing has been much bumpier and more tortuous than I’d expected—in fact, I still haven’t completely gotten there. I was naive to have believed that I’d simply submit my dissertation to the library and dust off my hands, neatly closing that chapter of my life. As it turns out, I still care a great deal about my research topic and the people who could be affected by it, and in trying to make my own findings more accessible, I’ve spent the past two years in a kind of para-academic purgatory I haven’t managed to escape.
So here’s the convoluted story of my attempts to get my research published. Whether you learn from my mistakes, laugh at my misfortunes, find a cause to advocate for, or simply feel less alone, I hope you get something out of this brain vomit of a blog post. (For readers who aren’t in the academic world, I’ll be explaining some concepts that many academic publishing folks will already be familiar with.)
I’m deliberately avoiding naming specific people, publications, and institutions, but if you recognize yourself and want to be explicitly credited, please let me know.
WARNING: Writing this post was necessary and therapeutic for me, but reading it will probably be incredibly boring for you. If the topic doesn’t interest you, I dunno, click on one of my cartoons or something.
TL;DR: The academic publishing system is bollocks, especially for unaffiliated para-academics. Continue reading “Publish and perish”
I drew my August cartoon for a post I wrote about plain-language research summaries for the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research’s KT Encounters blog. Please click through on the image below to read the post if you’re interested!
I’ve been to dozens of conference poster sessions, but I struggle to think of a single thing I’ve learned from them. I don’t think I’m alone, considering the antipathy toward academic posters I’ve noticed among colleagues and librarians.
Me to fellow conferencegoers: "So can we be the generation of scholars that stops perpetuating this poster nonsense?"
— Iva Cheung (@IvaCheung) June 27, 2017
Finally. It's the awkward beauty pageant of academia except instead of a talent portion it's just hypotheses and graphs. So terrible.
— holy modal lounger (@AhemNason) June 27, 2017
It's a punishing small talk avoidance machine. People shuffle around. Presenters die a little until someone asks a question.
— holy modal lounger (@AhemNason) June 27, 2017
I guarantee that 75% of the people who look at posters are doing it to validate the feelings of the people presenting and not reading.
— holy modal lounger (@AhemNason) June 27, 2017
they're also way more trouble to present than conference talks & have less of a valuable record
— Alex (@axfelix) June 12, 2017
They are really only useful as c.v. padding and for providing a guise for socially awkward academics to talk to one another
— Kristin Hodgins (@kristinhodgins) June 12, 2017
When I first started medical editing, I had to start attending medical conferences and discovered poster sessions. I was so curious.
— Mededitor (@Mededitor) June 12, 2017
So I'm walking around, looking at them, wondering, "What the hell is this? Some kind of static Powerpoint?"
— Mededitor (@Mededitor) June 12, 2017
The second half of the Open for Collaboration event (I summarized the first half earlier) was intended as a panel discussion—but was more like five jam-packed mini-presentations—about not only open access but also open education and open source software. The theme of the evening was, “Is it time for Canada to implement a unified open strategy for higher education?”
Juan Pablo Alperin is a faculty member in the Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing and has worked with PKP for almost ten years.
“Open access to knowledge doesn’t just happen,” said Alperin. “And we need to do more. Open access is only one piece of the puzzle. We have to teach openness—to get students to understand what openness is—and we have to teach the practice of openness.” These students will become future faculty who are completely comfortable in openness and will teach it to the next generation.
Alperin’s guide to teaching openness in five easy steps:
An optional sixth step is, if your teaching involves data, to use open data.
“The number of students that would have done this on their own? Probably zero,” said Alperin. But the number of students who have resisted these steps is also zero. “Students don’t have a problem with doing this,” said Alperin. “Just get them into the habit of putting their knowledge out there.”
David Ascher has been at Mozilla for seven years, where he manages software projects (other than Firefox) and tries to make them as widely available as possible. Mozilla is a global nonprofit with a thousand employees and tens of thousands of volunteers, and its mission is to promote an open internet. “Mozilla has a policy of open by default,” said Ascher. Most of its programs are open for participation and critique. “We have an imperfect view of the world,” he said. “And open drives many decision-making processes and lets the world tell us why we’re wrong. Open keeps us honest.” Part of Mozilla’s work involves pushing for open standards and open policies.
One of its projects most relevant to open access are Open Badges, a micro-credentialing system that allows people to earn badges for what they learn and display these badges online as a way to show their set of skills. Any organization can use the free software and open technical standard to create and issue badges to people who have learned from them. The ever-growing list of organizations issuing badges is diverse and includes 3d GameLab, the Dallas Museum of Art, NASA, and NOAA Planet Stewards, among many others. “A lot of good work went into that,” said Ascher, referring to the Open Badges initiative. “It pushes students to learn throughout their lives, and there’s a rich community built around promoting badges.”
“For an institution, teacher, and students who get open, it can work beautifully, collaboratively,” said Ascher. “If it’s forced through because of policy, the hierarchy of badge systems reflects the hierarchy of the institution’s power structure.”
Ascher touched on the Open Source movement, which he said “got stuck on licensing and software distribution as a topic and lost track of the social, societal impact of that work.” Powerful open source software is behind a lot of what tech giants like IBM and Google have developed. These companies “follow the letter of the law,” said Ascher, “but the reality is that people don’t interact with open source software. They interact with online products and services.”
“IBM embraced open source and used it strategically,” said Ascher. Meanwhile, players in the Open Source movement have spent a lot of time fighting one another and have missed opportunities to advance the movement’s core goals.
Since 2013 Clint Lalonde has been with BCcampus, which manages the Open Textbook Project on behalf of the provincial government. Open textbooks are a subset of open educational resources (OERs), which are teaching resources with Creative Commons licensing and can be freely copied, shared, modified, and reused.
However, “we can’t assume that there’s a common understanding of what it means to be open,” said Lalonde. For example, a lot of MOOCs (massive open online courses)—such as those at Coursera—have open registration but are not openly licensed. There are still copyright restrictions on the material used in those courses.
Fourteen countries around the world have made commitments to OER, said Lalonde, with the view that “publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources. We paid for something—we should make that something as widely used as possible.”
What complicates developing a unified open strategy is that whereas in other countries, post-secondary education is considered a national responsibility, in Canada that responsibility lies with the provinces. A promising step forward is that BC, Alberta, and Saskatchewan have signed a memorandum of understanding for sharing OER.
Open textbooks have thus far saved BC students more than $1 million over the past two years. “Students using OER are doing as well, maybe even better, than students using textbooks from publishers. It would be nice to make OER the default, not the exception.:
Inba Kehoe helped create the BCOER Librarians group, which began in 2013 with the aim of building a community of practice to address the question, “Why not open?” The group shared knowledge, participated in hackfests, created guides and posters, and developed a rubric for librarians reviewing OER resources. All of the discussions are open and take place online through forums such as wikis.
At the national level, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries is pushing toward sustainable scholarly publishing, and within the organization there’s a working group dedicated to open access issues.
Internationally, the SHERPA/RoMEO database at the University of Nottingham stores publishers’ policies about self-archiving and open-access repositories. Librarians can add to the database by looking into publishers’ policies and providing the evidence to RoMEO. “Canadian publishers are not well represented,” said Kehoe. “Let’s get our publishers’ policies into this database.”
By checking the member of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals against the list of journals in the RoMEO database, Kehoe and her collaborators hope to figure out which ones are missing and start collecting the data to fill in the holes.
Back at her home institution, Kehoe oversees the Journal Publishing Service, which uses Open Journal Systems to publish twenty-eight open-access journals. “Three-quarters of them are student journals,” said Kehoe. “Students learn the publishing process and learn about open access.” Kehoe also handles faculty requests to publish research and teaching resources, as well as open access books. “We work with the bookstore, which has a print-on-demand machine,” said Kehoe. “And I ask for research funds for the editorial work and design,” which usually runs from about $2,500 to $3,000.
Since 2006, Rosie Redfield has run the RRResearch blog, an open science blog. She proposed a few top-down efforts that might help openness:
“We need policies in place to make faculty justify it if they want to work with a publisher,” said Redfield.
“There’s inertia among faculty about using open textbooks. Put in top-down policies to make faculty explain why” they decide to use non-OA textbooks. “The material on OpenStax is completely free, and it’s just as good.”
Open-access publishing requires authors to accept a CC BY licence, which means that anyone can use the material, even for commercial purposes, as long as the original author is credited. “Unscrupulous publishers like Apple Academic Press will take open articles, repackage them in a glossy book, and sell the book for more than $100 online. The people who wrote the articles have no idea this is being done,” said Redfield. Often the original publication is not mentioned. “To the scientific community, it looks like the researcher is trying to self-plagiarize. Authors can’t take these presses to court. Journals don’t own copyright so can’t take them to court. We need centralized support to defend researchers’ interests when we use OA.”
Make open access the expectation for students, not the exception. Get students used to having their work be open. Whether the work involves adding pages to Wikipedia or speaking at an Ignite event, which archives its five-minute talks on YouTube, “set an expectation that the work that students are doing for their grade are producing benefits outside the classroom.”
Two major barriers to OA are that “big academic publishers combine strong and weak journals into exorbitantly priced bundles, and researchers protest when they lose free access to their favourite (often obscure) journal.” A possible solution is a nationwide program that gives all faculty and students at Canadian institutions free access to all paywalled journal articles.
For Open Access Week (October 19–25), SFU Library, UBC Library, BCcampus, and the Public Knowledge Project joined forces to host an evening of speakers and discussion about all things open. Ostensibly, the theme of the event was “Is it time for Canada to implement a unified open strategy for higher education?” but the speakers deviated from that theme quite a bit, which, in my opinion, ultimately made the evening more interesting. A summary of John Willinsky’s keynote is below. I’ll blog about the panel discussion in a separate post.
(An overly fastidious editor’s confession: I vacillated between uppercasing and lowercasing Open Access, feeling that open access as a concept is widespread enough that it doesn’t have to be capitalized. Just to be perfectly insufferable, I’ve retained the caps for the name of the movement. If you have strong feelings about this issue, I’d love to hear your thoughts.)
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John Willinsky is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the director of the Public Knowledge Project, headquartered at SFU. Award-winning author of books such as Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED, and Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End, Willinsky has been a champion of the Open Access movement for about two decades. “Open Access started to take on the name in 2001,” said Willinsky, but the idea emerged in the 1990s with the growth of the internet. “There was the sense that, if there is an internet, there should be more access to knowledge,” said Willinsky. “Information should be free, and now we have the means to begin sharing it.”
Until recently, open access has applied largely to research articles, although now more books are being made open access. “Open access means it is available to anyone,” said Willinsky, and in the past decade “We’ve had a great achievement”: Jamali and Nabavi (2015) found that 61 percent of all research articles were freely available. (Ironically, Jamali and Nabavi’s paper is not open access.)
“I have to add a qualifier,” said Willinsky. “Eighty percent of those articles are illegally posted online.”
“Fortunately, there has been very little prosecution in this,” he added.
“The movement has taken hold. The White House has a policy on open access: research supported by all federal granting agencies has to be open access. The Tri-Council in Canada [NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR] requires open access.”
Has open access had an impact on the public? “What happens when we start making these articles free? Will people care?” Willinsky cited research by Juan Pablo Alperin, who found that in Latin America, 20 to 25 percent of people who viewed peer-reviewed articles were not affiliated with universities, and Laura Moorhead, who gave doctors free access to research articles for one year and asked, “Would they be too busy to use these resources?” Moorhead found that, indeed, two-thirds of the doctors who signed up were too busy to look at research articles, but the remaining one-third consulted research to inform their practice, to confirm what they’ve known intuitively, and to resolve disagreements with their colleagues.
The next frontier, said Willinsky, is open data. Pharmaceutical giant Bayer, he told us, has committed to making its patient-level information available to researchers and registering all of its clinical trials. “In the past,” said Willinsky, “pharma did not tell people about trials. They used to be very proprietary about data, which made it difficult to create generic drugs.”
“We cannot take [open data] for granted the way articles are taken for granted,” said Willinsky. The international community has to come together to develop standards that will allow us to take advantage of this open data. Personalized medicine is based on the ability to share and compile and analyze genomic data, he said, but right now we have no standards for sharing it in an interoperable way.
The spirit of cooperation that open data calls for builds on the cooperation that has helped open access succeed. “We’re no longer talking about whether open access is good,” said Willinsky, “but the final kilometre will be the biggest challenge.” Worldwide, we spend $12 billion on journal subscriptions, a number that isn’t decreasing despite open access. “We need to rethink the idea of subscription as a way to exclude,” he said. Subscription, at its birth, was a way to support the creation of a work. In 1612, when the Accademia della Crusca found that it had no money to print the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, the first dictionary of Italian, it called on people to contribute to the cost of printing in exchange for an acknowledgement in the publication. Subscribers directly supported the publisher, and this model of subscription as micro-patronage was borrowed to print similar works.
Willinsky calls on multiple stakeholders—libraries, journals, professional associations, presses, and funders—to create cooperatives that function more like this original subscription model. Some of the $12 billion we spend for subscriptions can surely be reallocated to pay for open access.
We’re seeing the first signs of how these kinds of cooperatives might work. Érudit, for example, is a consortium of universities in Quebec that makes the 130 Canadian journals in its collection available to all of those institutions’ libraries. And the Canadian Research Knowledge Network cuts a single cheque to a publisher and makes that publisher’s journal available to all member libraries. “There’s no advantage to libraries to have that knowledge locked up,” said Willinsky. “Let’s have the same cheque for subscription journals to make all of them open access, available to all Canadians and everyone in the world.”
Professional societies can also pave the way for more access: the American Association of Anthropology, for example, receives $500,000 a year in revenue from subscriptions to twenty-two journals that only library users can see. The association publishes with Wiley-Blackwell but owns its content and could work with any other publisher, including one that would support opening up access of those journals to the public, in a way that wouldn’t cost the organization anything in revenue. “The idea that we have to lock up knowledge to create value doesn’t work with research. Research is a public good like health is a public good. The quality of the whole is lost,” said Willinsky, if we divide it and put part of it behind a paywall.
“We know we have enough resources,” he said. “We are not powerless in the face of that challenge… On the basis of cooperation, we will get access to the whole.”
