Ripping books

I have ripped my first book: In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power, by Shoshana Zuboff.

Why In The Age Of The Smart Machine, in particular? Well, first of all, it’s not really my book, or at least I didn’t buy it: it was bought by Robin Peek, my colleague, mentor, and friend from Simmons College (and my ripped version retains her name written in it on the flyleaf), and I inherited it when she cleaned out her office probably over a decade ago. So I didn’t have the emotional attachment to it that I might if I’d bought it with my own money. Plus, while I didn’t (and didn’t feel I had to) run it by Robin to get her permission, I think she’d approve. Also, it seemed appropriate: what could possibly make for an age of smarter machines than large collections of digitized texts?

Ripping a phonebook

I’ve wanted to rip my books since I first read this post, in which Alex Halavais describes ripping his own books (to an audience at an AAUP conference, brave man!), in the interest of saving space at home and having his materials available on the road. Genius, I thought… why didn’t I think of that? And then I was reminded of my grand ambitions when I saw Jason Griffey’s recent post, Ripping your books.

My early forays into the paperless office were not books, however, but papers in my file cabinet. That task is now mostly completed, thanks to my (no doubt very bored) GAs over the past 2 academic years. I’ve also wanted to build the DIY book scanner for a long time, and I even got as far as some semi-serious discussions on the topic with Cristóbal Palmer… but we ran up against the fairly basic problem of simply not having anywhere to build the thing.

And so it’s taken me this long to get around to ripping my books, using more or less the Alex Halavais method. And here’s where I talk about my technique.

First I literally ripped the book. The copy of In The Age Of The Smart Machine that I have is a paperback, with just glue holding the spine together. I broke the spine, and tore the book into chunks. The book is about 470 pages long, and I tore the book into chunks of about 20 pages. Why 20 pages? Because that’s about as thick as the paper cutter in the SILS library will accommodate. I then sliced the inside edge off the chunks, to remove the glue of the binding. That took less than a quarter-inch off the width of the page. Reassemble the book in page order, and stick on desk for a few weeks.

Eventually I got around to the actual format-shifting. Here’s how that worked. I took a chunk of pages and stuck them on our office photocopier. Each stack was around 100 pages, because that’s as thick a stack as the copier could handle (the grade of paper is fairly thick, thicker than printer paper). Oh and BTW, I had to turn each page individually before putting the stack on the copier, because there was some residual glue connecting some pages. Those pages pulled apart easily… but easier to do that pre-scanning than to go back and re-scan later. Because the cut edge of the book was a little rough, I had to put the stack on the copier upside down, so it fed the outside edge of the book in first. That just prevented the copier from jamming on the rough edge.

Our office copier will scan to PDF, and email the PDF. I love that feature. So I scanned the whole book in chunks, and received a bunch of PDF attachments to emails from the copier. I discovered that, slightly annoyingly, the maximum length of a PDF that the copier will send is 50 pages, so for most batches I received 2 or 3 files. Download the attachments. Open in Acrobat.

Because I scanned the book upside down, I had to rotate the pages 180°. Easy enough. I combined the (many) PDF files from the copier using Insert Page. When the whole book was one big PDF file, I ran Acrobat’s built-in OCR on it. Unexpectedly, the file size shrank after OCRing, from around 16K to around 13.5K.

So there you have it, folks. I now have a fully searchable, PDF version of a book. And it was a big book too, so I think it makes for a good proof of concept. I wish it were in a more flexible format, rather than PDF, but I’ll take what I can get. And proof of concept it is too: I’m now faced with the decision of which of my books (that I paid for with my own money this time) get the axe first.

I now have a stack of paper that used to be a bound book sitting on my desk. I’ve considered just dropping it in the recycle bin, but I just can’t bring myself to do that. I think I’ll put it on the table in the SILS lobby. Surely some student will want it. If not, then the bin. And that should tell us something about the value of the print format.

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What Then Must We Do? (Part 1)

I was recently asked to talk to the UNC library staff about open access & copyright issues. Why was I, who am neither a lawyer nor a scholar whose research focuses on publishing and OA, invited to talk about this? Because of my recent run in with Taylor & Francis. Truly, I have achieved internet fame through my blog: I am famous to 15 people. Also, apparently the way to get invited speaking gigs is to have war stories.

Anyway, in an effort to appear as if I actually had a clue when I talked to the library staff, I started writing not one but two posts, in an effort to get my thoughts in order on the topics of copyright, OA, and academic libraries. Specifically, I wanted to be able to answer the question that I believe at least partially motivated my invitation to speak: librarians asking themselves, What Is To Be Done?

So this post is part one of two. Mostly it was written before my talk, as I said, in an effort to get my thoughts in order. But I’ve updated it some now that the talk is over, and I post it here for your edification or amusement. I suppose I’d be happy with either.

It seems to me that this topic has two sides to it: libraries’ collections and subscriptions, and faculty publication habits. Both of these are large, complicated, and thorny issues, which is why I decided to address them in two posts. In this post, I’ll discuss the former.

The position I started from on this is the belief that I’ve held for some time: I think it may be impossible for academic libraries to extricate themselves from the full-nelson stranglehold that commercial journal publishers have them in. Why? Because until faculty stop publishing in, reading, citing, and assigning articles from commercially-published journals, libraries have to subscribe to them, or else cease to fulfill their mission to support the research and teaching at their institutions. And by “subscribe,” I mean either or both purchase to own and have on the shelves, or rent access to online. These are not the same, of course, and have different implications for the library doing one or the other, but I’m going to ignore that for now.

(As an aside: Is the full-nelson a stranglehold? I should probably avoid using sports metaphors, since I have no idea what I’m talking about.)

Of course, libraries have been dropping subscriptions to journals, have for years. The serials crisis, yada yada, nothing new to report here. Academic libraries simply can’t afford to subscribe to everything, so as subscription costs rise, libraries drop titles. (To step up on my evaluation soapbox for a moment: one hopes that these are the titles that receive the lowest use locally, that libraries actually use usage data to make these decisions. But that’s another rant.)

So academic libraries, in order to fulfill their missions to support research and teaching, must subscribe to commercially-published journals… but they’re already falling down on that job by dropping subscriptions. Which is mostly fine, because the subscriptions they’ve dropped are mostly not missed anyway (cf. previous comment about lowest use locally)… and besides, we have ILL networks, so can get those materials, as long as you’re willing to wait a few days.

Now, I’ve been reading about academic libraries dropping their subscriptions to the Big Deals offered by publishers — “offered” is a word which here means, “forced upon” — and instead subscribing to journals one by one. This is, I believe, a step in the right direction. Commercial publishers have academic libraries in a stranglehold, but — to really do violence to this metaphor — ditching the Big Deal is analogous to libraries saying, “You thought you had me by the throat? Ha! That’s my leg!” Libraries don’t need the Big Deal; they’ve just been sold a bill of goods by publishers, in the guise of convenience, because libraries have had neither the data nor the negotiating skills to ask for anything different. As I say, I think this is the right direction to take. Moving away from the Big Deal demonstrates that what’s important for libraries is materials that get used (books are for use), not materials for their own sake. I’ve said it many times: libraries need to (a) get better evaluation data, and (b) grow a pair where negotiating with vendors is concerned.

The problem with the ditching-the-Big-Deal trend is this: commercial publishers aren’t stupid. (Malicious, maybe, but not stupid.) Publishers didn’t get the better of academic libraries by accident; it was the result of careful market analysis and manipulation, over the span of decades. So, for the sake of argument, let’s say that many or most academic libraries drop the Big Deal, and subscribe to titles individually, over the next few years, so that this becomes the norm. Over the span of years, publishers will be perfectly capable of doing data analysis on their sales & usage data, and identifying which individual titles are the most used. And then we’ll be back to more or less the same situation we’re in now: publishers will charge astronomical subscription rates for those individual titles, to milk every last dollar they can out of the library market. Of course what the high-use titles are will vary somewhat by institution… but publishers are perfectly capable of identifying those market differences, and have. And much of the time, publishers have better data about libraries’ usage of online titles than the libraries themselves do. And publishers have demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to use non-disclosure agreements to hide the details of their contracts with individual libraries or consortia, so other libraries cannot benefit from that information. So, in other words, publishers hold all the cards in negotiations with libraries. Publishers are essentially monopolies (in that they are the exclusive purveyors of the specific scholarly content they publish), so it should hardly be surprising that they engage in monopolistic behaviors. The one card that libraries hold here is, of course, the money card. Libraries can vote with their wallets, so to speak. That is, of course, the most important card in the deck (to overextend yet another metaphor). But, as consumers, libraries are operating from an informational disadvantage: they only see their own, and maybe a few others’ consumption behavior, but the vendor benefits from aggregate data.

Let’s recap: subscribing to journals in sets isn’t working for libraries, and subscribing to journals individually won’t work in the long run. Commercial scholarly publishers have demonstrated that they are bad actors. So the only conclusion I can come to is this: libraries have to stop doing business with commercial scholarly publishers altogether. Which, unfortunately, brings us back to libraries not being able to fulfill their mission to support the research and teaching at their institutions.

Of course, libraries will never do this, precisely because doing so would hinder their ability to fulfill their mission. And if libraries cannot fulfill their mission, they risk irrelevance, which means loss of users and loss of funding. If libraries don’t subscribe to the journals that faculty and students at the institution use, then the faculty and students will get those articles from other sources: Google Scholar or other commercial services. At which point, the college or university administration would be perfectly justified in asking, Why are we pouring all this money into supporting the library again? Of course, to be fair, without journal subscriptions, the library’s budget would be quite a bit smaller.

Which brings me to an idea for a study: A library should identify every article that’s downloaded from all journal subscriptions from the publishers’ sites (that is, not from a third-party database), and identify what it would cost if the library didn’t have those subscriptions and each article had to be purchased individually. Then compare that cost to the cost of all of those subscriptions. My hypothesis is that the cost of buying articles individually at the paywall would be lower — quite a bit lower — than the cost of maintaining all of those subscriptions.

Assuming that this is true, I see a new role for academic libraries (and one that librarians will almost certainly hate): as a funding source for purchasing individual articles at paywalls. What I envision is this: some clever setup on the the campus network, so that any time anyone hits a paywall for an article, there would be an option, Do you want to purchase this article? Click yes, and it would be purchased and downloaded, and the library fund debited. Make it as easy as online shopping. I challenge some library somewhere to do this.

There are, of course, 2 problems with this: First is that, again, if this were to become the norm for libraries, publishers would jack up the cost at the paywall, and we’d be back to square one. Second is that any barrier to access, even if the user is not the one paying, would probably decrease the number of articles accessed, and so we’re back to libraries not fulfilling their mission to support research and teaching.

I’ve started writing the conclusion of this post several times, and I keep finding myself slipping into the realm of faculty publishing behaviors. But I’m going to set that aside for my next post. For now, let me try to focus on answering the original question I set for myself: What can academic libraries do in the arena of copyright and OA, in light of collections and subscriptions?

The position I’ve been advocating for throughout this post is this: drop all subscriptions from commercial publishers of scholarly content. Subscribing to third-party databases of scholarly content might still be viable, I’m not sure. I haven’t thought that one through very extensively. (Note to self: make that the topic of a future post.) “Collect,” by which I mean link to in the OPAC and via any other mechanism, any and all OA publication venues that might be relevant to the local community.

Of course, no library would do this (except for the linking to OA pubs in the OPAC part, which many libraries do in fact do), for the reason stated above: failure to then fulfill their mission. Doing so would essentially kill the function of the academic library. And so I’m back to where I started: impossible for academic libraries to extricate themselves from their completely dysfunctional relationship with commercial journal publishers.

The only hope that I see for academic libraries is actually almost completely out of libraries’ hands: for faculty and other scholars to radically change their publishing behaviors, and start only publishing in OA venues. And I mean only: if any commercially-published journals are left standing, we’re back to square one for libraries. As I wrote at the start of this post, I’ll deal with publishing behavior in my next post.

Am I being overly dramatic or doom-and-gloom about this? Maybe. Maybe I’m just having a failure of imagination. But I just don’t see any way to get from here to there without burning the village.

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In which Pomerantz responds to his loyal fans

I’ve gotten a lot of love and kudos from the interwebs from my recent post, in which I document in nauseating detail my taking a principled stand on retaining copyright to an article I and a colleague wrote, and ultimately telling the publisher Taylor & Francis to kiss my shiny metal ass. I haven’t done any data analysis to back up this claim, but my sense is that this was my most-retweeted tweet and most commented-upon blog post ever. I thank you all for your support.

But I’ve also gotten some flak, mostly in the comments on that post. That criticism falls, more or less, into 3 categories:

  1. Why don’t you publish your paper in an OA journal?
  2. Why don’t you put your paper in your universities’ institutional repositories?
  3. T&F and all publishers have more generous contracts in their back pocket, if only you know to ask.

Let me respond to each of those in turn. Because I think those are all fair criticisms, and all get to important issues.

Why not publish our paper in an OA journal?

Well, for one thing, my co-author Diane and I were pretty well sick of dealing with journal editors and publishers by the end of our saga, so we didn’t really want to start all over again from square one. Second, as I wrote, neither of us needed that paper to be published for professional reasons. UNC (my institution) has post-tenure review, and Duke (Diane’s institution) has performance reviews, and publication record is part of those review processes. So another publication would be useful professionally. But this one article won’t make or break either of us.

When I got tenure I seriously considered taking a vow (though to whom, I’m not sure) to only publish in OA journals. (The only reason I ever got involved with T&F in the first place was because my friend and colleague Lorri asked me to write something for her special issue… that will teach me.) But I realized very quickly that taking an OA-only stance in this field is almost completely untenable. There are simply not enough A-list OA journals to choose from. And I apologize if you’re the editor of an OA journal in ILS… nothing personal. Obviously yours is one of the great ones.

Still, despite my protestations, there are plenty of OA journals out there to choose from in ILS. And some of them do have good reputations. And, let’s face it, the only way a B-list journal becomes an A-list journal is if good scholarship is published in it. This is a slow process, like most things in academia: one good article in a second-tier journal won’t do the trick, it takes lots of good articles over the span of years. Which probably means a concerted effort on the part of the editor(s) to raise the journal’s profile. Still, this can be done, and I’ve seen it done, with at least two journals in ILS. (To give credit where it is so abundantly due, the editors who took on this probably pretty thankless reputation-building task for their respective journals are Candy Schwartz, and the team of Michelle Kazmer and Kathy Burnett.)

So: I hereby vow (though I’m still not sure to whom) to only publish in OA journals from now on… to the extent that is possible. I reserve the right to publish in commercially-published journals, in the event that a friend and/or colleague asks me to contribute to their special issue, or something like that. (Lorri will, I feel certain, never ask me to contribute to anything ever again, now that she knows what a pain in the backside I am.) Anyway, that is my vow: to the extent possible, publish only in OA venues. And you, dear reader, should do the same. Be the change you want to see in the world.

Why don’t you put your paper in your universities’ institutional repositories?

Yes, we should do that. And, when I’m less sick of thinking about this paper, I will do that. (I don’t want to speak for my co-author.)

But here’s my problem with IRs: putting a paper in an IR gets me nothing more than self-hosting it, and self-hosting it is easier. Not that it’s difficult to put a paper in an IR, but it’s just so much easier to put it up on my own site. In the case of our paper on liaison librarianship, all I did was make the Google Doc public, and link to it here. Easy peasy.

As for the “gets me nothing more than self-hosting”: don’t get me wrong, I think IRs are a good idea, in principle. But I have to say it, IRs are a perfect example of one major thing that’s wrong with many digital library projects. (And I think I get to say this, given that my research is, in large part, on DLs, and I teach the DL course in my School, so I therefore spend a lot of time thinking about DLs.) This one major thing is this: IRs are, by and large, hidden silos. Part of the point of OA publication is that the publication is freely accessible to the reader, but equally important is that it’s discoverable. Freely accessible without discoverability is, quite frankly, close to useless. The problem with most IRs is that they their contents are not discoverable through Google. Try this sample search. For whatever reason, someone thought that it would be a good idea for the Carolina Digital Repository to exclude search engine bots. So the only way to know that my paper is in the CDR is to search in the CDR, or for me or someone else to link directly to it. This is of course an easy fix: The CDR could simply be opened up to Google. But it isn’t currently. While my site is. And so, obviously, is Google Docs. So if I put our paper in the CDR, it’s in principle publicly available, but in practice invisible.

Publishers have more generous contracts in their back pocket, if only you know to ask.

Well, I know that now. And now, so do you. Others have very generously told their stories in the comments on my previous post: see those to learn about what to ask for.

But look, it’s completely ridiculous that authors have to ask at all. (And, in my case, browbeat.) The ALA has two copyright agreements, copyright assignment and copyright license, and they give you the option up front, no hassle. Why is that not standard practice?

Others have said it before, many times, but let me say it again… Authors donate content for free to publishers. Reviewers and editors donate their time for free to publishers, to add value to that content. Commercial scholarly publishers take that content, typeset it, and sell it back to us for insanely high profit margins. It’s exploitation, pure and simple. And while they’re at it, they want to own that content forever, in every medium currently known or that will ever be invented between now and the heat death of the universe, and prevent authors from ever using it again? Oh, but no, don’t exaggerate, Pomerantz… We’ll give you your copyrights, of course we will. The forms are in the bottom of this locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of The Leopard.” What’s the problem? Well, I’m sorry, but fuck that. Play nice or get out of my house. Commercial publishers, what have you done for me lately?

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My Copyfight

Actually it’s our copyfight, but my had a better ring to it.

Here’s the backstory. Lorri Mon, a friend and colleague, is the guest editor of a special issue of the journal The Reference Librarian, on topics around the future of reference and library education. Since I have a thing or two to say about those topics (as my students have heard ad nauseam), Lorri asked me to contribute a paper. I said, ok, how about a paper on liaison librarianship and how to teach it in the standard Reference course in ILS programs? I figured I could easily write 5000 words on that topic, since I have taught that standard Reference course many times, and have tried to integrate liaison librarianship into that course. And it was Lorri asking. So I said yes.

Fast-forward nine months or so. In the interim there somewhere, I had asked Diane Harvey, another friend and colleague, and the Head of the Instruction and Outreach Department for the Duke Libraries, who’s involved with their liaison librarianship program, to co-author the paper with me. Nine months or so later, the paper is written. We’ve submitted the paper to Lorri. It’s undergone blind peer review. We’ve made revisions based on the reviewers’ comments.

And here’s where the fun begins.

Lorri sends us the copyright form. Both Diane and I sit on it for a while, a few weeks, more out of laziness than anything. We were not intending to play chicken, as described here by Jason. After a few weeks of sitting on this form, Diane left me a voicemail asking me if I’d signed the form yet, and I left her a reply voicemail saying no. I also thought I should contact Lolly Gasaway, law professor extraordinaire and former instructor of my School’s copyright course… and who I have heard, from her very own mouth, ‘fess up to playing that game of chicken with publishers. Diane beat me to the punch though, and contacted Kevin Smith, Duke University’s Scholarly Communications Officer… and, incidentally, my hero.

I have to stop here briefly, to point out that the publisher of The Reference Librarian is Taylor & Francis. I had not even thought about who the publisher is, prior to agreeing to write this article… like a typical academic, I imagine. In academia, we’re acculturated to the mindset that the publication is the important thing, and the publisher is a means to that end. Journals, not publishers, have reputations and impact factors and whatnot, so that when we choose where to publish, “where” equals “in what journal.” We give little thought, generally, to the publisher behind the journal. Indeed, the publisher is largely invisible, or if it is visible, it’s only in the person of the journal editor, who doesn’t even work for the publisher. We all know that there’s a serials crisis, and about the open access movement, and all that. But when the rubber hits the road, we tend to think in terms of journals, and not in terms of publishers. I will never make that mistake again.

In response to Diane, Kevin replied that Taylor & Francis’ copyright agreement form is extremely confusing. See the form here. Note the following two issues. One: The copyright assignment agreement is on pages 2-3, but the author signs page 1, making it unlikely that the author will read the fine print on pages 2-3 closely. Two: The Schedule of Author’s Rights contains the actual terms that the author is agreeing to, but that Schedule is not included in this document, nor is a link to it provided. Kevin, of course, being a mensch, found it online… see it here.

Kevin also pointed out that, according to the Schedule of Author’s Rights: (1) The author transfers all rights to T&F, (2) T&F grants some rights back to the author, and (3) among these are (a) the right to post a preprint “on your own website, or on your institution’s intranet” (item 4 on the Schedule), and (b) the right to post a postprint, but not until “18 months after first publication” (item 6). Now, let us consider these rights. First of all, preprints are defined as “versions of the article created prior to peer review.” In other words, a draft. I would argue that a more common definition of preprint is the version of the article after peer review and revisions, but prior to copyediting and layout: what T&F defines as a post-print: “the Article in the form accepted for publication in a Taylor & Francis journal following the process of peer review.” (Though, to be fair, if I understood Kevin correctly, he disagrees with me on these definitions; he would define these terms as T&F does.) Second, I can’t post a post-print until a year and a half after the issue in which my article appears is published. Which means probably 2.5 years after it was accepted for publication, given how long the issue production process takes. Kevin pointed out that this 18-month restriction is unusual, and that the goal of it is pretty clearly to make author self-archiving difficult and, ultimately, irrelevant.

After this conversation between me, Diane, and Kevin, I emailed Lorri to ask if she could look into whether a change could be made to these policies. She did, and got an extremely unhelpful and unbudging response from a T&F representative (“we cannot change this section of our author rights policy”). I then replied to Lorri that Diane and I would not sign the T&F copyright agreement. I referred to the UNC Faculty Council Resolution on Faculty Ownership of Research. (I understand that Duke has a similar policy, but I don’t have a URL for it.) I offered to provide a revised author rights document that Diane & I would be willing to sign. And I apologized profusely to Lorri, for being a thorn in the side of her special issue. Lorri suggested that I write all those things to the regular journal editors (Rita Pellen & William Miller) and the T&F rep (Stacy Stanislaw), which I did.

And here, as a comic interlude, is where we had a “What we have here is a failure to communicate” moment. The response I got from Rita was: T&F will not publish the article without the copyright form signed by the authors, therefore we cannot include your article in the special issue. I replied, I wouldn’t expect T&F to publish the article without a copyright form signed by the authors. What I’m saying is that we won’t sign the form as is, but I’m offering to create an edited version of the form that we would be willing to sign. To her credit, Rita suggested that I send her an edited version of the form, and offered to submit it to T&F. This of course committed her & William to nothing, but was, from my point of view, a welcome show of solidarity.

So I created a revised version of the T&F copyright form. Because the original form was so confusing, my goal was to make it a single page: just the page that the author signs. I edited out all references to the “agreement attached” (that is, the copyright assignment agreement on pages 2-3), thus also eliminating all reference to the Schedule of Author’s Rights. I also removed the assignment of copyright to T&F, and replaced it with the right to publish, etc. — language which I lifted from the ALA’s copyright license agreement. My revised form is here… not that it matters, since T&F rejected my version.

The T&F rep Stacy replied to me a few days later that T&F “cannot accept your revised copyright form.” I assume that in the intervening few days, a fleet of lawyers had picked apart my watertight legal logic… though Stacy never mentioned who had decided that they could not accept my version. Instead, Stacy suggested that we sign T&F’s “License to Publish” form. What she said about that form was: “This form will allow you to retain copyright on your article. We would then consider you — the author — the rightsholder and list you as copyright holder at the top of the article.” One odd thing about this License form is that, apparently, only a T&F production manager can generate one, so it took a few days for one to get created for us. But here it is.

I have to stop again briefly here, to point out something very important. T&F has — had all along — a License to Publish form. Why had Stacy not mentioned this before? This email exchange had, by this time, been going on for a month. Let’s give Stacy the benefit of the doubt: let’s assume that she was not being malicious, but that she simply did not know about this License to Publish form until she ran my version by T&F’s lawyers. This is a very significant piece of information for the rep to a journal (almost certainly more than one journal) to not possess. Which means that this is a very significant oversight on the part of T&F, not keeping their journal reps informed. The result of which was that the rep to a journal was unprepared for a situation in which the author demands a less-restrictive copyright agreement. A situation which, I would like to believe, is not uncommon. Or perhaps this is a deliberate tactic by T&F? A tactic to put authors in the position of having to agree to a restrictive copyright agreement, because no one they could possibly have any contact with knows any different. Which brings me back to maliciousness.

As an aside, when Stacy first mentioned this License to Publish form, before a copy was generated for us, I did some searching. Turns out, Peter Suber had a post back in 2006 on T&F’s iOpenAccess program, which seems to have been the origin of their License form. So this License form has been around for 5 years. Plenty of time for Stacy to have learned of its existence. Also, plenty of time for it to have been integrated into the journal production process more cleanly, so we didn’t have to wait days for just the right T&F employee to create one.

The License form looked ok to me… the author retains copyright, and there’s no mention of an embargo period. But we ran it by Kevin Smith anyway, to get his reaction. And, of course, he demonstrated why I am not a lawyer. His reaction was that there is not much difference in the author’s position under the License agreement or the original Copyright Assignment agreement. The author retains copyright, but grants T&F an exclusive license to publish. By doing so, the author would need T&F’s permission to put the article in a repository. That permission is contained, you guessed it, in the Schedule of Author’s Rights, which is referred to in the License form. So there would still be an 18 month embargo for posting a post-print.

And so we come to the end of this saga. Diane and I spoke, and decided to withdraw our paper from the special issue. I wrote to the T&F rep Stacy, to drive the point home that all of this was on account of a too-restrictive copyright policy; and I wrote to Lorri to apologize profusely, again, and to promise her several drinks the next time we meet, for the hassle.

So now we have this paper on our hands. It was peer reviewed and revised. What to do with it? Diane & I discussed submitting it to another journal, but we decided that we’d had it up to here with publishers for the moment. And, of course, we don’t actually need to publish this article… need in 2 senses, actually. For one thing, I have tenure and Diane has continuing appointment, so neither of us need this publication for professional reasons. For another thing, if we want to put this article out there, we can just do it. We have the intertubes and we’re not afraid to use them.

And here’s where I get on my Open Access soapbox. What is the point of scholarly communication? I would argue that the most important function of scholarly communication is making scholarship (the input, e.g., data, datasets, etc.; and the output, e.g., articles, reports, etc.) publicly available. So that the scholarship can join The Great Conversation: so others can benefit from it, can react to it, can criticize it, etc. So scholarship, in all its forms, should be made public, though not necessarily published, at least in the traditional sense of the word. Of course, I’m not saying anything even remotely new with any of this.

And here’s where I realize that I am a very bad person. Because this whole saga has made me realize that there’s a possibility for a dirty trick here. One could, were one so inclined, submit an article for review to a journal, have it reviewed, make the revisions as recommended by the reviewers, then withdraw the article. This is of course what we did, but not by design. One could do this by design, and thereby address one of the persistent criticisms of scholarly publishing outside of the vehicle of the journal: the lack of peer review as a quality control mechanism. Plus it would still allow you to do whatever you want with your article, unbeholden to any publisher’s copyright agreement. Of course this is a total free-rider approach, and therefore unsustainable at scale: free-ridership as parasitism. But hell, the scholarly journal publishing industry is collapsing anyway, why not help it along?

So in the end, Diane & I decided to just make our article public. So here it is: here is a link to the article as a Google Doc. In fact, the Google Doc in which we wrote the article. I was thinking of setting up a WordPress instance and installing CommentPress, and putting this paper there, so that you, dear readers, could comment upon it and give it a round of post-print peer review. And maybe I will do that for future writing. But it seemed like overkill in this case.

Let me start my conclusion by saying that there’s a certain amount of irony to this whole soap opera. On the one hand, this is a tempest in a teapot: this paper is in no way worth the trouble that has surrounded it. It’s not even 5,000 words, and is hardly my magnum opus. (At the risk of speaking for my co-author Diane, it isn’t her magnum opus either.) I really don’t care all that much if it gets published or not. On the other hand, precisely because I don’t care if it gets published, it’s the perfect paper on which to take a principled stance. I can afford to take a principled stance, because I don’t care if I lose. Where “lose” is a word which here means, “don’t get the paper in the special issue.” Which, let’s face it, is losing the battle but winning the war.

It’s good to be tenured. Pre-tenure, I would have signed the copyright agreement and barely stopped to read it. If I did read it, I would have been annoyed and then signed it anyway. Now, I can afford to be an asshole take a principled stance and give the publisher a hard time over an unreasonable policy.

Now, let me really conclude by saying this: I hereby boycott all T&F journals. T&F publishes a fair number of journals in ILS (Journals by Subject > Information Science), and I shall not publish in any of them ever again. And, furthermore, I would encourage you, whether you are in ILS or not, to not publish in T&F journals either. Because, let’s face it, the only way publishers will change their restrictive copyright policies is if authors refuse to publish with those publishers. Give ‘em hell.

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Email stats

Inspired by Paul’s #noemail project, I’ve been wondering what the cost-benefit of the various media I employ is. Despite being solidly in the “I wish I could do that” group, I’m not quite ready to divest from email. For me, the most important consideration is that, as Paul points out, our shared institution relies heavily on email, and there is no real institutional solution other forms of communication and data sharing. As tempting as it is, some days, to cut myself off from many of my colleagues’ conversations, I’m not quite ready, or perhaps not quite brave enough, to do that. But the #noemail project got me thinking about how much time I spend on email, and other media, and what I get out of it. So I decided to do what any good academic would do: I decided to collect some data.

Following Paul’s lead, I started with email. Plus, email seemed like the easiest medium on which to collect data.

In the interest of ease of data collection, I decided to care about only 3 categories of email:

  1. Received: Number of email messages I receive per day. This is individual messages, not threads: if I get 3 messages from the same person as part of one conversation, then I count 3 messages.
  2. Read: Number of messages I read per day. I delete many messages unread: the Subject line and 2-line preview is my friend. I’m also going to be liberal about this one: if I start to read an email that turns out to be spam or otherwise irrelevant, I’m going to count it as read, even if I didn’t read the whole thing.
  3. Replied: Number of messages to which I reply per day. This is not equal to the number of messages I send per day, because I initiate some email conversations… though as few as I can get away with. This is the number of received and read messages to which I reply.

These categories are, naturally, flawed. Received email includes spam. Spam is always an issue, but especially so since I was migrated to Exchange: I get far more spam now, in Exchange, than I did when I was forwarding my UNC email to Gmail. I’ve been setting up Inbox Rules, to filter out as much spam as I can. (Read: Exchange is a radical downgrade from Gmail.) But plenty still gets through. So the Received category includes spam. The Read category includes only those messages that I opened, even though I read the Subject line and 2-line preview of probably every email I receive, to decide if I want to read it in more depth. So that’s cheating a little, maybe. But opening an email and reading the whole thing takes more time than reading just the Subject line and preview, and that time spent is what I’m interested in. Finally, Replied includes only email that I received that I replied to, not email threads that I initiated. I try to do that as little as possible, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. So anyway, the usual limitations apply: These categories are flawed. It’s only one person’s data, it’s only 2 weeks worth of data. This data is only counts; I didn’t collect any data on the content of these emails. Et cetera.

How did I collect this data? Unfortunately, manually. I created a simple 3-field Google spreadsheet form. Every morning, I look through my Inbox and Trash folders, count up the 3 categories of emails above for the previous day, and fill in the form. Now that it’s summer, I’m sitting in front of a computer far less than during the semester, so most of my email is read & written on my iPhone. (I love the Dragon Dictation app.) I’ve read about iPhone usage forensic software, the name of which I no longer recall, which I’d love to use. But when I read about it, I looked into it, & I recall it being about $700, which is approximately 2 orders of magnitude more than I’m willing to spend, given that this data collection is a total whim on my part. I indulge my whims, perhaps too often, but not that much. (If anyone has a less expensive iPhone or Mac usage forensics solution, I’d love to hear about it.)

So: Obviously Replied will be a subset of Read, which will be a subset of Received. The question is, what are the percentages of these subsets?

I’ve collected data on this for 2 weeks now. Admittedly, 2 weeks isn’t much time… and anyway it’s summer, so email traffic is down in the halls of academia (though not as much as I’d wish). But I wasn’t going to wait until August to collect this data. So anyway, here it is. As my colleague Chuck says: A little mediocre data is better than no data at all.

The first thing to notice is that Thursdays are the big email day. I would have expected Monday, to be honest, but apparently I’d have been wrong. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

The second thing to notice is that, predictably, weekend email volume is way down. Also, 5/30 was Memorial Day, which is why that day, though a Monday, had weekend-level numbers.

This data indicates that I receive approximately 30 email messages per weekday, ± approximately 10. I read approximately 50% of those, which honestly is a higher percentage than I had expected. I reply to less than 10% of the messages I receive, less than 20% of the messages I read.

As an aside, Paul reports that he gets “about 100+ new messages, post-spam filtering, hit my inbox every 12 hours.” So clearly I shouldn’t complain… I’m at a third of his volume. But then, I’m not as much of a network hub as Paul. Obscurity has its compensations, clearly.

Looking at this data the other way ’round, I delete unread approximately 50% of the emails I receive. So clearly I need better spam filters and a better killfile (or the Exchange equivalent). I’m not spending a lot of time deleting all those emails, but even a little time is too much. Also, more than 80% of the emails I read do not require a reply. Clearly much of the material in the email I receive could just as easily be handled by RSS feeds. I’ve moved as many of my mailing lists and table of contents subscriptions to RSS feeds as I can, over the past few years, so those are off the table. What’s left is, I’ll be honest, mostly institutional announcements, discussions among my colleagues (other than Paul, as of 3 days ago), and conversations with students. I don’t have much hope that the first 2 will move off email any time soon. I can do better with the third.

So there you have it: 2 weeks of email data. Problematic though it may be. This is perhaps just the start: I’m interested in how I use other media as well. Paul writes that “Twitter always returns more value for time spent for me than email.” I’m not actually sure that’s the case for me. But that’s fine: the point here is not to emulate Paul (worthy goal though that may be), but to look critically at my own media use. The problem is, I’m not sure how to collect data on my Twitter (or Facebook or whatever) use: not just what data to collect, but logistically, how to collect it… cf. previous comment about iPhone usage forensic software. Suggestions, anyone?

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Citizen of Google

Within the past two days the news came out that Google was shot down by Judge Chin for overstepping in the Google Books case, and that Google is forking over half a million dollars to detect Internet transparency issues.

On the topic of a Google books: I am not by any stretch of the imagination a copyright lawyer, so I’m not really qualified to be issuing opinions on this subject. I’m really looking forward to Kevin Smith’s blog post on this topic. However, I think that Judge Chin really blew this one. First of all an opt-in arrangement, as Google has pointed out, is completely untenable. As a result, a vast number of orphan works will be lost for to public use, which is a social tragedy of the highest order. Second, I will grant you that perhaps Google would gain essentially a monopoly over orphan works. However, who else but Google could do this? I don’t see Microsoft or Amazon stepping up to this particular plate. This is my objection to Siva Vaidhyanathan‘s Googlization of Everything arguments: yes, on the one hand he is right that it is a bit of a Faustian bargain. However, who else is going to do these things? It sure as hell isn’t going to be libraries or the library community generally. It should be, but it hasn’t been and it won’t be. It is, unfortunately, Google or nobody. I say this to my classes all the time, and I’m sure my students are tired of hearing it, but Google is fighting libraries’ fights for us, and has been for years.

On the subject of Internet transparency issues: Google is developing a set of tools that will be immensely useful in political crisis situations, such as existed in Egypt and exists in Libya, and according to the reports they are going to give it away for free. Let me emphasize these points: Google is creating a set of technology tools that are clearly useful in the service of social change. Also, Google is giving it away for free. Why are they doing this? Clearly, it is in Google’s business interest for there to be more, rather than fewer, users on the Internet. It really doesn’t matter why there are fewer — ISPs throttling users, governments cutting off ISPs, etc. It’s in Google’s business interest to prevent or limit this. Still, that business interest has the happy side effect of enabling the creation of tools that can be used for social change.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Can I become a citizen of Google, please? I haven’t seen a single government on the planet do as much to promote the public good in the online arena as Google has done within the past several years. I’ve been following the reporting and tweeting about Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, etc. with great interest. And I’m coming to the conclusion that what is good for the Internet is good for society. Increasing channels of communication is good for society, and the Internet allows for an increase in the number of channels of communication. That’s overly simplistic, admittedly, but that’s what it boils down to. Enter Google. It is in Google’s business interest to enable use of the Internet, and to foster the existence of online channels of communication. The fact that this is a profit-making endeavor for Google does not, I think, change the fact that by pursuing their business interests they are also incidentally providing tools for the benefit of society… whether those tools are to detect Internet throttling, or to provide large corpuses of texts accessible to every one of the several billion internet users on Earth. Let me be more clear. I am coming to believe that by pursuing their business interests Google is making the world a better place. And I can’t believe I’m hearing myself say this: I sound like a Conservative. I’m the last person who would claim, uniformly, that business can run the world better than government. But in this case I’ll make an exception. Somebody tell me I’m wrong. Do I wish that some public or nonprofit organization were doing these things? Yes. But I don’t see anyone stepping up to these particular plates in such a systematic way. If not Google, who? If Google decided to run their own country, I would very likely want to move there.

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A proclamation!

Cross-posted with the Pomerantz Kidblog.

It’s been a long time since I’ve obsessed publicly, here on this blog, over a children’s book. So clearly it’s time.

We’re big Mo Willems fans (the man who brought us the pigeon who is not allowed to drive the bus), and ever since seeing this movie, have been obsessed with naked mole rats. (It was a happy, happy day when the Syracuse zoo installed a naked mole rat exhibit.) So we were congenitally unable to resist this book:

Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed

Wilbur’s different from the other naked mole rats in his colony, because he wears clothes — and likes it! But what will happen when Grandpa, the oldest, wisest, and most naked, naked mole rat ever discovers Wilbur’s secret?

*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***

What happens is this: Grand-pah makes a proclamation, on the acceptability of clothes. (There’s one page were 3 naked mole rats repeat “A proclamation!” Charlotte loves to read this dialogue in increasingly high voices: A PROCLAMATION! A proclamation! a proclamation!) And when he makes his proclamation, Grand-pah is dressed in a rather natty summer Southern suit and hat. At which point, Wilbur rushes home to get dressed, and when he returns, several other naked mole rats are also clothed.

Which makes me wonder: Where did Grand-pah and the other naked mole rats get their clothes? Three possibilities present themselves to my mind:

1. They went out and bought them right away: Grand-pah before his proclamation, and the others as soon as the proclamation was made. I reject this option, as it wouldn’t have given the others enough time to go shopping. The text very clearly states that Wilbur ran home and got dressed and returned, “as fast as his legs could take him.”

2. They stole the clothes from Wilbur’s store. Oh yes, did I mention that Wilbur opened a clothing store? At the sarcastic urging of his fellow naked mole rats. One has to wonder to whom Wilbur expected to sell clothes, since, as his fellow naked mole rats repeatedly point out, naked mole rats don’t wear clothes. Theft from an unmanned (unmoleratted?) store would of course speed up the clothing acquisition process. But it would also indicate an amorality and lack of regard for the law that one does not usually associate with naked mole rats. Though let’s give them the benefit of the doubt: maybe they intended to pay Wilbur later.

The other problem with option #1 is this: Where did Grand-pah get his clothes? Not from Wilbur’s store, since if he had, Wilbur would have been wise to the theme of the proclamation ahead of time. Maybe Grand-pah (and the others?) went shopping at someone else’s store? But not a store owned by another naked mole rat, since it seems pretty clear that Wilbur’s store is the first of its kind. So this begs the question, who else makes clothes in naked mole rat sizes? Moles? Rats? Is there some kind of rodent Garment District a few burrows over?

3. They had the clothes all along, and only had to run home to get them. I’m sure it says something profound about how my head works, that this is my preferred option. Because it makes me wonder about the existence of a clothing underground in the naked mole rat community. Anti-nudists? Could there have been a whole bunch of closeted (Get it? Closeted? Ha!) naked mole rat dressers out there? While only Wilbur was bold enough to go public with his fetish, it was a fetish shared by many: approximately half of all naked mole rats, to judge by the picture in the book. Perhaps Wilbur wasn’t a poor businessrat; perhaps he had a bead on otherwise hidden naked mole rat subculture. I imagine all those poor little naked mole rats, dressing up in front of their tiny full-length mirrors, feeling like freaks and misfits (Get it? Fit? HA!). Worried, and rightly, if Wilbur’s case is any indication, about persecution by their fellow naked mole rats. And then Grand-pah takes a stand validating clothing fetishism! Support from the top for inclusion and alternative lifestyles! Civil rights for the clothed! It’s enough to make you cry. Well, almost.

Of course, prior clothes-ownership only pushes back the problem; it does nothing to address the underlying question: where did the clothes come from in the first place? Still, I’m willing to overlook this glaring omission, in favor of a good civil rights story.

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My Favorite Martian

Recently I tried to watch Babylon 5. I never saw it when it was on the air in the mid- to late-90s, even though many of my friends were big fans. So, way late, I figured I’d give it a go. I’ve always been impressed by the fact that Straczynski apparently created a real 5 season-long story arc, without succumbing to the X-Files Effect (that is, getting hopelessly lost in the storytelling and ultimately jumping the shark). So I convinced Y, got the pilot from Netflix… and I could barely make it through those 90 minutes, the writing and acting was so bad. The aliens were pretty interesting, and Straczynski had clearly done some solid world-building (galaxy-building?). But, well, the writing and acting was just terrible. Afterwards, twenty minutes on Wikipedia reading about the show satisfied my curiosity about all the questions that the pilot raised. So that’s that then; I won’t be watching more Bab5.

Watching the Bab5 pilot got me thinking about one of my favorite topics: aliens. Specifically, TV and movie aliens. Why are all aliens in TV and movie SF basically people with prosthetic foreheads? And I don’t mean the costuming, either. CG exists, so we can create whatever damn creature we want on screen, and yet most movie and TV aliens are people in costume. Even aliens that are entirely CG (I submit to you Avatar) might as well be people in costume. But I’m willing to overlook that. What I want is a really alien alien: an alien with alien motivations. Not an alien that’s basically a human personality trait taken to the extreme (think Spock). In Bab5, the aliens were basically humans, with human motivations: a declining empire struggling to remain influential on the galactic stage, a civilization recently freed from oppression with a chip on its shoulder, a more advanced civilization whose technology is indistinguishable from magic. Interesting, but hardly original.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, as he so often does, totally nails it in this video. In it, he says:

You know what the best Hollywood alien movie has been in my list? The Blob, the old Steve McQueen movie from the ’50s, The Blob. That didn’t have a face, did it? It was just this creature. And you didn’t know what made it work, but it loved your blood. Even though it was a B-movie they did well.

In my opinion, this is one of the things that makes Tyson so good at presenting popular science: he’s really got his cultural referents down. Typically, my favorite alien is more obscure. For my money, the best alien in all of science fiction — and I mean it, in the entire corpus of SF from the beginning of the genre — is the ocean from Solaris. I mean the original Stanislaw Lem novel, not the Tarkovsky film, and definitely not the George Clooney remake.

Solaris is brilliant on a number of levels. But one aspect of the story in particular that I’ve always appreciated is that Lem creates an alien that is well and truly alien. I mean, really, what would we have to talk about with a planet-sized ocean? There is a chapter in the novel in which Lem describes the history of human discovery of Solaris. Part of this was that it took humans a long time to even recognize that the sea was alive and had volition. A major theme of the novel is the question of whether the sea is sentient, and if so, what does that mean for the definition of sentience?

Existentialism has dealt with the issue of the Other for a long time. The Other is fundamentally unknowable to the Self. This is both horrible and wonderful. (I’m pretty happy that Y can still surprise me, after being together for over a decade.) But let’s face it, no matter how alienated we are from our fellow human beings, both they and we are human beings, and so there will always be a lot of common ground. Cultural differences, experiential differences, gender differences, fine. But both you and I have the same sensorium. We’re evolved from the same common ancestor shrew. We’ve spent our whole lives breathing oxygen, eating carbon-based foods, drinking H2O. On the other hand, what do you and I share in common with a planet-sized ocean that single-handedly maintains its planet in a stable orbit in a multiple star system and can produce human avatars? Sweet FA, that’s what.

Why can’t we have decent aliens in TV and movie SF? The George Clooney remake of Solaris was actually ok, but it wasn’t about the ocean, it was about the relationship between Kelvin and Rheya. Which is, of course, rather complicated by the fact that Rheya isn’t human at all, she’s an avatar of the ocean. And she comes to realize this slowly, and it messes with her head. That in itself is an interesting story, and it’s a subplot of the Lem novel. But — and let me repeat this — the movie is not about the ocean. Why not? Because an inscrutable planet-sized ocean doesn’t make for very good movie-watching. Even if the filmmaker did show us some mimoids, it would just be good CG work. And so what? Avatar had good CG work, so I hear… I never saw it, and I don’t care to. Again with the lame aliens.

Why was the show Firefly so good? Well, good writing, good acting, good world-building. So, hard to go wrong there. But fundamentally, it was a Western. It was Wagon Train to the Stars, as Roddenberry supposedly pitched Star Trek originally. Firefly was SF with no aliens, only humans. It was about people being people. (Even the Reavers were people, in the end… people irreparably broken by other people.) And why is this good SF? Because people being people makes for good storytelling, no matter what the genre.

I believe there must be a middle ground between Firefly and Solaris. And it’s not Spock (though I love Spock) and it’s not Worf and it’s not Yoda. The Alien is close… the Alien is good, but fundamentally the Alien is just a killing machine. It’s a weapon of war. So, fairly simple motivation there. The Predator, as much as I like the Predator movies, is just a prosthetic forehead: it’s a hunter, and we’re the prey. Simple. There’s something nicely visceral to stories about people not being at the top of the food chain (think Jaws), but the Predator is not, fundamentally, alien. I mean, think about if the roles were reversed: a human lands on an alien planet and starts to hunt the natives? Not too far-fetched really: just replace “on an alien planet” with “in an alien land.” Like, say, the Americas, circa the 15- through 1700s. Or reverse the roles in another way: replace the Predator with something that humans actually hunt, a deer perhaps. You get a Far Side cartoon.

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks in that video about the Blob. But as much as I like the Blob, again, it’s just a killing machine. Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Maybe. What’s the motivation of the Pods? We don’t know. What would happen if they succeeded in replacing everyone on Earth? Would they just go about their business (our business, really), or would they suddenly launch into some new and previously hidden agenda? We don’t know. Invasion of the Body Snatchers has always worked for me on two levels: the inherent creepiness and paranoia of everyone around you slowly being replaced, and the further paranoia of the underlying hint of a hidden agenda.

And speaking of hidden agendas… for my money, another great alien is the Targive from Future Boston, a book so obscure that, according to WorldCat, fewer than 200 libraries in the world own a copy. As far as I know, I own the only copy in private hands in the world. The Targive are always hidden, you never see one. Indeed, it’s not even clear if the Targive are individuals like us. All you ever see is the Targive Citadel, a constantly shape-shifting structure made of, apparently, beetle chitin. (The Targive are genetic engineers.) People go in, and come out genetically changed. How did these people make their requests? We don’t know. Targive-created products are all over the place in the book. How did they get to market? We don’t know. What motivates the Targive? We don’t know. They seem to be interested in collecting DNA. But what for? We don’t know.

And so, once again, we return to inscrutability as the characteristic that makes the alien most alien. And perhaps that’s where we have to leave it. If an alien had truly alien motivations, would we be able to relate, to empathize? What does an octopus want? What is it like to be a bat? This is probably unknowable. And so the truly alien alien would be inscrutable, by definition.

But that’s really unsatisfying, as an avid SF reader. I challenge someone to write an alien, motivated by truly alien motivations, and not have that character be inscrutable.

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Social Q&A vs. Newsgroups

This tweet by Howard Rheingold led me to this short piece that he wrote in 1994. In it he describes newsgroups as “a worldwide, multimillion member, collective thinktank, available twenty-four hours a day to answer any question from the trivial to the scholarly.” That description sounds a lot like social Q&A sites to me. Which got me thinking: of course there’s nothing particularly new about a “new” technology not being new. But I started wondering what the actual differences are between social Q&A sites and newsgroups. I mean, it seems obvious. But these things never are, when you start thinking about them.

Let’s start with this: Shah, Oh, & Oh 1 define social Q&A as “a service that involves (1) a method for a person to present his/her information need in natural language (mostly a question, and not a collection of keywords), (2) a place where other people can respond to somebody’s information need, and (3) a community built around such service based on participation.”

Let’s take those in turn for newsgroups, shall we?

One: A method for a person to present his/her information need in natural language. Yes, newsgroups certainly meet that criteria. Of course, a newsgroup is a venue for more than presentation of information needs; it’s a venue for conversation. And questions are a subset of conversation. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that newsgroups afford all manner of speech acts, and questions are one type of speech act. But I suppose that amounts to the same thing.

Two: A place where other people can respond to somebody’s information need. Yes, that has always been one of the functions of newsgroups.

Three: A community built around such service based on participation. Well, no. I guess here’s where we get to the crux of the difference between social Q&A sites and newsgroups. Newsgroups are not built around the service of question-answering; newsgroups are built around topic-specific conversation. The fact that question-asking and -answering can happen in that venue is a side benefit, one that derives from the nature of conversation.

So there’s the distinction: the raisons d’être of the two types of venue are different: newsgroups are based on conversation, and social Q&A sites are based on question-asking and -answering. Can we then make the leap to say that, since question-asking and -answering is a subset of conversation, social Q&A sites are a subset of newsgroups? That doesn’t sound right to me. A subcategory? Maybe. A narrower use case?

The only other distinction that I can think of at the moment is platform: newsgroups and social Q&A sites are powered by different software, with different functionality. Despite having been a big Usenet user in my misspent youth, I actually don’t know a whole lot about the software that powered newsgroups. I do know, though, that there’s at least one open source application designed to run social Q&A sites. And again, while I don’t actually know for sure, I feel confident that Yahoo! and other companies that run their own social Q&A sites wrote their own software to do it. So the software is different, an custom-built.

Which brings me to the functionality of that software. Newsgroups didn’t allow the user to do much except write and submit what you wrote. What you wrote could be a reply to what someone else wrote. Social Q&A sites allow that as well, though with less threading: there’s the question and there are the answers, but not replies to the answers. Social Q&A do, however, have whatever reputation systems they’ve implemented: in the case of Yahoo! Answers, for example, the questioner and/or the user community can vote on best answers, and answerers accumulate points and levels. Newsgroups for sure didn’t have that kind of explicit reputation system in place. Newsgroups had reputation systems in place, yes, but they were socially constructed, not built into the software. So another difference between newsgroups and social Q&A sites is the functionality of the software behind them. Which, I suppose you could argue, falls out of the raisons d’être of the two types of venue.

  1. Shah, C., Oh, S., & Oh, J. S. (2009). Research Agenda for Social Q&A. Library & Information Science Research, 31(4), 205-209.
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In which Pomerantz reflects upon his responsibility for his students’ research

Every semester I advise a few students on their Masters papers. Last semester I had two students who, for very different reasons, had trouble collecting data. In the end, both students were fine, they collected good data, their papers were interesting, they got their papers submitted on time, and all’s well that ends well. But the fact remains that the middle part of their process was rocky. This has stuck with me. In this post I will reflect on the following question: To what extent is this my fault?

My immediate reaction to even thinking that is to then think: Pomerantz, you have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. Bordering, perhaps, on megalomania. Certainly you have too much of an internal locus of control.

Then, my counter-reaction is that no, these are my advisees, and if they’re having trouble with the mechanics of their studies, then I should have done something differently prior to their arriving at that point. I’m supposed to be the expert in how to conduct a research project, not them. How have I failed if my advisee is running into problems conducting said research project?

Then, my counter-counter-reaction is to remember what I say to my advisees — inspired by Huxley (“The great tragedy of science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”) and Einstein (“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”) — that research is a messy, unpredictable business, and the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley. (Ok, I don’t really say that in Scottish.) Part of the process of learning to do research is learning how to make a graceful recovery when things go sideways. Because they almost always do.

So the question I have to ask myself is this: What is the educational goal of the Masters paper? When the topic comes up (which is more often than you might expect), I tell people that, at least in part, the goal is to get students thinking about doing research right before they graduate and leave us to join the professional world. So hopefully our grads will carry that mindset out into the profession, and will be inclined and unafraid to conduct research in their places of work. And that this research will be of good quality. Because academics in ILS are always saying that what this profession needs is more good (emphasis on good) practitioner research. So… if this is in fact the educational goal of the Masters paper — to give students experience with conducting a full research project — then my counter-counter-reaction is the right one: let them dangle. Trial by fire makes for effective learning. No, I’m being melodramatic. It’s not trial by fire: it’s not like I make my students figure out how to recover from problems in their research by themselves, without any assistance from me. But it is true that educational research shows that the best, and possibly only, time for people to learn is at the point of need.

So the next question I have to ask myself is this: Is “experience conducting a research project” the only educational goal of the Masters paper?

We do have the option for students to do a Masters project… though, interestingly, I have at least one colleague who will not advise students if they want to do a project instead of a paper. But never mind the fact that, if we’re unwilling to advise on this, we should probably not have that option on the books. The fact remains that the Masters project is on the books as an option for students. And at the risk of being pedantic, the Masters project is not a research project. The description says that the Masters project can be an evaluation… and I’d be the first to advocate for the value of conducting an evaluation. Indeed, I’ve had students conduct evaluations for their Masters paper research. So perhaps that’s not such a useful option for the Masters project. The description also says that the Masters project can involve system design. In all my years in SILS, I’ve had one student do a Masters project and build something. So clearly this is not a very popular option among the students.

Still, it is an option. So, what is the educational goal of the Masters project? Harder to say, since I’ve thought about it so much less. But as a first pass, I’d have to say, to give students experience with managing an entire development project. The problem with that is, project management isn’t exactly something you can do by yourself. To do project management right, you need to be managing a team, or something like that. Without that, the Masters project becomes simply an opportunity for teaching oneself new skills: a new programming language, perhaps. Which goal is probably better suited to a field experience or an internship. So I’m talking myself out of the usefulness of the Masters project, here. I’m one step away from becoming like my colleague who won’t advise students on Masters projects.

But let’s put that aside for the moment. If a goal of the Masters project is to give students experience with (individual) project management, then certainly you could say that that’s equally a goal of the Masters paper. Time management and managing one’s own workload are valuable skills, and ones that you really shouldn’t be allowed to graduate from grad school without having acquired. But I think it shouldn’t be the job of the Masters paper / project to get students those skills… the acquisition of those skills is really built into the entire process of grad school. I think we don’t need to belabor the point at the Masters paper stage. Plus, if a student gets to the point of doing a Masters paper and hasn’t yet acquired those skills, it’s probably too late anyway. I’ve had one student in that position, actually. He hasn’t finished yet.

I’m left with the conclusion that the educational goal of the Masters paper — at least the primary goal — is to give students the experience of conducting a research project. So I should allow them to hit snags. Next question: How can I help my students do their research projects in the most educationally and professionally useful way possible? Actually, I think I’m doing a pretty good job with that. Though I feel like Descartes, saying that: he started from first principles (cogito ergo sum), and ended up reconstructing the world exactly as it was, complete with monotheism and monarchy. Suspicious, if you ask me. But anyway, that last question boils down to the perennial question that someone in my line of work should be asking themselves every day: How can I be a better teacher? Not a question I can answer here.

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