The history of the future in publishing...

The nature of publishing has changed. A number of factors have influenced this transformation.
There is a suggestion that this change in culture is entirely due to emerging technologies. I would disagree. Although I concede that new technological advances caused seismic shifts, I believe it is worth consider the social and political landscape of these changes, how and why these technologies were invented. 

Just as Adam Curtis describes in his epic second installment of 'Machines of Loving Grace', there is a strong relationship between the material need for rare items and the digital realities that they are used to create. He cuts between scenes of oxford circus as people queue for the new playstation with images of armed conflict in the Congo over control of precious metals to sell to the west to build the playstation console.

I believe that disruptive technologies and societal relationships have an interdependent relationship. I think that this is true of publishing too. Disruptive technologies can be born out of a societal problem as we can only invent what we can dream and we can only dream of what we want (as opposed to what we have).

The explosion of information that was made possible by new digital technologies was build out of hacker cultures that were dependent on finding alternatives. Yes, the archetiture of the internet was built by governmental scaled institutions: ARPANET et al.... but it was the applications and the inventions of distribution that were mainly the produce of small groups of individuals working to find different ways of communicating across technology.

Publishing has and is adapting to disruptive technologies but I think that it is worth stressing that these technologies were built by people often for noble or problem-solving purposes.

With that in mind, what has been the disruption to publishing by technology? Some would say that it has been democratised by open access and by digital copies which in past 'future' predictions were considered cheaper (there not if the publishers overprice them!!!!). The notion of value added has to creep into the trade publishing model. If other people are allowing access to content free of charge then why would someone pay for content from a publisher such as penguin random house?

Value added could be the production of a printed book or the cost to institutions rather than end users for publishers to host and package open access content. Value added could be the curation of public domain content into attractive packages. Publishers, just as librarians, can be navigates to content, especially when it is so easy to become overwhelmed by content overload.

The Open Revolution and its enemies

We were given an overview to the history of open access publishing. For this lecture I wrote seven and a half pages of notes! So hopefully I have absorbed and can regurgitate some useful information...

Ernesto described a situation that we all face: the dreaded paywall and even situations when we should technically have access to content but through glitches in the systems / un-user friendly interfaces and bad design, we can be blocked.

The insanity of this this systems was demonstrated thusly:

An institution receives public funds for research. A research outcome is captured into an article which is included in a journal which is paywalled and the original author has no rights over their own work. The same institution (who is funded through public money) must then purchases a subscription to this journal to have access to content that was created through public funds and throughout all of this the actual public (who don't have institution access to scholarly content) are barred from reading the research that they helped fund. I have attempted to represent this graphic, apologies for poor MS Paint skills....

We then spoke about the serials crisis and how it informed (perhaps) the creation of open access publishing. Ernesto spoke about what he thought the serials crisis was about: the sudden hike in price for journal subscriptions that academic libraries started to grapple with in the 1980s and 1990s. This 'crisis' however is not a universally felt problem. This perceptive is from the point of view of the academic libraries and refers to a financial crisis/burden.When we talk about paywalling this is from the end user's perceptive. Ernesto encouraged us to read Stuart Lawson's article on this topic, which hopefully I will get around to doing...

Another problem is that many mass media publishers, such as daily newspapers will refer to academic studies that 'prove' certain things. "cabbage gives you cancer" and the like. However if there is a link to any sort of research article or proper reference, once you go to access this article you will often be hit with a paywall notification. This is of course only true to people that do not have the required institutional login to access the content, but as we have already shown there is a madness to the general public funding research that they are then barred from reading.

Lyn Robinson, who was sitting in on the lecture, emphasised that this shouldn't be described as a evil plot created by the publishers. Ernesto argued that, that description was far too simplistic and said that if there is a capitalist plot then it is one that is throughout society and is expressed in the commodification of EVERYTHING not just knowledge and scholarly communication. In my own view I would say that it is not a coincidence that we see the serials crisis happening at a time when the shaping role of the shareholder was rife through business (and still is usually) in the 1980s and 1990s. Publishing organisations realised that the power they held over the dissemination of scholarly communication was immense and that institutions could potentially be held to random financially to a profitable end.

This isn't to say that I don't believe that there are not substantial costs involved in publishing. Of course there are. Even online content takes skilled people to turn into publishable academic journal articles. This was a point picked up by Martin Paul Eve is his lecture on open access publishing. Martin said that he preferred to think about costs in terms of labour, as opposed to the price of a product. Publishing an article requires type-setting, editing, checking and also manufacturing costs and online content management, all of these tasks can be seen as a service which must be paid for. However, he argued that publishers often over quote the costs involved and that he is something suspicious of publishing companies that manage to create vast profits for their shareholders while stressing the heavy cost of production, i.e. the numbers don't add up....

Ernesto then compared the publishing industry to fast food businesses, clubbing venues and rock bands. The thread that I followed was that there becomes a problem when large wealthy companies dominate a market. Everything is different for them, their advertising is completely different, their strategies are different, and this is also true for publishing. For journal publishers this is around reputation and markers like the impact factor. We also touched on the idea of the publisher as curator and selector, which has come up before in lessons.

Lyn asked: What happened before the impact factor and when did it really start to have an impact? Ernesto admitted that he wasn't sure and they spoke about how worth was judged before IF. They also suggested that although scholarly publishing has become a lot more democratised a consequence is that there is a lot more red tape, more people to compete with and that (perhaps) it was simpler and easier before when the system was more elitist. My criticism of this thought process would be to ask - easier for you? and how representative was scholarly communication of more general human experience? If it was easier for default (white) man to get published, should be care? I personally think that the array of voices within scholarly publishing is a strength and that all is required is bodies who have the necessary skills to organise and curator this knowledge, perhaps this will be the publishers' new role. Ernesto asked "What is the role of the record label if people can publish from their bedroom?"

Ernesto spoke about the beginnings of open access and how it was mainly within scientific disciplines also their article lengths were a lot shorter than those found in humanities subjects so could be stored cheaply in online systems. OA within the humanities, arts and social sciences have their own worth and evolution. We heard about the Budapest open access initiative. We were encouraged to look at the Finch Report on OA in 2012 which (as far as I understand) created a mandate that research which is publicly funded should be available OA to the public through institutional repositories - also known as green open access publishing. However I will endeavour to read the original report soon.

Ernesto put forward the notion that "we can only agree that OA is good if we think that more people knowing more is a good thing." this would conflict with the corporate publishing model that knowledge is a commodity. Copyright law traditionally is about restricting distribution of content. OA is not a change in the selection or editorial model. It is a change in the pricing and permissions model. If citation in the end will determine the impact of a research publication, what is the harm posed by open access to quality?

I will be looking for a copy of "Open Access" by Peter Suber in due course.
I will look at "Force II Manifesto 2012"...

Even linking to copyrighted (all rights reserved) content online can break copyright laws as it can be seen as a form of distribution. If I have more skill and brains I would talk about Martin Eve's lecture. However, Martin puts it best in his own words and I would definitely encourage anyone interested in the topic of OA to look at his book: https://www.martineve.com/2014/11/27/book-open-access-and-the-humanities/

The history of scholarly publishing and its relationship with libraries

Session 5

Despite this week's announcement - that our blogs are no longer compulsory -  I will be continuing with this excerise for the following reasons:

a) I have found this useful in supporting my learning of this module

b) it has encouraged me to do more extensive research and contemplation outside of lessons

c) it challenges me to create content, an important facet to the life-cycle of publishing. As Ernesto put it "not every readers writes but every writer has to read" [to read back their own work].

This week we considered the history of scholarly publishing. Ernesto emphasised the difference between 'scholarly', 'trade' and 'professional' publishing, (professional being a recent addition). That scholarly writing had grown out of the church (monasteries and theology texts) was mentioned, the royal society's contribution and the historical context of these traditions of publishing. 

We were shown (and got to touch) facsimiles of 19th century scholarly journals - both science related. I was struck by the format - tiny text laid out like an old fashioned broadsheet. Also the mix of content was striking; book reviews mixed with patent announcements but also poetry was included along the margins.

We talked about how Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was the first academic journal (in the sense that we understand it to be) which was first published in 1665. Which, quite frankly, seems insanely long ago. Ernesto mentioned very briefly the 'uniform penny post' which enabled low cost subscription p+p and created an explosion in subscription publishing.

I was intrigued by this, as I haven't come across it before. I looked at the postal reforms here: Rowland Hill & the Penny Black. However, I found little about their effect on publishing or on wider society.

Ernesto described the different factions within scholarly publishing and how they interact, such as scholarly publishers' reliance on academic libraries for a large volume of their output. As disruption creeps into academic systems this has an effect on the publishing eco-system and also visa-verso. For example, the 'serials crisis' in which academic institutions could no longer afford the high prices of journal subscriptions. What is clear is that the balance between writers and reads is nothing compared to the effect that publishing operations have on these two occupations. It would seem an obvious point to make, but whoever has control over what is distributed in a society has immense influence over a populace.  When the price of publishing is too high then output cannot be disseminated, but then the cost is too low or too easily available there is little room for development and investment in writing, art and curation. Publishing is then under valued as a pursuit.

In one of the suggested journal article given to us by Ernesto I found an interesting table which outlines some of the different characteristics of the author and the publisher. The main difference between an author and a publisher would seem to be that an author creates something within a closed system. They create for their own reasons (even when there are multiple authors) and work toward a 'finished' text/output. Whereas, publishers are curators. They manage content, administrate systems for readers and writers and stimulate production. A publisher's role and existence is dependent on there being a producer/writer (even then the publisher is themself the writer).

*screen shot taken from:

Binfield, Peter,  Rolnik, Zachary, Brown, Cindy and Cole, Kerry (2008) "Academic Journal Publishing", The Serials Librarian: From the Printed Page to the Digital Age, 54:1-2, 141-153, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03615260801973992 [accessed 02/03/2015].