The Ed Techie

An unbundled publishing business proposal

For my digital scholarship book I have been reading about the tenure process a lot (I'll blog it soon). One of the issues that arises is that peer-review is always perceived as the gold standard. Promotion committees in universities, faced with the complexity of judging research in highly specialised fields, revert to using peer-review publication as a proxy. This is becoming problematic in the humanities in particular where the academic book is seen as the main evidence of excellence in research. Such monographs were often published by university presses. But in financially straitened times, many presses are closing, and if they are staying in business then they need to make publishing decisions with very strong financial incentives - they're only going to publish those books which they can be sure will be profitable.

Now, I think we should be finding new ways of achieving what peer-review provides for us, but in the meantime here is a business proposal. Publishing a book is easy - anyone can do it without the need for approval from a publisher using services such as Blurb and Lulu. But in academia we still want the peer-review filter prior to publication.

So here's my publishing business proposal - a service which sits on top of an online publisher such as Blurb. The model would work something like this:

1. The author pays a modest fee (let's say £100) for peer-review which is organised by the company. They then either pass the book, get modifications or reject it. 
2. Once accepted the author publishes via Blurb (or other service), using the publishing company's style sheet to mark it as approved, and with a set price.
3. An additional proof-reading service can be provided by the company, for a fee.
4. The author gets to keep all profits from the sale of the book, hopefully recouping the cost of the initial peer-review process, and making more than they would through the small percentage from traditional publishers.

What is missing is the distribution channel into libraries and book stores here, but that might be an additional service that the author could again opt for at a fee.

What this model does is unbundle the various functions of a publisher and allow authors to pay for them selectively, but to keep all of the profit from the book. At the moment these services are all bundled together and the author pays by only getting a small percentage of the royalties. The unbundled model allows greater flexibility and also means that an author can take a risk if they really want to publish something but it may be unprofitable. In the current model we have conflated academic worthiness and profitability - when you review a book you are really passing a judgement on how well it will sell, not on how academically sound it is. By separating out these elements this model brings clarity (I think) to the process, and still allows academics the peer-review filter they cherish.

Is someone already doing this and if not, anyone want to fund it?

Tenure, publishing and Tony

As Tony Hirst has blogged, his recent promotion case was unsuccessful. I'm obviously disappointed by this, for his sake, and because it was our first attempt at pushing through a digital scholarship case.

We don't know why it was unsuccessful yet (detailed feedback will follow I suspect), but today I was reading an excellent report from the Center for Higher Education Studies at Berkeley titled "Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Valuesand Needs in Seven Disciplines". There are several points it raises which I think reflect on Tony's experience and others like him. Here are some key quotes with my interpretation of each of them:

"the peerreviewed journal article is the primary mode of scholarly dissemination in the sciences and the quantitative social sciences, while the more interpretive, historical, and qualitative disciplines rely heavily on the university press monograph with a varying mix of journal articles, critical editions, and other publications. These traditions, which rely heavily on various forms of peer review, may override the perceived “opportunities” afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category."

So, even if we acknowledge there are benefits to using new technologies, the cultural traditions may prevent us taking advantage of them. This was a theme I explored in my earlier presentation on researchers and new technologies and which I go into detail in for my forthcoming book.

"In most fields, however, a stellar publication record in prestigious peer-reviewed outlets usually counts significantly more in advancement decisions. At some institutions, scholarly contributions such as data curation or multimedia websites are considered to be forms of “service” or “teaching” in a scholar’s academic portfolio, or they may receive credit when presented in a peer-reviewed publication that “discusses” the resource or data set."

Even when other outputs are recognised, the peer-reviewed journal trumps them all to the extent that they may placed in an ill-fitting separate category.

"The degree to which peer review, despite its perceived shortcomings, is considered to be an important filter of academic quality, cannot be overstated."

This stuff is deeply entrenched.

"enthusiasm for the development and adoption of technology should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements (including the needs and goals of final archival publication) in highly competitive and complex professional environments. Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core."

This reinforces the point I made in my research talk - the environment we have created works in direct opposition to innovation and adoption of new technologies. This is a dangerous situation.

If we take Tony as an example the way he works raises some interesting questions about what we mean by research. He typically explores new technologies and data visualisation in particular. A random sampling of recent posts include:

• An analysis of twitter connections between UK politicians
• A representation of online communities who use the same hashtag
• An interrogation of the Mendeley software to show users by institution
• Sharing his own promotion case
• A presentation on ‘data driven journalism’

Each of these is intended to promote discussion, and has suggestion for implications, for example in how higher education can make effective use of data. None of the posts arise from a specific research project, and each of them is fairly small in terms of time and resource. The use of a blog though (instead of publications) allows Tony to engage in this ongoing experimentation, as it has an outlet, and it simultaneously encourages it also since discussions will arise on the blog (or in other places such as Twitter). Taken as a whole then, the blog itself represents the research process, and in this context it is difficult to say that it is not demonstrating the REF definition of research: ‘a process of investigation leading to new insights effectively shared.’

A paper on scholarship has recently been approved by the OU Senate and there is undoubtedly a desire to engage with and recognise new forms of scholarly activity. But what the report demonstrates is that cultural practices are almost inextricably bound up with publishing. And when you unpick what publishing means it leads you to some difficult considerations. This is Bellow's Law in action. When a case like Tony's comes across it simply doesn't fit well with the existing framework. This is, I guess, one of the perils with being a pioneer. Not that this is much consolation.

The way I'm working is (kinda) working

I read Tony Schwartz's The Way We're Working Isn't Working recently (and after my last post, yes it was on the Kindle). Some of it irritated me and much of it I couldn't relate to (not being a high-powered AMERICAN executive who works 15 hour days), but after Scott blogged about the meditation app he found useful, I thought I'd post some thoughts on what I did take away from it.

The first is that napping is good! I like an afternoon nap, but in an open plan office the sight of someone sprawled across their desk with a small puddle of drool congealing by the keyboard is, for some reason, deemed unacceptable. He advocates a 90 minute full on sleep, which is pretty much impossible to fit in, but I do find when I'm working at home a quick 10 minute nap is enough to revitalise me. I don't suppose in these financially straitened times a campaign for more napping in the workplace will find much support but he has some strong evidence that it is much more productive to do so than to carry on through.

Secondly, he proposes working in 90 minute creative bursts, without distraction (we are nowhere near as good at multi-tasking as we think we are he argues). I tried this recently when I had a week of study leave to work on my digital scholarship book. I parcelled the day out into 90 minute chunks and during these I turned off twitter and email and wrote. At the end of 90 minutes I would make myself stop, go away from the desk for half an hour and do something else (walk the dog, have lunch or nap). It worked very well, I wrote a lot in that week and I maintained a high level of concentration and felt more focused.

The rest of the book has advice on eating, self-esteem, taking holidays, etc which are things I don't worry too much about anyway. But it did make me appreciate that we don't often reflect on our own working practice, it is too often something imposed on us by meetings, physical environments and deadlines.

However, there are times when I don't mind working in the distracted, channel-hopping mode he deplores. For example if I'm doing a task that is tedious (completing a research proposal say), then I like to be dipping in and out of twitter, following links, reading other bits in between - it makes the task more bearable. Whether it makes me more productive is a different matter, but if it means I get the job done with sanity intact, that is good enough for me. And it also helps to mix up something mildly creative (even crafting a jokey tweet) with something laborious, possibly even making the output of the tedious task better as a result. 

So I don't think it's a matter of having one way of working, but rather of having ways that suit different requirements. And with that platitude I shall take my nap...

 

Kindle & the iTuning of book purchasing

Probably my favourite app on my iPad is, errm, Kindle. Yes, getting my £600 device to behave like a £100 one is where it's at.

That aside, what is interesting about the Kindle is the way it is beginning to alter my book buying behaviour. In short it is iTuning my purchasing behaviour, in that I am tending to buy more on impulse - a recommendation or thought comes to me, and I don't add it to a wishlist, I buy it. This means I am adopting a more exploratory approach, buying books I wouldn't do otherwise, or ones I know I only want a section from.

But this behaviour is hampered by the publishers and arcane pricing policies. iTunes had the advantage that music (in the form of CDs) was evenly priced, ranging from around £3.99 to £13.99. This meant that getting consensus from recording companies on a set price of 99c for a track was relatively easy. Books on the other hand (and particularly academic books) range wildly from £1 to £100. Reaching agreement on a uniform price is therefore more difficult. But, for the sake of the industry itself, it is essential. At the moment the Kindle version is usually the same price as the physical one - and laughably, sometimes it is more expensive.

Amazon is probably the only player big enough to push this through. Publishers are proprietary and closed by instinct, so want to believe e-books are just another outlet but with higher profit margins. There are two reasons why I think they need to alter their behaviour:

i) iTuning buying behaviour leads to greater sales - if the standard price for a Kindle book was sufficiently low, say £1.99, then it leads to higher sales, particularly in the long tail. Brynjolfsson, Hu & Simester (2007) demonstrate that when a product moves online the concentration of sales becomes more distributed: “the Internet channel exhibits a significantly less concentrated sales distribution when compared with the catalog channel, even though these two channels offer the same products at the same set of prices.” Being online encourages a more ‘long tail’ oriented set of behaviours. They further argue that as search costs reduce, then so sales concentration becomes more skewed towards niche products. This means selling more of those special interest books, but only if the price is sufficiently low to encourage 'I may as well' purchasing behaviour. Maintaining the price point artificially high loses the benefits they might gain from this new channel.

ii) Resentment breeds piracy - by maintaining physical object prices, buyers become irritated at what they perceive as both greed and a lack of understanding around the new channel. Music piracy was driven partly by getting something for free, but also out of frustration that music companies were either ignoring the internet or treating it just like an infinite shopfront. One of the reasons Apple got agreement for iTunes was the fear of Napster. By repeating these mistakes publishers will drive potential customers into piracy, and then spend ages trying to lure them back. This is a key moment for book purchasing, they shouldn't ignore the very recent lessons history has to teach them. I want my book purchasing behaviour to be iTuned, don't turn me away now.

An open Open University course on openness

[Update - see James' comment below, and to clarify this is a course produced as a result of a research project in a collaboration with many others: the Hellenic Management Association, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, SPI in Portugal, ELIG, and UNU Merit. As such it's not an OU course that has been through the normal course production process, nor does it carry OU credit]

Like Tony I think the OU has been a bit slow to start creating truly open courses - I'm partly to blame since I suggested doing one a couple of years back and then didn't do anything. Before that Ray Corrigan simply released his course as openly, but that was withdrawn to make way for OpenLearn. We've had some good study skills courses from the library and Tony has dabbled with it, but I think those have largely been the release of course material. This is the first time we are running the course in the open I think (please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to undermine someone's else's claim).

So James Aczel and team have put together a course on Business and Management competencies in a web 2.0 world, which is taking registrations now for a 1st Nov start. It says:

"openEd 2.0 is a FREE/OPEN course targeting business students and practitioners alike. The course consists of two strands: an academic and a professional practice based strand, though both strands can be taken together. Furthermore, the openEd 2.0 course is MODULAR, thus learners can also “pick” the individual modules they are interested in."

I think this follows in a long tradition of the groundbreaking courses being about the subject itself - a medium is the message principle. When we ran the first elearning course its subject matter was computers and the internet. This is a good way to start since the technology and delivery are part of the experience. But it shouldn't be confused with it meaning that you can only teach about those subjects this way. Just as we can now use elearning to teach about philosophy or engineering, so open courses can be about any subject, this is just a good way of finding your feet with a sympathetic audience.

Be interesting to see how it goes.

Twitter as interdisciplinary tool & culture

I have been writing a chapter on interdisciplinarity for my book on digital scholarship, and thought I would share this section which explores the idea that social networks (Twitter in this case) can be viewed as interdisciplinary tools. One of the ideas I am particularly interested in is that a barrier to interdisciplinary work has been the existence of different cultures in various disciplines. It may be that tools such as Twitter and blogs have a culture of their own, which can to some degree, compensate for these other differences. Put simply, do bloggers in different disciplines have more in common than non-bloggers and bloggers in the same discipline?

In this post I want to look at both the culture of twitter and how this combined with its features can aid interdisciplinarity.

Three key features of twitter demonstrate how an open approach has allowed community norms to emerge. The first is the convention of putting an @ sign in front of a person’s twitter id to send them a reply (eg @mweller). This was a user convention first of all, so it would designate that a particular tweet was for the attention of a particular user. As Twitter developed it became a standard convention, and then incorporated into the software, so now users can see all replies to them listed separately. The @ reply rule grew out of the email naming convention, but has almost become synonymous with twitter now.

The second convention was the use of hashtags to define a particular comment which could be grouped together. The use of the # was proposed by Chris Messina in a tweet: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”. Hashtags can be seen as metadata, describing the content of a tweet. They became relevant as the use of search on Twitter grew. People could search on a hashtag and thus gather all of the tweets on a particular topic. This was seized on by conferences, so all the delegates at a conference would agree to use a hashtag, and later conference organisers began specifying an official hashtag. Search was originally performed by a third party service, (using the open API), but in July 2008, Twitter bought Summize, the most popular Twitter search tool. Hashtags could now be incorporated into the standard Twitter practice, and ‘trending’ became a relevant term as topics grew on twitter, often denoted by a hashtag. Apparently the Twitter team initially rejected hashtags as ‘too nerdy’, but their simple, and unregulated, creation has allowed them to flourish.

Hashtags can now be used as the means to define a community, particularly around an event, course or topic. The open data approach of Twitter means that these can in turn, be analysed to reveal connections between members, subjects of discussion, locations, and prominent members. As well as a useful means of categorising tweets, hashtags are now so ingrained in practice that they form a part of humour on Twitter, with people often creating ‘mock’ hashtags (although there are no official hashtags) as an ironic counterpoint.

The third norm to emerge is that of the retweet. This is the practice of passing on someone’s tweet. Originally this was achieved by copying and pasting the tweet and adding RT and the user’s id at the start. Boyd, Golder and Lotan identify the following motivations for retweeting:

• To amplify or spread tweets to new audiences
• To entertain or inform a specific audience, or as an act of curation
• To comment on someone’s tweet by retweeting and adding new content, often to begin a conversation
• To make one’s presence as a listener visible
• To publicly agree with someone
• To validate others’ thoughts
• As an act of friendship, loyalty, or homage by drawing attention, sometimes via a retweet request
• To recognize or refer to less popular people or less visible content
• For self-gain, either to gain followers or reciprocity from more visible participants
• To save tweets for future personal access

As with the other community behaviours, the retweet became enshrined in code, when in late 2009 Twitter implemented a retweet function on their site. This allowed users to easily retweet a message by simply clicking a button, without the need for copy and paste, but some of the subtlety as to how it appears in timelines was lost (it is shown coming from the originator and not the retweeter).

What these three examples demonstrate is that the community has evolved over time, suggesting, experimenting and then adopting norms of behaviour – the ‘stickiness’ we saw earlier with blog culture. Once it has become established, and proven to add value, Twitter have then moved to implement it in code to make it easier and also to further spread its use. They have not imposed the practice from the start, and sought to define how users will interact, which has often been the case with software development, instead they have allowed the community itself to develop its own norms.

If I analyse my own twitter network (using TwitterAnalyzer.com) then it reveals that the geographic spread of my followers is mainly across the following countries:

• UK
• US
• Australia
• Germany
• Canada
• France
• China

By analysing the biography details people provide the top professions amongst my followers are:

• Consultant
• Technologist
• PhD student
• Lecturer
• Manager
• Teacher
• Librarian
• Author

Amongst these I can identify a number of communities and networks, some of which will intersect. These include:

• Bloggers – many of the people I follow are those I already had an online connection with via blogs, and twitter was an extension of this.
• The Open University – I have acted as an advocate for Twitter in the Open University, and see it as a means of informal knowledge sharing within an organisation
• Cardiff - there is an active twitter community, which often meets face to face.
• >UK Higher Education – As well as bloggers and Open University people there is a large contingent of peers in other universities, funding bodies, libraries, etc
• Journalists and media – a number of journalists and media consultants use twitter regularly
• Tottenham Hotspur – I support Spurs and a number of the people I follow for this reason, but also there is a wider group for whom football is an interest (who are also members of the other networks)

There are a number of sub-groups in this also, for example Canadian bloggers form a coherent network of their own, and many individuals will occupy more than one category. One can view these many different groups and sub-groups as networks that will become more or less active, and distinct, according to external events. For example, during the general election in the

Huberman, Romero and Wu have investigated interactions on Twitter and find that despite many followers the number of people a user interacts with (ie sends replies to) is relatively small. This reflects findings in Facebook and is interpreted as the existence of Dunbar’s number (1998) in social networks. Dunbar’s number suggests that people find it cognitively difficult to maintain meaningful relationships beyond a certain number of friends, usually given as 150, with a smaller core group around 20-30.  While this may well be true for the more stable relationships, the use of tools such as hashtags and retweets allows for a finer grading of online acquaintance. I can read, or retweet, someone else’s posts without ever interacting with them, and they may reciprocate, without engaging in direct conversation, yet these people form part of a valuable network.

As an interdisciplinary tool my twitter network has a number of advantages, and associated issues:

• Geographical diversity – while it is inevitably centred around the UK and North America, it is a global community which brings different perspectives. It is limited by language though, and the immediacy does not allow for translation so there is a danger of English language views dominating.
• Professional diversity – within the different networks a number of professions and experience can be found, which will inevitably bring a degree of interdisciplinarity. One of the benefits of Twitter has been to improve intra-departmental communication within an institution. However, while the table above shows a reasonable range of occupations, it is still largely centred around higher education. There are, for example, very few (or no) priests, builders, make-up artists or senior retail managers in my network (which is not to say they are not present on Twitter). For interdisciplinarity this may not be an issue.
• Size – at the time of writing I follow around 1,100 people and have approximately 2,800 followers. That represents a considerable network and pool of expertise which will share a wide range of knowledge and will also respond to requests for advice on topics outside of my own domain.
• Immediacy – one of the changes Twitter required in my behaviour was a shift from exhaustive reading to regular sampling. As a blog reader I tried to keep up with most posts from those I subscribed to, with subsequent guilt when the unread count on my blog reader mounted. As my Twitter network expanded this behaviour was not possible and so a shift was required, where I ‘dip into’ Twitter, sometimes more intensively and other times I am completely absent. This is the concept of the stream, it is not meant to be consumed in its entirety, but sampled on occasion. Twitterers are responding in real-time and thus it is ideal for capturing diverse reactions and interpretations before they are filtered into disciplines. There is a consequent danger though that this relentless churning of information means useful research will be missed via this route.
• Interdisciplinary bridges – the ease of sharing provides a means to bridge disciplines, in particular the retweet can be viewed as a tool for bridging audiences and disciplines as a twitterer in one domain can rebroadcast to their network, which will have the types of sub-groupings shown above.
• An inherent set of cultural norms – the three features we saw above, as well as other practices indicate that, as with blogs, Twitter has its own set of cultural norms, which provide the required ‘stickiness’ for communities to develop. These may be sufficient to overcome the differences in cultural norms across disciplines, and provide a common framework.
• Professional and personal mix – twitter occupies an intersection between professional and personal, formal and informal, resource and conversation. In many previous tools we have sought to separate out these elements, for instance when we create forums for students in VLEs it is a common practice to have a separate ‘Chat’ or social forum so that this doesn’t interfere with the academic discussion. However, this blend in one place in Twitter both provides motivation to partake (we don’t separate out our thoughts or lives so neatly) and also provides hooks into other areas of interdisciplinarity.

The list above shows a number of benefits in developing a networked approach to interdisciplinarity which may address the issues which have plagued it for many years. Indeed if we had intentionally set out to create a tool for promoting interdisciplinary discourse, then the resultant service may have not looked dissimilar to Twitter.

Bellow's Law

 

In my talk for George last week, I proposed 'Bellow's Law', which I thought I'd share here. 

In that Great American Novel, The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow famously observes that ‘there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining'. When we look at the impact of new technologies, the reverse would seem to be true also:

there is no targeting of liberation; if you release one thing, you also release the adjoining. 

It is this knock-on effect that creates the era of uncertainty we are in now. This can be seen as the law of unintended consequences, but I think the element of neighbourhood it adds is useful. We are seeing the liberation (that is obviously a term with positive connotations, but let’s go with it for now) of a number of activities that are facilitated by the digital, social network. These include the removal of filters, freedom to publish and broadcast, the ability to share easily, establishing peer networks without the need for travel, creating communities of interest around diverse subjects, etc. It is why attempts by many industries to control what is liberated ultimately fail. You can't simply say we will liberate the music track from the whole album or from its physical format and expect record companies to stay the same. If you liberate one then others will follow.

In digital scholarship an example might be seen with publishing - once we have removed the filter to publish through blogs and other outlets then the neighbouring practices cannot remain unaffected: academic journals as the main source of knowledge sharing; the tenure process and what it recognises; research and dissemination; the granularity of research outputs and activity; course content. All of these begin to change because the pressure on one element in an interconnected system has been removed. It's not entirely unpredictable, but it may be one element in the sort of emergent behaviours Scott is interested in.

If you want to know what practices will be influenced by new technologies, then a good place to start is to consider what elements have been liberated by them, and then map the neighbouring practices, sure enough you'll see an activation across these soon. 

And we don't have enough laws named after great novelists.