The Ed Techie

Hits & thoughts ain't evidence

This week we've been populating the impact map for the OER Research Hub. The impact map (http://oermap.org/) has been developed largely by Rob Farrow and Martin Hawksey, and features lots of Hawksey-goodness. You can do the following on the map:

• Look at evidence for any one of our 11 hypotheses (eg. for hypothesis A regarding performance)
• Look at the flow of evidence
• Examine evidence by country
• Filter evidence by sector, polarity, hypothesis, country
• Explore the map for OER policies (a work in progress)

So, as well as putting our own evidence in there, we have been trying to add in the research of others that really demonstrates evidence for one of the hypotheses. And this has been an interesting exercise. I have been working through Rory McGreal's excellent resource OER Knowledge Cloud, going through papers and trying to add them in. The problem is very few OER papers actually give anything approaching proper evidence or research. Try it yourself, pick a few papers from the knowledge cloud at random. What you get are project reports about releasing OERs, lots of "lessons learned", a lot of beliefs stated as evidence eg "this will improve retention", quite a lot of download stats, but very little hard evidence that you could point at and say to someone "this supports (or negates) this hypothesis".

In some ways this is understandable - OERs had to be developed in order to do research on OERs. So the early phase of the field will always be partly driven by evangelism and implementation. But we've moved beyond that phase now, after more than 10 years of OERs. The field really needs to up its game in terms of research now and demonstrating impact and evidence. I think all OER projects should have a research strand built in that asks questions such as "what are the expected benefits of this work?", "how will we measure that?", "what happens if these aren't realised?" etc. (Our 11 hypotheses would be a good start for anyone).

I really believe in OERs, and I think in the early stage of their development you just needed to take a leap of faith and develop them. But they have reached a level of maturity now when we can ask tough questions of them, without fear of undermining the whole enterprise. Indeed, I think having such solid research to point to is essential for OERs to make that next push through into mainstream practice.

So if you've got any of this evidence lying around (and I do mean evidence, not something a bloke down the pub told you), please let us have it.

Build it and they might come

Some of you will have seen a report about a survey conducted on the use of Open Course Library (OCL) free, open textbooks. The findings were that use was "extremely limited". Over the 42 courses that could use the textbooks, this amounted to 98,130 possible students, but only 2,386 did, some 2.4%. All that is rather disappointing to say the least, and it left me a little puzzled. Why would uptake be so low? Given the question "do you want to buy this $100 textbook or have this free one?" one might expect more than 2.4% to go for free.

Tony Bates posted a very good response to it which captured much of my feelings. The survey itself raised a number of questions he suggests: 

• who commissioned the survey? If it was the college stores, would students necessarily go through college stores to download free online materials? If it was the college stores, is not there a conflict of interest here? Who benefits from the sale of high-priced textbooks?

• is this survey too soon to draw any real conclusions? How long were the materials available for instructors to review them? These kinds of decisions are likely to be taken several months before courses open, and it may take another year at least before instructors start to accommodate to these materials

• since the report concluded: ‘the question remains as to why so few of the sections for these 42 OCL courses actually used any of the free or lower-priced materials’, why did the Chronicle of Education, when reporting this, NOT get a comment from the people running the project in Washington State?

 Let us for now, accept that the survey is a true reflection of the state of uptake (although I agree with Tony, using stores as a measure seems an odd way to approach it). This raises other questions about OER adoption. Simply existing is not sufficient for a number of reasons:

• Faculty have established practices, if they are unaware of the resources, or see no reason to change, then why disrupt their curriculum? 
• Existing publishers will not go quietly into the night and spend a good deal on marketing existing provision that open textbooks have to compete with. In online chat someone said Pearson had been on their campus 3 times that week.
• Students will create a momentum if they are aware of the content and it is relevant. The question I posed at the start regarding cost becomes a no-brainer if the material performs the same function

What this mostly comes down to is awareness. Given time enough students may pass around knowledge about this material, but to really make an impact OERs have to be competing with large marketing budgets. This represents the next phase in this particular battle for open I would suggest. Having created the content, getting into the system is now the challenge.

Understanding OER in 10 videos

A long time ago, back when we still used the phrase 'web 2.0', I proposed an idea for a tool called "9 step" which sequenced online resources together, with connecting narrative. My proposal was that you can learn anything in 9 steps. I think Orson Welles once said he learnt everything he knew about cinematography in an hour, so 9 resources should be enough.

Well, due to my inability to see things through and lack of commercial flair I never did anything with the idea. Since then similar things have been trialled, to not much success, but I won't let that deter me from declaring that it was a great idea. 

Anyway, as part of the OER Research Hub we thought it would be useful to give people an introduction to OERs. I decided resurrecting my sequenced resources idea would be appropriate, but in a less ambitious manner, so I've created a YouTube playlist of 10 videos that explain OER. This goes from a simple "isn't it great" type introduction, then sets some of the context around sharing and reuse, before looking at some examples of projects and research. It ends with a long, thoughtful piece from Gardner Campbell on what openness means. 

You can add notes to a playlist, so this provides some of the narrative, but they're quite short. Even so, I think watching this playlist would give anyone a pretty good understanding of OERs and associated issues. You can view it as a course if you like. It could be massive, it's open, and online. If only there were an acronym for such things...

Anyway, see what you think, I feel we could make better use of playlists as educational tools.

Better bums on seats

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikelegend/4879039847/ >

During the expansion of higher education in the 90s & 00s it was all about getting more bums on seats. In the UK the Labour government set a target of 50% of 19-22 year olds going in to higher education. The aim then was just to attract as many students as you could.

But now we're in a period of reduction in student numbers, the drive is less for pure numbers but for students who will stay the course. It is very costly to universities to go through the enrollment process and for a student to then drop out. And it's often a damaging experience for the student as well, so it's in the interests of both parties to ensure that learners are really ready and suited to the course they want to study. We want bums on seats still, but we need to make sure they're the right bums on the right seats.

This is one of the hidden benefits of OERs and MOOCs I think. For instance on the OER Research Hub project we found that lots of users of OER are using them as tasters before committing to formal education. So they're seeing if they're ready for the level of study, and also the subject area they are interested in. And once they're in study, lots of learners are then using OER to complement their formal study to help them get through a course.

The OU backed FutureLearn MOOC platform launched today, and our Vice Chancellor Martin Bean has suggested that MOOCs act as a shop window for universities. I think this is a sound model - if learners get something for free and then some sign up for formal study, both parties win. This makes it a sustainable model, without the need to make a profit for venture capitalists.

But what I think may be as interesting as its recruitment function is the filtering function of OERs and MOOCs. If as a result of having studied open content the subsequent students you get into formal education are then less likely to drop out then it represents a huge benefit for both unis and learners. It would be a difficult figure to quantify, but I think improved retention savings would be worth looking at.

Calling OA academic book publishers

Now is the time for you to seize the moment and make a small to modest profit while performing a useful academic function. 

Okay it's not quite a passionate rallying cry, but I've been thinking about open access book publishing recently for two reasons. The first is that on an almost monthly basis I get emails from colleagues/peers/random people asking me about my experience of publishing with Bloomsbury Academic because they are writing a book proposal and want to go open access. They've either been told no by established publishers or 'yes, but it'll cost you £20,000 - will your university fund it'. To which the answer is no, or 'eff off you cheeky money grabbing ...', depending on the author. This indicates to me that there is a market for more OA book publishers out there. 

While we're here, I'll answer the query about Bloomsbury - my experience was very positive, they did a professional job on copy editing, they were prepared to go to several designers to get a cover we liked, they produced a good web site for the free online version, and were brave in giving it a CC-NC licence. So, I'd commend them to any authors.

The second event that set me thinking about OA book publishers was the recent FlatWorld Knowledge debacle. Once proclaimed as a model for sustainable open textbooks, they recently announced that, erm, they weren't offering books for free anymore.

I don't know FWK's business model but it seems to me they went too ambitious. They were after that big US set textbook market. This means you have to have a big product. Which means you can then get venture capital (of $26 million), which means you have to have a really big product, and so it goes on. They developed their own platform to allow annotation of books, and sales system. But when you're doing that you get through a fast money burn rate, and then the idea of, you know, giving books away seems less appealing to the VCs who've piled their money in.

But I think the more modest market of academic text books could be accommodated by a far simpler model. The reason academics are going to publishers and not just sticking their own books up online is that they get a range of benefits from the publisher, which include:

• Reputational benefit - if you self-publish you're seen as a looney with a fragile ego, if a publisher puts your book out, you're an author. This matters in academia where the book sales won't amount to much more than in literature (where you can be the next 50 shades success and not give a damn about reputation because you have a massive yacht).
• Copyediting - you really do need a professional to go through an 80,000 word book and do a proper job of copyediting
• Layout, design - no, you can't use that clip art. Or comic sans.
• Manufacture - making all those book things
• Promotion - this is probably the biggest one. Getting books into libraries, promoted at conferences and reviewed in places is difficult. I have to say all my publishers have really relied on me to provide places for review, and even then I'm not sure they ever got them reviewed, so this service isn't as good as it should be. But library distribution is important.

I've raised this before, but it seems to me that these functions are not difficult to realise for a commercial publishers and don't require huge amounts of upfront investment, unlike FWK, if they make use of existing tools. Let's take each of them in turn:

• Reputational benefit - this will take time to acquire, and will need the publisher to operate a quality threshold. This will probably necessitate reviewers looking at proposals and making recommendations. I do this occasionally and going rate seems to be about £50-£100.
• Copyediting - this is generally outsourced by publishers (mine were in India). 
• Layout, design - again, this can be outsourced. You'd want a housestyle and template, and much of it can be done by the author.
• Manufacture - use print on demand or simply operate through a provider such as Blurb. You provide the online version free, and take a percentage of the sales of the print ones.
• Promotion - this would require decent knowledge of how to get books into libraries, and a good social media, network presence. But it's not insurmountable and most publishers don't do great at this anyway.

So how to make it all pay? I'd suggest two options:

1) The authors pay upfront the production costs (for copy-editing, reviewing, design and initial print run), but then keep a large proportion of profits. My royalty because I wanted to go OA was less than 10%, so authors may want to gamble and go for a 50% return if they think it'll sell well. 

2) Company pays production costs, but claims a larger percentage of royalties.

In both cases the online text is free under a CC licence and the physical book costs (and maybe a 99p Kindle version?). I think there are a lot of models that could be explored here that existing publishers don't seem willing to engage with. This would be a prime model for University presses of course, but most of those have been sold off or disbanded, so I'll reiterate my call for a rebirth of university presses. But it looks like some publishers are giving it a go - Open Book Publishers are operating a model similar to the one I've set out for academic texts in the Humanities. I think there's room for a few more in the market too.

It's not without risks, and the returns may not be as large as FWK hoped for, but I think it's a viable business model. And it's one the sector seems to require. So, go on you entrepreneurial types, give it a go. I'll come on board as your Chief Biscuit Officer if you want.

 

 

Two OER sites for researchers

I've been involved very peripherally with a project funded through SCORE, and led by my colleague Robin Goodfellow. The aim was to develop two sites, one aimed at overseas postgrads coming to the UK to conduct research study. This site gives advice on matters such as research methods and writing for academic purpose. It is at http://www.readytoresearch.ac.uk/

The other site is aimed more at UK undergraduates and looks at digital literacy, digital scholarship type issues, so addresses topics such as learning with social media, plagiarism, collaborating online. It can be found at: http://www.digitalscholarship.ac.uk/

The interesting thing about the project was that the brief was to build it using only OERs as content. This led to quite a bit of agonising about what constituted an OER, for instance did it need to have an explicit reuse licence attached? In the end we have opted for CC licensed, good quality OERs where we can, but occassionally had to opt for a different resource.

The role of the team then was to find and select appropriate resources then. We didn't want a site that provided an exhaustive list of all possible resources, but rather one that deliberately selected what we thought were the best ones. This reinstigation of a filter, after it has been removed from the publishing stage, is a potentially significant role for higher education I think.

While it was probably quicker to find, select and describe resources and then coordinate a nice site around them than it was to produce them all from scratch, it wasn't that quick. But I do think the overall quality is better as a result and this may be the better selling point for OERs. There is an obvious analogy with teaching here - we could have just as easily been creating a course in these subject areas. 

Anyway, I hope you find them useful and can maybe think of some people to pass them on to.

The three ghosts of open access articles

WARNING - this post contains stretching of a flimsy idea to breaking point. Look away if you find strained literary metaphors distressing.

In keeping with the festive season, I'm going to frame some thoughts on stages of academic publishing with a Dickensian motif. I'm trying to develop an approach that covers three phases of a journal article's life, so let's go for a Christmas Carol. 

The Ghost of Articles Past - Scrooge is shown his own past Christmases, and given to reflect and reinterpret them. The ghost says he is there for Scrooge's 'reclamation'. For articles, they are usually published in a journal, where they may receive an initial flurry of interest, and unless they become a standard text they fall into obscurity (indeed most never emerge from obscurity). As I mentioned in my last post, I'm interested in the possibilities that open access allows for a new life for articles, for them to be taken, republished in different collections or reused in different contexts. This can happen with existing, proprietary articles but it's a closed process, it is open access that allows for the generative, innovative reuse that will allow articles to be reclaimed.

This idea is somewhat in its infancy in terms of meta-journals and having a critical mass of open access content, but in other ways one of the oldest practices online with bookmarking, linking, blogging. So it indeed resembles the first of Dickens' spirits in being "like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium"

The Ghost of Articles Present - This is the easiest one, as it represents the norm. I've written about academic publishing a lot, especially in this chapter of my book, so I won't repeat it all here. But despite the many criticisms we may have of it, the carefully researched, well-written and peer-reviewed article has a strong place in academia and is in many ways the core practice that allows it to distance itself from commercial or marketing influence. But it's also a bloated industry in its own right and one that is both bountiful and undergoing change, just as Scrooge is in the midst of change as he views the different interpretations of present Christmas. So we can both see the current publishing model as akin to the Ghost who was "a jolly Giant, glorious to see" and also one who like the Ghost of Christmas Present is destined to fade soon.

The Ghost of Articles Yet To Come - one of the most interesting developments over recent years has been the rise of the physics pre-print repository arXiv. Articles that are ‘published’ here are not peer-reviewed, so can be pre-publication, or unpublished. An initial filter is applied, which is that the article is of reviewable quality. To quote the arXiv founders: “that they would not be peremptorily rejected by any competent journal editor as nutty, offensive, or otherwise manifestly inappropriate, and would instead at least in principle be suitable for review.”

ArXiv has become the de facto distribution medium for scholarly articles in Physics, with Sir Martin Rees commenting it has “transformed the literature of physics, establishing a new model for communication over the whole of science. Far fewer people today read traditional journals. These have so far survived as guarantors of quality. But even this role may soon be trumped by a more informal system of quality control, signaled by the approbation of discerning readers”. 

These are articles that have not yet been published, but could be. They are thus akin to the Christmases of the future that Scrooge sees - they are shadows, possibilities, but not definite. In the removal of the heavy peer-review process this approach strikes fear into many academics, like the Ghost who "was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form... the Spirit neither spoke nor moved"

My plan is to try and cover all three of these aspects. I have the Meta EdTech Journal, am an editor on JIME, and am trying to set up an arXiv type pre-print for ed tech. I think people often see new technological approaches supplanting old ones, but it's the complementary nature I find interesting. It is the advent of alternatives to previously monolithic systems that is exciting.

So, join with me and Scrooge in saying:

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!"

 

Launching Meta EdTech Journal

The other day I was trying to find a list of Open Access journals. I found this very useful open list from George Veletsianos. While looking through the journals it occurred to me that what would be useful would be a regular review of these, or a kind of meta-journal. Not one that just lists all the papers, but rather a filtered view.

I mentioned it on Twitter and Doug Belshaw pointed me at the new Google/Wordpress collaboration, Annotum - a WordPress theme for creating open access journals.

So in the a spirit of DIY, I have created Meta EdTech Journal. The idea is simple - three times a year an issue will be published, collating some of the articles from the open access ed tech journals. At the moment this is at my discretion, but I would welcome an editorial board, or perhaps editors to work on very focused special editions. You could imagine very interesting special editions drawing on the open access journals in all manner of subjects, and using material from the past three years or so. A Meta EdTech Medical Education Special Edition? A Meta EdTech Social Media Special Edition? A Meta EdTech Mobile Learning Special Edition? Well, you get the idea, they're all relatively easy to do.

Now, you could say, 'so what?'. After all, there's nothing in this I couldn't do in a blog, delicious, tumblr, paper.li, scoop.it, etc. However, I have come to the conclusion rather late in life, that context is important. By looking roughly journalish, calling itself a journal, behaving like a journal, and crucially only gathering together journal articles, it begins to feel like a journal. And that might be of interest to a few people. 

What I find most interesting about this though is the potential for interdisciplinarity. I have gone for a fairly boring Ed Tech focus, but you could have some really interesting intersection. Interdisciplinary journals have traditionally suffered because of the economics of publishing - they just don't have a big enough audience. But if you are drawing on open access publications, you can make an interdisciplinary journal on any subject you want (provided there are enough open access papers to draw upon). Classics and Manga Studies? You bet. Postmodernism and Sports Psychology? Why not.

The other mild revelation, is that it's yet another example of what I like about open access. It's the unpredictability and different uses that content can be put to that is really exciting. Your article no longer sits in just one journal, but may appear in dozens of different 'mashup' or meta journals. Each of these may have a different audience, beyond the scope of the original journal. Again, as an author, why wouldn't you want this? The development of meta-journals itself may be a driver for open access, since authors want to be included in them.

A couple of admin points: I've tried to give the proper attribution for each paper but if anyone thinks it looks as though I'm trying to claim authorship, let me know (it automatically adds 'Author' as the person who creates the post, which is annoying). I'm not a WordPress expert so I'm not sure I've set it up optimally. For instance I couldn't see how to create Issues, so I have simply created a page for each issue, and listed in the sidebar. Again, any thoughts on this are welcome.

We'll see how it goes, maybe no-one will read it, as the other tools I've mentioned above already fulfill this function. But for now, it was kinda cool to think 'this afternoon, I'm going to create a journal, on my own, with no funding.'

Yeah, but who pays?

My colleague, Gill Kirkup, asks this question of digital scholarship, and it is a frequent refrain of Alan Cann's. It's a good question, and one I usually try to have an answer for. I don't think I am guilty of Gill's charge of hoping for the "internet equivalent of the tooth fairy". In fact, one of my complaints about the current academic publishing model is that it's a poor economic one. Now, one can make many arguments about open access that don't address the economics, for example around it being a public good, or a more effective way of working for instance, many of which are compelling in their own right, but in this post let's just focus on the money bit.

And I should add that there are much broader 'who pays' questions - there is a who pays in terms of environmental impact of running servers, and also 'who pays' in terms of higher education and society, but both of these are beyond the scope of this post, and I'm concentrating on the 'who pays' question as it is conventionally put in terms of open scholarship.

While I think it is a good question to ask, I'm also suprised at how much people think new ways of working are necessarily unsustainable. I think this arises partly because we're often talking about many different things when we ask the question 'who pays?'. Gill probably has open access publishing in mind, but others will be referring to OERs, or digital scholarship in general. I'll take a few interpretations and look at the 'who pays' question for each. Some are easier than others, but none assume a complete overhaul of global financial systems, radical change in human behaviour, or liberal quantities of fairy dust. They're all doable.

Open access publishing - this is the one that has had the most attention. Let's assume we want to keep a peer-review journal system - this is by no means certain, but it addresses the question most directly. Willinsky suggests you can publish an open access journal for zero cost. As an editor of one, I'd say this is unlikely - you need someone to do some of the admin support and technical setup and maintenance, even if you're using OJS. And handling promotion, library and database take-up is quite a specialised skill. A bit of copyediting is also necessary, although the degree of this varies. But the large bulk of the journal process - peer review, editing, organising, decision-making - is stuff academics generally do for free anyway. So the associated costs are quite low. 

One model for OA is the gold route, or author pays. Usually this means the research funder builds the costs in. This pretty much maintains the current model, and ensures OA, so in that sense, it is realisable. However, the costs under this model are high - somewhere around $5,000 per article if published by a commercial publisher. Whereas a non-profit, open access journal (say one run by a society) has much lower costs, around $750 (see Clarke for lots of numbers). Most of that difference in cost is going on proprietary systems, marketing, shareholders and salaries. And that money either comes from research grants or libraries. While I'm not after making people redundant, those additional costs aren't factors that are really the concern of academic researchers.

The cheaper, non-profit versions could be funded through the research councils (either through author pays, or directly as ongoing research distribution sources), through library consortia (as Frances Pinter suggests), or through universities. Universities used to run their own presses, but these became difficult to maintain and were often sold on, but the online equivalent of a university press might see a central team of one techie, and two admin or librarian staff (say) supporting 5-10 online journals. That is a much more sustainable model.

If any of the above solutions seem unrealistic to you, then imagine if I was trying to sell the idea of the current model - research councils fund research, this is undertaken by university staff, ofte subsidised by the institution, they then write articles, these are reviewed and edited by staff in other universities, for free, then all of this labour is provided to commercial publishers who sell the product back to the same universities and make very considerable profits along the way.

Open scholarship - more generally, we can talk of open scholarship, which is just sharing stuff you do. This might be a conference presentation, data from a research project, workshop structure, etc (as well as the publications above). This is the one area where I really don't see the 'who pays' question. The actual costs involved in doing so aren't great - you've prepared your presentation, and maybe practised it, so adding this to Slideshare is a minimal effort. People often ask of blogging, 'where do you find the time?' but for me having an effective online presence is such an integral part of how I work the question I ask back is 'how do you operate without it?". It is rather like asking them 'how do you find the time to read?'.

I also feel that we are often blind to the inefficiencies in the ways we work currently, because we're accustomed to them. In a word - meetings. I tend to spend three days on campus, during which time I am in meetings solidly, usually through lunch. While these are often necessary, I also know that I get a lot more actual work done on the two days I work from home and communicate via other methods. And while I love meeting people at conferences, these are hugely wasteful of time, and much of that connection can be formed via other means. That's not to say we should abandon all conferences, but maybe you don't need to go to one a month now. Finding other ways of working often leads to open practices as a by-product. For example, if I want to share a presentation I've just finished, then instead of emailing to everyone there, I put it up online and make it open to all. 

So, in short, open scholarship I feel is just absorbed as part of everyday practice, using a combination or free tools and services and different approaches to working. 

Open education - this, I think, is the most difficult to answer the 'who pays' question, because teaching money (whether it comes from the state or the student) is what really funds higher education. There has been lots of work on the sustainability (or otherwise) of the OER movement. David Wiley has probably the best review, and suggest three models: The MIT, USU and Rice models. The USU model is near to making OER a by-product of teaching, releasing content as you go. Whether this will impact on student numbers in the long term if everyone did it, we don't really know, but generally the feeling is that it wouldn't as students want more than just the content.

Open education isn't just OERs of course. There are open courses, which can be bespoke MOOCs of the type George, Dave and Stephen run eg Change. I wouldn't suggest these are sustainable as the entire replacement for all higher education (and neither would any of their developers). That's not what they're about. We should rather view these as new types of learning offerings we can do that are complementary to, or parallel to, existing structures. So if you want to try an experimental subject or approach but can't get it approved, then setting up a MOOC is relatively low cost. They are action research if you like - something we couldn't do before, but can now.

Perhaps more relevant are the boundaryless open courses. For example, Alec's or Jim's courses which have a traditional, campus, fee paying student body, but which is open to anyone else to take part in, for as long as they like. These can be a win-win situation - students get access to a wider range of expertise and participants, and the open participants get to experience part of study. My guess is this approach wouldn't really hit student numbers and, if your course is online, it doesn't take much to make it open. I think making the case as to why the university should do this is a tougher sell, but in terms of the costs, it needn't undermine existing models (it may even act as a good recruitment vehicle).

A recent, interesting example, combines open education potentially with open publishing. The Stanford AI course has gained incredible student numbers. The course uses a text authored by one of the lecturers, which suggests a future model might be something like: write an open access textbook - create a course from it - sell more copies of your book and get increase sign up to the university version of the course with accreditation. Everyone is a winner.

I don't suggest that it is easy to tackle the 'who pays' question for all forms of openness but I would argue that none of them are based just wishful thinking or naivete. And I would also suggest that we should examine some of our current economic models carefully and ask just how sustainable they really are in a digital, networked world.

A simple open vs closed tale

Science in the Sands reports how a US Professor, Dianne O'Leary, wrote to the publisher, Springer, asking for a PDF of her own paper. They refused and as her university doesn't subscribe to the journal, because it is prohibitively expensive, she couldn't get a final copy of her own article.

A later update reveals that, she could get the copy, but you have to ask the right person. This is something I have often encountered - getting the definitive copy, as quite often the last version you hold on your machine is not one that has been through final edits. So even when she could get the copy, it took a long time to obtain it, you had to find the right person to ask, and it often comes with limitations on use (such as you can't post it on a website). 

Now, contrast this with a recent experience I had with my Digital Scholar book, which is published by Bloomsbury under a Creative Commons license. I realised the other day that I too, didn't have a PDF version of the final book. The version they make available is in HTML. I knew that the book torrent site Library Pirate had made a version available. As it is a non-commercial license, this is perfectly legitimate (I think). So I went to their site and downloaded a 'pirate' version of my own book. Within minutes I had a PDF (Download TheDigitalScholar), which I could do with as I wish.

As an author, which process is preferable?