The Ed Techie

Gravity always wins

More out of tradition than profound insight, here is my annual running review post.

First, since you demand it so, is the data:

• Miles run: 1049
• Duration: 188:58 hours
• No. runs: 141
• Av. distance: 7.44 miles

Not bad overall, on a par with last year. It seems that having struggled to break the 1000 mile barrier for a few years I can now do it, but not with much to spare. Any significant increase would mean changing my approach drastically.

It's been a bad year in terms of events though, I signed up and trained for the Llanelli marathon in April, but went to India, caught Delhi belly and bailed from it. I did the New Forest Half marathon in September (wet, slow) and that was it. I decided I needed a new challenge so signed up for the Lakeland 50 and set off on a mountain/trail running regime. I found that I really enjoyed running through forests and taking 5 hours or so to complete a run with lots of walks in it, necessitated by hills. It's a different rhythm to road running. We live outside of Cardiff and I have Caerphilly mountain and lots of trail runs of around 15-20 miles on my doorstep. And then there's the Beacons less than an hour away, and I managed a 20 miler around the peaks here on my own. I'm not much of a navigator, but Sarah has loaded up her extensive set of trails onto a GPS device for me which I follow slavishly.

But I came to realise that was the extent of my ambition. As I mentioned last year I don't have a reservoir of fitness to draw upon and to do the 50 I'd need to be up in the mountains every weekend. As I slogged around the Gower coastal marathon (eventually only doing the half) I realised I don't love mountains in the same way Sarah does. I like them, I enjoy being in them, but I don't want to spend 20 hours dragging myself through the mud. I do actually like doing the running part, and sometimes it's so steep, or icy, or boggy, or treacherous, that you hardly run at all.

Living with an ultra runner kind of distorts your sense of distance. In our house the following sentence can be uttered with a straight face: "I'm only going to do 20 miles today". The word 'only' has no rightful place in that sentence.

So, I decided on reflection that the 50 isn't for me, and instead have signed up for an event a month, consisting of halfs, marathons and even a 10k. I've enjoyed the trail running so I want to keep that in the mix. I suppose my lesson for the year is that you need to both always be exploring what kind of runner you are, and also know when something isn't your bag. But to accept that may not always be true - in a year's time I may find the thought of going 0.1 mph uphill, knee-deep in icy mud a really appealling day out.

The other thing I've taken on this year is to start studying an MA in History, and there's an element of this here also. I am of a scientific bent and I'm finding the subtle disciplinary differences and attitudes interesting. But I'm now of an age when I can appreciate them, whereas I think my younger, more arrogant self, would have had to be in one camp. 

The year has ended badly though, with a virulent flu bout (no, not effing 'manflu') which has laid me up for 10 days over Christmas (no alcohol, no food, no holiday!). It means my first event - a marathon in January - is unlikely to happen as I've lost the key period I needed and am still not back running. But hey, I lost a stone in weight, so when I do start back, I should be flying.

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.

 

 

Education in 'not broken' shock

This is what all education is like - FACT.

I've complained about the "education is broken" meme before - my reservations about it have been threefold:

i) It's just lazy - saying something is broken (or dead) avoids having to do any subtle analysis and appeals to a simplistic viewpoint. 

ii) It frames technological change as a crisis and not an opportunity - Mike Caulfield covered this better than me, but once you adopt a 'broken' metaphor then a whole set of language accompanies it which frames it as a negative problem to be fixed.

iii) It's suspicious - those who peddle the "education is broken" line usually have something to gain from its acceptance. Either they are directly selling a solution that will mend it (after all, a broken something needs to be fixed, see point ii) or they have individual prestige in being seen as someone who can at least see the means of fixing it.

I've been studying the Masters in History at the OU recently (it's an 18 month long haul, only 2 months in). So I thought I'd reflect on how 'broken' this experience feels. The answer is, well, not at all really. This isn't an advert for the OU, I'm sure the majority of reliable HE institutions would provide a similar experience. The point is that it isn't a radical course in terms of approach or technology, and so provides a reasonable experience of what education is really like I think. I'm sure there are plenty of worse examples, and grudgingly, maybe I'll concede there are some better ones, but this is what distance education in the 21st century roughly equates to, I'd hazard. 

First of all we had to read quite a dense text (Davidoff and Hall's Family Fortunes), we were provided with reviews around it and the first assignment was based around analysing its approach. The aim of this was, I think, to introduce us to the type of academic writing in history (I suspect it weeds out the people who really just want to do genealogy), and to think about the range of references and resources required to provide a comprehensive argument (Davidoff and Hall are exhaustive, and at times, exhausting in this respect).

The assignment was an old fashioned 2500 word essay. And it worked - I read the book in a much more analytical manner because of it, I followed up references, I considered the manner in which evidence is found and constructed to form a picture, I engaged with fellow students in the VLE (shhh).

We're now on to a more active block, looking at the range of online resources. This is enjoyable stuff, I really didn't know there was just soooo much stuff out there. I have been lost for a few evenings in the House of Commons Parliementary Papers, or the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, or the National Library of Wales, etc.

I'm not going to do a critique of the course, but studying it has reinforced my belief that "Education is broken" is an unhelpful stance to take. For a start it doesn't reflect the reality. I would urge anyone who uses this claim to study a course outside of their own domain of expertise and see how it feels (I'm obviously focusing on higher ed here, the claim is also frequently used for K12, which I can't claim expertise in). I think many protaganists are basing their claims on rather outdated views of what it feels like to be a student. 

But more importantly, if one adopts the broken stance then you want to start afresh. In my experience this isn't beneficial. I can see how you could take the existing course and maybe add some new elements in to it, or campaign for open access to all historical archives for instance, explore new forms of assessment, find ways of making such courses more accessible and open (I didn't say MOOC, no sir), etc. These are opportunities to build on top of a successful approach, which seems a better, if less sexy approach, than demanding wholesale revolution with some glorious new leaders installed.

Reflecting on this has made me think of a fourth reason why I don't like the 'education is broken' rhetoric, and that is it is fundamentally cliquey or elitist. It's underlying message is "all these other people don't get technology like we do. That's why they're stuck in that old fashioned way of thinking which we know is hopelessly broken. Come join our new gang." But of course, if this new gang became the establishment they'd quickly abandon it. They don't really want educational change, they just want to feel cool for a while. Let them do that, we can do better.

Be the Sat Nav

Our metaphors for human behaviour are often informed by technology, and the metaphors we adopt play an important role in how we see the world. Lakoff and Johnson argue that "If... our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor."

But can you consciously choose metaphors to shape your own behaviour? This is part of the argument of talking therapies, that you change your interaction with the world by the way you frame it conceptually. All of which is trying to provide some academic justification for a small idea in a small post...

I was pondering this the other day, when I got lost and my sat nav was patiently trying to guide me somewhere, although I thought it had got it wrong. The beauty of the sat nav is that it has no memory. It doesn't care that it told you turn around when possible, or that it said turn left and you turned right. It calculates purely from the present. It doesn't give up in a huff and say "well, if you're just going to ignore me, what's the point?" This is reassuring when you're driving, you need to know it doesn't matter what has gone before, it can navigate you anywhere from this point.

In life, having memory is generally a good thing (we wouldn't have evolved it otherwise). But there are times when being able to 'be the sat nav' and take it forward only from the present and forget the past is useful. Personally, I'm a person who can bear grudges. There is a blogger I still haven't forgiven because they once quoted me and inserted [sic]. They were correct to do so, I had made a grammatical error, but I interpret [sic] as [I'm smugly superior to this person]. I should let it go. I should be the sat nav.

So, if you find a relationship is blocked because you can't forgive a minor misdemenour (I'm not suggesting you should forget if someone has stolen your car and emptied your bank account), then breathe deep, say the mantra 'I am the sat nav' and then say 'at the next interaction, go straight on'. Or something equally zen like.

PS - I also don't forgive people who don't say thankyou when you let them through in traffic, who don't put the 'next customer' indicator down for you in supermarket queues, who use 'literally' incorrectly... ok, it's going to take some practice.

A technology extinction event?

(file this post under frivolous banter)

In a post the other day I was positing that the declaration of "X is dead" is usually a good indicator of a charlatan/self-promoter. I suggested that technologies rarely die, but find more nuanced, specialist audiences. Some people commented that technologies NEVER die. 

So, just for discussion - is the typewriter a contender for a technology that will actually die. The last one in Britain was produced yesterday. I know there are some existing users, writers often, who still like to craft their work on a typewriter. But this is a habit, and a declining market. This is very distinct I would suggest, from a new audience discovering a preference for the old technology, as we've seen with analogue cameras and vinyl records. These typewriter fans would suggest otherwise. I think people can make a case for preferring a typewriter to work on (it makes you think more about what you commit to paper, it forces a linear sequence rather than cut and paste, etc), but I think these only apply if you started out on a typewriter, they're not compelling enough to make you want to use one over the convenience of a word processing package. Anyone who has used a typewriter for typing a long document on will know these romantic preferences soon wear thinner than your correction fluid.

Then there's typewriters as objets d'art, which I think is valid, they are quite exquisite machines. But admiring them in a museum is different from them being used in anger.

So what do people reckon, will the typewriter die with its existing set of fans, or will it find a new existence with a niche audience?

 

Treading the integrity line

I had some media training last week, as part of the OU's REF build up. I've authored one of our impact case studies (on Open Education). The idea is that should we be asked to appear on radio then we're prepared to deal with the four minute interview on our subject.

I was a bit cynical going in to it, but it was a useful and fun session, practising being interviewed and getting your point across to a general audience. It's probably good practice for all academics to do, regardless of whether they'll ever be on the radio (and with a voice like mine, I hope not for everyone's sake). 

I made the point that academics often come across awkwardly in interviews because they are caught in a somewhat schizophrenic situation. They are trying to speak simultaneously to two audiences. There is the general audience who doesn't want to know the subtle details, doesn't care about the history and framing work and hasn't got time to consider the complications - they want to know the key details and what's relevant to them. But at the same time the academic is aware that their peers may well be listening. They could come across as trying to claim more for themselves than is the case, of overstating the implication of their research and of grossly simplifying the complexity of the situation. 

The media advisers said that the best academics in the mass media tended to ignore this second audience and just focus on the mass one. This is indeed a skill, and there are academics who do it well, making their subject interesting without sacrificing too much. And then there are academics who clearly become enamoured of the mass media attention and trade in all intergrity in order to become the person who makes a media friendly statement. For instance there's Dr Cliff Arnall who every year does the rounds with the Blue Monday nonsense. 

I think it would be easy to eschew all mass media, but it can be done right - I just don't know that I could do it right. Which is why this blogging and online stuff suits me better - you get to explain it when you want to, and on your terms. Plus, here everyone's friendly, right?

The key I guess is in maintaining an integrity you feel comfortable with. And integrity always brings to mind the story I heard about Nick Cave who turned down a substantial sum from Gap for his music to be used in an advert. He reasoned:

"I get letters from people telling me they got married to The Ship Song, or that they buried their best friend to a Into My Arms, and I don't want them to look at the TV and see that they buried their friend to Cornetto or something. I feel some sense of responsibility about that, even though they wave enormous sums of money at you."

So here's some Nick Cave:

Hanging with the MOOC boys

Now that MOOCtober has passed, I think it's safe to talk about MOOCs again. 

As I've mentioned I'm experimenting next year with running my block of the Masters Course in Online and Distance Education as an open course. I've wanted to do this for ages, but always been blocked, but now that MOOCs are on everyone's radar, lots of elements have fallen into place that make it possible. This might be a beneficial consequence of the MOOC hype - they create an environment in which experimentation in open courses is encouraged.

My course will run for 6 weeks and is part of the longer 20 week course, H817 Openness and Innovation in elearning. It'll be interesting to see how making part of a longer course open works. My part is on Open Education, looks at OERs, MOOCs, pedagogy and technology.

As part of it I recorded an interview with Dave Cormier and George Siemens talking about MOOCs. We cover the initial idea behind MOOCs, the term itself, the new MOOCs and future directions. It also has an affordances klaxon. I thought I'd share it here too, enjoy! (Thanks to George and Dave for sparing the time for it).

The X is dead test, or why you shouldn't trust simple answers

Many of you will be familiar with the (itself overhyped) Gartner Hype curve. I'm not going to get into its scientific validity here, but I think it has resonance as people recognise their own relationship with technology in it. There are more sophisticated technology adoption theories, but let's go with this one for now. 

Back when we used to use the term 'web 2.0' without embarrassment, many of us were hyping it up. I'm guilty of this as much as anyone. At the time, the combination of user generated content, wide connnectivity, social networking, mobile devices seemed to open up possibilities. I still find it amazing that I have such a rich, global network of peers, all of whom are smarter than me, and most of whom I haven't met. I would arguse that this optimism, and slight discarding of critical powers we felt wasn't a failing however, it was a necessity. By engaging in this new world whole-heartedly one could really get the benefits and also potentially shape the possible futures we were envisaging.

Inevitably some of that glossy holiday romance wears off. This isn't a bad thing - as Clay Shirky is fond of saying, a technology becomes really interesting when it becomes invisible. Social networks, user generated content - all these things are more interesting in social terms now they're part of everyday life than when they were a niche club. But our attitudes shift also, and it now becomes appropriate to have a more questioning stance, as these very tools become used by a much bigger audience and for different means. Gardner Campbell covers this in detail with his refrain "That is not what I meant at all"

What is now required from us educators is to tread a fine line. It is easy to become cynical, to dismiss all new innovations and bemoan the good old days when blogging was a really exciting, new world. The danger there is that we become the very people resistant to new ideas that we used to bemoan. And we miss genuine opportunities. On the contrary side, we need to avoid simple, easy solutions. We know that technology, education and society is more nuanced than simple slogans allow.

So, if anyone states any of the following now (ahem, I can let them off if they did it a while ago), they are revealing either that they are naive, or worse, a charlatan:

• Specifying a particular technology is dead - actually technologies rarely die (some do, eg the fax), their monopoly is lost, and they become specialised, adapted, mutated. Think of radio, or books. Merely declaring something to be dead is usually a precursor to selling its replacement.
• Disrupting education - I've moaned about the "education is broken" meme, and Audrey Waters has a thoughtful piece on the simplistic narrative around education has remained unchanged for 200 years. As Brian Lamb comments:

I think the next time I read about somebody "disrupting" education, I'm gonna throw a keg party in their office.
— Brian Lamb (@brlamb) November 5, 2012

• There's nothing new here - the reverse of these is to dismiss everything. We've seen all this before, there's nothing new here so no need to change my approach.

So, I'll make a plea here - we like simple answers, we like people who give us simple answers. They're sexy. They're convenient. They're tweetable. But life isn't like that, and actually the messy, nuanced, complex picture is more interesting. Be suspicious of those oh so sweet tasting simple answers on either side of the technology divide.

Quality is the best gaming device

[There are some games you shouldn't play - image http://www.flickr.com/photos/whatwhat/8457309/]

Gamification comes up a lot in higher education. It's a by-product of a metrics driven economy, as soon as you meaure something, and add value to that measurement, then people will find ways to gamify it. The measurers often know this, and the trick is if you can get people to do the desired behaviour through gaming, then it's worthwhile, for instance good assessment will mean that learners end up acquiring desired skills and knowledge, even if they game the system. But too often, gaming itself becomes the focus.

The following are all aspects of gaming for higher education:

• Assessment gaming - are there ways of getting good scores in assessment with minimal effort?
• Teaching - are there ways of getting good scores in the National Student Survey? Can we find ways around contact hours?
• Learner analytics - if you start measuring performance through 'data exhaust', and attaching value to it, then it stops being exhaust, a by-product of natural behaviour and becomes a deliberate action. For instance if time spent in the VLE is a measure used to automatically monitor students, they will soon log on for long periods, while they go to the pub.
• Research metrics - the REF is essentially a very expensive exercise in gaming. Universities game it by buying in good REF researchers just before the REF deadline, sacrificing some staff for others (eg put your name first because that person isn't going to be refable) or moving non-eligible staff to teaching contracts. Individuals game it by getting their papers cited (self-citation, mutual citation circles), getting students to publish papers with their names, and publishing in targeted journals.
• Online identity - methods of increasing blog traffic, gaining reputation, getting attention.

It's quite a depressing list, you could spend all of your time being concerned with gaming and not with the actual work it is meant to represent. All these was brought into focus for me by this great blog post from author Paul Raven. A wannabe ebook author writes to him asking for advice on how to get improve sales. The potential author asks:

"Why not start a Facebook Group: “The EBook Likers?” Join the group, and you pretty much agree to go around and LIKE all the other Member’s eBooks which are on Amazon. The Power of LIKE!"

And he goes on, excitedly:

"Something like this goes on every day at Twitter... The I’ll-star-your-tweets-if-you-star-my-tweets factor. Most tweeps on Twitter rarely, if ever, favorite any tweets at all. But there is an in-bred niche of super-favoriters who go to Favstar to track exactly how many stars and retweets each of their tweets get.

By analyzing the data, it becomes clear that the Favstar Superstars don’t achieve their status with superior content, but with superior networking. Take any Favstar Superstar and examine several of their tweets in detail, and you will find the exact same avatars always at the beginning thirty spots, with just a few odd avatars; the further up the number of stars a tweet gets, the more variety in avatars."

He continues with lots of such possibilities and questions. As Raven points out, he never mentions his writing once, and asks nothing about the craft of writing. It's a sad example of how gamification becomes the focus itself.

Raven offers this sage advice:

"There’s one thing that might make your book sell better, though — and that’s making it a better book. Or making a new book that’s better than the last, and another one that’s even better than that, and then another and another. And sending them out, whether to agents or editors or straight into the whirlpool of the Kindle store, and letting them speak for themselves, while you wait at home patiently, writing the next one."

That is the key for me. Whether it's blogging, teaching or writing research papers, the thing to focus on is the quality of the activity itself. Sure, there are some things that are easy and worth doing - I use images in blog posts because I think it may attract attention, and I tweet a link to my posts when I publish them, I tend to blog during weekdays as no-one reads at weekends, etc. I want people to read my posts, I just don't want to fundamentally alter the nature of what I do to achieve that end. So, for instance, I don't play games such as trying to create controversy to get hits, or breaking posts up into shorter ones on the basis that more posts create more traffic, or spend time promoting posts in other forums. 

But it's an easy trap to fall in to - the next time I find myself thinking, or sitting in a meeting discussing, methods of gamification, I'll remember that needy writer in Raven's post. That way lies madness.

 

The Great Open Access Swindle

In my digital scholarship book, I make two pleas, the first is for open access publishing, and the second is for scholars to own the process of change. I've never been great at a rousing finish, but the book ends thus:

"This is a period of transition for scholarship, as significant as any other in its history, from the founding of universities to the establishment of peer review and the scientific method. It is also a period that holds tension and even some paradoxes: it is both business as usual and yet a time of considerable change; individual scholars are being highly innovative and yet the overall picture is one of reluctance; technology is creating new opportunities while simultaneously generating new concerns and problems....

...For scholars it should not be a case of you see what goes, you see what stays, you see what comes, but rather you determine what goes, what stays and what comes."

The open access element has proceeded faster than even I imagined when writing this back in 2010/2011. The Finch Report can be seen as the crowning achievement of the open access movement, in setting out a structure for all UK scholarly articles to be published as open access. But in typical "you academics are never happy" mode I've become increasingly unhappy about the route Open Access is taking. And the reason is that it fails to meet the second of my exhortations, ie it is a method being determined by the publishing industry and not by academics themselves.

The favoured route is that of Gold OA - ie authors pay publishers to have open access articles published, usually through research funds. This is good in that it means these research papers will be openly available to all, but bad from a digital scholarship perspective. And here's why:

Ironically, openness may lead to elitism. If you need to pay to publish, then, particularly in cash-strapped times, it becomes something of a luxury. New researchers, or smaller universities won't have these funds available. Many publishers have put in waivers for new researchers (PLoS are excellent at this), but there's no guarantee of these, and after all, the commercial publishers are concerned with maximising profits. If there are enough paying customers around then it's not in their interest to give out too many freebies. And it also means richer universities can flood journals with articles. Similarly those with research grants can publish, as this is where the funding will come from, and those without, can't. This will increase competition in an already ludicrously competitive research funding regime. You're either in the boat or out of it will be the outcome. The scholarly kitchen has a good piece of OA increasing the so-called Matthew Effect. It would indeed be a strange irony if those of us who have been calling for open access because of a belief in wider access and a more democratic knowledge society end up creating a self-perpetuating elite.

It will create additional cost. Once the cost is shifted to research funders, then the author doesn't really care about the price. There is no strong incentive to keep costs down or find alternative funding mechanisms. This is great news for publishers who must be rubbing their hands with glee. It is not only a licence to carry on as they were, but they have successfully fended off the threat of free publication and dissemination that the internet offers. Music industry moguls must be looking on with envy. The cost for publication is shifted to taxpayers (who ultimately fund research) or students (if it comes out of university money). The profits and benefits stay with the publishers. It takes some strained squinting to view this as a victory.

Steven Harnad argues again for Green OA, claiming that

"Publishers– whose primary concern is not with maximizing research usage and progress but with protecting their current revenue streams and modus operandi –are waiting for funders or institutions to pledge the money to pay Gold OA publishing fees. But research funds are scarce and institutional funds!are heavily committed to journal subscriptions today. There is no extra money to pay for Gold OA fees"

It doesn't promote change - in my book I also talked about how a digital, networked and open approach could change what we perceive as research, and that much of our interpretation of research was dictated by the output forms we have. So, for instance we could see smaller granularity of outputs, post review, different media formats, all begining to change our concept of what research means. But Gold OA that reinforces the power of commercial publishers simply maintains a status quo, and keeps the peer-reviewed 5000 word article as the primary focus of research that must be attained.

I've heard Stephen Downes say that as soon as any form of commercial enterprise touches education it ruins it (or words to that effect). I wouldn't go that far, I think for instance that commercial companies often make a better job of software and technology than universities, but academic publishing is such an odd business that maybe it doesn't make sense as a commercial enterprise. As David Wiley so nicely parodies in his trucker's parable, there isn't really another industry like it. Academics (paid by the taxpayer or students) provide free content, and then the same academics provide free services (editorship and peer-review) and then hand over rights and ownership to a commercial company, who provide a separate set of services, and then sell back the content to the same group of academics. 

I know a few people who work in commercial publishing, and they are smart, good people who genuinely care about promoting knowledge and publishing as a practice. This is not a cry for such people to be out on the streets, but rather for their skills and experience to be employed by and for universities and the taxpayer rather than for shareholders. In this business Downes' contamination theory seems to hold, there is simply no space in the ecosystem for profit to exist, and when it does it corrupts the whole purpose of the enterprise, which is to share and disseminate knowledge.