The Ed Techie

Why don't academic authors self-publish?

<Photo by MonsierLui http://www.flickr.com/photos/monsieurlui/316350341/>

I got an invite from Frank Rennie the other week to contribute a chapter to a book he is thinking of putting together around the subject of the mismatch (or distance) between academic thinking and the potential of new tools. Frank is a big fan of the self-publish sites and has suggested we eschew an academic publisher, and just publish ourselves via Lulu or Blurb.

This got me thinking as to why more academics don't do this, and still chase the book contract. It certainly isn't for the money, so it must be for the prestige. This can be broken down into personal and external I think. There is the personal prestige one feels in having a book accepted by a publisher and going through the actual process. One feels like a proper author. There are some practical advantages also - real deadlines to keep you motivated, professional copyediting and some promotion. But these practical advantages are often over-played, for example, as an author you have to suggest most of the avenues for publicity.

The external prestige is probably the greatest factor. This is strongly reinforced in the UK by the REF, which wouldn't really consider a self-published book, but also by promotion committees and just general esteem amongst colleagues. Self-publishing is seen as rather sordid and the last recourse for the demented author who couldn't get published anywhere else. It tended to smack of desperation somewhat. But that clearly isn't the case anymore (if it ever was), with the news that author Barry Eisler turned down a $500K contract to self-publish. Going it alone is seen as a sensible option.

Academic authors are not in the same position as Eisler, but they never were anyway. The return on most academic books won't buy you a yacht cap, let alone a yacht. But increasingly academics are developing what we might nauseatingly refer to as personal brand. That is they carry sufficient credibility and connections within their own networks to make self-publishing as viable as traditional publishing in terms of generating interest. Add to that they can be in charge of rights and make their books open access. So the question then is what is the aim of academic publishing? Is it to be as widely read as possible or to generate items for your CV?

So why did I go with a publisher? Well, they are doing open access so maybe, you can have a bit of both. And I don't think I've quite shaken that prestige thing.

References are like airport security checks

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/4228752706/ by Mike Licht>

This is the penultimate post in my week-long series of reflections on the book writing process (you have been reading them all, right?).

I've moaned before that referencing is largely an anachronistic practice which is located in dealing with physical objects. As I said in that post, there are two main reasons that I can see:

1. To properly acknowledge the work of others. The act of referencing provides a clear framework for avoiding plagiarism since it positively encourages students to reference others and thus removes ignorance as an excuse.
2. To allow readers to locate any sources for themselves. This acts as both a check on the author (they can't make up references or misrepresent them), and also promotes knowledge sharing.

The first reason, that of acknowledgement, is obviously valid. But in an online context this is achieved by linking - the link is the acknowledgement, nothing else is required. And indeed, proper acknowledgement is one of the cultural norms of blogging, twitter, etc. We don't have problems with acknowledgement.

But in compiling the references section for my book, I was struck again by the redundancy of official referencing systems. You want to know where a book was published? Really? Isn't Amazon enough? You need a full reference for a quote when the quote itself is the reference in Google? Is an accessed date for every online reference really necessary? 

But I'm a good boy and I have a properly structured reference section of around 230 sources. It seems especially strange as most of my references are online, so I have to find a way of structuring the link into a recognised format, so something like "As Anderson notes.." becomes "Anderson, C. (2008) ‘Freemium math: what’s the right conversion percentage?’ <http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/11/freemium-math-w.html> [Accessed 11^th February 2011]". I'm not sure what additional information is conveyed in the second version of this.

This then goes offline into a printed book, fair enough, and will then go back online. But what bugs me is the supposed supremacy of print in this. For an online reference of a journal article, the URL is not sufficient but rather the full journal reference is required, because that legitimises it.

And we treat referencing as such an immutable practice. This is a classic of example of where the method has become confused with the intention. What we want is to find sources and for that work to be acknowledged. In a print world a standard method of describing these characteristics to enable location made sense. It makes little sense in an online world. 

This reminds me of airport security checks, such as questions around whether you packed yourself or are carrying guns, body checks, etc. Any questioning of the practice is dismissed with very serious concerns about terrorism. Just as querying the reference system is met with furrowed brows and deep sighs about plagiarism and proper scholarship. But like those airport checks this adds delay, is cumbersome and only inconveniences people who are happy to play by the rules anyway. It does nothing to catch the hardcore plagiarists, and doesn't guarantee a reference will still be available any more than a link does. Yet we have no choice and have to persist in it.

If I had the courage of my convictions, here is what I should have submitted for my reference section:

JFGI

Comparethejournal.com

A journal comparison site? Simples.

This another post from the stable of 'Martin's great business ideas that never get taken up, and which he never progresses.'

One of the themes in my digital scholarship book is that of alternatives - new technology driven approaches give us alternatives when previously we had none: we can join in a conference remotely, we can choose which medium we wish to convey our message in, we can make our outputs as detailed or as general as we like and we can chat about professional interests, sport, politics, film, or whatever we like all in the same space.

Looking at academic publishing, it strikes me that this rather odd model (as so well parodied by David Wiley in the Trucker's Parable) persists precisely because of the lack of alternatives. In order to disseminate research the only option available was the printed journal. So we had to sign up to it, and then the journal article became a measure of reputation so it became the means by which promotion committees determined an individual's case, meaning there was even less alternative.

The second of these problems, the tie-in with tenure, still persists but the first has been eroded by the advent of the read/write web. The journal's monopoly on research dissemination has been broken. But this doesn't mean we need to discard the academic journal, it is still likely that the peer-review process will be one of the scholarly approaches we wish to retain. It does mean the journal has to adapt though.

And many are doing just this, PLoS being a great example. Here are some of the factors authors might want to bear in mind when looking for a journal to publish in, and if these can't be met, then maybe they should consider going down the blogging or alternative route:

• Open access - does the journal have an open access policy? (If not, ask them why).
• Green or Gold - if it is open access, does it operate a Gold OA policy (the journal is open, and the author pays) or Green (the journal isn't OA, but the author can self-archive).
• Fee - if it is Gold OA, what is the fee?
• Embargo - if it is Green OA, is there an embargo before the author can self-archive
• Rights - does the author or the publisher retain the rights?
• Average publication time - what is the average time between submission and publication?
• Rejection rate - what percentage of submissions are rejected?
• Review policy - is it open, blind, double-blind reviewed?
• Added value - what extras does the journal provide, eg metrics on access, tracking blog references, promotion
• Impact factor - if you must...

When you look at these factors they begin to resemble the choices you select for car insurance or similar. The significance of each might be more or less for any individual, eg. if you have a very current piece, then publication delay becomes very important. 

I don't think all of this data is readily available, but certainly a lot of it is. You could image a site then that allows you to select the broad area of interest, and then work through these various options, allowing you to determine which journal meets your requirements. I would propose that the existence of such a tool would itself make journals begin to compete on some of these factors, and thus improve choice.

Maybe such a tool already exists, if not, who will join/fund me in building one. Come on, let's make these journals work for our publications!

A failure of ownership

In writing my digital scholarship book several themes keep recurring. One that I hadn't really set out to explore, but find depressingly persuasive is that of a failure of ownership by scholars over their own practice. This is particularly related to their use of technology to help refine their ways of working. Inevitably this has meant we have outsourced functions to for-profit companies. There may not be anything intrinsically wrong with this, I'm happy for a company to run the catering facilities for instance. But for complex activities that go to the heart of scholarship, once we outsourced them we became reliant on them, and effectively lost control. Here are three examples of this in action:

1. VLEs - the central role of elearning was underestimated by many and so we looked for simple solutions. The commercial VLEs offered this, but our return was an attempt by Blackboard to patent the very idea of elearning, and of increasingly costly contracts. Because the VLE became so embedded in institutional systems it became almost impossible to overthrow once it was in place.
2. Tenure, assessment and publications - as I've mentioned in an earlier post, the complexity of measuring excellence in different fields was outsourced to the peer-review process. This placed publishers in a central position in academia, since they controlled the routes to career progression. Related to this was the manner in which scholars bowed to governmental pressures for assessment exercises which sought to quantify the quality of research. This reinforced the publishers' position since their journals were linked directly to institutional funding.
3. Publication - many professional societies and university presses handed over their publications to for-profit publishing firms, effectively outsourcing the process, the proceeds of which they would then have to buy back. As Edwards and Shulenberger suggest the relationship with publishers operated successfully when it was seen as a fair exchange, a ‘gift economy’, but, they claim “beginning in the late 1960s and early '70s, this gift exchange began to break down. A few commercial publishers recognized that research generated at public expense and given freely for publication by the authors represented a commercially exploitable commodity.” In Clarke's analysis of publishing costs he reports that an ejournal article published by a for-profit costs around $3400 whereas one published by a non-profit professional society costs around $730. The difference is largely because of the expensive software the commercial publisher has developed to maintain their competitive advantage and "their much greater investment in branding, customer relationship management and content protection." None of these seem to me to be related to scholarship.

George Siemens has argued that we should take ownership of the open education debate before it is too late, and given the above history, I would say he is right. The message I take away from the above is that we allowed this to happen because we failed to engage with the required technology. Large scale open source projects could have (and in cases such as OJS and Moodle have been successful) solved many of these problems and the overall cost to universities would have been much less than being at the mercy of commercial companies for whom scholarship is not their primary interest. The type of resistance we saw, for example, to the very concept of elearning, often on the grounds of commercialisation of education, did not prevent it, and in many ways played directly into their hands. Far better is to take the attitude of inventing your own future.

I'm not against commercial partnerships in education, for instance many of the free services I like to promote seem to me better for being not developed in education (eg Flickr), but we should be aware of what it is we are handing over. As we face the question of 'what do we do about web 2.0/cloud computing/social media?' then a full understanding of what it can do is essential, and simply handing over the problem to someone else will not serve us well.

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.

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.

Why academic publishing is doomed

You may recall that a while ago I said I would only review for open access journals. Whenever I get asked to review for a journal now, I send back a polite reply saying telling them this, as I figure if they hear it enough it may encourage them to take an open access approach. After sending one such response to an editor, they forwarded it to the commercial publisher, to try and raise their awareness. The reply from the publisher set out a number of things they try to do, but this one caught my eye:

"Sponsored articles: Over 350 [publisher's name] journals offer authors the option to pay a $3,000 contribution fee to sponsor unlimited online access at publication to their respective articles via ScienceDirect."

I had to re-read this several times. So, not only do we provide the content, editing, and reviewing services for free, they now want us (or 'offer' us) to pay for open publication. And that's your open access model - the authors pay for it? I suppose one consolation is that it is surely not sustainable - when free alternatives exist the market will move towards them. It persists for historic reasons currently. Can you imagine taking this to a venture capitalist as a business model now?

I've used it before but Itzhak Stern's line in Schindler's list comes to mind: 'Let me understand. They put up all the money. I do all the work. What, if you don't mind my asking, would you do?'

Everyday I write the book

I put together a proposal before the summer, for a book on digital scholarship. It's part-polemic and part academic monograph. I want to explore the changes to academic practice brought about by three key characteristics: digital, networked and open. 

I wanted to find an open access publisher, so I'm pleased to say that it's been accepted by Bloomsbury Academic. Their model is that they give away a free HTML version, you can buy a standard hard and paperback version, or you can buy a version that also gives you access to additional online content. I don't know how much this additional content line will work, but kudos to them for trying a new model.

Before I embark on the writing, a couple of thoughts:

i) Much of the book will be adapted from blog posts here. In this sense I've already been writing the book for four years. Lots of writers do this - Shirky's books always feel as though I have already read them because you know so much of his output. This is one possible downside of writing continually in the open - a book will seem a bit familiar to many readers. As I go along I'll be blogging bits of it as well, for instance the recent pregnant widow post. My apologies in advance then if this means that when you read the book (you will read it won't you?) you have a sense of deja vu.

ii) Why write a book at all? There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that I like to write and a book gives you more space to explore ideas. And the second is that it is a nice way of bundling together content in a way that is both recognised and easily shareable.

iii) Why not just self-publish? I considered this, it would mean I'd get to keep more of the money (but then keeping a small amount or a large amount of not very much still gives you not very much). But there is a sense of legitimacy in having a publisher accept it. They also hopefully provide some services such as copy-editing and have a distribution channel which may help it get out there. And I particularly wanted to explore what it would be like to publish with an open access approach.

I've got some ideas for things I might try out for the book, including getting input from my network, so be prepared to find excuses. In the meantime, here is Elvis Costello with the title of this post:

The return on peer review

A while ago I took a decision to only publish in open access journals. I recently received two requests to review articles for journals. Peer-review is one of the great unseen tasks performed by academics. Most of us do some, for no particular reward, but out of a sense of duty towards the overall quality of research. It is probably a community norm also, as you become enculturated in the community of your discipline, there are a number of tasks you perform to achieve, and to demonstrate, this, a number of which are allied to publishing: Writing conference papers, writing journal articles, reviewing. 

So it's something we all do, isn't really recognised and is often performed on the edges of time. It's not entirely altruistic though - it is a good way of staying in touch with your subject (like a sort of reading club), it helps with networking (though we have better ways of doing this now don't we?) and we also hope people will review our own work when the time comes. But generally it is performed for the good of the community (the Peer Review Survey 2009 states that the reason 90% reviewers gave for conducting peer review was "because they believe they are playing an active role in the community")

It's a labour that is unaccounted for. The Peer Review Survey doesn't give a cost estimate (as far as I can see), but we can do some back of the envelope calculations. It says there are 1.3 million peer-reviewed journals published every year, and the average (modal) time for review is 4 hours. Most articles are at least double-reviewed, so that gives us:

Time spent on peer review = 1,300,000 x 2 x 4 = 10.4 million hours

This doesn't take into account editor's time in compiling reviews or chasing them up, we'll just stick with the 'donated' time of academics for now. In terms of cost, we'd need an average salary, which is difficult globally. I'll take the average academic salary in the UK, which is probably a touch on the high side. The Times Higher gives this as £42,000 per annum, before tax, which equates to £20.19 per hour. So the cost with these figures is:

20.19 x 10,400,000 = £209,976,000

[Update - Alan Cann gave me this link, which puts the cost at £1.9Billion a year]

I accept this is subject to lots of objections, it may well be less, but then again, many reviewers are often eminent, and thus further up the pay scale, so it could be more. It seems a reasonable conclusion based on the data we have. So that's over £200million a year that academics are donating of their time to the peer review process. This isn't a large sum when set against things like the budget deficit, but it's not inconsiderable. And it's fine if one views it as generating public good - this is what researchers need to do in order to conduct proper research. But an alternative view is that academics (and ultimately taxpayers) are subsidising the academic publishing to the tune of £200 million a year. That's a lot of unpaid labour.

Now that efficiency and return on investment are the new drivers for research, the question should be asked whether this is the best way to 'spend' this money? I'd suggest that if we are continuing with peer review (and its efficacy is a separate argument), then the least we should expect is that the outputs of this tax-payer funded activity should be freely available to all.

And so, my small step in this was to reply to the requests for reviews stating that I have a policy of only reviewing for open access journals. I'm sure a lot of people do this as a matter of course, but it's worth logging every blow in the revolution. If we all did it....