ArXiv for social science research anyone? @savageminds @culanth @haujournal @jmtrombley @jasonjackson2 @daniel_lende @MattThompsonTMM

— ryan anderson (@anthropologia) May 19, 2016

This is a pretty interesting idea. What would it entail taking arXiv as a role model?

What is arXiv?

Like SSRN, arXiv is a digital repository. They are both examples of Green OA — a type of open access where authors deposit versions of their work so that they can be accessed by readers for free. What version of an article makes it into the repository depends on which publisher you’re working with, but almost all of them allow authors to deposit the original submission: no peer review, no mark-up, no type setting. Others are more generous, a few even allow the post-print to be deposited. It just depends, if you want to go Green do some research on your publisher’s homepage or ask a company rep.

Green OA is frequently contrasted with Gold OA, where the author submits to a journal that makes the final product available to readers for free, examples include HAU and Cultural Anthropology. Again, there is great diversity among Gold OA publishers just as there is among Green repositories but we’re not getting into that here.

arXiv is Green OA, it is a pre-print repository but of a particular kind. If you’re at an elite or second tier R1 you probably already have access to a repository through your institution. However many of these institutional repositories (IRs) share a common problem, faculty participation is low. Some universities have attempted to address this with OA mandates, but this is not always sufficient to change faculty behavior. People are really busy, or maybe they don’t see the value in access. Perhaps they think someone else will do it for them, or are mistaken about their author’s rights. For whatever reason many people who can go Green choose not to.

The generally poor showings for institutional repositories has lead some in the digital libraries field to argue that IRs are not the way forward for Green OA. Instead they anticipate that disciplinary repositories (DRs), sometimes called subject repositories, will be more successful. Perhaps in our neoliberal world faculty are less tied to their institution than their discipline? Both SSRN and arXiv are DRs.

nb. There are other ways you can get your pre-prints out there without a repository. Social networks like academia.edu and researchgate.net exist to facilitate self-promotion and the sharing of information. Similarly with personal webpages. However, a major advantage to IRs and DRs over social networks and personal webpages is that the former are run by information professionals. Digital librarians who will work to insure that your metadata meet international standards and that technical stuff, like bit stream preservation, are well maintained thus keeping your work discoverable and accessible. To get the best of both worlds deposit your work in a repository, this will result in a URL that you can embed on your webpage or network.

So both SSRN and arXiv are Green OA, disciplinary repositories run by full-time professionals. But there’s a difference!

What makes arXiv special?

Three things make arXiv magic. It carries prestige among the community it is intended to serve, it has a very successful business plan, and it has a very successful governance model. All of this was achieved with only twenty-five years of hard work and sacrifice.

On its front page arXiv boasts 1,148,725 e-prints available for download, better than double SSRN’s 563,300. This is pretty remarkable when you consider that arXiv was originally intended as a repository just for physicists (today it has slightly expanded that scope) whereas SSRN aims to serve all of the social sciences and the humanities.

For some reason physicists have really bought into what arXiv has to offer. Maybe it is a result of the collaborative atmosphere of physics research? In my imagination, cultural anthropology romanticizes the lone genius — we’re either collecting ethnographic data in some out of the way place isolated from the rest of the world or perhaps cloistered in an solitary office channeling that experience into text only to emerge with the finished product. Maybe we just don’t do enough stuff as part of a team?

Aside: I think an integral part of the professional life of someone in the social sciences or humanities is the experience of being in a constant state of precarity. Not only do our colleagues in the STEM fields have more resources at their disposal, they are not constantly called upon to defend their very existence to powerful outsiders. Shoestring budgets and the unending barrage of existential threats make a lot of social science and humanities faculty “small-c conservative,” risk averse and skeptical about diverging from the well-worn path of professional success offered by conventional publications.

All of this is to say, there seems to be something about the “culture” of physicists that contributes to their high participation rate. If I was a physicist and I deposited an e-print in arXiv I could tell my buddies and everyone would pat me on the back. Good job! Another publication! If as an anthropologist I make a deposit to SSRN and I tell my buddies about it, everyone would say, What’s SSRN? and, When are you going to publish that? Raising the prestige and visibility of Green OA is one of the best possible outcomes of the SSRN/Elsevier merger. But more on that later

One more detail: arXiv does not rely on peer review. Instead, there is a system of vetting author submissions. Like peer reviewers, experts volunteer to vet submissions but instead of writing comments they are primarily interested in making sure that papers are acceptable and properly sorted into their appropriate sub-field. Many arXiv papers go on to have other lives as traditional publications and thus go through a peer review process eventually. My point here is that physicists think sharing unreviewed work is a notable accomplishment in a way that anthropologists (currently) do not.

The business plan for arXiv is perhaps the most crucial ingredient to its success. Born in the Los Alamos Laboratories in 1991, arXiv has since migrated with its founder Paul Ginsparg to Cornell. Cornell University Libraries, known as a leader even among the most elite libraries, has since 2011 provided the repository with infrastructural support and staffing. Annual funding from CUL is supplemented with the deep pockets of the Simons Foundation, both in the form of annual funding and challenge grants. Further contributing to this are voluntary pledges from about 200 institutions that represent arXiv’s heaviest users, these pledges range $1500-3000 per institution per year. The above are 2012 numbers.

Oya Yildirim Rieger writes in “Sustainability: Scholarly Repository as Enterprise” (Bulletin for the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol.39, No.1) that there are five sustainability principles CUL adheres to in planning the future of arXiv: (1) deep integration into the scholarly community and scholarly process — scientists take a leadership role in guiding arXiv, it reflects their values and their community as a result; (2) a clearly defined mandate and governance structure — if you’re running a digital archive then you’re playing a long game. The long game is the whole point of archiving things!; (3) technology platform stability and innovation — the data architecture and user interface game has to be top notch and always responsive to the constantly changing expectations of the users; (4) systematic development of content policies — be crystal clear about collection policies, submission guidelines, copyright status, etc.; (5) reliance on business planning strategies — you want big money for your repository? Then you better be able to talk the business talk and show value to your investors.

The long term viability of arXiv is sustained by its thoughtful governance structure. CUL upholds its end of the bargain from a managerial and administrative standpoint, they house the archive. But they are in constant communication with two boards: a Member Advisory Board, consisting of elected representatives from stakeholder institutions, and a Scientific Advisory Board that consists of researchers in the fields arXiv serves. These two boards are responsible for providing input on different aspects of arXiv’s development. The MAB is more concerned with implementing information standards, working towards interoperability, and planning. The SAB is concerned with intellectual oversight and the vetting process.

What about the future of SSRN?

As you can see arXiv has a lot to recommend it and achieving these goals will be a tall order. In the meantime, we already have the SSRN plus all manner of other institutional repositories and digital libraries. So, do we really need something like arXiv instead?

To be sure Elsevier’s acquisition of SSRN is disappointing to many open access activists because it represents another step towards the corporate enclosure of intellectual life. Elsevier is perceived by many as among the worst of the bunch because of its reputation for playing hardball, being litigious, gobbling up author’s rights, and even on a few occasions acquiring OA journals and then charging for access to them. What a bully!

Elsevier has also been the focus of past and ongoing boycotts with scholars refusing to cite their journals, submit work, or volunteer as reviewers or editors. No doubt some authors will feel that they should abstain from participating in SSRN as an extension of their OA activism. If this sounds like you, then you will no doubt be in good company. There are lots of other ways you can go Green OA. Vote with your feet and choose one of those instead.

I’m actually going to run the other way with this. I am not going to advocate for the boycotting of SSRN and this is why: open access is not free.

arXiv solved the problem of funding open access by aligning itself with an Ivy League school and the philanthropic arm of a crazy rich hedge fund manager. Plus it still manages to get hundreds of other libraries to send it checks on an annual basis, NPR-style. SSRN saw another way forward, selling out to corporate America. Did the professional staff at SSRN all get big bonuses and golden parachutes as a result? Probably not. They do, however, get to have salaries and benefits which is pretty cool considering they give their product away for free. They, SSRN, had reached the limit of their growth as an independent entity and needed more resources to advance their goal. Ckelty is probably right that Elsevier sees this as an opportunity to feast upon data, but if the service remains free to use while increasing in quality then that might be an acceptable trade off. As we have known since Darwin, trade offs are an integral part of distributing risk through populations living in complex ecosystems.

I suspect that some will not be persuaded. Contributing to an Elsevier property will be an ideological bridge too far and, to be honest, I am sympathetic with this position. An arXiv for the social sciences holds a lot of promise — but here’s the rub. Even if you had arXiv’s mad funding and governance skillz, you would still be missing a key ingredient: acceptance and prestige among the community the archive intends to serve. The physics community has embraced arXiv and Green OA in a way that anthropology and the social sciences has not. That’s on us.

So maybe we don’t need to replicate arXiv. Maybe we need to have a period of reflection, reflexivity in that classic ANTH 101 sense, about our “culture” as a discipline. Then conceptualize a repository that reflects that in a way that other anthropologists will think is valuable. That might result in something that is not identical to arXiv, but uniquely our own.

But the mad dough and Ivy library would probably be pretty helpful too.

In the end, the intel turned out to be incorrect and we all let out a collective sigh of status-quo-preserving relief. For a minute there we thought we might have to get all up in arms and start checking the oil in our X-Wing fighters and such to fight the big Open Access battle of the century. No need. Stand down folks, stand down.

But the false alarm got me thinking of the time that Elsevier issued more than 2,000 take-down notices to authors who had illegally posted articles on Academia.edu. This was back in 2013. Remember that? You might not. But. It. happened. That was the time that a bunch of scholars get all bent out of shape at the Big Evil Publisher that had committed the dastardly act of exercising its legal rights! The nerve! The gall! What right does that Big Evil Publisher have over work that authors freely and willingly gave away via signed author agreements? I mean, seriously, what those publishers are doing is an outrage. Right? Who has the time to read the author agreements? Is there even any text on those agreements? Who reads any fine print these days?

Here’s what Barbara Fister had to say about the whole Elsevier fiasco:

HAHAHAHAHahahahahah . . . whew, that was funny. (Wipes away tears of laughter and frustration.) Those chickens finally came home to roost. All these years librarians have been saying to scholars, “uh, you realize what happens when you sign away your rights, don’t you? You just gave your copyright to a corporation. We have pay them to get access to that content, and anyone who can’t pay can’t read it. Is this really what you had in mind when you wrote up that research?

As Fister explains in her post, the usual response she gets when she tries to bring up these issues is something along the lines of: “ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz snort, snuffle. Huh? Did you say something? Oh, yeah, tenure. Promotion. Don’t be silly. I’m working on a review article, can you get these articles for me?” But when people get take-down notices, suddenly they wake up and get outraged about their articles and their rights. Here’s her response:

While in a way I find this outrage a little funny, I can’t indulge in “I told you so.” This episode once again shows that librarians are not the change agents we want to see. We can’t get scholarly authors attention quite the way a publisher can when it actually uses the all-rights-reserved copyright that authors have willingly given them.

Fister’s post ends with some suggestions: read some Peter Suber. Take some time to learn a bit more about the rights journals are asking for, and the kinds of waivers you can request that help you retain more of your rights. Browse the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). She lists a few more suggestions as well. The main problem persists though. Despite the options that exist, many scholars keep doing the same old thing and signing away the rights to their work. Sure, the Elsevier take-down created a stir…but it was short-lived. Now most of us are back to the grind–publishing and signing away our rights faster than you can say “Hey what the hell are those folks at Cultural Anthropology talking about with all of this ‘publishing otherwise’ business?”

Rex here at Savage Minds also wrote about the big Elsevier shocker:

When you publish with Elsevier, you sign an agreement with them called a ‘copyright transfer agreement’. Guess what it does? That’s right: It transfers control of your creative work to them. In many important ways, your work no longer belongs to you. You may be the author, but you are no longer the owner.

Rex wrote that “Elsevier and other publishers have quietly tolerated the tremendous traffic of PDFs that happens both in public and private on the Internet.” They do this because it’s in their best interest, as Rex explained: “if most people realized the way they had signed away their rights to publishers, the open access movement would double or triple in size overnight.”

Did you see that? Let’s recap: If most people realized the way they had signed away their rights to publishers, the open access movement would double or triple in size overnight.

This mass realization obviously hasn’t happened yet. And so the screwed up world of corporate academic publishing keeps grinding forward. The worst part, as Rex points out, is that so many of us are surprised–if not shocked–when publishers actually do what they told us they were going to do in the first place. This, he says, is like being upset at Jaws for eating people in questionably accurate 1970s films. Of course the shark is eating people! It’s the 1970s! And, duh, look at the poster for the film! Likewise, of course the massive corporate publisher is gobbling up and controlling all of our academic output! We went swimming in their ocean, after all.

Like Fister, Rex has some advice to help soothe our wounded souls. There are ways to make the world of scholarly communication a better place. Publish in gold OA journals. Publish in green OA journals. Alter the terms of your author’s agreement. He ends with this:

But there’s one thing I don’t think it is fair for us to do: complain about the way the world is because we lived under the impression that it was something else. Especially if we are actively engaged in reproducing it. So if you are pissed off about the Elsevier takedowns, then please join our rebel alliance now — because guess what? Darth Vader actually is out to get you.

Jason B Jackson made a similar argument at the time:

While I am a Elsevier boycott participant and cannot ever imagine publishing with them, I 100% support the rights of Elsevier and other publishers to fully and legally exercise the copyright that they legally hold and to protect their property from illegal misuse by third party firms and from their author agreement-disregarding authors who mistakenly believe that because their name is on the byline of an article that they can do whatever they wish with value-added property that, despite their authorship, they do not own.

Self-piracy is wrong and it is not helping build a better scholarly communication system. Instead, it further confuses the already confused into believing that [pseudo] open access is easy and it leads to painful ironies such as scholarly society leaders setting publishing policies that they do not understand and that they, even as they make them, are out of compliance with.

Jackson’s final argument is that breaking contracts we signed by essentially stealing articles and posting them on for-profit sites “is not the way to do it.” There are other options. Plenty, he reminds us. He also says that it is our obligation as scholars to know how to modify author agreements. This is one step in moving things forward (and something that has been suggested by all three authors I have cited so far–probably good reason to pay attention).

Gavia Libraria also chimed in on the matter right around the same time. For her, much of it comes down to mass ignorance of the issues:

The great mass of those who publish in the scholarly literature are pig-ignorant about how scholarly publishing works. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have to worry about scam open-access journals or journal impact factor, just to offer up two obvious examples, because they would be laughed out of existence.

This mass of people, she says, has an unwarranted sense of entitlement to the scholarly literature and a warped understanding of their own contributions to it. This entitlement, combined with ignorance, works to the benefit of toll-access publishers. How? Because, she argues, people who feel this sense of entitlement yet know almost nothing about the workings of the publishing world are”are easily manipulated into signing contracts they shouldn’t and vehemently defending organizations and processes out to exploit them.”

These are some harsh words. They might hurt–but that’s probably because they’re right on the mark. I’m definitely someone who has been guilty of complaining about Big Evil Publishers in the past–without looking deeper into the issues. This kind of populism is fun and all, but there’s no actual end game. If the goal is to do something about the current publishing regime, then the first thing we’re going to have to do is wise up. Read up. Learn more and listen more when it comes to publishing.

And here I’m not just talking about the usual conversations about publishing–you know, the ones where people tell you to either get yourself published in the usual toll-access journals or watch your career slowly wither away. I’m talking about the kind of “publishing otherwise” that Marcel LaFlamme writes about (not one, but two nods there folks). The kind of rowdy, alternative publishing that Eileen Joy writes about. And after we educate ourselves, well, it’s time to actively take part in building the alternative publishing platforms that will make the current world of pay-walled publishing seem ridiculous, laughable, and, probably most important, completely inept.

Maybe now is actually the time for the big Open Access battle of the century. If not now, when?

*We don’t actually have an editorial office.

Before I begin, I should state right away that the reason I heard about OUP’s bibliography project is that I wrote one as did another Mind here on the site, Matt. So there’s some transparency on that.

Oxford sees the Internet as a jungle: rich, dense, dangerous, and easy to get lost in. The bibliographies are meant to be the path through that jungle. Their basic form is extremely traditional: they are annotated bibliographies of about 100 entries. Each entry is broken down into sections. Each section is introduced by a short paragraph which contextualizes the entries, and then the entries themselves have an annotation which describes their central argument or finding. Pretty straightforward.

The goal of the bibliographies, however, is to be selective, so each section can only have a half-dozen or so entries. As a result, readers really only get the genuinely useful and important entries on a topic. Writing my bibliography, I was struck by the amount of conceptual work it required. These highly curated bibliographies are not just lists of ‘top rated’ articles, but carefully-structured narratives. I’ve been impressed by the quality of the bibliographies on the site, and by Oxford’s selection of authors.

Of course, annotated bibliographies are not new. What is new is the way Oxford is publishing them. These pieces are born digital and live digitally on the website. Unlike an encyclopedia or other reference work, there will be no second or third edition to purchase — institutions will just subscribe to a bibliography site that is being constantly updated. PLUS Oxford pipes each individual bibliography out to Amazon and other vendors so you can purchase individual bibliographies.

Do you see the genius of this system? It’s a paywall’d, cherry picked version of Wikipedia. And unlike a lot of embarrassing ‘next-gen’ reference works pushed by publishers, this one is actually really good. It’s simultaneously fantastic and scary.

It matters that this comes from OUP. There’s a big difference between, say, McGill-Queens University Press and Elsevier. One of them is a small press which really is in it for the love of publishing good books. The other is part of a massive corporation whose idea of demonstrating corporate responsibility is cutting its connections to the weapons industry. OUP is its own sort of beast. I think of it less as a university press and more as the last remaining political institution of the British Empire. In fact I think of it as that empire. This is a company that provides school books to the world, and carefully shepherds intellectual property across centuries. It will be interesting to see how they price this work, and how much of it they make accessible. Clearly they are looking to expand beyond textbooks and small runs of British Academy Monographs and move into the higher ed market more broadly.

So next week enjoy reading (and downloading) OUP’s offering for library week, and give the bibliographies a look. Open Access advocates will have to take a look at what OUP’s done and see how a similar OA project might work.

When you publish with Elsevier, you sign an agreement with them called a ‘copyright transfer agreement’. Guess what it does? That’s right: It transfers control of your creative work to them. In many important ways, your work no longer belongs to you. You may be the author, but you are no longer the owner. In saying this I am condensing a lot of complex argumentation about what constitutes ownership, authorship, and so forth. But you get the picture. When Elsevier tells you you can’t post your own work on Academia.edu or anywhere else, they are only exercising the rights that you gave them.

So far, Elsevier and other publishers have quietly tolerated the tremendous traffic of PDFs that happens both in public and private on the Internet. Doing so is in their own best interest — if most people realized the way they had signed away their rights to publishers, the open access movement would double or triple in size overnight. At the moment, exercising these rights seems a bonehead play because it wakes academics from their dogmatic slumbers and gets them pissed off. But is it really a dumb play? Perhaps this is the first step in a gradual process of acclimatization in which publishers slowly send more and more take down notices, getting us used to the idea that we can’t control our own work. Perhaps Elsevier did the numbers and decided it was better to increase sales, even if it comes at the expense of their public reputation. Who knows? Maybe they’ve decided we can’t hate them anymore and just said ‘to hell with it’.

But you can’t blame them for seeing clearly the nature of the game we play with them. When was the last time you watched Jaws and thought to yourself: “It’s not fair! That shark isn’t supposed to eat people!”  The crazy guy with the stitched up face and the chainsaw? What did you think he was doing here in the same creepy mansion with you? And are you really surprised your cell phone doesn’t work in here?

The world of scholarly communication is deeply screwed up. Most people don’t notice, most of the time. But there are a lot of ways to make it less screwed up. You can publish in fully open access journals. You can publish in green OA journals that allow you to post preprints of your work. You can alter the terms of your author’s agreement (many authors do this successfully) to make your work more accessible. Or if you are on the road to tenure or a job, you can just say “grub first, then ethics” and publish away, knowing that you’ve made a deal with the devil. I understand that sometimes these deals have to be made.

But there’s one thing I don’t think it is fair for us to do: complain about the way the world is because we lived under the impression that it was something else. Especially if we are actively engaged in reproducing it. So if you are pissed off about the Elsevier takedowns, then please join our rebel alliance now — because guess what? Darth Vader actually is out to get you.