The University of California is well known for its open access policy, its digital library (CDL) and the eScholarship repository within it. It is therefore of great interest that both the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) and the Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) have delivered reports on the transition to digital scholarly communication and open access. It will interest readers that these reports are contradictory. While CSHE interprets its findings (based on in-depth interviews) as indicating that acadmic values stand in the way of progress, the OSC interprets its survey results as showing that institutional policies are the primary obstacle.
What is the case? And what to make of these contradictory results?
The CSHE report: Scholarly Communication: Academic Values and Sustainable Models. C. Judson King, Diane Harley, Sarah Earl-Novell, Jennifer Arter, Shannon Lawrence, and Irene Perciali. Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley. (July 27, 2006)
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?t=3
The OSC report: Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication: Survey Findings from the University Of California [August 2007]
http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/responses/activities.html
My criticism of the CSHE report is included in the follwing paper:
Armbruster, Chris, "Society Publishing, the Internet and Open Access: Shifting Mission-Orientation from Content Holding to Certification and Navigation Services?" (July 2007).
http://ssrn.com/abstract=997819
The CSHE team argues that "approaches that try to 'move' faculty and deeply embedded value systems directly toward new forms of archival, 'final' publication are destined largely to failure in the short-term". This assertion is based on interviews with faculty, editors, librarians and administrators across the sciences and humanities.
My criticism is that a close scrutiny of the CSHE results reveals an unacknowledged shift in academic practice from 'norms' to 'interests' and from scholarly community to institutional hierarchies. In reading the CSHE report, I detect two incongruencies:
1. The respondents and the authors of the study insist that peer review is the hallmark of communication and publication, but the study reveals an increasing reliance on indirect and even surrogate measures of peer review (e.g. rank, funding or institutional affiliation) that substitute for the actual examination of argument and data.
2. The printed journal is preferred for the final archival publication while faculty demand and use electronic access and hardly ever consult the print edition any longer.
My overall interpretation is the following: There is no 'lack of willingness of faculty to change' as the CSHE report has it, but an unwillingness to take risks in the face of an increasingly rigid academic stratification among institutions and within institutions. These observations are congruent with results of the OSC survey such as:
- the current tenure and promotion system impedes changes in faculty behaviour
- there is a disconnect between attitude and behaviour with regard to copyright
- senior faculty may be the most fertile targets for innovation in scholarly communication
If the issue is not 'values' but 'interests', then progress towards digital scholarly communication would hinge on:
A) Funder mandates and funder policies that systematically encourage and reward the deposition of results (data and publication) in open access repositories;
B) Changes in the tenure and promotion system that encourage innovation in scholarly communication and reward junior researchers who go the extra mile in scholarly communication and in the dissemination of their results in open access.
There is one more interesting result from the OSC report:
C) The Arts and Humanities (and not the natural sciences) may presently be the most fertile for sponsored initiatives in the transition to digital scholarly communication.
Chris Armbruster
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=434782
Received on Fri Sep 14 2007 - 12:05:49 BST