1 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,000 And they can hear us. 2 00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:13,000 So I will start my little introduction and then I will hand over to you, Martin, for this session, which will ultimately last until twelve thirty. 3 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:20,000 So I'm just going to say a few words here to start off. 4 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:27,000 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this session of Chase Encounters hosted by Birkbeck University of London. 5 00:00:27,000 --> 00:00:32,000 My name's Joe Brooker and I have the role of Assistant Dean for postgraduate 6 00:00:32,000 --> 00:00:37,000 research in the School of Arts here at Birkbeck. Over the last couple of years. 7 00:00:37,000 --> 00:00:44,000 That has meant I have had a lot of involvement with CHASE and I have been glad to see firstly how 8 00:00:44,000 --> 00:00:50,000 these studentships have assisted students to undertake their studies across a range of disciplines. 9 00:00:50,000 --> 00:00:51,000 Secondly, 10 00:00:51,000 --> 00:01:00,000 how its placement schemes and its grants have allowed people to extend their research going to certain different locations and also how its training 11 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:09,000 funds have encouraged staff at CHASE Member Institutions to set up events and series which have brought people together across the different colleges. 12 00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:17,000 There have been lots of examples of that. We did one here at Birkbeck in science fiction with Goldsmiths essentially a year or two ago. 13 00:01:17,000 --> 00:01:26,000 Birkbeck is very glad indeed to be a member of CHASE, and therefore we're also very glad to be hosting this particular, 14 00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:32,000 also particularly unusual, edition of CHASE Encounters in that regard. 15 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:39,000 I must pay tribute, especially to the work of Professor Roger Luckhurst and also of above all, 16 00:01:39,000 --> 00:01:47,000 I think Aren Roukema, who I understand has done exceptional work in bringing this event together. 17 00:01:47,000 --> 00:01:55,000 During day one yesterday, I saw a remarkable range of work ranging from how Neandertal people 18 00:01:55,000 --> 00:02:03,000 used fire and chose things to burn to the current cultural politics of colonialism. 19 00:02:03,000 --> 00:02:12,000 I was also profoundly impressed by the keynote by Professor Esther Leslie, which was a remarkably wide ranging, imaginative, 20 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:19,000 at times poetic exploration of the material substances that underpin our digital 21 00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:25,000 lives with attention to the commercial and political interests involved. 22 00:02:25,000 --> 00:02:31,000 It's now my pleasure to introduce the second keynote address, which will be very different, 23 00:02:31,000 --> 00:02:42,000 but which I also expect to be of very great interest and relevance to contemporary issues and the state of the Academy today. 24 00:02:42,000 --> 00:02:46,000 I will now introduce the speaker and then once he has concluded, 25 00:02:46,000 --> 00:02:53,000 I'll moderate the Q&A until twelve thirty and there should be ample time to raise questions and thoughts. 26 00:02:53,000 --> 00:02:59,000 Well, Professor Martin Paul is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing, 27 00:02:59,000 --> 00:03:05,000 as well as the Strategic Lead for Digital Education at Birkbeck University of London. 28 00:03:05,000 --> 00:03:11,000 Martin is also Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University, 29 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:22,000 Until 2022. Martin specializes in contemporary American fiction, histories and philosophies of technology, 30 00:03:22,000 --> 00:03:27,000 evaluative cultures in the academy and scholarly communications discourse. 31 00:03:27,000 --> 00:03:38,000 He is the author of a number of books, including Pynchon and Philosophy, Open Access and the Humanities, Password 32 00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:49,000 (something that's relevant to all of us every day), Literature Against Criticism, and Close Reading with Computers, which has been a big topic lately. 33 00:03:49,000 --> 00:03:59,000 Martin is also a co-founder of the Open Library of Humanities, a platform which fosters and enables open access publishing. 34 00:03:59,000 --> 00:04:05,000 I am looking forward to Martin's lecture today, which is entitled "Doing It to Ourselves: 35 00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:14,000 Pandemic-Proofing Humanities Scholarship". [Martin Paul Eve]: Thank you very much, Joe, for that extremely generous introduction. 36 00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:23,000 And also, I'd like to extend my thanks to Aren and Roger, but also to all participants in this most extraordinary of years 37 00:04:23,000 --> 00:04:30,000 for the patience we all show one another in our new normal, so to speak, 38 00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:41,000 as we communicate using devices that are perhaps less divisive, in this particular context than Professor Leslie may have led us to believe. 39 00:04:41,000 --> 00:04:49,000 In any case, I was asked speak today for about 20 to 30 minutes so that I don't send everyone off to sleep. 40 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:53,000 Obviously, in this digital space, concentration spans can be shorter. 41 00:04:53,000 --> 00:04:59,000 But we've got a full hour to talk today about contemporary systems of academic publishing 42 00:04:59,000 --> 00:05:09,000 and our cultures of communication in the humanities disciplines in the 21st century, in digital modes. 43 00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:17,000 Now, I'm very aware that PhD students are usually subjected to a great number of talks on "how to get published", 44 00:05:17,000 --> 00:05:22,000 but as practical advice talks on what you have to do to navigate the scholarly 45 00:05:22,000 --> 00:05:29,000 communication system, on how to write your book, on how to place it with an editor. 46 00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:41,000 These talks are often of a very pragmatic, formulaic nature that teach these students how to navigate existing structures. 47 00:05:41,000 --> 00:05:51,000 They usually do not query some of the underlying premises of scholarly communications infrastructures, of journal publishing, of book publishing. 48 00:05:51,000 --> 00:05:56,000 They simply tell you what you need to do to exist within it. 49 00:05:56,000 --> 00:06:04,000 Today, I am not going to do that. I'm afraid this is not a talk about how to get your book published with a top university press. 50 00:06:04,000 --> 00:06:13,000 This is more talk that wants to dismantle the ideas of what we talk about when we talk about a "top" university press. 51 00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:21,000 It's a talk that I hope will give you some insight into the "behind the scenes" actions of academic publishing infrastructures, 52 00:06:21,000 --> 00:06:28,000 its labours, its modes of operation, and its historical foundations as well. 53 00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:35,000 And of course, the problem is that when I give this kind of talk, lots of academics tend to tune out somewhat. 54 00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:41,000 Every academic thinks they know about academic publishing because they have been published. 55 00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:49,000 But that's a bit like claiming that you know about supermarket supply chains because you've been to the supermarket and shop there. 56 00:06:49,000 --> 00:06:58,000 Very few academics know about digital preservation systems, persistent identifiers, economics and outsourcings, in scholarly communications, 57 00:06:58,000 --> 00:07:06,000 the ways in which histories of prestige and hierarchy have shaped the ways that behavioral systems come into play today. 58 00:07:06,000 --> 00:07:12,000 The history of peer review, for instance, which is much, much younger than most academics presume. 59 00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:19,000 In fact, Albert Einstein was at one point outraged to learn that his paper had been sent for peer review and demanded 60 00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:26,000 to know why the editors had betrayed his confidence in soliciting feedback on this before it was published, 61 00:07:26,000 --> 00:07:31,000 rather than simply publishing his work because he was a great scientist. 62 00:07:31,000 --> 00:07:37,000 And so what I want to do today is unpick some of these histories. I am going to give some practical advice, 63 00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:42,000 but it's around new modes of open publishing and how they within the structure 64 00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:50,000 of the academy rather than how to navigate the prestige hierarchy itself. 65 00:07:50,000 --> 00:07:54,000 But I guess the theme that really has 66 00:07:54,000 --> 00:08:00,000 been the core thread that I've tried to weave through this is what the pandemic has shown about our systems of 67 00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:12,000 scholarly communications. I think, when libraries all went into lockdown in March this year, we were all left in quite a difficult position. 68 00:08:12,000 --> 00:08:20,000 And you may have noticed, at that point, that publishers immediately scrambled to take particular actions. In particular 69 00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:29,000 they lowered their paywalls in order to allow everyone who could no longer get to libraries to have access. Those paywalls have now gone back up. 70 00:08:29,000 --> 00:08:38,000 But for many of us who are in the vulnerable category and shielding, for instance, returning to a library still seems quite a distant prospect. 71 00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:44,000 So the question that really this raises for me is: what was exceptional about this year? 72 00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:50,000 Why did it expose so vividly the fault lines in our scholarly communications infrastructures? 73 00:08:50,000 --> 00:08:55,000 And what might we do to ensure that we don't end up in this position again? 74 00:08:55,000 --> 00:09:02,000 Because what most us were exposed to this year, the isolation, the inability to travel to research institutions, 75 00:09:02,000 --> 00:09:09,000 was what some members of our community experience all the time. There are disabled academics who cannot travel, for instance. 76 00:09:09,000 --> 00:09:14,000 There are those for whom library access is just a pipe dream. 77 00:09:14,000 --> 00:09:20,000 There are those in parts of the world who do not have access to research libraries like the British Library. 78 00:09:20,000 --> 00:09:29,000 And the less economically developed status of those nations means they're unlikely to be able to get access to that scholarship. 79 00:09:29,000 --> 00:09:42,000 In other words, I want to think about what the pandemic has exposed about the exclusionary aspects of our scholarly communications infrastructure. 80 00:09:42,000 --> 00:09:45,000 So to go back somewhat. 81 00:09:45,000 --> 00:09:53,000 I thought it was worth a very basic introduction to some of the questions that really should underpin our publishing activities. 82 00:09:53,000 --> 00:09:57,000 These are not usually asked by most academics or even most peers. 83 00:09:57,000 --> 00:10:02,000 These questions, because they seem as though they're self-evidence. Why do we publish? 84 00:10:02,000 --> 00:10:08,000 How do we publish? And what do we want from publishing? 85 00:10:08,000 --> 00:10:15,000 Now, it seems that the obvious answer would be, "why do we publish? Well, so that others can read our results". 86 00:10:15,000 --> 00:10:24,000 "So anyone can have access to this material". But that would be quite a facile way of viewing what is actually a complex and deep topic, 87 00:10:24,000 --> 00:10:29,000 because if really the sole aim of what we were doing was that others could read our work 88 00:10:29,000 --> 00:10:37,000 would we not just put this up on a Web site for anybody to download for free immediately? 89 00:10:37,000 --> 00:10:41,000 Instead, I propose there are actually two sides of this coin: that we wish 90 00:10:41,000 --> 00:10:47,000 on the one hand to be read. And that is a motivation. We wish for the dissemination of our scholarship. 91 00:10:47,000 --> 00:10:53,000 But on the other hand, we also want to be assessed within various frameworks of legitimation. 92 00:10:53,000 --> 00:11:00,000 That is, there are legitimation functions in the way in which we put our work through publishing processes that 93 00:11:00,000 --> 00:11:09,000 tend to act as evaluative criteria for people who are navigating a situation of information overload. 94 00:11:09,000 --> 00:11:16,000 So this is another point that's worth considering when you say "why do we publish?" More is published 95 00:11:16,000 --> 00:11:23,000 every year in even the smallest of subdisciplines than it would be possible to read in a lifetime. 96 00:11:23,000 --> 00:11:28,000 That is to say that it is impossible to read everything that is published. 97 00:11:28,000 --> 00:11:33,000 You might want to also consider how this works in the fictional space. 98 00:11:33,000 --> 00:11:42,000 So actually, I did a calculation recently that showed that if you wanted to read all the fiction that was published in the English language in 2015, 99 00:11:42,000 --> 00:11:53,000 you would have to read 10 books a day every day from age 10 onwards until you died to achieve that goal of reading just one year's output. 100 00:11:53,000 --> 00:11:57,000 There's a similar scenario at play in academic publishing, 101 00:11:57,000 --> 00:12:06,000 which is to say that in a culture where we cannot read everything, we need ways of deciding where to put our attention. 102 00:12:06,000 --> 00:12:09,000 And you can think of this in quasi-economic terms, 103 00:12:09,000 --> 00:12:16,000 that essentially we have a limited attention economy and we need to decide where to spend our time. 104 00:12:16,000 --> 00:12:25,000 We already use those metaphors of finance and exchange in how we think about attention and its expenditure or otherwise. 105 00:12:25,000 --> 00:12:31,000 So how do we decide whether a piece of academic work is worth reading? 106 00:12:31,000 --> 00:12:39,000 Well, we usually look at the shorthand measures, at the paratextual features of that publishing apparatus. 107 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:45,000 So an example of that might be to consider where the work was published. 108 00:12:45,000 --> 00:12:53,000 Hyper exclusionary journals that have strong peer review measures and high rejection rates of material. 109 00:12:53,000 --> 00:12:59,000 So you can think of the top tier journals and literary studies where I work, for instance, like PMLA, for example. 110 00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:05,000 The idea here is that they will only take supposedly the best work. 111 00:13:05,000 --> 00:13:13,000 They will exclude other work. So you can be sure that when you go to PMLA you are reading the crème de la crème, the top in the field. 112 00:13:13,000 --> 00:13:20,000 And that gives you some confidence, is the idea. That this is worth your time. 113 00:13:20,000 --> 00:13:26,000 Now, the challenge is that this relies on a structure of peer review, the system by which academics appraise one another's work, 114 00:13:26,000 --> 00:13:32,000 usually before publication. You'll probably be experiencing, some point later into your PhD 115 00:13:32,000 --> 00:13:38,000 studies, or when you go on to postdoctoral positions, requests for peer review, 116 00:13:38,000 --> 00:13:44,000 which come with increasing frequency as you go on in your academic career. 117 00:13:44,000 --> 00:13:48,000 And these are conducted on an exchange basis. 118 00:13:48,000 --> 00:13:52,000 So in reviewing journal articles, academics are not paid. 119 00:13:52,000 --> 00:13:57,000 They do it because it's part of service to the field. Peer reviewing books, which can take a lot longer, 120 00:13:57,000 --> 00:14:06,000 there is sometimes a transaction involved, but it's not really commensurate with the volume of work that entails. 121 00:14:06,000 --> 00:14:14,000 However, this structure of peer review is slightly dubious at best across all disciplines. 122 00:14:14,000 --> 00:14:22,000 There are various studies that have tried to replicate systems of peer review by resubmitting papers that had previously been accepted to journals. 123 00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:30,000 And it turned out that peer reviewers gave results that might be described and were described by an editor of the British Medical Journal, 124 00:14:30,000 --> 00:14:35,000 in fact, as "no better than chance" in some circumstances. 125 00:14:35,000 --> 00:14:38,000 But that's to say that the papers that were resubmitted to these journals that they 126 00:14:38,000 --> 00:14:43,000 had previously accepted were now rejected for not being significant enough, 127 00:14:43,000 --> 00:14:47,000 not being novel enough, not being methodologically sound and so on. 128 00:14:47,000 --> 00:14:56,000 But in that study, only five percent of the papers were rejected because somebody had noticed that they'd already been published. 129 00:14:56,000 --> 00:15:01,000 Peer review then appears to be an extremely subjective process. 130 00:15:01,000 --> 00:15:05,000 And there are all the jokes that go round on Twitter about the vicious Reviewer 131 00:15:05,000 --> 00:15:11,000 Two giving a fierce report while Reviewer One might have said to publish. 132 00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:13,000 This isn't universally the case. 133 00:15:13,000 --> 00:15:21,000 I do a lot of editorial work on journals and there are clear cases where reviewers agree that something should not be published. 134 00:15:21,000 --> 00:15:27,000 We're quite good, actually, at rejecting work and having consensus on that. 135 00:15:27,000 --> 00:15:34,000 There are also some instances where we get very strong double recommendations from two reviewers that work should be published. 136 00:15:34,000 --> 00:15:42,000 And that's a clear, clear signal. But there's a whole field in between where we have entirely divergent opinions. 137 00:15:42,000 --> 00:15:48,000 And one reviewer will say this work should be rejected. The other will tell us that should be accepted. 138 00:15:48,000 --> 00:15:51,000 And that's a very difficult editorial situation. 139 00:15:51,000 --> 00:16:02,000 But it's also a world that creates some problems for our systems of value and what we read and where we spend our time. [Toby the dog]: BARK BARK [Martin Paul Eve]: Apologies, 140 00:16:02,000 --> 00:16:10,000 you might be able to hear my dog barking in the background there. That's the other joy of this online communications system. 141 00:16:10,000 --> 00:16:19,000 So, some of the problems that we have in this structure are about our time and where we spend our attention. 142 00:16:19,000 --> 00:16:28,000 There's also the fact that systems of hiring, promotion, and assessment in the academy are dependent on those frameworks. 143 00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:35,000 So you've probably been told in advice from your PhD supervisors, that if you want to get an academic job, 144 00:16:35,000 --> 00:16:43,000 you will need to have published in X or Y journals, or you will need to have a book with X or Y press. 145 00:16:43,000 --> 00:16:48,000 And the reason for that is that the assessment panels at universities who are deciding who gets 146 00:16:48,000 --> 00:16:56,000 jobs or where to allocate funding in funding applications or who are on REF panels and so on 147 00:16:56,000 --> 00:17:00,000 need those same frameworks to denote value. 148 00:17:00,000 --> 00:17:09,000 If they read material outside of the frame of the journal in which the material was published or the book press with whom the work came out, 149 00:17:09,000 --> 00:17:18,000 it is very unlikely that they would come to the same hierarchical rankings as they did if they were looking at the work within that frame, 150 00:17:18,000 --> 00:17:21,000 which is all to say that we seem to have built an economy, 151 00:17:21,000 --> 00:17:28,000 an apparatus of publishing that we believe helps us to filter work and to read selectively and to give us our time back. 152 00:17:28,000 --> 00:17:38,000 But the epistemic foundations on which it sits appear to be shakier than we might like. 153 00:17:38,000 --> 00:17:45,000 Now, this has consequences that are material and economic for universities. 154 00:17:45,000 --> 00:17:50,000 So while we talk about academic publishers as a homogenous unit, 155 00:17:50,000 --> 00:17:56,000 there are actually lots of different types of academic publishers in very different economic positions. 156 00:17:56,000 --> 00:18:00,000 There are sets of university presses who are technically charities. 157 00:18:00,000 --> 00:18:06,000 they're often affiliated with universities and they are often mission-driven institutions. 158 00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:15,000 That is that their charitable objects are furtherance of education and the public benefit that derives from that. 159 00:18:15,000 --> 00:18:24,000 Apart from Cambridge and Oxford University Press and perhaps Harvard University Press, though, these entities are not massively wealthy. 160 00:18:24,000 --> 00:18:25,000 They are usually, in fact, 161 00:18:25,000 --> 00:18:35,000 about one lawsuit away from bankruptcy and operate on tight margins with subsidy from the host institutions to help them run. Cambridge and 162 00:18:35,000 --> 00:18:42,000 Oxford University presses are definite exceptions from that rule as they have a textbook 163 00:18:42,000 --> 00:18:49,000 arm of their publishing outfits that operates very differently to other presses. 164 00:18:49,000 --> 00:18:57,000 That is the textbook market in mathematics, natural sciences and physics are highly lucrative academic publishing markets, 165 00:18:57,000 --> 00:19:04,000 and those university presses benefit from that cross subsidy into their research publishing arms. 166 00:19:04,000 --> 00:19:13,000 The problem is that there are also a set of incredibly rapacious for-profit publishers. 167 00:19:13,000 --> 00:19:20,000 The Big Three that come to mind for me are Springer-Nature and Taylor and Francis, Elsevier. 168 00:19:20,000 --> 00:19:24,000 And to give an indication of the kinds of levels of money we're talking about. 169 00:19:24,000 --> 00:19:37,000 Elsevier made two billion pounds turnover in 2016 with a profit margin of over one billion pounds in the middle of a global recession 170 00:19:37,000 --> 00:19:41,000 (these figures are from earlier in the decade). 171 00:19:41,000 --> 00:19:49,000 Elsevier is more profitable than Big Pharma, more profitable than the oil industry by percentage. 172 00:19:49,000 --> 00:19:57,000 It is, as George Monbiot put it in an article in The Guardian, basically given a license to print money. 173 00:19:57,000 --> 00:20:03,000 And why is that? Well, it's due to this prestige economy that we've been speaking about. 174 00:20:03,000 --> 00:20:07,000 The situation is that you will need to publish in particular journals or publish 175 00:20:07,000 --> 00:20:13,000 with particular presses because those presses denote the value to our peers, 176 00:20:13,000 --> 00:20:17,000 no matter how shaky the foundation of exclusion and review might be there. 177 00:20:17,000 --> 00:20:23,000 And so these entities who own these titles basically have us over a barrel. 178 00:20:23,000 --> 00:20:29,000 We need to publish with them because that's how we assess work and that's how that culture has developed. 179 00:20:29,000 --> 00:20:36,000 They own the rights to that though. They also own the copyright to that work and they own the copyrights to the work they publish, 180 00:20:36,000 --> 00:20:44,000 that you wrote, that they do not pay for in the journal space, until 70 years after you are dead. 181 00:20:44,000 --> 00:20:54,000 That is until 70 years after your death, if you publish in an Elsevier journal, they will only exclusive rights to sell that material. 182 00:20:54,000 --> 00:20:58,000 And this comes with dire material consequences for the academy. 183 00:20:58,000 --> 00:21:11,000 Since 1986, there have been hyperinflationary cost increases to university libraries to access all material; that is about 350 percent above inflation. 184 00:21:11,000 --> 00:21:15,000 And library budgets have just about kept pace with inflation. 185 00:21:15,000 --> 00:21:23,000 There's not a single university in the world that hasn't canceled a journal subscription on the basis of price and not being able to afford it. 186 00:21:23,000 --> 00:21:28,000 Even Harvard, which practically has a bank inside it. 187 00:21:28,000 --> 00:21:32,000 There are also lots of problems of concentration of the publishing industry going on at the moment. 188 00:21:32,000 --> 00:21:40,000 So you might consider the fact that commercial book publishing presses in the humanities like Bloomsbury Academic, 189 00:21:40,000 --> 00:21:49,000 for instance, has bought Methuen Drama, Arden Shakespeare, Cassell, T&T Clark, Berg, and so on. 190 00:21:49,000 --> 00:21:57,000 There are ever fewer players as the academic publishing industry, consolidated into fewer and fewer presses. 191 00:21:57,000 --> 00:21:59,000 And that has economic consequence as well, 192 00:21:59,000 --> 00:22:06,000 because it means that these entities own more and more of the content to which we need access and that we wrote for them. 193 00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:16,000 I should also point out that one of the goals of the academic publishing system is to free researchers from the pressures of the market. 194 00:22:16,000 --> 00:22:24,000 So academics do not typically, unless you're Slavoj Žižek, make enough from their books, 195 00:22:24,000 --> 00:22:33,000 and their journal publishing, to live on. It is assumed that because we work an intensely specialized areas, 196 00:22:33,000 --> 00:22:39,000 most of our work is going to be given to a publisher for them to publish for educational benefits. 197 00:22:39,000 --> 00:22:44,000 And the author is going to receive very little remuneration for that process. 198 00:22:44,000 --> 00:22:47,000 This is not like writing a trade book. 199 00:22:47,000 --> 00:22:54,000 In most cases, although obviously in the field of history, historians do write trade books that go on to sell very well, 200 00:22:54,000 --> 00:23:00,000 but if we take a step back from those titles and think about the more common research monographs, say in Church Pews, 201 00:23:00,000 --> 00:23:09,000 1910-1911, intensely specialized areas of study, we're not looking at a remunerative culture through that. 202 00:23:09,000 --> 00:23:14,000 Instead, we're looking at a culture where academics accept that they publish and they don't make 203 00:23:14,000 --> 00:23:18,000 money directly from the publication, so they can publish on the area that they wish to. 204 00:23:18,000 --> 00:23:27,000 They're freed from the market pressure of having to write on a popular topic. But this will lead to a job, to promotion, to grant funding and so on. 205 00:23:27,000 --> 00:23:35,000 So there are ways in which this prestige economy translates, as Bordieu would have it, always back into material economies. 206 00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:42,000 It's just not a direct market relation of having to sell the work. 207 00:23:42,000 --> 00:23:53,000 I should also point out that this system of academic publishing that we've established has some poor international political connotations as well. 208 00:23:53,000 --> 00:24:08,000 So most typesetting in academic journals and books is outsourced to organizations like Integra, which is a an Indian based typesetting outfit. 209 00:24:08,000 --> 00:24:11,000 I am willing to bet, though, that most people who have published in, say, 210 00:24:11,000 --> 00:24:18,000 journals of post-colonial studies, have never inquired about the economic circumstances of the typesetters, who are paid to typeset 211 00:24:18,000 --> 00:24:26,000 their very work. And that's because these organizations are third party contractors to academic presses. 212 00:24:26,000 --> 00:24:35,000 So it looks like you're publishing with, say, Routledge or Taylor and Francis or Oxford University Press. 213 00:24:35,000 --> 00:24:39,000 However, behind the scenes, this is being outsourced to the Indian subcontinent. 214 00:24:39,000 --> 00:24:49,000 And it masks the labor. And you might want to consider this in the terms that Susan Leigh Star has in her famous article in Science and Technology Studies, 215 00:24:49,000 --> 00:24:55,000 The Ethnography of Infrastructure, where she talks about the ethnography of infrastructure. 216 00:24:55,000 --> 00:25:01,000 She talks about the need to expose hidden labor within various systems. 217 00:25:01,000 --> 00:25:09,000 A good question might be: what labor is masked beneath our systems of scholarly communications? 218 00:25:09,000 --> 00:25:19,000 So over the past two decades, to start to try to address this problematic scenario of access, the prestige economy, 219 00:25:19,000 --> 00:25:29,000 the ways in which we're locked out from reading even our own research, sometimes, a movement called the Open Access Movement has emerged. 220 00:25:29,000 --> 00:25:34,000 And the fundamental premise of open access is that in the digital age, 221 00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:42,000 it should be possible for us to publish peer reviewed scholarship that is free to read and free to reuse. 222 00:25:42,000 --> 00:25:51,000 So what we mean by this is: aren't there ways when we're no longer talking about printing copies of journals and posting them around the world, 223 00:25:51,000 --> 00:25:57,000 that we might enable readers to access scholarly material without paying? 224 00:25:57,000 --> 00:26:02,000 And to give them also the freedom to say to reuse that material in their teaching, 225 00:26:02,000 --> 00:26:07,000 to reuse longer passages than would be allowed under fair dealings provisions in copyright, 226 00:26:07,000 --> 00:26:13,000 to give them additional flexibility with what they do with our scholarly material. 227 00:26:13,000 --> 00:26:17,000 This is not an uncontentious movement for several reasons that 228 00:26:17,000 --> 00:26:22,000 I'll go on to discuss. But there are some terms that it's worth knowing about as this is now a major 229 00:26:22,000 --> 00:26:28,000 international movement that is altering the direction of scholarly communications. 230 00:26:28,000 --> 00:26:37,000 So when we talk about "green open access", this means putting a copy of something you've published into an institutional repository. 231 00:26:37,000 --> 00:26:44,000 So at Birkbeck, for instance, our repository is called BIROn. It runs on software called eprints. 232 00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:51,000 And the basic gist of its use is that whenever I publish an article in any peer reviewed scholarly journal, 233 00:26:51,000 --> 00:26:58,000 I am allowed to put the final accepted manuscript version into a repository, into BIROn, at Birkbeck. 234 00:26:58,000 --> 00:27:03,000 And then others can read that free of charge. It's not the final typeset version. 235 00:27:03,000 --> 00:27:13,000 Sometimes there's an embargo of up to 24 months, but it's certainly better than nothing in giving people access to scholarship. 236 00:27:13,000 --> 00:27:17,000 The other type of open access that's important is called gold open access. 237 00:27:17,000 --> 00:27:25,000 And this refers to conditions of open access where the publisher themselves makes the material free to read. 238 00:27:25,000 --> 00:27:29,000 Now, this usually means that the publisher needs a different business model. 239 00:27:29,000 --> 00:27:34,000 Unsurprisingly, when you're giving something away for free, it can be difficult to sell it, 240 00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:38,000 although that's not necessarily the case in monograph publishing. 241 00:27:38,000 --> 00:27:44,000 It turns out that people like to read books in hard form, even when a digital copy is available. 242 00:27:44,000 --> 00:27:47,000 And so the relationship between giving away a copy, 243 00:27:47,000 --> 00:27:53,000 a digital copy of a book and selling print copies is actually very different to the academic scenario, 244 00:27:53,000 --> 00:28:02,000 where we're used for many years now, in the journal space to reading article length material in digital form. 245 00:28:02,000 --> 00:28:11,000 Essentially, open access is contentious, though, because one of the primary business models that has emerged for gold 246 00:28:11,000 --> 00:28:12,000 open access is for the publisher 247 00:28:12,000 --> 00:28:21,000 to charge what's called an article or book processing charge, an APC or a BPC, an article or book processing charge. 248 00:28:21,000 --> 00:28:29,000 And the logic is as follows, that if we invert the way we're looking at this and see that publishing now becomes a service to the author, 249 00:28:29,000 --> 00:28:33,000 where the labor of typesetting, copy editing, proofreading, digital preservation, 250 00:28:33,000 --> 00:28:38,000 platform maintenance, system identification and so on is taken by a publisher, 251 00:28:38,000 --> 00:28:47,000 that's a service to an author as well as a reader. Then maybe we should take payment from the author's side, rather than from the readers. 252 00:28:47,000 --> 00:28:52,000 Essentially the most well-known business model for gold 253 00:28:52,000 --> 00:29:00,000 open access is one where the author, their funder, or their university is asked o pay a fee once their article has been accepted. 254 00:29:00,000 --> 00:29:06,000 And this is about usually 3000 pounds or so for a scholarly journal article. 255 00:29:06,000 --> 00:29:12,000 And it ranges in price for books. Even up to eleven thousand pounds or so. 256 00:29:12,000 --> 00:29:15,000 It is not cheap. 257 00:29:15,000 --> 00:29:23,000 But one of the reasons for that is that academic publishing is itself not cheap, and it helps to understand a little bit about the cost structures 258 00:29:23,000 --> 00:29:29,000 if we're going to make critical judgments about a publishing industry. 259 00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:37,000 So it turned out there's a Mellon-Ithaka study in 2016 of U.S. university presses on what it costs to produce scholarly monograph 260 00:29:37,000 --> 00:29:43,000 (that's a book, an academic book or a research topic written by a single author). 261 00:29:43,000 --> 00:29:49,000 And the prices range, sorry the *costs* to those presses ranged from fifteen thousand dollars or so, 262 00:29:49,000 --> 00:29:54,000 up to one hundred thirty thousand dollars for a single book. 263 00:29:54,000 --> 00:30:01,000 Now, in the one hundred thirty thousand dollars case, what's going on is that that they're probably producing a scholarly edition. 264 00:30:01,000 --> 00:30:10,000 They've hired an editor specifically to work on the book with an academic. That's obviously a highly bespoke object that has 265 00:30:10,000 --> 00:30:17,000 had a great deal of individualized labor put into its construction. 266 00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:21,000 But what I'm pointing out here is that actually these things are not cheap to make. 267 00:30:21,000 --> 00:30:30,000 There is a whole professionalized industry devoted to a publication of these volumes, coordinating peer review and so on. 268 00:30:30,000 --> 00:30:34,000 And we do need to find ways to meet those costs. 269 00:30:34,000 --> 00:30:44,000 The problem with the article processing charge model for open access, though, can be well demonstrated with a quick mathematical metaphor. 270 00:30:44,000 --> 00:30:55,000 If you imagine that there are 100 people in a room who have come to attend a talk, much as we are here today, and they each have ten dollars. 271 00:30:55,000 --> 00:31:03,000 There are many ways that we could work out what we're going to do to fund, say, the underlying costs of putting on this talk. 272 00:31:03,000 --> 00:31:07,000 Let's say we want to have a hundred dollars as a return. 273 00:31:07,000 --> 00:31:16,000 And that will allow us to run this. If every one of those hundred people gave one dollar, then that would be a way of paying for this. 274 00:31:16,000 --> 00:31:18,000 And we could then say, but we've got enough. 275 00:31:18,000 --> 00:31:25,000 We'll make this talk available to anyone who wants to come, regardless of whether they can pay if those hundred people come. 276 00:31:25,000 --> 00:31:29,000 And that's what a subscription model looks a little bit like. 277 00:31:29,000 --> 00:31:33,000 It's saying everybody is going to pay a small amount so they can have access. 278 00:31:33,000 --> 00:31:37,000 Now, admittedly, in that mode, usually we don't give access to everyone else. 279 00:31:37,000 --> 00:31:46,000 You'd say only those who pay get access. The article publishing charge model puts this the other way round and it says to one person, 280 00:31:46,000 --> 00:31:51,000 "you must pay 100 dollars upfront so that everyone else can come for free". 281 00:31:51,000 --> 00:31:55,000 But that one person doesn't necessarily have one hundred dollars. 282 00:31:55,000 --> 00:32:02,000 This is a cost concentration model that comes with extreme problems of distribution. 283 00:32:02,000 --> 00:32:06,000 So we can also, if people are interested, talk about this more in the Q&A. 284 00:32:06,000 --> 00:32:14,000 We did a modeling exercise for the U.K. on how much it would cost to make all of our scholarly monographs openly accessible. 285 00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:23,000 There were five thousand and twenty three monographs published in 2013 just by the largest four publishers in the UK. 286 00:32:23,000 --> 00:32:27,000 And we estimated on 287 00:32:27,000 --> 00:32:37,000 an average processing charge price of commercial and University Press publishes that it would cost 55 million pounds to make them open access. 288 00:32:37,000 --> 00:32:45,000 The problem is the UK would be paying that as opposed to an international community of libraries buying the books. Again, 289 00:32:45,000 --> 00:32:49,000 this is problem of distribution of economics. That is the challenge here. 290 00:32:49,000 --> 00:32:58,000 Not the actual mechanism itself. I should also say the article President Charge is not a payment to bypass peer review or any of those structures. 291 00:32:58,000 --> 00:33:07,000 It is a payment to make the work openly available because it's anticipated that it can't be sold. 292 00:33:07,000 --> 00:33:20,000 I should also point out that the funding landscape in the UK and beyond now places a great deal of emphasis on open access publication. The 293 00:33:20,000 --> 00:33:29,000 Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK insists that work submitted to it is open the accessible. For those who don't know, the REF 294 00:33:29,000 --> 00:33:34,000 is our system of assessment and funding allocation in the UK. 295 00:33:34,000 --> 00:33:38,000 Every academic with a research contract must submit to this exercise. 296 00:33:38,000 --> 00:33:46,000 And there's a panel of disciplinary experts who assess the work and then decide on university's research funding allocations for the next five years. 297 00:33:46,000 --> 00:33:52,000 REF insists that works submitted are green open access and have been put into a repository. 298 00:33:52,000 --> 00:33:59,000 Articles that do not do so are excluded and scored as zero. 299 00:33:59,000 --> 00:34:07,000 The funding councils in the UK have a review this year into open access principles and what they're going to support. 300 00:34:07,000 --> 00:34:14,000 It's anticipated that there will be a mandate forthcoming in that exercise for monographs 301 00:34:14,000 --> 00:34:22,000 that must be openly accessible in the near future. And finally, this is being driven by an organization called Coalition. 302 00:34:22,000 --> 00:34:32,000 S and their funding plan called Plan S., which I think sounds like a cartoon villain, which is why we have Dr. Evil at the top of the slide. 303 00:34:32,000 --> 00:34:37,000 You can imagine someone stroking a white cat in a in a chair talking about Plan S. 304 00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:44,000 The Plan is essentially a pan-European initiative to push for immediate open access to scholarly research work. 305 00:34:44,000 --> 00:34:52,000 Now, this association with funders has led people to accuse open access of being a neoliberal scheme. 306 00:34:52,000 --> 00:34:57,000 And really, there are there are some justifications for this thinking. 307 00:34:57,000 --> 00:35:01,000 So in particular, the reuse provisions of, say, 308 00:35:01,000 --> 00:35:06,000 scholarly and scientific work does sound as though it's there for industry to 309 00:35:06,000 --> 00:35:13,000 be able to extract value from universities in the pursuit of private profits. 310 00:35:13,000 --> 00:35:19,000 The fact that right-wing to center right-wing governments have been pushing for open access also gives 311 00:35:19,000 --> 00:35:27,000 us some hint that all is not quite straightforward in the political space around who who wants this. 312 00:35:27,000 --> 00:35:34,000 My interest in open access, though, stems from a belief in equality and a desire to be read. 313 00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:41,000 And so I think it's very difficult to consider open access simply on a left right polarity of socialists 314 00:35:41,000 --> 00:35:48,000 saying that work should be available to anyone for free vs. right-wing economic governments 315 00:35:48,000 --> 00:35:58,000 saying that actually everyone should pay for things. It seems to sit uneasily at different points along this political spectrum. 316 00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:04,000 Which brings me to the last of my slides and where we're going to close up before we open for questions. 317 00:36:04,000 --> 00:36:12,000 I did the typical academic thing and didn't really stick to half an hour. I apologize for that, but I hope it's been enlightening nonetheless. 318 00:36:12,000 --> 00:36:20,000 I guess one of the things I want to go back to with this is the frustration we've had in the pandemic with access to material, 319 00:36:20,000 --> 00:36:27,000 and it's very easy to blame a publishing culture for that and to see systemic factors that deny you access. 320 00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:35,000 So the fact you haven't got access to a journal article or a book during the pandemic, it's easy to sit here and say. 321 00:36:35,000 --> 00:36:41,000 "Well, that's the system's fault. Why? Why didn't they fix it?" 322 00:36:41,000 --> 00:36:46,000 And I really think that the answer is that we have to fix it ourselves. 323 00:36:46,000 --> 00:36:54,000 And this is obviously a difficult thing to say to a room full of PhDs who are faced with difficult decisions about where to publish, 324 00:36:54,000 --> 00:37:00,000 whether to play the prestige hierarchy, how to play the game of academia. 325 00:37:00,000 --> 00:37:04,000 But I suppose there are some practical things I can recommend that you could do if you 326 00:37:04,000 --> 00:37:11,000 want to do what you wish others would do so that we can all have access to material. 327 00:37:11,000 --> 00:37:19,000 And the first is try to publish in a reputable open access venues that don't have article processing charges. 328 00:37:19,000 --> 00:37:25,000 The Open Library of Humanities that I run has 28 titles spanning the humanities disciplines, all of them peer reviewed, 329 00:37:25,000 --> 00:37:29,000 all of them reputable with editorial boards at prestigious universities, 330 00:37:29,000 --> 00:37:36,000 all of them openly available to anyone to read, but funded by libraries so that we can give the work away. 331 00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:42,000 So look for titles that are open access and that will will help you to achieve that, 332 00:37:42,000 --> 00:37:49,000 but still have those reputable markers of distinction that people want in their selectivity. 333 00:37:49,000 --> 00:37:56,000 The other thing is you can always deposit a copy of your journal articles in an institutional repository. 334 00:37:56,000 --> 00:38:00,000 There's a site called SHERPA/RoMEO [spells out "SHERPA/RoMEO"] 335 00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:08,000 that will tell you the policies of a journal on what you're allowed to put in the repository. 336 00:38:08,000 --> 00:38:15,000 But you can always ask your librarian as well at your institution. Am I allowed to do this when you publish? 337 00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:19,000 And simply putting a copy in a repository can increase your audience, 338 00:38:19,000 --> 00:38:24,000 your citation rates and the ability of those who can afford to pay to read your work. 339 00:38:24,000 --> 00:38:32,000 It really does a great deal for your readership simply to have the author's accepted manuscripts available, not even the final version. 340 00:38:32,000 --> 00:38:36,000 And in 97 percent of cases, we found you will be allowed to do that. 341 00:38:36,000 --> 00:38:46,000 So it's really worth pursuing that. The other thing is you can always ask a publisher if you've got to the point where your work has been accepted, 342 00:38:46,000 --> 00:38:52,000 asking about open access options and what might be possible is not going to get you rejected. 343 00:38:52,000 --> 00:38:56,000 I know it's tempting to think it feels precarious at that point, but actually by that stage, 344 00:38:56,000 --> 00:39:02,000 the publisher has invested lots of time in the peer review and care in typesetting your work and so on 345 00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:06,000 Copy editing. It really it does no harm to ask. 346 00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:15,000 And it shows publishers that there is a desire for this open practice and a desire on the part of academics to see it if nobody ever asks. 347 00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:21,000 They think that nobody cares about whether they are read or not. And so that brings me to the end, 348 00:39:21,000 --> 00:39:28,000 which is that often you are faced with choices about whether to behave in the way that you would like 349 00:39:28,000 --> 00:39:35,000 and that you wish others would versus the way that you are told you have to to advance in the academy. 350 00:39:35,000 --> 00:39:40,000 I suppose I would say that ever since I completed my PhD in 2012, 351 00:39:40,000 --> 00:39:49,000 I have worked tirelessly to achieve open access and it has only done very good things for my career. 352 00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:52,000 I do not think these two things are opposed to one another. 353 00:39:52,000 --> 00:40:06,000 And I think that you can, if you really want to help to make the world better through education. 354 00:40:06,000 --> 00:40:21,000 [Joe Brooker]: Thank you, Martin. Thank you. I am going to put my reaction on the screen. 355 00:40:21,000 --> 00:40:35,000 Here we go. Applause. I have listened with great interest to this lecture and many, many thoughts have emerged from it for me and on the other side 356 00:40:35,000 --> 00:40:45,000 I look forward to the participants raising their hand to come in and we can hear people's thoughts out loud. 357 00:40:45,000 --> 00:40:49,000 And we can and you can respond. 358 00:40:49,000 --> 00:40:55,000 But also we may have comments in the chats. People are already saying "a superb talk". 359 00:40:55,000 --> 00:41:03,000 You can see these comments yourself. I think "relations between impact and OA" was one. 360 00:41:03,000 --> 00:41:09,000 Serena has got to a comment. Let's go to Serena's comment first. 361 00:41:09,000 --> 00:41:15,000 She says, having trained as a literary agent, I've had my fair share of headaches due to manuscripts to evaluate which 362 00:41:15,000 --> 00:41:20,000 broadly is a form of peer reviewing in the fiction narrative publishing space. 363 00:41:20,000 --> 00:41:28,000 My expertise is limited, but how would you suggest to change the approach to peer reviews in an open access environment? 364 00:41:28,000 --> 00:41:45,000 If Serena, you might like to come in on my and elaborate on that perhaps. 365 00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:54,000 I think you're on mute, Serena. 366 00:41:54,000 --> 00:41:57,000 [Martin Paul Eve]: OK, because I think Serena is having trouble coming off mic, 367 00:41:57,000 --> 00:42:05,000 there's been a lot of research in recent years into what might be done to improve peer view. 368 00:42:05,000 --> 00:42:14,000 And in the scientific disciplines, the predominant mode that has emerged for this is a culture of preprint with post publication review. 369 00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:22,000 And this is a scenario where work is put online after it passes a basic series of quality checks. 370 00:42:22,000 --> 00:42:31,000 So to make sure it's not just some awful spoof. Make sure it's actually got some ethical clearance. 371 00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:37,000 You can also have some institutional affiliation as a signal that this is something that is to 372 00:42:37,000 --> 00:42:44,000 be taken seriously and it's put online at that point rather than after process of peer review. 373 00:42:44,000 --> 00:42:54,000 But it's clearly marked as not having been peer reviewed. You then go through a process of review in the open where people are asked to pass, 374 00:42:54,000 --> 00:43:00,000 comment on it, to say whether they endorse the work wholly, in part, or not at all. 375 00:43:00,000 --> 00:43:06,000 And if it goes through, there's a system called, well, Welcome Open Research, for instance. 376 00:43:06,000 --> 00:43:10,000 That is the Wellcome Trust medical publishing platform. 377 00:43:10,000 --> 00:43:15,000 And if you go there, the authors on there, you'll see this system in operation where there are ticks and crosses next to 378 00:43:15,000 --> 00:43:22,000 all scores from reviewers who are actually named as to who is passed this judgement. 379 00:43:22,000 --> 00:43:34,000 The challenge is that that system asks us quite a lot in terms of evaluation and ask us to read anything that's been put up. 380 00:43:34,000 --> 00:43:41,000 And unless you target people and ask them to review, people do not just come because you've built this structure for reviewing. 381 00:43:41,000 --> 00:43:50,000 So it really does need behind the scenes, still a driving publisher to ask reviewers to get the right people to comment on it. 382 00:43:50,000 --> 00:43:57,000 There's also Kathleen Fitzpatrick's brilliant book called Planned Obsolescence about cultures of publishing in the academy. 383 00:43:57,000 --> 00:44:01,000 She notes there that one of the really important things in systems of open review is knowing 384 00:44:01,000 --> 00:44:07,000 who is doing the reviewing and what their qualifications are to pass this type of judgment. 385 00:44:07,000 --> 00:44:13,000 You know, it's not the case if you're commenting on a Large Hadron Collider, 386 00:44:13,000 --> 00:44:22,000 that the opinion of Professor X who spent his or her entire life studying this is equal to the to the views of Neil from down the road 387 00:44:22,000 --> 00:44:24,000 who is very good at Call of Duty. 388 00:44:24,000 --> 00:44:33,000 There is something to be said for the person reviewing and personal appraisal of their knowledge and expertise. 389 00:44:33,000 --> 00:44:39,000 So really, that's one way that has been proposed around. This is a culture of preprint and post review. 390 00:44:39,000 --> 00:44:42,000 But there are also challenges there because, you know, 391 00:44:42,000 --> 00:44:47,000 let's say that you as a student were asked to review the work of a senior professor in your field. 392 00:44:47,000 --> 00:44:53,000 Would you feel that you could really give a fairly critical appraisal in the open with your name against that, 393 00:44:53,000 --> 00:44:57,000 where you said this is no good? There are dynamics of power that 394 00:44:57,000 --> 00:45:04,000 really play off against one another. So I don't think that's free of challenges either. 395 00:45:04,000 --> 00:45:12,000 If you're interested in this, I have a book coming out on peer review in January that will be open access. 396 00:45:12,000 --> 00:45:16,000 It's it's called Reading Peer Review from Cambridge University Press. 397 00:45:16,000 --> 00:45:22,000 And that goes through in detail all the permutations, actually, of what you can do, to change peer review. 398 00:45:22,000 --> 00:45:26,000 [Joe Brooker]: Thanks, Martin. Thanks very much. 399 00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:35,000 I hope that was a helpful response, Serena. I want to go to a question that Julianne asked, which is, "are there links between impact and" 400 00:45:35,000 --> 00:45:39,000 Oh, Julianne, if you'd like to come in and expand on that at all. 401 00:45:39,000 --> 00:45:45,000 That would be helpful. But otherwise, I'll just I'll just wait for a sentence. 402 00:45:45,000 --> 00:45:49,000 [Julianne]: Hi. No, I. 403 00:45:49,000 --> 00:45:55,000 I just I used to work in publishing for academic publishing journals for a long time. 404 00:45:55,000 --> 00:45:59,000 It was when the open access debate started. 405 00:45:59,000 --> 00:46:12,000 Basically an impact factor is such a huge drive for the editorial process in terms of recruiting authors and so on. 406 00:46:12,000 --> 00:46:19,000 I was so I was just sort of curious about the relationship between open access 407 00:46:19,000 --> 00:46:25,000 and impact factor because you want it to be read and cited as much as possible. 408 00:46:25,000 --> 00:46:32,000 So it makes sense that it's open access. Yeah, I was just curious about that. 409 00:46:32,000 --> 00:46:40,000 [Martin Paul Eve]: So, for those that don't know, the impact factor is a technical measure of citation at the Journal level. 410 00:46:40,000 --> 00:46:47,000 So a journal is awarded an impact factor based on the number of citations it achieved over the past two years, 411 00:46:47,000 --> 00:46:51,000 divided by the number of articles that it published. So it's a relative 412 00:46:51,000 --> 00:46:57,000 measure of the average citation level within a journal. 413 00:46:57,000 --> 00:47:02,000 And in some disciplines, this forms a really core motivation for publishing. 414 00:47:02,000 --> 00:47:08,000 So in business studies, for instance, I believe they even have lists of ranked titles by Impact Factor. 415 00:47:08,000 --> 00:47:13,000 And you need to get into the top tier to really be valued by your peers. 416 00:47:13,000 --> 00:47:18,000 In my discipline of English literature, we do not really value the impact factor. 417 00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:23,000 We instead just have an informal hierarchy of journals that most people know about. 418 00:47:23,000 --> 00:47:29,000 So I'm not saying one or the other is better. They both have deleterious consequences, 419 00:47:29,000 --> 00:47:40,000 but they are ways of trying to rank the way that research and dissemination cited and what impact it has on a field. 420 00:47:40,000 --> 00:47:45,000 The problem with impact factor is that it's a very blunt measure that assesses a whole journal. 421 00:47:45,000 --> 00:47:52,000 So if you can get a single paper that's cited several thousand times in a journal -- and that often happens in scientific disciplines -- 422 00:47:52,000 --> 00:48:00,000 it brings the impact factor up of the title, even if the vast majority of articles were only cited between one and 10 times. 423 00:48:00,000 --> 00:48:05,000 It's not a sensitive measure. 424 00:48:05,000 --> 00:48:10,000 It also really inscribes that power at the publisher level and has those economic consequences. 425 00:48:10,000 --> 00:48:20,000 I talked about. Open access has been shown to bring a citation advantage in several studies, although these studies continue. 426 00:48:20,000 --> 00:48:22,000 So Springer-Nature, for instance, 427 00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:30,000 recently showed the open access books are cited on average seven times more than their closed, for sale counterparts. 428 00:48:30,000 --> 00:48:40,000 So that really is quite a striking, statistically significant find for the benefits of being cited with open access works. 429 00:48:40,000 --> 00:48:49,000 This would, you would anticipate, mean that in the journal space, open access titles would have a higher impact factor than closed titles. 430 00:48:49,000 --> 00:48:52,000 The problem is that the historical legacy of titles like Nature, 431 00:48:52,000 --> 00:48:59,000 Science and Cell (those top scientific publications) is so inscribed in the consciousness of 432 00:48:59,000 --> 00:49:05,000 scientists worldwide that those continue to attract citations even though they're closed access. 433 00:49:05,000 --> 00:49:10,000 It was worth saying that every institution subscribes to those titles and has access. 434 00:49:10,000 --> 00:49:14,000 So it's not as though those being open access would improve the citation rate 435 00:49:14,000 --> 00:49:20,000 because everyone already has access to them because of their historical legacy. 436 00:49:20,000 --> 00:49:27,000 There are also strange changes in the fluctuation of impact factor over time in titles like PLOS One, 437 00:49:27,000 --> 00:49:31,000 where when they vastly increase their output publication in one year, 438 00:49:31,000 --> 00:49:37,000 their volume of publication, they suddenly saw a drop in impact factor because they were publishing so much more. 439 00:49:37,000 --> 00:49:47,000 So really this quite complex relationship between citation measures like Impact Factor and open access and what those those look like. 440 00:49:47,000 --> 00:49:52,000 [Joe Brooker[: Thanks, Martin. I want to go to a question from Anna and Anna might want to 441 00:49:52,000 --> 00:49:57,000 come on, Mic. But otherwise, I'll read this out. 442 00:49:57,000 --> 00:50:07,000 It's Anna did a placement with Bloomsbury Academic, including working on the integration of I.B. Taurus with Bloomsbury. 443 00:50:07,000 --> 00:50:11,000 You're a. You. I see you're there. So would you like to to take this up? 444 00:50:11,000 --> 00:50:15,000 [Anna]: Yeah. I mean, I guess this is more of a worry kind of question. 445 00:50:15,000 --> 00:50:23,000 But listening to the range of publication houses that you are saying got integrated into Bloomsbury sales that earlier this year. 446 00:50:23,000 --> 00:50:29,000 So that struck a particular chord. But it's amazing that there's there's two editorial assistants for the entire list. 447 00:50:29,000 --> 00:50:34,000 And this includes the backlist of I.B. Taurus, as well as their forthcoming works. 448 00:50:34,000 --> 00:50:36,000 And so things like that in the book. 449 00:50:36,000 --> 00:50:44,000 When books from the 1940s straight on to print on demand, which are now outdated, but they haven't got the time to go through and work out. 450 00:50:44,000 --> 00:50:51,000 How do you know whether that scholarship is still of the same value anything? 451 00:50:51,000 --> 00:50:54,000 And so it's more of concern about how fewer publishing houses that might end up 452 00:50:54,000 --> 00:51:00,000 with in terms of how much new capacity you can have. 453 00:51:00,000 --> 00:51:07,000 Yeah. Do you have any comments on it? [Martin Paul Eve]: Yeah. So. For the past 20 years, 454 00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:12,000 there's been a discourse of the crisis of the humanities monograph -- that is that 455 00:51:12,000 --> 00:51:19,000 academic book publishing is itself in grave danger from economic collapse. 456 00:51:19,000 --> 00:51:27,000 And this has really been manifest in a decrease in number of titles, no copies of a title sold. 457 00:51:27,000 --> 00:51:33,000 So two decades ago, you could expect, say, 500 sales of a monograph. 458 00:51:33,000 --> 00:51:40,000 Now the figure is about 200. And this has meant that the pricing of academic books has had to commensurately go up. 459 00:51:40,000 --> 00:51:44,000 To cover that. But that then comes with exclusionary consequences. 460 00:51:44,000 --> 00:51:49,000 I mean, academic books can cost between 60 and 120 pounds for a single title. 461 00:51:49,000 --> 00:51:59,000 That's definitely the opposite of accessible. But I think what you're raising there and is a really important point that as we see ever-more 462 00:51:59,000 --> 00:52:08,000 concentration as the natural sciences and there are obvious examples of Elsevier Springer Nature,. 463 00:52:08,000 --> 00:52:16,000 Taylor and Francis and so on continue to erode our budgets. Humanities publishing comes under increasing pressure. 464 00:52:16,000 --> 00:52:24,000 Now, for many, open access becomes the compounding factor here that is going to finally kill off the monograph publishing. 465 00:52:24,000 --> 00:52:29,000 There's a fear that this is asking too much of a system that is already stretched to capacity. 466 00:52:29,000 --> 00:52:36,000 But. I suppose really what we need to do is to take stock at this point. 467 00:52:36,000 --> 00:52:43,000 Of what? What do we want from a publication system? How might we redesign that if we were thinking in the digital age from scratch? 468 00:52:43,000 --> 00:52:47,000 What labour do we need to be performed and what don't we need? 469 00:52:47,000 --> 00:52:48,000 So, for instance, 470 00:52:48,000 --> 00:52:57,000 US university presses have acquisition editors who go to every major humanities conference and seek out the scholars that they want for their list. 471 00:52:57,000 --> 00:53:00,000 Is that really something that we want our library budgets to be paying for? 472 00:53:00,000 --> 00:53:08,000 Because the salary for that staff member's time is part of the what we're paying when we pay for an academic monograph. 473 00:53:08,000 --> 00:53:09,000 And these are. Yeah. 474 00:53:09,000 --> 00:53:18,000 So if you're interested more in this Geoffrey Crossick's 2015 report to HEFCE on open access monographs is really the thing to read. 475 00:53:18,000 --> 00:53:25,000 It sort of addresses the crisis of monograph publishing and the economics of it in a changing world compared to open access. 476 00:53:25,000 --> 00:53:31,000 But we're hitting a point of difficult conversations, basically. 477 00:53:31,000 --> 00:53:36,000 [Joe Brooker]: Thank you, Martin. I'm aware there's a number of questions, but I want to go to this one. 478 00:53:36,000 --> 00:53:42,000 And she I'll just read this out and then get Martin's response. What do you think about initiatives like Sci. Hub? 479 00:53:42,000 --> 00:53:46,000 Do you think it is having a positive impact on raising the awareness of the 480 00:53:46,000 --> 00:53:50,000 issues of academic publishing and can push publishers to rethink their model? 481 00:53:50,000 --> 00:53:55,000 The creator has been sued by several publishers, but was also named by Nature, 482 00:53:55,000 --> 00:54:03,000 one of the suing parties, as one of the most important people in science in 2016, is this an interesting paradox? 483 00:54:03,000 --> 00:54:13,000 [Martin Paul Eve]: Okay, so this is one of my favorite questions. So Sci Hub is a pirate site for accessing academic journal articles. 484 00:54:13,000 --> 00:54:20,000 It's partner of another initiative called Library Genesis that is a pirate archive of academic books. 485 00:54:20,000 --> 00:54:26,000 It currently contains 35 terabytes of academic pirated e-books. 486 00:54:26,000 --> 00:54:36,000 My books are in there. It turns out, you know: I cannot possibly condone the use of these services. 487 00:54:36,000 --> 00:54:39,000 But I think what you're raising there is really interesting. 488 00:54:39,000 --> 00:54:47,000 How is it that there's a discourse among the people who run these initiatives that they are actually pursuing the project of the Enlightenment? 489 00:54:47,000 --> 00:54:52,000 They are ensuring universal access to materials which people would not otherwise have access. 490 00:54:52,000 --> 00:54:59,000 That is an educational benefit. My view is that these initiatives don't solve the problem. 491 00:54:59,000 --> 00:55:07,000 We should be fixing this at core so that we can properly remunerate publishing professionals so that we don't just 492 00:55:07,000 --> 00:55:17,000 assume that it's okay to in our economic systems as they exist to take people's work without paying them for it. 493 00:55:17,000 --> 00:55:23,000 But they highlight, you're right, the absolute paradox of the fact that this is supposed to be for the good of humankind. 494 00:55:23,000 --> 00:55:31,000 But we need a pirate archive to get access to it. It also mirrors a history of piracy in relation to education. 495 00:55:31,000 --> 00:55:37,000 Adrian John's book on the history of piracy is really interesting here when he notes that US reprints, 496 00:55:37,000 --> 00:55:42,000 for example, of work that had appeared in the UK, 497 00:55:42,000 --> 00:55:48,000 though there was a legal culture of reprints of pirate reprints across the Atlantic that led to the much greater 498 00:55:48,000 --> 00:55:56,000 dissemination of work than was possible under the publisher limited statutes that were in place at that time. 499 00:55:56,000 --> 00:55:59,000 And so I just think this is actually the continuation of digital age. 500 00:55:59,000 --> 00:56:06,000 But yes, the founder of Say Hub can't leave Russia basically because Elsevier wants her head on a plate, 501 00:56:06,000 --> 00:56:11,000 while at the same time there are scientists who call for her to be awarded the Nobel Peace 502 00:56:11,000 --> 00:56:17,000 Prize for what she's done for access to educational material for those who can't afford it. 503 00:56:17,000 --> 00:56:22,000 And that really is the heart of the problem that I was trying to talk about today. 504 00:56:22,000 --> 00:56:29,000 [Joe Brooker]: This was like an echo of Edward Snowden. I want to go to a question from Peter Wood. 505 00:56:29,000 --> 00:56:37,000 I'll read this out. Peter Wood writes, I'm an older AHRC student who is not looking for an academic career but will want to be published. 506 00:56:37,000 --> 00:56:42,000 This is a significant demographic. We want the rigor of the academy to support our work. 507 00:56:42,000 --> 00:56:50,000 Is there a separate space for reaching an audience for us? [Martin Paul Eve]: So I don't think so. 508 00:56:50,000 --> 00:56:54,000 I mean, in that scenario, 509 00:56:54,000 --> 00:57:05,000 you're not under the same pressures to publish in venues that carry the prestige factor that institutional hiring panels value. 510 00:57:05,000 --> 00:57:12,000 So you can have a little more of ethical freedom in selecting where you publish according to its values. 511 00:57:12,000 --> 00:57:17,000 So taking longer to find a not for profit press, for instance, 512 00:57:17,000 --> 00:57:26,000 might be something you could consider or thinking through the journals in which you publish and what their policies are on open access. 513 00:57:26,000 --> 00:57:33,000 So, for instance, Cambridge University Press is open access journals will allow you to deposit a green copy, 514 00:57:33,000 --> 00:57:43,000 with no embargo, period. Whereas Taylor and Francis's journals will require you to wait 24 months before you can make the green copy available. 515 00:57:43,000 --> 00:57:48,000 SAGE likewise has a policy of zero embargo Green open access. 516 00:57:48,000 --> 00:57:55,000 So really, I guess it's just more about taking your time in that scenario, evaluating the different options for where your work could fit. 517 00:57:55,000 --> 00:58:01,000 Having conversations with peers and your mentors about the venues that they value. 518 00:58:01,000 --> 00:58:05,000 And knowing that there will be a rigorous process of peer review that, 519 00:58:05,000 --> 00:58:10,000 despite its flaws, will give some assurance that the work has has had some scrutiny. 520 00:58:10,000 --> 00:58:21,000 That's really important. But you can also factor in those other elements freed from some of the constraints that other academics might face. 521 00:58:21,000 --> 00:58:28,000 [Joe Brooker]: Aren has just come on screen, and I'm guessing that that means he wants us to finish this session, is that correct term? 522 00:58:28,000 --> 00:58:35,000 Well, it's probably good we have to go straight to our video poster 523 00:58:35,000 --> 00:58:40,000 Q&A session now. But that was fantastic, Martin. 524 00:58:40,000 --> 00:58:45,000 I think incredibly useful for people at many of our research stages. 525 00:58:45,000 --> 00:58:49,000 So apologies for those whose questions we couldn't get to. 526 00:58:49,000 --> 00:58:55,000 I'm sorry about that. But as you can see, Martin, well, you I'm sure you could contact Martin for further follow ups. 527 00:58:55,000 --> 00:59:01,000 If anybody does have does does want to follow up on any urgent questions? 528 00:59:01,000 --> 00:59:04,000 Yeah, I thought that was tremendous. 529 00:59:04,000 --> 00:59:13,000 And I'm you know, just thanks also very much, Martin, for sharing your thoughts so, so rigorously and eloquently today. 530 00:59:13,000 --> 00:59:17,000 [Martin Paul Eve]: Thank you very much. I hope you have a great rest of the conference and 531 00:59:17,000 --> 00:59:22,000 it's great to meet you all as well. Thank you so much. 532 00:59:22,000 --> 00:59:51,620 Yes. If you would like to attend. Just go into the breakout room indicated on the program and do please enjoy.