WEBVTT 00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:05.000 This meeting is being recorded. 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:10.000 Hello. Welcome. 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:17.000 To this and justice martin. Can you see me there? I did remove the cell PU, so I don't know if you can see. 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:22.000 But it doesn't matter. It's all about you. Professor Martini. 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:32.000 Thank you for making time for us. Where are you joining us from right now? 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:34.000 You can say, can you hear me? 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:37.000 Yeah, just about. You're very quiet when you're away from the mic sorry 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:44.000 Okay. All right. So I will actually And I will repeat questions from people. 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:48.000 To ensure that you can hear it. Okay, so you won't see me now, but you can hear me right Okay, where are you joining us from now, Martin? 00:00:48.000 --> 00:01:11.000 Yep. Cloud and clear. So I'm in my home in broad stairs on the coast, a long way from the University of London where I normally work but um I hope that we can have a good conversation today about open practices, design justice and the social justice issues behind open access publishing. 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:16.000 Thank you so much for joining us. All right. 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:21.000 I wanted to ask you first. And we still have students coming. 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:28.000 I want to first ask you about your background into you know how did you get into open access? 00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:29.000 How did it come about? 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:49.000 So I actually work in an English department. I'm an English literature scholar and it's during my phd It suddenly dawned on me that the academic job market is absolutely terrible, right? It's very hard to get an academic job, which was what I was aspiring to do. 00:01:49.000 --> 00:01:54.000 And I had backup plans to become a computer programmer if that didn't work. 00:01:54.000 --> 00:02:04.000 But the thing that annoyed me was that while I was at university, I had access to all this fantastic research, all these resources that came through the university. 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:10.000 And I was learning more about the publication system and finding out that academics aren't paid for journal articles. 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:17.000 They're not you know it's not a revenue source for them or anything by producing these things But somehow. 00:02:17.000 --> 00:02:25.000 They were producing these things and then they were being sold back to universities. And when I left, I was potentially going to be cut off from that access. 00:02:25.000 --> 00:02:41.000 And it just seemed to me totally contradictory You've got people who are working with these lofty ideals about what the university is for, what the point of higher education is, doing this research, publishing about human artifacts in my case, about literature, which is open to everyone 00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:47.000 And they were publishing this in a way that meant that only very few people are ever going to be able to read it. 00:02:47.000 --> 00:02:50.000 I wasn't going to be able to read it when I left. 00:02:50.000 --> 00:03:06.000 They sometimes couldn't get access to their own material. And it just dawned on me that this whole thing seemed like a circular mess of craziness that somebody had designed very badly for thinking about why we act in this way. 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:21.000 And I guess over time my anger at this has subsided a little bit and lapsed into a pragmatism. I do accept that we need the labor of publishers to do certain things that we can't do or don't want to do 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:36.000 In the academy but it just struck me there's got to be a better way to do this than to to cut people off from access and to make it this circular dependency of you publish the work, then you can't get access to it. 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:42.000 How have things changed since? I mean, when was this when Can you place that historically we are talking about 00:03:42.000 --> 00:04:03.000 Yeah, so that was around 2010, I guess. The situation then which was you know um almost a decade after the open access for the past declaration virtually no work in my field was open access at that point. It was all paywalled. 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:19.000 If you wanted access, you had to go through a provider Also, I don't know if people know, but the boxes that sometimes come up that say you can buy individual access to a journal article They simply don't work. You end up on a on a 00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:34.000 A goose chase trying to to work out how you can actually get access to this thing. You can't buy it individually if you want to. My friend Ben who worked at the higher education research council hefty for ages tried this on a series of articles and just found 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:41.000 It was impossible as an individual to get this access, even though they advertised it Because what they want is the library subscriptions. 00:04:41.000 --> 00:04:50.000 But if you think about how things have changed since 2010, there is a lot more content in my disk than is now openly accessible. 00:04:50.000 --> 00:05:00.000 It's probably worth also saying, sadly, perhaps from certain perspectives, there are pirate sites that provide a type of open access to this material. 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:07.000 It's really funny when people tell me that open access will damage the economic standing of publishers and cause problems for them. And I say. 00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:19.000 Well, it's already accessible, whether you like it or not, through copyright violation your work is out there and it doesn't seem to have dented what you're doing and your labor efforts. 00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:34.000 It's an interesting situation at the moment. It feels like we're in a transitional phase in some disciplines. Some disciplines are very advanced in open access and almost everything in high energy physics for example you can read for free They use Archive extensively and that's great. 00:05:34.000 --> 00:05:53.000 But other disciplines have been much slower. History, for example. There are signs of this tide shifting. There are mandates from funders there are academics who are interested in this issue There are pressures on the academy to make work accessible and to ensure that the public can read it. 00:05:53.000 --> 00:06:07.000 So I sort of feel sort of It's slow it's glacially slow the progress but there is some shift and change in the attitudes and behaviors of academics towards open access. 00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:21.000 Thank you. And can you tell us a little bit about how you start the open library of humanities and then worked on the management on the software on Janeway. 00:06:21.000 --> 00:06:22.000 In general terms, I know that you could give hope on this 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:33.000 Sure. Yeah, I mean… The… Right. The main problem for open access in some disciplines like the humanities, for example. 00:06:33.000 --> 00:06:39.000 Is that the economic model is very different to something like high energy physics, for example. 00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:56.000 In high energy physics, you get a lot of academics getting grants And if there's a book processing charge of £12,000 or an article processing charge of £3,000, they can very easily put that on their grant and ask the funder to pay it because dissemination is obviously 00:06:56.000 --> 00:07:00.000 Part of the goal of those funders. They want the work to be circulated. 00:07:00.000 --> 00:07:16.000 So this model of article or book processing charges is akin to me saying to the guy on the front row here uh Right. I want you to pay £3,000 And then everybody else will be able to read your work. 00:07:16.000 --> 00:07:34.000 So what is done is it's really concentrated costs on one place, on one person, on one institution and it said you bear the total cost of publication This model really doesn't work very well in my disciplines, which was what publishers were trying to do. They just thought. 00:07:34.000 --> 00:07:47.000 We've seen that work in the sciences. We'll just make it the same in the humanities and they can pay this. But it turns out that their grant funded work just doesn't happen in my discipline so much. There are very few grants and they're very hard to get. 00:07:47.000 --> 00:08:01.000 You've got a situation where institutions are not wealthy enough to pay this from their English or history department budgets and so you know we asked around we asked humanities academics how much could you pay if we had this model? 00:08:01.000 --> 00:08:16.000 And they just came back saying, well, nothing really. My dean would laugh me out the office if I tried to argue that you should give them £3,000 from the budget just to publish an article and the next person's going to come along and say the same thing and sign on and on. 00:08:16.000 --> 00:08:24.000 So we had to come up with a new economic model for what open publishing in the humanities would look like. And that's where the Open Library of Humanities came from. 00:08:24.000 --> 00:08:45.000 Was desire to implement a new model. And what we decided instead was if we could get, say, 350 libraries worldwide to pay i don't know a few thousand pounds each into a central pot would have enough to publish all the material that passed peer review that came into us 00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:51.000 And we could do that without charging anybody, any academic fee. 00:08:51.000 --> 00:09:07.000 So basically, libraries want open access We want to make it work in the humanities and can't do article processing charges what do we do we pull funds from those libraries who say they want it to work and use those funds to operate and to run our publisher. 00:09:07.000 --> 00:09:23.000 And so lots of people said this will never work. What you're doing is you're asking libraries to pay for something that doesn't give them anything you know they they they cannot participate. And if you publish stuff openly everybody will get it anyway and that's called the free rider problem 00:09:23.000 --> 00:09:37.000 And we just said well Yes, but as we've said, libraries have been driving this quest for open access for well over a decade now, they really said they want it so put will they put their money where their mouths are? 00:09:37.000 --> 00:09:47.000 And fund us so we can operate and so that we can get the humanities academics a space where they can safely publish without those fees blocking their publication. 00:09:47.000 --> 00:09:59.000 And they did. It took a lot of work. All these projects. If you ever want to build something and make some utopian project that you think will make the world better You've got to be prepared to put the groundwork in. 00:09:59.000 --> 00:10:12.000 I was traveling to Japan and one day Edinburgh the next and San Francisco after that the next day It was this very intense period of life where we were getting these libraries on board. 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:20.000 But we did it. We're now stable and funded. I don't run the OpenLife Humanities anymore. I've handed it over to a colleague. 00:10:20.000 --> 00:10:25.000 So, you know, we've got succession planning, we've got continuity, we've got sustainability. 00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:33.000 We built something that I think will now last and is a sustainable contribution to this space. 00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:40.000 It's been fantastic i mean As you know, I mean, permanent all that the team achieved. 00:10:40.000 --> 00:11:02.000 Could you tell us a bit more about the relationship between what you have described which is about The Open Library of Humanities has an organization that it is offering a different way to fund scholarly publishing probably and and therefore i did and that includes a different way of making 00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:17.000 Scholarly publications available. And the design of uh of I mean, of owning the platform that is And that meant designing it from scratch. 00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:25.000 That also enables this way of of financing and providing access. 00:11:25.000 --> 00:11:31.000 Do they go hand in hand can they exists one without the other. 00:11:31.000 --> 00:11:32.000 So… 00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:55.000 How can we learn from that you know when people think about designing an interface how how connected is it to the mission of the organization and how specific was the work on Janeway thinking about the funding and the and the access enabling aspect. 00:11:55.000 --> 00:12:13.000 So… An interesting aspect of the launch was that at that point we needed some kind of bootstrapping mechanism to get off the ground We had this situation where we didn't have a platform that we own we had potential funder interest 00:12:13.000 --> 00:12:26.000 And an idea for our sustainable economic model And one of the options was we can build our own platform from scratch, our own interface and workflow. 00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:36.000 And it will delay our launch by a good year. We'll spend a year building software, designing an interface, ensuring it all works. 00:12:36.000 --> 00:12:44.000 Will launch and will launch this software will be brand new untested and we're in a difficult situation. 00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:54.000 So what we did instead was we went to an organization called Ubiquiti Press that is a sadly for-profit publishing services provider. 00:12:54.000 --> 00:13:09.000 And we partnered with them to operate our platform initially to give us basically the publishing services that we couldn't had immediately and use those as the starting point. 00:13:09.000 --> 00:13:17.000 That worked well for a while. It did exactly what we wanted it to do. It got us off the ground. We had a platform that worked and was tested. 00:13:17.000 --> 00:13:35.000 We didn't own or control that platform in any way though so if there was a change we needed, for example, I don't know, enhancing disability accessibility it became very difficult for us in that situation of non-ownership to get that implemented as a priority you know we're dealing with 00:13:35.000 --> 00:13:42.000 A provider who's trying to cater to multiple clients, multiple competing design priorities on what they've got for their platform. 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:47.000 It's not necessarily the ideal situation. 00:13:47.000 --> 00:13:58.000 But we use that time when we were with ubiquiti to design and build our own workflow platform for what we were doing behind the scenes. 00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:06.000 We wrote it in Python so that basically you know one of the most popular programming languages in the world so it's easy to hire people to work on it. 00:14:06.000 --> 00:14:12.000 Which was which was an hr and hr social decision behind the technology choice. 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:30.000 But that platform was built over as i said over the course of about a year it started as a weekend hobby project and evolved into a full-time software development initiative. The platform's called janeway It's a scholarly communications workflow management tool 00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:40.000 And we own it, control it, understand it, operate it now and migrated all our journals to it a few years ago. 00:14:40.000 --> 00:14:51.000 And managed to get off Ubiquiti, giving us better cost savings by running our own platform. 00:14:51.000 --> 00:14:52.000 Yeah. But you… 00:14:52.000 --> 00:15:07.000 And, you know, it's just been getting better ever since. I guess the challenge is we have to build a workflow that worked for scholarly communications which is a very specific space it's really there's nothing else quite like it. It's not as though you can take a generic workflow platform and just say, well, we'll use that. 00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:19.000 We had to think about where does peer review sit in this, for example? I don't know if people know what peer review is. It's when academics submit research it has to be vetted by other academics to whether it can be published 00:15:19.000 --> 00:15:32.000 But there's debates about whether that should be done before something's made public or afterwards, for example. So pre-review where somebody says that shouldn't be published so the article never sees the light of day. 00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:35.000 Or you make the work public so everyone can read it. 00:15:35.000 --> 00:15:38.000 And then afterwards you get academic opinions on it who say. 00:15:38.000 --> 00:15:51.000 There's some problems with this. Look at this and this and this and everybody can see the dialogue going on. So, you know, we had decisions about what to do with the platform and its workflow and where you put review in that status chain. 00:15:51.000 --> 00:16:03.000 But it's been a really interesting experience building it and learning about different spaces and their demands and the differences between them and how we can cater to as many as possible with that software. 00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:05.000 Sorry, Ernesto, I think I interrupted you. 00:16:05.000 --> 00:16:23.000 Oh, no, that's great. I was going to say that the Sayu, sir, a long time user now i agree on on how well it it's working really and it's working really the improvements that have been noticeable from my user experience. 00:16:23.000 --> 00:16:32.000 Just moving on a little bit, I know I dropped that question out of order from what we have previously discussed, so I apologize for that. 00:16:32.000 --> 00:16:43.000 Going back to the idea of social justice, Martin. Is it correct to say that that you see open access as a matter of social justice. 00:16:43.000 --> 00:16:51.000 And could you elaborate if you see it or not? Like a question of social justice 00:16:51.000 --> 00:17:14.000 So yes, I see it as a matter of social justice but the and i'll explain why in a second The really interesting thing about open access is that There are several parties involved in its realization, theorization creation whatever you want to call that. 00:17:14.000 --> 00:17:23.000 Who have different competing ideologies and ideals that they believe open access contributes to. 00:17:23.000 --> 00:17:40.000 So it's at this intersection of a set of different people. So there's a whole group of people for whom open access is merely a way in which small business enterprises, for example, can get access to engineering papers so that they can improve their systems and it helps them and it's 00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:46.000 You know a very neoliberal economy of they'll get a benefit from this. They paid tax so they should get access to it. 00:17:46.000 --> 00:18:01.000 And there's not much social justice in that angle of things. It might have its own unique benefits that might be upsides to that view you know maybe it's good that our small enterprises can thrive and get access to this stuff. 00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:11.000 But that's very different to say scholars in South Africa who are saying we can't get access to papers from the global north our institution can't afford them. 00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:16.000 We can't publish our papers open access because we can't afford the fees that these journals charge as well. 00:18:16.000 --> 00:18:35.000 You know for me doing open access right unlocks a whole global discourse of academic communication It lets everybody participate in reading and having access to research in a way that you would not see if you didn't have open access as a principal. 00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:41.000 And that's a very different stance to the people who have that small enterprise view. 00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:50.000 But it doesn't really matter in a way because it doesn't really we both want the same thing. We both want open access to happen there are just different motivations behind it. 00:18:50.000 --> 00:19:08.000 And I think… that's where projects tend to succeed actually is where you've got a practical thing you want to do and several different political ideologies coming together and saying You know what, actually, although we're very different in what we believe and why we're doing this. 00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:11.000 We think that we actually want to achieve the same thing. 00:19:11.000 --> 00:19:28.000 There are open access advocates who are very strongly opposed to that view I've just articulated. They think that would be a compromise it would be a hideous pollution the ideal situation with open access where it's all just about ensuring that everybody has access you know 00:19:28.000 --> 00:19:38.000 Regardless of whether they can pay so the poor and the rich the global north and the global south the poorest person who's got access to the internet versus the richest person. 00:19:38.000 --> 00:19:53.000 But I think that the pragmatic stance is to say well, so what that they don't want it for that reason and have this other goal behind it We can't block their other goal. It would be very hard to reconfigure open access to make sure that didn't happen. 00:19:53.000 --> 00:19:58.000 Let's work with them to make this a reality. 00:19:58.000 --> 00:20:06.000 Just quickly, what's your view on article processing charges in the i mean obviously in the humanities, as you already suggested. 00:20:06.000 --> 00:20:14.000 It was even more of a shock, the notion, the whole idea that authors would be asked to pay to publish their own work. 00:20:14.000 --> 00:20:24.000 Even if that had been happening somehow indirectly before through institutions or or libraries. 00:20:24.000 --> 00:20:25.000 So… 00:20:25.000 --> 00:20:38.000 Do you see APCs? That's a necessary step or does it do they have a necessary step positive aspects. What's the story with APCs from your perspective? 00:20:38.000 --> 00:20:49.000 So I think that article processing charges are a result of lazy business thinking from academic publishers. 00:20:49.000 --> 00:21:02.000 They… Okay, so it's always worth thinking about publishing and these type of enterprises as a labor driven organisations. 00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:10.000 There is always labour going on at a publisher that we need, that we can't get rid of that somehow needs to be done somewhere. 00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:25.000 So that needs to be funded. People can't work for free. That's unethical. That's something we need to think about. So what they did was they said right we used to compensate that labor and make a profit or whatever we do by 00:21:25.000 --> 00:21:35.000 Selling this material that we've published. So each of you pays a small amount and essentially there's enough money to pay for the labor of publishing that academic article. 00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:41.000 Okay you know that sounds like a fairly typical business model. That's what you had in the sales model. 00:21:41.000 --> 00:21:48.000 Then we said, okay, actually, you know what? We don't want you to sell that anymore. We want everybody to get to get access to it without paying. 00:21:48.000 --> 00:22:03.000 To get free access to this material. And they scratch their heads and say, okay, but that's really problematic because all of our revenue comes from people having exclusive access to this and paying us for it. And if they don't do that, how are we going to compensate the labor? 00:22:03.000 --> 00:22:10.000 So they turn around and said okay well Let's re-envisage what we do as a service to the people who are coming to us to publish. 00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:24.000 And we, you know, we get the paper peer reviewed we typeset it, we copy edited it, we proofread it, we submitted the digital preservation, we put it on a platform so we'll put all those as propositions to an author and their institution their academic 00:22:24.000 --> 00:22:30.000 Organization and say, well, you know what you should pay this now because we're doing it for you. 00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:33.000 So your work can be disseminated widely and everyone can read it for free. 00:22:33.000 --> 00:22:41.000 Now, that sounds good in theory But they really haven't thought about that distribution aspect that I talked to you about earlier. 00:22:41.000 --> 00:22:53.000 That if we can spread the cost as a sales model does and as our consortial model does at OLH, you've got a much better model that doesn't have this unequalizing effect. 00:22:53.000 --> 00:23:01.000 And it's just a real problem exclusion. And that's a social justice issue Some institutions, particularly in poorer parts of the world. 00:23:01.000 --> 00:23:06.000 Really cannot afford an article processing charge of £3,000 just for a single article. 00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:09.000 It's just it's not going to fly. They can't do it. 00:23:09.000 --> 00:23:19.000 But the other thing we know is that at the moment we can afford to publish all the research that's published in the world right now. 00:23:19.000 --> 00:23:37.000 I mean, Elsevier, the largest academic publisher in the world makes 33% or more profit per year on its on you know billions of pounds of revenue It's far more profitable by percentage profit than shell oil than big pharma. 00:23:37.000 --> 00:23:45.000 You know those are sort of running at 18% and they're running at 30 plus percent There is enough money in the system to make this work. 00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:57.000 The problem is turning it around, getting it into a central location and then publishing the work based on merit without charging people in a way that they can't afford. 00:23:57.000 --> 00:24:13.000 So really, it's a social problem of organization collectivism and pooling resources to achieve the compensation of labor that makes the social justice results of open access viable economically. 00:24:13.000 --> 00:24:19.000 Sorry if that's yeah might be a little bit complicated but hopefully I've explained that in a clear enough way. 00:24:19.000 --> 00:24:29.000 That's great. Thank you. Definitely. Thought-provoking. 00:24:29.000 --> 00:24:43.000 The rise of i'm sorry, not to mention it, Marathi but the rise of gen ai And… Yeah, obviously the profound transformation of the of search by ai 00:24:43.000 --> 00:24:55.000 The theater. And they… potential changes to copyright law or policy. 00:24:55.000 --> 00:25:09.000 And the current reactions of or resistance perhaps of the creative industries, at least in the UK towards the uk towards the gen AI situation? 00:25:09.000 --> 00:25:39.000 Could you tell us a bit more like from your perspective, how do we balance the potential paradoxes between openness you know uh fairness and big corporations potentially arguably profiting from from intellectual labor without without paying the original creators 00:25:39.000 --> 00:25:40.000 Yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry. 00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:57.000 So this is a very tricky area but one of the um One of the original goals of open access was to open material to text and data mining potentials and potentials you know one of the arguments made was that 00:25:57.000 --> 00:26:04.000 Having academic material openly accessible and made computationally accessible. 00:26:04.000 --> 00:26:23.000 Would yield a new way of searching literature. We might find new things by computational methods that text and data mine these papers, synthesize them into something new and produce novel outcomes through that process you know we didn't know what that would look like in 2000. 00:26:23.000 --> 00:26:40.000 12, 2002, when the previous open access initiative was signed yeah it was just a glimmer on the horizon but it was one of the things that was thought interesting and promising. And one of the reasons that open licenses were applied in the open access space. 00:26:40.000 --> 00:26:48.000 When it's actually happened, we've had text and basically Gen AI training is text and data mining on a massive scale. 00:26:48.000 --> 00:27:03.000 It's ingesting tons and tons of material to the point where you have a model where the statistical average can produce useful language for what it's synthesized across all these papers, across all this content that is brought in. 00:27:03.000 --> 00:27:12.000 People don't like it. They say you've stolen my material when it's when it's harvested by a gen a high harvester. 00:27:12.000 --> 00:27:18.000 Well, that was the goal of some of the open access movements. It's hard to say you couldn't see that coming. 00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:24.000 But they have also used material that is not openly accessible, that is just available in pirate archives. 00:27:24.000 --> 00:27:33.000 And you know that's it's potentially difficult if If an author relies on sales of their material, they suddenly see someone using it and think. 00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:47.000 That's outrageous you know it's really u.s copyright law has a thing called transformative use which is a fair use provision where if you do something completely unanticipated with a work and transform it. 00:27:47.000 --> 00:27:53.000 Into something that the author couldn't have anticipated you are allowed to do that with copyrighted material. 00:27:53.000 --> 00:27:59.000 That material is there. For people to find ways to use that the author didn't anticipate. 00:27:59.000 --> 00:28:14.000 If the author thought of it and wanted to sell it in that form you know that's not acceptable and that would have been copyright violation but I'm pretty sure that US courts will rule in the near future that Gen AI harvesting is transformative use. It's something novel. 00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:40.000 That comes out of the use of copyrighted material. And this discourse also hides a lot of misunderstanding about the history of copyright Copyright is a time-limited right to sell work that expires and then things become public domain The point of copyright is not actually the individual economic protection that people think it is. 00:28:40.000 --> 00:28:45.000 Is to ensure that once that is done and people have had their share of it. 00:28:45.000 --> 00:28:52.000 The work is publicly available for free forever for everyone it becomes openly accessible as the default. 00:28:52.000 --> 00:29:10.000 And that was a bargain struck between various publishers and the government in the statute of Anne back in previous centuries but This is really all just being questioned now when we come to Gen AI. And there are some very bad copyright arguments coming through that don't understand that history. 00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:15.000 And think that basically copyright should be perpetual forever and for one person. 00:29:15.000 --> 00:29:21.000 But, you know, my personal stance is AI is not going away. 00:29:21.000 --> 00:29:28.000 We're not going to get rid of it. So it should be as good as it can be and it should serve us as best as it possibly can. 00:29:28.000 --> 00:29:36.000 And I think that having high quality academic papers that have the truth in them available for synthesis and training. 00:29:36.000 --> 00:29:52.000 Is a much better way to ensure these things do give us a truthful and reliable account when we ask them rather than them going to Reddit and ingesting some horrific content that is completely inaccurate and having that as their training base. 00:29:52.000 --> 00:29:57.000 So that's how I see it. I don't think we're going to block it and it's going to go away. 00:29:57.000 --> 00:30:01.000 It's something we have to live with and we should live with it being as good as possible. 00:30:01.000 --> 00:30:15.000 Thank you so much. Okay, so we have reached the end of our time dedicated to the Q&A, but we have time for a couple of questions from the crowd in the room. 00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:26.000 Would someone like to ask Martin something in the context of much of the lecture or his talk 00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:30.000 He's looking at you now. I'm fighting. 00:30:30.000 --> 00:30:34.000 I can see you. Yeah. 00:30:34.000 --> 00:30:42.000 It doesn't bite. It's okay if you don't have questions as well. 00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:45.000 You sure? So we are very lucky to have you here Oh, okay. Yeah, sorry. I just clicked on something that I shouldn't have clicked on. 00:30:45.000 --> 00:30:52.000 This was someone that someone's got a hand up. 00:30:52.000 --> 00:30:59.000 Okay. Yes. Okay, we can try. 00:30:59.000 --> 00:31:05.000 If you speak, Ernesto could repeat the question to me afterwards is probably the best way to do it. 00:31:05.000 --> 00:31:17.000 What's your first perspective of of how the internet starts off essentially as system to openly transfer information. 00:31:17.000 --> 00:31:25.000 And now it's becoming something that's no longer than I 00:31:25.000 --> 00:31:43.000 Private service and how that kind of applies to this open access Yeah, so I think someone managed to pick that up on the on the captions but uh your perspective on the history of the internet as a system that started as 00:31:43.000 --> 00:31:55.000 Intended to transfer share information And the current landscape of privatization of the online landscape. 00:31:55.000 --> 00:31:56.000 In relation to open access, what you've been talking about. 00:31:56.000 --> 00:32:03.000 Yeah, fantastic. That's a really great point and question, actually. 00:32:03.000 --> 00:32:23.000 The history of the internet is quite a complex phenomenon with the original ARPANET coming out of Stanford when it was first developed Janet Abate in her book about inventing the internet you know clearly makes it very clear that The original goals of the internet were to serve a military command and control 00:32:23.000 --> 00:32:43.000 Perspective you know they were they were u.s military funded They had to build a communication network that was resilient and particularly decentralized. I mean, we were in a post-Cold War context at the birth of the internet And the fear was, well, what happens if we build a centralized communication system that relies on 00:32:43.000 --> 00:32:56.000 Some complete unit in the US where all communication goes through that It will immediately become a target for any potential military adversary And if it's destroyed, our digital communication network falls apart. 00:32:56.000 --> 00:33:05.000 So they were tasked with building a network that was resilient and distributed and could root around any problems that were found in it. 00:33:05.000 --> 00:33:22.000 But the thing was, you've got this very interesting combination of people again It's this combination of political ideologies that I talked about earlier you've got people with a military ideology coming together with a hippie intellectual culture at stanford of people who believe in the open free sharing of information 00:33:22.000 --> 00:33:32.000 Everything should be free and open and with that social justice mission But they both want to build a decentralized network that can't be shut down. 00:33:32.000 --> 00:33:36.000 One group wants to build it because they think the government will come to them and shut them down. 00:33:36.000 --> 00:33:46.000 The other group wants to build it because they think that the Russian government will come and shut down their network. But they both want the same thing at the core of it. They want this open dissemination. 00:33:46.000 --> 00:34:02.000 And so you see this gradual network build out from Stanford to other academic institutions And that's where they start sharing information between themselves, the hippie academics you know they're they're posting their computer science and physics papers on these FTP servers between the original 00:34:02.000 --> 00:34:17.000 Nodes on the internet. And you know from then on, for some people, the logic is just clear information and research should be freely shared using these digital systems that allow for infinite replication. 00:34:17.000 --> 00:34:26.000 Other people who've been entrenched in print cultures for decades have a lot of trouble adjusting their mindset to this new digital world and what it offers and what it can bring. 00:34:26.000 --> 00:34:37.000 But I think you're just right in the insinuation there that the core logic of why the internet developed and was built contains within itself. 00:34:37.000 --> 00:34:52.000 The logic of open access and the idea that open sharing could be a social justice project of the internet and it's it's logical to pursue that given what the technology offers. 00:34:52.000 --> 00:35:10.000 Great question. I was thinking along similar lines. I keep thinking every open access week I think of aaron Swartz You mentioned Stanford there and and he went to Stanford didn't he And Lawrence Leslie was in Stanford. 00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:11.000 Or I don't know if he was in Harvard by then. 00:35:11.000 --> 00:35:12.000 Yep. 00:35:12.000 --> 00:35:29.000 But yeah, iron, so apologies if this is wrong. We need to fact check But he was a university student and and you know he also got to work with Tim Bernersley And he was that motivation of a free culture free culture t-shirts 00:35:29.000 --> 00:35:51.000 Openness as a human right you know a way to keep government under control And things have suddenly moved towards a situation in which this very same technology has been and is being used sort of like in an opposite direction. 00:35:51.000 --> 00:35:55.000 Or uh yeah contradicting those ideas almost 00:35:55.000 --> 00:36:01.000 Have you told the group about Aaron Swartz and what happened to him and who he was and that? 00:36:01.000 --> 00:36:04.000 I only alluded to it very briefly, but no. I needed to. Yeah. 00:36:04.000 --> 00:36:24.000 I mean, it's just worth saying that He was a developer of the rss protocol, the really simple syndication feeds and workflow on Creative Commons, but his final project in a set was to download all of the material on JSTOR from the 00:36:24.000 --> 00:36:45.000 Academic network he was based in with the suspicion that his goal was to release this, whether it was in copyright or not so basically kind of guerrilla liberation project for information this all went very wrong when his downloading script was discovered. The FBI swooped in on him 00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:55.000 He was faced with excessive federal charges and He killed himself sadly still basically a teenager it was absolutely devastating. 00:36:55.000 --> 00:37:02.000 This pioneer of the open access movement and early sort of martyr for the cause in the end. 00:37:02.000 --> 00:37:20.000 But it does show how strongly copyright is enforced and how authoritarian the clampdown was against basically a teenager who was trying to do some good in the world, even though it violated copyright law And it's an extremely sad case 00:37:20.000 --> 00:37:34.000 You know it does show there's no way we can do this in ways that are illegal. We can't really work around the system as it stands. We've got to change the system for it to work properly If we don't ourselves want to face those legal threats and end up in 00:37:34.000 --> 00:37:36.000 Dire situations. Sorry, there was a question on the front row, I think. 00:37:36.000 --> 00:37:41.000 Thank you. I answered it was about the British that Arles wasn't. 00:37:41.000 --> 00:37:46.000 Yeah, sure. He says you've answered the question already. Any other questions? 00:37:46.000 --> 00:37:50.000 Okay. 00:37:50.000 --> 00:38:04.000 Yes. Yeah, so you mentioned The 33% profit margin for that publisher. 00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:05.000 Elsewhere yeah 00:38:05.000 --> 00:38:25.000 Yeah. And so obviously there's monetization there And I also think about copyrights. And if I remember rightly, copyright was meant to give the author the chance to work adapt and improve and create more stuff based upon their work and they kind of got extended extended extended 00:38:25.000 --> 00:38:43.000 And use more for a more perhaps monetary reasoning how I'm just thinking, is that possibly just going to happen again with any implementation of what you're doing what other people are doing. So, you know. 00:38:43.000 --> 00:39:01.000 Maybe that's been trying to or not necessarily revenge but that someone might come up with a way that actually works against open access to monetize it, but using some of the principles or something. Is that something that it's sort of? 00:39:01.000 --> 00:39:08.000 So I did hear that, by the way. So thank you for that question. And you've got a very loud voice obviously or They're sitting closer. 00:39:08.000 --> 00:39:13.000 Yeah. And they're being deliberately loud 00:39:13.000 --> 00:39:32.000 So I guess… Organizations that run open access publishers are not in a very good position to monetize the contents that comes in because essentially they're giving it away for free and they put an open license on it so other people can take it and redistribute it and 00:39:32.000 --> 00:39:47.000 You know that it's a bit like Odysseus binding himself to the mast as he goes past the sirens they've they're kind of tied there in hands by saying it's openly licensed you know they've made it very difficult to sell although 00:39:47.000 --> 00:40:00.000 Open Act as book publishers, for example. Copies of the physical print book that they produce you know and they do charge for that. So as long as there's a digital copy openly available. 00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:07.000 They can sell print and there's a demand for that because Is it fun reading 80,000 words of a book on screen? 00:40:07.000 --> 00:40:20.000 Not particularly. Actually, the print codex and the print volume still holds a huge appeal to people so you know that that's a way that they could monetize things but that's a way that most authors are pleased to be monetized you know 00:40:20.000 --> 00:40:25.000 They don't care if you sell their books. They want a print copy. It's nice to give to your grandma and say. 00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:35.000 Look, I wrote a book you know to see people reading it in public to have it in bookstores you know this is all good for the dissemination of the work. 00:40:35.000 --> 00:41:01.000 And I guess this is different about the open access space of academic publishing and other spaces of publishing or other spaces of work is that academics don't really expect a direct return on what they publish and produce. What they expect is if they can get their work published and respected by other academics and peer reviewed and 00:41:01.000 --> 00:41:16.000 Sanctioned by a publisher who has a prestige factor they will take that back and either get an academic job as a result of it or they will be promoted or they you know recognized in some way at their institution 00:41:16.000 --> 00:41:27.000 So basically, the monetary return for the author comes in the employment status that is conferred by the prestige of the publication. 00:41:27.000 --> 00:41:32.000 So this publications start to serve as a kind of proxy for evaluating people. 00:41:32.000 --> 00:41:43.000 And whether they're any good. It's very odd. You don't get that in say publishing a novel it's you know publish a novel and get it with a prestigious publisher. 00:41:43.000 --> 00:41:48.000 It's not going to make any difference you know you need to sell it to actually make money as an author in that context. 00:41:48.000 --> 00:42:01.000 In the academic context. It doesn't matter if only two people in the world read your paper but they are really senior people and really important and it changes a whole field of study, for example, because of what you did. 00:42:01.000 --> 00:42:19.000 That's what might get you the kudos to get your promotion and your monetary return centrally So I'm not clear that academic authors have the same desire to see various forms of self-monetization of what they've published. 00:42:19.000 --> 00:42:30.000 They're very happy to give that to a publisher. And let them monetize it in whatever way they see because it's not value to them until it's published by the person they want it to be published with. 00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:39.000 So there's quite a complex symbolic economy basically going on here that maps onto that real economy and makes things tricky to understand. 00:42:39.000 --> 00:42:54.000 But that's what I think is going on. What academics don't like though is when it seems recently and this comes back to the gen AI stuff we were just talking about if you publish something with an open access publisher 00:42:54.000 --> 00:43:06.000 They make it available for free. You've given it away in the spirit of good faith and you've done that for public good for readership for worldwide global discourse and so on. 00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:16.000 And then a for-profit corporation comes along trains their AI model on your work without any recognition monetary comeback and so on. 00:43:16.000 --> 00:43:24.000 You know for me that's not a problem for other people they think is a very big moral problem and wrong and they don't want to do it. 00:43:24.000 --> 00:43:34.000 But the way I see it is I have licensed my work for anybody to use and I'm afraid that includes for-profit corporations those I agree with, those I don't agree with. 00:43:34.000 --> 00:43:49.000 But that's just part of taking the risk, I guess, of open thinking and open practices you know you don't know who or what is going to do something with your work if you surrender the rights to it, you just have to go with it and see 00:43:49.000 --> 00:43:54.000 That's interesting. I didn't anticipate that happening. 00:43:54.000 --> 00:43:58.000 Excellent. Beautiful. Cheers. 00:43:58.000 --> 00:44:03.000 Someone else? 00:44:03.000 --> 00:44:07.000 People just do you have time for one last question, Martin, for me 00:44:07.000 --> 00:44:09.000 Yeah, sure, go for it. 00:44:09.000 --> 00:44:15.000 Well, this module is relatively new. It's on its third year. 00:44:15.000 --> 00:44:20.000 And it's the second year I lead it. 00:44:20.000 --> 00:44:49.000 And so a question that maybe a question that maybe in some… of our minds What does it have to do with design? 00:44:49.000 --> 00:44:50.000 Yeah. 00:44:50.000 --> 00:44:58.000 And of course, we have referred to have referred so very literally to the work on Janeway Right. And So that implies interaction design user-centered research I will share later a link to an article published that evaluates the punishment systems, including 00:44:58.000 --> 00:45:14.000 Janeway. That a colleague of us published recently in 2020 But how do you think of that? I mean, that isn't isn't the usability of the whole scholarly publishing landscape a big problem? 00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:30.000 We were chatting earlier about how some people's experience of research is that it should be full of friction that if there's no friction there is no research work that it should be very difficult to access something for it to be valuable almost. 00:45:30.000 --> 00:45:32.000 What are your views on this? 00:45:32.000 --> 00:45:53.000 Yeah, so… I guess first i guess first The term design is a very broad to you know we design all sorts of things. We can design systems We can design interfaces we can design software But we also you know we all work is designed social systems 00:45:53.000 --> 00:46:09.000 We have to think about how do social groupings, social hierarchies, governance structures affect how easy something is or otherwise to use When you're designing a software interface, for example. 00:46:09.000 --> 00:46:24.000 You can't just sit down and do it in isolation. You have to reach out to groups of people. You have to think about if you're going to be user-centric you can't just imagine your users. You have to actually find some of them, talk to them 00:46:24.000 --> 00:46:45.000 Find out their real life aspects of what they need from a system and design your social structures to support that. So it's very important that new organizations that are trying to be user centric and trying to design interfaces that work for their clientele, their customers, whatever the people using it might be called. 00:46:45.000 --> 00:47:00.000 Have a say in how an organization is run and have essentially you know the buck stop governance at the end of it that says they can tell designers what is needed because they know it themselves and are involved in the process so 00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:12.000 All the governance structure has a lot of academics on advisory boards to tell us precisely what's needed so that we can go to them for consultation when we're building things. 00:47:12.000 --> 00:47:33.000 In terms of the friction point that we were discussing earlier, Ernesto um It really bugs me that some people think that you know that endless friction you encounter when you come up with the paywall sign that says sign in here using your institution and you try and sign in using your institution your institution doesn't have access 00:47:33.000 --> 00:47:46.000 So then you go and try and find the original piece in some green open access repository and it's not there either. So then you go and ask the author and the author emails you the paper you know what kind of interface is that to scholarship 00:47:46.000 --> 00:47:50.000 But that's basically what we've got. Lots of people, as Ernesta said. 00:47:50.000 --> 00:48:06.000 Think that that really is the process of research you know it's getting hold of the thing is as much part of the process as reading it, synthesizing it and producing new research from those models. So I find this very frustrating i just think 00:48:06.000 --> 00:48:11.000 But that's pathetic. What if you could just click something and get access to this paper? 00:48:11.000 --> 00:48:19.000 And you didn't have to spend three days waiting for the author to email you back so you can get one crucial thing for your research that's blocking you. 00:48:19.000 --> 00:48:32.000 It's not doing research. Anyone can technically do what you're doing, which is discovery But it's become part of this discourse that that's what we have to do to get access. 00:48:32.000 --> 00:48:38.000 You know that's how long it takes and that's why research is so time consuming and it just really bugs me. 00:48:38.000 --> 00:48:44.000 So I just think In order of priority. 00:48:44.000 --> 00:48:48.000 Designing social systems is almost the most crucial part of interface design. 00:48:48.000 --> 00:49:06.000 It's something that you have to get right from the start who's involved, what are the stakeholders What does your organization look like? And it's only then that you can get user stories, get ideas of what you're going to actually build in whatever faces your users whether that's software or or 00:49:06.000 --> 00:49:11.000 You know a human interface. But that's my experience of it. 00:49:11.000 --> 00:49:16.000 That's that's why design plays a key role in what we were trying to do. 00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:21.000 So much. Very useful. Thank you for your time, Martin. 00:49:21.000 --> 00:49:27.000 You're welcome. Very nice to meet you all. I hope you enjoy the course. Thank you. 00:49:27.000 --> 00:49:30.000 Thank you. Can I stop there? 00:49:30.000 --> 00:49:36.000 Great. I'll speak to you soon, Lester. Take care and see you all soon. Good luck.