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Martin Eve: This meeting is being recorded.

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Ernesto Priego: Hello!

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Ernesto Priego: Welcome to this injustice, Martin.

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Ernesto Priego: Can you see me there? I did remove the self view, so I don't know if you can see, but it doesn't matter it's all about you.

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Ernesto Priego: Professor Martinez.

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Ernesto Priego: Thank you for making time for us. Where are you joining us from? Right now?

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Ernesto Priego: You can say. Can you hear me?

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Martin Eve: Yeah, just about. You're very quiet when you're away from the mic. Sorry.

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Ernesto Priego: Okay, alright. So I will actually.

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Ernesto Priego: And I will repeat questions from from people

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Ernesto Priego: to ensure that you can hear it. Okay, so you won't see me now, but you can hear me right.

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Martin Eve: Yep.

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Ernesto Priego: Where are you joining us from now, Martin?

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Martin Eve: 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

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Martin Eve: I hope that we can have a good conversation today about open practices, design, justice, and the the social justice issues behind open access, publishing.

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Ernesto Priego: Okay, thank you so much for joining us. Alright. So I

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Ernesto Priego: I wanted to ask you first, st

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Ernesto Priego: and we still have students coming?

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Ernesto Priego: I want to. I want to 1st ask you about your background into you know, how did you get into open access?

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Ernesto Priego: How how did it come about?

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Martin Eve: So I'm I actually work in an English department, you know. I'm I'm an English literature scholar, and it

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Martin Eve: during my Phd.

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Martin Eve: It suddenly dawned on me that

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Martin Eve: the academic job market is absolutely terrible. Right? It's it's very hard to get an academic job, which was what I was aspiring to do.

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Martin Eve: and I had backup plans to become a computer programmer if that didn't work.

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Martin Eve: 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 that came through the university.

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Martin Eve: And I was learning more about the publication system and finding out that academics aren't paid for journal articles. They're not, you know. It's not a revenue source for them or anything by producing these things. But somehow 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, and it just seemed to me totally contradictory, because

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Martin Eve: 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.

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Martin Eve: And they were publishing this in a way. That meant that only very few people are ever going to be able to read it. I wasn't going to be able to read it when I left.

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Martin Eve: 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

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Martin Eve: craziness that somebody had had designed very badly for thinking about

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Martin Eve: what? Why, we act in this way, and I guess over time

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Martin Eve: my anger at this has subsided a little bit and lapsed into a pragmatism. You know 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 in 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

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Martin Eve: you publish the work, then you can't get access to it.

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Ernesto Priego: How have things changed since? I mean, when? When was this? When can you place that? Historically we are talking about.

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Martin Eve: Yeah. So that was around 2,010, I guess. There's the situation then, which was.

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Martin Eve: you know, almost a decade after the open access, Budapest declaration, but

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Martin Eve: you know virtually no work in my field was open access at that point. It was. It was all paywalled.

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Martin Eve: You, if you wanted access, you had to go through a provider.

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Martin Eve: Also, I don't know if people know, but the you know, the the boxes that sometimes come up that say, you can buy individual access to a journal article. They simply don't work, you know. You end up on a on a

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Martin Eve: 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 my friend Ben, who worked at

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Martin Eve: the Higher Education Research Council. Hefke for ages tried this on a series of articles and just found it was impossible as an individual to get this access, even though they advertised it, because what they want is the library subscriptions.

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Martin Eve: But if you think about how things have changed since 2,010. There is a lot more content in my discipline that's now openly accessible.

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Martin Eve: 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. 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, 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

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Martin Eve: what you're doing and your labour efforts. So

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Martin Eve: 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

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Martin Eve: almost everything in high energy physics, for example, you can read for free. They use archive extensively, and that's great.

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Martin Eve: But you know other disciplines have been much slower history. For example.

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Martin Eve: there are signs of this tide shifting. There are mandates from funders. There are

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Martin Eve: academics who are interested in this issue.

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Martin Eve: There are pressures on the Academy to make work accessible and to ensure that the public can read it.

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Martin Eve: So I sort of feel 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.

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Ernesto Priego: Thank you. And do you. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started the open Library of Humanities, and then worked on the management, on the software, on, on Janeway.

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Ernesto Priego: Oh.

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Martin Eve: Sure, so.

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Ernesto Priego: In general terms. I know that you could give.

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Ernesto Priego: Yeah. I mean.

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Martin Eve: The right. The main problem for open access in in some disciplines like the humanities, for example.

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Martin Eve: is that the the economic model is very different to something like high energy physics, for example.

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Martin Eve: in high energy physics, you get a lot of academics getting grants. And if there's a book processing charge of 12,000 pounds, or an article processing charge of 3,000 pounds. They can very easily put that on their grant and ask the Funder to pay it, because dissemination is obviously part of the goal of those funders. They want the work to be circulated.

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Martin Eve: So this this model of article or book processing charges is akin to me, saying to the guy on the front row, here, right, I want you to pay 3,000 pounds, and then everybody else will be able to read your work.

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Martin Eve: So what's what it's 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.

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Martin Eve: This model really doesn't work very well in my disciplines, which was what publishers were trying to do. They just thought 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 you know that grant funded work just doesn't happen in my discipline so much. There are very few grants, and they're very hard to get.

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Martin Eve: 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?

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Martin Eve: 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 pounds from the budget, just to publish an article, and the next person is going to come along and say the same thing and on and on.

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Martin Eve: 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 was desire to implement a new model.

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Martin Eve: And what we decided instead was, if we could get, say, 350 libraries worldwide to pay.

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Martin Eve: I don't know a few 1,000 pounds each into a central pot.

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Martin Eve: We'd have enough to publish all the material that passed. Peer review that came into us.

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Martin Eve: And we we could do that without charging anybody any academic a fee.

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Martin Eve: 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, you say they want it to work and use those funds to operate and to run our publisher.

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Martin Eve: And so lots of people said, this will never work. You know what you're what you're doing is you're asking libraries to pay for something

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Martin Eve: that doesn't give them anything. You know they they cannot participate. And if you publish stuff openly. Everybody will get it, anyway, and that's called the Free Rider Problem.

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Martin Eve: and we just said, Well.

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Martin Eve: 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 will they put their money where their mouths are 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.

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Martin Eve: And they did. You know, 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, you know I was traveling to Japan, and one day Edinburgh the next, and San Francisco after that. The next day. It was. It was this very intense period of life where we were getting these libraries on board.

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Martin Eve: but you know we did it. We're now stable and funded. I don't run the open live humanities anymore. I've handed it over to a colleague, so you know, we've got succession planning. We've got continuity. We've got sustainability.

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Martin Eve: We built something that I think will now last, and is a sustainable contribution to this space.

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Ernesto Priego: It's been fantastic, I mean, as you know, I mean permanent awe at what you and the team achieved.

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Ernesto Priego: Could you tell us a bit more about the relationship between what you have described, which is about the open library of humanities as an organization, that

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Ernesto Priego: it is offering a different way to fund

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Ernesto Priego: scholarly publishing, probably, and and therefore, and that includes a different way of making scholarly publications available.

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Ernesto Priego: And the the design of of of I mean, of owning the platform, that is, is and that meant designing it from scratch.

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Ernesto Priego: That that also enables this way of

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Ernesto Priego: of financing and providing access? Do they go hand in hand? Can can they exist one without the other?

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Ernesto Priego: How how.

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Martin Eve: So.

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Ernesto Priego: How can we learn from that?

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Ernesto Priego: You know, when people think about designing an interface, how how connected

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Ernesto Priego: is it to the mission of the organization, and how specific was the work on Janeway, thinking about the the funding and the

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Ernesto Priego: and the access enabling aspect.

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Martin Eve: So an interesting aspect of the launch was that

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Martin Eve: at that point we needed a some kind of bootstrapping mechanism to get off the ground. We had this situation where we didn't have a platform that we own

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Martin Eve: we had potential funder interest and an idea for our sustainable economic model.

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Martin Eve: And we had, you know, 1 1 of the options was, we can build our own platform from scratch our own interface and workflow.

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Martin Eve: and it will delay our launch. By a good year.

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Martin Eve: We'll spend a year building software, designing an interface, ensuring it all works. And we'll launch. And this software will be brand new, untested, and we're in a difficult situation.

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Martin Eve: So what we did instead

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Martin Eve: was we went to an organization called Ubiquity Press. That is, a sadly for-profit publishing services provider.

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Martin Eve: and we partnered with them to

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Martin Eve: operate our platform initially, to give us basically the publishing services that we couldn't get immediately and use those as the starting point, so

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Martin Eve: that worked well for a while. It! It did exactly what we wanted it to do. It got us off the ground. We had a platform that worked and was tested. We didn't own or control that platform in any way, though, so

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Martin Eve: if if there was a change we needed. For example, I don't know enhancing disability, accessibility.

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Martin Eve: It became very difficult for us, in that situation of non-ownership, to to get that implemented as a priority. You know, we're dealing with a provider who's trying to cater to multiple clients, multiple competing design priorities on what they've got for their platform. It's it's not necessarily the

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Martin Eve: our ideal situation.

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Martin Eve: But we used that time when we were with ubiquity to

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Martin Eve: design and build our own workflow platform for what we were doing behind the scenes. 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, which was which was an Hr. And social decision behind the technology choice.

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Martin Eve: But that platform

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Martin Eve: was built, 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.

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Martin Eve: and we own it, control it, understand it, operate it now, and we migrated all our journals to it a few years ago

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Martin Eve: and managed to get off ubiquity, giving us better cost savings by running our own platform. And you know it's just been getting better ever since.

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Martin Eve: I guess the challenge is, we have to build a workflow that

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Martin Eve: worked for scholarly communications, which is a very specific space. It's really

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Martin Eve: there's nothing else quite like it. It's not as though you can take a generic workflow platform and just say, right, we'll use that we had to think about, you know, 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 has to be vetted by other academics to whether it can be published. But there's debates about whether that should be done before something's made public or afterwards. For example, so Pre. Review.

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Martin Eve: where somebody says that shouldn't be published, so the article never sees the light of day.

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Martin Eve: or you make the work public, so everyone can read it, and then afterwards you get academic opinions on it? Who say 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.

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Martin Eve: But it's

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Martin Eve: It's been a really interesting experience building it and 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. Sorry, Ernesto, I think, I interrupted. You.

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Ernesto Priego: Oh, no, that's great. I was going to say that as a user, a long time user. Now, I agree

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Ernesto Priego: on how well it it's working, really, and the

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Ernesto Priego: and the improvements that have been noticeable from my user experience

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Ernesto Priego: just moving on a little bit I know, I dropped that question out of further from what we have previously discussed. So I apologize for that. But

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Ernesto Priego: 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.

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Ernesto Priego: And could you elaborate if you see it or not, like a question of social justice.

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Martin Eve: So. Yes, I see it as a matter of social justice. But the and I'll explain why in a second.

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Martin Eve: the really interesting thing about open access is that there are several parties

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Martin Eve: involved in its realization, theorization creation.

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Martin Eve: whatever you want you want to call that, who have different competing ideologies and ideals

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Martin Eve: that they believe open access contributes to.

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Martin Eve: 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, you know, a very neoliberal economy of they'll get a benefit from this. They pay tax so they should get access to it, and there's not much social justice in that that angle of things, you know. It might have its own unique

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Martin Eve: benefits. That might be

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Martin Eve: upsides to that view, you know. Maybe it's good that our small enterprises can thrive and get access to this stuff. But that's very different to say scholars in South Africa who are saying.

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Martin Eve: we can't get access to papers from the global North. Our institution can't afford them. We can't publish our papers open access because we can't afford the fees that these journals charge as well.

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Martin Eve: you know, for me, doing open access, right

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Martin Eve: 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.

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Martin Eve: And that's a very different stance to the people who have that small enterprise view. But it doesn't really matter in a way, because we both want the same thing. We both want open access to happen if there are just different motivations behind it.

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Martin Eve: And I think that's where projects tend to succeed actually is where

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Martin Eve: 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. We think that we actually want to achieve the same thing.

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Martin Eve: There are open access advocates who are very strongly opposed to that view. I've just articulated, you know. They think that would be a compromise. It would be a hideous pollution of the ideal situation with open access where it's all just about ensuring that everybody has access, you know, regardless of whether they can pay. So the poor and the rich, the global north and the global South.

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Martin Eve: the poorest person who's got access to the Internet versus the richest person.

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Martin Eve: But I think that the pragmatic stance is to say.

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Martin Eve: 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. So let's work with them to to make this a reality.

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Ernesto Priego: What's just quickly. What's your view on article processing charges in the I mean, obviously in the humanities that you already suggested it.

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Ernesto Priego: It was even more of a shock. The notion, the whole idea that authors would be asked to pay to publish their own work.

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Ernesto Priego: Even if that had been happening somehow, indirectly before, through institutions or or libraries.

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Ernesto Priego: Do you see? Do you see Apcs as

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Ernesto Priego: as a necessary step? Or does it do they have positive

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Ernesto Priego: aspects? What's the story with Apcs from your perspective?

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Martin Eve: So I think that article processing charges are a result of lazy business thinking from academic publishers.

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Martin Eve: They okay. So it's always worth thinking about publishing and

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Martin Eve: these these type of enterprises as a labor driven organization. So

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Martin Eve: there is always labor going on at a publisher that we need that we can't get rid of that somehow needs to be done somewhere.

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Martin Eve: so that needs to be funded. People can't work for free. That's 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 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.

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Martin Eve: Okay, you know, sounds like a fairly typical business model. That's what you had in the sales model.

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Martin Eve: Then we said, Okay, actually, you know what we don't want you to sell that anymore. We want everybody to be get to get access to it without paying to get free access to this this material.

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Martin Eve: 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? 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. And we, you know, we get the paper peer reviewed. We

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Martin Eve: typeset it, we copy, edit it. We pre-freed 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

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Martin Eve: organization, and say, Well, you know what you should pay this now, because we're doing it for you. So your work could be disseminated widely, and everyone can read it for free.

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Martin Eve: Now that, you know, sounds good in theory, but they really haven't thought about that distribution aspect that I talked to you about earlier that if we can spread the cost as a sales model does, and as our consortial model does. Olh.

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Martin Eve: you've got

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Martin Eve: a much better model that doesn't have this unequalizing effect. And that's the real. It's just a real problem exclusion. And that's a social justice issue. Some institutions, particularly in poorer parts of the world really cannot afford an article processing charge of 3,000 pounds just for a single article. It's just it's not going to fly. They can't do it.

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Martin Eve: 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.

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Martin Eve: 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.

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Martin Eve: It's it's far more profitable by percentage profit than shell oil than big Pharma.

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Martin Eve: You know, those are sort of running at 18%, and they're running at 30 plus percent. It's there is enough money in the system to make this work.

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Martin Eve: 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. So really, it's a social social problem of organization, collectivism and pooling resources to achieve the compensation of labor

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Martin Eve: that makes the social justice results of open access viable. Economically.

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Martin Eve: Sorry if that's yeah. Might be a little bit complicated. But hopefully I've explained that in a clear enough way.

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Ernesto Priego: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Definitely thought provoking. And finally,

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Ernesto Priego: the rise of I'm sorry not to mention it, Marty, but the rise of Gen. AI.

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Ernesto Priego: And yeah, obviously, that profound transformation of of search by AI of the the the and the

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Ernesto Priego: the the potential changes to to copyright law or policy.

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Ernesto Priego: and the current reactions of, or resistance, perhaps of the creative industries, at least in the Uk towards

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Ernesto Priego: towards the Gen. AI. Situation. Could could you tell us a bit more like from your perspective? How do we balance the potential paradoxes

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Ernesto Priego: between openness?

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Ernesto Priego: You know? Fairness and big corporations potentially, arguably profiting from from intellectual labor, without

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Ernesto Priego: without paying the original creators or.

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Martin Eve: So this is a very tricky area. But.

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Ernesto Priego: Yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry.

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Ernesto Priego: You know. One of the

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Martin Eve: One of the original goals of open access

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Martin Eve: was to open material to text and data mining potentials. And you know, one of the arguments made was that.

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Martin Eve: having academic material openly accessible and made computationally accessible.

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Martin Eve: would yield a new way of searching literature, we might find new things by computational methods to 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 2012, 2,002, when the 3 best open Access initiative was signed. It was just a glimmer on the horizon, but it was one of the things that was

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Martin Eve: thought interesting and promising, and and one of the reasons that open licenses were were applied in the open access space.

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Martin Eve: When it's actually happened. We've had text. And basically, gen, AI training is text and data mining on a massive scale. It's 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.

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Martin Eve: But people don't like it, you know. They say you've stolen my material when it's when it's harvested by a Gen. AI Harvester.

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Martin Eve: Well, that was, that was the goal of some of the open access movements. It's hard to say you couldn't see that coming, but they have also used material that is not openly accessible that is just available in pirate archives. And you know, that's it's potentially difficult. If

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Martin Eve: if an author relies on sales of their material they can, they suddenly see someone using it and think that's outrageous. But

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Martin Eve: you know, it's really Us. 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 into something that the author couldn't have anticipated, you are allowed to do that with copyrighted material. That material is there for people to find ways to use that the author didn't anticipate.

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Martin Eve: If the author thought of it, and wanted to sell it in that form.

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Martin Eve: 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

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Martin Eve: that comes out of the use of copyrighted material.

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Martin Eve: And this discourse also hides a lot of

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Martin Eve: misunderstanding about the history of copyright.

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Martin Eve: Copyright is a time limited right to sell work

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Martin Eve: that expires, and then things become public domain.

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Martin Eve: The point of copyright is not actually the individual economic protection that people think it is. It's to ensure that once that is done and people have had their share of it. The work is publicly available for free forever for everyone it becomes openly accessible as the default.

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Martin Eve: and you know that was a bargain struck between various publishers and the government in the statute of Anne back in previous centuries. But

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Martin Eve: this, 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 and think that basically copyright should be perpetual forever. And for one person. But you know my personal stance is

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Martin Eve: AI is not going away.

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Martin Eve: We're not going to get rid of it.

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Martin Eve: so it should be as good as it can be, and it should serve us as best as it possibly can. And I think that, having high quality academic papers that have the truth in them available for synthesis and training

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Martin Eve: 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

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Martin Eve: horrific content that is completely inaccurate, and having that as their training base.

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Martin Eve: So that that's how I see it. I don't think we're going to block it, and it's going to go away. It's something we have to live with, and we should live with it being as good as possible.

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Ernesto Priego: Thank you so much. Okay, so we have reached the end of our time dedicated to the Q. And A. But we have time for a couple of questions from the the crowd in the room.

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Ernesto Priego: Would someone like to ask Martin something in the context of the much of the lecture or his talk.

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Ernesto Priego: He's looking at you now.

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Martin Eve: See it? Yeah.

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Ernesto Priego: It doesn't bite.

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Ernesto Priego: It's okay. If you don't have questions as well. You sure

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Ernesto Priego: it's very. We are very lucky to have you here.

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Martin Eve: And someone's got a hand up.

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Ernesto Priego: Oh, okay, yeah. Sorry. I just clicked on something that I shouldn't have clicked on.

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Ernesto Priego: Okay, yes, it will show.

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Ernesto Priego: Okay, we can try.

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Martin Eve: If you, if you speak unless they could repeat the question to me afterwards, is probably the best way to.

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Ernesto Priego: What's what's your perspective on how the Internet started off essentially as oh

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Ernesto Priego: system, to openly transfer information. And now it becoming something that's not.

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Ernesto Priego: Oh, what the bandwidth goes, and private servers.

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Ernesto Priego: and how that kind of applies to this open access.

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Ernesto Priego: Yeah, so you did you get, I think the I think someone managed to pick that up on the on the captions. But the yeah, your perspective on the history of the Internet as a system that started us.

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Ernesto Priego: yeah, intended to to transfer share information

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Ernesto Priego: and the current landscape of privatization of the online landscape.

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Ernesto Priego: Yeah, in relation to open access. What you've been talking about.

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Martin Eve: That's a really great point and question. Actually.

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Martin Eve: you know, the history of the Internet is is quite a complex

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Martin Eve: phenomenon with the original Arpanet coming out of Stanford when it was 1st developed. And

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Martin Eve: Janet abate in her book about inventing the Internet, you know, clearly makes it very clear that

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Martin Eve: the original goals of the Internet would serve a military command and control perspective. You know they were. They were us military funded.

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Martin Eve: They had to build a communication network that was resilient and particularly decentralized. I mean, we were in a post cold war context of the birth of the Internet, and the fear was, well, what happens if we build a centralized communication system that relies on 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.

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Martin Eve: So they were tasked with building a network that was resilient and distributed, and could root around any problems that were found in it.

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Martin Eve: 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

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Martin Eve: a hippy intellectual culture at Stanford, of people who believe in the open, free sharing of information that 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. One group wants to build it because they think the government will come to them and shut them down.

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Martin Eve: 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. 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 to hit the academics. You know, they're they're posting their computer science and physics papers on these Ftp servers between the original

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Martin Eve: nodes on the Internet. And you know from then on, for some people, the logic is just clear.

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Martin Eve: Information and research should be freely shared using these digital systems that allow for infinite replication.

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Martin Eve: 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. But I think you're just right in the insinuation there that

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Martin Eve: the the core logic of why the Internet developed and was built contains within itself

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Martin Eve: the logic of open access. And the idea that open sharing

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Martin Eve: could be a social justice project of the Internet. And it's it's logical to pursue that. Given what the technology offers.

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Ernesto Priego: Great question. I was thinking along similar lines, but I keep think every open access week. I think of Aaron Schwartz.

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Ernesto Priego: You know you mentioned Stanford there, and and he went to Stanford, didn't he? And Lawrence Lessig was in Stanford.

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Ernesto Priego: and or I don't know if he was in Harvard by then. But yeah, Aaron so apologies. If this is the wrong guy, we need to fact check. But but he was a university student, and and you know, he also got to work with Tim Berners-lee.

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Ernesto Priego: and he was that that motivation of free culture, free culture, T-shirts

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Ernesto Priego: openness as as a human right, you know, a way to keep government under control.

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Ernesto Priego: and and things have suddenly moved towards a situation in which this very same technology

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Ernesto Priego: has been and is being used sort of like, in an opposite direction. Or, yeah, contradicting those ideals almost.

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Martin Eve: Have you have you told the group about Aaron Swartz, and what happened to him, and who he was, and and that.

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Ernesto Priego: I only alluded to it very briefly, but no.

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Martin Eve: I mean, it's just worth saying that. So he was a developer of the Rss protocol. The really simple syndication feeds and worked a lot on creative commons. But

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Martin Eve: his his final project in a set was to download all of the material on jstor from the

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Martin Eve: academic network he was based in

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Martin Eve: with the suspicion that his goal was to release this, whether it was in copyright or not. So basically a kind of guerrilla liberation project for information.

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Martin Eve: This all went very wrong. When his downloading script was discovered, the FBI sweeped in on him. He was faced with excessive Federal charges, and he killed himself sadly. Still, basically a teenager. It was absolutely devastating. You know, this pioneer of the the open access movement and early

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Martin Eve: sort of martyr for the cause in the end.

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Martin Eve: But it does show how strongly copyright is enforced and how

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Martin Eve: authoritarian that 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. But

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Martin Eve: you know it does show there's no way we can do this in ways that are illegal. We can't really work around

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Martin Eve: the 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 dire situations.

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Martin Eve: Sorry there was a question on the front row, I think.

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Ernesto Priego: Very honest. It was about the produce that Aaron was working.

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Ernesto Priego: Yeah, sure he's he? Says he. You've answered the question already. Oh.

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Martin Eve: Okay.

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Ernesto Priego: Any other questions.

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Ernesto Priego: Yes.

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Ernesto Priego: Yeah. So you mentioned the 33% profit margin, or that that's publishing.

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Martin Eve: That's a bit.

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Ernesto Priego: Yeah, and so obviously, there's there's monetization there. And I also think about copyright. And if I remember rightly, copyright was meant to give the author

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Ernesto Priego: the chance to work, adapt, and improve and create more stuff based upon their work, and they kind of got extended, extended, extended.

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Ernesto Priego: I don't use, or for a perhaps monetary reason.

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Ernesto Priego: What?

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Ernesto Priego: How I'm just thinking is that possibly just gonna happen again with any implementation of

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Ernesto Priego: what you're doing, what other people are doing like that is a, you know.

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Ernesto Priego: and maybe that's been trying to trying to prevent or not necessarily prevent, but

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Ernesto Priego: that some someone might come up with a way that actually works against open access to monetize it. But using some of the principles or something.

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Ernesto Priego: is that something that it's possible.

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Martin Eve: So I did hear that, by the way, so that thank you for that question. And I you've got a very loud voice, obviously, or sitting closer.

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Ernesto Priego: Indirectly. Yeah.

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Martin Eve: So I guess organizations that run open access publishers

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Martin Eve: are not in a very good position to monetize the content that comes in, because essentially, that 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

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Martin Eve: you know it's a bit like Odysseus binding himself to the mast as he goes past the sirens. They've they've kind of tied their own hands by saying, it's openly licensed, you know, they've made it very difficult to sell, although

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Martin Eve: open access book publishers, for example, sell 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.

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Martin Eve: you know, they can sell print. And there's a demand for that. Because is it fun? Reading 80,000 words of a book on screen? Not particularly, you know. Actually, the the print codecs and the print volume still holds a huge appeal to people. So

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Martin Eve: you know that that's a way they could monetize things. But that's a way that most authors are pleased to be monetized, you know they don't care if you sell their books, they want to print copy, you know. It's nice to give to your grandma and say, look, I wrote a book, you know, to see people reading it in public, to have it in bookstores. You know this is all

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Martin Eve: good for the dissemination of the work.

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Martin Eve: And I guess this is what's different about

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Martin Eve: the open access space of academic publishing, and other spaces of publishing or other spaces of work is that

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Martin Eve: 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 sanctioned by a publisher who has a prestige factor.

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Martin Eve: 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.

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Martin Eve: So basically, the monetary return for the author comes in

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Martin Eve: the employment status that is conferred by the prestige of the publication.

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Martin Eve: So these publications start to serve as a kind of proxy for evaluating people, and whether they're any good.

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Martin Eve: it's 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. 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.

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Martin Eve: in the academic context, it doesn't matter if only 2 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, you know. That's what might get you the kudos to get your promotion and your monetary return centrally.

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Martin Eve: So. I'm not clear that academic authors have the same desire to see

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Martin Eve: various forms of self monetization of what they've published. They're very happy to give that to a publisher and let them monetize it in whatever way they see, because it's not of value to them until it's published by the person they want it to be published with.

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Martin Eve: So there's quite a complex symbolic economy basically going on here that maps onto that real economy and makes things tricky to understand.

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Martin Eve: But that's what I think's going on. What academics don't like, though, is when

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Martin Eve: it seems recently. And this comes back to the Gen. AI. Stuff we were just talking about.

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Martin Eve: If you publish something with an open access publisher, they make it available for free.

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Martin Eve: 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.

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Martin Eve: And then a for-profit corporation comes along

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Martin Eve: trains their AI model on your work without any recognition, monetary comeback, and so on.

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Martin Eve: you know. For me, that's not a problem for other people.

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Martin Eve: They think it's a very big moral problem and wrong, and they don't want to do it.

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Martin Eve: But the way I see it is I. You know I have licensed my work for anybody to use, and I'm afraid that includes for profit for corporations those I agree with those I don't agree with. But that's just, you know, 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, and if you surrender the rights to it, you just have to go with it and see.

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Martin Eve: That's interesting. I didn't anticipate that happening.

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Ernesto Priego: Thanks, so beautiful man!

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Ernesto Priego: Alright cheers someone else

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Ernesto Priego: people just do. You have time for one last question, Martin, for me.

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Martin Eve: Yeah, sure go for it.

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Ernesto Priego: Well, this this module is relatively new. It's it's on its 3rd year, and it's the second year I I leave it

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Ernesto Priego: and

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Ernesto Priego: So a question that maybe in in in some of

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Ernesto Priego: of our minds might be, why does it? What what does it have to do with design.

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Ernesto Priego: And of course, we have referred to Hello, David.

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Ernesto Priego: very literally to the work on Janeway, right? And and and

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Ernesto Priego: so that implies interaction design and user Center research. I will share later a link to an article published that evaluates the management systems, including Janeway.

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Ernesto Priego: that the 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

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Ernesto Priego: you. You were talking. 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

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Ernesto Priego: what are your views on this.

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Martin Eve: Yeah. So I guess first, st the term design is a very broad

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Martin Eve: term. You know, we design all sorts of things. We we can design systems, we can design interfaces. We can design software.

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Martin Eve: But we also, you know, we always design social systems. We have to think about.

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Martin Eve: how do social grouping social hierarchies, governance structures

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Martin Eve: affect how easy something is or otherwise to use.

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Martin Eve: When you, when you're designing a software interface. For example, you

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Martin Eve: 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 if you're going to be user centric.

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Martin Eve: You can't just imagine your users. You have to actually find some of them, talk to them, find out their real life

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Martin Eve: 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

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Martin Eve: interfaces that work for their their clientele, their customers, whatever whatever the the people using it might be called.

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Martin Eve: have a say in how an organization is run and have essentially the. 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

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Martin Eve: you know, our our governance structure has a lot of academics on advisory boards to tell us precisely what what's needed so that we can go to them for consultation when we're building things

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Martin Eve: in terms of the friction point that you know, we were discussing earlier. Ernesto.

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Martin Eve: It really bugs me that some people think that you know that endless

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Martin Eve: 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. 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? But that's that's basically what we've got. And lots of people, as Ernesta said, think that that really is the process of research. You know, it's

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Martin Eve: getting hold of. The thing is as much part of the process as reading it, synthesizing it and producing new research from those

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Martin Eve: models. So I find this very frustrating, I just think.

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Martin Eve: But that's pathetic. What if you could just click something and get access to this paper. And you didn't have to spend 3 days waiting for the author to email you back. So you can get one crucial thing for your research. That's blocking you.

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Martin Eve: That's it's not doing research. That's that's.

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Martin Eve: you know, anyone can technically do what you're doing, which is discovery. But it's become part of this discourse that that's that's what we have to do to get access. So you know, that's how long it takes. And that's why research is so time consuming. And

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Martin Eve: it just really bugs me.

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Martin Eve: So I just think, in order of priority.

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Martin Eve: designing social systems is almost the most crucial part of interface design. 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

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Martin Eve: ideas of what you're going to actually build in whatever faces your users, whether that's software or or you know, a human interface.

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Martin Eve: but that's my experience of it. And

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Martin Eve: that's that's why design plays a key role in what we were trying to do.

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Ernesto Priego: So much, very useful. Thank you for your time, Martin.

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Martin Eve: You're welcome very nice to meet you all. I hope you enjoy the course. Thank you.

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Ernesto Priego: Thank you.

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Ernesto Priego: Can I start.

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Martin Eve: I'll speak to you soon. Take care and see you all soon. Good luck.

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Ernesto Priego: The