Daring to dream of Universal Open Access
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Open-Access-Tage 20191 / 11
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
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I do believe that we are at a historic moment in open access, and that's indicated again on the stage. The fact that Wiley, Springer, Taylor and Francis and the other publishers are sponsoring an event on open access
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signals things have changed. That when I started all of those decades ago, these publishers were not sponsors of open access, so all credit to them for realizing the value of open access. And that value doesn't just go back the two
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decades that I've been working on this project. The value of open access goes back to the very beginning of scholarship. But let me go back to just Leibniz. Let me just start with Leibniz since we're here at his home. I started working on Leibniz in the 90s. I first came to my attention in that
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heyday of the internet, that exciting time when we were all on the entrance ramp to open access. The internet superhighway of information, everything was going to be possible. And Leibniz came to my attention because he thought about the possibilities of knowledge. Because Leibniz's goal was
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to bring together all of the forms of knowledge. That he had a concept of the universal behind knowledge. Now in the 90s when I first discovered Leibniz, it was rather breathtaking in terms of the scope of his work. It was
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fascinating in terms of the mining and the windmills and the calculators and everything else. But what grabbed my attention was his job as a librarian. That if he was going to work with all of the knowledge in the world in a way that would bring it together, he always had his hands on the practical
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issue of what book goes where. Of how do you organize the Duke's library. How do you spend the Duke's acquisition budget, which I understand was very generous. And at the same time what attracted me to Leibniz was his
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apartment. Forgive me. Apartment envy, I don't know if any of you suffer from that. But Leibniz, and this may be apocryphal, I'm not sure it's true, but at one point I read that he had an apartment in the center of the library. That the Duke had afforded him the building of a
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library around his home. And that concept to me of living at the center of all of that knowledge was very attractive. But also this idea of living with your problems. Of waking up each morning and throwing the door open
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and saying, how do we organize all of this knowledge? Now to give you a scope of the ambition of Leibniz, when I say organize all of this knowledge, he believed he could create an alphabet out of which he was going to establish
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an algebra or calculus of knowledge. That every concept could be represented by a symbol, by a letter, by an ideogram. Leibniz was very attracted to Chinese language, in the sense that he thought of it at least, as each
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ideogram representing a concept. And if we could pull all of those concepts together into a single language, then we could realize a power of knowledge that eluded us in the 17th century where Leibniz was working and
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eludes us today. And that same dream that we have not fully realized the capacity of what we know collectively as a planet is the inspiration behind a concept of universal open access. And how I want to address this is by saying
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we need a standard by which to measure every proposal and project to which we can apply this concept in a way that will help us to judge, to judge the initiatives of the government, of the university, and to think about is
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this going to contribute to universal open access. Not open access in Brunswick or Saxony, not open access in Germany or Europe, but universally, which means the planet. And I want to come back and be held to that standard.
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But let me do a little bit more of this history. Let me give you in fact a quote of Leibniz that I have here. All concepts and things can be put into beautiful order. There's a lovely mathematical sense to that, the idea of
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putting ideas into order. But what that sentence doesn't give you is the sense of purpose. What we need to keep in mind is why we want both this access and this order. And the idea is that there is an unrealized capacity. There is an
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ability to put together ideas in a way that we haven't before. Will we solve all of the world's issues? No. The university does not want to make that promise. Leibniz's windmills failed. The mines were not kept free of water.
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But the idea that we can begin to realize new associations, new concepts, new ideas is the possibility. And the idea that everyone can participate is the greater promise. That what's important about universal open access,
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what's important about Leibniz's dream, is that it is open to everyone. And that potential has never been more real. It's still dependent on an internet. It's still dependent on connectivity and infrastructure. But it is far more
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global than it was in Leibniz's time and far more global than it was in the 20th century. Now Leibniz is famous for a phrase that we are living in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire made great fun of this concept of the best of all possible worlds when there were such disasters and have
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continued to be. But there's an interesting logical twist to the best of all possible worlds that I want you to consider. And that is that the best of all possible worlds can actually be made better. That it is not
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a logical contradiction to say that while we may live in the best of all possible worlds, many of us are figuring we're living in the only world we've got, and others of us, especially living in the United States right now, are saying this is the best possible world. But underneath
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that is the sense that the best can always be made better. And the efforts to do that we have to be careful about. So I want to be
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enthusiastically utopian, idealistic, but I don't want to be naive. And so I want to introduce some of that critical edge. But let me give you an example of how that enthusiasm has taken different forms. Let's leave aside the Baroque for a moment or two. Although what a beautiful
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kind of modernization of the Baroque right here under natural light. Quite a treat. But what happened in the 20th century are a couple of interesting turns. H.G. Wells. Do we know the science fiction writer H.G. Wells? A few nods in the audience. War of the worlds H.G. Wells.
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H.G. Wells had a concept of the world brain. Now it's not the best kind of term for it. It's not universal knowledge, it's world brain. And you think of the planet and
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kind of the cranium. But it caught on. And he had a concept of a global encyclopedia and was definitely thinking beyond Europe and Eurocentrism in the 30s. Actually towards the end of the 30s. Quite a period. He puts forward the proposition of a world brain, of a global encyclopedia. And of
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course you're thinking right now that maybe we've come to a point of that. But one of the people who picked up on the world brain concept was Eugene Garfield when he created the citation index. Garfield said that the citation
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index, the web of science as we know it today, was a forerunner of the world brain. And where I come from, it's not at the heyday of the citation index. That citations counts and impact factors
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are not the most popular measure today. And that when you aspire to a world brain kind of sensibility, when you assume that you can speak to the universal, you have to be careful about the unintended consequences. You
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have to be careful that all knowledge will end up being counted by the number of citations that you receive. You have to be careful that ideas aren't the point or focus of attention, but that some measure or count becomes the whole value of the university, of a publication. And so
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when I talk about universal open access, I want to be careful, and I want to be conscious that it's going to take some interesting turns, not all of which I can control. Eugene Garfield comes up with a
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citation index concept in 1964. I'm moving too quickly here from the 17th, 18th century now to the 1960s. Were there any other periods really? No, sorry, giving away my age here, those decades. In the 60s, we have Eugene Garfield's citation index, and we
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have Michel Foucault's the order of things. We have the critique of knowledge and power. And we need to understand in the universities that as we contribute to the order of ideas, we are contributing to the power of those ideas. And when the state and the
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university join hands to form some kind of global universal open access, we need to remember Foucault's critique that what we assume to be all of knowledge as if it was somehow direct from
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nature, as if we could know the world directly, as if we could perceive reality in that immediate sense. From Foucault's perspective, no, we are just ordering things. We are creating and constructing
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a world. And he uses Borges, the Argentinian author at the opening of his book, as a check, as a point of laughter for his book, but as a check in which Borges imagines a Chinese encyclopedia, completely fictional, but almost in the spirit of Leibniz, who thought that Mandarin would be a universal
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language in terms of concepts. And Borges talks about that encyclopedia as classifying the world, as creating a natural classification of everything. And I invite you to do a Google
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search. You can take your phones out. I won't be offended. And look for Borges, encyclopedia, Foucault, order of things. And you'll see that that classification of the world, a universal classification, begins with it belongs to the emperor.
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Another one is it's included in this classification. Another one is it's painted with a fine camel hair brush. And the last
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one is those things that at a distance look like flies, which is only to say that each of us is constructing the world and classifying it in a way that has implications for everyone
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else. And that at universities like this and in libraries where you're working and universities where you're working, you have both the opportunity and the responsibility to classify the world. But I'm asking you to do that in a way that considers the planet, the globe, the universal, and
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your responsibilities in that regard. Let me go to the 21st century and this dream of universal access. At the turn of the century, in fact, I was amazed. I don't know if you've looked at the Google Doodle. The Google Doodle last
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week celebrated the 21st anniversary of Google. On September 9th, 1998, Google was born. Now, I was thrilled by that because the public knowledge project, the project I've developed, was born nine days earlier. We're like
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twins separated at birth. Google, public knowledge project, Sergey Brin, John Wolinsky. The turn of that century, the turn of the century we were living in was
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a time of a dream. Google's aspiration was to organize all the world's information and to make it accessible. And what it did in particular for those of us in this room was
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Anurag Chura created, as an engineer, Google Scholar. And the brilliance of Google Scholar, the universal use of Google Scholar has been a wonderful thing in the commercial and the public sense of that index as a commercial enterprise and as a public index. But the
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laggard in that index has been the universities. The promise and hope that all of that knowledge would be accessible is not the case today because we don't have universal open access. What we have today, roughly by a
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number of different measures, is 30 percent. A third, perhaps, of the world's knowledge that the university produces is open access, is available globally. The university, what Leibniz dreamed of, were only partly
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there. What Google built an engine to share, the university is only sharing in part on a minority status. Wikipedia is totally the Leibnizian dream, totally the
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world brain dream of H.G. Wells, not so much Eugene Garfield, perhaps, certainly not Foucault. Wikipedia started in 2001, and again, its ability, I was one of the people who said in 2002 and 3, this will never work. I'm
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a school teacher by trade, and if you don't give marks or grades or incentives, if you don't give authorship to editors, they will never complete an assignment. I had been a school teacher for 10 years. I knew that. I was so
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thoroughly wrong that when you let people construct knowledge in a way that can be shared with others, when you leave the teacher out of the equation, when you make learning a gift for everyone, you get Wikipedia. And
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Wikipedia is universal in that same aspiring way except for one thing. The citations and research that it uses is not universally available. That only one-third of the
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research can be freely cited in a way that people can look at. The research we're just finishing now, a little premature to announce it here, but we're all friends. I can share this with you. This isn't a public disclosure. This
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is just between me and you. If my co-authors heard me doing this, no tweeting at this point, closed tweeting. What we found with Wiki Project Medicine, that is the medical part of Wikipedia, readers are less likely to
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check a citation than for the rest of Wikipedia. No, not check. Click on a citation. Readers of the medical parts of Wikipedia are very quick to look if there is a citation,
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but they don't click through. In the rest of Wikipedia, when they're looking up their sports team, Brad Pitt, nobody hesitates to click through on Brad Pitt or Madonna wearing a microphone like this. I found that really discouraging.
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We're kind of wrestling with it right now. How do we explain people are less interested in using Wikipedia as a gateway to research because research has given people a message that says we're not yet available. It's a one-third chance you might get through. Would you take a train across
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Germany when you had a one-third chance? Oh, you would. Okay. Sorry. I don't live here. I don't know this. It is worse than one-third. Well, for Wiki, that's good. I'll
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have to keep that in mind. Where I come from, we don't do that. There are airports where you get a delay, but you still get on the plane eventually. So this idea that we haven't yet fulfilled the promise that the public has come to us and said we want your work in Wikipedia. We
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want to use that authority, and they are using the authority. People are looking, but you're not letting us treat it as a gateway. You're not letting us have that universal access so all of the world can begin to take
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opportunities. And that is the challenge for us. And that's why I'm ready to risk Foucault's wrath in order to promote universal open access. In order to say to
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Wiley and Springer and Taylor and Francis and other publishers is what you're proposing for open access universal. Can everyone participate on the basis of your proposals? Now, it's easy for me to challenge
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others. What are we doing in the public knowledge project? This project from two decades ago, older than Google by nine days, apparently. We're working with publishers. Our principle contribution to create universal open access
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was to build a tool, a series of tools. We developed a publishing platform in an open source software package to make it freely available. We thought if we built the tools, everyone would drop what they're doing. Not
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naive, remember? No, not naive. Everyone would drop what they're doing and build open access journals. All over the planet, people would download the software and start new journals. They would walk from nature, science, cell,
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and they would start new journals. It hasn't quite turned out that way. We have about 10,000 journals using open journal systems. But that's not good enough. So we've been working with publishers, and I want to share two concepts with you. One very simple, very straightforward. One proposal for journals that are not with
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big publishers, but maybe even the big publishers. And then I want to share a more radical idea. I want to say to you, in approaching open access, you need a simple focus on what is open. You need a practical focus on how to
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make it open. And then you need a radical consolation prize to say to yourself, if this practical, simple idea doesn't work, what do we need to do? What is our plan
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B? What radical steps could we take? Let me start with the simple, the practical. We're working with a couple, a few, not a couple, a few publishers, smaller publishers, Berghahn Books, Brill, Annual Reviews, and a series of Canadian societies, Canadian Historical Association and
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societies like that, with a concept of subscribe to open. I want you to see how little this changes, how simple this can be. Hold that expression in your head. Subscribe to
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open. Think about the word subscribe. In English, it means paying a fee, yes, to the New York Times, to nature, but subscribe also means getting behind an idea. You can subscribe to ideas. And libraries have always
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subscribed to the idea of openness. Libraries have been bastions since the medieval monasteries, since the great library at Alexandria, of creating an open space for the
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sharing of ideas. At Stanford, and I'm sure at your library, anyone can request a book at any point. This is the first, second week of classes at Stanford. A student who was in high school in June comes to Stanford, and
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on the second week of classes goes to find a book on Leibniz and finds that it's signed out by professor, no, doesn't find it out, sorry, sees that it is signed out to John Wolensky, but doesn't know that. That student, only
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on campus for 11 days, can request that book, and I have to deliver it to the circulation desk, almost what seems to me immediately, unfairly. And when I demand to know the
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student's name, they will not tell me. They say to me, everyone in the library has equal access to everything in the library. No matter how self-important you may think
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your work on Leibniz is for the talk you're going to give and hand over, and so the libraries have always subscribed to open. Now, how do we make that practical? What Berghahn Books is doing right now is sending out
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renewal notices for its journals and anthropology, 13 of them, I can't show you 13, 13 journals and anthropology, and on the renewal notice, it's only sending it to libraries that renewed last, or sorry, that subscribed previously,
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and on the renewal notice it says, oh, by the way, when you subscribe this year, 2020, you're subscribing to open. Move your lips, people, show me that you're, lip sync with me here. You're subscribing to open,
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and the library says, well, how much more will this cost me? And then it says underneath, you're not reading the form properly. It doesn't cost anything more than renewing what you did last year with a little bit of inflation. Actually, annual reviews says
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5% less if you subscribe to open. Very clever. Then you have to take this cheap choice. There's no second choice, but subscribe to open is 5% less for the annual reviews. It's not with Berghahn Books. Publishers are experimenting with this. So the librarian says,
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well, where will I get the money for this? And then the form says, don't forget, you paid this last year. You already have the money. How will I explain this? Explain it by saying that the library is
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renewing this journal that is important to them, and the only difference is everyone in this community, in this city, in this state, in this country, in this world will have access for the
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same price. What advantage did the libraries have when the journal was locked up? Well, the university would make money from parking. People would have to drive to, no? Okay. Is parking free here? Oh, sorry. Okay. Many universities, not free.
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So subscribe to open changes almost nothing. Subscribe to open says to the publisher, if you needed X dollars last year to publish this journal,
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you will get X plus inflation this year. The only difference is the journal will be open. What do authors get? What they got last year? Nothing. No, no, sorry, sorry. Inappropriate. What
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authors get is readership. When you take a closed journal and make it open, you get readership. Now, does this qualify in terms of open access? Yes. Does it qualify in terms of universal open access? If Berghahn's 13 journals
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get a sufficient number of libraries close to what they got last year in renewals, and the signs so far have been good. In fact, what Vivian Berghahn, it's a family business, has told me that they're not only getting renewals, they're
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getting thank yous. What Annual Reviews has told me is that all of Brazil signed on through the CAPES consortia, and they thanked Annual
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Reviews. And when Brazil thanks you, you're in the territory of the global, of the universal. Now, if a library didn't subscribe to the journal last year, how much does it cost them this year? I taught school. I can wait. Go like this.
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Because they're not even going to get the renewal notice, are they? You only get a renewal notice if you subscribed. Now, what
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happens if the libraries say, no, I want a free ride? And all the libraries say, no, if it's going to be free, I don't want it. Then the journal doesn't go open. It's closed. And the
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library has to pay the same amount. And they don't qualify for the subscribe to open concept. And Leibniz frowns upon them. So subscribe to open is a pilot, is an experiment. We have
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about 70 journals in Canada that are participating. We have 13 at Berghahn, five at Annual Reviews. Brill is not coming on until 2021. Everyone is waiting to see. Wiley is asked about the outcomes. But the concept, the simplicity
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of the concept. Note about authors. Who can submit to these open access journals? Only the Germans? Only the Dutch? Go like this. Thank
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you. Anyone can submit. Why is that? Because I wouldn't be putting this idea to you unless it had that quality of universal open access. Do I have time for one more concept? Okay.
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But if we got subscribe to open, you can ask it. There will be time for questions. Subscribe to open has the following qualities to recap. Simplicity, even the subscription agents, the people who sell subscriptions like EBSCO and other groups can participate in subscribe to
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open. They can still get their three, five, 15 percent because they're now subscribe to open subscriptions. The only difference is the journal is open. Now, part of this, I should
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say before I go on to this last idea, part of this has been a new level of accountability. And that is we need to explain to libraries why we're charging what we're charging because we're asking them to participate as partners, not as vendors. Sorry, we're not vendors. They're not
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as consumers. Excuse me. We have to provide statistics to libraries to show that they're in fact using the journal. But guess what? We have the technology. We can track who's using the journal. We can use IP ranges to know which libraries are using the journal. In fact,
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we can even grow the subscription base because when you open a journal and annual reviews open the journal of public health for one year, they did it in a kind of awkward way
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that they're rethinking, but they did open it for one year, and they had libraries all over the world using the journal that had not previously subscribed. They were able to provide documentation of the readership for any given library. They were able to demonstrate the
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value of the journal to the library. And when you can demonstrate the value of a journal to a library community, it's very hard for that library to say, no, we will not support it, or we would rather it was closed and we
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have to subscribe. Let me share the radical idea. Let's imagine that that's not going to work. Let's imagine for a moment what would be the next step. And what I'm working on and what I'm considering, and this is partly
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because I'm a Canadian living in the United States, and as a Canadian living in the United States, now to be fair, I went down the year Obama was elected, and I was quite excited, is that you pay attention to how the country
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is organized in a way that not all Americans do. And copyright in the United States is a constitutional power. The Constitution grants Congress the power to promote the progress of
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science and the useful arts. Congress is allowed to grant authors and inventors an exclusive right for a limited term, to promote the progress of science. So I'm contending as a visitor, excuse me, an alien
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resident, a legal alien resident. I love the alien part. I'm saying that American copyright law is unconstitutional. American copyright law is not doing anything to promote
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the progress of science. It is doing a great deal to disincentivize, to discourage Wikipedia readers and others from promoting the progress of science. Now, in Germany and Austria and
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Switzerland, think about your intellectual property laws. Think about whether there is anything in those laws that says or recognizes that open access is what everyone now agrees promotes the progress of science. That copyright, if it's
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going to do its job to create an incentive for people to make contributions to society through science and the useful arts, needs to recognize that open access does that better than anything. It took us 20 years, two decades
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only, 20 years to get everyone on board with the concept that open access is the best thing for science. And now the law needs to catch up, because the law has caught up to Taylor
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Swift last year. You're not following Taylor? There are 20 million people following Taylor Swift and you're not? Taylor Swift got upset with streaming music. People were streaming Taylor
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Swift like crazy, and she wasn't getting her fair share, and she said the law is out of date. The law is not recognizing streaming. I'm not getting my fair share. Microphone, Taylor Swift. I'm feeling very Taylor right now. And
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so they changed the law. Last year, the United States, in a period of seven months, in a Congress that isn't the best of all possible Congresses right now, live in it, Congress
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passed the modern, excuse me, the Music Modernization Act of 2018. The Music Modernization Act of 2018 says times have changed. We need to recognize streaming. That act last year is like the 20th or 30th
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change, because at the turn of the century, in 1998, they recognized video games, video recording. They recognized time and again movies and, excuse me, baseball games and sports bars have been part of the change to
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American copyright law. Everything has been updated in copyright law except the constitutional imperative to promote the progress of Taylor Swift's music. It's right there. So I think we have a case. And I
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want to leave you with these two different directions. I want you to think about what, on the simplest basis, you can change at your institution so that your concept, your
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subscription to open can be realized, whether that is sponsoring a journal, helping students set up an open access journal, offering your faculty the possibility of setting up an alternative journal or with an alternative venue like a library as
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publisher. And then the second thing I want you to consider is the more radical concept, and that is what is the law doing to realize the benefits in the Leibnizian sense that we need to think
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about making ideas universally available because only then can everyone make, however small or great, a contribution. We don't all need to be Leibnizian in our scope, the polymath par excellence, but there are
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possibilities that have yet to be realized, that the best of all possible worlds can be better, and that universal open access has a great deal of promise and a few
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points of caution. Thank you very much.
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