My colleague Martin Weller launched his new book : ‘The Digital scholar’ today. You can buy the book through Amazon, or you can read it online – for free- in open access form on the Bloomsbury Publishers website. I haven’t finished it myself but so far as I’ve got it’s full of good ideas and a great read.
I’m a believer in the ‘digital scholar’- – someone who engages with digital technologies as an integral part of all their scholarly activities. I believe that blogs -like this one of mine – are part of scholarly practice. Martin is not just a promoter of digital scholarship – for him open access scholarship – free and open content -is integral to this new scholarship. This is the bit that still has me puzzled. Who pays the digital scholar for the time and expertise they put into producing their scholarly ‘goods’? Who pays to host that scholarly content, and to make it freely accessible. Traditional hard copy commercial publishers do look like an outdated form of production and distribution of ‘stuff’, and many see that themselves and are experimenting both with new media as well as with new services for both readers and writers. But moving away from hard copy to online doesn’t move away from high-cost technological production to no-cost non-technological production.
It has been estimated that Google alone has 900,000 servers, and Amazon at least 400,000. The same article that quotes these figures says that Amazon spent $86 million on servers in 2008 alone. These are only two giants among many. I might give my writing for free-or as in most cases my University has paid for the time I used to write in- but why should someone pay for the server space to host my writing? We can guess the answer: while Google delivers content to us, it delivers us and our information to the commercial world. We are becoming familiar with the saying: ‘if you are not paying for the product, you are the product’. Is there something worse perhaps than being the vehicle for a publisher to make profit from – in the form of books sales?
I don’t know the answer to that – and Martin doesn’t claim to have the answer himself- although he offers some ways to bridge the commercial and the free. It is time we digital scholars got our heads around the economics of the digital and stopped thinking our words of wisdom are being funded by the internet equivalent of the tooth fairy.
[image from www.twiddleskeep.com]
You are asking the wrong question. Compared to the cost of your salary, sever costs are trivial. So the question should probably be, who will pay you to contemplate whatever ineffable thingamy it is that you research? Then given that you are generating interesting knowledge (we hope) the question of how widely that should be circulated strikes me as a bit of a no-brainer. Of course it should be circulated in as open a way as possible, to maximise the opportunity for others to build on it.
(As an interesting aside, what if we consider something really expensive like CERN? I wonder what the break-down between salaries and hardware is in their budget? Can anyone think of a more extreme example?)
It’s not so much how we pay for digital scholarship, how we find a business model for open access and OERs – it’s more like the old AUT* question:
How do we fund ignorance?
So we have to find ways of funding research, because not to do so would be a million times more expensive…
*”If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”
I’m disappointed that commenters so far have dismissed this important post as asking the wrong question. There are, indeed, alternative models and ways of being but to transitition to these takes more than a ‘flip’ in people’s ways of thinking.
As Gill points out, the current model requires money to be spent to host content. I’d challenge my fellow commenters to look at Boone Gorges’ Project Reclaim – something I’m trying to deal with over the medium to long-term. As the ease and cost of getting your stuff online decreases to effectively zero it actually seems to be getting more difficult to host your own stuff in a way that will enable it to be found.
This stuff isn’t easy, and it certainly doesn’t involve the binary oppositions assumed by previous commenters on this post. :-/
Actually, I disagree, Doug; simple economics can show us how this cost can be recouped.
At present, my institution spends £800,000/year on journal subscriptions. This has increased year-on-year at rates that outstrip inflation. For £800k we could easily afford a dedicated server (either in-house or with, say, Kimsufi: ~£500/year). We could then afford over 16 full-time staff to manage this, if we so required (we wouldn’t). Furthermore, the figures quoted here are for major multinational corporations. Academic archives do not need the same throughout as Google because they are used, whether we like to think so or not, by a relatively select few.
Yes, we need transitional models, but a funding model for OA makes absolute sense compared to the traditional costs. If these costs were eradicated, there would be no problem paying for OA.
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Hi
I think this exchange in the comments in characteristic of other discussions I’ve been in. By saying “lets model the costs of change” it doesn’t mean Gill, or Doug, or I are implying that the economics will be found wanting. It just means we’re saying that alongside the arguments about better practice, the ethics/fairness, we also need to thrash out the economic effects of change. JISC funded the Houghton report back in 2009 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelssummary.aspx and we’re continuing to look at the economic effects of systemwide change.
I find it very interesting that even mentioning costs is seen as reactionary and opposed to change. I suspect often the debaters are on the same “side” and talking at cross purposes … those of us that care enough to debate it usually DO want change and are thinking through how to get from A to B, and what that means in all sorts of ways, including economic models.
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