Libraries Defend Open Access

aisaac writes "Earlier this year an article in Nature (PDF, subscription required) exposed publishers' plans to equate public access to federally funded research with government censorship and the destruction of peer review. In an open letter last month, Rockefeller University Press castigated the publishers' sock-puppet outfit, PRISM, for using distorting rhetoric in a coordinated PR attack on open access. Now the Association of Research Libraries has released an Issue Brief addressing this PR campaign in more detail. The Issue Brief exposes some of the distortions used to persuade key policy makers that recent gains made by open access scientific publishing pose a danger to peer reviewed scientific research, free markets, and possibly the future of western civilization. As an example of what the publishers backing PRISM hate, consider the wonderfully successful grants policy of the National Institutes of Health, which requires papers based on grant-funded research to be published in PubMed Central."

Overdrive. Our libraries come up short.

[dsaklad]

Our libraries come up short with regard to overdrive...

Letter to the Boston Public Library
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/bpl.html [fsf.org]

        * Send this page to somebody

To the Management of the Boston Public Library,

Don Saklad forwarded me your message which reports that OverDrive Audio Books use "copyright protection technology" made by Microsoft.

The technology in question is an example of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)--technology designed to restrict the public. Describing it as "copyright protection" puts a favorable spin on a mechanism intended to deny the public the exercise of those rights which copyright law has not yet denied them.

The use of that format for distributing books is not a fact of nature; it is a choice. When a choice leads to bad consequences, it ought to be changed, and that is the case here. I respectfully submit that the Boston Public Library has a responsibility to refuse to distribute anything in this format, even if it seems "convenient" to some in the short term.

By making the choice to use this format, the Boston Public Library gives additional power to a corporation already twice convicted of unfair competition.

This choice excludes more than just Macintosh users. The users of the GNU/Linux system, an operating system made up of free/libre software, are excluded as well. Since these audiobooks are locked up with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), it is illegal in the US to release free/libre software capable of reading these audiobooks. Apple may make some sort of arrangement to include capable software in MacOS (which is, itself, non-free software for which users cannot get source code). But we in the free software community will never be allowed to provide software to play them, unless laws are changed.

There is another, deeper issue at stake here. The tendency of digitalization is to convert public libraries into retail stores for vendors of digital works. The choice to distribute information in a secret format--information designed to evaporate and become unreadable--is the antithesis of the spirit of the public library. Libraries which participate in this have lost their hearts.

I therefore urge the Boston Public Library to terminate its association with OverDrive Audio Books, and adopt a policy of refusing to be agents for the propagation of Digital Restrictions Management.
Sincerely
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
MacArthur Fellow
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/bpl.html [fsf.org]

Re:say what?

[budgenator]

I'm not sure that even electronic publishing could ever be free, just keeping the disks spinning and bandwidth paid for the usefull life of an article has an monitary expense. I will admit that the monitary expense is minor compared to the costs of editorial and peer review, yet these cost are not exclusively a monitary expense, the initial editorial and peer review could easily be payment in kind for publication credit. I would explain what I'm thinking about as a chimera of Slashdot [slashcode.com] and arXiv.org [arxiv.org]. The editors would be editors and be resonsible for maintence of the actually sections and their continuity, there would be an advisory board and advisory boards for the subject sections like at arXiv.org and the whole thing could be karma based. So an article would be submitted, when the editorial board signns off, it goes to the advisory board who would either veto it for errors or vote on it it to establish a ranking for science and topical interest, if the ranking is high enough it gets published on the main page or the subject pages, failing that in stays in the firehose for a while then gets archived. Because topicality is considered for display position and it's web-based all of the mundane things like hardware/software/sysadmin expenses could easily be advertiser sponsored. The "related stories" feature would be very inteesting especially if it could be weighted to provide both agreeing and disagreeing related articles.

Re:say what?

[LooTze]

I agree with most of what you but need to add a couple of points. Before I proceed, let me start by saying that I am all for free access and whenever there is a choice I try to publish my stuff in open access journals. The big deal in open access (at least in Biology) has been the introduction of PLoS which attempts to compete with the top three journals (Nature, Science and Cell). And there is still no evidence that this can be economically feasible - primarily because such journals have genuine editors who are paid a lot of money to do the editing. So unlike most other journals, these editors actually can summarily decide to reject a paper for weird policy reasons like it is not flashy enough or popular science enough (even if the reviewers recommend publication). Whether you like the policy or not, the journals want to assure that they have editors who have a clue and are committed. So these are full-time jobs which are well-paid. In addition, most journals do have to pay copy editors, printers, etc. The only way PLoS has been able to circumvent this is by (a) huge donations )primarily from a couple of donors (b) Charge the authors money to publish their work. This used to be $1500 and now has been increased to $2000 or $2500. Of course, some argue that the high cost is primarily because the PLoS offices are located in San Francisco. (But that belongs to a different offshoring story. Unfortunately, recently HHMI was trying to decide what to do about this open access but did not end up doing the right thing. The reason this is important is that HHMI is the largest private funder of biomedical research in the US and probably the world - and HHMI investigators contribute a significant chunk of papers in top journals. HHMI investigators are evaluated every few years and it is a scary process because if you get kicked out, there is not way you can get back in. HHMI started off by saying that they will only count open access journals in this review process but then eventually after a lot of backdoor politics - primarily because the stupid scientists did not want to stop publishing in the top journals - it was decided that HHMI was going to pay publishers a truckload of money to allow open access (eventually) to papers from HHMI investigators. They had so much negotiating power that if they had stood their ground, they could have easily got open access for everyone in a year or so. But sadly, not going to happen.

Re:Overdrive. Our libraries come up short.

[shalla]

I have a response to this. Instead of haranguing the libraries, bug the hell out of the publishers. As it stands there are currently ZERO library vendors that offer eAudiobook downloads that are compatible with Mac or GNU/Linux because of the DRM on the files. This is certainly NOT the choice of the libraries.

I'm a librarian for a public library in Pittsburgh. We get requests all the time for downloadable audiobooks. We got requests before we had any options, and we get them now that we offer both OverDrive and Netlibrary downloads. At least OverDrive has the option to (in some cases, if the publisher has allowed it) burn the book to CD. After that, you can then import it to iTunes and transfer it over to your iPod. It's stupid clunky and you're better off just getting the CDs in the first place to listen that way, but it can be done and OverDrive's CEO has been known to tell people that.

Now, here's the question from the library's point of view. Is it better to not offer ANY eAudiobooks at all, despite the many requests for them, than to offer ones that can only be used by those with the dominant operating system? (We have to make the same decision with video games, too. What formats do we buy in?) With all due respect to the parent poster and to Mr. Stallman, my job is not to take a stand on DRM. It's to provide materials to the public in the formats they want, and that means that in some cases, like it or not, we're going to decide to offer eAudiobooks that cannot be used by all computer users. Just as DVDs cannot be watched by VCR owners, and CDs cannot be listened to by those with merely a tape deck, and Mac software cannot be run on a Windows machine. We're going to have to judiciously apportion an appropriate part of the budget according to demand for the items.

Now, would libraries love to change this? Yes. I personally have a list of free, non-DRM sites that allow you to download eAudiobooks for free that I hand out along with instructions on how the library-accessible eAudiobooks work. The problem is that those sites (such as Librivox [librivox.org] or AudiobooksForFree [audiobooksforfree.com]) don't offer Janet Evanovich or John Patterson or the other bestsellers. They're generally things in the public domain (obviously), and our patrons usually want newer items.

Every chance I get, I complain to our Recorded Books representative (who works with Netlibrary) about the DRM limitations and make the case that should another company come along that offers downloads without DRM, we're gone to them no matter the cost. The libraries that have told OverDrive to buzz off in the past have just gotten shrugs. It doesn't change anything. (This includes the library located right next to Apple Headquarters, by the way. They finally gave in to demand.)

This is something that gets discussed all the time amongst librarians and on library blogs. My feeling is that complaining to the libraries is useless. We agree with you in spirit, but in practice, we're going to offer the product because our patrons want it. What we WILL support you in is complaining to the companies themselves, and in pushing the publishers to reach for a broader market. Instead of writing letters to libraries, spend your time convincing the publishers that they'll have wider listenership (without losing sales) if they hit the non-DRM market and convincing OverDrive and Netlibrary to begin offering other options than the protected WMA files.

From OverDrive's Web site, here's their contact information:

OverDrive, Inc.
Valley Tech Center - Suite N
8555 Sweet Valley Drive
Cleveland, OH 44125 USA
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

And from NetLibrary's Web site:

NetLibrary Division Office
4888 Pearl East Circle, Ste. 103
Boulder, CO 80301
USA
[e-mail]

Or, since NetLibrary is a division of OCLC:

Headquarters
OCLC Online Computer Library Center

Re:say what?

[budgenator]

the "karma system" would have to be multi-dimensional, you'd get more publication credit if your articles survived peer-review, you might get more peerage credit if you comments to an article were moded up by others etc. if your publication score is high, you'd need less peer review, if your peerage is high you'd be able to review more articles or your review would get a heavier weighting. Considering it's the first time my idea has seen the light of day I think it's pretty good, but of course it's still rough and needs some polishing. At worst it could be an idea that seems good at first glance but has unanticipated problems. The system might even encourage some interesting cross field collaborations, maybe a scienceforge instead of a sourceforge.