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It has been about a year and a half since I released the first version. As I have said before, the goal was to provide instructors with an alternative to commercial textbooks. As such, I opted for a license that prohibited commercial use. Since then, 1000s of people have downloaded the book and it has been used at several universities.*
I have since come to realize that the noncommercial restriction might discourage legitimate uses of the book; other sites offer extended discussions of this point. The most recent version uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license. Users are still required to acknowledge me as author of material in the book, and any derivative works must be offered under an open license. However, they may use the work or derivatives for commercial purposes. As a result of the fine print, derivative works may more readily include materials published under other open licenses.
There is little danger that a publisher will sell an overpriced deluxe edition of forall x, because the Sharealike provision would preclude them from exercising restrictive rights over it. The content would still be free.
And now it's more free than ever.
* The numbers are hard to pin down. The PDF on the main site is downloaded over 30 times a day, but lord only knows how many of those are by actual readers. I get occasional e-mails from people who have read and enjoyed parts of the book, I have corresponded with several people who have used it as a course text, and web traffic suggests that the text has been recommended at some other schools. People are under no obligation to tell me when they assign or use the book, however, and typically they do not.
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My d-cog paper just appeared in Social Studies of Science. The journal does not provide paper offprints. Instead, they sent me a link which allowed me to download a disk image. On the disk image was an application that allowed me to open a secured PDF. Once I indicated that I was using the computer on which I intended to use the PDF, I was allowed to see the paper.
It will allow me to print the paper from this computer and forward the paper as a link to as many as 25 other people.* The whole rigamarole is meant to preclude my being able to forward the file directly or upload it to the web.
I was rather cross about this copy protection, and I wondered if the journal itself could be so difficult to access. By way of the UAlbany library website, I loaded the most recent issue and downloaded my paper. It is an ordinary PDF that has none of the crippling DRM that my author copy has got.
Subscribers, it seems, are more trusted than authors.**
* This latter part doesn't actually seem to work. I had someone e-mail me and ask for an offprint of my paper, but I can't see how to exercise the promised functionality.
** Considering my last post, I should add that the SSS author agreement is not especially egregious. I signed rights over to them, but the agreement explicitly permits me to reuse the paper in whole or in part in any work that I author, edit, or compile, to distribute photocopies to colleagues or students, and to put a final author draft on the web or in a repository. I am officially supposed to wait a year before putting it in a repository, but that is pretty standard.
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Last week, I attended a session on 'Copyright for Scholarly Authors.' Listening to the spiel, it occurred to me that there was an unresolved tension in the rhetoric.
Academic journals typically require an author to sign over rights to an article before they'll publish it. In addition to squeezing university libraries for subscription fees, the press can profit from reprint and archival rights. Many publishers have become more flexible on this point, but others (primarily corporate presses) are milking the system for everything they can get.
The situation is becoming untenable. University libraries are cutting back on subscriptions because they simply cannot afford them all. Once a journal becomes expensive enough, it can make sense to ask for specific articles by inter-library loan rather than subscribe to the journal; but that strategy only works if there is still a lending library somewhere that subscribes to the journal. Something has to give.
OK, but looming disaster is neither a principled reason nor does it point to the solution. There are two principled rationales for changing the system. Both are appealed to by various revolutionary parties, but they are fundamentally incompatible.
First: An academic author owns the copyright on an an article after he writes it, as recognized by law. Since academic journals rely on the free labor of scholars as authors and referees, there is no reason for authors to sign over those rights to the journal. The publisher does add some value, but the scholar gets more from the kudos associated with having a peer-reviewed article accepted than from the other services of the publisher. (Having someone copy edit my prose is good, but not every journal bothers. Appearing in print is nice, but most articles are not widely read. Professionally, the line on my CV is the biggest incentive.)
Second: Academic work is supported by public and educational funds. This is especially true in the sciences, where work is often funded by government or philanthropic grants. Even my work is supported by the state, insofar as it is part of my job to do some research or other. As such, academics are ethically obligated to disseminate the results of their work as widely as possible.
Both these rationales motivate rejecting the traditional model of academic publishing. If published journals are not Open Access, then authors ought to be able to put preprints in Open Access repositories.
I think it is obvious that authors ought to be able to make articles available in some Open Access way. But must they? Here the two rationales disagree. The first insists on authors' rights over their own work, and so must allow that authors may legitimately refuse to allow their work to be deposited in Open Access repositories. The second would find this anathema.
Regardless of how we settle that score, reprint rights are even trickier. If we say that the results of research must be disseminated as widely as possible, then what do we say when a commercial publisher wants to include an article in a collection or textbook? Should the article be free? Should the publisher be required to make a small payment to support Open Access repositories? Should the author or journal be able to set the price or conditions?
Unresolved tension aside, the session gave me something else to think about: I have tried to submit papers to journals with relatively permissive publication agreements. Nevertheless, I have ended up with some papers in more restrictive journals. In those cases, I have gritted my teeth and signed the journals' publication agreements. I now realize that I could have amended or rewritten the agreement. Journals may want unlimited, exclusive rights, but they can publish with something short of that. Now I know that journals may be willing to dicker on the details, so I'll try it next time.
UPDATE: Peter Suber links to a paper which I think deals with the issue that vexes me. I cannot say for certain, however, because the final sentences of the abstract are linguannihilated doublespeak and the article itself is available to paid subscribers only.
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I wrote this back in February, but saved it with the intention of honing it further. The examples, which had been on the whiteboard in my office, have now been replaced by some logical formula. So it must be time to post it.
In Patterns of Discovery, Norwood Russell Hanson provides a figure like this one:
He writes: "Normal retinas and cameras are impressed similarly by figure 1. Our visual sense-data will be the same too. [Yet...] Do we all see the same thing? Some will see a perspex cube viewed from below. Others will see it from above. Still others will see it as a kind of polygonally-cut gem. Some people see only criss-crossed lines in a plane. It may be seen as a block of ice, an aquarium, a wire frame for a kite-- or any number of other things."
Take a moment to look at the figure and see it in each of the ways Hanson suggests. Don't merely acknowledge that such a figure could be seen in such a way, but try to actually see it in each of the ways he lists. I want to make a point about the phenomenology, and it is no good for me to tell you what your phenomenology is like. (If your phenomenology fails to support the distinction I draw below, please mention this in the comments.)
When I switch between seeing it as a cube from above, a cube from below, a gem with only the center square jutting forward, or mere lines on a page, there is a shift. It is a kind of 'pop' as the figure changes aspect.* When I suppose that it is a cube seen from above and change what I imagine its composition to be, I experience no such change. I imagine it to be a block of ice, a glass box, or a wire frame with no change in my perception of it.
The contrast can be drawn out clearly by considering another case:
You will probably see this as just a square. Yet, it may be seen as a napkin, a handkerchief, a ceramic tile-- or any number of other things. Take a moment and run through these possibilities.
Although figure 2 might be seen in these different ways, the switch between them does not involve the pop that occurs when the faces of figure 1 shift perspective. Moreover, I cannot imagine any two ways of seeing figure 2 such that the shift between them causes such a pop.
Here is a trickier case, adapted from another of Hanson's examples:**
Take a look at this for a moment before reading on.
If you can make no sense of it, then it is just a jumble of lines. It is, however, a drawing of a tree trunk with a koala bear climbing on the other side. Perhaps there is a pop when one first sees the figure in this way. With just this interpretation in mind, however, I feel no pop when shifting back to seeing it as mere lines or back again to seeing it as a koala on a tree.
In order to get any pop out of figure 3, I need to think of it as something else. For example, I can see it as the cross section of a vertical tunnel which is lined with sharp gears. When I switch between this and the koala on the tree, I feel the pop.
Hanson overlooks this difference between the changes that pop and those that do not. Yet it seems like an important feature of observation that some differences are visceral and others more intellectual. Arguments from the theory-ladenness of perception often supposed that theory makes a popping, visceral difference in how the things show up to us. I do not know the current state of psychology, but I wonder whether the difference between the visceral and intellectual shifts indicates some different underlying mechanism or is merely epiphenomenal.
* It might be more precise to call this pop a 'gestalt switch.' A similar shift occurs when considering an inkblot. Someone describes a particular splodge as a dog, pointing to the head, the legs, and whatall else. If I merely entertain the possibility that it might be a dog, then it still just looks like a splodge of ink to me. If I see it as a dog, then it gets collected together in my perception of it.
** Thanks for John Styles for suggesting the revised version of the example.
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Spawning references is an important scholarly strategy:* Begin with a recent article or book on your topic of interest. Look at the list of works cited. Go look at those articles and books. Repeat until you know enough about the topic, you have a sufficient number of references, or you are too exhausted to think about it anymore.
The method only works if citations focus the subsequent search. It is stymied if authors do not cite one another, and also if authors cover their own vagueness and imprecision in an indiscriminate blizzard of citations. The latter is more common than the former in philosophy of science. In defense of a specific claim, an author cites a large book without so much as a range of pages. When I spawn the reference and cannot find the claim, perhaps it was somewhere else in the book. (Large and wide-ranging books like Philip Kitcher's Advancement of Science are typically cited in this imprecise way.)
It seems to me that responsible citation requires that (a) an author distinguish between those sources that are especially important, influential, and central and those that are peripheral; an author should cite the relevant literature, but not as an undifferentiated flurry. Further, that (b) an author should be as precise as possible when marshaling support for a specific claim or pointing to where an issue is further developed.
Minding these imperatives is a pain in the butt, but minding onerous demands is part of the job.**
* I was never explicitly taught it, though, so the monicker is my own concoction.
** As you might guess, this post was prompted by frustration with a specific text. Decorum restrains me from naming it.
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