I am sure that all of us have been watching the tragedy that is unfolding in Japan. This reminded me of the Tsunami that devastated many countries after an earthquake in the Indian Ocean on Dec 26, 2004. Though none of our friends and family were directly affected by it, many that we know were involved in helping those who were affected. Seeing how quickly many of these countries recovered, one can only hope that the same will happen in Japan. Technologists are doing what they can to help the countries, including the person finder and other resources that you can find here.

Whether it is the tragedy in Japan or the recent happenings in the Middle East, we have seen how some of the technologies have played an important role. They are typically freely available social media tools that have revolutionized the way we communicate with each other and have helped bridge the gap between diverse world communities. They all share some of the important aspects of the topic that I want to talk about. Whether it is twitter or youtube or facebook, they are free to use and offer a platform for easy dissemination of information. Of course, there are many problems with these models, including the fact that it is easy to be anonymous and very easy to put out unsubstantiated information, but, with few exceptions, self-correction mechanisms come in and solve the misinformation.

We began the PLTC & LTS co-sponsored Teaching and Technology lecture series with an excellent talk on Open Access Journals by Ellen Duranceau from MIT. She set the stage by showing how the journal costs have grown far steeper than the inflation and how some of the most successful publishers of the science journals have profit margins that are significant.

The other major issue with the journal publishers has been author’s rights to their work. This link http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/index.shtml provides an excellent set of links for those interested. Basically, though the author’s are not free to distribute their own published work, which severely limits the dissemination of the information. This has been changing and many publishers have begun providing methods by which authors can request the right to freely distribute published works (on the web, for eg.). However, as Ellen pointed out, many authors fear that the simple act of requesting this exception has an effect on how their work is reviewed.

Open access journals came about to address these two issues. There are a lot of myths about these which Ellen listed. For eg., contrary to popular belief, they are peer reviewed, and they are not always free. You can see the a list of open access journals here. It is true that open access journals are cheaper and the authors have the right to distribute their published work freely for broader dissemination of their scholarly work.

Adoption of open access journals have been slow for various reasons including the prestige of publishing in certain journals and the fear of several unknowns in the open access journals. However, with the adoption of open access policies by leading institutions such as MIT and Harvard, one hopes that the issue of author’s rights to published work will be treated differently by publishers.

I learned a lot from Ellen’s talk and so did the attendees based on the questions that were asked.

It is no secret that I am a proponent of open source software. There are some parallels between open access and open source. The major software vendors that charge big bucks like Microsoft and Oracle are like the publishers. The open source software is in some sense like the open access journals published work of many collaborators (the programmers). In many cases, we don’t really know who the programmers are because there are just so many of them. Though many of the major open software like Apache and Drupal have elaborate review mechanism in place (such as Apache project’s Committers), not all have them. Most of the open source software are governed by GNU General Public License, which in a simple fashion preserves the freedom to distribute and modify the source code.

It is also the case that the fact that something is open source and is governed by GPL does not necessarily mean it needs to be free. Whereas many open source software are free, some do have fundraising drives and some suggest a small donation. Whereas initial cost of the open source software may be free, ongoing support for them requires expertise and human capital just the same way a purchased software does.

Just the same way that the prestige of publishing in certain journals important to scholars, institutions feel that it is important to purchase software from established software vendors because of the comfort of knowing that there is someone to support it. It turns out that the fear of the unknown about open source – we don’t know who wrote it, who owns it and who will support it – sometimes applies equally to the highly priced proprietary software.

Whether it is SunGard (Banner) or Microsoft, our experiences show that the user community and the web has answers that are quicker and better than the answer you get from the vendors! Yet, we continue to pay a lot of money for the comfort of knowing that there is someone with a company name to help us.

The most recent example is our web CMS vendor. When we recently had issues with the College webservers, despite frantic and desperate calls, the answer seemed to be “you must have done some changes to your network”!

In any case, as we move forward, both the Open Access journals for scholarly publishing and open source software will be two key strategic pieces for us and we need to be on top of them.