From reality to rhetoric

It's been some years since I last spoke with JSTOR's Bruce Heterick. Today from him I learned of a kind of change in JSTOR's degree of openness, or closure:

JSTOR–Free Access to Early Journal Content and Serving “Unaffiliated” Users

Nearly 500,000 articles in more than 200 journals are now freely available on JSTOR

The press release from JSTOR's Laura Brown begins:

I am writing to share exciting news: today, we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR.

The release goes on to spell out details of this alteration and goes out of its way to say that the indictment of Aaron Swartz could have affected the timing and substance of this step, but ultimately did not.

Mr. Heterick concluded his brief email with:

I’m not a big fan of your rhetoric, but in your work as an independent scholar, I thought you’d find this beneficial.

Ok.

Bruce,

I'm not a fan of JSTOR's reality, but such as it is, this is a small step toward acknowledging the factual truth of my argument. Human knowledge, gleaned by humans in taxpayer-funded institutions of higher learning, could even now be freely available in toto to all who seek it. Unfortunately, the desires of craven academic publishing houses to continue to subsist in antiquated form, coupled with the highly lucrative artificial scarcification of academic data thanks to the walled garden stratagem of JSTOR and its imitators, continue to transform this potential reality into a chimaera.

This transformation is the real rhetoric, in all its material voracity. Except that this can now be qualified as, "material voracity after 1922."

Thanks for the update.

Tom

Britain decides to emulate USian University Epic Fail

Eagleton on a new, private university in London:

If a system of US-type private liberal arts colleges like this one gains ground in Britain, the result will be to relegate an already impoverished state university system to second-class status. So far, British society has held the view that the education of doctors, teachers, social workers and so on is too momentous a matter to be left to the vagaries of the profit motive. This is why though there are already one or two private universities in the country, nobody has a clue where they are. This new college, however, could be the thin end of an ugly wedge. Why should Grayling, Dawkins and their chums care about that, though, when they will be drawing down mega-salaries for what is reported to be an extremely modest amount of lecturing?

In the US, getting yourself a decent education depends in part on the whims of the well-heeled. It is they who decide whether to obtain their tax breaks by donating a new theatre or lab to your college, or whether to find some more devious way of avoiding the inland revenue. This new venture in Bloomsbury is said to be backed by multimillion pound funding from private investors. While the Graylings and Colleys spout on in the classrooms about humane values, they are in the pay of those who would not recognise such things if they were to move into their living rooms.

Cost-per-action in San Marino

SCEPSI - European School of Social Imagination
Conference 20-22 May 2011, Republic of San Marino

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM:
PRACTICAL INFORMATION:

Reinventing the autonomy of knowledge is the task of our time. It’s not only a political task. The epistemic foundation of research and learning as autonomous activities is at stake, when dogmas of profit, growth, competition take the lead in the old institutions of production and transmission of knowledge. This is why we are calling students and researchers, artists and scientists and social activists to gather in the first conference of SCEPSI that will take place in San Marino, on 20-22 May 2011.

Protests against the financial aggression and the destruction of the
public school in the European continent are spreading, but we have to
create new institutions, aimed to self organization of cognitive workers
and to the reactivation of social sensibility and imagination. The
conference will be the first act of the activity of the European School of
Social Imagination, that in the next year will organize seminars in San
Marino, and in European cities like Helsinki, London, and Oslo.

The activity of the School starts from four question[s]: 1. How can we think
the consequences to every day life in the face of a possible economic
failure of the European Union? 2. How can art and poetry arouse new
energies and revitalize the social field weakened by precarization and the
alienation of (digital) labour? 3.How can emergent scientific imagination
reconstitute the social body? 4. How can we open up spaces for the
autonomy of knowledge within the process of the marketisation and
capitalisation of the education system?

These questions will be foundational for the emergent curriculum of the first year of seminars and engagements of the European School of Social Imagination. The following is the program of the conference, that may change slightly during the next weeks.

One apparently must go to San Marino to find people talking about something worthwhile. Of course we USians gave up the autonomy of knowledge early on - was it at the time we decided that all speech should be impregnated by advertising? Or was it endemic to our method of escaping history -- making all speech, all public records, merely somebody else's marketing, to which we triumphantly suggest our counter-marketing?

If Europe is concerned for the destruction of the public school, it is now in need of referring to our history.

danah boyd to Grub St. of Academe: "Wake up or get out"

open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals

must-read - thanks to the Head Lemur, Alan Herrell, for the pointer.

We see the shinola, where's the shit?

Kia on the sad state of book reviewing; on what it means to educate the book audience; on Cyril Connolly and Marvin Mudrick; on the stupefaction of stupid fiction; on the reasons she reads; on the relation of a news timeframe to a literary timeframe; on Mudrick's method of reviewing and his kind of good judgment; on remembering that "nobody gives a shit about you"; on academic "collegiality":

The great virtue is collegiality, the maintenance of this specious chumminess among people who secretly and violently loathe each other. What brings them together is saying shit about the stupidity of students and grad students and (I suppose) of those untenured phantoms who roam from campus to campus, living on Top Ramen, doing the actual teaching.

on preferring British book reviews to the USian species; on the wellsprings of USian essay tedium:

in order to say anything critical about anything and keep your mass audience you have to play the self-deprecating curmudgeon. “Oh, don’t you mind Uncle Frank. The Katzenjammer Kids set fire to his underpants again.”

on a certain parallel between contemporary essayistic (/blogistic) finery and the somnambulent procession of 19th century Augustanism; on getting "a pretty strong sense of the difference between shit and shinola," among other things.

I've not been reading many blogs lately. And whatever happens on Twitter can stay on Twitter. Who has time for Facebook? But this is like suddenly being hauled out of the ClichéoSphere with a Swiftean smack of sanity. I warmly recommend the whole thing.

Telling chickenshit artificial scarcification monopoles what to do with it

Cape Town Open Education Declaration:

Unlocking the promise of open educational resources

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. Educators, learners and others who share this belief are gathering together as part of a worldwide effort to make education both more accessible and more effective.

The expanding global collection of open educational resources has created fertile ground for this effort. These resources include openly licensed course materials, lesson plans, textbooks, games, software and other materials that support teaching and learning. They contribute to making education more accessible, especially where money for learning materials is scarce. They also nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need.

However, open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement.

There are many barriers to realizing this vision. Most educators remain unaware of the growing pool of open educational resources. Many governments and educational institutions are either unaware or unconvinced of the benefits of open education. Differences among licensing schemes for open resources create confusion and incompatibility. And, of course, the majority of the world does not yet have access to the computers and networks that are integral to most current open education efforts.

These barriers can be overcome, but only by working together. We invite learners, educators, trainers, authors, schools, colleges, universities, publishers, unions, professional societies, policymakers, governments, foundations and others who share our vision to commit to the pursuit and promotion of open education and, in particular, to these three strategies to increase the reach and impact of open educational resources:

1. Educators and learners: First, we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.

2. Open educational resources: Second, we call on educators, authors, publishers and institutions to release their resources openly. These open educational resources should be freely shared through open
licences which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.

3. Open education policy: Third, governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections.

These strategies represent more than just the right thing to do. They constitute a wise investment in teaching and learning for the 21st century. They will make it possible to redirect funds from expensive textbooks towards better learning. They will help teachers excel in their work and provide new opportunities for visibility and global impact. They will accelerate innovation in teaching. They will give more control over learning to the learners themselves. These are strategies that make sense for everyone.

Thousands of educators, learners, authors, administrators and policymakers are already involved in open education initiatives. We now have the opportunity to grow this movement to include millions of educators and institutions from all corners of the earth, richer and poorer. We have the chance to reach out to policymakers, working together to seize the opportunities ahead. We have the opportunity to engage entrepreneurs and publishers who are developing innovative open business models. We have a chance to nurture a new generation of learners who engage with open educational materials, are empowered by their learning and share their new knowledge and insights with others. Most importantly, we have an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world through freely available, high-quality, locally relevant educational and learning opportunities.

We, the undersigned, invite all individuals and institutions to join us in signing the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, and, in doing so, to commit to pursuing the three strategies listed above. We also encourage those who sign to pursue additional strategies in open educational technology, open sharing of teaching practices and other approaches that promote the broader cause of open education. With each person or institution who makes this commitment -- and with each effort to further articulate our vision -- we move closer to a world of open, flexible and effective education for all.

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There are currently 1160 signatories to the Declaration, including:

Media Alternatives (FMA) (Philippines)
Tony Bailetti, Carleton University (Canada)
James Bosco, Western Michigan University (United States)
Katarzyna Bratkowska, (Poland)
Martin Dougiamas, Moodle (Austria)
Mark Hamlin, University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNC-Asheville) (United States)
Alicja Jania, Grammar school (Poland)
Don Johnson, Rice University (United States)
Maximillian Kaizen, Huddlemind Labs (South Africa)
Mills Kelly, George Mason University (United States)
Kathy Kikis-Papadakis, Foundation for research and Technology-Hellas (Greece)
Anna Klimowicz, National Agency of the Lifelong Learning Programme (Poland)
Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons (United States)
Kevin McCauley, (South Africa)
ESTELLE MYNHARDT, Better Best Educational Projects (South Africa)
Zuzanna Orzel, (Poland)
Henrietta Otokunefor, University of Port Harcourt Library, University of Port Harcourt, East-West Road, Choba (Nigeria)
Natasha Primo, Association for Progressive Communication (South Africa)
Lee-Anne Prinsloo, African Career Development Centre (South Africa)
Ashoka Samuelson, Indian Institute of Science (India)
Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical (United Kingdom)
Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia Foundation/Wikia (United States)
Nahmsath Yabouri, University of Lome (Togo)
xiuli zhuang, Beijing Normal University (China)

The full list of individual signatories is here. You can also view lists of organizational signatores and the participants in the Cape Town meeting, who were the first signatories to the Declaration.

JSTORiana

The Technology Editor, ZDNet UK, finds something lacking in JSTOR's closed world formula:

ask any independent researcher. There are a lot of them out there, writing books, building businesses, experimenting with ideas, inventing the future, educating themselves, trying hard to participate in the great human endeavour of standing on the shoulders of giants. They will all have had the experience of finding exactly what they want, only to be told "NO".

It is extraordinarily frustrating, and the exact opposite of JSTOR's laudable aims. Furthermore, it is unthinkable that the situation will continue like this indefinitely. I cannot envision a future where this huge library of public knowledge is forever denied to those who need it. Every sign, every pointer, every tiny eddy in the tide, says otherwise.

The wall is pernicious. Break it down.

That guy up there is not the Technology editor, ZDNet, UK. He's Surinder Kumar Mandal of Bihar, India, featured in Jan Banning's extraordinary series of photos of Bureaucrats of the World. I have had that page of images open ever since finding it (I wish I could remember how) more than a week ago.

Why build a digitized scholarly archive, searchable via the public internet, if access to it is controlled like some kind of top-secret database?

That's Christopher Barden, a longtime reader of The Stingy Scholar, which seems to be some sort of educator's blog with, disturbingly, a very large standing image of Michelle Malkin in the right hand column, where indeed she belongs - not that she's standing, actually, one can't be sure, we only see a blow-up of the front of her head, i.e., her face, but the image is standing, sort of like a foetid pool of cess, right there on the right every time you flick or click to a story.

No, no, that's not Christopher Barden, up there behind the desk. That's Sergey Mikhailovich Osipchuk, policeman of Oktjabrskij, Tomsk province, Siberia. I wouldn't want anyone to confuse scholar/editor critics of JSTOR with deskwarming bureaucrats who seem to man their posts with a certain gatekeeperly determination.

There must be some connection with the whole JSTOR thing, I just can't put my finger on it. . .



P.S.: "Chris," a commenter at The Stingy Scholar, asks who to sue at JSTOR and PROJECTilevomit MUSE, calling them jointly "the great firewall of America."

JSTOR Watch

The longer I homeschool and the more I interact with online technology, the more firm my conviction grows that formal teaching is part of the problem, not part of the answer. AKMA

For years, we've watched academia acclimate to the Internet, version 1.0, with JStor articles, podcasts and course Web sites. Mostly, these are conveniences that improve education for those already inside the academic cloister. But Web 2.0 is all about universality, about content that reaches groups well beyond its intended audience, about the unpredictable ways that items online link people together. Maha Atal 08

Barnacle of Higher Education

Librarians Protest Science's Departure From JSTOR, Fearing a Trend

By PETER MONAGHAN

When the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced in late July that it would pull its flagship journal, Science, from JSTOR, the popular, nonprofit digital archive of scholarly publications, the association cast its decision as a natural evolution.

According to the announcement, the AAAS, as the association is known, was merely joining "an increasing number" of large scientific-society journals that were "digitizing and controlling their own content."

Why, then, are so many librarians kicking up a ruckus about it?

Why infuckingdeed.com:

To continue reading this premium article, you must have a Chronicle account AND a subscription or an online pass.

Subscriptions start at $40; Web passes for under $10.

WHEN WE CONSIDER the responsibility of intellectuals, our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology. Chomsky via Golby.

Amid the stately frontispiece of poor

An email exchange, some context setting here. I added a few links and emended a few phrases mostly for clarity.

How do we reconcile elite traditions with democracy? - Phil asked, sending along this link and a quick reference to A.B. Giamatti and his sense of what is noble.

To Phil:

Bart Giamatti would have a lot to teach us about the possible relations of elite traditions and democracy. He might start by parsing the terms -- are all traditions elite? There are cultures and folkways that maintain a kind of eternal now of wisdom and practice among the poorest on the earth. Are all elites traditional? Are all elites rooted in the same source of eliteness? etc.

I don't know, the two things, "democracy" and "elite tradition," seem like two optimizations, each of which requires some sacrifice of the other in order to fulfill its own realized whatness. It's why, even as the poor and random waifs of democracy might have their noses to the windowpanes of private entitlement, the poor saps attending "ivory snow" decorumed events occurring in cultural and human vacuums more than likely pine for the "jazz clubs" or other rawness, the demotic ferment of open inspiration.

I spent a little time on that IPI site you linked to; its buttoned up reek of pillow mint struck me as essentially a different flavor of this, this, and this sort of thing -- the same worldwide migration of sharks circling around the hint of blood, just a different rhetorical costume.

I keep thinking there is vast opportunity for hilarity in these programmed elite masques. A Fred Wiseman docu-satire, a staging of yes-men intervention, a peeling away of the napkin from the rawer appetite beneath.

I guess I'm wondering if an aim of reconciling these things makes sense. I mean, the goal is - really it is - noble. But a synthesis that somehow avoids destroying what is so valuable in each is difficult to imagine.

The country house is a genre, a vast system of ideas, values, about man and his world, society, justice, art, law, order. The book of the people begins in Genesis with a bunch of miserable goat herders getting chosen. One of them, running from his brother's wrath, sleeps on a stone, dreams a dream, and realizes he's in the house of God. This is an entirely different system, only the image of the house is in common between them. If one is, like Peter Karoff, informed by both worlds, a certain restlessness is understandable, even necessary, if one happens to be alive at all.

I certainly can't envision a synthesis. But it seems entirely worthwhile to ask with you, what can each of these worlds learn from the other? From what you've written, Tracy Gary sounds like one who can speak to that. Confronted with democratic openness, certain Institutes might provoke a shattering laughter. Still, the man in the street approaches the works of aristocratic aspiration with a certain degree of respect or risks idiocy.

Noble Cubeta, you are writing - and we are learning from you about all this - from your perch where these worlds sit in unstable adjacency. Aristocrats walk among the million in disguise in order to feel alive, free. But when they mix among their own, walking around with their ivory snow labels, protected by buffers of time and distance and access and police, they are free to be "themselves."

low Things clownishly ascend. -

How to make any headway in your question, this quest. We might not yet know whether any reconciliation is in the cards. Consider the motives and appetites of the players. Currently among the quite extraordinarily wealthy (at least in the US) there is the appetite for private experience and pedigreed paideia. Affluent communities are being built with faculties for ongoing education. Ivy League schools offer tours to fabulous locales for those who can afford them.

I guess I'm saying, there is need, in both realms. Different needs, where one might be in a position to help the other. The possibility of exchange has to start, I'll wager, in the willingness of those in each to be open to the idea that they and their worlds do not know everything, or have everything. Can they learn from those they constitutively exclude?

The Ben Jonson vision of measure invokes music, harmony, over spectacle, in part because it derives from a calm unblinking awareness of mortality. The Big Legacy can't cheat death. Perhaps this is where the marshaled forces of USian wealth and poverty can find common ground, this absence of ground who respects no rank, no distinction, no privilege.

I know none of this helps. What can we do -- that's not a rhetorical question. You are asking important non rhetorical questions. What can I do that might be of use?

Jouissance de JSTOR

I think what I find most hilarious in the JSTOR project is the mutually assured destruction at the base of both its mission and its business model.

• If the mission is to preserve and perpetuate the archives of human understanding in the form of scholarly journals,
• And the business model is to preserve and perpetuate monies due upon accessing aforesaid scholarly journals,

Then to present us with pages like this is to manage at one and the same time to ensure that

1. no transmission of human knowledge occurs, and that
2. the possibility of even buying said knowledge is put out of reach of all but those who belong to a payor institutional subscriber.

Bottom line: Mr. Vettori's review of Mr. Hollander's $55 book about a single letter allegedly by Dante Alighieri remains a closed book. Ignorance, except for a happy very few, is assured; no money changes hands. Just one more blissful adventure in the psychosis of capital blindness.

Happy Labor Day, JSTOR.

fuck you all and to all a good night

“University Publishing in a Digital Age” – a report sponsored by Ithaka and JSTOR.. . . was released late last week. On Thursday, IHE ran a detailed and informative article about the Ithaka Report, as I suppose it is bound to be known in due time. The groups that prepared the document propose the creation of “a powerful technology, service, and marketing platform that would serve as a catalyst for collaboration and shared capital investment in university-based publishing.”

Clearly this would be a vaster undertaking than JSTOR, even. The Ithaka Report may very well turn out to be a turning point in the recent history, not only of scholarly publishing, but of scholarship itself. Scott McLemee, "Sailing from Ithaka" (bolding mine). See also here, here ($), here, etc.

From the Ithaka report:

“A shared electronic publishing infrastructure across universities could allow them to save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, unite the resources of the university (e.g. libraries, presses, faculty, student body, IT), extend the brand of American higher education (and each particular university within that brand), create a blended interlinked environment of fee-based to free information, and provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors.” (italics mine)

Guess the report has thought of everything...

- pregnant pause -

except how, freed from the shackles of intellectual proprietorship, shared scholarship could allow universities to educe, enlighten and empower the human imagination.

Update: blogs take up the Ithaka report: Dorothea, Free Range Librarian, MediaCommons.

Dorothea: "Bite the bullet and go open-access."

Don't get caught in the loo without it