Category: Essays

What to do about, and/or with, the American Sociological Association?

person pushing boulder
Flickr / CC: https://flic.kr/p/sjBWi

The scholarly communication system is broken, and the American Sociological Association lives off the money that brokenness creates. So, what should we do about it?

According to the 2016 budget report, 35% of total revenue comes from journal operations. That is $2.2 million that came from institutional subscriptions (mostly paid by the libraries of colleges and universities where ASA members work), under the contract with Sage publishing. Increasingly, these subscriptions are part of big Sage bundles of journals, in which individual libraries have little say over what they’re actually buying. Publishing the journals, in turn, costs 11% of total expenses, or about $717,000. That doesn’t mean the association nets $1.5 million (68%) profit, because some of the other expenses go to running the publication contracts, including a publications manager and other staff time. But journal publishing produces money for other things the association does. As you read this ASA is looking for opportunities to create more paywalled journals, to generate more money for the association (in addition to whatever good additional journals are supposed to accomplish).

At the same time, ASA — like other paywall publishers — is in an increasingly defensive position, as open access alternatives spread (including preprint servers like SocArXiv), and the cost of technologically and legally defending the paywall increases under pressure from Sci-Hub (which I wrote about here) and various other breaches. In a quasi-official statement from the ASA, publications director Karen Edwards wrote that Sci-Hub, “threatens the well-being of ASA and our sister associations as well as the peer assessment of scholarship in sociology and other academic disciplines.” Without the paywall, in other words, peer review itself cannot survive.

More generally, the staff has raised alarms about the sustainability of the current model. From the Publications Committee minutes in spring 2016:  “The possibility exists that the journal world may not be as profitable in the future as it is now. The journal marketplace is shifting, and will continue to do so, so Council and EOB should keep an eye on this revenue source.”

It would be easy to say ASA should get ahead of these shifts, stop publishing paywalled journals and embrace new publication models. We know that free journals could be published for a fraction of what ASA and Sage now spend and reap. But that would mean giving up a substantial share of the association’s current income.

Of course, it’s not a simple task, even as good people are working hard on solutions. A recent report considers 15 different scenarios for “flipping” journals from subscriptions to open access, with evidence on a variety of outcomes and experiences. A white paper by Rebecca Kennison (who serves on the SocArXiv steering committee) and Lisa Norberg proposes a model in which scholarly societies and academic libraries form a new partnership to remake scholarly publication in the humanities and social sciences. I described that proposed future like this:

The basic design of the system to come is we cut out the for-profit publishers, and ask the universities and federal agencies that currently pay for research twice — once for the researchers, and once again for their published output — to agree to pay less in exchange for all of it to be open access. Instead, they pay into a central organization that administers publication funds to scholarly associations, which produce open-access research output.

Solutions will require creativity, collaboration, and hard work. Designing a new system is relatively easy, but moving today’s institutional actors in that direction is not.

For ASA

ASA in particular is unlikely to leap forward with a new solution. The simplest explanation for that is the money at stake, which pays for things that the key decision makers want, including salaries, but also everything from receptions and hotel suites to minority fellowships and policy briefs. Taking concrete steps requires an assessment of how the association works, especially the imbalance between the members and their elected representatives on the one hand and the professional staff on the other (see the aforementioned Edwards post for a sense of their stance).

My cynical view may be slightly exaggerated but it is more true than not. I see elected sociologists come and go from various positions in the association. Some, like journal editors, are specialized experts uniquely qualified for their jobs. But many are punching professional service tickets on their way up the chain, people who may be great sociologists but without expertise in or commitments to specific aspects of the organization. Awards committee, subcommittee member, ad hoc committee member, committee on committees member, and so on. Even the members of the Publications Committee and the Council mostly have little expertise or knowledge about academic publishing (I include myself in that, although I have learned a lot since I first attended the Pub Com meetings as a non-voting editor a few years ago), and rely on the professional staff to explain this world to them.

Our work in these roles is important, but mostly it doesn’t much matter who does it, because the range of motion for individuals is extremely limited. We are interchangeable. In contrast, the staff are trained professionals who stick around for a long time. Most of the member interaction with them involves listening to the facts the staff present, asking questions, considering and then approving their recommendations. At least that’s how it usually works on the important matters, the things that affect the association’s income stream. These staff people are very devoted to the organization and work hard at it, and I have nothing against them personally, but their structural role is as institutional brake on change.

However, the members could – with concerted effort – set the direction of the association. Here are some smaller and larger suggestions for specific actions ASA members could take. These are things candidates for office in the association could propose in their election campaigns, things committee members could implement in their committees, things the membership could ask for from their leaders.

  1. Set high-level, long-term goals, and hold staff accountable for developing plans to implement them. For example, within 7 years we will find new ways to fund them, and flip our journals to open access. Start developing and fundraising now. This is the most ambitious suggestion, as it will require acting over the strenuous efforts of the professional staff. But with mobilization, signatures, a referendum, or whatever, it is conceivable. The political will is not there for this yet, but someday this may have a greater chance of success than convincing the staff to move in that direction one step at a time, without a high-level mandate. That is, timidly asking for a report or suggestions will not work. Sage, too, is expert at diverting such weak impulses, as evidenced by their implementation of an open access journal for ASA (Socius), which served as a pressure release valve for open access sentiment among the members. It will take stronger stuff to move ASA for real, so that’s probably for down the road.
  2. Become a signatory to the Center for Open Science’s Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, and conduct a review of the standards for potential adoption within one year. The guidelines are incremental, but they set an important tone and direction. This could be done with a vote of the Council. Or, individual journal editorial boards could implement them. ASA staff and Council may say journals aren’t allowed to do this, but this hasn’t been tested. The actual rules limiting the power of editors are much vaguer than you think.
  3. Take steps to promote open scholarship norms in the profession:
    • Require paper awards to limit nominees to publicly-available papers, like we did with the dissertation award. Having a paper considered for an award is a privilege, not a right, and having it considered in secret is not a reasonable accommodation. Let’s just say, if you want your paper considered, let’s all have a look. If that makes you uncomfortable, that’s fine – there are plenty of great sociologists who deserve awards.
    • Require journals to make clear they will consider submissions of papers that have been shared in public repositories such as SocArXiv, without prejudice. This could be a simple statement from the editors, or it could from a statement by the Publications Committee or Council. It’s not really a change in policy, which already permits consideration of papers that have circulated, as long as they have not previously been peer reviewed.
    • Promote working paper culture by using SocArXiv or another proper open-access repository to archive and distribute papers, including conference papers and ASA research reports. Make the conference a public sharing project, modeling open scholarship norms and best practices regarding preservation and metadata.
    • Change the association’s policy stance. Lend organizational support to open scholarship initiatives and lobbying efforts. Drop opposition to federal open access policies, explicitly withdrawing earlier statements such as Sally Hillsman’s 2012 statement against the Office of Science and Technology’s public access policy.

I would be happy to hear other ideas about how and where to attempt to move ASA.

I could be wrong about the prospects for rapid structural change at ASA. But whether it’s fast or slow, progress in the right direction is likely to be driven as much by outside pressure as by internal mobilization. That’s why, in addition to pushing on the association, working on SocArXiv and other actually-existing alternatives now is a good use of effort.

Celebrate the 26th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act by making your open scholarship accessible

 

 

Ensure that the future of open scholarship is available and inclusive for people who use assistive technology

By Judy Ruttenberg

SocArXiv is dedicated to opening up social science, to reach more people more effectively, to improve our research, and build the future. By applying a few simple principles and practices of universal design and web accessibility, you can help ensure that this future of open scholarship is available and inclusive for the community of readers and scholars who use assistive technology to render text to speech, braille, and other formats.

Whatever authoring software you’re using — most commonly Microsoft Word — you can create accessible documents by being mindful of a few basic principles: use of headers, lists and alt text to describe images; identification of document language, clearly identified column and row headers in tables, and the export to PDF as “tagged” to preserve these elements.

There are many guides available on the web providing step by step instructions. I particularly like the guides provided by the University of Washington, which has been a leader in accessibility and universal design for decades. If you are on a college or university campus, there are likely resources available to you locally if you have questions.

As we build this future of open scholarship in the social sciences, let’s make it really open by making it accessible to the global population of people with visual, physical, perceptual, developmental, cognitive, or learning disabilities that render print inaccessible.

Sociologists: Where’s your paper?

conversation-better

Thousands of sociologists are writing papers right now. As the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association approaches (August 20-23, Seattle) In the next month, many of them will perform an archaic ritual. They will send their paper to the discussant for their upcoming panel. The discussant will have the right to read and discuss any aspect of the paper at the conference — but not to share it with the public or other scholars.

Then, at the conference, the author will spend 15 or 20 minutes presenting some parts of the paper, and the discussant will verbally comment on it before an audience of 0 to 100 people, including at least a few people (the other panelists) with a demonstrated interest in the topic. Afterward, those who are interested may approach the author and ask for a copy of the paper.

The presentation is open to anyone — who happens to be physically in the room — and the paper is now “out there,” but in just about the least accessible form possible: a verbal presentation, with slides. This can all lead to good conversations and exchanges of information and insights. This conference presentation goes on everyone’s CV. The whole thing is “public” in the way that public was defined 100 years ago.

Of course, technology has changed this. People send the papers electronically now. Some share them with friends and colleagues. Some papers are already under review at peer-reviewed journals. And some are posted on personal websites or in institutional repositories. But the vast majority are not available outside the room of the conference.

Technology — and social organization — now allow us to improve on this process dramatically. That paper can be posted on an open-access paper server and shared much more widely (see instructions for SocArXiv here). Other panelists and colleagues who are attending the conference can read the paper before the session, maybe commenting, or deciding to attend the session and be part of the conversation. Other researchers can learn from the work and respond, too. Members of the actual public can see what’s going on and respond. In short, the research can come out of its shell.

ASA2016: Tag, share, build community

When you submit your paper at SocArXiv.org, you get a permanent URL. If you put this on your slides and handouts at the conference, interested readers get to your work immediately. Further, when you tag your paper with the ASA2016 tag (very simple instructions here), anyone can browse over and read it. Tag with your session number (tell your fellow panelists!) or a tag for your department, working group, or Twitter hashtag. Build your community, widen the circle, promote inclusivity, make your work matter more.

Worries

Here are some common concerns about posting conference papers, with responses:

What if the paper isn’t ready, or is wrong?

It is understood that these are usually not “final” versions of the paper. In fact, the conference rules require it, forbidding papers that have been “published prior to the meeting or accepted for publication before being submitted to organizers for consideration.” But you are already presenting it to the people who are most likely to see and care about its flaws: other researchers at the conference. Widening the circle may be worrying or intimidating, but that’s part of what you’re trying to do. We believe the benefits (to the researcher and public) outweigh the risks. Of course, if you have errors in the paper you want to find that out as soon as possible and get it right. Being wrong now is part of the normal workflow — being wrong later can be a major problem.

What if someone steals my ideas?

The program at the conference is good for stamping your work as your own. It’s a recognized form of notification for the academic community. But it doesn’t actually include the content of the paper. Posting the paper on a public server, time-stamped for all to see, is even better protection, especially for junior scholars. Of course, bad people can do bad things, but they probably are already. And with a public, citable version, at least you have the norms of the profession on your side if any dispute arises. As our Center for Open Science partner Jeff Spies pointed out, finding a like-minded scholar early in the process gets you a collaborator — finding them later gets you a competitor.

What if posting my paper discourages a journal from publishing it?

No respectable journal prohibits publishing papers that have been shared in working-paper form (and the ASA rule cited above doesn’t prohibit sharing in this form). The conference presentation is already public, it’s just public in a much less open and inclusive way. When you subsequently publish the paper, you can update the version on SocArXiv, and provide a link to the journal version. The link you receive with your submission is permanent and will always take people to the current version of the paper. (For specific journal policies, check out the RoMEO database.) And of course you can remove it from the archive if you choose.

Open is your friend

We have already written some more about why posting your paper to SocArXiv is a good idea, for you and your research, and the wider community. By using what (to the user) is pretty simply technology, we can make our work better, faster, and more engaging. We hope you will try it out.

At the conference, display the Where’s Your Paper? SocArXiv button to let people know you posted yours (or support those who did). And come to the 13th Annual ASA Blog Get-Together & SocArXiv Party: Sunday, Aug 21 from 4pm-7pm, at The Pine Box Bar (1600 Melrose Ave, Seattle).

The conversation gets better when someone says, “Where’s your paper?” and the answer is: “Here.”

The server is open now in a temporary, preliminary form. We want to hear from as many people as possible about what they need from an open archive. And we need people to get involved as moderators, reviewers, and volunteers to build the organization.

Why you should post your papers to SocArXiv

 

why-socarxiv

By Elizabeth Popp Berman

Academia.edu. ResearchGate. Your personal website. You have lots of options for posting your preprints online. Why should you upload them to SocArXiv?

Because you want them to reach people, and because you believe in open access to social science.

You know that posting your work online can extend its audience—to academic peers, journalists, and the wider public—by getting it out from behind journal paywalls. But papers at a personal website aren’t always picked up by academic search engines, and they lack the metadata to maximize your visibility.

And new corporate intermediaries are trying to insert themselves between your research and others’ ability to read it. Uploading to sites like Academia and ResearchGate will reach some of your colleagues. But not every researcher has (or wants) an account, and they’re not designed to provide access to the broader public.

More importantly, while they provide a free service now, these are for-profit enterprises that have to find a way to monetize the content you provide—your research. Academia, for example, recently floated the idea of asking users to pay “a small fee” for papers to be “considered” for recommendation by peers. Expanding access to knowledge is not these companies’ primary mission.

The last couple of years have seen smaller endeavors—first Mendeley, and now the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)—swallowed up by Elsevier, the 800-pound gorilla of for-profit academic publishing. With a trend toward consolidation and a drive to make money, these sites do not have the best interest of social science in mind.

SocArXiv: the open-source alternative

SocArXiv is the noncommercial, open-source alternative to this enclosure of the commons. Uploading your papers to SocArXiv provides a fast, simple way to make your work available and discoverable to the widest possible audience—while also linking you to an emerging community of social scientists and a rapidly developing set of research tools.

We won’t spam everyone (or anyone) you’ve ever met with requests to sign up. And through our link with the Open Science Framework, you’ll also be able to upload data, code, documentation, presentations, and any other files related to your research, and have the option of inviting comments and discussion of your work.

Using SocArXiv is good for you. But it’s also good for social science. Developed in collaboration with the Center for Open Science (COS), SocArXiv’s sole mission is to maximize access to social science and improve its quality. And because we’re noncommercial, we can keep service to social science at the heart of our mission.

In addition, the partnership between SocArXiv and COS means that archiving preprints is just the beginning. COS, home of the Reproducibility Project in psychology, provides free, open-access tools to support data sharing, project collaboration, and pre-registration of studies. As it grows, SocArXiv also plans to develop peer review options, support research communities, and public open-access electronic journals. Like COS, we want individual incentives for researchers to align better with good scientific practices.

How do I start?

Getting started is quick and easy. As we roll out, we have implemented a temporary process for collecting papers. Take five minutes to follow these three easy steps and help us reach a critical mass:

  1. Email socarxiv-Preprint@osf.io from your primary email address.
  2. The subject of the email should be your paper title. The body of the email should be your abstract. Attach the paper as a pdf, Word document, or other file.
  3. Hit send.

That’s it. An Open Science Framework account will be created for you, and your paper will show up here at the temporary site. If you want, you can add tags to make it easier to find. When the full site rolls out, your paper will automatically be included.

You can upload any documents or files you have not specifically signed away rights to share. This includes conference papers, working papers, datasets and code. For most journals, you have the right to post a preprint—and sometimes the published version—of a publication. SocArXiv will track multiple versions of papers, so readers see the most up-to-date while a historical record is retained.

Concerned about journal restrictions? RoMEO maintains an extensive list of journal copyright policies that will reassure you. In sociology, for example:

  • The American Journal of Sociology allows archiving of both preprints and final published versions, as do open-access journals like Sociological Science and Socius.
  • Other ASA journals, including the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Psychology Quarterly, Sociological Methodology, Sociological Theory, Sociology of Education, allow preprint posting with a link to the published version.
  • A wide range of journals in which sociologists publish, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Criminology, Demography, Gender and Society, Journal of Marriage and Family, Politics and Society, Social Forces, Social Problems, Socio-Economic Review, Sociological Forum, Theory and Society, and many others, have similar policies.

Imagine if anyone, inside or outside academia, had access to all your research, and could reach it through a simple open web search. Social science doesn’t have to be walled off. Help us make open access a reality. Add your research to SocArXiv.

Visit SocArXiv.org for more information or to sign up for updates. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook. To make a tax-deductible contribution to SocArXiv through the University of Maryland, visit:http://go.umd.edu/SocArXiv.

Announcing the development of SocArXiv, an open social science archive

July 2016

SocArXiv announces a partnership with the Center for Open Science to develop a free, open access, open source archive for social science research. The initiative responds to growing recognition of the need for faster, open sharing of research on a truly open access platform for the social sciences. Papers on SocArXiv will be permanently available and free to the public.

Social scientists want their work to be broadly accessible, but it is mostly locked up from the public and even other researchers – even when the public has paid for it. SocArXiv wants to help change that. In recent years, academic networking sites have offered to make preprints available and help researchers connect with each other, but the dominant networks are run by for-profit companies whose primary interest is in growing their business, not in providing broad access to knowledge. SocArXiv puts access front and center, and its mission is to serve researchers and readers, not to make money.

Social science is in the middle of a heated conversation about the reliability and reproducibility of our results. By partnering with the Open Science Framework, this initiative lays the groundwork for a broader project that can provide access to data and code along with papers, allow for preregistration of studies, and (if researchers choose) provide public peer review of completed work. In short, the open archive will improve our science, better connect us as scholars, help place control of the research process back in the hands of researchers instead of for-profit publishers and gatekeepers, and deepen our engagement with the public.

The first phase of the project will be a preprint server for social scientists, providing the following services:

  • Fast, free uploading of academic papers and open access for all readers
  • Free registration open to all, regardless of academic affiliation
  • Permanent identifiers that link to the latest version of a paper (authors can provide links to versions published elsewhere)
  • Full access and discoverability through Google Scholar and other research tools
  • The option to use any Creative Commons license
  • Comment and discussion on papers among registered users
  • Grouping of papers together for conferences or working groups
  • Analytics data on how often papers have been accessed
  • Easy sharing on social media sites – without requiring readers to register

As the archive grows, SocArXiv will engage the community of scholars, members of the research library community, and publishers to develop a fuller publishing platform, with post-publication peer review and evaluation, and open access electronic journals.

“SocArXiv is an exciting opportunity to democratize access to the best of social science research,” said Katherine Newman, Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “This resource will make it possible for students, faculty, researchers, policy makers, and the public at large to benefit from the wealth of information, analysis, debate and generative ideas for which the social sciences are so well known. This will assist the nation’s academics in making clear to the public why their work matters beyond the ivy walls.”

Chris Bourg, Director of MIT Libraries, added, “We need to find new, efficient ways to foster openness and inclusion in the research process. As an open-source, open-access preprint server with a post-publication review system, SocArXiv represents the kind of innovative thinking we need right now in scholarly communication.”

Each year, social scientists write thousands of papers for presentation at conferences and submission to peer-reviewed journals. These papers usually remain out of sight for months or even years, slowing the progress of research and impeding the capacity of researchers to collaborate and learn from each other’s work. With an open access preprint server, papers can be read by anyone immediately. SocArXiv will allow researchers to reap the benefits of openness and sharing while protecting the record of their scholarly contributions.

For example, an author may post a working paper to be presented at a conference. After presenting the paper and receiving feedback, the author revises the paper (now updated on SocArXiv) and submits it for publication. After further revisions, the paper is published a year later, and a link is posted at SocArXiv from the final preprint to the published version. All along the research was open to the public – who were invited to share and comment – while the researcher’s authorship was publicly marked, and the work was available for citation. All scholars will retain control over the papers they post, including the ability to revise them (with or without allowing access to previous versions) or to remove them from the archive.

In addition, papers on SocArXiv may be linked to the full suite of services available free through the Open Science Framework. OSF supports project management and collaboration, connects services across the research lifecycle, and archives data, materials, and other research objects for private use or public sharing. OSF also provides project preregistration to improve research transparency and accountability.

“We are building the future of social science scholarly communication,” said SocArXiv Director Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, which serves as the archive’s institutional home. “It’s past time for social scientists to bring their work out into the open, to make it better, faster, more accountable, and more transparent.”

With the Center for Open Science as a technology partner, Cohen added, “there is nothing to stop us from making this future a reality. The barriers to openness now are social and political, not economic or technological.”

SocArXiv is directed by a steering committee of sociologists and members of the research library community. They are:

An advisory board with representation from a wide array of research communities is in formation.

Visit SocArXiv.org for more information or to sign up for updates. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook. To make a tax-deductible contribution to SocArXiv through the University of Maryland, visit: http://go.umd.edu/SocArXiv.

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