Oven at Punch Pizza, Highland Park, Saint Paul
Image by Aaron Landry via Flickr

Last week, Phil Davis published a post criticizing a paper reviewing the evidence around the purported “citation advantage” of open access (OA). Two OA proponents contacted SSP leadership to complain about the Scholarly Kitchen, urging the SSP to repudiate the post and censure the author.

Taken in isolation, it wasn’t a big deal. But this has been a trend. In fact, the only times we’ve had interactions like this is when we’ve written about open access.

This post is dedicated to those few among us who won’t engage in an open dialog when people are skeptical or critical of their ideas and evidence, and who instead resort to unseemly tactics in attempts to get their way.

At the same time, I want to make it clear that we welcome open debate.

SSP’s leadership has been, and continues to be, uniformly supportive of our independence to work as individuals on this blog as members of SSP. After all, the SSP is an organization of individuals, not an advocacy organization. And the Scholarly Kitchen — which has emerged as a popular and respected venue for good discussions — encourages individuals to contribute openly to discourse on a wide variety of relevant topics.

The Scholarly Kitchen consists of opinions from a group of clearly identified individuals. We often don’t agree with each other, and we don’t represent any official point of view of the SSP. We work independently. (As evidence, today’s post by Joe Esposito showed up unbidden in my mailbox last night. I had no idea it was being written, or any inkling about his feelings on the topic.)

But back to the attempts to subvert open dialog. On any given occasion, the accusations or insinuations from OA proponents haven’t bothered me — they revolved around minor points once you peeled away the rhetoric.

What bothers me is the repeated attempts to intimidate people, insinuate an agenda, and squelch critical thinking.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? The topic is open access, which holds as a fundamental tenet that open access to information is vital to progress, yet these few proponents of open access apparently won’t engage in open dialog.

It’s tempting to respond with: “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the Kitchen.”

But we want the dialog here, for all to see.

Behind-the-scenes calls seeking to create pressure to censure our authors or have them repudiate posts aren’t appropriate ways to disagree, especially when it involves a freely accessible blog that clearly promotes commentary from all quarters. People with differing opinions who attempt political end-runs are effectively sneaking around behind the backs of the readers of the Scholarly Kitchen.

To me, it’s wrong for a few people to try to appropriate the debate. Instead, they should participate in it.

If you have ideas and opinions, there is nothing about the Scholarly Kitchen or how it’s run that will stop you from being heard.

This blog is meant to shed light on topics and ideas about which reasonable people might disagree, while providing enough analysis and opinion to inform superior debate among a very sophisticated community. It started with the goal of familiarizing people with new research and trends in publishing, and prompting them to discuss it. To that end, I think it’s succeeding. Comments outnumber posts many times over.

I believe we should have any differences of opinion in the open, as professionals pursuing similar and admirable goals.

If you disagree with us, there is no excuse for you not to do so openly. You have all you need to participate in one of the most sophisticated discussion groups in STM publishing, and at no cost.

But if you can’t stand the heat . . .

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One of my favorite running gags in “The Princess Bride” is when Wallace Shawn’s character keeps saying, “Inconceivable” with every one of Westley’s heroic escapades, at which point Mandy Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya responds, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”

We may be the equivalent of Wallace Shawn when we’re talking to our audiences about technology, as revealed in this interesting video montage from TrendWatching.com (other interesting videos are at the site, as well).

We all reach a specialized audience (imagine them asking about your journal or book title, or academic institution — even the biggest names can land with a thud in the larger world), but technology takes some time to penetrate the culture.

(Thanks to MH for the pointer.)

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Heeney.ca Site Map - Take 3
Image by davidcrow via Flickr

With the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and blogs; the development of the iPhone, iTunes, the Kindle, and the pending iPad; and the continued utility of email, which has only been enhanced by smartphones — well, there’s a question haunting the status quo of Web development for publishers:

Do you really need all that Web site?

We’ve been enamored with the big site for more than a decade now — a shovelware monstrosity that has mutated to include e-commerce, supplementary data, rapid online publication, and complex search engines.

Designers slave over these sites, and entire departments try to analyze the data and make sense of it. Domain-level sites produce a lot of related activity because they’re the centers of our online identities, the foundations upon which we’ll build, the areas of wise investment and strategic renewal.

But is that where does your brand generates the most value online? Is that where you have your most dynamic community?

Is your .org, .com, or .edu going to remain the center of your future digital identity?

If you’re certain that your most profitable, highest impact, and smartest move over the next 3-5 years is to do more at your main domain URL site, then it probably makes sense for you to build an appropriately extravagant presence there. But what if you’ve been blinded to alternatives? What if you’re greatest value is to be found on Twitter? On Facebook? Through email? On devices?

And what is the opportunity cost if you’re overspending on a set of dressed up directories that your customers really don’t care much about?

Basically, what is the purpose of that Web site you’re running?

It’s an interesting question that’s posed nicely in a post by Mitch Joel on his TwistImage blog, which is itself an example of the issue at hand.

Mitch’s company has a complex site, but his overall digital presence is mainly supported by the TwistImage blog. For cents on the dollar, he cultivates a loyal Twitter following, blogs actively, and lets the viral work its magic.

Contrasted to the search-centric mentality we’re accustomed to, the concept of the “feed” has renewed the power of browsing. At the same time, the sheer abundance of information has ensured that alerting is and will be more important to information awareness. Meanwhile, devices like the iPhone, the Kindle, and the iPad have become or might become central to users.

Scholarly publishers have site-centric approaches for defensible and rational reasons — institutions buy access to domain sites; technology providers in our space are geared toward site-centric approaches (from HighWire and its ilk to CrossRef and its approach); and only a minority of sites have been able to scale beyond the site-centric approach to see what other options might exist.

Yet, when you list out the forces at play (browsing, feeds, alerting, devices) in creating an audience, it seem that in some ways, scholarly publishers could get trapped in the site-centric model.

We reflect site-centric thinking when we do usability testing, for instance. I’ll bet that most of your usability testing has been about the site, and not about the usability of the complement of information options you use or could use. Did you ask if the email you send is usable and ties nicely with the site? Did you ask if landing on your site from Google made sense? Or were you just testing the usability of your site? If so, that’s site-centric, and potentially part of the trap that keeps us in the rut.

Because of habits of mind like this, we’ve probably over-engineered our site offerings. And with online still severely undervalued as a communication medium, these lavish expenditures may not earn back.

For instance, I’ve always wondered why, instead of creating a full-featured site, I shouldn’t just make a great email system and a good search engine, with minimal HTML and a bunch of PDFs on the back end. After all, if customers want the convenience of an online journal, this approach would satisfy all editorial and customer requirements, while slashing my costs.

Is there really a premium for “pretty” among scholarly Web sites?

Email is the lifeblood of our sites, driving the majority of traffic for us. Google does most of the rest. Twitter and Facebook are increasingly important in some fields. PubMed and other specialized search repositories are also major sources of awareness and traffic.

Why do I need a big Web site to benefit from all this?

Let’s say I have a decent site. If I were to add a good Twitter presence and maybe make the home page more like a blog (maybe even run it off WordPress) while delivering PDFs to authorized users, my online presence might improve substantially, and at a fraction of the cost of what I’m paying the site-centric providers now.

I could still sell the site to institutions. I would probably have the same level of traffic (with a blog main page, I might actually be more visible in Google), and I’d be less tied to any particular provider of technology products.

Right?

Are we spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on over-engineered, site-centric solutions? Is the “Age of the Big Website Build” drawing to a close?

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Join us for the Food Fight in San Francisco!

Registration is open for the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s 32nd Annual Meeting, June 2-4, 2010, in San Francisco.

Fans of the Scholarly Kitchen may be interested in attending the closing session, “Food Fight! The Best of the Scholarly Kitchen,” where Kent Anderson, Phil Davis, Joe Esposito, Michael Clark, David Crotty, and Ann Michael will talk about the blog, debate trends in scholarly publishing, and answer questions from the audience.

We hope to see you there!

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A common bit of speculation, bolstered by Chris Anderson’s book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” is that providing free copies of books drives awareness and redounds in a commercially beneficial way (Anderson didn’t pursue this approach himself, it’s worth noting). (Update: I was wrong. He did offer it for free. I just didn’t hear about it.)

Various publishers, some in the scholarly space, have had success with this approach — but arguably always as part of a carefully constructed business model in which “free” has a clear purpose. Even open access can be characterized as free output to spur paid input.

Aside from Anderson, one of the biggest mainstream proponents of “free” as a marketing tool is Cory Doctorow. He shamelessly recommends “free” as an unqualified benefit to authors, and feels he has benefited for years from the approach of giving away electronic copies of his science fiction books under a Creative Commons license. Doctorow is that rare author who has created for himself the vaunted “platform” currently in vogue in trade publishing circles — a personality, speaking engagements, writing in big venues (Boing Boing), and publishing books. Some revenue comes from each aspect, and the four aspects drive each other in a virtuous cycle.

(Doctorow should also consider that maybe his success is based on his skill as a writer. Surrendering success to a “free” strategy negates the role of skill as a writer, after all.)

Given this potential “fundamental error of attribution,” I wasn’t surprised to see Doctorow cheerleading a recent study about the effects the free e-books have on print sales:

A new study from two academics at BYU tracking the sales of printed books following free ebook releases found that generally, a free ebook release is correlated with increased sales. Interestingly, the exception is for a group of ebooks that were released for a week and then withdrawn — part of Tor.com’s launch strategy, and a success in getting large number of people signed up to the site. Very nice to see some crunchy data in the mix.

It would be nice to see some “crunchy data” in the mix, but the data in this study were largely uncrunched. In fact, they were just raw tables, barely masticated by the two Brigham Young University researchers.

There are many problems with the study published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing:

  • Sales for only 70% of retail outlets were used as a basis of evaluating increased print sales, and these probably don’t even account for a majority of sales (Wal-Mart was left out, for instance).
  • No data about e-book downloads were included to compare with print sales.
  • “Correlation” is claimed, but there are no statistical tests of correlation in the study.
  • No other factors are adjusted out — e.g., increased marketing, author name recognition, awards, etc.
  • Only science fiction, tech non-fiction, and fantasy genres were included in the study.
  • There isn’t a meaningful $ to be found in the study. Sales figures are provided, but the researchers didn’t push to find out if pricing changed on the print versions during the “free e-book” weeks studied, or if Tor in particular generated more revenues indirectly by creating leads using free content.

Why should the financial aspect been analyzed? One of the publishers covered by the study, Tor Books, took a risk making its e-books free, even for a week at a time. Doctorow and the authors of the JEP paper both speculate that Tor’s practice of only release e-books free for a week is what limited their upside of the “free” approach. But with only a week of free availability rolling through the 41 titles studied, Tor’s sales declined by 5,268 units. That’s $42,091 in lost gross revenues basing it on an average sales price of $7.99 per title (which seems to be Tor’s average paperback price — the actual revenue loss is probably greater). So, in the eight weeks studied, Tor potentially gave up more than $40,000 of revenues to offer e-books for free. Users had to register to get the free e-books, so Tor increased its email list. But at a cost of $40,000+, that had better be one well-monetized email list.

Had the authors thought this through even as superficially as I just did, they would have seen the size of the hill “free” can create for a publisher to surmount, and could have speculated on the likelihood of Tor’s email strategy overcoming that challenge.

One interesting element of the raw data counts presented by the researchers is that Random House and Tor titles sold much better overall than the other books. Is this because their marketing arms are that much better? Is it because the authors are more popular in general? Do these publishers just have better lists? Are the books generally more current or newer? (Many of the tech titles were older titles.) Again, the researchers didn’t measure these factors or adjust for them.

One author of Tor titles notes his own increased sales during the free e-book period, commenting on a confounding variable:

Were there other factors possibly relating to that increase? Sure; for example, in March of 2008 I was nominated for two Hugos, including Best Novel for The Last Colony. That might have had some influence, but I suspect if so it was tangential, since it wasn’t Old Man’s War up for the award.

While he may think the effect of being nominated for two Hugos is “tangential,” that’s a pretty powerful shot in the arm — to have two nominations for a genre’s crowning prize. Yes, I think that would drive strong sales across an author’s catalog.

Some books had significant sales declines with the offer of free e-books, if you accept e-book availability as the only driver. As an author or a book marketer, there is risk to be found in this study, and that’s enough to give one pause.

But, of course, one author of the study published in JEP gives himself away as a shameless advocate of free content:

I think there’s a huge benefit to society by making something available for free. Recently I’ve been involved with another study with my dissertation, and this studied just eight books, and over a few week time these books were downloaded over 100,000 times, and sales increased moderately. But the point wasn’t whether sales increased or decreased; here are 100,000 people who accessed works who otherwise wouldn’t have. So my hope would be that this study would relieve people’s fears that if they put books online for free their sales would tank, and they’d say, ‘let’s think about a more global benefit to having your works online for free.’

It’s nice to have this intellectual bias revealed in an interview after the study was published. It might have been better if he had stated in the paper itself his hope about which direction the results would point. Not that he didn’t leave intellectual clues aplenty — you can feel the authors working throughout the paper to make the “free content” argument appealing. This clear bias in their writing is what sent me to look for evidence that they held an intellectual bias.

Free access to content makes sense in some cases. But, it seems to make the most sense in the context of a business model that can make it work. Publishing studies like this — complete with lightweight data, flimsy analysis, and intellectual bias — doesn’t help.

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Image representing Lulu as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Self-publishing has the stigma of being the last hope for the impossibly unpublishable. It’s a stigma that’s fading fast as books like “The Shack” and “Still Alice” dominate best-seller lists despite either being self-published or starting as self-published.

Just over a year ago, I self-published my first novel, partially because I could and should, but also to learn. A year later, I find myself working on my third novel, and working hard to juggle writing with book blogging, a book signing, interviews about the books, and discussions with a movie producer.

Yeah, self-publishing’s for losers.

Well, now this revolution in publishing has a new recruit — John Edgar Wideman, a National Book Award finalist, a winner of two Faulkner awards, and a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. He’s the author of the award-winning Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, and Fanon.

Now, he’s published a set of microstories called Briefs via Lulu, along with titles from his backlist, deciding, according to his press release:

. . . against a traditional publishing contract — and royalty advance —  for Briefs because he wanted more control over the publishing process and to develop a more direct connection with his readers. He also wanted to experiment at a time when the publishing industry is undergoing more revolution than evolution.

Wideman goes on to make comments I took as distinguishing quality from quantity, an interesting rebuke to the attitude among defenders of traditional publishers, which has often confused quantity (sold) with quality:

I have a very personal distaste for the blockbuster syndrome. The blockbuster syndrome is a feature of our social landscape that has gotten out of hand. Unless you become a blockbuster, your book disappears quickly. It becomes not only publish or perish, but sell or perish.

Wideman is the first client using Lulu’s VIP service, which ties promotion to publication, helping to create awareness beyond family and friends. But perhaps the most potent part of the PR event here is Wideman’s choice itself, which may generate more attention for this work than traditional publishing would have.

Of course, the novelty of this will wear off, but as many have argued in the past, the financial benefits of self-publishing may be enough to bring even more prominent authors into the practice. Stephen King and J.K. Rowling really should do the math.

But, as Henry Baum at SelfPublishingReview.com notes about Wideman’s choice:

Sure, you can still make the argument that it’s hard to sell a self-published book, but you cannot make the argument that it’s only for second-rate writers.

Who knows what’s next? For book publishers, this source of competition — the power of independence — is sure to change negotiations, and not in their favor.

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Penguin Books is showing off some ideas it has for books on the iPad. CEO John Makison has the right attitude:

We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error.

There’s more in a related post at PaidContent.com if you’re interested.

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Image via Wikipedia

Let’s play Supreme Being for a moment. Assume you’re assembling a solar system. Obviously, you need a powerful gravitational vortex at its center. Yet, despite the organizational benefits of the approach, this gravity well has effects well beyond organizing the system. Its mere presence can dictate many things about how the inhabitants of the system around it function and evolve. It can introduce limitations that can be justifiably interpreted as absolutes instead of variables.

There seems to be a gravity well at the center of Web thinking these days, whether it manifest itself in attention economy for scholars, the pernicious effects of digital apologists, the vanishing middle-class of information workers, the belief that free content can be sustainable, and the sanctity of advertising. I think it’s also somewhat related to the Age of Systems, and is, in its totality, encapsulated as the bright, gaseous star we call Google.

About a year ago, I covered a piece Scott Karp wrote about how Google doesn’t want your content, just your links. And recently, our own David Crotty made a comment in which he said, “Google’s business is selling ads. They constantly try to drive the price of nearly everything else on earth down to zero in order to use those things as incentives to sell ads.”

In case you harbor any doubts that ads are what drives Google, this chart from the Silicon Alley Insider should put those doubts to rest:

So it began to dawn on me — Is the ubiquitous and powerful Google so mighty and pervasive that its mere presence actually has a gravitational effect on our thinking that hasn’t quite registered completely?

I’m not talking about the prosaic effects of its search engine, as covered recently in yet another Wired article about the search giant. I think Google represents much more than that in our lives now. And while it doesn’t want your content, just links, Google knows that certain conditions favor the creation of more links to harvest, and is happy to encourage these conditions.

In short, I’m pretty sure that Google’s business model and practices broadcast that open content is more linkable and valuable. This benefits Google since the more open the Web becomes, the bigger Google can become.

Open content leads to more sharing, more automated linking, more traversals to drive the awareness that results in linking, which all lead to more money for Google. The problem is, we can be fooled into thinking Google’s business model is our business model.

And it’s not just textual content that Google inherently wants to make free — given the chance to make maps, Google made them free; given the chance to put maps on the iPhone, Google made them free; and given the chance to turn its maps into a GPS program for the Android, Google made it free.

Who cares if Tom-Tom and Garmin are crippled because of it? Google’s ad dollars insulate the giant, and justify its every move.

Look at what happened to newspapers, the first explorers to make a close approach to the GoogleSun — prices dropped, commoditization accelerated, and the wings of many news operations began to melt in the heat.

While Google may only want links, the heat of its link-seeking creates disastrous side-effects. To make more links, Google wants content to be as linkable as possible. They don’t just want your links, they want as many links as they can get.

But let’s think through the implicit messages of Google’s approach and whether they really make sense:

  • Could it really be that advertising is the most naturally viable online commercial model?
  • Could it be that we should really make our content freely available in order to facilitate linking?
  • Has Google really organized the Web? Can any a system be smart enough to do that?
  • Are digital systems sufficient, even superior, compared to more intuitive human systems?

What if Google were somehow geared to make money off subscriptions — subscriptions to maps, subscriptions to newspaper content, subscriptions to music services, subscriptions to magazines, subscriptions to search solutions — and advertising was something they hadn’t tackled? What if Google had integrated into its business plan the recent news that a significant proportion of customers are willing to pay for content?

I’ll bet Google would have made the best subscription system the world has ever seen, be rich beyond imagining through micropayments, and all our content would be commercialized in a way that made content more lucrative than it will ever be in its current role — acting as a roadway for Google traffic and parking lots for its links.

Advertising is Google’s game. And, as in a solar system that sustains life, there’s a distance and angle relative to the GoogleSun that’s optimal. Get too close, you get burned. Move farther off, and you don’t have the radiant heat or light to sustain large-scale species diversification.

Unfortunately, many STM publishers are small, remote from the sun, and have to subsist off other sources of energy.

What does this have to do with the Age of Systems? Because Google’s reputation is that it has been able to organize the world’s information, it’s tempting to think there’s a system in the digital realm that can actually do this. But the fact is, Google is a pretty limited organizational system. For instance, I can’t drag all the files I find in a search onto my hard drive. I can’t be sure the search results a week from now will be the same as those I’ll get today. I can’t compare one page to another within the system.

Google isn’t really organized — it’s useful, repeatedly useful, but not organized. Google’s only organized as much as Google needs to be in order to be the best search portal . . . in order to sell ads.

Given its centrality and power, I think the gravitational effect of Google may have changed how we think about digital and cast the recent moves back to subscription models and closed content in an uncomfortable — dare I say, unnatural — light.

As long as Google is able to deliver more for (apparently) less, it’s gravity of assumptions and preconditions will continue to hold sway over the information solar system.

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Yesterday, I published an analysis of the “Power of Print” advertising blitz that just kicked off, to the tune of $90 million. As part of the onslaught, the publishers put this rather bombastic video argument on YouTube:

Now, if print is such an immersive and invaluable medium, why did they have to put this on YouTube?

Possibly to reach the audience that doesn’t read them anymore?

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Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

The blog posts on the Scholarly Kitchen have become known as thoughtful, analytical pieces, and they take a long time to write. Now, the chefs at the Kitchen are proud to introduce a microblog via Twitter at scholarlykitchn (the character limits at Twitter forced us to sell the last vowel).

Each post from the Scholarly Kitchen will be tweeted there, along with links and thoughts from the Kitchen bloggers, allowing us to update you on things that are interesting but don’t justify a complete blog post, or that we just don’t have time to analyze but wish we did, or that are just perplexing and different.

If the Scholarly Kitchen has been serving great meals, we’ll consider this the drive-thru window, I suppose. Join us on Twitter and find out!

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