IT’S NOT ACADEMIC (ANYMORE)
 

 When I was an adolescent, growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, I was often left alone in my house on a Saturday night while my parents and my older siblings drove to the symphony, the movies, or a party somewhere.  And as much as I felt deprived of fun, I felt more strongly the deprivation of stimulation.  For me, someone who loved learning new things and reading books, I used to imagine what it would have been like if I could have had my own adolescent salon – with intelligent and cordial peers talking about the kinds of profound questions that introspective teenagers like tended to dwell on:  Who made the world?  What is the meaning of life?  What is the purpose of sex?  Why do the athletes always get to date the pretty women at school?  Who decided that I needed to take biology in 10th grade?

 How the world of the lone teenager has changed.  Everywhere I go in public now, I see young people privately engaged with Walkmen, Gameboys/Girls, or cellphones.  Now, admittedly, this is the portable stuff you can take with you to the mall.  But what about their electronics at home?  Instead of the color TV, or the new stereo, most teenagers homes today contain, I can only presume, a desktop or laptop computer, replete with CD games and a connection to the Internet.

 And here’s where I get really envious of the youth of today.  Sure, I suppose a sophisticated computer game like SimCity might have been just the thing to keep me fascinated on a Saturday night.  But the Internet – what a marvelous universe for a young person.  (Please bear with me;  I know I’m already beginning to sound like an old fogey.)

 When I say “marvelous,” I’m not talking about pornography or chat rooms.  I’m talking about knowledge and wisdom.  (Yes, Virginia, it still exists.)  I think of my former, younger, self, a teenager with a million problems and virtually no one whom I could really trust for nonpatronizing answers.  But the Internet ... thousands of websites to look for the answers to even the most mundane personal, or even scholastic, questions.

 Let’s suppose – hypothetically of course – I was anxious about writing an essay for English class, and wanted to know how to structure a compelling essay.  So many sites just waiting to give me advice about how to write better – or how to conquer writer’s block.  Or advanced algebra – that was no fun.  But surely I would have found some interesting sites sponsored by mathematics professors.  Shamed by my confusion about the meaning of a joke in Shakespeare – how nice to get a contemporary translation without shaming myself in class.  Indeed, how nice to have a search engine at your service as my personal tutor ... without any affectations or shaming.

 Well, now I’m an adult.  And although I can go to my public library whenever I want, or can call an organization to get some information I need, I’m still a person with intellectual questions that hit me at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.  And now, because I’m an adult and the world is no longer black and white, the questions require more than just a date or a factoid.  Perhaps I’m a parent wondering how many “time outs” is healthy for a child in one week, or whether “time outs” really work at all for a 12-year-old.  Perhaps I need to know whether researchers have studied the positive effects of language instruction on later learning abilities.  Maybe I want to know how I can encourage my close friends, who are terminally cynical, to vote on off-year elections.

 If I don’t regularly read social science journals, or don’t have friends who are experts in these areas, where could I go?  I hear about an article in the Journal of Social and Personality Psychology, but ... my public library doesn’t carry that journal.  In fact, the library only has funds for two psychology journals per year.  Maybe I could call the local university, but maybe it’s a private institution and doesn’t have an office to help community members with advanced research questions.  But then I think:  the Internet!!!  And so I search for the academic journal in question and find out that it’s only available by subscription. I’m stuck.  So I forget my question, and six months later I’m still wondering whether I should be punishing my 7-year-old son with time-outs.  Or I’m still baffled as to how to help my 17-year-old daughter pursue a professional career in geology.

 Well, there’s at least one man out there trying to bring the benefits of social science research to me and other people who are neither librarians nor scholars.  Some of us know that our government has tried to make biomedical knowledge more available to everyone, particularly if it was funded with government grants.  (Visit the National Library of Medicine site for this stuff.)  But what about education research?  Or social psychology research?  And where, oh where, can I go to find out what solutions seem to work for my specific parenting problems (that is, after I’ve exhausted our local bookstore’s entire shelf of self-help parenting manuals)?

 One man coming to our rescue is Professor John Willinsky, a Canadian professor of Technology and Literacy Education.  As a scholar of education at the University of British Columbia, he has been thinking for a number of years about how to help people and organizations who need knowledge but can’t pay for those hefty academic journal subscriptions.  And with the advent of the Internet, he has been devising clever ways to bring all kinds of social science research to those of us who really want to see what our academic researchers have found out.  In a 1999 book called Technologies of Knowing (Beacon Press), Willinsky first imagined a kind of nonprofit clearinghouse/website that might organize and perhaps even summarize research in major areas of public application.  But since then, he has realized that something less monolithic might work just as well or even better.  Indeed, on the Internet there is room for a hundreds of websites to flower, each providing basic or applied social science knowledge in formats appropriate to the site organizer’s purposes.

 Willinsky is particularly concerned that relevant research into the social sciences become part of the public weal.  He reminds us that, in contrast to the glamorous but more technical work in physics or astronomy, “[w]ith the social sciences, there is the longstanding promise of a knowledge to which people should be able to turn freely for guidance.  There is the hope that they can find greater satisfaction in life, secure greater justice for themselves and others.  There is the aspiration to better understand how we are to live together, to better understand the sense of it all.” [1999, p. 3]

 Moreover, Willinsky notes that what we already have studied in the social sciences often eludes us.  He proposes that “the great intellectual challenge of this Age of Information is not coming up with a grand unified theory in physics or discovering the origins of human life.  The great challenge is to be better served by what we already know.  ... Here we have this computer revolution networking the world, and the social sciences cannot find the means or will to establish technologies of knowing that would enable its potential contribution to this knowledge economy to flow freely among the public, that it might irrigate democratic debate and processes.” [Id., p. 4]
 
 Three years after Technologies of Knowing, Willinsky now heads something called the “Public Knowledge Project,” a creative venture funded by both the Canadian government and private philanthropy.  And he has been working on many different flanks to bring social science research out of the academic libraries and into the civic commons.

One of the main problems is how to keep the publication social science research economically viable.  Academic journals in the social sciences tend to be published by commercial publishers.  How do the economics of this normally work?  Disciplines need these journals to provide fora for researchers to publish.  Researchers need these journals to publish in order to progress in their careers and gain such prizes as tenure and long-term grants.  And university libraries need these journals for its own faculty’s research.  So, publishers normally have a built-in subscriber base, as well as a base-line demand for maintaining the prestige journals in each discipline.

 But with the Internet, commercial money for printing, distribution, and dissemination to the world is no longer a necessity.  In one sense, the Internet has become one huge library.  It’s not quite as selective as a university library, but it doesn’t have to be, because – at least so far – there’s no worry about running out of space or out of funds for the subscription.  To some extent, the Internet is one gigantic, free library – although one with few librarians to keep order.  And even the reference librarians – the best search engines out there – although precise, are not particularly personable.

 But Willinsky is concocting schemes, as well as encouraging others to do likewise, to make this cyberspace library more friendly for social science users.  Willinsky’s website, the “Public Knowledge Project” is a comfortable patchwork quilt of links to cutting-edge websites, software demos, prior scholarly articles on the philosophy of open access to academic research, and many other labors of love by scholars who wish to disseminate social science research more widely.  <http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/index.hmtl>

 One of PKP’s showcase demonstration projects is a joint website with the Vancouver Sun newspaper.  Here, a reader can read news about the interaction of technology and education – but with a twist.  All of the articles have links to primary resources, more technical articles, and other helpful resources.  It is a kind of tutorial model for public media:  the brevity of mass media combined with the scholarship and research behind the news bites.  <http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/sun/index.html>

 The website also contains some detailed resources depicting the current problems with commercial-publisher-funded journals and offering alternative institutional arrangements for a “Knowledge Exchange Model” that would allow much wider access by the public.  The Knowledge Model, discussed at length in a published article linked at the PKP site <http://cie.ed.asu.ed/volume3/number6>, diagrams several alternative systems for the approximately $480 million that the major 120 research libraries in this country (members of the ARL, or Association of Research Libraries) spend on buying academic periodicals each year.  In particular, Willinsky introduces electronic models that would take full advantage of XML software indexing tabs (for organizing all kinds of article indices) and other software that would offer public users guidance as to how a single research article is linked to the wider “web” of knowledge collection and production that comprises the scholarly enterprise.  Users would be able to link from a single research article, for example, to other information resources that might explain the methodology used in that research article.

 Equally compelling is a Harper’s Magazine-style index that portrays, in stark quantitative terms, the economic imbalances of the current, commercial-publisher based system. <http://www.kpk.ubc.ca/resources/spei.html>.One learns, for example, that Reed Elsevier, a leading commercial publisher of academic journals, received a 29% rate of return on investment in 1999.  And that the cost to house one volume of a journal for one year in a research library is $20.  And, moreover, that the average subscription to an academic journal rose 207% from 1986 to 1999 -- twice the rate of inflation for the costs of health care in Canada during that same period.

 Finally, the Public Knowledge Project is also helping to develop free software that empowers journal editors and conference convenors to both manage and provide access to scholarly papers.  The conference software, tentatively called the Open Conference System, allows conference convenors to manage all research paper submissions via the Internet, including the management of peer reviewer comments.  This software also would allow the public to read or download the final versions of all conference papers, or any other conference material made accessible.

 Perhaps even more exciting is the “Open Journal System” software (OJS), to be released in the fall of 2002.  OJS gives journal editors almost everything they would need to run a journal via the Internet.  With OJS, editors can receive submissions, send them out for peer review, and format them for final publication on the Internet.  As the OJS documentation notes:  “Each step in the publishing process, from manuscript submission to journal publication, provides the editors with a complete record of all transactions, as well as prompts and help boxes to guide editors” in utilizing all of the software tools.  All Emails concerning the publication process could be recorded and stored.

But internal management is not the only benefit of the software.  OJS also allows members of the public to email editors and scholars, leave comments discussing a particular article, and read ongoing discussions that others have initiated at the journal site about particular research.  Finally, if Willinsky and company accomplish their goals, each journal article managed by OJS will also be linked to something called an RST, or Research Support Tool.  The RST links the reader to other information related to the article, including related theories, related research articles, definitions of terms used in the article, and an email address where one can communicate with the author.  The RST will be particularly useful to students, journalist and other researchers who are less familiar with the research domain of the author.

In one sense, then, OJS allows each journal to become its own tree of knowledge – publishing new articles, reviewing new research for flaws and errors, and mediating or evoking discussions of the relevance and application of the knowledge spawned by the research.  With OJS, both academic colleagues and nonspecialist citizens will hopefully find nourishing food for the mind on the website of a scholarly journal.

 Novelist Nicholson Baker generated a lot of talk and sympathy several years ago with his articles and books chronicling the disposal by various large libraries of card catalogs, old bound newspapers sets, and other collections for which these libraries no longer had space.  Space, and the economics of storage, are major concerns in research library management these days.

Whether one agrees with Baker that research libraries should be saving all of their holdings for posterity, the fact is that the living academy must find more cost-effective ways to maintain fora for scholarly publishing.  John Willinsky’s vision of saving the visible foundations of research dissemination, while at the same time improving the public’s access to knowledge that could inform social issues, is not just eminently sensible.  It’s tremendously exciting.

With a project that encourages novel software and websites devoted to the publishing, and interconnecting, of research for both scholars and the public, Professor Willinsky has eagerly moved his office hours, if not his office files, into that new civic commons known as the Internet.  I hope that many other professors will walk down the stairs from their Ivory Towers and join him, for at least two hours a week, in this newly forming cyber-university.

(P.S. And if you know of a professor whom you would like convince of the benefits of open-access publishing of scholarly research, consider sending him to a linked webpage operated by the Association of Research Libraries.
<http:// www.arl.org/create/faculty/faq/scomm.html>.  There s/he, or you, will find a concise and compelling discussion of the “scholarly communication crisis.”  And if that’s not enough, Professor Willinsky is always eager to exchange ideas.  You can email him at: <john.willinsky@ubc.ca>.)
 

References
Public Knowledge Project Website:  <http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/index.hmtl>

Willinsky, John, Technologies of Knowing:  A Proposal for the Human Sciences (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1999).