Create Change Canada

Heather Morrison

Heather Morrison
Simon Fraser University
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/

Heather Morrison is a PhD Student at the SFU School of Communication, specializing in transformative change in scholarly communication, especially open access, as well as a professional librarian and adjunct faculty member at UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies.  Links to most of Heather’s work (published, informal and in-progress) can be found on her scholarly blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

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How have the Internet and computing technology changed the way Communication scholars work?

For me, the Internet has made it possible for me to actively collaborate with colleagues around the globe; to participate in discussions that are contributing to both understanding and change in my area of scholarly communication and open access.  My blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/ , is a scholarly blog.  That is to say, the work that I post there is serious scholarship, and in my opinion, libraries should take on the work of preserving blogs like this.  There are ideas there that I likely won't explore further, not due to the merit of the ideas, but just because I don't have time.

Being able to collaborate with other scholars in this area saves all of us time, through venues such as the Open Access Tracking Project and the Open Access Directory.The internet and computing technology have profoundly changed communication studies.  Probably the most important change is in WHAT we study, particularly in media studies where new media is a major focus.  Computing technology has obviously greatly facilitated quantitative research, both in terms of speed of computation and visualization of results.

Scholars are excited about digital archiving.  Many of my colleagues do work that they think belongs in archives, openly accessible where possible in view of ethical obligations, and it makes sense to us that we would take the responsibility for uploading, if someone else would look after access and
preservation.

Why have you been an advocate of open access?

I have been an open access advocate for many years.  Open access just makes sense from many perspectives.   Scholarship is essentially  collaborative in nature; each scholar builds on the work of others. The more that a scholarly work is read and used, the more valuable it is, especially to its author.  Economically, while it will take us a little while to figure out the transition, open access makes sense because it is less expensive.  There are costs involved with preventing reading (and troubleshooting when these measures fail). This is not money well spent.

Is there consensus among your colleagues about the use of digital media and sharing of information? If not, what are the biggest areas of debate?

Yes, there seems to be a pretty good consensus about the desirability of open sharing of information.  The questions people have, have more to do with how than anything. Copyright is a huge area. It would be helpful for grad students to learn about copyright early on, i.e. before you even start thinking about gathering stuff for your thesis. There is also a need to learn how to use tools to take advantage of new media - from audiovisual to statistics packages to network analysis tools.

What traditions would you like to see change to improve the digital scholarly communication landscape?

Libre open access, or down with DRM! (digital rights management). PhD students like me are increasingly reading online.  What makes sense to me is that I should be able to copy materials to my desktop - books too - and KEEP them there, use the copy and paste function to help me with my notes, highlight - in the colours of my choice - and add comments. This makes sense to me both as a reader, and as an author, too.

When an author submits a work for publication, why not send a folder with all the full-text of the references?  This would save the time of referees and editors.  The same goes for when students submit a paper for marking. Working around DRM, for example having to print stuff out, make notes on paper and then type them up, is just a waste of time for the scholar.

What do you think about funding agency policies calling for free online access to publicly funded research?

I am actively advocating for funding agency policy; for detail, see here:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AZn66wofwO7aZG5weGdiNF8yMmRxdnc3Z2Rm&hl=en

What do you think about the developments at Harvard, where the arts and sciences faculty has chosen to make their work open access? Do you think that might have an impact on other campuses, including yours?
 

The Harvard policy is, in my view, an excellent model, except for the part where it says "but not for a profit".  This should read "for open access", as not for a profit leaves the door open for cost recovery charges. This is the model that I would like to see adopted in Canadian universities, for two reasons:  1) this reinforces that the rights are the author's to grant; and 2) a policy adopted by the faculty themselves is most likely to be broadly accepted.  I expect that at some point SFU will look at OA policy.

What is the argument you'd offer for more open sharing of research?

For the past few years, I have actively sharing my work through self-archiving, publishing in open access journals as much as possible, openly sharing data, and practicing an open research process (sharing information throughout all stages of the research process). For me, this has been helpful in facilitating collaboration and disseminating my work, and it has helped me to get invited to speak at conferences as well. Having my work in electronic form in open access archives (at SFU and E-LIS) has also been very convenient for me - one place to look for my works, helpful when I need to copy out the bibliographic information or send someone a URL to one of my articles or presentations.

What are some of the challenges and changes to publishing in your field?

A challenge: Funding agencies, potential employers, etc., still have review procedures that reward publication in high-impact journals, rather than considering the broader dissemination of open access or the greater effectiveness of new approaches to scholarly communication.

Monograph publishing continues to be very important in this field.  It is my hope that open monographs press (and hopefully library-supported monographs publishing) will address some of the current issues with limited dissemination of monographs.  Last year, I published a book and it is discouraging to think of the limited readership with the typical limited print runs for academic books nowadays.  I wrote the book to be read, not to make money from it.  Next book I write, I definitely want to be open access.

An opportunity:  the SFU communication grad students have our own open access peer-reviewed journal, Stream (I am the Managing Editor): http://www.streamjournal.org/index.php/stream Student publishing offers lots of opportunities for learning and experimenting with publishing and with new approaches to education. We are in the process of working on a couple of class-based special issues, for example.  I have done this with students as an adjunct faculty member at SLAIS. It is a very different experience for a student to work on a paper for publication, as compared with a term paper that will probably not be seen by anyone.

Are there other changes that you find encouraging?

Yes, lots!  The Dramatic Growth of Open Access:  over 5,000 fully open access, peer reviewed scholarly journals listed in DOAJ, growing by more than 2 titles per day; and over 1,600 repositories listed in OpenDOAR, with contents growing by the millions every quarter.  I write a quarterly series about this topic on my blog, with an open data format for downloading:  http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2006/08/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-series.html

In communication, we are beginning to see a number of open access journals, including some with highly prestige, such as the International Journal of Communication http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/index.