Crowd Sourcing Gun Control

Background checks deter only those with prior offenses. For more comprehensive gun-violence prevention, we need systems that help law enforcement focus on high-risk individuals before their first offense. Such prevention systems must operate within important legal and political constraints: they must be compatible with the second amendment, they must be relatively effortless for the vast majority of low-risk gun buyers/owners, and they must respect the privacy of all citizens.


Graph theory makes it possible to extract strong information from a large set of weak relationships. It is the foundation of companies like Google and Facebook. It is the basis for alternative metrics that assess the quality of scholarly papers. Graph theory also applies to gun control. As individuals, we absorb all kinds of information about others and decide to like or dislike, befriend or avoid, trust or distrust them. These individual assessments are rather unreliable, but they become a powerful resource when connected with one another in a graph. For gun control, imagine a system in which gun owners recommend one another. This creates a graph on which to unleash the power of graph theory.

Consider a concrete example (no graph-theory knowledge required):

1. Every gun buyer/owner registers three Qualified Recommenders (QRs). Without assuming any legal liability, QRs state that the gun buyer/owner is not presently a danger to himself/herself or to society and that they will withdraw as QR if their opinion changes or if they should lose contact with the gun owner.
2. Most legal gun owners may act as a QR. However, law enforcement may revoke anyone's QR status at any time for any reason. Such action prevents this person from submitting new recommendations, and it voids his/her existing recommendations. Revoking the QR status carries no other consequences. One's own QR status does not affect one's right to own guns.
3. A gun buyer who is unable to obtain three QRs is subject to a background investigation that may include interviews with family, friends, and neighbors.
4. A gun owner may lose recommendations because (1) QRs may withdraw their recommendation, (2) QRs may die, or (3) QRs may lose their QR status. A gun owner who does not maintain three QRs is subject to increased scrutiny.

Maintaining three QRs is relatively effortless for low-risk gun owners, who tend to have strong ties to their communities. If they should become high risk (through mental illness, for example), their QRs are likely to withdraw their recommendations, thereby creating an early warning.

The impact on high-risk gun owners is more substantial. Very few law-abiding gun owners would be willing to sponsor someone they consider dangerous because of mental health, behavioral issues, or criminal connections. Convicted criminals cannot be QRs, because they cannot be legal gun owners. This reduces the pool of available QRs for their non-convicted associates. Law enforcement can reduce that pool even further: when they arrest someone, they could revoke the QR status of the arrestee and of his/her QRs (under the theory that these QRs are unreliable).

Consider a few scenarios.

Scenario 1. Joe is a gun owner. His QRs are his wife (Mary) and two friends (John and Pete).

Scenario 1a. Joe develops a mental-health problem and is in therapy. Mary convinces Joe to dispose of the guns. Mary withdraws her recommendation and, perhaps, approaches John and Pete to withdraw theirs. There are no legal proceedings of any kind.

Scenario 1b. Joe develops a mental-health problem, refuses therapy, and develops violent tendencies. The QRs and the police develop a plan to withdraw their recommendations and, simultaneously, to impound Joe's weapons. After the emergency intervention, Joe's fitness to own guns is evaluated.

Scenario 1c. Joe is arrested under suspicion of committing a violent crime.

Upon his arrest, Joe's QR status is revoked immediately. Joe's gun rights depend on the resolution of the criminal case against him. Mary, John, and Pete are not legally liable for failing to intervene in time, but their QR status is revoked.

Mary, John, and Pete remain legal gun owners. If they acted as each other's QRs, they have to find replacement QRs. For most gun owners, these circumstances are an extremely rare occurrence, and replacing QRs is a low hurdle. For criminal gangs, every arrest eliminates QRs from their environment and increases their difficulty of replacing QRs.

Scenario 2. Bill sells his recommendations. As soon as he is identified as a shady operator, the police subjects his network to heightened scrutiny. With the first arrest in Bill's network, he loses his QR status, and his recommendations are voided. As Bill's clients find replacement QRs, they leave useful network trails.

Scenario 3. Mary, a law-abiding citizen living in a gang-infested neighborhood, wants a gun for protection. Some of her relatives and friends have arrest records, and she cannot find three QRs. She is a high-risk gun buyer because of the circumstances of her life: her gun is at much higher risk to be stolen and/or misused. She is able to buy a gun after passing an in-depth background investigation.

Scenario 4. Bob is a criminal and does not care about gun laws. Because his guns are illegal, he faces a much harsher sentence if arrested and convicted.

Bob's guns are most likely stolen or obtained from sources that claim their guns were stolen or lost. If one of his guns is traced back to Mary, her QR status is revoked immediately. If Mary is an innocent bystander, losing her QR status is no big deal. If she is a member of a network that traffics guns illegally, this incident reduces the pool of available QRs.

Other Scenarios. The QR system implements a form of social control that occurs organically in small communities where everyone knows their neighbors (a rarity nowadays). The process of finding QRs provides opportunities for a community to intervene in a non-confrontational manner and to help prospective gun buyers make a realistic assessment of their own risk profile.

The QR system shows that gun-violence prevention does not require storing detailed personal information. It shows that an alert and involved community does not need to become a society of snoops that report every eccentricity to the police. Yet, the QR system is just one example. Graph theory provides a lot of flexibility to respond to legal and political concerns.

I call on the graph-theory community to contribute to the gun-control effort. It is up to you. Criticize. Amend. Propose. Do something. Anything. Save lives.

MOOCs Teach OA a Lesson

Just four years ago, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were tentative experiments promoted by a handful of professors. (Wikipedia, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education) Today, universities across the world are rushing in, and millions of students are enrolling. Contrast this with the Open Access movement (OA). More than twenty years after the introduction of the hep-th database (which became arXiv), OA remains a struggle. There have been significant OA advances, but universal open access to the scholarly literature remains a distant promise, probably requiring many more years.

Why did OA never reach the kind of momentum MOOCs seem to have?

Because successful MOOCs serve many thousands of students, their per-student costs are extremely low when compared to traditional teaching. Yet, the cost of producing a series of high-quality large-scale interactive multimedia events is significant. Compared with MOOCs, the start-up cost of OA is almost negligible. After an institutional repository is set up, the only barrier to OA is a few key strokes per scholarly paper.

Why were academic leaders so concerned about the minimal costs of OA? Why are they not concerned about the far more significant costs of MOOCs?

MOOCs have the potential of disrupting thousands of teaching positions. MOOCs are a threat to admissions offices and a system of university reputations based on rejection rates. On the other hand, universal OA would primarily disrupt libraries, publishers, and their middlemen, not academics. Yet, academic leaders are enamored with MOOCs, and they treat OA like a chore for which there is always some excuse to postpone. If MOOCs really prove to be as disruptive as hoped or feared, they figure it is preferable to be on the side of the disrupters.

Why do academic leaders not make the same calculation with respect to OA? Why do they fear the potential of OA-caused disruption? Why do they embrace the potential of MOOCs-caused disruption?

In my search for answers, I arrived at four tentative conjectures.

Conjecture 1. MOOCs are in their infancy. The wave of initial excitement will pass, and the hard MOOC work lies ahead. OA is further along in its evolution. Passed its own wave of initial excitement, OA is now in the slow process of building its infrastructure. Some form of OA will soon emerge as the inevitable path.

This conjecture provides cover to continue on the current path.

Conjecture 2. With MOOCs, first movers have a clear advantage. They have the most time to develop the know-how for producing successful MOOCs. With little competition, they can afford to make mistakes and learn from them. With OA, first movers provide a service to those on the sidelines and get little in return. (This perverse incentive explains, in part, the need for OA mandates.)

This begs for initiatives that reward scholars who make their works OA.

Conjecture 3. With MOOCs, faculty control their work, and they do what they do best: they innovate an area in which they are experts. OA feels like an external imposition. To add insult to injury, some repository managers have turned simple light-weight OA repositories into a bureaucratic mess with useless policies that turn faculty off. And it is not just repository policies. Scholars are increasingly awash in conflicting and confusing OA-related policies from funding agencies, publishers, universities, and libraries. Discussions about OA mandates do not help the cause either. It is irrelevant that OA mandates require very little effort when enacted; the discussion itself is a turn-off.

This is an argument to reduce the heavy-handedness of current OA approaches. Eliminate the bureaucracy, and replace institutional repositories with self-managed individual repositories. These may not eliminate all institutional policies, but they give scholars a greater degree of control and flexibility. Individual repositories are also portable when scholars move from one institution to the next. There are at least two options that make it easy for scholars to manage their own individual repository: academia.edu and myopenarchive.org. ORCID, the recently launched initiative to manage the identities of scholars, could also evolve into a system of individual repositories.

Conjecture 4. OA is not sufficiently disruptive. Hoping to minimize resistance to OA, OA advocates tend to underemphasize the disruptiveness of OA. Gold and Green OA leave the scholarly-communication system essentially intact. When presented in a minimalist frame, they are minor tweaks that provide open access, shift costs, and bend the cost curve. Such modest, even boring, goals do not capture the imagination of the most effective advocates for change, advocates who have the ears of and who are courted by academic leaders: venture capitalists. This is a constituency that seeks out projects that change the world.

This conjecture is an argument to pursue disruptive OA. What if OA completely erased the cost of all scholarly communication? That would reduce the cost of education and/or research by at least as much as some of the most disruptive MOOC scenarios.

PeerJ falls in the category of disruptive OA. PeerJ is a new model for open-access journals with peer review. PeerJ charges authors a one-time $99 membership fee and eliminates the per-paper publication charges of Gold OA journals.

One could, of course, dispose of journals altogether. Combine individual repositories with open evaluation and alternative metrics. The field of altmetrics has developed various impact measures based on usage statistics of individual papers. This fine-grained analysis is far superior to the rather coarse and often misleading Journal Impact Factor. To succeed, open evaluation and altmetrics must win over the entrenched interests that control academia's prestige machine.

Perhaps, none of these conjectures fully explain differing attitudes towards MOOCs and OA. Perhaps, it is a combination of all four. Perhaps, there are other factors at play. If so, what are they, and how should those factors influence our approach to OA?

Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke

Publishers are manipulative capitalists who extort academia by holding hostage the research papers they stole from helpless scholars on a mission to save the world. This Hitler vs. Mother Teresa narrative is widespread in academic circles. Some versions are nearly as shrill as this one. Others are toned-down and carry scholarly authority. All versions are just plain wrong.

Scholarly publishers do what is expected of them: they offer a service and maximize their profit. Prices are set by a free market, where consumers make cost-benefit evaluations and decide to buy or not. If journal prices keep rising at exorbitant rates, assess why publishers have the power to dictate prices, and fix what is wrong. Do not blame the bee for the sting; it is what bees do.

Scholars submit their manuscripts to journals to expose and validate their work. They are referees because they benefit from the peer-review system or hope to benefit eventually. When they become editor of a journal, scholars advance up the prestige ladder in proportion to the reputation of the journal. Every step of the publishing process rewards scholars in the currency of academic prestige, the foundation of a portfolio that leads to academic appointments.

If journals were only about the dissemination of information, they would not survive current market conditions. There are free resources (not all legal) to obtain scholarly papers: from open-access repositories, from colleagues by e-mail, or from Twitter-enabled exchanges. There are free resources to disseminate research: blogs, web sites, or self-published e-books. None of these alternatives to acquire or disseminate research have affected the scholarly-information market. Scholarly journals are expensive not because they disseminate information, but because they disseminate prestige.

Authors and editors benefit from a journal's prestige, and the survival of “their journal” is important to their field's prestige and, by implication, their own. They never personally face the cost-benefit question (Is a journal's prestige worth its price?), but they influence their organization's subscription decisions. In faculty discussions, the issue of access often serves as a proxy for prestige. For authors and editors, the university canceling “their journal” is outright institutional rejection. To a certain extent, journal subscriptions are a means to divvy up prestige. This inherently dysfunctional market is further distorted by site licenses. (See a previous blog post.)

There are no Hitlers. There are no Mothers Teresa. There are just individuals and organizations looking out for their self-interest in a market complicated by historical baggage (site licenses modeled after paper-journal subscriptions) and competing interests (access, prestige, cost, profit). Academic leaders are concerned about the cost of scholarly communication, but they are equally reluctant to undermine the established system for assessing and rewarding excellence in scholarship.

Scholarly publishers create value by attaching prestige to (what has become) a commodity service. This is not unlike Coca Cola, which ties its commodity products to various nostalgic sentiments. Where Coca Cola invested in mass-marketing campaigns, publishers invested in relationships with academia. They developed the capability of identifying emerging disciplines ready for new journals. They learned how to select editors. They learned how to acquire and disseminate academic prestige. They achieved the power to set prices by seamlessly attaching their prestige infrastructure to the academic enterprise. However, just like team spirit, family togetherness, and the desire for world peace would survive the loss of sugary flavored water, the pursuit of  prestige will survive new dissemination methods for scholarly communication.

From a free-market perspective, Gold Open Access journals seem to have the right structure. When authors pay to be published, they weigh the prestige of the journal against its price. Yet, there is a problem. To survive, a Gold journal only needs a relatively small base of paying authors. It does not need subscribers. It does not need a high impact factor. This presents an opening for opportunists to create vanity platforms. To counter this, universities could prohibit the use of institutional funds to pay for publication in low-impact journals. Unfortunately, this would also increase the difficulty of launching legitimate new Gold journals, decrease competition, and increase prices.

Scholars who grew up with the web will, eventually, question the paper-era structure of all journals. The burgeoning field of alternative metrics uses graph theory to produce article-level quantitative assessments based on correlated web usage. Altmetrics will first complement, then compete with, and ultimately replace the journal impact factor. When articles are assessed based on their own metrics, bundling articles into a journal loses much of its significance. Today, respected academics will not accept a blog post, a self-published e-book (long or short form), or a web site as a valid method to establish academic credibility, let alone prestige. This skepticism is justified, dismissiveness is not.

The journal impact factor exerts its influence through an infrastructure of editorial boards and related organizations that took decades to develop. To achieve that kind of institutional impact, altmetrics need their own social constructs. It may take considerable time and effort to develop these constructs and to have them institutionally accepted. But if it succeeds, such a prestige infrastructure could herald a new era of scholarly communication based on personal dissemination methods.

A Physics Experiment

Researchers in High Energy Physics (HEP) live for that moment when they can observe results, interpret data, and raise new questions. When it arrives, after a lifetime of planning, funding, and building an experiment, they set aside emotional attachment and let the data speak.

Since 1991, virtually all HEP research papers have been freely available through an online database. This repository, now known as arXiv, inspired the Green model of the Open Access movement: Scholars submit author-formatted versions of their refereed papers to open-access repositories. With this simple action, they create an open-access alternative to the formal scholarly-communication system, which mostly consists of pay-walled journals. The HEP scholarly-communication market gives us an opportunity to observe the impact of 100% Green Open Access. Following the scientists' example, let us take a moment, observe this twenty-year-long large-scale experiment, and let the data speak.

When publishers digitized scholarly journals in the 1990s, they added site licenses as an add-on option to paper-journal subscriptions. Within a few years, paper-journal subscriptions all but disappeared. At first, publishers continued the super-inflationary price trajectory of subscriptions. Then, they steepened the price curve with assorted technology fees and access charges for digitized back-files of old issues. The growing journal-pricing crisis motivated many university administrators to support the Open Access movement. While the latter is about access, not about the cost of publishing, it is impossible to separate the two issues.

In 1997, the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) launched the Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP) as an open-access journal. JHEP was an initial step towards a larger goal, now referred to as Gold Open Access: replacing the current scholarly-communication system with a barrier-free system of journals without pay walls. The JHEP team implemented a highly efficient system to process submitted papers, thereby reducing the journal's operating costs to the bare minimum. The remaining expenses were covered by a handful of research organizations, which agreed to a cost-sharing formula for the benefit of their community. This institutional-funding model proved unsustainable, and JHEP converted to a site-licensed journal in 2003. This step back seems strange now, because JHEP could have copied the funding model of BioMed Central, which had launched in 2000 and funded open access by charging authors a per-article processing fee. Presumably, JHEP's leadership considered this author-pay model too experimental and too risky after their initial attempt at open access. In spite of its difficult start, JHEP was an academic success and subsequently prospered financially as a site-licensed journal produced by Springer under the auspices of SISSA.

Green Open Access delivers the immediate benefit of access. Proponents argue it will also, over time, fundamentally change the scholarly-communication market. The twenty-year HEP record lends support to the belief that Green Open Access has a moderating influence: HEP journals are priced at more reasonable levels than other disciplines. However, the HEP record thus far does not support the notion that Green Open Access creates significant change:

• Only one event occurred that could have been considered disruptive: JHEP capturing almost 20% of the HEP market as an open-access journal. Instead, this event turned into a case of reverse disruption!
• There was no change in the business model. All leading HEP publishers of 2012 still use pre-1991 business channels. They still sell to the same clients (acquisition departments of academic libraries) through the same intermediaries (journal aggregators). They sell a different product (site licenses instead of subscriptions), and the transactions differ, but the business model survives unchanged.
• No journals with significant HEP market share disappeared. Even with arXiv as an open-access alternative, canceling an established HEP journal is politically toxic at any university with a significant HEP department. This creates a scholarly-communication market that is highly resistant to change.
• Journal prices continued on a trajectory virtually unaffected by turbulent economic times.

Yet, most participants and observers are convinced that the current market is not sustainable. They are aware of the disruptive triggers that are piling up. Scholarly publishers witnessed, at close proximity, the near-collapse of the non-scholarly publishing industry. All of these fears remain theoretical. Many disruptions could have happened. Some almost happened. Some should have happened. None did.

In an attempt to re-engineer the market, influential HEP organizations launched the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³). It is negotiating with publishers the conversion of established HEP journals to Gold Open Access. To pay for this, hundreds of research institutions world-wide must pool the funds they are currently spending on HEP site licenses. Negotiated article processing charges will, in aggregate, preserve the revenue stream from academia to publishers.

If SCOAP³ proves sustainable, it will become the de-facto sponsor and manager of all HEP publishing world-wide. It will create a barrier-free open-access system of refereed articles produced by professional publishers. This is an improvement over arXiv, which contains mostly author-formatted material.

Many have praised the initiative. Others have denounced it. Those who observe with scientific detachment merely note that, after twenty years of 100% Green Open Access, the HEP establishment really wants Gold Open Access.

The HEP open-access experiment continues.

Queer Education

When a son in his pre-teens acts effeminate, likes to wear dresses, or thinks of himself as a girl, most parents force the child to conform to society's preconceived norms. (There is more tolerance for girls acting boyish.) A New York Times Magazine article profiles some parents who question this orthodoxy. These parents give their children the freedom to be who they are. They take on the hard, at times socially awkward, task of protecting their children as much as possible against the social consequences of non-conforming. They postpone the big questions, “Is he gay?” or “Is he a transsexual?”, until the questions evolve into “Am I gay?” or “Am I a transsexual?”, or until they evolve into nothing.

Serious scholars will debate this topic, at length, in learned journals and at scholarly conferences. The debate will spill over in the popular press and in online forums. After all is said and written, this will be the outcome: these brave parents are developing the model for how all parents and all teachers should educate all children.

The primary purpose of our current educational model is to serve society, not to serve the individual child. Listen to politicians when they talk about education. It is about creating a competitive labor force. It is about economic growth. These goals appeal to parents, who want their children to do well, be able to provide for themselves and their future families, and have a successful and satisfying career.

By putting society's goals front and center, parents, teachers, and government officials think of children as empty vessels, to be filled up with knowledge and skills developed by previous generations that society deems important. At every step, educators evaluate how well students have absorbed the information. They award certificates, diplomas, degrees, and other distinctions that serve as entry tickets to the labor force. These are worthwhile goals, and the classical educational model has exponentially improved our standard of living.

Yet, can't we give children a break? Stop the rush. Give them time and opportunities to explore who they are and what they like to do. Expose them to as many different experiences as possible. Use grades and other assessment techniques not to rank children, but to observe their individual strengths, weaknesses, and interests. Teachers should help parents observe their children as they are, not as they wish they should be. After all, few parents are able to be objective about their children. Even if they do not intend to, they invest their own dreams and ambitions in their children, often squashing the child's own dreams and aspirations.

Let children tell us who they are, what they like, and what they are good at. They will tell us in their play and in their creative endeavors. Postpone the question “What would I like my child to be?” until it evolves into “What would I like to be?”

A child-centered approach to education does not fit the model of a teacher in front of a class of twenty or more students. The “sage on the stage” model completely ignores whether a particular child is ready for and/or interested in a particular subject at a particular time. It is moderately efficient to fill twenty vessels with the same information, and it is extremely effective at turning education into a chore that kills the creativity and natural curiosity of children.

Cultivating this creativity and curiosity should be the primary purpose of education from kindergarten through high school. Give them opportunities to work on a range projects of their choice. Introduce increasingly challenging projects, and let them discover what particular knowledge or skills they need. Let them learn new knowledge and new skills when they need it, when they are most interested in it. In this model, the teacher observes, guides, and points children to resources that are helpful. The teacher becomes a “guide on the side”. (See Clayton Christensen's book, “Disrupting Class”.)

To make this concept work, we must build a comprehensive library of online courses. Advanced educational software will take on the role of “filling the vessels”. As guides on the side, the teacher's role is to make sure a child takes a particular course at the right time: when the child is primed by curiosity and by the innate drive to finish an interesting project. As educational software evolves and improves, it will adapt to each individual child's learning style.

Adaptive, on-demand, just-in-time education will become an enduring facet of the information- and technology-based economy, and not just for children. Our fast-changing society requires a culture of life-long learning. Such a culture is built by adults eager to continue learning, no matter at which stage they are in life. Everyone will need access to this kind of educational infrastructure.

To prepare our children for their future, let start listening to them now.

The Isentropic Disruption

The free dissemination of research is intrinsically good. For this reason alone, we must support open-access initiatives in general and Green Open Access in particular. One open repository does not change the dysfunctional scholarly-information market, but every new repository immediately expands open access and contributes to a worldwide network that may eventually create the change we are after.

Some hope that Green Open Access together with other incremental steps will lead to a “careful, thoughtful transition of revenue from toll to open access”. Others think that eminent leaders can get together and engineer a transition to a pre-defined new state. It is understandable to favor a gradual, careful, thoughtful, and smooth transition to a well-defined new equilibrium along an expertly planned path. In thermodynamics, a process that takes a system from one equilibrium state to another via infinitesimal steps that maintain order and equilibrium is called isentropic. (Note: Go elsewhere to learn thermodynamics.) Unfortunately, experience since the dawn of the industrial age has taught us that there is nothing isentropic about a disruption. There is no pre-defined destination. Leaders and experts usually have it wrong. The path is a random walk. The transition, if it happens, is sudden.

No matter what we do, the scholarly-information market will disrupt. The web has disrupted virtually every publisher and information intermediator. Idiosyncrasies of the scholarly-information market may have delayed the disruption of academic publishers and libraries, but the disruptive triggers are piling up. Will Green Open Access be a disruptive trigger when some critical mass is reached? Will it be a start-up venture based on a bright idea that catches on? Will it be a boycott to end all boycotts? Will it be some legislation somewhere? Will it be one or more major university systems opting out and causing an avalanche? Will it be the higher-education bubble bursting?

No matter what we do, disruption is disorderly and painful. Publishers must change their business model and transition from a high-margin to a low-margin environment. Important journals will be lost. This will disrupt some scholarly disciplines more severely than others. An open-access world without site licenses will disrupt academic libraries, whose budget is dominated by site-license acquisition and maintenance. Change of this depth and breadth is messy, disorderly, turbulent, and chaotic.

Disruption of the scholarly-information market is unavoidable. Disruption is disorderly and painful. We do not know what the end point will be. It is impossible to engineer the perfect transition. We do not have to like it, but ignoring the inevitable does not help. We have to come to terms with it, grudgingly accept it, and eventually embrace it by realizing that all of us have benefitted tremendously from technology-driven disruption in every other sector of the economy. Lack of disruption is a weakness. It is a sign that market conditions discourage experiments and innovation. We need to lower the barriers of entry for innovators and give them an opportunity to compete. Fortunately, universities have the power to do this without negotiation, litigation, or legislation.

If 10% of a university community wants one journal, 10% wants a competing journal, and 5% wants both, the library is effectively forced to buy both site licenses for 100% of the community. Site licenses reduce competition between journals and force universities to buy more than they need. The problem is exacerbated further by bundling and consortium “deals”. It is inordinately expensive in staff time to negotiate complex site-license contracts. Once acquired, disseminating the content according to contractual terms requires expensive infrastructure and ongoing maintenance. This administrative burden, pointlessly replicated at thousands of universities, adds no value. It made sense to buy long-lived paper-based information collectively. Leasing digital information for a few years at a time is sensible only inside the mental prison of the paper model.

Everyone with an iTunes library is familiar with the concept of a personal digital library. Pay-walled content should be managed by individuals who assess their own needs and make their own personal price-value assessments. After carefully weighing the options, they might still buy something just because it seems like a good idea. Eliminating the rigid acquisition policies of libraries invigorates the market, lowers the barriers of entry to innovators, incentivizes experiments, and increases price pressure on all providers. This improves the market for pay-walled content immediately, and it may help increase the demand for open access.

I would implement a transition to subsidized personal digital libraries in three steps. Start with a small step to introduce the university community to personal digital libraries. Cancel enough site licenses to transfer 10% of the site-license budget to an individual-subscription fund. After one year, cancel half of the remaining site licenses. After two years, transfer the entire site-license budget to the individual-subscription fund. From then on, individuals are responsible to buy their own pay-walled content, subsidized by the individual-subscription fund.

Being the middleman in digital-lending transactions is a losing proposition for libraries. It is a service that contradicts their mission. Libraries disseminate information; they do not protect it on behalf of publishers. Libraries buy information and set it free; they do not rent information and limit its availability to a chosen few. Libraries align themselves with the interests of their users, not with those of the publishers. Because of site licenses, academic libraries have lost their identity. They can regain it by focusing 100% on archiving and open access.

Librarians need to ponder the future and identity of academic libraries. For a university leadership under budgetary strain, the question is less profound and more immediate. Right now, what is the most cost-effective way to deliver pay-walled content to students and faculty?

On Becoming Unglued...

On June 20th, the e-book world changed: One innovation cut through the fog of the discussions on copyright, digital rights management (DRM), and various other real and perceived problems of digital books. It did not take a revolution, angry protests, lobbying of politicians, or changes in copyright law. All it took was a simple idea, and the talent and determination to implement it.

Gluejar is a company that pays authors for the digital rights to their books. When it acquires those rights, Gluejar produces the e-book and makes it available under a suitable open-access license. Gluejar calls this process the ungluing of the book.

Handing out money, while satisfying, is not much of a business model. So, Gluejar provides a platform for the necessary fundraising. When proposing to unglue a book, an author sets a price level for the digital rights, and the public is invited to donate as little or as much as they see fit. If the price level is met, the pledged funds are collected from the sponsors, and the book is unglued.

Why would the public contribute? First and foremost, this is small-scale philanthropy: the sponsors pay an author to provide a public benefit. The ever increasing term of copyright, now 70 years beyond the death of the author, has long been a sore point for many of us. Here is a perfectly valid free-market mechanism to release important works from its copyright shackles, while still compensating authors fairly. Book readers that devote a portion of their book-buying budget to ungluing build a lasting free public electronic library that can be enjoyed by everyone.

The first ungluing campaign, “Oral Literature In Africa” by Ruth H. Finnegan (Oxford University Press, 1970), raised the requisite $7,500 by its June 20th deadline. Among the 271 donors, there were many librarians. Interestingly, two libraries contributed as institutions: the University of Alberta Library and the University of Windsor Leddy Library. The number of participating institutions is small, but any early institutional recognition is an encouraging leading indicator.

I hope these pioneers will now form a friendly network of lobbyists for the idea that all libraries contribute a portion of their book budget to ungluing books. I propose a modest target: within one year, every library should set aside 1% of its book budget for ungluing. This is large enough to create a significant (distributed) fund, yet small enough not to have a negative impact on operations, even in these tough times. Encourage your library to try it out now by contributing to any of four open campaigns. Once they see it in action and participate, they'll be hooked.

Special recognition should go to Eric Hellman, the founder of Gluejar. I have known Eric many years and worked with him when we were both on the NISO Committee that produced the OpenURL standard. Eric has always been an innovator. With Gluejar, he is changing the world... one book at a time.