Ithaka: Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources

The Ithaka organization has released a report on the Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources with support from the Strategic Content Alliance and JISC in the U.K. The report deals with the difficult question of how to sustain all the free online resources we have built in the first enthusiasm of the web.

There is no single formula that Online Academic Resources (OARs) can apply to achieve sustainability, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ plan that any organization can follow to reach a point of financial stability. There are, however, a variety of processes and approaches that can help to improve the likelihood of entrepreneurial success. In an age when traditional content producers – including scholarly publishers and newspapers – struggle to maintain their financial footing in face of the challenges of the digital world, OARs cannot turn to lessons of the past to find their way, but must see themselves as nimble players in a quickly shifting field.

Part of the problem is that we think of the digital as if it were a grant project with a print outcome. You do the research, you develop the resources, you publish it and then you move on. Digital publication seems to be cheaper and faster than print, but the true cost is the sustainability. You can get it up faster, but then you have to maintain it forever. The report argues that the problem is that academics, as smart as they are, don’t know how to think like entrepreneurs.

Clearly the leaders of these initiatives are competent professionals; why do they not rely on processes that have proven effective in both commercial and not-for-profit contexts? We have concluded that a key reason for this is that academic researchers tend to approach these problems from a different perspective, and with a different mindset, than do commercial entrepreneurs. (Page 5)

For this reason the report presents an entrepreneurial start-up model which excludes academics who can’t focus soley on a project (which is most of us):

Running a start-up is a full-time job and requires full-time leadership. The mode of principal investigators, in which they divide their time between overseeing a variety of research grants, teaching courses, and other responsibilities, is not conducive to entrepreneurial success. New initiatives aiming for sustainability require fully dedicated, fully invested, and intensely focused leadership. If a principal investigator cannot provide it, he or she will have to retain a very capable person who can. (Page 7)

This is the second time in a week or so I have heard people calling for the professionalization of academic resource development (the other time being at the Tools for Data-Driven Research meeting where the view was voiced that tool development should be taken out of the hands of the academics.) Reading the report I wonder what the role of academics in scholarly resources is, if any? It reminds me of calls for MBAs to run universities rather than academics. I wonder what it would look like to apply the logic of this report to the university itself (as a type of institution.) I think it fair to say that the university has clearly proven to be longer lasting (more sustainable) than commercial enterprises. For that matter ask how many software companies still exist ten years later (see my blog entry on In Search of Stupidity, over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters). To be fair I think the report is looking at models for large-scale academic resources like online journals and other non-profit resource organizations that are often run by professional staff already.  Hereis a list of their major points:

  1.  Most OAR projects should not assume ongoing support from initial funders.
  2. Sustainability plans must include and provide for resources to support future growth.
  3. OAR projects create value through the impact they have on users.
  4. Projects should think in terms of building scale through partnerships, collaborations, mergers, and even acquisitions.
  5. In a competitive world, strategic planning is imperative.
  6. OAR leaders must see both the needs of users and the competitive environment as dynamic and constantly changing.
  7. OAR leaders must become fully accountable both to their projects and to their funders.
  8. Catalysing a dynamic environment for agility, creativity, risk-taking, and innovation is imperative.

While I am skeptical of the entrepreneurial thinking the report starts with we can learn from these points about sustainability by looking at the issue from an entrepreneurial perspective still stands. We can and should think about the long term sustainability and we can learn from other perspectives.

The really useful part of the report is “Section 4: Revenue Generating Options for OAR  Projects” which systematically discusses direct and indirect ways of generating revenue including the much avoided approach of allowing ads into academic sites.

Brandon Crisp and Game Addiction

The sad story of Brandon Crisp and his parents is over. The Globe and Mail reports that an Autopsy shows Brandon Crisp died from fall. Brandon had run away from home after his parents revoked his Xbox privileges after he had skipped school to play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Microsoft got involved when they doubled the reward for information about Brandon’s whereabouts and shared information about his online team. His parents were afraid he was addicted to the game though the truth may be that he was caught in a network of obligations to team members with whom he played. As an article in Maclean’s puts it:

What they didn’t know at the time, his parents say, was just how much the game meant to their son and how troublesome that connection had become. Since his disappearance, the true extent of his involvement has become clear. While he had few friends in Barrie, his Xbox had a list of 200 people whom he played Call of Duty with online. Judged too small to keep up in hockey, the shy but competitive teenager found respect and success in the video game world, where he played on “clans,” or online teams. It wasn’t just a game, it was Brandon’s life — something he might even make money playing in professional tournaments one day, he once told a friend. “These are the things I didn’t realize,” says Steve, standing in a police command centre near where Brandon vanished, his hands wrapped around a bottle of water. “When I took his Xbox away, I took away his identity.” (What happened to Brandon? by Colin Campbell and Jonathon Gatehouse, Oct. 30, 2008)

The article mainly talks about the possibility that computer games are addictive and includes a response from the ESA that the media is “addicted” to such stories. The Escapist in response to Maclean’s has an editorial by Andy Chalk (sent to me by Calen) titled The Stigma of Normal which argues that the evidence of a connection between games and Brandon’s running away is scant.

Playing videogames in this day and age is no more remarkable than watching television or listening to music. Did he overindulge? Maybe, although we have only his parents’ word to that effect, and if he did, it would hardly be beyond the pale for teenage behavior anyway. Yet even though the only videogame connection to the case is the fact that he played them, it’s virtually impossible to see or read anything about his disappearance without the gaming angle being thrust in your face like the armored crotch of a victorious deathmatch opponent. (The Stigma of Normal, Andy Chalk, Nov. 5, 2008)

It seems to be both sides, the media and … the (gaming) media are addicted to each other and this issue. They both have their audience and play to them. How could the discussion around gaming mature?

Alternative DNS roots

In the category of “why didn’t I think of that” I recently discovered that there are alternative DNS roots. Domain name services are what resolve domain names like “theoreti.ca” into an actual IP Address. The available root names like .com, .ca and so on are limited and you can’t invent your own like “.rockwell” without paying a lot or convincing ICANN. That’s where alternative DNS root name servers come in. Obviously there are good reasons to not use alternative roots systems. As the Internet Architecture Board puts it in RFC 2826:

To remain a global network, the Internet requires the existence of a globally unique public name space. The DNS name space is a hierarchical name space derived from a single, globally unique root. This is a technical constraint inherent in the design of the DNS. RFC 2826: IAB Technical Comment on the Unique DNS Root

That said, Guy pointed me to a blog entry on Why I use my own DNS resolvers that explains why one might want to run your own DNS service (speed) and how you can then use OpenNIC root servers to resolve alternative names.

Orion: Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Orion conference Powering Research and Innovation: A National Summit on a panel on Cyberinfrastructure on “Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Back to Supercomputing.” Alas Michael Macy from Cornell, who was supposed to also talk didn’t make it. (It is always more interesting to hear others than yourself.) I was asked to try to summarize the humanities needs/perspectives on cyberinfrastructure for research which I did by pointing people to the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure report “Our Cultural Commonwealth.” One of the points worth making over an over is that we have a pretty good idea now what researchers in the humanities need as a base level of infrastructure (labs, servers and support). The interesting question is how our needs are evolving and I think that is what the Bamboo project is trying to document. Another way to put it is that research computing support units need strategies for handling the evolution of cyberinfrastructure. They need ways of knowing what infrastructure should be treated like a utility (and therefore be free, always on and funded by the institution) and what infrastructure should be funded through competitions, requests or not at all. We would all love to have everything before we thought of it, but institutions can’t afford expensive stuff no one needs. My hope for Bamboo is that it will develop a baseline of what researchers can be shown to need (and use) and then develop strategies for consensually evolving that baseline in ways that help support units. High Performance Computing access is a case in point as it is very expensive and what is available is usually structured for science research. How can we explore HPC in the humanities and how would we know when it is time to provide general access?

Information Overload and Clay Shirky

Peter sent me to Clay Shirky’s It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York which starts with a chart from a IDC White Paper showing the growth of digital information. His title summarizes his position on the issue of Information Overload, but on the way he made the point that we have been complaining about overload for a while. To paraphrase Shirky, “if the problem doesn’t go away it is a fact.” Shirky jokes that the issue comes up over an over because “it makes us feel better” about not getting anything done.

I, like others, have used the overload meme to start talks and am now wondering about the meme. Recently I was researching a talk for CaSTA 2008 that started from this issue of excess information and found that Vannevar Bush had used overload as the problem to drive his essay, “As We May Think” in 1945.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. (Vannevar Bush, As We May Think)

If Shirky is right that this is a fact, not a problem, and that we default to using it to leverage ideas as solutions, then we have to look again at the perception of overload. Some of the questions we might ask are:

  1. What is the history of the perception of overload?
  2. Is it something that can be solved or is it a like a philosophical problem that we return to informatics as a ground for discussion?
  3. Have structural changes in how information is produced and consumed affected our perception as Shirky claims? (He talks about FaceBook being a structural change for which our balancing filtering mechanisms haven’t caught up.)
  4. One common response in the academy is to call for less publishing (usually they call for more quality and less pressure on researchers to crank out books to get tenure.) Why doesn’t anyone listen (and stop writing?)
  5. What role do academics play in the long term selection and filtering that shapes the record down to a canon?

NiCHE: The Programming Historian

NiCHE logoNiCHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment) has a useful wiki called The Programming Historian by William Turkel and Alan MacEachern. The wiki is a “tutorial-style introduction to programming for practicing historians” but it is could also be used by textual scholars who want to be able to program their own tools. It takes you through learning and using Python for text processing for things like word frequencies and KWICs. It reminds me of Susan Hockey’s book, Snobol Programming for the Humanities. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) which I loved at the time, even if I couldn’t find a Snobol interpreter for the Mac.

We need more of such books/wikis.

Conference Report: Tools For Data-Driven Scholarship

I just got back from the Tools For Data-Driven Scholarship meeting organized by MITH and the Centre for New Media and History. This meeting was funded by the NEH, NSF, and the IMLS and brought together tool developers, content providers (like museums and public libraries), and funders (NEH, JISC, Mellon, NSF and IMLS.) The goal was to imagine initiative(s) that could advance humanities tool development and connect tools better with audiences. I have written a Conference Report with my notes on the meeting. One of the interesting questions asked by a funder was “What do the developers really want?” It was unclear that developers really wanted some of the proposed solutions like a directory of tools or code repository. Three things the breakout group I was in came up with was:

  • Recognition, credit and rewards for tool development – mechanisms to get academic credit for tool development. This could take the form of tool review, competitions, prizes or just citation when our tool is used. In other words we want attention.
  • Long-term Funding so that tool development can be maintained. A lot of tool development takes place in grants that run out before the tool can really be tested and promoted to the community. In other words we want funding to continue tool development without constantly writing grants.
  • Methods, Recipes, and Training that are documented that bring together tools in the context of humanities research practices. We want others with the outreach and writing skills to weave stories about their use to help introduce tools to others. In other words we want others to do the marketing of our tools.

A bunch of us sitting around after the meeting waiting for a plane had the usual debriefing about such meetings. What do they achieve even if they don’t lead to initiatives. From my perspective these meeting are useful in unexpected ways:

  • You meet unexpected people and hear about tools that you didn’t know about. The social dimension is important to meetings organized by others that bring people together from different walks. I, for example, finally met William Turkle of Digital History Hacks.
  • Reports are generated that can be used to argue for support without quoting yourself. There should be a report from this meeting.
  • Ideas for initiatives are generated that can get started in unexpected ways. Questions emerge that you hadn’t thought of. For example, the question of audience (both for tools and for initiatives) came up over and over.

Fortune of the Day – Fortune Hunting

Visual Collocator

Lisa Young with the support of the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group (STG) has developed a Fortune of the Day – Fortune Hunting interactive art site based on a collection of scanned fortune cookie slips she created. It has elements of a public textuality site like the Dictionary though focused completely on fortunes. The interface is simple and elegant. I believe it has been exhibited recently for the first time. The project uses the TAPoRware Visual Collocator for one of its interfaces.

University Affairs: MLA changes course on web citations

University Affairs has a story by Tim Johnson on the latest MLA Style Manual, titled “MLA changes course on web citations”, where they quote me about the new MLA recommendation that URLs aren’t needed in citations (because they aren’t reliable.) I had a long discussion with Tim – being interviewed when they have talked to other people is a strange way to learn about a subject. In retrospect it would have been more useful to point out the emerging alternatives to URLs, some of which are designed to be more stable. Some that I know of:

  • TinyURL and similar projects let you get a short (“tiny”) URL that redirects to the full location.  A list of such tools is at http://daverohrer.com/15-tinyurl-alternatives-shorten-your-urls/
  • The Digital Object Identifier (DOI®) System allows unique identifiers to be allocated and then has a resolution system to point to a location(s). To quote from their Overview, a DOI “is a name (not a location) for an entity on digital networks. It provides a system for persistent and actionable identification and interoperable exchange of managed information on digital networks.”
  • The WayBack Machine grabs copies of web pages at regular intervals if allowed. You can thus see changes in the document over time.

In short, we don’t have a clear standard that has emerged, but we have alternatives that could provide us with a stable system.

I should add that the point of a citation is not what is in it, but whether it lets you easily find the referenced research so that we can recapitulate the research.

CaSTA 2008: New Directions in Text Analysis

CaSTA 08 LogoI am at the CaSTA 2008 New Directions in Text Analysis conference at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The opening keynote by Meg Twycross was a thorough and excellent tour through manuscript digitization and forensic analysis techniques.

My notes are in a conference report (being written as it happens.)