German-oa-debate

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German Open Access Debate

Notes and links related the German debate about open access in early 2009, stemming from the 'Heidelberg Appeal' regarding the protection of copyright.


Materials

Heidelberg Appeal: The Freedom to Publish and the Protection of Copyright

‘Open Expropriation’ through GoogleBooks

Free Access to Knowledge, democratization through Google? The slogan ‘Open Access’ seems promising but the preservation of our social knowledge is at stake/ by Rudolf Walther

Every technological innovation produced its own myths and legends. The railroad was believed to sicken the more sensitive minds. Decoding the human genome led to the rumour that soon we will be able to (re-)produce dysfunctional body parts from scratch. In the wake of the emergence of the internet and search engines a double-side myth came to the fore; firstly to be have free access to trusted knowledge and secondly to thus democratise the access to knowledge.

This argument plays off the expensive, yet scientifically excellent Brockhaus (the German equivalent of the Encyclopedia Britannica; trans) against more comprehensive and cheap search engines and web encyclopedias that do not comply with rigorous academic standards. The latter does not constitute an alternative for only a mad ideology can make people believe that competently organised knowledge can be accessed for free in the long run.

Faced with problems of verifiability and the limited shelf life of web encyclopedias, the survival of published and printed encyclopedias ought to be ensured. This cannot be left to private arbitrariness, but is as important a task for cultural policy-makers as the protection of a variegated publishing landscape (for the printed book). In other words, parliament ought to act for the logic of the market fails.

Google makes entire library catalogues accessible online, occasionally breaching copyright law. As the philologists and editors Roland Reuß and Uwe Jochum have shown in their contribution to both the journal Textkritische Beiträge and on their website Textkritik.de, the emergence of Googlebooks produced new myths. They are subsumed under the heading of ‘open access’, i.e the free access to as well as the global visibility of academic publications. These ‘heralds of the public sphere’ present their message disguised in the ‘tinsel of democratisation’ and promise access to academic knowledge will become cheaper [all quotes from the Reuß and Jochum article; transl.].

Uwe Jochum has done the maths. In 2005, the University of Yale has paid $4.668 to provide their researchers with access to a single article in an extremely specialized biomedical e-journal. One year later, these quasi-monopolists demanded $31.625 per article. This is equivalent to seven annual subscriptions to conventionally published biomedical journals. ‘Open Access’ isn’t cheaper, it’s merely faster.

People obscure who pays for this faster access. In Yale a private trust did so, in Germany it would be taxpayers’ money channelled through libraries. Even the US university gave up when faced with the enormous costs of ‘open access’ publications. If library use their budgets to pay for the purchase of digital publications rather than books, they undermine themselves ‘from within’ (Jochum). Does faster access compensate for this?

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Association; transl), which is entirely funded by taxes, also propagates the ‘open-access madness’ (Reuß). However, it takes the slogan at least seriously, leading not to higher expenditure on the part of libraries, but to altogether more foundational problems. The DFG wants to force the recipients of research grants to publish the outcome of their research not only with academic publishers, but also to make it accessible ‘digitally and free of charge online’. Academic publishing houses are small and medium-sized companies. What publishing house would be mad enough to print a book if it its content can be downloaded for free the next day? This, however, is but the smallest of the three crucial problems with ‘Open Access’.

The second problem is the blackmail and disfranchisement of authors. The University of Zurich leads the way. As evidence of one’s research output, it regularly demands a list of researchers’ publications. There would be nothing wrong with this, if it didn’t demand at the same time that these papers be placed at the disposal of the university server, which can be accessed free of charge. This amounts to a direct infringement of the intellectual property right of the author, who can rightfully decide how to (re-)use his works when and where he/she wants. This is nothing other than an expropriation. No academic publisher will publish a book that can be read on a freely accessible server.

The third problem is especially relevant for cultural policy. It remains to be seen for how long web content is readable – for five, 50, 500 years or even forever? This means a society exclusively storing its scientific and cultural artefacts on the web risks either losing at once or progressively forgetting its history, knowledge and culture? Data from the first generation of PCs that is barely 30 years old can be rendered readable today only at considerable cost.

No one knows how great the danger is that, one day, 3000-year old hieroglyphs remain decipherable, whereas 50-year old texts won’t. It would be naïve to trust engineers and scientific technocrats. When the CD emerged, the industry praised its ‘imperishability’. Today we can’t even read badly burned CDs. It is astonishing how silent academic publishers, researchers and responsible librarians remain on all this. Google piracy and the ‘Open Access’-sham are more dangerous than the pirates off the Somali coast.

Open Excess: The Heidelberg Appeal 

  perlentaucher.de/artikel/5347.html

Main points:

Open Access or ‘Open Expropriation’?

What access should we have to digital knowledge? In the wake of a taz article a debate emerged on the access to scientific information / by Ben Schwan

Rudolf Walther’s trenchant critique of GoogleBooks and free access to academic texts, which was published last Friday, made a lot of noise in the comment section of the taz. Even among taz editors there were heated debates, with online writer favouring open access, whereas the editors of the printed papersuch as the editor of the Zeit, Michael Naumann, and the taz, Bascha Mika, signed the Heidelberg Appeal of German authors and publishers repudiating the movement termed by the Walther ‘Open Expropriation’.

What is it all about? The academic world is undergoing tremendous change. Whereas articles used to be published in academic journals, the trend points to the digital realm, where both open and closed access meet. On the one hand there are academic publishers that transpose their offline business model to the online world making good money. The Open Access movement, on the other hand, demands all academic publications be accessible online for free.

Numerous German research institutions support the latter view: Wissenschaftsrat, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or Leibniz-Gesellschaft and Max-Planck-Institutes. Then there is Google, with its grandiloquent digitization project ‘GoogleBooks’. It attempts to make as much knowledge accessible as possible while using advertisements to fund itself.

Among scientists, two factions seem to crystallise. Some consider Open Access a laudable endeavour for it enables them to access the works of their colleagues from all over the world. Others fear that their publications will become invisible once they join the pile of data that is the internet, while their authorial rights are undermined for universities force them to publish online, thus preventing a traditional publication with one of the established academic publishers. Walter belongs to the critics of the Open Access movement... [What follows is a summary of Walther’s article, ‘Open Expropriation’ through GoogleBooks, transl.]

Walter was fiercely criticised by specialist blogs. Markus Beckedahl of netzpolitik.de regards Walther’s piece as a fundamental critique of the digitization of books and believes Walther did not get what Open Access is about.

Matthias Spielkamp, expert for digital rights, writes for Perlentaucher.de, arguing that Google’s digitization project amounts to a fait accompli, the better to complete out of court settlements with US publishers’ and authors’ associations (relying on millions of dollars). ‘All authors and publishers need to comply with these settlements for they constitute “class action”, which has a quasi-legal effect on members of a professional class.’ The archivists’ blog Archivalia contends that Walther’s position is on the margins of the debates: ‘Even the taz polemicises against Open Access’.

The truth, as so often, is somewhere in between. ‘Only a mad ideology can make people believe, competently organised knowledge can be accessed free of charge’, Walther wrote. No one claimed the opposite. On the web one can find very different business models ranging from direct payment to advertisement, which, incidentally, have been used by private TV stations for decades. The problem is the transitional phase we find ourselves in. Ad executives pay relatively little for the attention of web users. Representatives of Open Access, however, claim that the state funds research in Germany – and the resulting knowledge should therefore be made freely accessible as public information. This scares copyright-conscious authors. In the long run, however, knowledge can be useful only if one has access to it. Walther also knows this when he fears digital media might become unreadable one day. That’s why we need back-ups; Open Access is one of them.

Joint statement from 10 science organisations

GoogleBook: Boon and Bane

The struggle for copyrights has at last reached Germany. This is a good thing. Since GoogleBooks began to digitize the archives of US libraries five years ago, there is considerable uncertainty, in particular among authors and publishers. The key issue is the following: Do companies such as GoogleBooks ensure free access to global knowledge in the future or do monopoly corporations currently act primarily to expropriate authors and intellectual producers?

This is not merely a question pertaining to a social minority of writers and publishers. No, due to the technological revolution the entire sector of knowledge production and transmission faces a complete reorganisation. Up to now, intellectual property rights remained with the heirs and publishers of the author for 70 years after the latter’s demise. With the aid of US libraries, GoogleBooks already started to digitize the more recent contents of library catalogues that are out of print. The ensuing complex problems led to legal actions in the US. Furthermore, it seems likely that e-books such as Kindle will achieve a breakthrough sooner rather than later, resulting in a complete transformation of the publishing markets as we know it.

The Heidelberg Appeal “For Freedom of Publication and the Protection of Authorial Rights”, signed by writers as well known as Julia Franck Daniel Kehlmann or Sybille Lewitscharoff accordingly turned out to be somewhat hysterical in tone: “Authors and publishers are objecting to all attempts and practices undermining, firstly, the copyright that is fundamental to literature, arts, and science, secondly, the freedom of research and academic teaching, and thirdly the freedom of the press.” The paper tiger roars. Yet who is to do something?

One group of irate publishers ranging from Michael Naumann (Germann weekly Die Zeit) to K. D. Woelff (of the prestigious Stroemfeld publishing house) points to the State, the German administration, or parliament to act. “Policy-makers have a duty to enforce, at both a national and international level, the individual entitlements related to the production of artistic and scientific works.” This, however, is more easily said than done.

Notwithstanding isolated iconoclasts, no one would dispute the claim that there is no going back to an age prior to both Google and digitization. Once something circulates in the world, it won’t disappear. The new technologies allow for user potential that is of interest to both consumers and producers. Does anyone remember the transition from hot type to photo composition and the accompanying sense of triumph among publishers that an entire (highly skilled!!) profession has been made redundant? Or does anyone recall the strenuous printers illegally producing first left-wing literature, then best sellers of big publishing houses, and distributing them by hand in the streets and pubs of Germany in the 1970s? These were ‘scrumpers’ breaching copyrights for romantic and petty criminal reasons. A No-Copyright scene emerged that, despite not having had a large-scale impact at the time, inspired the future vocabulary of web activists: no censorship, free access to cultural riches for all, etc. The debates raging around Googlebooks, however, are not about small-time data piracy, but about the carefully constructed corporate power that complies with the logic of a capital-intensive and global business. This is the reason why there is so much concern.

Yet the real question of the Heidelberg Appeal is: Who pays for intellectual production if more and more people have free access to literary and scientific works? What happens with the independent artists and scientists if their intellectual property right is not acknowledged and remunerated, how are they meant to produce and live?

The promise of democratization through digitization would turn out to be a fluke if the basis of production dried up in the meantime. Intellectual labour could only be pursued by civil servants, the independently wealthy and corporate employees. All the same, there is something strange in the appeal by German intellectuals: There is not even a hint of a self-employed business practice or a regulatory regime that constitutes an adequate response to scientific and technological progress. This is symptomatic of the reputed intellectual elite of Old Europe. Many react to the techno-cultural revolution from abroad by calling for the state. Incidentally, this conceals that there was no resolve to establish an independent, morally and socially superior business idea with a global reach. Obviously, Google, Amazon, Sony, Youtube and all the others benefit from the slowness of its (Old) European rivals.

The German consumer couldn’t care less whether German-language literature has been digitized within an American or German library catalogue. Yet there is no reason for schadenfreude as long as it remains unclear who will foot the bill for the individual production of art and knowledge. Both fee-based downloads and an extension of the VG Wort (an organisation responsible for the receipt and distribution of authorial royalties; the translator) to cover the digital sector provides viable alternatives. Compulsory contributions to the Artists’ Social Welfare Fund by Google are also currently being discussed.

The average user already knows that the consumption of immaterial works of art and science cannot occur free of charge. The material aesthetic of the web and related opportunities for both users and fraudsters will not make more traditional means of communication such as the printed book superfluous either. Generally speaking, new technologies also create new markets. Free Access only works if others pay for it. Google makes a handsome profit from advertisements, from which cultural producers without legal advisers thus far do not benefit at all. These circumstances can be changed. Lawsuits currently taking place in the US will possibly break new ground in June. The old copyright is dead, long live the new copyright.

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