Humanities and the WebA look at how the Web is changing the humanities

Reuben Binns, William Fyson, Chris Hughes08 July 2013

Innovation, Regulation and the WebFuture implications for the creative industries

Christoper Hughes

What is Innovation: Definitions

• “The management of all the activities involved the process of idea generation, technology development, manufacturing and marketing of a new (or improved) product[/service]”

• “The process of turning opportunity into new ideas and of putting these into widely used practice”

• “A regular gathering of people for the purchase and sale of provisions, livestock, and other commodities) “

• “Innovation is the conversion of knowledge and ideas into a benefit, which may be for commercial use or for the public good; the benefit may be new or improved products, processes or services”

How can we maximise innovation?

• International aviation used to be one of the most regulated industries in the world

• Large state-owned monopolies protected from the forces of competition, with fares being subject to state approval and access to routes and airport slots being tightly controlled to the benefits of the incumbents

• Regulations created market distortions that resulted in an inefficient trade-off between imperfect competition and imperfect regulation.

• Adverse affect on efficiency of Airline Industry

• Deregulation revolutionised the air transport industry

• Created more opportunities for entrepreneurs, resulting in more innovation and competition to the benefit of the consumer

Disruptive Innovation

Should markets be free?

Regulating the Web

• The internet offers the closest thing to a perfectly competitive market in the world today

• However, if left to the market it is unlikely to provide enough incentives to maximise innovation

• Largely because invention “spill over” where firms can copy the new idea without having to pay research costs

• IP such as patents and copyright, were designed to protect investors and increase the incentive to innovation; however, we now live in a world where ideas can be easily be designed around and… stolen.

History of Internet Governance

Policy 1.0 (1990 – 2000)

“hands off the internet”

Policy 2.0 (2000-2010)

“Mass copyright infringement and protectionism”

Policy 3.0 (2010-now)

“Economic pressure for growth”

Conclusion

VS

The Web and Scholarly Communication

William Fyson

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The Web and Research• The Web can be utilised in the research

environment for two primary goals:

• 1) Breaking down the barriers to communication

• 2) Providing access to a vast array of powerful resources, enabling brand new methodologies

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Scholarly Dissemination• The Open Access (OA) movement aims to

revolutionise scholarly communication:

Open Acces

s

Read

Download

Copy

DistributePrint

Search

Link

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Open Access• There are two flavours of Open Access publishing:

• Gold OA: Authors pay to publish

– Gold OA journals can charge very expensive Article Processing Charges (APCs)

• Green OA: Authors deposit published articles in an online repository

– Journals often impose lengthy embargo periods that restrict an article’s availability

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The Humanities Perspective on OA

Opportunities Concerns

Journal subscriptions are increasingLack of infrastructure or funding to support new dissemination methods

Book list numbers are dwindlingAPCs may price postgraduates or independent scholars out of academia

Research output is rapidly growing OA monograph business models are not sufficiently developed

...and an ethical obligation to make research available to all...?

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OA Humanities Projects

Numerous projects aim to make the humanities more open!

Humanities Directory

• A sister publishing site of the Social Sciences Directory

• Low APCs and waives where appropriate

• Fast publishing route

• Author retains copyright

• 12,000 downloads of their first 5 papers

Open Humanities Press

• Aims to raise awareness of OA in the humanities

• And provide technical support to OA journals

• Offers an OA monograph publishing service

Open Library of the Humanities

• Inspired by PLOS – a gold OA publisher

• Published based on accuracy, not importance

• Also waives APCs• Articles digitally

preserved and safely archived

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Other Web Advantages• WYSIWIG tools, born digital documents and multimedia.

• Enhanced sharing of resources, co-creation and community building.

• Physical collections can be shared among many researchers across institutional boundaries.

– Projects can be strategically split to take advantage of institutional strengths

– Increase chance of funding whilst simultaneously cutting costs– Wider impact across disciplines and outside of academia

• Crowd sourcing creates a new class of citizen scholars

Licensing Your Research

Reuben Binns

Content Licensing - what and why?• Traditional copyright comes by default

• Licenses versus waivers

• Licenses make it clear to others what they are and aren't allowed to do with the creative work

• Open licenses build on existing copyright and database right laws

• They are layered: legalese -> human -> machine

Open Licenses - Creative Commons

All CC licenses allow the work to be copied, distributed, displayed, digitised, subject to some combination of the following conditions:

License for papers

Most open access journals and preprint repositories use a CC-BY license (attribution)

As the most permissive license, it allows new works to be built on top without restrictions

License for research data

Tools and guides for easy licensing

CC license chooser - creativecommons.org/choose/

Open Data Commons guide - opendatacommons.org/guide/

Open Research Data Handbook - booki.cc/open-research-data-handbook/

Find openly licensed images - photopin.com/ , flickr.com/creativecommons