Academic Journals Now Have More in Common with Other Online Media

Two recent developments noted by the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Wired Campus blog show that academic journals can be treated online like most other media – they can be swapped online legally and illegally.  I’m a fan of sharing journal articles as widely as possible, but I prefer that it be done legally.

The true innovation is in the Netflix-like service provided by Deep Dyve, an academic search engine that recently started a rental service for journal articles.  Unlike the red envelopes you get in the mail, articles rented through Deep Dyve must be viewed on their system – no downloading or printing possible.  You get 24 hours with the article for $0.99, which can make researching a lot cheaper for those without access to libraries with plenty of journal subscriptions.  Open access journal articles can be viewed for free.  There are subscription plans that allow for greater access periods with a monthly fee.  The companies revenue-sharing agreements with journals likely prevents any legal action over what could be construed as re-selling of a journal publication.  The hope is that more researchers will actually purchase the article from the journal after renting it via Deep Dyve.

The illegal swapping was detected in a study published in the Internet Journal of Medical Informatics.  Over a six-month review of a website visited by medical students and professionals, over $700,000 worth of journal articles were shared without subscription access.  This represents nearly 5,500 articles, or $5,500 if all of these articles were available for viewing on Deep Dyve.

Arizona Court Decides Metadata is Part of the Public Record

The Threat Level blog from Wired reports on an Arizona case that expands what counts as part of the public record.  This expansion concerns all that extra information that document programs like word processors and databases add to documents.  This information gives context and history to a document – when it was created, by whom, how many versions there were, etc. (this data depends a lot on either program settings or data entry on creations).  It could reveal a fair number of interesting facts.  For instance, if government agencies simply run with the texts provided to them by lobbying groups, that might show up on metadata about document history.   In the case that led to this court decision, the plaintiff was concerned that relevant documents had been backdated, something that metadata would likely uncover.

The Arizona state Supreme Court ruled that embedded metadata (like what is often entered in Word documents automatically) in records stored in electronic format are part of the public record.  By specifically mentioning embedded metadata and electronic formats, the decision does not place a significant burden on records administrators, since the electronic document could be transmitted, and metadata that is not embedded  in the document (and most likely harder to track down and produce) does not have to be disclosed.

As you might expect, several open government and public watchdog groups filed friend of the court (amicus) briefs in the case, and will likely seek other cases that might be receptive to the decision by the Arizona state Supreme Court.  Whether public agencies will be more careful with embedded metadata or more instances of managing information will emerge remains to be seen.  I lean toward the latter.