A new technology journal relies heavily on old closed technologies, to the dismay of those who want to see real change to open models. And I make a modest suggestion.

And I think that in the new Web 2.0 world, people are beginning to understand that they can and should value what is free. Think of the people who now depend on Linux, on Google everything, on MySpace and Blogger, etc.

Do NPO people value what they get for free?

In my experience, for-profit business people simply don’t. If you offer them something for free, whether it’s a journal or a service or a pen, they’ll take it, sure, but they’ll suspect it isn’t really any good because you aren’t charging for it.

But most engineers do, and did even in the government-funded R&D world I entered in the 80’s. Even then, when money wasn’t the issue, we were using GNU-emacs because it was better. (I’m still using it.)

These worlds are radically different. Software geeks love what works and works elegantly, and can tell by looking at the code and running it. Business people evaluating process advice have a much harder task: they have to evaluate the product based on their experience and the reputation of the author, and if they do try to “run” the advice, they have to do it in the real world of their enterprise at a very high cost for failure.

I’ve been a consumer of free software as an engineer and free business advice when running a multi-million dollar company, and I was a lot more comfortable taking the software, which could be tested, even if it wasn’t supported. When it comes to valuing something, it seems to me that the real currency is reputation, not money. But money is the way you “tag” valuable items in the business world.

Are non-profit companies and people different?

Michael as always has an even-handed and calm approach to criticism – allow me to be a bit more passionate in his defense. Michelle writes:

I think it is incumbent upon knowledgeable leaders to provide models for how to do things differently - provide tools that foster social change in ways that foster social change, not in ways that help to sustain the status quo.

I would love nothing more (and I know that Michael’s with me all the way) to find a way to do things differently – to be able to create well researched, thought out, and edited content and provide free access for all. After having spent more than a year trying to find that model, though, I don’t know if it exists.

And I have to admit that I find it incumbent upon the leaders who are advocating for openness of everything to provide models on how this can work for small organizations who make a living based on content (like Michael’s). Good content is a service that requires hours and hours of time and thought. If you’re doing it full time, money is a necessity. And to me, high quality content is worth paying money for, especially in the nonprofit sector, where there is so little sharing of information. If we as a sector advocate against models that allow authors or editors to be paid then we make it even more difficult than it already is to try to put this – incredibly needed - content in the world.

Michael’s not in this for the money. I would be extremely surprised to find out that his organization has even come close to covering their costs for the Journal. While I know he’d love to find a way to provide this content in an open manner, may I suggest that it’s better to have it in a closed format than not to have it at all? That tradeoff really does exist. And if putting things out there in a closed fashion results in an outcry about the format, it’s easy to feel as an organization that it would be better just to not publish it at all.

If people have thoughts on a sustainable model by which small organizations can both publish open content and cover their costs in writing it, I’d be excited to discuss that. That’s a terrific conversation to have. But I’ll put an unpopular suggestion out there: I think we as a community also need to consider possible negative impacts of advocating that all content ought to be open. It’s already very difficult to pay for the effort of creating great content; if in addition we promote in people’s mind the idea that all content ought to be free, it’s hard to escape promoting the idea that no content is worth paying for. Which puts us in danger of tipping an environment in which it’s very difficult to support good content into one in which it’s downright impossible.

Second, as Michael suggested, I would nothing more than having a CC license on the Journal. Since Michael and the Gilbert Center did a lion share of the work, with his staff, and we at NTEN did not have the resources to pay him, I agreed to the license with the hope that we would continue the conversation and fundraising to make the Journal available to everyone, widely and free of charge.

One caveat: We did make the Journal available to all attendees of the Nonprofit Technology Conference who could download a copy without subscription.

I appreciate Peter’s suggestion for using the OA repository, and also Michael’s idea of an ‘open’ bounty. I believe there are also sponsorship and fundraising opportunities that we have not explored that would allow us to pay for the production costs while providing the Journal at no charge with a Creative Commons License (as is all of our content on our site). I welcome this communitie’s suggestions and hope that we will see the next issue widely disseminated. Thanks for starting the conversation, Michelle.

Katrin Verclas
NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network

This comment is for Michael. One way that your journal can support open access (OA) without giving up subscription revenue is to allow your authors to deposit their peer-reviewed postprints in an OA repository. (In the jargon of OA advocacy, journals charging subscriptions but permitting this kind of author-initiated self-archiving are called “green”, while journals giving up subscriptions and providing OA themselves are called “gold”.) About 70% of traditional, non-gold, peer-reviewed journals are green. For example, all of Elsevier’s journals went green in 2004.

Going green helps readers, of course. For the same reason, it enlarges the audience and impact of the journal. Finally, it helps attract the kinds of authors who want to appear in your pages *and* provide OA to their own work.

I hope you’ll consider it.

Best,
Peter