Announcing announce@list.mathed.net

"Maybe someday you could continue Jerry Becker's email listserv." --David Webb, circa 2015

Dr. Jerry Becker died on April 16 at the age of 85, leaving behind his wife, three children, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and a very useful set of email listservs. By way of my Ph.D., Dr. Becker is an academic great-uncle of mine, although I never had the pleasure of meeting him. I can't pretend to fill his shoes, but there is something I can do to continue in his tradition by providing a service similar to what he offered for so many years.

Today I'm announcing announce@list.mathed.net. (Self-subscribe here.) It's an email distribution list to share the kinds of things people used to share through Dr. Becker: job openings, conference announcements, requests for articles for journal issues, and other items of interest to the mathematics education community. Instead of sending items to me, subscribers to the list can email the list address directly and I'll moderate items along that appear legitimate and useful. I'll tweak things along the way and, if there's demand for additional lists or services, I can consider offering them. The service is provided by an international GNU Mailman host. The software isn't flashy, but it works and isn't going anywhere. I may not live to 85 to keep hosting the list like Dr. Becker did, but I'll stick around as long as I can and I won't be surprised if Mailman sticks around that long, too.

So who am I and why am I doing this? I'm the mathematics specialist at the Colorado Department of Education, and prior to that I was a high school math teacher and a Ph.D. student at CU Boulder. Regardless if I was working in practice, research, or policy, I've been interested in the organization of education communities and how they communicate ideas. This includes professional organizations, Twitter, the Global Math Department, and forums like MyNCTM. Under the mathed.net domain, I've blogged and maintained a wiki, and at one time spun up an experimental instance of a social network using free software. In my current role with CDE I operate the CoMath listserv, which has been in existence since 1995, and I help edit the Colorado Mathematics Teacher journal. My advisor, David Webb, made the comment above somewhat offhandedly partway through my graduate school experience and it's stuck in my head ever since. Dr. Becker didn't leave his listservs to a successor, and the subscription lists they contained are (as they should be) the private information of his university. But that doesn't mean we can't try starting anew to continue the old.

I've long believed that if mathematics teachers and educators are going to all be part of a professional community, it's going to take many different related sub-communities in many different forms, using different technologies, membership structures, languages, and different target audiences. We're too numerous to all huddle under one hashtag, and too smart to think that our ideas could—or should—fit in one place. Maybe others will start email list services of their own to meet a particular need, or find other ways to communicate. That would be excellent. The more the merrier. We all have a part in this, and my next part is to moderate a new email list. So if you have something to share, or need to have things shared with you, I'll be at announce@list.mathed.net waiting for you to subscribe and post your messages.

Maintaining an Online Scholarly Identity

tl;dr: I prefer an ORCID + figshare + Twitter/Google+ combination over services like ResearchGate and Academia.edu.

By 2009 I was taking social media pretty seriously, and with all those links to find, save, and share, I put a lot of thought into social bookmarking. I was trying to figure out how to manage a bunch of overlapping options; at one time or another, I was using Delicious, Diigo, Pinboard, Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and FriendFeed. Some of those products had integrations (like sending links from Reader to Twitter) while simultaneously having overlapping functions (like following someone on Reader for the links you were also seeing them post to Twitter). New services popped up all the time, and others faded away or were killed off completely. It was kind of a mess, and it taught me some things about what I valued in my tools: (1) multiple small tools (but not too many) focused on being good at specific tasks could return greater total value than all-in-one solutions, and (2) openness is important, for financial reasons (both mine and the service), interoperability, and exportability.

The current landscape of tools and services for managing an online scholarly identity feels very reminiscent of those social bookmarking days. Part of that online identity includes general social media services, like Twitter and Facebook, but also a bunch of services for academics: Academia.edu, ResearchGate, ORCID, Google Scholar, figshare, SlideShare, ResearcherID, and Mendeley. I'm sure there are others.

My experience with social networks and bookmarking taught me I had three basic needs: establishing my identity, saving resources, and a place to follow and share with others. For my identity, I've used my own website as well as services like about.me. For saving resources (links, mostly), I eventually ditched both Delicious and Diigo and went with Pinboard. For following and sharing, I now stick mostly to Twitter and Google+, with less activity on Facebook and LinkedIn.

With a scholarly identity, I feel like I still have the same three basic needs: establishing my identity, saving resources, and a place to follow and share with others. In academia, your identity is often represented by your curriculum vitae and publication record, and there are ways of maintaining a CV online that go beyond just posting a PDF of the paper version. For saving resources, academics need a repository to save their slides, posters, handouts, pre-prints, and unpublished manuscripts. That leaves a place to follow and share with others. It could be an all-purpose social network, or it could be something more specialized. Here's how I see the services I mentioned playing out across these three needs:

My view of the online scholarly identity landscape

Right away, you see two services, Academia.edu and ResearchGate, making the all-in-one play. They also happen to be mostly closed, profit-seeking services, which has raised the eyebrows (and/or fists) of some academics. Mendeley is nearby but doesn't offer much as a social network. Google Scholar is a bit further from the center, as it lets you follow other academics and be notified about new publications, but offers no way to interact with other people. For the most part, these services — while certainly valuable in their own ways — go against my two criteria of simplicity and openness. Does that mean I don't use them? Actually, I have accounts and profiles on all four of these services, but I don't spend a lot of time on them and I'm very wary of the rights they want over my work. It's tricky to add a publication to your ResearchGate or Academia.edu profile without actually giving them the document, and if you manage to do it they'll hound you for the full-text version. So tricky is Academia.edu in this respect, I've decided to trust it with nothing. For more on the pros and cons of these services, I'll refer you to the post "A Social Networking Site is Not an Open Access Repository" from the Univeristy of California.

That leaves me seeking out tools in the non-overlapping parts of my diagram. Here's what I've come to use most:

Identity: This is probably the easiest choice of them all. My ORCID is like my CV, and its sole purpose is to give researchers a unique identity tied to their scholarly activities and outputs. (See this as a list of ten things, if you prefer.) My profile is filled with a lot of things I entered manually, but when I published an article recently with Springer I gave them my ORCID and got two things: (1) the article was added to my ORCID profile automatically via CrossRef, and (2) I got a little ORCID badge on the article that links to my ORCID profile. Over time, this system is designed to make sure that no person or system confuses me with another Raymond Johnson, and all my works are tied together. I do pay attention to my Google Scholar profile since it's such a widely used and useful search tool, but you can tell Google doesn't put a ton of resources behind it and I'm not sure how many people or services rely on the profile features. Impactstory is a really cool thing that belongs in this category (nearest the center), but it really operates on top of, not instead of, ORCID and other services.

Repository: This is a tougher choice because in addition to having a repository that is stable and secure, there are also intellectual property rights to think about. I have tried hosting files on my own website, as many publishers allow academics to do. That puts a certain amount of responsibility on me, and I have to worry about registering domains, fixing broken links, having a stable URL structure, etc. I'm moving away from that and recently added all my slides and posters to figshare. While figshare does give me a profile page, identity services are really not its thing. Figshare is about sharing all kinds of open-licensed scholarly outputs, including datasets, figures, posters, presentations, and documents. They give you a stable DOI that (I assume) will always point to your file, even if figshare shuts down and someone else takes over the repository. figshare does have its rough edges, and through following their social media activity I can safely say that most of their attention is on behind-the-scenes integrations with services like ORCID, ImpactStory, and APIs that are more for librarians than individual users. figshare also takes some commitment, as you have to choose one of a number of open licenses to post your work publicly (like Creative Commons BY; I wish other CC licenses were available, but they're not), and once you post something there's no delete button. It's not that you've given your property to figshare and they won't give it back; rather, you've licensed your property for the world to see and use and figshare is making sure the world can exercise that right. There are alternatives, like SlideShare, but they're owned by LinkedIn, more business-oriented, and not as open or integrated into academic services.

I currently have two documents that I'm not sharing on figshare and have instead chosen to use our university repository. I could put more on scholar.colorado.edu and rely on the fact that it will probably operate so long as the university exists, but I can't continue to use it after I leave the university.

Social Network: While I get notifications about publications through Google Scholar and ResearchGate, I don't interact hardly at all with other people there. For that, I stick with Twitter and Google+. And that's fine with me, really, as I only have so much mental bandwidth to work with anyway. Once in a while I'll look at the Q&A on ResearchGate but rarely do I see a conversation I really want to jump into like I do routinely on my regular social media accounts.

By going with an ORCID + figshare + Twitter/Google+ combination I feel like I'm getting (and retaining) more value than I would with a single service like ResearchGate. It's a fair amount of work, though, and I'd recommend people not try to maintain too many identities at once. My Academia.edu profile is nearly empty because fewer education researchers I know are there, and it's just too much duplicate work to maintain it and ResearchGate, and my ResearchGate profile still doesn't include everything I list at ORCID. I think the rarer your name is, the less need there is for you to maintain a Google Scholar profile, and you can probably settle on just one repository for public posting of your work. I have a lot of confidence that ORCID will be around for the long haul, unlike some of these venture-funded services that will have to make a profit or likely be shut down. It's not easy to tell who might go the way of Google Reader or FriendFeed, but as we saw with those services, something new came along to replace them and it was easier if we weren't too invested in any one tool.

Oh, and if all else fails, an up-to-date, ready-to-print pdf of your CV is still not a bad thing to have handy.

Nielsen's Reinventing Discovery (2011) in the Context of Education Research

As a Ph.D. student I've taken my share of methods courses, giving me skills in everything from ethnography to ANOVA. But as important as those things are, I've sensed that there are new research methods emerging thanks to technological advancements and online communities. Our lives are too data-rich and our means of communication are too plentiful to limit ourselves to the same methods for research -- and learning -- that we used just 10 years ago.

Even though I feel like I live in the thick of this revolution, engaging with teachers and researchers on Google+ and Twiter, I wanted a broader perspective on how researchers use networks to make new discoveries. For this I turned to Michael Nielsen's book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. Although Nielsen is a pioneer in quantum computing, I hoped to find some ideas that I could apply to a social science like education research.

Nielsen uses a variety of examples and concepts to describe what works and what doesn't (or hasn't) in networked science. Instead of listing them here, watch this TEDx talk by Nielsen:


If that talk wasn't long enough for you, Neilsen held a longer talk at Google that is worth checking out.

As much as I like Neilsen's example of Tim Gowers's Polymath Project, I can't imagine a direct translation to education research. One of the beautiful aspects of mathematics is that it usually doesn't require conducting an experiment, interviewing subjects, sampling a population, or agreeing on a conceptual framework -- the kinds of things that make social science untidy and difficult. Frankly, if solving problems in education were structured like proving mathematical theorems, I think we'd be solving more problems and finding better solutions than we are currently.

Neilsen's story about Qwiki hits home for me. For some time now I've imagined creating and maintaining a wiki that essentially translates the contents of the NCTM's Second Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning into knowledge that teachers could access and use. Just like Qwiki, it's easy to get math teachers and educators to agree that this would be a great resource to have. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how a math education wiki like the one I've imagined would avoid Qwiki's fate. Without incentives for experts to contribute and maintain the site, I'd probably spend more time fighting spam than helping teachers.

Neither the Polymath Project or Qwiki offer a blueprint for a new kind of mathematics education research. Thankfully, Nielsen describes some general characteristics for successful networked science. First, in his chapter titled "Restructuring Expert Attention," Nielsen suggests networked science has these attributes:

• Harnessing Latent Microexpertise -- The project must allow even the narrowest of expertise. A 3rd-year algebra teacher might not have the broad expertise of an experienced math education researcher, but that 3rd year teacher might have small elements of expertise that exceed that of the recognized experts.
• Designed Serendipity -- The project needs to be easy to follow and encourage participation from a variety of experts. You want problems to be seen by many in the hopes that just a few will think they have a solution they wish to contribute.
• Conversation Critical Mass -- One person's ideas need to be seen by others so they create more ideas, and the conversation around all the contributions keeps the project going.
• Amplifying Collective Intelligence -- The project should showcase the fact that collectively we are smarter than any one individual.

Those are all great characteristics of any project. But what makes this any different than any traditional, offline project? Nielsen offers several suggestions. Unlike a large group project with clear divisions of labor, technology allows us to divide labor dynamically. Wikipedia certainly would not have grown the way it did if labor had been divided statically between a set of contributors. Also, networked science uses market forces to direct the most attention to the problems of greatest interest. Lastly, contributing to an online project rarely feels like committee work, and participants can more easily ignore poor contributions or disruptive members.

Projects like Wikipedia and Linux exhibit the above attributes, but Nielsen explains that such projects needed something extra in order to scale to thousands of participants. Nielsen describes these in a chapter called "Patterns of Online Collaboration," and they are: (1) being modular, (2) encouraging small contributions, (3) easy reuse of earlier work, and (4) signaling to what needs attention. When I look at this list and think of Wikipedia, I can see how well a wiki or open source software project fosters these patterns. But how do we build such a project in education? Given Nielsen's framework above, a project that would interest me needs three key aspects:

• The content of the project has to be something that both teachers and researchers can contribute, such as a collection of math tasks, curriculum plans, or perhaps pedagogical techniques.
• Teachers need to be able to easily use and modify each other's content.
• (This one's the crux!) When teachers use content, there needs to be a way to collect and submit feedback about the use of that content, and that feedback becomes data that researchers can use not only to improve the content of the site, but to produce new and traditional reports of research.

It's that last bullet that's the hardest but most intriguing. There are so many places to get lesson ideas on the internet, but I don't know of any that collect data about the effectiveness of the lesson in a format suitable for research. Khan Academy claims to do this this kind of data collection internally, but KA is a closed project that lacks nearly all of the attributes Nielsen has described in his book. The project I want needs to be an open one, with all of its moving parts exposed and no more owned or identified with a single participant as Jimmy Wales is identified with Wikipedia. If you have ideas for what such a project could/should look like, leave them in the comments!

Open Access Publishing in Mathematics Education

As I write this, the White House petition to require free access over the internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research is within 150 signatures of the 25,000 needed to guarantee a response from the White House. If you're unfamiliar with the petition, this video concisely explains the issue:



Most of the advances in open access publishing seem to be in the natural and medical sciences -- mathematics, biology, medicine, etc. Much is this is due to a policy by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that requires publications from NIH-funded research be made available to the public, and the hope of the petition is that a similar policy would spread to other government funding agencies. Given that a significant amount of education research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), education researchers are going to have to think about their open access publishing options should policies require open access to publicly-funded research.

I'm a teacher, not a researcher. Should I care about open access to research?

Yes! Few things annoy me more than the assumption that teachers should not read or take any interest in published education research. I strongly believe that the more researchers think about teachers as part of the audience for their research, the more relevant that research is likely to be and the more quickly we can implement the results. So if you're a teacher and you come across a research article, pay attention. If it makes no sense to you or seems totally irrelevant to you as a teacher, there's probably something wrong. You would be doing a great service to bring that article and your problems with it to the attention of the research community, and researchers should welcome your input. Right now a lot of high-quality research hides from you in for-profit, closed journals, which I believe has allowed the goals of teachers and researchers to drift apart. With open access journals and greater communication via social media, I hope the divide between teachers and researchers can come together with greater frequency.

Current Top-Tier Mathematics Education Research Journals

In mathematics education, the following four journals are often seen as the most prestigious. Let's look at their current publishing policies:

Journal of Research in Mathematics Education - JRME is NCTM's research journal and  probably the top journal in the field. Unfortunately, they have a very author-unfriendly publishing policy:

Assignment of copyright for the article to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is required as a condition of publication. After acceptance by JRME, a manuscript may not be published elsewhere, including on the internet, without written permission from NCTM. Each author of a paper published in JRME will receive five complimentary copies of the issue in which the paper appears.

Wow, five complimentary copies? With those I can freely distribute my work to 5 people, or approximately 0.0000002% of worldwide internet users, all of whom can read this measly blog page.

Educational Studies in Mathematics - This journal was founded by Hans Freudenthal in 1968 and is currently published by Springer. Although Springer is an enormous publishing company with a vested interest in a traditional publishing model, they are making efforts to find ways to increase access while still making a profit. Authors have a choice: (a) Transfer their copyright to Springer or (b) opt into Springer's "Open Choice" program, which makes articles freely available on SpringerLink and allows the author to retain copyright and publish under a Creative Commons Attribution License. The catch? Springer charges the author a $3000 fee.

International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education - This journal is also published by Springer and has the same "Open Choice" option as ESM.

Mathematical Thinking and Learning - This journal is published by Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group. Their copyright agreement (PDF) includes the classic language about why authors should transfer copyright (and when I say "classic," I mean old, as in pre-internet): "The transfer of copyright from author to publisher must be clearly stated in writing to enable the publisher to assure maximum dissemination of the author's work." The thought that putting written work in an expensive journal distributed to a relatively small number of people and institutions "assures" a wider distribution than the open internet is plainly laughable. The copyright agreement does throw a few bones the author's way with these three exceptions:

1. Authors can copy their own article for their use in classrooms.
2. Authors can reuse the work in a textbook they might author.
3. Authors can copy their work for internal distribution within their institution.

Exception #2 is not to be overlooked -- some publishers will not grant that exception. I know one researcher who wanted to re-use an article he'd written as a dissertation chapter and was denied, forcing him to start the research and writing anew.

Current Open Access Journals

Assuming the journals above don't convert themselves to an open access publishing model (one without $3000 fees), the most immediate option for publishing under an open access mandate would be in an journal that's already open access. No, these journals don't have the history or prestige that the above journals have, but I do get the sense that tools like Google Scholar are making the journal name less relevant than in the past. Many of these journals have emerged in just the past 5-10 years, and I'll limit the list below to those that publish primarily in English and appear to receive submissions from U.S.-based researchers. All the journals found below were indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

I divide open access journals into two main camps -- those where the publisher takes copyright, and those where the author retains copyright. Given the open nature of these journals, I imagine some negotiation about copyright would be very acceptable, particularly if using something like the SPARC Author Addendum.

Author Copyright

International Journal for Mathematics Teaching and Learning - IJMTL is a joint publishing effort between Plymouth University, UK, and the College of Nyiregyháza, Hungary. Their author guidelines say nothing about copyright, but authors are expected to do their own copy editing and formatting of their final article. The articles I looked at made no mention of copyright or licensing, so I assume authors have retained copyright and have the right to assign a Creative Commons license if they wish.

Journal of Statistics Education - JSE has been published by the American Statistical Association since 1993 and clearly indicates the author's copyright on each article.

Journal of Urban Mathematics Education - JUME is edited by David Stinson at Georgia State and appears to be one of the higher-quality open access efforts, publishing articles by William Tate, Rico Gutstein, Megan Staples, Jere Confrey, Michael Battista, Jo Boaler, and others. Authors retain copyright with first publication rights granted to JUME.

Numeracy - This journal specializes in quantitative literacy and is hosted by the University of South Florida. Authors retain copyright under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. There are no publication charges.

Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal - Edited by Paul Ernest at the University of Exeter, UK, this journal has existed since 1990 and the copyright notice reads: "All materials published herein remain copyright of the named author(s), or of the editor if unattributed. Permission is given to freely copy the journal contents on a not-for-profit basis, provided full credit is given to the author and the journal." This sounds much like a "legal lite" interpretation of a Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial license, although there's no explicit mention of derivative works.

Pythagoras - This is the journal of the Association for Mathematics Education of South Africa, in existence since 1980. The copyright notice on a recent article indicates that the author retains the copyright and the work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Technology Innovations in Statistics Education - TISE is edited by Robert Gould at UCLA and authors retain copyright with publication under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial - Share Alike license.

The Teaching of Mathematics - This is published by the Mathematical Society of Serbia and makes no mention of copyright on their site or on published articles, so I assume copyright would stay with the author.

Publisher Copyright

Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education - Part of this journal includes articles about technology and mathematics education, with editorial review organized by AMTE. The publisher retains copyright to published articles.

International Electronic Journal of Mathematics Education - IEJME is published by Gökkuşağı, a Turkish publisher, and dates back to 2006. Their author guidelines don't say anything about who retains copyright of the published articles, but the journal itself indicates the copyright is held by Gökkuşağı.

Journal of Mathematics Education at Teachers College - This is a good looking journal with submissions from some well-known authors. The submission guideline page says nothing about copyright, but the journal itself and each article claims copyright for the publisher.

Journal of STEM Education - This journal requires the author pay a fee ($395 for the first 8 pages and author's bio, then $35 for each additional page) and also requires the transfer of copyright.

Statistics Education Research Journal - This international journal appears to include a wide variety of content but requires authors to transfer copyright.

The Mathematics Educator - TME is a student-produced journal from the University of Georgia and was first published in 1990. Despite the maturity of this journal, copyright is very unclear -- the site says nothing about transferring copyright, and the journal itself claims copyright for the publisher in the front matter, but nothing on articles themselves, and articles are available individually.

The Mathematics Enthusiast - Formerly known as the Montana Mathematics Enthusiast, this journal says nothing on the site about transferring copyright, but the articles themselves indicate a copyright held by the publisher.

Conclusion

It's difficult for me to predict exactly how an open access mandate would affect current journals. Those top four journals, because of their prestige, might not change a thing and hope to get submissions from authors who aren't funded by major federal agencies. Some of the open access journals are obscure now and will likely stay that way, at least to U.S. researchers. What I'd like to see is some of the currently closed "second-tier" journals open themselves. Some, like The Journal of Mathematical Behavior (an Elsevier publication), isn't a likely candidate. For a journal like For the Learning of Mathematics, opening access might be easier. (FLM already has a FAQ including the question, "Can I reprint an FLM article on my web site / anthology / lunch box?" with the simple answer, "If you are interested in reprinting articles that appear in FLM, please contact the managing editor.") Some journals already have policies that would seem to pull them in the direction of open access. Teaching Statistics, for example, is closed but allows authors to retain copyright so long as they give an exclusive license to publish to the journal. I don't know what good it is to have a copyright but no right to publish, but some tweaking of those policies might turn such a journal into something open.

Then again, maybe math education researchers will gravitate towards current large open access repositories. The article Number Concepts without Number Lines in an Indigenous Group of Papua New Guinea caught my eye not just for its content, but the fact it is published in PLoS ONE, a journal that's flourished publishing open access science and medicine content, not necessarily education-related articles. But there's no reason PLoS ONE can't expand its scope, something it's likely to do if new governement open access policies demand more open publications in more content areas.

Bonnie H. Litwiller, 1937-2012

I got word tonight that my undergraduate advisor, Bonnie Litwiller, passed away a couple days ago at the age of 74.

As a freshman at UNI, I had a temporary advisor until my program became more certain. After declaring as a math education major, Bonnie Litwiller was assigned as my advisor. I knew nothing about her. I remember asking Ed Rathmell, whom I had gotten to know while applying for a scholarship, what to expect from Litwiller as an advisor. I remember his response: "If you listen to her and do what she asks, she's great. She'll have your back when you need something. But don't cross her."

That's an uneasy way to know someone before you even get a chance to meet them. It felt like a description more fitting of mafia boss than a professor. But Rathmell's advice, as usual, was solid. Litwiller proved to be tough, and she made it clear to us that being a good math teacher was hard work. She set a good example: she and her research partner, David Duncan, would set aside a day a week where they'd lock themselves away in the library and write. As UNI isn't a top-level research university, the research activities of professors aren't always visible to the students. But Litwiller's dedication to research was clear, and there was no topic too small or journal too obscure. If she thought she had knowledge that would improve the teaching and learning of mathematics somewhere -- anywhere! -- she would write and submit for publication. She continued to write and publish even after her retirement from UNI in 2000, eventually passing the almost unfathomable mark of 1000 scholarly publications.

I took two classes with Litwiller, Teaching Middle School Mathematics and Teaching High School Mathematics. The classes were tough due to Litwiller being both picky about the quality of our work and her lack of clarity in describing what she wanted us to do. Some of us thought she was just being careless with her assignments, but I always wondered if this wasn't somehow purposeful. Either way, it was clear that she didn't want to do a lot of hand-holding. Some of us, ever so quietly yet respectfully, referred to her as the bulldog. A trusty companion that might just bite if you got out of line. If you didn't have the initiative and sense of responsibility to do quality work, I think she wanted a way for you to sort yourself out of the program. It happened, too; every semester some classmate would go missing and we'd try to find out what happened. Inevitably, someone would say, "They couldn't cut it. Litwiller dropped them from the program." You hear a lot today about colleges adopting GPA or test score requirements to improve the quality of their education majors. We didn't have those -- we had Litwiller. And just like letting a GPA decide who can be a teacher, I'm sure her judgement wasn't perfect and mistakes were made. (An acquaintance of mine, who shall remain nameless but now holds a PhD in math education, told me about a narrow escape from Litwiller's axe after a dispute over access to a local school.) But I think Litwiller had a sense for the quality that people expected from a UNI-prepared teacher, and a sense for giving us some survival skills that would get us through our first few years of teaching. There must have been far more successes than failures, too -- by the time I graduated in 1999, someone had estimated that a quarter of all the math teachers in the State of Iowa had been taught by Bonnie Litwiller.

My appreciation for Litwiller and her work has grown through my years first as a teacher and now as a graduate student in mathematics education. It was she who first introduced me to the NCTM Standards, and her direction of the NCTM Addenda Series was and still is an enormous contribution to the field of math education. What I believe was originally intended to be a six-book series to support the Standards grew into 22 total books, each designed to take the research behind the Standards and turn it into something teachers could use. Litwiller might have been the director and not the author of the Addenda Series, but it carried her trademark: getting as much useful information into the hands of teachers as possible. She gave me two books from the series, the middle school and high school books about statistics and data analysis. It was the first time I really thought about statistics education, and it's since become the area of school mathematics I find most interesting.

The world will miss Bonnie Litwiller, but she didn't leave without making a mark, both on the field of mathematics education and on me. Teacher education is a challenging business, and it's probably best to judge it with a certain amount of hindsight. For all of her toughness, she did have my back when I needed it, just as Ed Rathmell said she would. I may not have learned all that she tried to teach me, but maybe her most important lessons -- a sense of dedication and rejection of "good enough" -- have been most helpful in getting me to where I am today.

The Research Works Act and the White House OSTP

Imagine Company X proposed a law that said if they added value to a public highway -- such as by organizing volunteers to pick up trash on the side of the road -- then that gave Company X ownership of the road and the rights to charge the public tolls to use them. Sounds crazy, right? Well, replace "Company X," "public highway," and "pick up trash" with "Reed Elsevier," "publicly-funded research," and "peer review," respectively, and you've basically got the Research Works Act, a bill currently in the U.S. House of Representatives. If passed, the Research Works Act would prohibit federal funding agencies (such as the National Institutes of Health) from requiring that the research they fund (with your tax dollars) be available to the public. Instead, publishers could restrict access to any research they add value to (such as coordinating volunteers for peer review) for profit. Where does that profit come from? Usually from the high subscription fees paid by research universities, money often obtained from public funds and tuition dollars. The effect is that taxpayers are paying twice for research that, in many cases, they still don't have access to.

Fortunately, people are paying attention. Michael Eisen's op-ed in the New York Times explains the Research Works Act and its potential harm to research and scholarship, and plenty more articles on the subject are easily found. Somewhat coincidentally, we are also at the end of a feedback period for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where they have made a formal Request for Information (RFI) about open access to scientific publications. Yes, the Research Works Act should be stopped and seen as little more than a request by for-profit publishers to continue having their work (along with their alarming profits) subsidized by tax dollars. But I don't think stopping one bill is enough. Instead, I hope to see all federal funding agencies adopt policies similar to those of the NIH. I expressed these hopes in an email today to the White House OSTP, the text of which I've copied below.

---

University of Colorado at Boulder
School of Education
249 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0249

January 12, 2012

To: Office of Science and Technology Policy
Executive Office of the President
725 17th Street Room 5228
Washington, DC 2050

From: Raymond C. Johnson, Doctoral Student in Mathematics Education
School of Education, University of Colorado at Boulder

Re: Response to the White House RFI on OA publications

I am a researcher, concerned citizen, and a supporter of open, public access to publicly-funded research. I speak for myself and not on behalf of my colleagues or my institution, although I believe I express ideas and opinions shared by many researchers and educators. In response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy request for information on “Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research,” I urge you to preserve policies that require public access (such as from the National Institutes of Health) and expand similar policies to other federal funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, a key source of funding for education research in mathematics, science, and technology. Currently it is with great jealousy I see the growth of open access publishing in areas such as health and medicine; as an education researcher I wish I had the ability to share the latest research with teachers and administrators, most of whom cannot afford the high fees charged by publishers of education research. Unfortunately, open access journals in education are relatively rare and undervalued. A change in policy, one that would require public access to federally-funded research, would quickly change the perceived valuation of open access publishing outlets and bring much-needed information to educators everywhere.

Prior to my becoming a researcher I was a high school mathematics teacher for six years in high poverty, rural Colorado school districts. I did not have the benefit of a nearby university or a district support staff with access to recent or prominent research. My main link to information was a powerful one: the internet. However, it seemed that my searches for research about teaching methods, curriculum, education policy implementation, etc., all eventually led me to paywalls put up by publishers to “protect” their work, requesting fees I could not afford to pay. Now, as a researcher, I realize that the authors of education research -- much of it funded with federal dollars -- are asked to give their copyrights to publishers in exchange for so-called “widest possible dissemination” of that research. Researchers neither receive nor expect any pay or rewards for giving away their work, other than some scholarly esteem and the hope their research somehow reaches and benefits students and educators. While that publishing model might have made sense twenty years ago, it does not any more. Any claim of “widest possible dissemination” that currently does not include searchable, full-text publication on the public internet is false, at best, and fraudulent, at worst.

In response to the eight questions in the RFI, I encourage you to consider the arguments and recommendations made by Harvard University in their response (http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/stp-rfi-response-january-2012). Their expertise in these matters far exceeds mine. However, I do wish to make the following amendments to their responses for questions (2) and (7):

(2) What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders involved with the publication and dissemination of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded scientific research? Conversely, are there policies that should not be adopted with respect to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications so as not to undermine any intellectual property rights of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders?

Harvard’s response refers to a need to divide and share rights between researchers and publishers. My recommendation beyond their statement is that any discussion of copyright include Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), an organization dedicated to creating and defending content licenses that allow creators to reserve some, but not all, of their copyrights. Their expertise should be invaluable in any discussion about the sharing of intellectual property rights. The Harvard response includes a recommendation of a Creative Commons license at the end of their response to question 1. I also urge you to consider the expertise of SPARC (http://www.arl.org/sparc/), the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition.

(7) Besides scholarly journal articles, should other types of peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded research, such as book chapters and conference proceedings, be covered by these public access policies?

In Harvard’s response, they say they “could support mandatory public access” for non-journal works, but consider these to be “secondary issues” and are “not prepared to list all the types of content to which a federal public-access policy ought to apply.” I worry that this position is short-sighted and leaves too much room to abuse public access policies. Often the events that lead to research becoming a book chapter instead of a journal article are entirely matters of circumstance, and not a basis of quality or public importance. In fact, the entire distinction between article and chapter relates to a paper-based publishing economy, one that is increasingly irrelevant in a digital age. After all, if we were still limited to publishing on paper it is unlikely that this kind of public access policy discussion would even exist. If the spirit of these policies is to give the public access to research they have funded through federal tax dollars, there is no need to worry about “types of content” other than to say the research will consist of bytes and files traveling the internet. Furthermore, if the policy only requires “journal articles” to be published openly, what is to keep publishers from re-branding themselves as something other than a journal? By relabeling their products as books, magazines, or something entirely new, unwanted loopholes around public access are sure to emerge.

The Publication Paradox

This week is Open Access Week (follow #oaweek on Google+ and Twitter), and while I've shared a few links and talked to some of my officemates, I haven't taken (or had, really) time to expand on my thoughts more fully. But I take Open Access very seriously, and I know the status quo (researchers signing over copyright to journals who lock away the research behind paywalls) won't change unless more of us keep sharing openly to the widest audience possible. Because the antithesis of Open Access isn't copyright -- it is the unwillingness to share any ideas at all.

In the field of education, particularly in education policy, research is conducted and published in one of two ways: either by academics to submit to journals, or by think tanks and other groups who generally do non-university-based research. Academics will defend their system because their research is peer-reviewed, whereas much think tank research is not. In fact, in an effort to force a peer review process onto think tank research, the National Education Policy Center created the Think Tank Review Project, which includes reviews of think tank research and the annual Bunkum Awards. (Disclaimer: I know, work with, and take classes from various scholars at the NEPC.) If the academics are right, and their peer-reviewed research is superior, does that mean it is more influential? Hardly. According to this research by Holly Yettick (also affiliated with the NEPC), university-based education research is only cited about twice as often in major news outlets as research from think tanks, even though universities publish about 15 times more research (2009, emphasis mine). Yettick's conclusions to this report include a recommendation to education reporters, urging them to consider more sources because "Unlike think tank employees, university professors generally lack the incentives and resources to conduct public relations campaigns involving outreach to journalists" (p. 15). My question is this: How does copyright and traditional publishing affect this incentive structure, and how can open access change it?

First, imagine you work at a think tank and you're proposing research. Even before writing a word, you probably have an audience in mind that you'd like to reach with your work. Once your research is approved, you go about the research process and publish a report. Because the think tank does the researching and the publishing, no transfer of rights are necessary -- the work was a work for hire and copyright belonged to the think tank from the very beginning. Now the think tank can set about trying to promote the results to the research to the media and other interested audiences. They have an incentive to promote because the research, the publication, and the promotion is carried out by the think tank, an organized unit that includes you in its shared ownership of the work. This gives the think tank a collective interest in spreading their ideas.

Now imagine you're a researcher at a university. You too have an audience in mind that you'd like to reach, but when your research is finished you submit your report to a peer-reviewed journal. In order for the journal to publish (or sometimes, even to consider) your article, you must transfer to them your copyrights. The journal now owns the report, and this is where the incentive system starts to break down. The article might be read by your peers, and may help you receive tenure, but surely (I hope) your peers and tenure committee don't comprise the true scope of your target audience. If you, the researcher, are still intent on making sure your work reaches the intended audience, how effectively can you promote something you no longer own? Most efforts to share your report will violate the publisher's copyright. You could create derivative work, in the form of conference presentations, blog postings, or articles for magazines, but this actually requires extra effort to avoid a copyright violation, impedes future progress on other research, and often does not count towards tenure.

Instead of self-promotion, can you, a researcher, count on a journal to promote your work? Why would they? Do they know the scope of the audience you would like to reach? What incentives does the journal have to promote work they did not create? The journal wants subscribers, to be sure, but because they have no rights to your future research (or that of any scholar), their main incentive is to preserve a system that positions their journal as one of the few credible outlets for research. For example, the American Education Research Association has 25,000 members and publishes six peer-reviewed journals. If you're an education researcher, you probably belong to AERA and you respect and read the scholarship in their journals. But in Holly Yettick's dissertation research, searching through "nearly forty thousand articles in hundreds of publications" (2011, par. 14), she has yet to see a single AERA-published article mentioned anywhere. So while you might hear Brian Williams start a story on the NBC Nightly News with the phrase, "A new study published in the journal Science...," you won't hear an equivalent statement mentioning an AERA journal, despite education getting plenty of attention from NBC.

Think tanks have an advantage because the shared ownership of the creation and publication of research creates a common incentive for promotion. Even if the research is lower quality, the spread of the research to a wide audience gives the research power and influence. The traditional system of university-based researchers transferring rights to publishers in exchange for publication might produce higher-quality work, but leaves us with a publication paradox: how do creators promote something they don't own, and how do owners promote something they did not create?

I see two options for improving the incentives to promote academic research: (a) publishers should own creation, or (b) creators should maintain ownership (or at least rights to open distribution). Option (a) essentially turns a publisher into a think tank, and would not fit with academia's culture of academic freedom and independence. Some universities host their own journals, but they do not do so for the purpose of sponsoring and publishing their own work. Furthermore, most university researchers don't want their work to be seen as "work for hire." Option (b), which is not without its challenges, is the better option, and the growing Open Access movement is making it a more viable option every day. But for it to be successful, researchers are going to have to support change -- not for selfish reasons, and not out of spite for publishers, but to ensure the best research is freely available to the audience for which it was intended.

References



Yettick, H. (2009). The research that reaches the public: Who produces the educational research mentioned in the news media? (p. 37). Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Inerest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/research-that-reaches

Yettick, H. (2011, May). Media, think tanks, and educational research. Academe Online. Washington, D.C. Retrieved from http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2011/MJ/Feat/Yett.htm

Copywrong: Unfortunate Claims of Intellectual Property

A number of stories this week discussed what I consider to be problems with or misuse of intellectual property, either by claiming copyright, patents, or other property rights.

Exhibit A: "Twenty Percent of Human Genome is Patented, ACLU Battle to Determine Legality"
U.S. patent law says you can't patent "natural phenomena," so how are parts of the human genome patented? Lawyers argued that if you take DNA out of the cell and modify it (a loosely-defined process, apparently), the genes are no longer considered natural. The biotech company Myriad Genome has patented two breast cancer genes using such methods and developed tests to detect the genes. They claim they would not have been able to finance their research without the patents. Sounds okay so far, right? Here's the problem: because of the patents, Myriad has been able to block other companies from developing similar tests, and universities and other research labs can't study the genes. The ACLU and the AMA aren't happy, and I can't imagine all those millions of people who donate money for breast cancer research want their dollars wasted because a patent is preventing research from being done.

(Update 3/29/2010: A New York federal court ruled that Myriad's patent claims on these genes are invalid.)

Exhibit B: "One Last Treat from Conan's Dirty Dog, Triumph"

While I don't mean to place the importance of a dog puppet alongside breast cancer research, this article claims that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog won't be following Conan O'Brien home from NBC. Due to intellectual property claims, Triumph doesn't belong to Conan, or even his creator/puppeteer Robert Smigel; he belongs to NBC. Will NBC do anything with Triumph in the future? I doubt it. They just don't want to see Triumph on another network making fans happy. And if anybody has figured out how to keep fans from being happy lately, it's NBC.

Exhibit C: "NEA - Who Owns Your Work? Probably Not You."
Many of the best teachers live by Picasso's words: "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." Increasingly, teachers are helping teachers by blogging, tweeting, and posting lesson plans online for free or profit. Unfortunately, according to the Copyright Act of 1976, teacher-created classroom materials are considered "works for hire," and their ownership belongs to the school district. If schools try to enforce this, there is a very real fear that teachers will respond by creating less content for their classrooms. The solution? Have your local teachers association negotiate with the school district to include teacher copyright protections into teacher contracts or collective bargaining agreements.

Exhibit D: "Critical Commons vs. Hitler: Resource for Free/Open Media and Fair Use"
Another participant in the "Downfall/Hitler in the Bunker" meme, Critical Commons uses the format to demonstrate the growing pains of "multimedia scholarship." Life would be easier for the publishing houses if academicians restricted themselves to journals and books, but current digital tools are pushing us all beyond publishing on paper only. As the academic community becomes more accepting of the "digital humanities," universities and publishers are going to have to adjust or risk their current institutional status. If scholars aren't allowed to thrive in a "remix" culture, their work will struggle to find relevancy among an increasingly media-savvy audience.