Creative Commons – Close Read

A Q&A about philosophy in journalism

Earlier this year, Varun Bhatta, assistant professor of philosophy at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, reached out to ask me some questions for something he was writing about the representation of philosophical ideas in journalism. He interviewed others as well and subsequently wrote and published his article with The Wire on March 2, 2024.

I’m pasting the conversation the two of us had in full below, with Varun’s permission. Varun also wrote the introductory note, as a preface to the questions. His questions are in bold; my responses are in normal type.

Preface

Newspaper journalists, while writing on a topic, use theories and ideas from history, sociology, economics, sciences and other disciplines to establish the relevance of the topic and analyse the pertinent questions. However, rarely do they draw from philosophical theories that are equally relevant to the topic. Why is it that, for instance, we do not see social/moral/political philosophers’ views also being presented in articles on social topics? Similarly, while presenting a scientific topic, it is not common to find insights from the philosophy of science. Why is that philosophy glaringly absent in newspaper journalism that otherwise seamlessly synthesises views from numerous domains while presenting on a topic?

The non-engagement with philosophy is a characteristic of journalism across the world. There have been a few initiatives – both from journalists and philosophers – to bridge this gap in the Global North. One of the well-known projects in this regard was the column The Stone at the New York Times. Irish Times still runs a philosophy column Unthinkable. There have been very few journalists who have expressed their fruitful engagement with philosophy. (See here and here.) Also, the new kind of journalism brought by Aeon and The Conversation has provided the much-required niche space for philosophy.

The situation in India, however, is abysmal. Indeed, this is largely due to the poor state of philosophy in India and this is not a new point. However, what is not known is the story from the other side. What is Indian journalists’ perception of philosophy and why is that they do not use philosophy? Regarding this, I want to interview a few print/online newspaper journalists and editors. I am also planning to converse with a few journalism faculty as the non-engagement with philosophy might be a symptom of the journalism curriculum that is largely taught in India.

Understanding the perspectives of journalists, I think, is the first step towards remedying the gap in the Indian context. This can open up the conversation between journalists and philosophers to create meaningful journalism projects to make philosophy relevant to the Indian public.

Q&A

1. Why do you think journalists do not draw from philosophical theories/ideas while analysing a topic and writing articles? I am asking this because online/print newspaper journalists draw from theories/ideas of other disciplines (social sciences, history, sciences) in spite of these being nuanced and complex (for both writers and readers).

It depends what exactly you mean by ‘philosophy’ because from where I’m sitting I disagree with the assertion in your question that Indian journalists don’t use philosophical ideas or theories in their work. They use it both directly and indirectly. They use it directly when making decisions about what kind of events, stories, and phenomena they’d rather cover and why. When I say I’m a journalist biased towards principles encoded in the Indian Constitution, there’s a philosophy of journalism at work there. I’m mindful of the philosophical position of falsifiability when I conclude there’s no point trying to fact-check or rebut a claim like “Sanskrit is a good language for AI”. Journalists use philosophy indirectly when drawing on all those other fields, which have been informed and honed by philosophical deliberations unique to them. For example, a philosophy of history determines how we narrativise the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation in addition to archaeological, genetic, and climatological data.

If your question is why journalists don’t write articles containing ideas from philosophy and the views of philosophers, there are two answers.

First, all journalism needs to be in the public interest, and I’ve no idea a) what a philosophy in the public interest sounds like, which is because I don’t know what constitutes philosophy news, that could lend itself to news reports, news analyses, and news features. Is there a community, collective or organisation of philosophers in India that’s trying to reach out to more people? Where can I engage with an articulation of what I’m missing out on when I skip a comment from a philosopher for a news article? On a related note, many of us in journalism have studied journalism, which is its own field – just like philosophy – with its own tools to develop ways to frame the world, to make sense of it. I have no idea where philosophy is situated here, if at all.

b) Even if I was familiar with what philosophers are experts on, I’d imagine philosophy as a field of study faces the same resistance to being represented in the news as exotic fields (from the PoV of the publics) like high-energy physics or mathematics. When I’m trying to write on the latter, I’m banking on some sort of numerical literacy on the readers’ part. It’s impossible to explain the Langlands programme to someone who doesn’t know (or care) what functions or sets are. I haven’t had the chance to consider the level of philosophical literacy in India but I don’t think it’s very good. So broaching that kind of thinking and reasoning in an article – especially in a news article – requires the author to lay the groundwork first, which is precarious. The more words there are, the more careful you need to be about holding a reader’s attention.

There also need to be concrete developments and they need to be in the public interest, and unless a writer and/or an editor comes along who can extract these nuggets from a paper or in conversation with an expert – and in interesting ways – it’s going to have no engagement. Worse, it’s going to impose a disproportionately high opportunity cost on news-producers’ time and labour by expecting them to be able to separate philosophical wheat from chaff. I believe this goes for both whole articles about philosophy and articles that include philosophical considerations in the mix. The Hindu is trying to step around this ‘concrete developments’ requirement with two daily pages called ‘Text & Context’ and one online-only (for now) science page every weekday. These are both fairly recent developments, which is to say securing such space in a newspaper or any news-focused outlet is difficult and needs the underlying organisation to be ‘healthy’ as well as a sound editorial justification of its own.

We also need to be clear there are differences between newspapers and magazines, their sizes, remits, and frequencies of publication. Publications that take it slower and with more pages than a newspaper – or, more generally, articles that are composed over a longer time (much longer than news reports, of course) and are also lengthier (more than a few hundred words at least) are also likelier to have the time and the room to include philosophical deliberations. This is the sort of room we need (in space and time) to lay the groundwork first. Otherwise, such ideas just vanish under the unforgiving demands of the inverted pyramid.

Now the second answer: If I have to pay a writer Rs 5,000 to write a 1,000-word article about some idea or event that’s of interest in philosophical circles, and I expect (based on historical data) that 10,000 people will engage sincerely with the article, I need each one of those people to be able to readily contribute 50 paise to the publication for me to break even – and this is hard. The size of the engaged audience will actually be more like 1,000, requiring each one of those people to contribute Rs 5. And this is extraordinarily difficult given the prevailing ratios of the sizes of the overall audience, the engaged audience, and the paying audience. Similarly, if I add another page in the newspaper so I can accommodate more philosophy-centred material and charge readers Re 1 extra to pay for it (assuming here that advertisers won’t be interested in advertising on this page), will I have enough new readers to offset those who will stop buying the paper because of the higher cover price? I doubt it.

2. I think the previous question needs to be invoked at the editorial level as well. Given that editors do request the writers to make changes (like including some data on the topic or getting a comment from a particular expert), the absence of philosophy in articles might largely be due to editorial decisions and policies: what is considered as “pertinent”, “readable”, “good” etc. For instance, one of the unsaid editorial policies seems to be that philosophical discussions are best suited for op-ed columns. This kind of presumption has resulted in the ghettoisation of philosophy to certain zones in newspaper journalism.

2a. As an editor, what are your thoughts on the points? What might be the actual, pragmatic challenges journalism faces in this context?

2b. Since editors play an equally important role in “setting the agenda” and changing the reading styles of the public, what might be the ways to overcome these challenges? How to break the wall around philosophy in journalism, so that it can be accommodated/incorporated in mainstream journalism?

Imagine the industry of journalism to be like a wave propagating through a medium. Let’s divide this wave into two parts: the wavefront and the wake. Newsrooms operating at the wavefront are distinguished by the resources to experiment and innovate, take risks, and pay more than competitively for the best exponents of particular skills in the market. Newsrooms in the wake are just about staying profitable (or even breaking even), innovating in incremental fashion, avoiding risks, and trying to pay competitively. Of course neither group is monolithic – most sufficiently large news organisations have some departments that are doing well and some that are fighting to stay alive – but this is a simplification to illustrate a point. I believe your questions are about newsrooms in the wake; they’re definitely more interesting in this context. With this in mind:

2a) Newsrooms need to make money to pay their journalists without compromising editorial independence and editorial standards. This is the single largest challenge right now. In the face of this challenge, especially since the rise of news aggregators and social media platforms as sites of news consumption, so many publications have shut shop, downsized or relinquished independence, or some combination of all three. Once a newsroom’s finances are sufficiently in the green and they can graduate from the wake to the wavefront, pertinence, readability, etc. can and do become the first questions an editor asks. Of course, I may not be saying any of this if the times weren’t what they are.

2b) I’m not sure there’s a wall around journalism that blocks philosophy. In fact journalists don’t have the freedom to choose (or decline, for that matter) what they consider to be ‘news’. But the flip side of this is no particular enterprise can be said to be entitled to a journalist’s attention. The reason this is so is because of how public interest is constructed.

For example, there’s a contest – very simply speaking – these days between a journalism that holds we’re doing the country a disservice by turning our heads away from everything that’s going wrong and another that’s particular about pointing its head in the opposite direction. Another example of a similar contest is centred on whether journalists should make plain their biases – because everyone is biased in some way – or if they should cover the news without losing (a reasonable) equipoise.

In these or any other scenarios, whatever constitutes the public interest is built jointly by journalists and the consumers of the knowledge they produce, and will vary from one publication to the next. The Hindu, The Wire, and The New York Times have different covenants with their readers about what public interest looks like, or ought to look like. The construction of the public interest is a shared and complicated enterprise that takes time.

As a result, most journalism, in the present era at least, follows some publics; journalism doesn’t lead them. This also means – taking all of these business, economic, and social forces together – that when people aren’t interested in philosophy-related matters, there’s not much an editor (in a newsroom-in-the-wake) can do to change that.

3. I need your comment on another editorial decision about the op-ed columns that have a specific implication for the Indian context. One of the ways academic journalism scales up the dissemination is by publishing the articles with Creative Commons licence. For instance, The Conversation and Aeon are using this method. The idea seems to be working very well. Create a niche space for academic journalism that usually does not have space in mainstream journalism and make up for the readership through free or paid syndication. This approach seems to be working well, and has provided a good working model.

However, in an uneven world, this does not favour everyone equally. Given its international scale/level/reach, this works well for the Global North academicians who have access to these platforms. Indian scholars do not have easy access to Aeon or The Conversation. And Indian online platforms have easy access to quality articles without having to deal with Indian scholars.

These issues are pertinent for most of the academicians in India. But I want to articulate the problem from the perspective of philosophy. This method of republishing further widens the gap between philosophers and journalism in India. This way of operating does not provide enough motivation for Indian newspaper editors to work with Indian scholars. In spite of publishing philosophy articles, Indian editors do not seem to be interested/invested in working/collaborating with Indian philosophers and commissioning articles. (Republishing international articles has a further implication: it deepens the imbalance between Western and Eastern philosophical systems.)

Would like to know your comments/thoughts on the above note.

I’m uncomfortable with providing a general comment. Please let me know if you have specific questions.

Free/paid syndication option of articles in international platforms indeed provides straightforward access to quality content for Indian platforms. And given the restriction of resources like time and finances, and largely the dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public, it is understandable what the Indian platforms are doing. Having said that, do you agree that there are implications of this shortcut approach? The first implication is about the politics of knowledge and representation, whose views are represented, etc. The second implication is the perpetuation of Indian journalism’s impatience to work with local scholars. If it does not invest and work with, say Indian philosophers, even for op-eds, the problem persists.

I agree wholeheartedly with the first implication. To republish from publications in the US, Europe and the UK that syndicate their articles on a Creative Commons licence is effectively to represent the views of the scholars quoted in those articles – mostly from Global North countries – instead of the views of others, especially those from India (from the PoV of Indian newsrooms and readers). However, it’s important to ask whether this really imposes the sort of opportunity cost that prevents Indian journalists from still trying to work with and represent the views of Indian scholars in other articles. My answer is ‘no’ simply because of the difference in the amount of effort expended in republishing an article and reporting on a scholar’s work, views, etc. Put another way, it takes me a few minutes to identify an article on, say, The Conversation that will work ‘well’ on my site and a few more minutes to republish it. Doing so won’t subtract from the responsibilities of or resources available to a reporter on my team. So if/when a publication says it is making do with stories from The Conversation, the problem arises with people in the newsroom who are choosing not to engage with Indian scholars – irrespective of whether it can or does republish articles from other outlets.

I also want to clarify something about the “dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public” in your question: there isn’t so much a dearth of good academicians who can write, there’s a dearth of academicians who believe communication at large is important at all. I’ve been fortunate enough to find more than a few scientists who are eager to write, and to be frank their numbers are increasing, but my experience is that the vast majority of scientists working in India distrust the media too much and/or don’t believe that the scientific work they undertake needs to be communicated to non-scientists – much less that they need to be the ones doing it. (I’m also setting aside the fact that many of the better scientists working in the country also shoulder many responsibilities beyond teaching and research, especially important administrative tasks, and communication – especially of the form that their employers may not recognise when considering people for promotions, etc. – only adds to this burden.) My point here is that the task of finding scientists to write is a lot more arduous than might seem at first glance.

I feel the same way about the second implication you’ve set out in your question: journalists are not impatient per se; what you may perceive as impatience is likelier than not the effect of newsroom mechanics that expect journalists to be productive to a degree that precludes prolonged engagement with scholars. Also, the distinction I pointed out in my first set of replies matters greatly. If you’re writing for a magazine or if you’re writing a news feature, you’ll have the time and the word limit for such engagement. But if you’re writing a news report for a newspaper, you will have neither the time and the word limit for nor – importantly – any expectation from your readers of slow-cooked material in the article. Finally, while I’ve tried to describe what is, I don’t think I’m prepared to call it justification. I think large newsrooms, especially those departments of such newsrooms that are closer to the wavefront than others, should try (honestly) to establish opportunities for slow-cooked material in their products.

A meeting with the PSA’s office

The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) organised a meeting with science communicators from around India on January 27, in New Delhi. Some of my notes from the meeting are displayed below, published with three caveats.

First, my notes are not to be treated as the minutes of the meeting; I only jotted down what I personally found interesting. Some 75% of the words in there are part of suggestions and recommendations advanced by different people; the remainder are, broadly, observations. They appear in no discernible order not because I jumbled them up but because participants offered both kinds of statements throughout. The meeting itself lasted for seven or so hours (including breaks for lunch and tea), so every single statement was also accompanied by extensive discussion. Finally, I have temporarily withheld some portions because I plan to discuss them in additional blog posts.

Second, the meeting followed the Chatham House Rules, which means I am not at liberty to attribute statements uttered during the course of the meeting to their human originators. I have also not identified my own words where possible not because I want to hide but because, by virtue of these ideas appearing on my blog, I take full responsibility (but not authorship) for their publicisation.

Third, though the meeting was organised by the Office of the PSA, its members were not the only ones of the government present at the meeting. Representatives of some other government-affiliated bodies were also in attendance. So statements obviously uttered by a government official – if any do come across that way – are not necessarily attributable to members of the Office of the PSA.

“We invest a lot in science, we don’t use it imaginatively enough.”

Three major science related issues:

Climate change
Dramatic consequences of our growth on biodiversity
B/c of these two, how one issues addresses sustainable development

Different roles for journalists within and without the government
Meeting is about what each one of us can do — but what is that?
Each one of us can say “I could do better if only you could better empathise with what I do”
Need for skill-sharing events for science journalists/communicators
CSIR’s National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources has a centre for science and media relations, and a national science library
Indian Council of Medical Research has a science communication policy but all press releases need to be okayed by health minister!
Knowledge making is wrapped up in identity
Regional language communicators don’t have access to press releases, etc. in regional languages, nor access to translators
Department of Science and Technology and IIT Kanpur working on machine-translations of scientific content of Wikipedia
Netherlands Science Foundation published a book compiling public responses to question ‘what do you think of science?’
In the process of teaching kids science, you can also get them to perform science and use the data (e.g. mapping nematode density in soil using Foldscope)
Slack group for science communicators, channels divided by topic
Leaders of scientific bodies need to be trained on how to deal with journalists, how to respond in interviews, etc.
Indian Space Research Organisation, Defence R&D Organisation and Department of Atomic Energy need to not be so shut off! What are they hiding? If nothing to hide, why aren’t they reachable?
Need structural reforms for institutional research outreach — can’t bank on skills, initiative of individual science communicators at institutes to ensure effective outreach
Need to decentralise PR efforts at institutions
People trained in science communication need to find jobs/employment
Pieces shortlisted for AWSAR award could be put on a CC BY-ND license so news publications can republish them en masse without edits
Please hold meetings like this at periodic intervals, let this not be a one-time thing
Issues with covering science: Lack of investment, few people covering science, not enough training opportunities, not enough science communication research in India
Need local meet-ups between journalists and scientists to get to know each other, facilitated by the government
Outreachers needn’t have to be highly regarded scientists, even grad students can give talks — and kids will come to listen
Twitter is an elite platform — science communicators that need to stay in touch need to do more; most science communicators don’t know each other!
Can we host one edition of the World Conference of Science Journalists in India?
What happened to the Indian Science Writers’ Association?
Today the mind is not without fear! The political climate is dire, people can’t freely speak their minds without fear of reprisal — only obvious that this should affect science journalism also
ISRO is a darling of the media, the government and the masses but has shit outreach! Rs 10,000 crore being spent on Gaganyaan but the amount of info on it in the public domain is poop.
CSIR’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology is very open and accessible, director needs to be kept in the loop about some press interaction but that’s it; perhaps the same template can be recreated in other institutes?
Outreach at scientific institutions is a matter of trust: if director doesn’t trust scientists to speak up without permission, and if PR people don’t respond to emails or phone calls, impression is that there is no trust within the institute as well as that the institute would like journalists to not be curious
People trained in science communication (informally also) need a place to practice their newfound skills.
Private sector industry is in the blindspot of journalists
People can more easily relate to lived experiences; aesthetically pleasing (beautiful-looking) stories are important
Most people have not had access to the tools of science, we need to build more affordable and accessible tools
Don’t attribute to malfeasance what can be attributed to not paying attention, incompetence, etc.
Journalistic deep-dives are good but lack of resources to undertake, not many publications do it either, except maybe The Wire and Caravan; can science communicators and the government set up a longform mag together?
Create a national mentorship network where contact details of ‘mentors’ are shared and mentees enrolled in the programme can ask them questions, seek guidance, etc.
Consider setting up a ‘science media centre’ — but can existing and functional models in Australia and the UK be ported to India without facing any issues?
Entities like IndiaBioscience could handle biology research outreach for scientific institutes in, say, the South India region or Bangalore region with some support from the government. That would be better than an SMC-from-scratch.
Consider including science communication in government’s new draft Scientific Social Responsibility policy and other S&T innovation policies
Allocate a fixed portion of funding for research for public outreach and communication (such as 2%)
Need more formal recognition for science communication researchers within scientific institutions; members currently stuck in a limbo between outreach office and scientists, makes it difficult to acquire funds for work
Support individual citizen science initiatives
Need better distinction between outreach groups and press offices — we don’t have a good press office anywhere in the country! Press officers encourage journalistic activity, don’t just promote institute’s virtues but look out for the institute as situated in the country’s overall science and society landscape
Any plans to undertake similar deliberations on philosophy of science (including culture of research, ethics and moral responsibilities)?
Scientific institutions could consider hosting journalists for one day a month to get to know each other
What’s in it for the scientist to speak to a journalist about their work? Need stronger incentives — journalists can provide some of that by establishing trust with the scientist, but can journalists alone provide incentives? Is it even their responsibility?
Consider conducting a ‘scientific temper survey’ to understand science literacy as well as people’s perceptions of science — could help government formulate better policies, and communicators and journalists to better understand what exactly their challenges are
Need to formulate specific guidelines for science communication units at scientific research institutions as well as for funding agencies
Set up fellowships and grants for science communicators, but the government needs to think about attaching as few strings as possible to such assistance
Need for more government support for regional and local newspapers vis-à-vis covering science, especially local science
Need to use multimedia – especially short videos, podcasts illustrations and other aids – to communicate science instead of sticking to writing; visuals in particular could help surmount language barrier right away

The press office

A press-officer friend recently asked me for pointers on how he could help journalists cover the research institute he now works at better. My response follows:

Avoid the traditional press release format and use something like Axios’s. answer the key questions, nothing more. No self-respecting organisation is going to want to republish press releases. This way also saves you time.
Make scientists from within the institute, especially women, members of minority groups and postdocs, available for comment – whether on their own research or on work by others. This means keeping them available (at certain times if need be) and displaying their contact information.
If you’re going to publish blogs, it would be great if they’re on a CC BY or BY-SA (or even something a little more restrictive like CC BY NC ND) license so that interested news organisations can republish them. If you’re using the ND license, please ensure the copy is clear.
Pictures are often an issue. If you could take some nice pics on your phone and post them on, say, the CC library on Flickr, that would be great. These can be pics of the institute, instruments, labs, important people, events, etc.

If you have inputs/comments for my friend and subscribe to this blog, simply reply to the email in your inbox containing this post and you’ll reach me.

On that Poynter debate about stock images and ethical visual journalism

Response to Mark Johnson, Article about free images ‘contradicts everything I hold true about journalism’, Poynter, February 9, 2018. ∞

Let’s get the caveats out of the way:

The article to which Johnson is responding did get some of its messaging wrong. As Johnson wrote, it suggested the following: “We don’t think about visuals BUT visuals are critically important. The solutions offered amount to scouring the web for royalty-free and (hopefully) copyright-released stock images.”
In doing so, the original article may have further diminished prospects for visual journalists in newsrooms around the country (whether the US or India), especially since Poynter is such a well-regarded publisher among editors and since there already aren’t enough jobs available on the visual journalism front.
I think visual journalists are important in any newsroom that includes a visual presentation component because they’re particularly qualified to interrogate how journalism can be adapted to multimedia forms and in what circumstances such adaptations can strain or liberate its participants’ moral and ethical positions.

That said, IMO Johnson himself may have missed a bit of the nuances of this issue. Before we go ahead: I’m going to shorten “royalty-free and/or copyright-released” to CC0, which is short for the Creative Commons ‘No Rights Reserved’ license. It allows “scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.” However, what I’m going to say should be true for most other CC licenses (including BY, BY-SA, BY-SA-NC, BY-SA-ND and BY-SA-NC-ND).

By providing an option for publishers to look for CC0 images, the authors of the original piece may have missed an important nuance: publishers come in varying sizes; the bigger the publisher is, the less excusable it is for it to not have a visual journalism department in-house. For smaller (and the smallest) publishers, however, having access to CC0 images is important because (a) producing original images and videos can invoke prohibitive costs and (b) distribution channels of choice such as Facebook and Twitter penalise the absence of images on links shared on these platforms.

Bigger publishers have an option and should, to the extent possible, exercise that option to hire illustrators, designers, video producers and reporters, podcasters, etc. To not do so would be to abdicate professional responsibilities. However, in the interest of leveraging the possibilities afforded by the internet as well as of keeping our news professional but also democratic, it’s not fair to assume that it’s okay to penalise smaller publishers simply because they’re resorting to using CC0 images. A penalty it will be if they don’t: Facebook, for example, will deprioritise their content on people’s feeds. So the message that needs to be broadcast is that it’s okay for smaller publishers to use CC0 images but also that it’s important for them to break away from the practice as they grow.

Second: Johnson writes,

Choosing stock images for news stories is an ethically questionable choice — you don’t know the provenance of the image, you don’t know the conditions under which it was created and you don’t know where else it has been used. It degrades the journalistic integrity of the site. Flip it around — what if there were generic quotes inserted into a story? They wouldn’t advance the narrative at all, they would just act as filler.

He’s absolutely right to equate text and images: they both help tell a story and they should both be treated with equal respect and consequence. (Later in his article, Johnson goes on to suggest visuals may in fact be more consequential because people tend to remember them better.) However, characterising stock images as the journalistic equivalent of blood diamonds is unfair.

For example, it’s not clear what Johnson means by “generic quotes”. Sometimes, some quotes are statements that need to be printed to reflect its author’s official position (or lack thereof). For another, stock images may not be completely specific to a story but they could fit its broader theme, for example, in a quasi-specific way (after all, there are millions of CC0 images to pick from).

But most importantly, the allegations drub the possibilities of the Open Access (OA) movement in the realms of digital knowledge-production and publishing. By saying, “Choosing stock images for news stories is an ethically questionable choice”, Johnson risks offending those who create visual assets and share it with a CC0 license expressly to inject it into the public domain – a process by which those who are starved of resources in one part of the world are not also starved of information produced in another. Journalism shouldn’t – can’t – be free because it includes some well-defined value-adds that need to be paid for. But information (and sometimes knowledge) can be free, especially if those generating them are willing to waive being paid for them.

My go-to example has been The Conversation. Its articles are written by experts with PhDs in the subjects they’re writing about (and are affiliated with reputable institutions). The website is funded by contributions from universities and labs. The affiliations of its contributors and their conflicts of interest, if any, are acknowledged with every article. Best of all, its articles are all available to republish for free under at least a CC BY license. Their content is not of the ‘stock’ variety; their sentences and ideas are not generic. Reusing their articles may not advance the narrative inherent in them but would I say it hurts journalists? No.

Royalty-free and copyright-released images and videos free visual journalists from being involved every step of the way. This is sadly but definitely necessary in circumstances where they might not get paid, where there might not be the room, inclination or expertise necessary to manage and/or work with them, where an audience might not exist that values their work and time.

This is where having, using and contributing to a digital commons can help. Engaging with it is a choice, not a burden. Ignoring those who make this choice to argue that every editor must carefully consider the visual elements of a story together with experts and technicians hired just for this purpose is akin to suggesting that proponents of OA/CC0 content are jeopardising opportunities for visual journalists to leave their mark. This is silly, mostly because it leaves the central agent out of the picture: the publisher.

It’s a publisher’s call to tell a story through just text, just visuals or both. Not stopping to chide those who can hire visual journalists but don’t while insisting “it’s a big part of what we do” doesn’t make sense. Not stopping to help those who opt for text-only because that’s what they can afford doesn’t make sense either.

Featured image credit: StockSnap/pixabay.

OA shouldn’t stop at access

Joseph Esposito argues in the scholarly kitchen why it’s okay for OA articles (which come with a CC-BY license) to be repackaged and then sold for a price by other merchants once they’re out in a paper.

The economic incentive to reach new audiences could make that otherwise OA article into something that gets brought to the attention of more and more readers. What incentive does a pure-play OA publisher have to market the materials it publishes? Unfortunately, the real name of this game is not “Open Access” but “Post and Forget.” Well-designed commerce, in other words, leads to enhanced discovery. And when it doesn’t, it enters the archaeological record.

If we can chase the idealists, ideologues, and moralists out of the temple, we may see that the practical act of providing economic incentives may be able to do more for access than any resolution from Budapest, Bayonne, Bethesda, or Berlin. The market works, and when it doesn’t, things quietly go away. So why all the fuss?

It’s not an argument that’s evident on the face of it, becoming apparent only when you realize OA’s victory march stopped halfway at allowing people to access research papers, not find them. The people who are good to helping other people find stuff are actually taking the trouble to market their wares.

So Esposito’s essentially argued to leave in a “finding fee” where it exists because there’s a big difference between something just being there in the public domain and something being found. I thought I’d disagree with the consequences of this reasoning for OA but I largely don’t.

Where I stop short is where this permission to sell papers available for free infringes on the ideals of OA for no fault of the principle of OA. But then what can OA do about that?

Read: Getting Beyond “Post and Forget” Open Access, the scholarly kitchen