In May 2008, Harvard’s Law School announced it would open access to the intellectual content created by its faculty members. This means content that is produced by faculty at Harvard will be available for us all to read - we don’t have to personally subscribe to expensive journals, or be affiliated to libraries that pay for journals. The university’s blog post states “the faculty voted to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy. Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit”. One driving issue has clearly been the sheer cost of the journals which means fewer and fewer libraries even can afford to stock them. Contrary to some of the negative rhetoric around openness, “open” does not necessarily mean losing control of ownership altogether; publications will be made available with copy/share friendly licenses.

Appropriately, this announcement rattled swiftly around the blogosphere. For many, it represents a significant step, a step toward the vision for democratic access to information on the internet. Commentators and open access campaigners were articulate on what this means for individuals and for the broader intellectual community. Peter Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and John Palfrey from Harvard’s Law School (also the Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a Principal Investigator of the OpenNet Initiative), both long-term open access campaigners involved in the motion at Harvard blogged the event. Writer Cory Doctorow who has benefited from publishing novels online before moving to print reported the event with enthusiasm on the technology and internet “pulse” blog, BoingBoing (boingboing.net).

Even for those not immersed in the issues, it is easy to see that this is a momentous step in the debates around openness of content. From its incept, one of the founding concepts of what sociologist Patrice Fiichy refers to as the “internet imaginaire” has been democratic access to content. The notion of open content does not limit itself to the publication and dissemination of scholarly articles. Many have argued that closed knowledge bases limit innovation, stunt business potential and reduce creative growth potential for business globally. This is not idle anti-capitalist rhetoric. Eric von Hippel’s 2006 book, Open Innovation, makes strong claims for the benefits of open innovation. Authors like Dominique Foray and Steven Weber have clearly articulated the issues in terms of the economics of knowledge around open and closed innovation.

How does all this relate to us, the readers and writers of interactions magazine? Directly. Recent debates around interactions magazine illustrate how discussions of openness and open content are challenging traditional views of publication, content distribution and dissemination, and indeed the economics of idea circulation. This issue was fore-grounded when our website went live earlier this year, with a number of people expressing surprise that only the first paragraphs of articles were available for download, unless one had a subscription to the ACM’s digital library. Currently, two pieces in each issue are available in their entirety on the interactions website, pieces that promote the magazine as a whole and the editors’ vision for the magazine. But a subscription to the magazine is needed to read the rest of the articles.

At CHI 2008 in Florence in April, a panel was held on whether interactions should or should not publish more articles and possibly the magazine in its entirety, for open download, on our webpage (acm.org/interactions). Mark Vanderbeeken of the experience design consultancy Experientia and I spoke on this panel. We discussed some of our personal thoughts and experiences of open content, and discussed our perspectives on whether the content of interactions should or should not be freely available online. Some of the points we brought up there are reiterated here.

First and foremost, paraphrasing John Thackara, quality that is not communicated is simply not quality. To put it crudely, who cares how great the ideas are if we make barriers to hearing/reading those ideas so high that the ideas only reach a small in-group. Closed content is restricted content, and restricted content shared among the few is likely to have limited impact.

Secondly, digital publication of articles is simply not a replacement for a carefully designed printed artifact. In my mind the core product, the print magazine is not going away. Print and digital artifacts have very different properties, they invite a different interaction; the experience of the content is radically different. A magazine with its layout is very different from how I would lay the same content out digitally on the web. As a big fan of O’Reilly’s Craft magazine which I have given as a gift to a number of people and as someone who like to note and thumb and mark my own copies, clicking through web pages is definitively not as good an experience. The interactive experiences of the tangible paper artifact are very different from those of a digital artifact. A tangible paper artifact that can be scribbled on, that can be shared with a friend, that sits on the table, that is read in the bath and can get a little soggy is highly valuable. Digital artifacts should invite the reader to want, to desire the physical artifact. And vice versa: I definitely go online to sites like ravelry.com, to instuctables.com and to YouTube.com to find other crafters and to see videos of how to do something - some skills, especially motor skills, just don’t get communicated as well in static print. I believe that medium matters, and we need to take seriously the careful design of a complementary relationship between the two.

Thirdly, there are many kinds of value aside from charging hard currency for content. Value may be purely non-monetary; it may be about personal satisfaction, or reputation and contribution to the community. At a less personal level, there can be value for those that promote the content.

Experientia’s strategy about content sharing makes concrete abstract assertions around value generation. Experientia has demonstrated that the paradigm that company information is proprietary and should be protected at all cost is now completely bypassed. Rather, an alternative approach is being taken there: everything not protected by NDA or of strategic value (e.g. the markets they plan to address in the next four months), should be open to all. All important content and ideas are published on the company blog, Putting People First. The
blog started out internally: a site where to post it all for all the staff to see. However, the site was not protected and before long, it was getting more and external visitors. The team decided that was not such a bad thing. Many visitors now come to the blog from major international companies like Yahoo!, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Philips and Samsung.

The company has directly experienced several benefits of this approach:

1. a channel - Putting People First provides an easy to handle communications channel (no email newsletters, no expensive advertising campaigns);
2. an audience - usually about 6000 professionals a day
3. a reputation - a company that has its finger on the pulse of what is going on;
4. a brand - substantial brand recognition for a company which is not even 3 years old;
5. loyalty - readers feel involved in the content that is given for “free” (Putting People First has become a professional research tool for many, thanks also to its categories and effective search engine), and this openness creates a loyalty;
6. regularity - the blog is updated nearly every day so to some extent Experientia is constantly in the minds of its readers;
7. relations - people contact the company regularly based on the blog; the blog offers a social nexus;
8. jobs - Experientia even got a few jobs although that is not the main reason for the firm doing this - if anything, PPF confirms the firm’s reputation rather than bringing in new clients out of the blue;
9. PR opportunities - Experientia staff is regularly asked for conferences and writing assignments based on their perceived qualifications;
10. dialogue - reactions and reflections on what is going on, either informally or publicly, either directly, or because people link, and re-link to the site

As the Experientia example suggests, the value-add of the open content is the ripple effect - the other things that become known which do generate monetary reward. In the case of scholarly journals and magazines like interactions, much of the labor of content production is volunteered, not for monetary gain. But the labor fits within a system where the rewards are very real - promotion of ideas, of products, of companies, of self, personal satisfaction, growth of future opportunities.

Before we get too carried away with all this happy, skipping, open sharing, printing a magazine costs money. The costs of production that need to be covered somehow are things like editing, illustrating, lay-out, printing, distribution, and archiving. Online distribution does not erase operating costs; funds are needed to cover platform and interface development and maintenance, promoting and archiving. The revenue model that is currently being followed to cover these costs is subscription, or what has been called “reader page charges”.

Other models that we can start playing with are:

• free access after an embargo period: for those who want content immediately charge, but after a while the content can be made freely available - this is one of a number of possible tiered revenue models
• author page charges: charge authors for the content
• institutional, governmental and vested agency payment: many argument for open content in the academic domain argue that taxpayers have already paid for government funded work through taxes, so the results should be freely available
• advertising: arguably the model that drives much of the internet
• sponsorship is another possibility: this could be issue-based sponsorship or section-based sponsorship

The Internet has been called a disruptive technology for the publishing industry in general. That said, readership of print magazines in the United States remains stable; around 85% of adults read consumer magazines and this figure has not changed since 2003. Disruptive technologies lead to the creation of a new industry or transform an existing one. Disruptive technologies sometimes enable changes in product characteristics, can add value and shift market position, or can destroy existing competencies and drive/enable change in a value network. Certainly, disruptive technologies shake things up, but most strategists agree that the only losers are those ossified in an outmoded model of business.

Mark and I argued on the panel that there is a great opportunity here, with interactions, to generate interest and gain momentum around important sociotechnical design issues through provision of a thoughtful, well-written and well-edited magazine very much appreciated by the professional user experience community. interactions provides - as named above - a great entree point…. to ideas, people and potentially to our funder, the ACM.

So the question is, what does open content mean for a magazine like interactions?

What are your views? Are you someone who would/do pay for the subscription, who would pay to download the articles…. do you have artful suggestions for business models not explored in this brief article? Please share your thoughts below!